The Long Apprenticeship: On Creative Development
I am painfully aware of How Things Are Going, and various descriptors come to mind: “poorly,” “bizarrely,” and “off the fucking rails” all present themselves as options. Half my friends are posting about their new work-from-home set-ups and their cute PJs; the other half are posting their PayPal and Venmo accounts because their jobs are being forced to close or sharply curtail their business and they are passing various mile markers along shit creek. Personally, I’m semi-essential, and occupying an odd position in between being able to take advantage of this time of public abandonment, and still needing to present my flimsy fucking body in a place at a time.
In the face of, you know, the burgeoning terror, I’ve noticed a number of injunctions to pursue personal projects — getting a hobby, making home repairs that have been put off, et cetera. I’m inclined to view such statements as generally value-neutral; whatever helps you sleep at night is whatever helps you sleep at night, and provided it doesn’t hurt anyone else, fucking go for it. But not only are these encouragements not universally accessible, they aren’t quite landing for me personally, either.
Here’s why: due to a family tradition of just fucking impeccable timing, I recently put a cap on two projects, both of which took an inordinately long time. One is a still-pretty-secret translation project, alluded to elsewhere, which consumed my every free hour for eighteen months, as well as much of my brain power the rest of the time.
The other is ten years in the making: a novella, entitled The Horn, the Pencil, and the Ace of Diamonds, forthcoming from us. Is that tacky? Yes. But I promise I’m going somewhere this.
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But let’s talk about music first. With respect to the translation project, I talked at some length about the music I’ve come to associate with working on, specifically, classical translation (it’s Thrice; I listen to Thrice while doing Latin and Greek). However, I know I’m not the only writer to intimately associate particular albums or artists with particular projects or types of projects: I remember encountering the acknowledgments to Jeff VanderMeer and Neil Gaiman novels in my teens and being absolutely thrilled at the more or less detailed accounts of what they listened to while working.
November, by Azure Ray.
When I first wrote The Horn, which began, like a number of other things, in Salina, Kansas, and later as I returned to it and edited it and expanded it — whenever I touched it, basically — I turned almost without exception to Azure Ray, and specifically Hold On Love and the November EP. Though my first encounter with the band was a now-difficult-to-find-for-streaming remix of “Rise,” Burn and Shiver never quite landed for me — I remain open to the possibilities of that one and their self-titled eventually hitting home. But Hold On Love and November tapped into something that resonated deeply for me: an organic melancholy, a contemporary alienation, a tender complicity in the close vocal harmonies and the lyrical reliance on the first-person plural.
Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia
To get to the heart of my affection for Azure Ray, I’m afraid we have to go even further back, to the mid-aughts. I was living in north-central Kansas while my dad worked on a book that proved to be an extremely drawn-out undertaking; in the interests of verisimilitude, we were living the top floor of the late-nineteenth-century mansion in Concordia. The house was owned by the resident Democrat in town, Marsha Doyenne; it was on her baby grand piano that I truly learned to play, insofar as I’ve truly learned to play any instrument; in the Concordia public library, I encountered Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, which was about the highest concentration of horny and queer that I could find off of the internet (tragic).
My dad brought Azure Ray to my attention, through the above-mentioned remix, and very kindly provided me with CDs of Hold On Love and November, once he had ripped MP3s of all the tracks (simpler times, eh?). I spent a lot of time listening to them, along with, of course, discovering emo through its third wave and like, I don’t know, crying or something. It was a complicated time for me both on a broadly emotional level and with respect to my gender and body image; I was very lonely, and trying very hard to find a femininity that was both actionable in my circumstances and acceptable to my own nascent self-concept.
And Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink, in a way, provided a possible model: fae and self-contained almost to the point of hermeticism, the sonic landscape they built mirrored my own actual landscape. The combination of electronic and organic sounds, the intimate and almost conspiratorial lyrical imagery, and Jesus fucking Christ those voices of theirs, mapped almost directly onto the experience of attending an online high school in the attic of a brooding mansion, never quite out of sight of the endless, uncaring plains.
That sort of time does things to a man, including and not limited to making you really like a particular band.
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Bong-Joon Ho, pictured here making his Oscars kiss.
Translation is a weird thing, right? It’s deeply weird. I’m currently reading George Steiner’s After Babel, the book that, it could be argued, established translation studies as a thing you could do. He spent most of the first thirty pages demonstrating, with electric intensity, that almost every act of communication involves a measure of translation, carried out internally, in secret even from the “translator.” Its ubiquity has only grown since the publication of Steiner’s book: Facebook offers automated translations of posts, to greater or lesser success; much was made of Bong Joon-ho’s remarks about Americans watching subtitled movies, which was followed by people other than anime fans jumping into the subs-versus-dubs debate. (On the topic of Parasite specifically, here’s a great piece digging in to some of what cannot be translated, as well as an interview with the guy who did the translation in question.) Basically, the role of translation in our lives is increasing in visibility, if not in comprehension.
As well it might. Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility, another important work on translation and its role, focuses on the English-language effacement of translation. A “good” English translation, Venuti argues, is one that is “invisible,” or at least, that’s how we talk about them. A “good” translation doesn’t feel translated, and Venuti takes his time explaining how and why that is a weird conceit.
Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Some things just don’t translate.
Consider the use of particles in ancient Greek (the “source language,” as it’s called, for the top-secret-translation-project). One of my professors defined them, generally, as “sentence adverbs.” As Kaegi’s Greek Grammar has it, at somewhat greater length:
It should be remembered that the meanings of the Greek particles which are given below are in many instances merely approximate. The Greeks were able by them to express the finest shades of meaning. In English, the stress of the voice, a change of tone, or even a gesture, will sometimes serve the same purpose.
Particles are ubiquitous in Homeric Greek, piled up in Plato. And no matter how many shades of meaning they may express, at the end of the day the reader of all this is still helplessly staring at a word that transliterates as “gar,” trying to determine how important its various senses (Kaegi puts forward, in general, that it states a reason, explains or specifies, or simply denotes impatience in a question) may be to the line to be translated. And “gar” isn’t even one of the hard ones.
Unsurprisingly, given that people have been translating things out of Greek for a long time, a number of different techniques have arisen to deal with the issue of translating two-to-five-letter words that flavor the whole sentence. Unfortunately, loudly cursing god and man isn’t one that usually makes it to the page.
Or consider the many different ways of seeing things, kind of, and watching light play on shiny things, that English expresses. We spend a lot of time glimpsing and glancing while things glitter and gleam and flash and shine and shimmer. I’m not very good at French, but in my experience, it’s hard to convey the exact quality of seeing something but just barely and without really meaning to that “glimpse” suggests.
Frankly, it’s amazing anyone conveys any sense of anything at all.
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In a conversation with a coworker, it came out that I had studied classical languages, and she asked why, or maybe how, I came to study them. The answer I usually give is that I thought, initially, that I wanted to study early Christian history and knew I would need them for that. I sometimes leave out the part where I then realized that a lot of the history I wanted to study was in Greek, which I did not like, and that Latin lyric poetry, which I like a lot, was right there.
For those who need introduction, a modern pentathlon consists of: Running, horseback riding, fencing, shooting, swimming.
But if I were to really answer that question, I would have to lay out a lot of personal history, which I strongly doubt this coworker has time for. (Or maybe she does now, but it would be weird.) It involves a conversation with my father confessor when I was 12, and a general sense of inadequacy, and is also tied up in why I want to do a modern pentathlon someday. There’s a lot of translation there, and I would have to show my work, and by “my work” I mean “a solid chunk of my life story.”
In a post a long time ago, I discussed how I devised the magic ritual a character uses in an episode of Perdition’s Teeth, our flagship project. I mention it now because The Horn was instrumental in me arriving at being the kind of person who likes coming up with magic systems — in fiction and, more recently, for my own well-being. Not unlike Cassandra’s in the Perdition’s Teeth episode, the magic system outlined in The Horn isn’t so much “outlined” as it is practiced with no explanation, and it’s not really “system” but rather a series of connections made almost by free association.
But they resonate for me on a bone-deep level, sort of the way finding myself studying classics did. The magic in The Horn, for me, makes sense: relying both on chance and the vagaries of contemporary life, it features mostly die-rolling and card-dropping to make decisions concerning things like travel routes, or figuring out someone’s phone number.
Because we were both unfortunate enough to be living in Salina, Kansas when I first drafted the story, I showed it to a friend of mine with some expertise in the field. While I don’t recall their exact wording, it resonated for them, too, the way things do when they don’t actually make sense but they just kind of… make sense.
Sometimes things do that, both in magic and in translation, which are arguably related phenomena.
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Why did these projects take me so long? Why was it 18 months — two babies, or a master’s program if you’re fast and British — for me to translate some five hundred lines of ancient Greek? Why was it ten years for a novella that doesn’t even break 20k words?
I mean, leaving aside Horace’s famed injunction to show your poems to people and then put them in a drawer for nine years (CW: untranslated Latin), sometimes shit just takes a while. In the case of the translation, it was because I work full time and my body hurts and sometimes I just can’t focus on stuff because of those things. In the case of The Horn it was all that stuff, sure, but also I couldn’t write The Horn now, or if I did, it would be almost unrecognizable. I had to write it then; I had to revisit it over the course of a number of years; I had to leave it in the fucking drawer and take it out sometimes and have a number of near misses with actually getting it out into the world.
Until now. I hope it’s good. I think it is. The time is right, I think? They say you never know.
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In any case, it’s due out 21 March, with phenomenal cover and interior art by Cassie Allen. It’ll be on Itch.io and Gumroad. You may also have noticed that we have an affiliates page now; please affiliate with us, and we will affiliate with you.