Saturday Good Reads

This list is somewhat longer than usual -- so many good things to read, so little time.

Prose

“Gotta Give It Some Thought” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy.

“Adam and…Who?” by Christy at Notable Blogger.

“Theology From Baseball” by Sarah Salter.

“Flags and Fractions” by Lainie Gallagher.

“The Perfect Game,” "Pretending" and "Your Story" by Billy Coffey.

“Spielberg’s Godly Sniper” by Patton Dodd at The Image Journal.

“Government Flunks the Test of Trust in the Gulf” by Ron Fournier of Associated Press.

“I Failed Him” by Tim Challies at Informing the Reforming.

“Taking the Plunge” and "Returning the Favor" by Duane Scott.

“How to Raise Geniuses” by Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience.

“That other loud and accidental point of time” by Kelly Foster at The Image Journal.

“He Does Me In” by Jessica McGuire for the MOB (Mothers of Boys) Society.

“Broken” by Doug Spurling at Spurling Silver.

“PBS Makes Me Desperate to See a Video Game Orchestra” by Keith Wilson at The Robotto-Mulatto.

“Strength” by Bridget Chumbley.

“Faith Heroes – The Passing of Greatness” by Jay Cookingham at Soulfari.

“Wiki-Culture” by David Griffith at The Image Journal.

Prose and Video

Priscilla Ahn “Dares to Dream” by Jeanne Damoff for The Master’s Artist.

Poetry

“See This Heart” by Nancy Rosback at Poems and Prayers.

“The Grove: A Poem Dedicated to a Street Near You” and "The Scarecrow and the Cougar" by Pete Marshall.

“Volcano” by Milton Brasher-Cunningham at Don’t Eat Alone.

“Where Laughing Gulls Hover” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

“Unready” and “Midnight Words” by Karen Eck at Phoenix-Karenee.

“Catch a Falling Star” and “On Waking Up” by Melissa at All the Words.

“Day’s Last Light” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy.

“Romanitas,” “At the silent doors of night,” and “Slaying the Old Man” by Justinian at Delight and Glory and Oddity and Light.

“The Raven and the Crow,” Poem of the Day at Men Shall Know Nothing of This.

“Anger – 3 Contemplations” by Rob Kistner at Image & Verse.

Photograph: Lamp, by Nancy Rosback. Used with Permission.

What I'm Reading This Summer

This week, I finished reading Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman and The Mailbox by Marybeth Whalen. I have whittled the pile of “to read” down a little bit, but here’s still a fairly ambitious stack. Or actually, two stacks, to be precise. And a few on a shelf.

Here’s the list:

Poetry

The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass.
Lighthead by Terence Hayes.
Imagination and The Written Word by Shaun Masterton.
The Hidden Life and Fault Lines by T.M. Moore.
Open Ground by Seamus Heaney.

Fiction

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott.
Crossing Oceans by Gina Holmes.
Mending String by Cliff Coon.
The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt.

Suspense

Rooms by James Rubart.
Forget Me Not by Vicki Hinze.
Broken by Travis Thrasher.

Non-Fiction

Parting the Waters by Jeanne Damoff.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio.
Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef.
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll.

Faith/Devotional

God in the Yard by L.L. Barkat.
The Ailbe Psalter by T.M. Moore.
The Cross Gardener by Jason Wright.

Ambitious, yes. But a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

Related:

My Spring Reading Thing by Cheryl Smith, who’s still trying to catch up on her spring reading.

Dan King’s 7 Fascinating Books.

A Sort of Summer Reading List by L.L. Barkat.

Summer Reading by Heather at Madame Rubies Writes.

Ann Kroeker's Ambitious Summer Reading List.

Bradley Moore's Summer Reading List.

Charity Singleton's Summer is Time for Reading.

Cheryl Smith's My Summer Reading List Is Getting Out of Control.

Picnic by Laura Boggess for the High Calling Blogs.

Generations

My mother, 87, holds great-grandson Cameron, almost 3 months, for the first time, June 9, 2010.

Life Is a Garden

I’m continuing to follow, read and record from God the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat. For me, it’s week 2: “Rules – The Way,” and I’ve been reading about spiritual practice, considering who’s really in control of my life, and how a pair of cardinals watching over a baby can suggest a lesson about learning to fly.

And there’s this chapter exercise about writing your life as a garden.

The gardens we have at home were originally planned by my wife with a landscape designer; you have to do something when the builder scrapes off the top six feet of dirt – including all the topsoil – and anything green. It was literally a clean slate – a clean clay slate. Missouri clay. We had it analyzed – zero percent organic matter.

Over the years, we’ve added a rather elaborate redwood fence, then replaced it with something similar in plastic when the redwood decided to rot. We built gardens around the perimeter of the house itself and along most of the fence.

As my wife’s knees steadily weakened, the garden fell more and more in my direction. And I’ve gone through phases. The rose phase lasted for several years; at one point we had more than 50 rose bushes. Then rose rosette disease struck and only a handful survived. The perennial phase started big and then slowed. But it never stopped – I still pick up occasional plants each spring at a nearby nursery. The annual phase started about three years ago, when we bought a bunch of zinnias and others to plant under trees, in borders and any place I can find to plant too many purchased plants. There’s also a small bed for tomatoes.

The one consistent planting practice I’ve had is bulbs. I plant a lot of bulbs each year. Lots. And I know exactly why – the Dutch Gardens catalog knows when it’s in the hands of an adult with big eyes – the proverbial kid in the candy store. All kinds of tulips. Irises. Daffodils. Hyacinths. I order by what looks appealing, with only vague thoughts in my head about where they will all go.

When the shipment arrives, usually sometime in mid-October, I’ve forgotten why I ordered so many. I can’t believe how many bulbs are in the box. But I dutifully get out the bulb tool and bulb fertilizer, and away I go. I always end up with aching hands and back and at least two skinned knuckles. It’s totally predictable.

The garden’s structure is provided by river birches, maple trees, magnolia trees, hollies, a viburnum that was only supposed to grow to six feet, not 12, hydrangeas, a dogwood and a crabapple. The front of the house also includes boxwood.

So, if my life is a garden, if my life is this garden, what does it say about me?

I love the beauty of living things, and I’m willing to work to produce them (usually). And the work can be hard and dirty – but that’s what it takes to grow what matters.

It takes a long time to grow a garden, particularly when the soil starts off with zero organic content and you have to add lots of stuff. And you have to keep adding lots of good stuff.

Nothing ever goes exactly to plan. Disease happens. Lack of rain requires watering. Too much rain is a problem, too. (I remember the late spring of 1993, trying to plant two rosebushes and it was as if the rain would never stop; that was the year of the great flood.) And then there are weeds; weak trees (like Bradford pears) that decide to fall down all by themselves; and seedlings spread from the maples (millions of seedlings spread from the maples; millions and millions).

I haven’t even mentioned the grass.

It looks orderly, but the order has little to do with me. In the spring and early summer, it can look spectacular and bring people walking by on the sidewalk to a stop. But there are always things to fix, things to do, things that die and have to be discarded, new things to try.

It does sound a lot like my life.

Related:

Contemplation by Laura Boggess.

Edith Grossman's "Why Translation Matters"

In the fall of 1986, I was in a master’s program at Washington University in St. Louis, and taking a seminar in “The Latin American Novel.” I have to admit that, prior to the course, I was familiar with (but had not read) only one Latin American novel – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (Yes, I was an Anglo-centric cretin.)

We read 100 Years of Solitude, and we read The Green House and The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. And Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. And The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. And several other works. I wrote my major paper for the seminar on Vargas Llosa’s Conversations in the Cathedral, which seems to have no narrative structure at all until you understand that it is actually four stories being told simultaneously. Think Faulkner on steroids.

This was a whole new world for me, and I explored it as fully as I could. Not too long after I finished the course, I began reviewing books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; the book editor discovered my affinity for Latin American fiction; and I soon became inundated with novels, non-fiction and poetry from Latin America, Spain and Portugal, and then the fiction of American children of immigrants to the U.S. (legal and illegal). I did this for close to seven years – and I had to keep funneling books to school libraries to prevent our house from becoming a vast library.

But I didn’t read the works in the original Spanish or Portuguese. I read them in translation. And so I met names like Alfred MacAdam, Helen Lane, Gregory Rabassa – and Edith Grossman.

Why Translation Matters is based upon two lectures Grossman gave at Yale University and an original essay written for this volume. She explains, with all of the artful love of a translator, what the process of translation involves, the challenges it poses (and they are formidable), and why translations are important. And she means translation “not as the weary journeyman of the publishing world but as a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two sets of readers.”

For the fact is that no good translation can be a literal, word-for-word effort. It’s simply not possible. Languages are full of expressions, artifacts, histories, nuances, hidden meanings and all of the other components of culture that may – or may not – translate well. And even if they translate well, they can’t really ever be exact, because the experience that shaped Spanish, for example, is not the same that created English. The translator faces the task of remaining true to the author’s words and intent, but that dedication can mean, and often does mean, continuing to “write” the work in hand. In that sense, translation means that no literary work is actually ever “finished.”

Grossman tackles these issues head on. And it’s because of translators like Grossman that we have anything resembling a “world literature” instead of a collection of “national literatures.”

Just a few years ago, Grossman translated Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. She had first read Don Quixote in English, translated by Samuel Putnam – the same translation of Don Quixote I first read and fell in love with. Her translation has met wide acclaim, and she talks extensively about it in her third essay in Why Translation Matters.

I knew her work before I met her in this volume. In fact, I’ve read at least seven novels she has translated, and I learned that I could see “Translated by Edith Grossman” on a book’s title page and know that I was holding a novel that would be well worth my time to read.

Don Miller's Message

My new post, on author and speaker Don Miller, is up at The Christian Manifesto. I consider his books Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and discuss how the medium is the message. Let me know what you think.

Cathedral

Cheap wine, Tokay, I think,
or Thunderbird, whatever fits
a plain brown paper bag;
plastic cup, reflecting the
light filtering the high
windows of the cathedral.
Drink, deeply.

Not a warm place; wind
slipping through cracks in
stone, cooling with stone’s
touch, brushing along stone
surface, light freezing through
glassy stains, shards of icy
color cast on icy stone.

Little side chapels, like silver
beads on a necklace or charms
on a child’s bracelet, decorated
with silence, sheens of
candlelight shimmering among
gilt-edged saints who
watch, not speaking.

Worshippers departed long ago
but tourists wander in awe.
Memory is not linear.