Culture at People's Expense: Convivencia and Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Spain

The university city of Alcalá de Henares, most closely associated with the personal confessor to Isabel I, is now a suburb of Madrid that, like many other small Castilian towns, presents itself as part of the heritage of the "tres culturas" of Spain, a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims forged a kind of coexistence, uneasy and inconsistent, but also vibrant and fruitful.

 

 

There is even a badly-proofread plaque in the "trilingual patio" of the historic site of the college commemorating a "three-faiths" encounter there.

But there is also this anti-US, anti-war mural that buys very directly into the Jewish-cabal-behind-it-all conspiracy-myth, right in the heart of the historic barrio judío. It's quite striking in its details, with a six-pointed Jewish star in the upper right-hand corner of the American flag where the 50 five-pointed stars (or even one large five-pointed star standing in for the tiny ones) should be.

 

 

It is a striking contrast as civic art in a city that is actively playing up its Jewish heritage, perhaps cynically to encourage tourism or perhaps in earnest as a real embrace of its past. But it is also a contrast that draws attention to the phenomenon of Jew-as-historical-artifact. Society at large is happy to embrace its Jewish past. After centuries of a different kind of national narrative, it has suddenly become a bit of a cool thing to do, and a path of liberation from the country's own fascist 20th century history. But it doesn't particularly seem to know what to do with actual, flesh-and-blood Jewish people.

Madrid itself is a city covered in swastika graffiti. I'd estimate that there are just about as many that are Xed out as a statement of general anti-fascism as there are that are painted on in earnest support of neo-Nazi or general fascist ideology, but that small and diffuse gesture doesn't inspire a lot of confidence against such an onslaught. It is a city that is, at a minimum, deeply ill-at-ease with its own position in relation to the whole of the twentieth century.

The Famed Delicatessens of al-Andalus

I saw these a few weeks ago in the supermarket and was desperately curious how such a malapropism was introduced into the label of this brand of molasses:

I assumed that it was some kind of mechanical translation issue and spent a few minutes trying to put various things back and forth between Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Arabic in Google Translate to see if I could reproduce the error; I came up with sort of a long shot but didn't think it was probably what had happened.

Then, when we were driving to Córdoba with the students, we passed a sweet shop just off the highway that was a shop that sold "delicación." It's a less-common word that's used to describe jiggly desserts, such as flan and jello-molds, and I could imagine the semantic range including molasses and molasses-based desserts.

Not only do the words sound similar, but if you type "delicación" into Yelp, it asks you if you meant to search for directions to a delicatessen, demonstrating that there are algorithms that seem to think, erroneously, that they are the same thing.

Post-Colonial Cough Syrup

I've been in Madrid for a week now, most of which has been spent thoroughly knocked off my feet by a combination of jet lag and the chest cold I seem to have picked up on the plane. I was expecting it to be a huge challenge to buy cold medicine here just because not only do the brand names of drugs differ, but even the generic names are not always the same. (For example, what we call acetaminophen, most of the rest of the world calls paracetamol.) However, as someone with multiple serious drug allergies, I do a fair amount of research and label-reading even in the US before I buy any kind of new medication; and this wasn't really any different than my normal practice.

This is coming to a point, I promise.

In the course of finding out that the cough suppressant guaifenesin is, in Spanish, just called guaifenesina, I also learned that in its natural form, it is the resin of the guayacá tree, which is native to Santo Domingo. The resin was first brought to Europe by the Spanish conquerers (although they initially hoped it would be a promising remedy for syphilis...).

So, I've not really done anything particularly Madrid-y yet, but at least I am taking culturally and historically appropriate cold medicine.

#BlackLivesMatter

The protest march against the Staten Island grand jury's failure to return an indictment against the police officer who killed Eric Garner began in Washington Square Park. Since I do occasionally post pictures of the goings-on on campus, and this is a going-on that is both very important and has resonances with other aspects of American religious history (of particular interest to me is the evocation of Heschel marching with King), I thought I'd share some of the images I made.

Click to embiggen. And note, especially, the protester writing her social security number on her body just in case.

A Very Brief Guide to European Visa Applications

I am theoretically supposed to be teaching at NYU's Madrid study-away site this spring. The university is trying to cycle the New York faculty through the sites with more regularity, which is great in theory; in practice, they haven't really ironed all of the glitches out of the system yet. As a citizen of the United States and nowhere else that would be even remotely useful in terms of spending more than 90 days in a country in the Schengen Area (the designation that the EU takes when talking about passports and visas), there are a lot of hoops to jump through; and so I'm compiling a checklist of things I need to do/have that I wish I had known about well in advance rather than just a little bit in advance.

— Get fingerprinted by the NYPD.
— Get a local police background and clearance certificate.
— Submit fingerprints and a request form to the FBI for a federal criminal background check.
— Medical certification that you are free of yellow fever, cholera, black plague (and not just if you're a medievalist, either), drug addiction, and mental illness. (The guidelines do not yet say anything about being certified as being free of ebola yet.)

The average processing time from submission of all of the documentation (which includes the above, plus a whole host of more expected things, like extra passport photos, a copy of your driver's license and passport, etc.,) is 45 days. Prepare for extra delays when dealing with the federal government. For example, this is the warning at the top of the FBI page with the information and forms for requesting a copy of one's criminal history:

Realistically, this isn't going to happen in time for me to go in the spring, although we're collectively whistling into the wind at this point. It seems like it would be easier to make curriculum and staffing adjustments earlier rather than later, and I would certainly prefer not to have to waste a ton of time playing along with jumping through bureaucratic and paperwork hoops for something that's not going to happen while I'm supposed to be finishing my book manuscript, but I'm not in a position to put an end to what seems to me to be a complete folly. For now, we're working on the assumption that the university will have some kind of workaround.  (Plus, as much as I was initially ambivalent about uprooting my life twice in two years, I'm disappointed that I likely shan't be going.)

In any event, the point is that I wish I'd had a lot more lead time in getting all of this together, hence the beginnings of a checklist, to be updated as I go through the process,  both for myself the next time I have to do this and for any of my colleagues who are also US citizens as we start to cycle around the "global network university."

Voir Dire

I’ve been summoned to jury duty next month.

I know that nobody ever wants to do jury service (with one serious, fabulous exception I can think of), but the idea of having to go down there and get empaneled (because the City and County of New York, unlike the City and County of San Francisco, does seem to empanel most people) while I’m on research leave seemed to me like a special sort of dreadful. It got me thinking about the absolute extent to which being on the tenure track skews one’s priorities. I know jury service is important. I know that smart people are exactly the ones who shouldn’t try to get out of it. I know that the obligation of women to serve on juries is barely older than I am, from a constitutional-legal perspective (Duren v. Missouri, 1979), and that women serving is tremendously important in ensuring trial by peer. But all of that logic keeps circling back to: But, while I’m on research leave? For my first book? My tenure book? Now? Trying to finish up my book manuscript has turned me into an incredibly tedious person. I'm not proud or happy about the fact that I care less about a lofty ideal of justice for the people who breathe the same air that I do than about some kind of historical-narrative justice for their 800-years-dead familiars. There's a lot of talk about justice and the academy these days — not in these terms, but I think it's another manifestation of the bigger problem. 

I’m looking forward to having my head and a slighter wider horizon back. But for now, in my current frame of mind, this is how the voir dire, the jury selection process, played itself out in my head last night:

— Have you served on a jury before?

--- Yes, sir.

— Did you think the outcome was fair?

--- Hard to say, in the end.

— Did you think the process was fair?

--- No, sir, I didn’t. It was a civil case. We were determining damages for a personal injury case that had already been decided. We weren’t even talking about orders of magnitude of difference and we just didn’t have a frame of reference for what might have been the right decision. It seemed like the sort of thing that a judge or an arbiter could have decided faster and probably more fairly. It wasn’t fair and it was a colossal waste of time.

— The plaintiff was entitled to have a jury decide.

--- Yes she was, sir.

— Do you think the criminal justice system has the capacity to be fair?

--- I think it has the capacity to be fair, sir, but most of the time it isn’t. That’s what I think, anyway. I think that if you’re not white, it’s hard to get justice and hard to be treated fairly.

--- I think that the current jury system brings out the worst in people. It incentivizes acting like a nut in this setting. The last time I was called for jury duty, there was a woman who was either acting nuts or only pretending to be a nurse, or the Mount Zion HIV/AIDS clinic has a real problem because she claimed to be a nurse for them. And I’m not proud, but you are talking to someone, you are about to empanel someone who cares more about her career right now than about justice.

— What is your career?

--- I’m a college professor, sir.

— What days do you teach this semester?

--- I’m on sabbatical, sir, so I don’t have regular classes that I’ll miss, but actually, that would be easier. I could ask a colleague to fill in or reschedule two, or even three meetings with my students for later in the semester. But if you take me away from my research for two weeks now, that’s two weeks that I’m not going to get back. I’m at a point where two weeks matters, where it could make the difference between finishing my book in time to submit it for tenure or not finishing in time. I know jury duty is important but I don’t want to lose my job.

— You can’t be fired for serving on a jury.

--- That’s not how tenure cases work, sir.

— You don’t want to be here, then.

--- It might be that I don’t give a damn anymore, but it might also be that I don’t give a damn again yet. I hope that’s all it is. Let me postpone to 2017 and we’ll see.

In Memoriam, Always Already

The view from my apartment complex.

Esta bala es antigua. 

En 1897 la disparó contra el presidente del Uruguay un muchacho de Montevideo, Arredondo, que había pasado largo tiempo sin ver a nadie, para que lo supieran sin cómplice. Treinta años antes, el mismo proyectil mató a Lincoln, por obra criminal o mágica de un actor, a quien las palabras de Shakespeare habían convertido en Marco Bruto, asesino de César. Al promediar el siglo XVII la venganza la usó para dar muerte a Gustavo Adolfo de Suecia, en mitad de la pública hecatombe de una batalla. 

Antes, la bala fue otras cosas, porque la transmigración pitagórica no sólo es propia de los hombres. Fue el cordón de seda que en el Oriente reciben los visires, fue la fusilería y las bayonetas que destrozaron a los defensores del Álamo, fue la cuchilla triangular que segó el cuello de una reina, fue los oscuros clavos que atravesaron la carne del Redentor y el leño de la Cruz, fue el veneno que el jefe cartaginés guardaba en una sortija de hierro, fue la serena copa que en un atardecer bebió Sócrates. 

En el alba del tiempo fue la piedra que Caín lanzó contra Abel y será muchas cosas que hoy ni siquiera imaginamos y que podrán concluir con los hombres y con su prodigioso y frágil destino.

***

This bullet is ancient. 

In 1897, a boy from Montevideo fired it at the president of Uruguay after spending a long time in solitude so he would be known to have acted alone. Thirty years previous, the same projectile killed Lincoln, in the criminal or magical act of a thespian made Marcus Brutus, assassin of Caesar, by Shakespeare himself. At the turn of the seventeenth century, vengeance used it to deal death to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the midsts of the public catastrophe of battle. 

Before that, the bullet was other things, because Pythagorean transubstantiation is not only the domain of men. It was the silk cord that Oriental viziers met; it was the artillery and the bayonets that destroyed the Alamo's last defenders; it was the triangular knife that slit the queen's throat; it was the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer and the wood of the Cross; it was the poison that the Carthagean general kept in an iron ring; it was the placid cup from which Socrates drank one late afternoon.

At the dawn of time it was the rock that Cain threw at Abel. It will be many more things that we cannot yet fathom but that will be able to put an end to men and their prodigious, fragile destiny. 

— Jorge Luis Borges. In Memoriam, J.F.K. English translation mine. 

Random Bullets of Neo-Medieval

• I had to tell someone walking down Bleecker Street today to watch his sword hand.
• I am succumbing to all of popular culture (or, more precisely, to the fact that they are filming season five at the Alhambra so I sort of feel obligated) and beginning to watch Game of Thrones.  Further bulletins as events warrant.
• I will be hosting Carnivalesque, the pre-modern blog carnival, in this space in just ten short days. Please submit your favorite recent pre-modern blogging here.

BYOLS

Bring Your Own Lightsabre to Washington Square Park Night. Natch.

   

"Regard us then as Beings..."

— Abigail Adams to John Adams, written at Braintree, 3/31/1776

A historical document for the fourth of July, a little bit outside of my historical period. High-res images available here and here.

When the Storm Starts Stopping the Drops Stop Dropping

I'd been inside all day working on a translation for the book, so when the storm that is currently rampaging through the northeast and promises to continue doing so well into the weekend broke for a little bit, I went out to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. The break didn't last long and I got caught out when it started to rain again. As is customary, some enterprising musicians were serenading the people trapped under Washington's arch. I like that the Empire State Building is visible through the trees in this photo (which pride dictates I mention is an actual photograph and not a still taken from the video below, which illustrates one last-ditch effort by the musicians before they, too, give in to the rain. You main have to turn the volume up to hear over the din of the rain.)

Manhattanhenge

Atlantic poetically says: "Where nature meets the grid, we find an ancient way of meeting the cosmos." It's also a chance of a bit of us-vs-themisim, pedestrians vs motorists since photographing the alignment of sunset with the E-W grid of Manhattan's streets requires standing in the middle of 14th, 23rd or 57th St. — viewing points precisely because they are the main thoroughfares that cut all the way across the island —  at the tail end of the evening commute. 

Bagpiping in the Rain

Spotted on campus, in the rain: 

Somehow, the idea of enforced bagpipe music as a punishment for forgetting one's umbrella tickled me.

Letter to an Undergraduate (who is about to make the same mistake that I did)

I posted this last week, ambivalent and on a day when I knew I would be posting pictures of pretty stained glass windows within 24 hours so it wouldn't stay at the top of the page for long. After some thoughtful encouragement that I consider the potential implications and fallout of posting something so personal on a blog that is closely tied to my professional life I took it down briefly, but after thinking things through, I have decided to re-post it because, in this case, the personal is professional. The experience that I had bears upon how I think about my own role in the pastoral care of undergraduates and in the ways I try to look out for and interact with my students. Additionally, I know that the student I am addressing here will most likely never see this letter but it is my hope that if more of us start to talk about this kind of predatory culture, she will know that she has someone to turn to when she needs help getting out of it.

Edited 6/5/14 to add:  Different professor, different department, but this is all going to get a lot worse before it gets better. What really struck me in the student's account was this: "Convert the professional relationship into a personal one. Establish trust and a close personal friendship with the person... He said that out of all his lovers, I was the fastest one to go to bed with him. He said it usually took him many months, even years, before young women went to bed with him."  That is the pattern that makes this all so pernicious. The person I'm describing here has justified his bad behavior in past instances by blaming it on a general "twisted sexual culture" at yet another ancient university, all of which raises the classic chicken-egg question.

****

Dear H,

Don't do it.

I didn't listen to advice when I found myself in a similar position to yours and I don't expect that you will either, but don't do it. You're at a good moment, graduating from college, to make a clean break. I know that you have a place to do a Master's degree in a place that is familiar with faculty you know and adore, but don't stay. Work for a year and reapply to different programs next year if you still want to work toward another degree. But for now, in this one very fundamental way, put yourself ahead of your professional aspirations. Turn around, start running, and don't ever, ever look back. As hard as it may seem to leave what has become familiar and comfortable and desirable to you, it will never again be this easy to walk away. 

He's young (compared with your other professors, anyway) and adorable and so terribly, charismatically charming. You are struggling with how to balance your own religious life and your academic work that touches up against it, and he seems to have that all figured out perfectly. He dotes on you. He knows how smart you are and how, with a little guidance, you'll outshine him one day. (This last bit is true: you will outshine him, but you don't need him for that.) You are even friendly with his wife, so it all seems perfectly safe. It is not safe. Run.

He will gaslight you and make you doubt grasp on reality. He will manipulate your time and your energy. He is so skilled in deception that you will believe the same lie again and again. This is a critical juncture, because if you continue down this path he will later point out that won't have made a move on you until after you'll have graduated — he'd never get involved with an undergraduate! — and you'll already be so twisted around that it'll seem noble.

I think that what he will tell you about having no sexual relationship with her is probably true, but after that it will all be varying degrees of lie. And that's just it. It's not about you, which makes it both easier and harder to take: Easier to take rejection when it will inevitably come, because it's not really about you. Harder to look back upon when you realize that a whole, intense, intimate relationship was never about who you were, but rather was about who you weren't. He doesn't value you for you, for the wonderful you whom he claims to adore for all her uniqueness, but rather he values you for being a non-her female entity.

The piece that I never realized until now, until I heard bits and pieces of your story is that she's in on it, too. I don't mean to make this sounds like a conspiracy. I'm sure they never sat down and had a conversation to set up a system; but befriending his young female students along with them, cooking with them, making them feel at ease in the situation, and then looking the other way as he does this over and over and over and over again, all of that must be her way of giving him what she herself cannot or will not.

He is a predator. He is grooming you.

Yes, you are an adult, if only just. Yes, you will consent to anything, emotional or physical, that you will do with him. But he will still be taking advantage of how young and stupid and starstruck you are; please understand that last remark sympathetically. I was that young and stupid once, too. It took the better part of a decade for the relationship to run its course and for me to finally be able to move on. I can tell you how to begin to fix yourself once it's all over. I can tell you how to start allowing men to treat you properly after the mind-and-heart-scramble you're about to take. But I don't have any practical advice for the better course of action, which is to get out of this before it's too late.

All I can say is this: Run. 

Love and live-and-let-die,

Sarah

Indestructible Prose

Thursday Schedule

1) Teach my last class until January 2015.*
2) Go home.
3) Eat lunch.
4) Sleep.
5) Exercise.
6) Sleep.
7) Rescue my apartment from its present state of end-of-term entropy. No, really.
8) Work on my entanglement paper, hopefully to be finished by Sunday.

*Inshallah. Paperwork pending.

Un lugar de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme...

At a talk this week in my department, the speaker kind of off-handedly mentioned, in the context of talking about how Central Park in New York and the Eixemple in Barcelona were developed roughly concurrently as part of the modernist movements in urban planning, that there has been a statue of Cervantes in Central Park that, after much skirmishing over where to locate it, ended up right across the street from us at NYU after years of wrangling over where it should go. I was really surprised, because I'd never seen a statue of Cervantes on campus and couldn't even picture some random statue I'd walked by a million times without ever really looking that could be Cervantes. 

By total coincidence, I took a bit of a circuitous way home today, and something down the alley between the Mews and the brownstones on Washington Square north caught my eye. And there he was.

The placard is pretty worn, but reads: This statue was presented to the City of New York by the Mayor of Madrid, Spain, in 1986. Located in Bryant Park before being donated to New York University in 1989.

And, having never really looked down the alley before, I happily discovered a really nice, quiet outdoors spot on campus.

The Right Choice

I've had reason to be thinking lately about the decision-making process in academic life, about right and wrong decisions and choices, and about what it says about us if, in a particular moment, we aren't able to discern the right choice from the wrong one. My general position is this: First, if someone makes a decision that seems objectively to be bad, then the right one probably wasn't the right thing to begin with. And second, I have very little respect for people who aren't able to discern good advice from bad, and so if they make bad decisions because they got bad advice, it's their own fault even more than the erroneous counselor. I've made pretty good decisions in my career thus far.

(And yes, before anyone starts, I know how much luck played into the fact that I have a tenure-track job. All I'm saying is that where I have had to make decisions, I've largely made the right ones, and that set me up well to be able to take advantage of the luck that came my way.)

In certain cases, I've chosen things that could have gone any way at all. For example, I received some very serious cautions against applying for the current position that I hold at NYU, on the basis that it was too early in my graduate career and that the search would probably fail and they'd have to re-run it the next year, why I could apply at a better moment for my dissertation. Obviously I didn't follow that advice, and as much as my dissertation did suffer, I'm obviously, on balance, glad to have the job and the less good dissertation than a great and comprehensive dissertation and potentially still be in job market limbo-hell.

But when I was choosing a graduate program, my hand was more forced. I made the right decision, but I don't know with 100% certainty that I would have, had the wrong choice actually been available to me. I applied to Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Chicago, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I was devastated to be rejected by the first on that list not so much because I really wanted to be there for graduate school but because I interpreted the decision to mean my own professors were telling me that I wasn't good enough. The second was where I really wanted to go, but I withdrew my application when the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department to which I had applied decided that I wasn't NELCy enough and kicked my application over to Comparative Literature; I hadn't applied to Comp Lit because I didn't want to be in Comp Lit, hence my decision to withdraw. I was admitted to the other three.

My undergraduate adviser had told me that if she could control both sides of the process, she'd just pick me up and put me at Cornell — that I could apply to Harvard, that I could think about Harvard all I wanted, but that at the end of the day I had to go to Cornell.  Her advice couldn't be clearer. By the time I got through my pre-admission visit at Cornell, what was right about that program was so clear to me. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the disfunction that is apparent even to the undergraduates at Yale. I'd like to think that out of respect to my adviser, I would have visited Cornell even if I had been admitted to Harvard, too, but I can't say with certainty that I would have. I like to give myself credit in hindsight and say that I would have seen what was so right about Cornell and chosen it even if Harvard and Yale had accepted me. But I can't be sure. I am so, unspeakably lucky that I was forced to make the right decision.

I made the rightest decision of my life, the one that has allowed me to make subsequent good decisions, essentially under duress. Since then I've become better about letting the right combination of head and heart rule in these situations and making the choices that are the right ones for me and objectively the right ones. But perhaps I can't afford to be as dismissive of those who don't make the right ones, especially early on. Or perhaps I've learned enough to have earned that perspective.

There's that Celia Cruz lyric that comes to mind. I'm not remembering it precisely, something along the lines of: Lucky me to be born in Havana, and there I became a singer of songs.

Lost Without Translation

Shakespeare doesn't work without text. It's not Shakespeare.

I've just returned from the National Theater of China's production of Richard III, which is currently playing at the Skirball Theater at NYU. In Mandarin. Without supertitles.

It's captioned, with a brief description of each scene projected onto a screen above the stage, at a cost of  what makes the play great, the precision psychological game and the beautiful, permanent havoc wrought on the English language. Without that, it's a story about a king, and some people who talk, and some people who die, and a new king by the time it's all over.

It reminded me of the recent and much-talked about magazine article by a man, writing about how his autistic son learned to speak and to connect with people by watching Disney cartoon movies. One of his observations was that Walt Disney had set out to make movies so bold and brash that they could be watched without the sound on, and this way, young children who had not yet learned language could still understand them, and ultimately make increasingly sophisticated connections between the bold colors and outlined characters and the dialogue and emotions and social interactions. This, he surmised, was why Disney movies worked as a conduit between his son and the world — they were a clear enough cipher for that particular need.

Watching Richard III in Mandarin is as good as watching it with the sound "off," as much as that metaphor can work for live theater. This was a story about a king fit for a child, and could just as easily have been the nursery rhyme about Old King Cole. But Richard III is not a nursery rhyme or Disney cartoon movie with an obvious likable hero going out on a quest with the aid of his sidekicks, vanquishing a monster and maybe one central internal demon as he goes, and coming home victorious. This was a story about a king — you could even call it a story about the historical Richard III told on stage if you wished to give that king a name — but it was no more Shakespeare's Richard III than any other text written about that monarch. It exists in parallel to Shakespeare's play and to every other literary-fictional representation, rather than as a translation of what it purported to be.

I didn't do a good job preparing for the theater this time because I've seen two live productions of Richard III in the last four years (and in fact, it was really interesting to see the way that the set design for this production was very clearly in conversation with Sam Mendes' production of the play, but that was so overridden by the sense of alienation from the action that the language barrier created) and I've watched Sir Ian McKellen's portrayal of the role on film several times in that same period and so I didn't think I needed to reread the play before I went to see it again tonight. I was a bad sport about it, too, once I realized what was going on. By the middle of the second act I had pulled out my phone, searched for the text of the play — thank you, God, internet and MIT —and tried to follow along as best I could. Of course, it doesn't really work like that. Productions of plays don't necessarily adhere completely to the script — lines are omitted and rearranged, and in this case I think that some of the minor characters were conflated, although it was really impossible to tell. There was no way to line up the subtle gestures of the actors with precise moments in the text. It was all broad, gross strokes, missing a cipher appropriate for the audience.

And that's not to say that I went in blind. The promotional materials say that the play is staged in Mandarin with supertitles, but by supertitles, they meant a single rough caption for each scene or two or three: the story-board (interesting typo: story-bard) version that misses everything about this version of the tale that makes it this version. I was a little bit suspicious upon receiving and reviewing the program when I arrived, with its quotation from a review that reads: "It scores for its intense confrontations and for a fascinating, mercurial villainy that needs not translation." I didn't for a moment think that this meant that it wasn't actually going to be translated. That reviewer is correct that this Richard III is a mercurial villain — the actor played him not as a hunchback but as someone who feigned physical disability when it suited him. However, without that variation being tied to the text, it was impossible to understand his vision for the character.

(I looked up the review to see if the quotation had been pulled out of context. It doesn't seem to have been. But the review does mention that the three witches from Macbeth dropped in — and I had wondered what was going on when three witch-like characters I didn't remember from Richard III turned up in the first act. If you're going to do a Shakespeare mashup, some guidance is required for an audience that cannot discern the Mandarin equivalent of "double, double, toil and trouble.")

Others people in attendance were worse sports than I was: there was a constant flow of audience members out of the theater throughout. When the thing was finally over, nobody clapped. The house lights came up, people got up and put on their jackets, and left.

In a way it was a very straightforward comment about text in translation that didn't require a lot of perveracating or theory or problematizing the cultural and literary and performative questions and all the kinds of things I'm supposed to be doing to text all day. Forget about what subtleties are lost in translation and whether translation and death and resurrection are related and what is or is not translatable and what the task of the translator might be. Forget about it all. If you can't speak Chinese, you can't watch Shakespeare in Chinese. It is all lost in translation without re-translation.

The translation is the cost of the meaning.

I'm sure it was a very nice play for the people in the audience who spoke Mandarin. It may even have been Shakespeare for them. But for me, for the people who left, for the people who sat there with their phones out struggling for the meaningful details that make the play William Shakespeare's, all it was, in the end, was a brash, colorful children's tale about an old king and a new king and about what was lost.

Ashes to Reform

I teach in the building that used to be the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which burned famously 103 years ago today, with hundreds of workers trapped inside. It's now NYU's Silver Center, which, I hadn't realized, has been an NYU classroom since 1916, so fairly shortly after it would have been restored.