Truth in translation

I didn't know anything about the Truth & Reconsiliation commission of South Africa before I went to see this play. My friend who is a lawyer told me about it and I went, albeit somewhat reluctuntly.

To put things into context: the TRC is a court-like body formed in South Africa after the apartheid, in order to avoid bloodbath and endless prosecution. Since it was immense numbers of people that were involved in atrocities during that era, it was thought that if the country were to take the route of prosecution, they would have to prosecute the entire country. So they came up with a different alternative: people were asked to come forward and tell the truth about killings and tortures and all the crimes committed during that time and in return they would get amnesty. This way, families of disappeared victims would know what happened to them and could mourn them in dignity, they could find their loved ones graves and possibly some kind of closure to their pain. Forgiveness of the perpetrators would be bonus. Apparently, amazing things happened during the hearings of the TRC, which lasted 3 years: nobel peace prizes were put to the test, mothers found their childrens' bones and killers and victims hugged. It is not clear wheather this has been the best way to go. Can victims forgive? Are perpetrators remorceful? Can there be crime without punishment? Are victims not angry, revenge-thirsty?

The play told the story of the TRC through the eyes of the translators that had to simoultaneously translate in first person the testimonies into the 11 official laguages of South Africa. They personified all the things that divided that country up until now and were dealing with each other fighting the stereotypes that are associated with each of their colour, tribes and social and economic class. By using the first person while translating, they had to empathise with victims and perpetrators alike and they felt their country's history all over again. Additionally to the multi-lingual dimension, the creators of the play use songs to dramatise some of the stories and to add the colour of African music to their piece.

The result of all this is extremely effective. You, as a member of the audience, are faced with awful narratives, powerful scenes and personal conflicts, but most of all you are faced with one country's desire to address the truth. South Africa believed that this was the only way to a new country, no prosecution necessary: people should hear what had happened (as the producer of the play put it as 'a tapestry of events'), should have to accept it and live with it.

People are still angry and 'peace and love' ideals have not emerged victorious, despite the idealists dreams.
People have not always forgiven each other.

But if some of them have, then it was all worth it.

Ute again!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7iQ2vjPCQkY

Look at this, look at this and weep. Weep if you've seen this before and weep if you have not.

Ute Lemper is God. I have never, never seen anyone been so much better live than on CD.

Whatever I write, it is not enough. Run for tickets.

Poor Jenny, bright as a penny
Her equal would be hard to find
Deserved a bed of roses, but history discloses
That she would make up her mind...

-ish!

I love English. It is a beautiful language, a dynamic language that can find linguistic means of expressing everything on the face of the Earth – and this is saying a lot. It is a language full of endearing linguistic pearls like pitter patter. It is an extremely onomatopoeic language – a lion does indeed roar and when you are sleepy you actually yawn. So, why the need of ruining the wavy, soft sounds of this language with the ugly expression ish?
I absolutely loathe it when people use ish. I hate it when they attached it to words and I hate it even more when they use it on its own as if it is some lexical item that you can look up on the dictionary. E.g. (and this happened in a class I was attending), teacher asks student if he is understanding whatever she is talking about and he replies, ish. Teacher asks student if he is done with his work and he says, ish. Excuse me? What do you mean by that? Why can you not reply something else, like not yet, not really, more or less? I’m not a native speaker and I could come up with at least three very acceptable phrases, so replacing the ghastly ish cannot really be that hard.
And what about when people turn to you and tell you they’ll see you at around 4-ish? This just kills me. No, you’re not seeing me around 4-ish because I don’t know when that is. I know when 4 0’clock is, when ten to four is, when five past four is, but I do not under any circumstances know what 4-ish is.
Ish, like many other expressions, is a linguistic fashion. Language is not immune to fashion, and certainly not a language such as English, which is so international and who everybody claims they can speak well (ahahahahahah!). I am not immune to linguistic trends either and I hear myself, with much disgust, saying such atrocities such as totally and gosh and sometimes I even say oh my god in this very OC-like way. Excuse me – in this very OC-ish way, actually (it’s really not my fault that the only funny thing to watch on TV this summer was the OC, is it?). I despise myself for speaking like this. I see it as the ultimate betrayal to the splendour of the English language, a language that resisted the invader so many centuries ago and stood up to Norman French, a language that Conrad used to write the monument of truth and glory that is Heart of Darkness, a language that allows you to say jolly and darling and splendour in the grass and glory in the flower and love me do and dreadful, which hasn’t got such a great meaning but sounds so nice, and funny words like via, which for some reason always makes me laugh, and of course my beloved pitter patter.
I will vow to try and be immune to fashion from now on. I will vow to respect the English language and appreciate it fully and keep its integrity. And this will be my main project the next year, right after writing up my dissertation.

The love-Getting older

I know I said I don't want to get too personal on this blog, so forgive this post...

It amazes me how everybody, how I change with time. There are things that some time ago I really could not understand, but now I do: I still don't agree with them, endorse them or accept them, but now I understand where they come from. For example, when I was younger I really could not understand how people, who don't love each other any more, still stay married. But then I saw older couples who cannot define themselves any more if they are not part of this union. They are not people, they are part of a show, facing society as members of this couple-thing, organising parties together and producing children. And then I understood that for these people, living without love is not the most important thing in the world. The most important thing in the world for them is organising these parties, together. Forever. Romance?

On a quite different note, I know I am getting older because of the way I love my parents now. They are always getting on my nerves, I can always find negative things for them but I have this amazing tenderness for them, for all the things they are and the ones they are not.

So, I MUST be getting old...

One day he'll come along, the man I love, and he'll be big and strong, the man I love...

Forgive me for this very cheesy, very soppy post, but it just has to be done.
The man of my life is a cartoon called Corto Maltese. He is tall, dark, very handsome and also very intelligent with deep, mysterious eyes. He wears a golden ring in his left ear and he is a sailor. He can never love me because he is not only a fictitious character but also a seaman, who travels from port to port looking for something he does not know exactly how to define or even what it is.
At some point, someone said about him that he was too kind to be a rogue and too selfish to be religious. And this is what makes him so human and, at the same time, so impossibly unachievable. He’s not the most moral of men, and therein lies his humanity. He’s a pirate, he thinks about himself first, he wants to benefit from every situation he’s involved in. But he is also brave and loyal to his friends, he respects and defends the weak and follows his heart. He does not love anyone because he loves everybody. As a boyfriend, Corto Maltese would actually be a nightmare. He would never live with me and allow himself the comfort of having a home, a nest he could call his own. He would never make my home his or give me any sort of reliance or stability. He would feel the constant need to move around, to leave, to see more and more and more of the world. He could never be a petit-bourgeois and settle for a pleasant life with a house, a car and a couple of babies. He would never give me his heart – and I would completely understand him.
A Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, once wrote about the importance of travelling and the indescribable opportunity it gives you to reinvent yourself constantly, to be someone else all the time. And this is exactly what Corto Maltese can do. He can do whatever he wants to because he can be wherever he wants whenever he wants. He doesn’t own anything and does not have to hold on to a mind-numbing job to pay rent. He doesn’t love anyone enough to stick around. He is free and the only thing he possesses is his own destiny and an immense sea that can take him where he wants to go. Corto Maltese does not even have to be himself if he gets tired of who he is – he can start over any second and change his personality as his pleases because he has no strings attached.
He’s the embodiment (insofar as a comic book character can be an ‘embodiment’) of the handsome stranger who’s gone the next day because he has better things to do and the world calls him by his name. He can do what Fernando Pessoa wrote about and what I wished I could do – to leave, to travel far away, to be someone else. If he was an actual man, women like me would sigh and cry over him and would love him forever and would never have him and would secretly envy him for his freedom and would wish they could live like that.
Also – the Corto Maltese comic books are the most beautiful, compelling comics I’ve ever read. They’re cinematographic books of firm, powerful drawing and wonderful stories. They’re must have, must read, must love books and Corto is definitely a must-fancy man.

On violence

Maybe because I am not a violent person, I like violence in movies and books. Fictitious violence is perhaps an outlet to release accumulated stress and oppression and fear. I can’t go around being rude to people, so I watch and read violence. I demand quality in violence, though. Van Damme or Seagal will just not do, but Tarantino, the obvious name, or Scorsese, or sometimes trashy Schwarzenegger are perfect. There’s a terrifying beauty in Mr. Orange lying almost dead in the most massive pool of blood you’ll ever see only to muster courage to get up slightly to shoot some guy dead, his face white and sickly. And there’s beauty in Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson pointing their guns in perfect synchrony at someone who we know will die.
Violence in language, which is what interest me the most, has the ability of being scarily beautiful as well. I will not mention Tarantino’s dialogues again, because it has become a platitude to point out how well written they are, and that’s probably because it’s true – they are brilliantly written. But a simple dialogue full of cursing and swear words such as the ones you can hear in Goodfellas is just so good you wonder how foul language can render such quality. Joe Pesci, an actor I still love despite the fact that I haven’t heard of him in ages, is the funniest, the most amazing actor delivering the “how am I funny?” lines, and he intersperses everything he says with the rudest swear words I’ve heard. And it’s brilliant and so much better, for example, than a decent, friendly language movie such as Jerry McGuire (first example that came to my mind, I really don’t know why).
Although it may be far-fetched and perhaps exaggerated, I do think that conveying violence in language is almost like poetry. One of the reasons poetry is so overwhelming is because of the work that it demands on language itself. A good poet must really know words – their meaning, their sound, their prosody. And then he must come up with a universal truth, the kind of truth that will make his readers think “That’s exactly it! This is exactly what I’ve been saying for ages!” And then this poet needs to combine his truth with the words he knows so well and only then will he stand a chance of writing mildly decent poetry (I guess that’s why there aren’t many truly good poets around). The same happens with violence, I believe. You cannot just write foul language and expect it to do the job. You can’t just come up with more or less scary threats like “I’m going to burn you alive and kill you” and expect it to be prime literary work. You must know language really well, so well that you can make the ugly words look pretty. And this is a very hard job, because ugly words are meant to be ugly, so anyone that can make them sound nice is really a true connoisseur of the language they speak. That’s why it is so thrilling to hear, for example, “your mother sucks cock in hell” coming from an innocent girl possessed by an evil entity. This is because, albeit the horror of it all, language is being used to its limit. And I guess this is why I like fictional violence.

The tragedy of having a family (Festen)

Why do Greek tragedies still define today’s movies? Because, what else is Dogme 95, if not a return to the art of storytelling in its purest form, an attempt to turn cinema into the absolute theatrical realism?
I regard Dogme as the reinterpretation of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, only now the rules are formed to force themselves on the art of cinematography and not functioning as a mere expression of what already exists. The biggest, most profound difference between cinema and theatre is that the former can magnify the detail, any detail (in a close up, with a slow motion) and thus wins in realism, while the other is realism, by the mere fact that it is done in front of you, live, for your sake only. Dogme tries to have the best of both worlds and that’s why it is the most influential cinema movement of recent history: Dogme uses cinema’s power along with raw and unmodified theatrical conventions. In Dogme movies, you can still have the (ever so powerful) close up, but the face will have no make up. The effect created by this combination is extremely dramatic.

Ever so appropriately the first Dogme movie is Festen, which is an archetypical tragedy, almost of the purest kind. The story is simple and it has to do with the oldest and sickest of human maladies: the family in its extremely dysfunctional form.
In the pater familias’s 60th birthday celebration the whole family along with guests is gathered in the old family hotel to celebrate. In this feast, which is the definition of bourgeoisie in its correctness and adoration of the family ‘rules’, the eldest son reveals that his father molested him and his twin sister (who took her own life a month ago) when they were children. The revelation finds initially the distrust and the indifference of the guests: they continue their dinner as if nothing has happened and they easily settle for the father’s naïve excuses. The son persists, further disclosing that his sister killed herself because of this abuse, only to be treated with more articulated disbelief and even violence. A letter of the dead sister is found however and is read on the table. The truth is unveiled and the oppressor becomes the victim: the youngest son, that careless mindless macho hits the father and tries to rape him only to be stopped by the eldest son, who made all the revelation in the first place. The victim forgives his oppressor. The following morning the father enters the dining hall and makes his (very theatrical) public apology. He is ostracised from the family, by being asked to leave the table so that the rest of them can ‘have their breakfast’, been deserted even by his wife, who finally teams up with her children. He accepts his fate stoically however, because he knows that such dirt has no place within the family structure, the family structure that he created and has his rules.
The entire film is extremely realistic with the exception of the last scene: the father’s public apology and his consequent acceptance of overall defeat is extremely stylisized. It must mean something, it must mean that an institution like a family still obeys its rules (and breakfast needs to be consumed in peace) and the world’s biggest pig obeys them when he has accepted his defeat. Maybe it shows the children’s ultimate revenge, that of taking away from their father what mattered to him the most: his family, where he was king. Now they are free to make it as they like it, by marrying the waitresses or random black men. The deconstruction of the fascist family has begun. There is indeed hope.

March 2006