Translating Emil Cioran’s Notebooks
@dustyhope.com / notes on (from first day I started...
Link to Latest Entry Translated
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Some Quotes from his First Entry,
Notes from first day addressing translation.
Four Lines FROM FIRST ENTRY, in FR
Emily Dickinson : « I felt a funeral in my brain », je pourrais ajouter comme Mlle de Lespinasse « de tous les instants de ma vie ».
Funérailles perpétuelles de l’esprit.
Comprendra-t-on jamais le drame d’un homme qui, à aucun moment de sa vie, n’a pu oublier le paradis ?
J’ai un pied dans le paradis ; comme d’autres en ont un dans la tombe.
Entries now translated into english at dustyhope.com. Maybe I will bring a little back here…
MY NOTES ON TRANSLATION
Point et infini, mes dimensions, mes modes of existence.
Emile gets out of — sensations de pauvre type — through a bit and bob of math too, as abstraction from heaviness of la maladie.
Projets infinis, chimériques, hors de proportion avec me capacités.
Ma grande prédilection pour les naufrages.
Naufrages means shipwrecks.
Parfois je sens au plus profond de moi des forces infinies. Hélas!
Hello!
License into his poetics, discusses in journal. Like Shakes he gets to the math…
accèss terrible d’obsessions noires,
forces of infinity.
Je me perds tous les jours, puisque je laisse mourrir le monde qui m’habite.
Lost for days, ever since left for dead, the world he inhabits.
Son sourire rudimentaire. Ballotté entre le cynisme and l’élégie.
Sourire means smile. Ballotté means tossed around.
Mon ennui est explosif.
Ennui means boredom, weariness, dissatisfaction.
Être un insecte célèbre.
Être is To Be.
L’universe explose dans mon cerveau. Fièvre intolérable. Je suis à un doigt du Chaos.
Cerveau means brain. Doigt means finger.
From Itineraries of a Hummingbird. On writing Aphorisms:
I only write this kind of stuff, because explaining bores me terribly. That's why I say when I've written aphorisms it's that I've sunk back into fatigue, why bother. And so, the aphorism is scorned by "serious" people, the professors look down upon it. When they read a book of aphorisms, they say, "Oh, look what this fellow said ten pages back, now he's saying the contrary. He's not serious." Me, I can put two aphorisms that are contradictory right next to each other. Aphorisms are also momentary truths. They're not decrees. And I could tell you in nearly every case why I wrote this or that phrase, and when. It's always set in motion by an encounter, an incident, a fit of temper, but they all have a cause. It's not at all gratuitous.
Notes oh his French.
Writes in french. A Second Language.
His syntax and grammar are level, like a level used in carpentry and construction.
(Just started reading this, thinking he is right about where I am, frenchwise.)
Fairly solid basic french grammar, past present and future. Thats it. Indicative, Future, Passe Compose and Imparfait. Thats it.
Doesnt bother too much with reflexive pronouns. Official french uses tons of la le un unes ce cette celle etc. He includes, but only as necessary.
Much more modern in that way.
And the words themselves, wrt meaning, can spot — I mean — in their being very easy to spot basic meaning, as he is using syllables that are shared in meaning across languages.
Basic vocab, pronoun and verb structure. OO la la.
Not like Beckett who has to test out every symptom of a verb.
Ciorans french isnt about the language PER SE. Whereas with Beckett it often is.
Cioran is journalizing, Kafka concerns in his questioning are very much here, but he’s writing more like Nietzsche, as if searching for aphorisms, for meaning that can be encapsulated in a single sentence or two — delush!!
If you have basic french, you will LOVE this book.
This is interesting! As for Cioran, I’m always thinking fuck he’s right where I am, existencewise.
Thank you!