Like much of Mendelsohn’s fine work, this slim book is a combination of close reading, cultural musing and autobiography. His focus is a literary techLike much of Mendelsohn’s fine work, this slim book is a combination of close reading, cultural musing and autobiography. His focus is a literary technique called “ring composition” in which “the narrative appears to meander away into a digression … although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end to be a circle.” The locus classicus is the passage in the Odyssey where the old nurse washing the legs of the stranger Odysseus notices a scar he received as a boy, whereupon Homer recounts the story of the original wound before bringing us back to the present. Probably the reason the locus is classicus is because Erich Auerbach began his famous book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by comparing this episode in Homer with the terrifying account of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis.
It took me a while to realize that Mendelsohn’s book is not so much about ring composition but its opposite, a narrative opaque and alarming, full of cuts, shadows and absences. Stories about exiles in which narrative is fractured, destroyed or lost: not only Auerbach, but Sebald and the 17th century author François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon. And, as it turns out, Mendelsohn himself.
In the end I wanted more, or something different, and I excuse my complaint as an awkward compliment to Mendelsohn, whose work is sometimes completely satisfying. In particular I’m grateful for his translation of and commentary on Cavafy, and the most delightful essay on Mary Renault I’ve ever read....more
When every page is an epiphany, an instant epic of masochism and mutilation, un bateau ivre, obsessed and deranged, unrelenting and gorgeous, the spirWhen every page is an epiphany, an instant epic of masochism and mutilation, un bateau ivre, obsessed and deranged, unrelenting and gorgeous, the spirit flags, staggers and sinks. Invocation and collage are not enough, or too much. The exuberant first page sucked me in but there was only modulation no development, only immersion in a mind cataloging its own luminous disintegration swirling down the drain. Maldoror meets JT Leroy. Gin and gin.
What a performance. I heard the horses sing. But it’s not a good book for horses....more
First of all, what a great cover! Looks like that credit goes to Zoë McLean of Cōnfingō Publishing. I’m adding a link to the UK publisher because if yFirst of all, what a great cover! Looks like that credit goes to Zoë McLean of Cōnfingō Publishing. I’m adding a link to the UK publisher because if you want a copy of the book, you may need to order it directly.*
The title popped up in Nicholas Royle’s Top 10 lighthouses in fiction last month. Royle first read this book in French in 1998, and promised himself that he would translate it. So far as I can judge, he did a terrific job: the prose is as spare and lucent as the lighthouse it describes (Cordouan off the French Atlantic coast).
This is a strange novel, building on the trope of keepers of isolated landmarks going mad (The Shining is the most famous example), but that’s only the beginning of the strangeness. It’s also about the pleasures and perils of solitude, of artistic work, of love and loneliness, of damage done early and working itself out in harrowing detail, plus some raw sex to boot. Patrick McGrath wrote the Foreword which makes perfect sense because if there’s a genre here, it’s the kind of horror McGrath does so well himself. Yet there’s also something classically French in de Swarte’s style, swift, light, lethal. The story is set in the late 90s but almost has the feel of a medieval tale – Bluebeard comes to mind. I loved it: the story, the style, the setting, the tortured character at the empty heart of it all. The ending was a bit of a mess, but then – it was never going to be happy.
Vincent de Swarte died young. Nicholas Royle has done a good thing.
---------- * Which is what I did after I couldn’t find it in the US. Cōnfingō shipped it immediately, without killing me with the transatlantic cost....more
A moderately-failed German professor (speciality: the iconography of beards in western art) wakes up from a dream in which his wife has betrayed him aA moderately-failed German professor (speciality: the iconography of beards in western art) wakes up from a dream in which his wife has betrayed him and immediately hops on a plane to Japan. Almost as soon as he’s there, exhausted, wandering and confused on a train platform, he notices a young man (with a scraggly false beard) contemplating suicide. Within a few pages Gilbert the professor has convinced Yosa the morose engineering student that they should retrace the path of Bashō to the far north. But Yosa has his own plan.
(At this point I located my abandoned copy of The Narrow Road to Oku and read it through. Reading the books side by side heightened the comedy of Poschmann’s professor, maybe dangerously, as I was reading Quixotic perils of Gilbert & Yosa back into the travels of Bashō & Sora.)
This book is at once melancholy and comic. Gilbert is clearly a figure of fun, hard to care about, but placing him in the company of a suicidal young man sharpens the sensibility. Gilbert also has a passion for poetry that is not pure pastiche, at times it erupts and sweeps me up in its flow. There’s a passage on pines (pp 115-116) that is an ecstatic list, as much Nabokov as Bashō. The specifically German humor pops up like bits of razor in Gilbert’s endless interior monologue. One example — the pair have arrived at a mountain car park, entrance to the forest of suicides at the foot of Mt. Fuji. Yosa is lecturing the professor, who receives it with a certain sourness.
The owners had got out here and not come back, Yosa said in a travel guide’s voice, one could say in a know-it-all tone, as if he personally had brought about these conditions and as if it were associated with some heroic achievement that escaped the average person like Gilbert, it had to escape them because the average person like Gilbert didn’t understand the higher meaning of disposing of one’s car in some wild place and disposing of one’s own body shortly afterwards, that is, to simply use the world as a waste-disposal unit for the spiritual and physical waste one had produced throughout one’s lifetime.
A bit later, Gilbert observes Yosa mapping their path into the forest with yellow tape, so that the professor can find his way out after the student hangs himself. Gilbert “found the idea of plastic tape sensible when compared with the breadcrumbs and pebbles employed in the pertinent German literature…”
One reviewer detected the sins of Orientalism in Poschmann’s style; I detect the obverse sin in the reviewer, the inability to appreciate the comedy, which inevitably exaggerates and distorts. This is a clever book of many delights even if none are profound. I’m grateful to Jen Calleja for her lively translation....more
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
One of the many satisfactions of Olga Tokarczuk’s newly translated book is the hectic presence ofA Robin Redbreast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
One of the many satisfactions of Olga Tokarczuk’s newly translated book is the hectic presence of William Blake. Its title is from his “Proverbs of Hell”, a poem that reads like a minature late 18th century version of the Gospel of Thomas. The book (despite the blurb) isn’t exactly a page-turner, it took me a least a month to read it. At first its narrator, an old woman living in a remote corner of Poland, seems almost incoherent, then batty, but at some point she charmed and convinced me and I was happy to follow her divagations wherever she went. The book begins with a death, followed by a murder, followed by another murder. As in some of Fred Vargas’s oddball crime stories, something uncanny and impossible seems to be responsible. When the shoe finally drops, it’s all dark dark fun.
Readers of Flights won’t be surprised by the glowing bits of metaphysics that float throughout the chapters. One of my favorites, uttered by the gnostic narrator: “I think it tallies with one of my Theories — my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our first defence system — it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”...more
Barón Biza’s only novel begins with one of the most disturbing sentences in literature (echoes of Gogol, Kafka and Bolaño). I won’t quote it. In fact Barón Biza’s only novel begins with one of the most disturbing sentences in literature (echoes of Gogol, Kafka and Bolaño). I won’t quote it. In fact the best service I can do in this review is to urge you to skip every other review, every advance explication of this strangely moving, horrifying and comical book. The history behind it might distract you, and is best absorbed in the afterword by Nora Avaro. Avaro calls Barón Biza “a master of the enigma without suspense,” which captures exactly what I felt as I read this novel. Possessed of a dark desperate genius, it’s unlike anything I’ve read. I suspect it will haunt me for a few days....more
This last week of 2017 Into English has been my favorite book-before-bed. My grasp of other languages is mostly at the “Me want coffee” level, so I’m This last week of 2017 Into English has been my favorite book-before-bed. My grasp of other languages is mostly at the “Me want coffee” level, so I’m grateful to translators who carry the treasures of other tongues into English. In this case, Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer had a brilliant idea: ask a translator/poet to pick 3 translations of a favorite poem and comment on the choices made by each translator. The results are as various as the poems themselves, yet – as with any creative theme – the pleasure is in the variations. The wide format displays the four versions (original + three translations) across a single set of pages, which makes sense but also makes it a floppy book to read in bed.
I’d love to see a hundred books like this.* On the one hand, the specific genius of poetry; on the other, the gift, imagination and ingenuity of translations that always succeed and fail because “poetry is what’s lost in translation” (Robert Frost, of course). My version would be: poetry puts into words what can’t be said. Even perfect poems (Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” jumps to mind) leave me astonished, because they only emphasize an ineffable, recalcitrant, elusive presence. You can’t say it any better than the poem itself, but it’s still something other.
A superb experiment. I’ll be reading Into English again next year.
Even after reading all of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu in both the Modern Library and Penguin editions, it never occurred to me to wonder muEven after reading all of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu in both the Modern Library and Penguin editions, it never occurred to me to wonder much about C.K. Scott Moncrieff, the first translator of Proust's long novel into English, until I came across an admiring review of this book in the Economist. There's no telling when this book will be published in the US, so I ordered it from the UK without regret.
Moncrieff was a man of many parts, all more or less delightful: not only the "soldier, spy and translator" of the subtitle, but "a generous family man, a promiscuous homosexual and a converted Catholic" as well (a phrase I just copied from Sam Taylor's review). And he's lucky to have as his first biographer Jean Findlay, his great-great-niece, a distant recipient of his generosity, a gift she fully repays. She presents Moncrieff with all his foibles, which is also to say, with all his charm.
Moncrieff was one of those public-school-educated corps of gallant young men who marched off to the fields of Flanders full of Homer and high spirits. He was, for a time, close friends with Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen et al. Like them, he was also homosexual (although Graves eventually said goodbye to all that). There's something astonishing about this mix of men, who even in the most horrific circumstances were able to transmute their experience into poetry.
Many letters from the Great War are about carnage and stinking trenches and lice and disease, but, although he experienced all of these, Charles wrote chiefly about friendships and flowers, and about the beauty of the French countryside and the idiosyncrasies of the French and Flemish people, especially at places where he was billeted.
Yet, even from the trenches and the hospitals (where he ended up, missing part of his leg), he produced unsparing criticism of the war poets:
He suggested that war played a trick on English poets, distorting their perspective, confusing their roles and exiling their muses. He maintained that real poets did not improve through war, if anything they deteriorated. He attacked the emotion war inspired in poetry, its demolition of idealism, its degradation of human hope. Poetry was for him about truth and beauty and preserving these as shields for the human heart.
This "poetic bubble" protected him the rest of his short life from despair. In his letters from Italy where he'd gone to live in the Twenties, one senses his delight in life even as he suffers bouts of trench fevor and his body is slowly eaten away by stomach cancer.
His encounter with Proust doesn't happen until halfway through the book, and it's an interesting story in itself, surprising practical and unromantic. Yet it's also clear from the translation that he "got" Proust before anyone else. These days his version is dismissed as too "dressy" – starting with his Shakespearean title in place of the more prosaic "in search of lost time." (The biography details his failed efforts to get Proust's opinion before the translation was published.) And indeed, Proust was appalled, but when he read the translation of Swann's Way at the very end of his life, he was full of praise. F. Scott Fitzgerald called the translation "a masterpiece in itself" and Conrad preferred it to the original. Moreover, Moncrieff completed (almost) the translation while he also translated a small library of other literature, including Stendhal and Pirandello, and within the space of time it took team of translators to complete the newer Penguin translation.
In Findlay's words,
The new Penguin translation is more literal, but Charles's version goes through the sieve of his soul; it involes his history, his education, and his experience of the trenches.
For me, there's also the matter of pure charm that is especially important in the first volume, in which Marcel recounts the tale of his childhood visits to Combray and the tortured passion of Charles Swann. The Lydia Davis translation is generally hailed as superior, yet (for me) it misses the Moncrieff sensibility that captured me on my first reading. For example, the scene in which when Marcel has been sent to bed so that the family could entertain Swann in their country garden:
But to-night, before the dinner bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty, "The little man looks tired; he'd better go up to bed. Besides, we're dining late to-night."
Marcel is in agony and convinces Françoise, his aunt's servant, to deliver a note to his mother.
At once my anxiety subsided; it was now no longer … until tomorrow that I had lost my mother, for my little line was going –to annoy her, no doubt, and doubly so because this contrivance would make me ridiculous in Swann's eyes – but was going all the same to admit me, invisibly and by stealth, into the same room as herself, was going to whisper from me into her ear; for that forbidden and unfriendly dining-room, where but a moment ago the ice itself—with burned nuts in it—and the finger-bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that were mischievous and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of them and I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my intoxicated heart the gushing sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I had written. Now I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us. Besides, that was not all, for surely Mamma would come.
Those burnt nuts served with the ices seem to me the emblem of that lost summer evening. In the Davis translation it is indeed less flowery:
… where, just a moment before, even the ice cream – the granité – and the rinsing bowls seemed to me to contain pleasures that were noxious and mortally sad because Mama was enjoying them so far away from me …
Even with the granité, the magic is missing.
In the end it's a matter of taste. Findlay's biography has enriched my own appreciation for the man behind the words. In the middle of the book, there's a short passage detailing Moncrieff's visit with the poetry editor Edward Marsh.
It was an intimate dinner, after which Charles no longer called him Mr Marsh but addressed his letters to 'Dearest Eddie'. Marsh showed him his famous art collection… by 1914 he had brought together the nucleus of what became one of the most valuable collections of modern work in private hands. It covered every inch of the wall space in his apartments at 5 Raymond Buildings. Surrounded by colourful paintings, they had a lively and literary conversation, and Charles left at 2 a.m.
That final sentence is as perfect a description of ordinary happiness as any I know....more
Hughes is one of the great English poets of the 20th century, a terrific translator, and an inventor of his own mythology. His selection from Ovid's mHughes is one of the great English poets of the 20th century, a terrific translator, and an inventor of his own mythology. His selection from Ovid's masterpiece is no substitute for the full version, but it's a powerful, satisfying recapitulation of the most famous episodes....more
No matter how well written they are, I have trouble reading the stories in The Yellow Birds and Redeployment. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are tooNo matter how well written they are, I have trouble reading the stories in The Yellow Birds and Redeployment. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are too painful, too recent; the savage ruin of human life so pointless. I'm wondering if that's how the French felt when La Permission appeared in 1957, in the midst of France's vicious war for Algeria. According to translator David Bellos, the novel "had few readers and only a handful of reviews. It was never reprinted."
Anselme's short novel takes a long time to get anywhere, but it gathers force in the last 50 pages and ends with a powerful, almost cinematically-despairing scene of soldiers being returned to the front. The three young men on leave are men the civilized world prefers to ignore. Anselme's bitterness is palpable.
Paris likes its soldiers only when they're parading tamely on the other side of white crowd-control barriers. But it looks down at them and doesn't want to see them when they're close up. In no other city are people so full of crude nationalist bluster and yet so easily ruffled, so refined, so tasteful, and so selfish. Paris, being elegant, is ashamed of its badly dressed soldiers: yet it constantly consumes whole cohorts of them, painting itself with their blood, morning, noon, and night, like a tart using lipstick. That's what was going through Lachaume's mind as he crossed Pont de la Concorde.
This polemic doesn't align itself with a political position. Anselme is simply enraged by the waste....more
Richard Pevear's Translating Music is the first number of The Cahiers Series, a set of expensive chapbooks published by Sylph Editions. It's beautifulRichard Pevear's Translating Music is the first number of The Cahiers Series, a set of expensive chapbooks published by Sylph Editions. It's beautifully designed and pretentiously titled. Pevear provides a translation of Pushkin's "The Tale of the Preacher and His Man Bumpkin," which is entertaining. The Russian original appears verso. The second, more substantial part of the chapbook is "a talk" on translation Pevear gave at a conference in 2006 at Tolstoy's estate Yasnaya Polyana. For readers of his translation of War and Peace this is particularly interesting, although some of it is repeated in his introduction to that massive volume.
I'm a fan of chapbooks and this is an enviable collection – but probably a bit too precious for me.
Is there any book more melancholy, more gently intelligent, than Sebald's Rings of Saturn? After watching Grant Gee's very fine documentary Patience (Is there any book more melancholy, more gently intelligent, than Sebald's Rings of Saturn? After watching Grant Gee's very fine documentary Patience (After Sebald), I was ready to read Sebald's book again. I first read it in 1998; on reading it again I found I remembered almost nothing except the mood of it – but maybe that's not surprising, as the book is, in a sense, nothing but mood, recounting Sebald's walking trip through Suffolk on the crumbling east coast of England, which turns out to be a walk through the "old ways" of his mind (to borrow a term from Robert Macfarlane's book which I'm reading now – no accident, as Macfarlane appears at several points in Gee's film).
This time through it struck me that Sebald's meditations are a version of the medieval classic by St. John of the Cross, a series of spiritual exercises that depend upon a deep, almost wordless engagement with the text. Each image, each sad story, is an allegory, an avenue into layers of meaning that we can't quite fathom but which we feel pressing upon us whenever we step back and allow reverie to follow its own haunted paths. ...more