conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Americans, America, National with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Essays & Correspondence?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Where the Stress Falls'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first two paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Where the Stress Falls
  To start with, we rehearsed in the dark. The bare proscenium stage was lit usually by only three or four candles, supplemented by the four flashlights I'd brought with me. When I asked for additional candles, I was told there weren't any. Later I was told that they were being saved for our performances. In fact, I never learned who doled out the candles; they were simply in place on the floor when I arrived each morning at the theatre, having walked through alleys and courtyards to reach the stage door, the only usable entrance, at the rear of the freestanding modern building. The theatre's façade, lobby, cloakroom, and bar had been wrecked by shelling more than a year earlier and the debris still had not been cleared away.
  Actors in Sarajevo, Pašovi had explained to me with comradely regret, expect to work only four hours a day. "We have many bad habits here left over from the old socialist days." But that was not my experience. After a bumpy start—during the first week everyone seemed preoccupied with other performances and rehearsals, or obligations at home—I could not have asked for actors more zealous, more eager. The main obstacle, apart from the siege lighting, was the fatigue of the malnourished actors, many of whom, before they arrived for rehearsal at ten, had for several hours been queuing for water and then lugging heavy plastic containers up eight or ten flights of stairs. Some of them had to walk two hours to get to the theatre, and, of course, would have to follow the same dangerous route at the end of the day.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: four more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Bosnian war is hardly the only horror show that has been unfolding in the past four or five years. But there are events—model events—that do seem to sum up the principal opposing forces of one's time. One such event was the Spanish Civil War. Like the war in Bosnia, that struggle was an emblematic one. But intellectuals—the writers, theatre people, artists, professors, scientists who have a record of speaking up on important public events and issues of conscience—have been as conspicuous by their absence from the Bosnian conflict as they were by their presence in Spain in the 1930s. Of course, it's speaking rather too well of intellectuals to think that they constitute something like a perennial class, part of whose vocation is to take up the best causes—as it's unlikely that only every thirty years or so is there a war somewhere else in the world that should inspire even would-be pacifists to take sides. Still, the standard of dissent and activism associated with intellectuals is a reality. Why so little response to what happened in Bosnia?
  There are probably many reasons. Heartless historical clichés certainly figure in the paltriness of the response. There is the traditional bad reputation of the Balkans as a place of eternal conflict, of implacable ancient rivalries. Haven't those folks always been slaughtering one another? (This is comparable to having said when confronted with the reality of Auschwitz: Well, what can one expect? You know, anti-Semitism is an ancient story in Europe.) Not to be underestimated, too, is the pervasiveness of anti-Muslim prejudice, a reflex reaction to a people the majority of whom are as secular, and as imbued with contemporary consumer-society culture, as their southern European neighbors. To bolster the fiction that this is at its deepest source a religious war, the label Muslim is invariably used to describe the victims, their army, and their government—though no one would think of describing the invaders as the Orthodox and the Catholics. Do many secular "Western" intellectuals who might be expected to have raised their voices to defend Bosnia share these prejudices? Of course they do.
  And this is not the 1930s. Nor the 1960s. Actually, we are already living in the twenty-first century, in which such twentieth-century certainties as the identification of fascism, or imperialism, or Bolshevikstyle dictators as the principal "enemy" no longer offer a framework (often a facile one) for thought and action. What made it obvious that one should side with the government of the Spanish Republic, whatever its flaws, was the struggle against fascism. Opposing the American aggression in Vietnam (which took over the unsuccessful French effort to hold on to Indochina) made sense as part of the worldwide struggle against Euro-American colonialism.
  If the intellectuals of the 1930s and the 1960s often showed themselves too gullible, too prone to appeals to idealism to take in what was really happening in certain beleaguered, newly radicalized societies that they may or may not have visited (briefly), the morosely depoliticized intellectuals of today, with their cynicism always at the ready, their addiction to entertainment, their reluctance to inconvenience themselves for any cause, their devotion to personal safety, seem at least equally deplorable. (I can't count how many times I've been asked, each time I return to New York from Sarajevo, how I can go to a place that's so dangerous.) By and large, that handful of intellectuals who consider themselves people of conscience can be mobilized now solely for limited actions—against, say, racism or censorship—within their own countries. Only domestic political commitments seem plausible now. Among once internationally minded intellectuals, nationalist complacencies have renewed prestige. (I should note that this seems true more of writers than of doctors, scientists, and actors.) There has been an implacable decay of the very notion of international solidarity.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But there are events—model events—that do seem to sum up the principal opposing forces of one's time. One such event was the Spanish Civil War. Like the war in Bosnia, that struggle was an emblematic one. But intellectuals—the writers, theatre people, artists, professors, scientists who have a record of speaking up on important public events and issues of conscience—have been as conspicuous by their absence from the Bosnian conflict as they were by their presence in Spain in the 1930s. Of course, it's speaking rather too well of intellectuals to think that they constitute something like a perennial class, part of whose vocation is to take up the best causes—as it's unlikely that only every thirty years or so is there a war somewhere else in the world that should inspire even would-be pacifists to take sides. Still, the standard of dissent and activism associated with intellectuals is a reality. Why so little response to what happened in Bosnia?
  There are probably many reasons. Heartless historical clichés certainly figure in the paltriness of the response. There is the traditional bad reputation of the Balkans as a place of eternal conflict, of implacable ancient rivalries. Haven't those folks always been slaughtering one another? (This is comparable to having said when confronted with the reality of Auschwitz: Well, what can one expect? You know, anti-Semitism is an ancient story in Europe.) Not to be underestimated, too, is the pervasiveness of anti-Muslim prejudice, a reflex reaction to a people the majority of whom are as secular, and as imbued with contemporary consumer-society culture, as their southern European neighbors. To bolster the fiction that this is at its deepest source a religious war, the label Muslim is invariably used to describe the victims, their army, and their government—though no one would think of describing the invaders as the Orthodox and the Catholics. Do many secular "Western" intellectuals who might be expected to have raised their voices to defend Bosnia share these prejudices? Of course they do.
  And this is not the 1930s. Nor the 1960s. Actually, we are already living in the twenty-first century, in which such twentieth-century certainties as the identification of fascism, or imperialism, or Bolshevikstyle dictators as the principal "enemy" no longer offer a framework (often a facile one) for thought and action. What made it obvious that one should side with the government of the Spanish Republic, whatever its flaws, was the struggle against fascism. Opposing the American aggression in Vietnam (which took over the unsuccessful French effort to hold on to Indochina) made sense as part of the worldwide struggle against Euro-American colonialism.
  If the intellectuals of the 1930s and the 1960s often showed themselves too gullible, too prone to appeals to idealism to take in what was really happening in certain beleaguered, newly radicalized societies that they may or may not have visited (briefly), the morosely depoliticized intellectuals of today, with their cynicism always at the ready, their addiction to entertainment, their reluctance to inconvenience themselves for any cause, their devotion to personal safety, seem at least equally deplorable. (I can't count how many times I've been asked, each time I return to New York from Sarajevo, how I can go to a place that's so dangerous.) By and large, that handful of intellectuals who consider themselves people of conscience can be mobilized now solely for limited actions—against, say, racism or censorship—within their own countries. Only domestic political commitments seem plausible now. Among once internationally minded intellectuals, nationalist complacencies have renewed prestige. (I should note that this seems true more of writers than of doctors, scientists, and actors.) There has been an implacable decay of the very notion of international solidarity.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This universalist model exists side by side with the persistence of language separatism, which asserts the incommensurability of cultures, of identities (political, racial, anatomical). So, in the former Yugoslavia, one language is being turned into many, and there is the farce of a patriotic call for translations. Both models exist simultaneously, perhaps interdependently. Language patriotism may continue to grow as a country pursues economic politics that sap national sovereignty, just as the most lethal myths of national distinctiveness can maintain their hold on a population even as it becomes ever more attached to the cultural paraphernalia of consumer capitalism, which is blandly supranational (made in Japan, made in the U.S.A.), or to computer technologies, which promote inevitably the growth of a world language, English.
  I don't have time to tell you any stories about my dialogue with the translators. I'll end by saying that I wish I could stop wanting to be available to them. I wish I could give up trying to see the words, my own sentences, English, shine through. It's melancholy as well as enthralling work. I do not translate. I am translated—in the modern sense and in the obsolete sense deployed by Wycliffe. In supervising my translations, I am supervising the death as well as the transposition of my words.
  The version of the aesthete sensibility I once tried to include under the name "camp" can be regarded as a technique of taste for making the aesthete appreciations less exclusionary (a way of liking more than one really wants to like) and as part of the democratizing of dandy attitudes. Camp taste, however, still presupposes the older, high standards of discrimination—in contrast to the taste incarnated by, say, Andy Warhol, the franchiser and mass marketer of the dandyism of leveling.
  There is a metaphoric use of translation-as-adaptation, which evokes the older, physical sense of translation: translating (transposing) from one medium to another. Here there are no guidelines about what may be produced by following the original more, rather than less, literally; or (as is often recommended) choosing an inferior work to strut one's stuff. When Berlin Alexanderplatz was "translated to the screen" by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the filmmaker preserved a large part of the spirit of Döblin's masterpiece, and also made a film that is a masterpiece. What might seem a counterexample, with equally exemplary results: Henry Bernstein's Mélo is far from a great play, but Alain Resnais's Mélo, which scrupulously follows the text of Bernstein's boulevard melodrama of 1928, is a great film. Resnais did not have to improve Bernstein's play. He only had to add to it his own genius.
  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin's Press.