Years ago, I stumbled across a blog called Nostalgia on 9th Avenue.
Back then, I was attempting the quite impossible task of teaching myself Japanese, and while it was admirable, painting the sweaty attrition of my summer days with the black strokes of kanji, orderly, tilted just so, I learned barely a fraction of the nearly 1,000 characters needed for literacy.
What I wanted, simply, was to read the last few chapters of a manga I had found online, that at the time was not so popular, the project abandoned. I was determined that the only way to ever know the ending of that great story was to learn an entire language, buy the print, and read it for myself. Quite the noble endeavor.
The blog aforementioned though, as it happens, was a translation site for japanese books and literature.
It wasn’t quite a concession of my defeat, in fact I believed then and still believe, that the price of broader knowledge and cultural elasticity must be learning the languages within which those practices and concepts exist.
But of course, there are still translations. Jhumpa Lahiri is one of my favorite short stories writers for her confectionary descriptions of intellectual colonialism and consumeristic tourism, and she recently published the collection “Roman Stories,” originally in Italian. With all due respect to the translator, as the merit of the novel remains, there are nuances that cannot be captured outside the context of the language that she conceived of them.
Yet, as a then adolescent, an avid reader, witnessing the impossibility that in the entire world of books and stories and tales untold, there was one person who thought to interpret a not so popular, unlikely novel (upon which the manga was based), I felt lucky. I felt I held a secret treasure.
It makes me contemplate the dormant beauty of blogging, or what it used to be. I dwell sometimes, on the title, Nostalgia on 9th Avenue, and I wonder what place was being referenced, if it were some mundane allusion. Sometimes I feel I know exactly such a place, because it exists in my memory when I reach for it: raindrops on the windowpane, a warm, threadbare blanket, the smell of old books, solitude.
Nostalgia on 9th Ave.
happy new year to all,
twf.
The-Bleu-Bivouac 