Translator and cultural scientist Sasha Moroz about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, a translator, a cultural scientist and aspiring theater director Sasha Moroz shares his stories about favorite books.
I started reading very early, before three years old. Few of my current acquaintances notice, but I am a drunken bibliophile. Fond of ideas. In childhood, there was the danger of strabismus due to night reading with a lantern. Later I translated, edited, published, sold books. She worked in various publishing houses, in the bookbinding workshop, in the library, in the "Project OGI" bookstore. at night - and she carried everything to the house.
My dad, a programmer and translator, has assembled a wonderful library. When I brought books from the Phalanster, I often distributed repetitions, if the pope already had such a copy. They bought important things and then gave them away to friends - for example, Sasha Sokolov's "School for Fools", and Fat Notebook "by Agotho Christophe. Home books were absolutely everywhere. Once, the first Russian translation of Georges Peck's novel “The Disappearance” fell on my head - this is how I learned about the existence of ULIPO.
Since the theater entered my life, relations with books have changed. The work assumes the absence of soil under your feet and close communication - and suddenly the books were not at all what they had seemed before: they turned from applied fount of hedonism into applied things. Changed and attitude to the translation. Then I introduced a rule: the book can be read only once, and from it you need to take the maximum practical benefit. It is impossible to return to the read - it will be another book. Today, my dialogue with the text is built without a hint of “bookishness” - this is a practical conversation, requiring arguments, time, effort, parallel analytics and the work of the unconscious. For fun, I try to read as little as possible. But when I look at the bookstore, my head is spinning!
My formation is Velimir Khlebnikov, William Carlos Williams and, oddly enough, Stuart Home ("69 places to visit with a dead princess"). After Khlebnikov, I began to treat expressiveness differently. At the same time, I, probably, was about fourteen or fifteen, drew attention to the sound writing, speech tactility. Williams is the poet through whom I subsequently contacted Beckett. "69 places ..." for a long time hid on the shelf with the spine inward; it was my first secret book - the second was James Ballard's The Crystal World.
For me, the book is important as an object: to smell, to drive with your fingers. I appreciate a good layout, paper, I buy albums from time to time. In early childhood, I loved to move publications from place to place - although after working in bookstores, the gleam in the eyes of this process, of course, diminished.
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges is a controversial author to me. I treat him, no matter how it sounds, like a woman. Hate. Impossible. I return again and again to reread another story with hate. I can not accept his scholasticism, the horizontal of fantasy, constructions. In general, for some hard-to-explain reason, I can hardly tolerate Hispanic authors. In this sense, Ezra Pound's "Cantos" is my salvation.
Astrid Lindgren
"Peppy Longstocking"
The first reader's experience - twenty-five times on repeat. "Peppy Longdog" in a white cover, where a perky girl with red pigtails showed her tongue - this hooligan image has stayed with me for the rest of my life. Everything was full of wonders - pure joy and an uncompromising world, devoid of order. The best of worlds. When I read Golding's “Lord of the Flies” a little later, what a blow to Peppy!
Katie Acker
"Eurydice in the Underworld"
I hope to play this play sometime as a directorial debut. In the dramatic works of Aker, the language itself becomes the material for theatrical action. I can only say that she is a real student of Burroughs, a brilliant prose writer (her novels in excellent translation were published by Dmitry Volchek in Kolonna Publications, I strongly advise) and the original playwright, and the play itself is sewn like a rich multi-level collage where the social context is not for a second overshadows the main question - about the existence of the poet. This material, written by Aker in 1997, before his death, and not the last role in the play is played by the figure of Marina Tsvetaeva.
George peck
"Double-ve, or Memory of childhood"
Book to read in different languages. I have only four copies on hand: French, English, Spanish and Russian. My friend Tolya Melnikov and I “lived” this book together for four months: we met in a cafe and read. The book is stratified into two: memories of the hero of childhood, which fall into fragments in which there can be no wholeness; and the story about a certain sports island, with its own hierarchy. I have long been interested in the connection between the Lettrists and fascism. Another favorite novel written in the same vein is the untranslated "Ella Minnow Pea".
Pierre Guyot
"Ashby"
This is my favorite book for three years now. I like her so much that I’m afraid to read other Guillaume novels. The author undermines the taste of the word - the corporeality of the tongue is very important to him. For me, all my life this is important - the more pleasant it is to observe how it gets more and more finished with every page.
Alain Badiou
"The Mysterious Attitude of Philosophy and Politics"
This book by Badiou is more important to me than Ethics — perhaps because it opened here as a mod. The difference between Deleuze and Badiou is significant for me, in what Deleuze creates, and Badiu sings the existing one. So much the better: a philosophy that lives at night, a philosophy in direct connection with poetry, a manual on general acceptance. His essay "What is love", by the way, makes me so angry that I reread it from time to time - for motivation.
Arkady Dragomoshchenko
"Tautology"
I got acquainted with the book a year after the death of its author - she was late. I remember that I came to the Lenin Library: a winter day, Dostoevsky had high snowdrifts, they brought me a pile of books on my topic - then I was working with a group of New York translators and anthropologists who worked with Indian oral tradition. There were some clues between my topic and Dragomoshchenko's acquaintances in America - and in the list of references in one of the books on the topic I found Tautology.
Opened it. Green lamp, squeaky chairs, winter outside the window, very heavy snow and the first synesthetic attack since childhood: I saw very bright colors of letters. I could not tear myself away from the book. I understood that it was impossible to read it entirely, in a row, but I hadn’t finished reading it yet, I didn’t leave it, I sat in the library until closing time. I often come back to this book to this day - I don’t think that I will ever leave it at all.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
"Anti-Oedipus"
This book traveled with me for a long time - I practically stole it from a friend (he knows): now it’s almost impossible to get one. Stupidity, but I remember very well how I first opened it, in London, on a bench in a small park - ducks screamed loudly around. With this book it is worth starting the "course of the young fighter": this is a book for the education of the youth. Universal code with which you need to open the modern world. The questions that society puts before us are not solved individually.
Paul bowles
"Signs in time. Moroccan stories"
Through this little book, I entered the world of Bowles, which I recorded in the dry classics of the second row. I was strongly shaken up by small, capacious, biting stories - they freely turn over time, work outside of explanations. A person who has fallen into this hematopoietic culture, pulsating, suffocating, turns out to be languageless. The shock of collision with the Other is so great that it ceases to be surprising at all. There is no morality or fear of naming - just nothing is ever called here.
Samuel Beckett
"Molloy"
Beckett is love. For myself, I call this book "score writing". Of all the modernists, Beckett is closest to me, because he may not be a modernist at all. In Molloy, Beckett had already defeated university “acne” and became a writer. "Pimple" he was also great - many do not like his first novel "Dreams of women, beautiful and so-so", and I love him dearly.
But Molloy is a different matter. One episode became a textbook for me: the problem of sucking stones. The hero sits on the shore and sucks in turn small pellets of pebbles, solving the problem of how to suck stones from four pockets in such a way as to act evenly and not to repeat. I love this task very much - it seems to me that it cleans the brain very well.
At one time, this Molloy headboard hung over my bed: "Being by the sea, I took the opportunity to replenish my reserves of stones for sucking. Yes, at the seaside, I filled them up considerably. I distributed stones equally in four pockets and sucked them one by one. I first solved the problem of succession in the following way: Suppose I had sixteen stones, four in each pocket (two trouser pockets and two coat pockets). I took a stone from the right coat pocket and stuffed it in my mouth, and in the right one coat pocket shifted Amen from the right pocket of the trousers, into which he transferred the stone from the left pocket of his trousers, into which he transferred the stone from the left pocket of his coat, into which he transferred the stone that was in my mouth as soon as I finished sucking it. Thus, in each of the four pockets It turned out to be four stones, but not quite the ones that had been there before. When the desire to suck the stone again took hold of me, I again climbed into my right pocket of my coat in full confidence that I would not get the stone that I had taken the last time. And while I was sucking it, I was shifting the rest of the stones along the circle I had already described. And so on".
Maurice Blancheau
"Waiting for Oblivion"
There are a lot of French on my list; Blanshaw among them is not a pet, but probably the strongest. If you need to immobilize yourself, stand still in front of the book, I get it. In "Waiting for Oblivion," only a dry residue of energy works, the crust of dialogue - and the train of an unnamed event. Bradbury needed a story about the city left. Blanshaw plot is not needed - "Waiting for Oblivion" is the city left. This is a terrible and endless, albeit small in volume book.