petak, 10. veljače 2012.

Neprevedeni, prljavi, zli: Flavia Company


Flavia Company? Zar je to ime i prezime? I još književnice! I još argentinske. Vau.
Upasti s pištoljem u ured nekog nakladnika i tražiti da se u roku 24 sati prevede nešto njezino!


Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1963, Flavia Company is a novelist, narrator, translator, and lecturer who has been living in Barcelona since 1973, the year she took Spanish nationality. As a journalist, Company has been a regular contributor to Catalonia magazine and a broadcaster hosting the program B 360 on Barcelona Television. She has authored stories, novels, essays, children’s books and articles in both Castilian and Catalan, including such works as Fugue and Counterpoint; Half Light; Neither You, Nor I, Nor Anyone Else; Knitting; Circles Etched in Acid; and With a Rope Around His Neck. The novel is the form with which she is most closely associated. Openly lesbian, Company cites fellow Barcelona transplant Cristina Peri Rossi as a kindred artist, and has made sapphic themes a special suit. Her masterpiece is the 1999 confessional work Pleasure, a graphic expression of pain accompanying a love affair gone sour. In structure, a mock epistolary novel, Pleasure is a tour de force of soul-baring and raw emotion and casts a cold, cruel spotlight on ruined romance, with unprecedented verve and acuity. Differing from such similarly-themed texts as Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Raduan Nassar’s A Glass of Gall, Pleasure, though quivering with the same naked intensity, is a biting, slangy monologue, even if deftly disguised as an accordionized concatenation of toxic causeries. A sustained scream of excruciating remorse, Pleasure is a book-length plaint conveying irremediable loss and longing and embodying the venerable Spanish literary tradition of the formal lament, or song of regret. Though a purely fictional study of the workings of the hedonic drive in human affairs, Pleasure captures the agony and the ecstasy of grand romantic passion with poignancy, immediacy, and conviction, and with a combination of pathos and campiness that is both daringly innovative and distinctly postmodern. - Gilbert Alter-Gilbert


Opening paragraphs from PLEASURE by Flavia Company

At this point, the whole gory story has made such a goo of my mind that my memories drip muck like hands slimy from messing around inside a pig's guts. I've tried to cleanse myself with everything I can think of: cold, hunger, money, other women. I've busied myself, I've buried myself, by watching movies, by reading books, by yielding to misery, to darkness… nothing helps. All that's left is words. And time. You tell yourself that if you live to be one hundred and twelve, you'll never again allow yourself to get anywhere near such a meat grinder, which is all the more pathetic in view of the fact that, at this stage of your life, you must stomach the suffocating conviction that you have already found and lost the grand romance, taken the great leap of faith, squandered the single biggest opportunity of your existence. Not to mention the feeling that creeps over you when you realize you're no longer a child, nor an adolescent, nor even a young woman, and that what you've done is done, which is to say that matters are far from ameliorated by the somber fact of your age, because you're already the adult you've been waiting and wishing to become, and that is the very thing you now can't wish away.

I can't even remember how I got by before. All I know is that talking about it for a while seems to help. And besides, I really haven't got anything better to do. Try to understand. Don't misinterpret me. I know you'll say seen through other eyes, life's a fairytale, and you'll think you know how I feel, because life's the same for everyone, but certain experiences aren't subject to comparisons, because they are marked off and set apart, and private sufferings are not interchangeable.

What can all this mean? What, exactly, has happened to me? I believe it is a combination of things, but when something so overwhelming happens, it's as if nothing had happened at all, because each contributing factor is made from disgrace, and quantifying it is irrelevant. When someone is hungry, it doesn't matter whether it's from a lack of meat or a lack of fruit…

—Trans. Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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