Archive for November, 2016

Elena Ferrante, author of Neopolitan Novels, guards her privacy zealously – in our intrusive age, who can blame her? She has claimed that “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” That hasn’t stopped repeated attempts to identify her. A few months ago, she was unmasked as the Rome-based translator Anita Raja. An earlier attempt this year tagged her as Neapolitan professor Marcella Marmo. Her website, anyway, is here. 

Who is she? Harper’s Magazine article assembled a sort of Q&A, taken from a collection of Ferrante’s papers that was published last month by Europa Editions as Frantumaglia. It’s here. Excerpt:

You could have the sort of fame that many people seek. Why have you chosen not to appear?

Freud tells of a woman who was afraid that someone would use her name to take possession of her personality. The woman began by refusing to write her name, and then she stopped writing completely. I am not at that point: I intend to continue to write. But when I read that story of illness it right away seemed meaningful.

Have you ever felt a surge of ego that made you want to throw open your window and cry, “It’s I who have created this world”?

My home is on the upper floors, I’m afraid of heights, and my ego gladly avoids leaning out the window.

I need to be sure whether you are a man or a woman. Establish your age. Deduce your lifestyle, your social class. I appreciate your writing but not the darkness that surrounds you.

What is better than a room that is dark except for the light of a single reading lamp? Look in the books and you will find eyes, sex, lifestyle, social class, and the id.

And finally…

Will you tell us who you are?

Elena Ferrante. I’ve published seven books. Isn’t that sufficient?

Read the whole thing here.

In 2001, Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro invited Ann Marie Lipinski, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and editor of The Chicago Tribune, to the presidential residence to mark the historic opening of the Tribune Company bureau in Havana. Six years later, the Tribune‘s correspondent, Gary Marx, would be expelled for his coverage of human rights and other issues.

Erika Guevara-Rosas, the Americas director for Amnesty International said Castro’s regime was characterized by “a ruthless suppression of freedom of expression,” including sometimes long prison terms for people who spoke out strongly against the Cuban government. “The question now is what human rights will look like in a future Cuba,” she said. “The lives of many depend on it.”

The 90-year-old Cuban leader who defied American capitalism for half a century died on Black Friday, the annual shopping frenzy that takes place the day after Thanksgiving. This photograph was shared by Ann Marie, a former Michigan Daily colleague, on her Facebook page, and is reprinted with her permission.

Excellent, excellent article on Steve Wasserman, one of the nation’s leading public intellectuals, this weekend at the San Francisco Chronicle. I’ve written about Steve in past posts on the Book Haven (here and here and here), and have been a big fan ever since I wrote for the Los Angeles Times Book Review during his nine-year editorship, when it was the best book review in the country, bar none. Now he heads Berkeley’s Heyday Books, after serving most recently as an editor at large for Yale University Press and even earlier stints (before LATBR) at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Time Books/Random House literary agent with Boston-based Kneerim & Williams. He is one of the chief architects behind the successful Los Angeles Festival of Books.

The article, by Steven Winn, a former arts and culture critic for The Chronicle, begins:

Steve with some of his books.

Books weigh heavily in the life of Steve Wasserman, the new publisher and executive director of Berkeley’s Heyday Books. So much so that when he moved from Connecticut to take the job, he shipped his 14,000-pound personal library and installed it on pristine white shelves that fill most of the wall space in the company’s warren-like offices on University Avenue.

But books, as Wasserman clearly exudes, walking a visitor through his carefully devised shelving system of some 15,000 volumes, aren’t just objects of pride and possession. They mean things, signify things in a culture that can seem indifferent if not hostile to what they embody.

“Ideas matter,” he says. “Writing well is the best revenge.”

Steve was reared in Berkeley, so his return to his roots at age 64 is fitting. A good thing for California, too: “He’s probably as knowledgeable about books and ideas as anyone alive,” said Robert Scheer, the Southern California author and journalist who has known Steven for nearly half a century. “To find someone who is both an excellent editor and agent and doesn’t feel competitive with you as a writer is very rare. He’s the total package.”

And we’d like to know a little bit more about that “carefully devised shelving system.” We could use one ourselves.

Read the whole thing here.

Over at Lithub, an hour-long phone conversation with Pulitzer prizewinning Junot Díaz, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and Paul Holdengraber. We always find the Dominican American author intriguing – here are a few excerpts:

On writing slowly…

Looking for the stories that death tells us.

Part of it is bad habit. But part of it is an attempt at a different kind of methodology. I have noticed that what matters to me is to reflect very, very long on what I might call my materials or very, very long on what I might call the sources of inspiration. Lately I’ve been thinking of my writing as—what interests me more than anything—is grinding these slow lenses. What I mean is giving events, giving history, giving people the time to unfold, the time to mean—to give forth their meaning.

On pain…

Often our pain encourages us to isolate ourselves. The truth of it is our pain is a badge for how we are members of this larger community. Recognizing this and recognizing our shared humanity is not a small insight. The ego pushes us towards individual, pushes us towards fantasies of achievement of power… and all of those things pull us away from our common link, our common clay… We are made of a common clay, and among the most prevalent minerals in that clay is our fragility.

On stories from the dead…

There’s also the stories that death tells us. What are the stories that the dead tell us? That’s not a language that’s easy to crack. It’s a language that I’m trying to master—that I’m trying to become sensitive to the nuances, sensitive to the phonemes, but it has been resisting me.

Go here for more.

Thanks to Lufthansa, I had a blissfully uneventful trip homeward to California and warmer weather. But my mind was still on Kraków, and last week’s conference on Zbigniew Herbert. During a stopover at the Munich airport, I idly paged through Herbert’s The Collected Prose: 1948-1998, and found this pertinent essay on the use of language. Here’s an excerpt from “Shield us from the dark word…”

From all of this a certain lesson can be drawn for readers: let them try to penetrate the value of a word not only by way of its meaning but also by its back stairs, its lining. Let them try to hear its sound, see its shade, its light and weight. And let them not be ashamed of naïve perceptions. If Słowacki‘s stanza dazzles them with bright radiance, or they hear in Norwid‘s funeral rhapsody the harsh rattle of armies, they will be closer to poetry than those who conceal their literary deafness under a wreath of learned platitudes.

But the word must return to its mother port – meaning. This not just an aesthetic problem but also a moral one. Naming objects and things human conduces to their understanding and judgment. Particularly after a chaos of ideas, after the last war, after a flood of lies, poetry must take on the labor of the moral reconstruction of the world by rebuilding the value of words. We have to part good from evil, light from darkness once again.

For that reason the last stanza of a beautiful poem by Jerzy Liebert is the prayer of all poets concerned not only with aesthetic problems but also with the ethical, social dimension of poetry:

Breathe in us, may your hand
pour olive oil onto our breast.
Shield us from the dark word,
From the dark word, save us!

A few days ago we posted one of Artur Sebastian Rosman‘s photos of Kraków, taken last week. Artur, who runs the Cosmos the in Lost blog, was in Poland’s cultural capital for the same reason I was: an international conference on Zbigniew Herbert, hosted by the Józef Tischner Institute.

We kindly asked him for permission to publish a few more of his black-and-white studies of the city, and he kindly gave it. Here goes:

.

Rynek Główny, viewed from a sidestreet.

An old man walks along the Planty, Kraków’s city park.

And the rooftops are decorative, too!

Prof. Grzegorz Bak Trzebunia Niebies of Madrid speaks, with Tischner’s photo behind him.

There’s a reason for our silence. We have returned to lovely Kraków for a conference about the poet Zbigniew Herbert.

The international event is sponsored by the Józef Tischner Institute, and includes scholars, translators, poets, and others from Siberia, Brazil, London, Madrid, Rome. From America, Artur Sebastian Rosman and Humble Moi are holding down the fort.

So that’s why we’ve been so silent. There has been plenty of eating and drinking to do. Above, with Anatol Roitman from Novosibirsk. He’s a noted translator of Czesław Miłosz from Polish to Russian – so we met several years ago at the Milosz centenary. This is our first reunion. The event is documented by Artur (who, by the way, runs the Cosmos the in Lost blog).

At right, one of Artur’s shakier efforts, after plenty of wine at Wesele, a restaurant on Rynek Główny. The original building goes back to about the 13th century. This is a portion of a the original ceiling. One of many reasons it’s glorious to be back in Poland.

At work in his Stanford home. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

I’m at the Times Literary Supplement this week, writing about the historian and poet Robert Conquest, and his lifelong balance between Clio and Euterpe:

An excerpt:

Until a few days before his death last year at the age of ninety-eight, Robert Conquest was busy finishing his memoir, completing a poem or two, and sending off a steady stream of letters to a wide international circle of friends. As always, his serenely successful life was divided between poetry and prose. Most of the obituaries concentrated on his groundbreaking work as a historian: The Great Terror (1968), Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and other books had exposed the genocidal horrors of Stalin’s regime and earned Conquest the disapprobation of left-wing intellectuals and the admiration of, among others, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

With Poland’s Radosław Sikorski in 2009.

But he was also a poet of note; not just for the light verse and bawdy limericks with which he entertained fellow guests at social gatherings (a selection of these, A Garden of Erses, was published in 2010 as the work of “Jeff Chaucer”), but for serious verse that is lyrical, sensual and exactingly observed. …

He wrote about the joys of the flesh even as he wrote, at other times, about the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. For decades after the publication of The Great Terror, Russians would tell Conquest that they had just learned how their loved ones had perished under torture, or by forced starvation, or by being worked to death in Arctic camps. Perhaps his poems were his clearest protest in an age where, as he wrote, “Shiva walks on and on / Down Coventry Street”, of the governments he saw as “the organization of absence of love”. His response to history’s monsters was not only to reveal their horrors; he answered them with his own love poetry, erotic poetry, and even limericks, which asserted an earthy humanity of their own.

Read the whole thing here. 

From a postcard in the new collection. Brodsky ties a shoelace on the morning of his departure from Leningrad in 1972. (Copyright: Lev Poliakov)

When the Soviet Union expelled the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in 1972, he already had a few friends waiting for him in the West. One of them, Diana Myers, would remain a confidante until the Nobel laureate’s death in 1996. The London home she shared with her husband, the translator Alan Myers, became his English pied-à-terre.

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford has recently acquired Diana Myers’ collection of Brodsky’s papers, including letters, photos, drafts, manuscripts, artwork and published and unpublished poems.

“We were keenly interested in adding the Joseph Brodsky papers collected by his friend Diana Myers to our vast archives on Russia and making them accessible right away,” said Eric Wakin, the Robert H. Malott Director of the Hoover Library & Archives.

“With Hoover’s significant holdings on the poet in its Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman Collection, and the recently acquired Joseph Brodsky papers from the Katilius Family Archive at the Green Library, we’re honored that Stanford has become a notable center for Brodsky studies in the United States.”

The new acquisition documents Brodsky’s enormous capacity for friendship and his long love affair with the English language.

“I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world,” he once told an American student visiting Leningrad in 1970 – strong words for the man who would become one of the preeminent Russian poets of the last century.

Brodsky, who settled in the United States, was fascinated by the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. His landmark poem “Elegy to John Donne” was written in 1962, when he knew very little of Donne’s work. It brought him international attention. He began translating and writing English poetry during his 1964-65 internal exile in Norenskaya, near the Arctic Circle.

When the newlywed Myers arrived in London from the Soviet Union in 1967, she was carrying an armful of flowers to lay at the feet of John Donne’s effigy in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The specific request from Brodsky was her first stop in her new homeland.

In a letter Brodsky wrote to Alan Myers a few months before his exile, he requested more information about George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughn. He sought guidance in finding the best editions of Ben Jonson, Henry King, Walter Raleigh and John Wilmot. An undated and unpublished poem in the collection seems to be an experiment written under their sway.

On another page in the collection, he adds his own illustrations to a few passages from Shakespeare, who anticipated the metaphysical poets.

Fifteen pages of holograph poems in the collection document the slow progression from an idea to a finished poem, with notations, corrections and amendments – all likely of interest to Brodsky scholars. “You can see how it worked, to the final version,” said archivist Lora Soroka. “It’s something that gives insight into his work.”

“It’s everyday life – everyday life when he was there, in England,” she said. “This is definitely our star collection – not big, but stellar.”

The collection also includes 70 letters from Brodsky, as well as correspondence to him from such figures as Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Swedish translator and author Bengt Jangfeldt, Australian poet Les Murray and others; 25 pages of notes and drafts; five self-portraits, a landscape, and a still life, all in black chalk; an elaborate wedding card he created and illustrated for the couple; a transcript of his 1964 Soviet trial for “parasitism;” and other records.

Brodsky in 1988.

Friendship and hospitality

Myers, who died of cancer in 2013, was born Diana Abaeva, ethnically an Ossetian, whose prominent father had been politically purged and shot under Stalin’s regime in the 1930s. She grew up in Moscow and Tblisi, in the Caucasus Mountains – Brodsky once traveled to Tblisi to visit when he was impatient for her return to Leningrad.

Friends recalled that she was small and slender, with straight dark hair, an aquiline nose, and a radiant smile that was slightly dimmed by nicotine stains, for she smoked almost as ferociously as Brodsky did.

Like Brodsky, she lived for literature and was impractical, even unworldly. One friend recalled she had a slightly languid “Eastern” air. On one page in the collection Brodsky calls her “queen of the couch.”

She was “very intelligent and thoughtful and idiosyncratic,” said University College London’s Faith Wigzell, who had been a close friend of Brodsky’s as well as a colleague of Myers.

Her great gift was for hospitality as well as intellectual conversation: “She was the most relaxed and welcoming hostess. Her home was an international hall of residence. People came to just sit around. She was an excellent cook,” said Wigzell.

For Brodsky, Myers was a means to continue the literary and cultural conversations that had started in Leningrad. In exile, he would continue to consult her, phoning from around the world to read his latest poem and get her opinion. He said she had insights unlike anyone else’s.

Alan Myers, who died in 2010, became an important early translator for Brodsky’s poetry and prose, publishing in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement. In one letter, Brodsky told Myers that he would be paid “substantially, I think” for his New Yorker work, and he reminded his translator that he was looking after his interests.

Brodsky’s “In England” cycle is dedicated to the couple. In the “East Finchley” section, both make an appearance in their London home. In addition, the sections “York: In Memoriam W.H. Auden” and “Stone Villages,” recall trips the three took to W.H. Auden’s birthplace in the northern city of York, an ancient Roman stronghold. (Auden had been Brodsky’s mentor, protector, and friend – and another vital link to England.)

“Joseph found our sleepy residence very relaxing,” Alan Myers recalled in an interview from 2003-04. He remembered him as “a radiant source of wit, generosity of soul and exaltation.”

“No one who knew him well thought it other than a privilege to share the planet with him,” he said.

***

This is the first time ever a poet’s voice was recorded. And he muffed the lines of his own poem. The recording contains the voice of the eminent poet Robert Browning (1812 – 1889), recorded in a dinner party given by Browning’s friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, on May 6th, 1889. (Browning died the following December.)

Colonel Gouraud, the sales manager of Edison Talking machine, had brought with him a phonograph and each of the guests was invited to speak into it. Browning was reluctant, then relents. Eventually he praises this “wonderful invention” – but perhaps he’s just covering his embarrassment at forgetting the lines of his own damn poem.

He’s reading his poem “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” though you may not quite catch the words (the video has subtitles to help). It’s only 50 seconds long.

(Merci to the Interesting Literature website.)