Friday, September 30, 2011

Eric Clapton / Autumn Leaves




Eric Clapton

Autumn Leaves
English Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
Music by Joseph Kosma

The falling leaves drift by my window
The falling leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands, I used to hold

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall



Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Robert Johnson / Me And The Devil Blues


Blues Music and the Devil

The "devil," called "Satan" in this song, appears to be a co-conspirator of sorts. This devil may or may not have a pitchfork, but he's certainly prodding the subject of the song to "beat [his] woman until [he] gets satisfied." The subject of the song feels mistreated by the woman in his life, and the way he returns that mistreatment has something to do with "that old evil spirit." Legend has it that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical talents. Perhaps the woman in the song is a metaphor for the blues, and perhaps the blues are the only thing keeping Robert Johnson tethered to this world. When the devil catches up to him, and the woman (read: the blues) leaves him, his body will be buried by "the highway side," so his "old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride." That is, he's eternally stuck at the crossroads where the devil bought his soul.
Robert Johnson’s song “Me and The Devil Blues” features an encounter with the devil: “Me and the Devil / was walkin’ side by side.” The physical description of the man and the devil “walkin’ side by side” gives the impression that the two mirror each-other. This feeds into the cultural construction that the Devil is indeed a black man-- same as in the legend. This reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Aaron the Moor” in Titus Andronicus, also referencing the existence of a black Devil. Essentially: dark skin is beyond physical, it could also be seen as an "evil" characteristic.

 

Robert Johnson
Me And The Devil Blues


Early this morning
When you knocked upon my door
Early this morning, oooo
When you knocked upon my door
And I said hello Satan
I believe it's time to go

Me and the Devil
Was walkin' side by side
Me and the Devil, woooo
Was walking side by side
And I'm going to beat my woman
'Til I get satisfied

She said you don't see why
That she would dog me 'round
(Spoken:) Now baby you know
you ain't doin' me right don'tcha
She say you don't see why, whoooo
That she would dog me 'round
It must-a be that old evil spirit
So deep down in the ground
You may bury my body
Down by the highway side
(Spoken:) Baby, I don't care
where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone
You may bury my body, woooo
Down by the highway side
So my old evil spirit
Can get a Greyhound bus and ride




Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Tracy Wan / Extricating


Extricating
by TRACY WAN
It takes a rare degree of mastery to untie knots with the same grace and speed at which you secure them. This is because the knot is usually what we desire, far more than its dissolution: in shoelaces, ties, most boating situations. It’s a skill, something to learn as a child and practice frequently. Knotted, things stay together, and they do not part lest we want them to. The sheer numbers of this life dictate that we are more often apart than we are together; only endeavour, and will, bring people to each other. They separate effortlessly.
In life we “tie the knot” happily, willingly, but when the relationship nears its end, these bonds “dissolve” and “fall apart” — responding to a force that is bigger than us, or so it would seem. We rope ourselves in when it’s good, but are cast away by circumstance when it’s not. I watch this happen weekly. “Things just didn’t work out.” “I don’t know where it went wrong.” “We did all we could.” This was not a narrative that I was going to accept for myself.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Aurelio Arturo by Gilberto Arturo

Aurelio Arturo and his father
Aurelio Arturo
BIOGRAPHY
By Gilberto Arturo
Translated by Nicolás Suescún

The poetry of Aurelio Arturo is both a world and a frame of mind. It is a dazzling and intimate world revealed through the poet’s sympathy with nature. It is a self-contained, complete universe in which every object is a living being, defined by its relations with the other beings that inhabit the same world.
It is a world closed to signification but open to transcendence: in its identification with the natural world, where animals and plants are one and the same ‘vegetation’; in its identification with the senses – the tactile, the aromas “only for the ear”, the wild, rustic tastes; and with living, vital, interrelated beings, all of them charged with meaning and sentiment.
In Morada al sur (A home in the south) Aurelio Arturo selected what he considered to be his life’s work; the rest, consequently, is conjecture.
His poetry does not describe the interior world of the poet’s own feelings: love flows from the contemplation of the outside world and from the music of the verse. It travels through different frames of mind as it moves through the various landscapes and places of his environment, meeting their inhabitants . . . the birds . . . the leaves.
In the end, he goes so deeply into himself (and the reader) that what flows from inside is a profound sensation of plenitude and peace, of harmony with the world, with nature – a feeling of tranquil and serene joy, not subject to sudden frights or fears. The words of his poems transport us into a world of enchantment and fantasy.
The strength of this poetry does not inspire reverential awe; nor does it derive from playing with words. It is a quiet strength, like that of the grass in his poem “covering footsteps, cities, years”. His poetry is like a fog that imperceptibly and slowly surrounds and covers us. Words pass before our eyes, following each other; and before we realise it, we are immersed and profoundly moved, surrounded by poetry.
Arturo’s is a mysterious poetry; but the mystery is not about something we don’t quite understand and therefore fear, but about what surrounds us, something we feel but do not touch. “In the mestizo nights that rose from the grass/ young horses, shadows, brilliant curves . . .” and “the murmur of date trees in the wind.”
His poetry is concerned with the enjoyment of life and, although it does not deny the setbacks and sadnesses of real life, it takes them and involves them in the deep experience of the moment.


Sunday, September 25, 2011

Bohumil Hrabal / The Close Watcher of Trains




Bohumil Hrabal
The Close Watcher of Trains
 by Mats Larsson








"BOHUMIL HRABAL TRAGICALLY DEAD," ran the headline on the front page of the daily Mladá fronta, 4 February 1997. The 82-year-old Hrabal died instantly when, on 3 February, he fell from a fifth-floor window at the Bulovka hospital in Prague. He had been at the hospital's orthopedic clinic since December 1996 for back and joint pain and was schedule to be released soon. According to witnesses, Hrabal was trying to feed the pigeons on his window sill when the table he was standing on tipped and fell.
 















It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) writes in "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age".

The particular - and almost eerie - significance of the fifth floor in Hrabal's life and work prompts speculation as to whether his death truly was an accident and not suicide. His Prague apartment was located on the fifth floor, and his fear of falling from this floor was known. Moreover, the motive to commit suicide by jumping from a fifth floor reoccurs several times in his writings. Ultimately, his exit made an appropriate ending point for an exceptionally vital and powerful career.
During Hrabal's lifetime, nearly three million copies of his books were printed in his native Czechoslovakia, and he was translated into twenty-seven languages. Among Hrabal's best-selling works, "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" (Tanecní hodiny pro starsí a pokrocilé, 1964), an exceptional story written in a single sentence, also came out in more editions than any other of his works. And Closely Watched Trains (Ostre sledované vlaky, 1965), his book about the little train station Kostomolaty under German occupation, is one of many of his novels adapted to film; directed by Jirí Menzel, the movie won an Oscar for best foreign film in 1967. Another of Hrabal's gems, "Cutting it Short" (Postriziny, 1976), also adapted to the screen by Menzel, features Hrabal's mother giving an unforgettable account of life at the brewery in Nymburk and how uncle Pepin came to visit for fourteen days and stayed for fourteen years.


The Swedish cover for ”Cutting it Short”. Hrabal describes the special pleasures of the brewer's wife the night after the butchery and the making of sausages (transl. James Naughton):
”That night I slept alone in the bedroom, cold air streamed in through the open window, on planks between chairs the sausages and puddings glittered on their rye straw, right by the bed on long boards lay cooling the dismembered parts of the pig, the boned and apportioned hams, the chops and roasting-joints, the shoulders and knees and legs, all laid out according to Mr Myclik's orderly system. As I got into bed I could hear Francin in the kitchen getting up and pouring himself some lukewarm coffee, taking some dry bread to chew with it, it had been a tremendous blow-out, all the members of the management board ate abundantly, only Francin stood there in the kitchen drinking lukewarm coffee and chewing dry bread with it. I lay in the feather quilt, and before I fell asleep, I stretched out a hand and touched a shoulder, then I fingered a joint and went dozing off with my fingers on a virginal tenderloin, and dreamed of eating a whole pig. When towards morning I woke, I had such a thirst, I went barefoot to fetch a bottle of beer, pulled off the stopper and drank greedily, then I lit the lamp, and holding it in my fingers, I went from one bit of pork to the next, unable to restrain myself from lighting the primus and slicing off two lovely lean schnitzels from the leg. I beat them out thin, salted and peppered them and cooked them in butter in eight minutes flat, all that time, which seemed to me an eternity, my mouth was watering, that was what I needed, to eat practically the whole of the two legs, in simple unbreaded schnitzels sprinkled with lemon juice. I added some water to the schnitzels, covered the pan with a lid, out of which angry steam huffed and puffed, and now I laid those schnitzels on a plate and ate them greedily, as always I got my nightdress spattered, just as I always spatter my blouse with juice or gravy, because when I eat, I don't just eat, I guzzle ...”


Readers loved Hrabal most of all for his inimitable prose - at times richly orally descriptive, other times sensually lyrical - which so completely captured life: from everyday dialogue - taken directly, it seems, from pubs and workplaces - via lyrical descriptions of nature, to philosophical expositions on the innermost meaning of life. Often, Hrabal fills his texts with odd characters, individuals from the fringes of society - anti-heroes of a sort - who possess a never-ending joy in their existence, a joy manifested foremost verbally. Moreover, Hrabal is a genuinely entertaining writer with a sense for the comically absurd in life. Hrabal stands alone in his ability to tell a story - often with the assistance of the authentic uncle Pepin - which sends the reader into fits of sensual delight:
My cousin was a twin and a real card, he was christened Vincek and his brother was christened Ludvicek, and when they were a year old their mother was bathing them in a tub and popped out to a see a neighbor, and when she got back half an hour later one of them had drowned, and they were so much alike nobody could tell which one, Ludvicek or Vincek, so they flipped a coin, heads for Lucvicek, tails for Vincek, and it came up Ludvicek, but when my cousin Vincek grew up he began to wonder - and he had plenty of time for it, he was always out of a job - he began to wonder who really did drown, whether the person walking around on earth wasn't really Ludvicek and he, Vincek, was up in heaven, which led him to drink and to wander along the water's edge and go in swimming, testing the waters, so to speak, till at last he drowned, by way of proof that he hadn't been the one to drown back then, " (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 1995 . Transl. Michael Henry Heim.)

Bear in mind that all of what Hrabal wrote derived from actual events; nothing is invented, only displaced in time and rearranged. As one of his admirers put it, instead of a brain, Hrabal had hard disk, which stored everything. While sitting amidst his admirers at the pub the Golden Tiger, Hrabal could effortlessly recite long passages from books he had read during his youth-from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, to Batista's text on matrimonial bliss, and Anna Nováková's book of dreams.
Appropriately, Prazská imaginace, a small publishing house run by Hrabal enthusiast Václav Kadlec, planned to release the nineteenth and last volume of Hrabal's collected works 28 March 1997, Hrabal's eighty-third birthday. Instead, the volume, which Hrabal had already seen in proofs, came out at the beginning of March.
Hrabal's death came at a point when, according to the author, he had said everything he wanted to and could. He had described his years growing up with his mother and uncle Pepin at the brewery in Nymburk, east of Prague, his experiences as a train dispatcher at Kostomlaty outside of Nymburk and from several different occupations (clerk, insurance agent, traveling salesman, steelworker, paper packer, stage hand, and film extra), and he had accounted for his years in Prague and Kersko.
Due to the circumstances of World War II and the normalization of culture under communist rule, Hrabal, who started as a poet, was forty-nine before he had his first breakthrough as a writer of prose with the collection of short stories "A Pearl on the Bottom" (Perlicka na dne, 1963). From 1963 to 1968, he published eight original works including two other collections of stories, "The Palaverers" (Pábitelé) and "An Advertisement for the House I Don't Want to Live in Anymore" (Inzerát na dum, ve kterém uz nechci bydlet), as well as "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" and Closely Watched Trains.






After 1968, Hrabal was banned from publishing; only after 1975, when the weekly Tvorba carried his perplexing proclamation of government support, did he regain the right to put out books. Between 1976 and 1979, the writer came out with his first trilogy of memoirs: Cutting it Short, Lovely Wistfulness, and Harlequin's Millions (Postrizingy, Krasosmutnení, Harlekynovy miliony). These works recount Hrabal's early years, the war, the communist take over and the first years thereafter. Nevertheless, several of his most important works could only be published abroad, including the novels The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (Mestecko, dke se zastavil cas) and I Served the King of England (Jak jsem obsluhoval anglického krále), as well as the novella, Too Loud a Solitude (Prílis hlucná samota), about a paper press operator who for thirty-five years keeps company with destroyed books and their thoughts. In 1986 and 1987, Hrabal published his second trilogy of memoirs. In these books, The Weddings in the House, Vita nuova, Vacant Lots (Svatby v dome,Vita nuova, Proluky), his wife Eliska tells of their life in Prague during the 1950s, 1960s, and the first half of the 1970s. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a number of Hrabal's previously banned books were published; the first of his collected writings came out in 1991.
Even with the publication of Hrabal's collected writings in nineteen massive volumes - which, since he regularly reworked, revised, and returned to his texts, contain only a fraction of the work he produced during his life - and despite a number of monographs on the writer, research on Hrabal's work can only be considered in its infancy. In Prague, Hrabal devotees are in the midst of setting up a project to post his collected writings on the Internet; at the same time, the question remains what to do with the enormous amount of material left behind by the author.
Meanwhile, fans can occupy themselves with weekend trips to the regions of Nymburk and Kersko to verify local names or track down people included in Hrabal's texts. While there, one can sample the bittersweet Czech pilsner, Hrabal's faithful lifelong companion. The Hrabal research industry is itself truly worth investigation, charting all the enthusiasts who scrutinize his texts or who, in the best of intentions, have built up a court around the unpretentious poet.
For a translator, Hrabal's use of idioms - seemingly lifted directly from eavesdropped conversations - prove an obvious challenge. All the odd characters who figure into his texts acquire their personalities from the verbal play which pepper their speech. And the greatest chatterer of them all is Hrabal's uncle Pepin, whose volubility overflows with military slang, obsolete profanities, and Moravian provincialisms. How, for example, should the unmistakable linguistic features of the Moravian countryside be conveyed? When Pepin opens his mouth, the Czech reader immediately understands what he's about: with the choice of words and special suffixes, he gives away his geographic roots. One prime example is found in the fourth chapter of "Cutting it Short," when he spins a yarn about uncle Metud who was bored and bought a raccoon:

Well now, Uncle Metud over in the Great Lakes he's begun to get a wee bit strange, and one day he read a notice in the paper: Suffer from boredom? Get yourself a racoon. And Uncle Metud, what with having no kids and that, he replied to the ad, and in a week's time the beast arrived, in a packing case. Well that was a thing now! Just like a child, it made friends with anybody going, but there was one special thing about it, you see, the German for racoon is Waschbär, and whatever that racoon saw, it simply had to wash it, and so it washed Uncle Metud's alarm clock and three watches, till nobody could put them together agai,n. Then one day it washed all the spices. And again, when Uncle Metud took his bicycle to pieces, the racoon went and washed the parts for him in the nearest creek, and the neighbours were comimg along saying: Uncle Metud, would you be needing this piece of junk at all? We just found it over in the creek! And after they'd brought him several bits like that, Metud went to have a look himself, and that racoon had gone off with practically the whole bang shoot. [...]
Further translating difficulties ensue from the technical terms related to the various professions and settings found in the books - from a steel mill and a paper recycling plant, to a pork slaughterhouse and a perfume boutique. In closing, a section of Too Loud a Solitude, where the paper press operator Hanta tells of his experiences during World War II, serves as a good example of Hrabal's lyrically invigorating - and often subtly political - prose:
For thirty-five years I've been compacting old paper, and in that time I've had so many beautiful books thrown into my cellar that if I had three barns they'd all be full. Just after the war the second one - was over, somebody dumped a basket of the most exquisitely made books in my hydraulic press, and when I'd calmed down enough to open one of them, what did I see but the stamp of the Royal Prussian Library, and when next day I found the whole cellar overflowing with more of the same - leather-bound volumes, their gilt edges and titles flooding the air with light - I raced upstairs to see two fellows standing there, and what I managed to squeeze out of them was that somewhere in the vicinity of Nové Straseci there was a barn with so many books in the straw it made your eyes pop out of your head. So I went to see the army librarian, and the two of us took off for Nové Straseci, and there in the fields we found not one but three barns chock full of the Royal Prussian Library, and once we'd done oohing and ahing, we had a good talk, as a result of which a column of military vehicles spent a week transporting the books to a wing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, where they were to wait until things had simmered down and they could be sent back to their place of origin. But somebody leaked the hiding place and the Royal Prussian Library was declared official booty, so the column of military vehicles started transporting all the leatherbound volumes with their gilt edges and titles over to the railroad station, where they were loaded on flat-cars in the rain, and since it poured the whole week, what I saw when the last load of books pulled up was a constant stream of gold water cum pitch and printer's ink flowing down from the train. Well, I just stood there, leaning aginst a lamppost, flabbergasted, and as the last car disappeared into the mist, I felt the rain in my face merging with tears, [...]
Works by Bohumil Hrabal available in English translation: "Cutting It Short"/"The Little Town Where Time Stood Still" (transl. James Naughton), Pantheon, 1993, Abacus, 1994; "Too Loud a Solitude" (transl. Michael Henry Heim), Harcourt Brace, 1990, 1992; "Closely Watched Trains", (transl. Edith Pargeter) Northwestern Univ. Press, 1995; "Closely Observed Trains, a Film" (script written by Hrabal together with Jiri Menzel), Lorrimer, 1971; "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" (transl. Michael Henry Heim), Harcourt Brace, 1995; "I Served the King of England", Vintage Books, 1990.


READ OTHER BIOGRAPHY HERE


Note:
There are two Web sites devoted to Hrabal, with texts almost entirely in Czech: http://hrabal.eunet.cz/hrabal/bh.htm and http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/2765/hrabal.html. Further on more original texts by Hrabal will be published here.

This article is © copyright Mats Larsson  1997.
Translated from Swedish by Kathryn Boyer.




Friday, September 23, 2011

Julio Cortázar / 62: A Model Kit

62: A Model Kit

By Julio Cortázar



This dust jacket is so similar in style and lettering to the one used for Hopscotch that you'd think it would have to be by George Salter as well, but Salter was long dead and this dazzling design was in fact by Kenneth Miyamoto. If you didn't look closely you might miss the suggestion of a cityscape with mountains in the distance. The superimposed geometrical forms below the title are actually appropriate, since the novel is set in several real European cities but also takes place in overlapping dimensions ("the City" and "the zone") that are organized more by systems of affinities than by geography.
This is Cortázar's strangest novel, and it took me a couple of tries to penetrate its mysteries. The first thirty pages or so are slow going the first time out, but once you get past that it's a book like no other, aptly described by Carlos Fuentes as "an ironic, sentimental journey through a city plan drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi." The reference to Lugosi isn't gratuitous; there's vampirism in the book, among many other things. The title alludes to Chapter Sixty-Two of Hopscotch, in which a prospectus for a novel -- or rather an approach to the writing of a novel -- is set forth. Almost everyone in the book is in love with someone, usually someone who's interested in another person entirely, who in turn... It all ends, sweetly and sadly, with dead leaves (actually a character named Feuille Morte, who has a pet snail) and insects circling a streetlight.
The American edition, from 1972, is jointly dedicated by Cortázar and translator Gregory Rabassa to "Cronopio Paul Blackburn," who had died the year before, and bears these lines from Jorge Manrique's "Coplas por la muerte de su padre":

y aunque la vida murio,
nos dexo harto consuelo
su memoria

Posted by Chris Kearin at 7:11 PM
Tuesday, October 05, 2010


Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Madeline Miller / Top 10 Classical Books

Homero
by Philippe Laurent Roland

Madeline Miller

TOP 10 CLASSICAL BOOKS

From Aeschylus to Sophocles, the novelist celebrates the ancient stories that have inspired her debut novel

Madeline Miller
The Guardian
Wednesday 21 Septembre 2011


Sophocles
A statue of Sophocles, c.450 BC
Photograph by Hulton
Archive/Getty Images
Madeline Miller was born in Boston and grew up in New York and Philadelphia. For the last 10 years she has taught Latin and Ancient Greek to high school students. The Song of Achilles, published by Bloomsbury this month, is her first novel.
              "The classics are back, and with a vengeance. In the past few years there has been a Vesuvius-sized explosion of translations, adaptations and re-imaginings of the ancient works. For lovers of Latin and Greek literature, it has been hog heaven, a chance to revisit the thrilling adventures, beautiful poetry and unflinching psychological insights the ancient stories offer us.
            "The Greek myths have been close to my heart since childhood, particularly Homer's Iliad, yet I never would have considered telling one myself – I simply loved the originals too much. But something about Achilles and his beloved companion Patroclus's story took hold of my imagination and wouldn't let go. I wrote academic papers about the Iliad; I directed plays; it still wasn't enough. Then one day I found myself in front of my laptop, typing furiously. The words on the screen were Patroclus's, and 10 years later they became The Song of Achilles. In celebration of this Latin and Greek revival, here are ten of my favorite classical works."



1. The Metamorphoses by Ovid

Ranging from the farcical to the deeply moving, the Metamorphoses presents hundreds of myths of transformation, all in Ovid's witty and passionate style. Perhaps this is perverse of me, but I particularly enjoy some of Ovid's most disturbed heroines, like Myrrha, who falls in love with her father. Ovid manages the tricky manoeuvre of awakening our sympathy to the girl's desires without diminishing our sense of horror at her actions.


2. Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

The kind, wise and thoughtful god Prometheus (his name literally means forethought) might be considered the first advocate of social justice. He defied Zeus's injunctions against aiding humans, daring to steal fire on our behalf, teach us the arts of civilisation and show us how to protect ourselves from the gods' greed. For this he was punished cruelly: chained to a cliff and condemned to have eagles tear out his liver every day for all eternity. Aeschylus's Prometheus is a figure of tremendous strength and dignity, who gladly suffers for the good he has done. Sadly, we only have the first of the trilogy that tells his story.


3. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Loosely inspired by the myth of Geryon and Heracles, this "novel in verse" conjures heart-stoppingly beautiful images on every page. Its deceptively simple language has a fiery, unearthly clarity and bone-deep wit: Carson's sentences ring out like bells. The story is moving, and its hero, Geryon, a little red boy with wings who falls in love with the wrong person, is unforgettable. There is no book I have read quite like it.


4. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer

Is it cheating to include them both? The first is Homer's action-packed and psychologically acute paean to a single man's rage. The second is the tumultuous journey of a war veteran struggling to get home to his family. Both are bursting with incident, poetry and amazing characters that grab the attention. When I began writing my own novel, I found myself constantly having to rein in digressions trying to include them all.


When I was in college, a friend asked me to direct this "problem play" set during the Trojan war. I knew little about Shakespeare at the time, but fell quickly in love with this outstanding and challenging play. Its dark comedy and bitterly satiric portraits of Homeric heroes have a startlingly modern sensibility. Arguably its most famous figure is the scurrilous soldier Thersites, who comments with acid precision on the folly he sees around him: "Wars and lechery," he sneers. "Nothing else holds fashion."


6. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson

Sappho's gorgeous, gem-like poems limn their subjects in gold. Whether the focus is a young woman, an apple on the highest branch or the narrator's jealousy, Sappho brings them all to life with sensual, visceral and breathtaking beauty. No wonder that Plato called her "the tenth muse".


7. The Bacchae by Euripides

I have loved this particular tragedy since I first read it as a teenager. Pentheus, prince of Thebes, refuses to worship the new god Dionysus, and the god takes bloody revenge. What makes the play so gripping is how eminently sympathetic Pentheus is: a stubborn, underdog rationalist who stands up to a bullying zealot. Haven't we all felt like drawing the line sometimes? In one memorable ancient production, Pentheus's head-on-a-spike was played by the real life head of Crassus, member of the first triumvirate with Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar.


8. Agamemnon by Aeschylus (The Oresteia Trilogy)

The story of the Greek general's disastrous return home after the Trojan war. I have never been a fan of Agamemnon, so I tend to cheer Clytemnestra on as she readies the murderous bathtub and axe. What does move me is Cassandra – the Trojan princess cursed to tell the truth and never be believed. Now Agamemnon's captive, she is doomed to knowledge of her own imminent death at Clytemnestra's hands. The famous opening scene, where fire beacons signal to Clytemnestra that her husband is returning, surely influenced JRR Tolkien's own use of fire beacons in The Return of the King.


9. The Aeneid by Virgil

Virgil's tale of arms and a man and so much more. A gorgeously crafted piece of poetry, a story of adventure, a moral examination of violence and a plea for mercy, Virgil's masterful Roman founding myth provokes and haunts long after you've finished. The characters are drawn with sympathy and sensitivity, and above all total humanity: Virgil never shies away from their faults as well as their virtues. I particularly love book two, the tale of Troy's fall; its brutal portrait of Achilles' son Pyrrhus inspired my own.


10. Philoctetes by Sophocles

The ageing hero Philoctetes, once a companion of Heracles, is bitten by a venomous snake on his way to join the Trojan war. The wound festers and the other Greeks, fearful of the bad omen, abandon him on an island. For 10 years, Philoctetes survives alone, embittered and in physical agony. I first read this play when my grandmother's health was failing, and I wept at Philoctetes' grief-stricken monologues. His pain at being forgotten by the world and despair at his body's weakness could have been my grandmother's own. But Sophocles chooses to close the play with hope: reconciliation, and a long-awaited end to the hero's suffering.





Fahrenheit 451 / Reading the 1950s



READING GROUP

Fahrenheit 451: Reading the 1950s


Ray Bradbury's dystopia is clearly humming with the anxieties of its times. But how well do we know the decade that made them?

Sam Jordison
Wed 21 Sep 2011

Fahrenheit 451 still resonates. Books censorship has never gone away, after all. But, as many people in the Reading Group have pointed out, it's also a book that clearly reflects its time.
Everythingsperfect, in particular, noted that s/he "would be very interested in looking into how it reflects its time and place, America in the early 1950s. Would it be possible to provide some background, to place it in context? I was just wondering whether the total cultural pessimism of F451 is something that is reflected elsewhere in society, or if it is just Bradbury who is a miserable so-and-so?"
So here we go. In this thread, any and all reflections on the 1950s are welcome. To get the ball rolling, here are a few loose thoughts of my own:
Ray Bradbury says that one of the main inspirations for Fahrenheit 451 came when he was out walking with a writer friend, and "a police car pulled up and the policeman got out and asked us 'What are you doing?'" Bradbury explained that they were out walking ("putting one foot in front of the other" was his first "smartaleck" response.) The policeman didn't like it. "Don't do it again!" he told Bradbury – which sent the writer into such a rage that he went home and wrote the short story The Pedestrian [PDF], imagining a time in which everyone who walked was considered a criminal. Later, he took his "midnight criminal stroller" for another walk around the future city – and Fahrenheit 451 was born.




It probably won't surprise you to learn that the original encounter took place in pedestrian-hating Los Angeles. Even so, it doesn't take too much of a imaginative leap to see it happening in plenty of other places in the US in the 1950s; the decade of the drive-in and the pink Cadillac. Most people were delighted by the automobile frenzy and the advances it brought, but there must have been alarm too. Especially for those such as Bradbury. He may be an SF author, but he writes with the same passion about nature as he does about technology, and the changes in the 1950s must have unsettled as much as they enthused him. Or at least, that's my hypothesis.

It's also impossible to talk about the 1950s without discussion of the Bomb. The book was written less than a decade after Nagasaki and Hiroshima (think about 9/11 to see how raw they must have seemed) and during an ever-escalating arms race. The future, in many ways, looked desperate.
Concomitant to the Bomb was, of course, the cold war – and clearly that, too, influenced the book. The Soviets were sending writers to gulags and banning questionable books, while in the US McCarthy was persecuting writers and the HUAC was in full swing. And then, of course, the memory of the Nazis still burned all too bright.
So, in (brief) answer to Everythingsperfect's question, it is possible to see plenty of pessimism in the 1950s and to take the view that it must have had an influence on Bradbury's writing. But I'm hoping that we can also provide a more nuanced vision. My notes create a very one-sided picture – and one that could easily be reversed. Yes, there were troubles in the 1950s, but in the US in particular, it's more often remembered as a happy, optimistic time. It would be interesting to hear more about that – and also about how that may be reflected in Fahrenheit 451 in the way most citizens are perfectly content to go along with the destruction of world literature provided they have TV, a few creature comforts, some good drugs and aren't troubled too much …
Over to you.


Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Julio Cortázar / Hopscotch


HOPSCOTCH
By Julio Cortázar

In the final paragraph of a letter to Paul Blackburn written from Vienna in September 1961, Cortázar shared a bit of news with his agent and friend. "Last week I finished La Rayuela (Hopscotch, you know). It is, I humbly believe, a very beautiful thing." Blackburn must have expressed puzzlement, because two weeks later the author explained: "La Rayuela is a novel, Mr. Agent. Of about 650 pages." And so it was. It was published in Buenos Aires in June 1963, although the American edition would not appear for another three years. During that time Pantheon's chosen translator, Gregory Rabassa, then a novice at the craft, worked closely with the author, struggling to devise creative solutions to the sometimes nightmarish obstacles the book posed. Years later, Rabassa recalled:
Hopscotch was for me what the hydrographic cliché calls a watershed moment as my life took the direction it was to follow from then on. I hadn't read the book but I skimmed some pages and did two sample chapters, the first and one further along, I can't remember which. Editor Sara Blackburn and Julio both liked my version and I was off and away.
When not busy translating One Hundred Years of Solitude, Paradiso, Conversation in the Cathedral, and dozens of other books, Rabassa went on translate five more of Cortázar's, the last being A Certain Lucas in 1984. His memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, was published by New Directions in 2005.
Cortázar, who was himself an experienced multilingual translator, was delighted with everything about the American edition ─ except for this colorful jacket by George Salter, which he claimed to have removed and thrown in the wastebasket as soon as his author's copy arrived.

 

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Posted by Chris Kearin at 6:37 PM


Sunday, September 18, 2011

Julio Cortázar / The Winners


THE WINNERS
By Julio Cortázar
BIOGRAPHY

The first of Cortázar's books to appear in English, The Winners (Los premios) was published by Pantheon in 1965 in a translation by Elaine Kerrigan. The jacket is by Muriel Nasser.
I really like the JACKET, Sara. Say so to Muriel Nasser, who I hope is not related to that other Nasser. Or is it the same Nasser who works for you under a feminine pseudonym? You never can tell.




I put the jacket on another book, and it looked wonderful. I like it very much, you know. I've never seen such a large photo of me. How young I was when it was taken! In this last three years I've aged a lot; now I can't read for more than two hours in one sitting, and at times I have rheumatism. But the heart is still young, as the bishop said to the actress.
Excerpts from a letter to Sara and Paul Blackburn, December 17, 1964, from Cartas 2: 1964-1968, published in 2000 by Alfaguara. Sara Blackburn was Cortázar's editor at Pantheon; her husband, the poet Paul Blackburn, translated several of his works as well as being his American agent and good friend. The translation of the excerpts is my own, but the portions in italics are in English in the original.

Sunday, October 03, 2010




Friday, September 16, 2011

My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan



My hero: Lucian Freud


'I find myself deflated, and moved, and grateful, all at once'


Esi Edugyan
Friday 16 September 2011


I
t was in Holland that I first encountered Lucian Freud's paintings in the flesh. And I mean in the flesh. Freud's use of paint, his remarkable relishing of the human form, the unbearable beauty and sense of time passing, of ageing itself, all stopped me in my tracks. I couldn't look away. I didn't look away.


Artists – whether painters, writers or composers – often seem to doubt the efficacy of art more than anyone else. I'd been doubting the decisions in my life, the intensity of effort required for the writing of a novel, wondering what impact the art itself might make. But standing before that Freud painting, something in the physical construction on the canvas, the weight of all that paint, made me feel hollowed out. There was nothing lonely in the work itself, but the presence of a figure clearly absent led me back into myself. It was a disturbing experience, a visceral one. At the time, it affirmed something for me about art and what it is that makes us who we are.
Born in Berlin, Freud fled the Third Reich with his family and ended up in London at an early age. His personality was, by all accounts, a difficult one – a man troubled and left uneasy by his own abilities as much as by his limitations. Or so I've found myself imagining. But it's the paintings that I return to, again and again. The privilege of experiencing the human form through his dissecting eyes and fingertips. That altered way of seeing. I find myself deflated, and moved, and grateful, all at once, whenever I get the chance to see through his eyes a little of what he saw.
Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize 2011.
THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser

007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville

011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016