Translation
Friday, November 14 2008
My Senior AV Technician and I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly last week and decided:
- Jean-Dominique Bauby was the Frenchest person imaginable.
- His condition – a severe stroke that left him able to communicate only with one eyelid – was the Frenchest illness imaginable (more than the so-called French disease, even).
- The consequent movie was the Frenchest movie imaginable.
None of which is intended to denigrate the French, their wonderful culture, or their centuries of proud history. We liked the movie, but just couldn’t help noticing the thrice-perfect Frenchness of it.
Netflix recommended it to me because I also liked The Sea Inside, a film about Ramon Sampedro. As far as movies about paralyzed people go, they are different as could be. I liked The Sea Inside a lot more than The Diving Bell, but I would recommend them both. (How is that Javier Bardem paralyzed is still twice as sexy as me able-bodied?) Both are in a foreign language with subtitles, but you’ve already this much so I know you can.
Having watched the movie, I now see that Bauby’s book is available in an English translation. Oddly enough, Ramon Sampedro’s Cartes desde el infierno (lit. Letters from the fire, ie. Hell) is not available in English, as best I can tell. I think the reason is that while Bauby’s book basically affirms the joy of life, such as it is, Sampedro’s book is all bleak poetry challenging the reader to rethink death. I have the 2004 Spanish edition, but summer-school Spanish was the only class I failed in college (the NIH was involved). That might make me the least-qualified person to offer an English translation of Sampedro, but somebody has to, right? So here goes, starting with the very first poem, “Y como hablo de amor si estoy muerto?”:
And how do I speak of love when I’m dead?
The dead hold no passions,
none of the humanly felt sentiments
only we the living [???]
All is incoherence and contradiction
for one dead among mortals.
It is not a lunacy, nor a flower, nor [???}
because it does not have flesh for reproduction.
What thing is more absurd than listening to a cadaver
speak passionately with a human,
who [the cadaver?] cannot sense hot or cold
nor feel sadness or [???]
Wow – that’s tiring, and I’m not even using a dictionary. Good thing for cognates, I suppose. Anyway, there’s more, later – that’s only half the poem.
If you speak Spanish and have read Cartes, drop me a line. Otherwise, check out the two movies. They’re heavy viewing, but – spoiler alert – they both have more or less happy endings. Actually, that probably tells you more about me than anything else.
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