Saturday musings

Am I the only person who enjoys reading the Dear Ceefax letters on p. 145? In it you will find, time and again, the most priceless gems. Here’s one from today:

“I regularly find myself in large halls full of elderly people. Apart from a few receding pates, virtually all the men over 60 have full heads of hair.

So why is it that so many (mainly British) chaps between the ages of 20 and 50 are now either completely or almost bald?

A crowd of young men now resembles a tray of eggs. Is it something in the water?”

I am going to miss these pages very much when there’s the big switch to digital. It’s a shame, as this is one of the few reasons I am still paying my TV licence.

* * *

Thanks to Roger Clarke for his unexpected present. After the Dante event at the Calder Bookshop, he came up to me and gave me some wonderful Latin texts. I used to be well versed in that language, but I am now a bit rusty through lack of practice. The addition of Tibullus’s and Catullus’s poems (many of which I used to know by heart in my student’s days) to my library is especially welcome. And a comprehensive Latin grammar will help me bring my Latin up to scratch again.

* * *

From my Ars Poetastrica, or Art of Bad Poetry (ll. 639-642) – a long poem I wrote between 1997 and 1999:

E ora c’è anche l’Internet, che dona
un pulpito virtuale a ogni persona,
offrendo a cani e porci l’occasione
di inquinarci con altra informazione.

And now there is the Internet: this is
a pulpit for what anybody says
which gives pig ignorants their best occasion
to foul our wells with extra information.

Quite ironic I should reproduce these four lines, ten years later, on a blog diary.

AG

Homo technologicus

Have you ever tried digging into old folders on your computer? I don’t keep much paper around me, but I find that I discard very little of my electronic productions. The result is that, when I am in the mood, I can spend hours reading old letters, projects, short stories, interviews, translations, poems, fragments, blurbs, proposals, reports, ideas and other intellectual residua – not just mine, but also from other people. It’s fascinating, but also scary.

Tonight, I came across a letter I wrote to Warwick Collins in late 2004, after reading the second draft of a novel he had just written, The Sonnets. Four people had read the book: three liked it (including me) and one didn’t. I might have published the book, but then the following year I left Hesperus and lost touch with Warwick. I was glad when I heard that Scott Pack at the Friday Project had picked up his work. And I am delighted to see that The Sonnets has finally been published, and that a paperback is coming out in May this year. Good luck to both author and publisher.

I also stumbled into a translation of a comic-strip version of Dante’s Inferno I did with my colleague Mark Balfour when I worked at Grant and Cutler, the foreign-language bookseller. That was over ten years ago. Wooosh. I remember we even gave a paper up in York about this translation – and I duly found copy of it. I am still in touch with the Italian illustrator, Marcello Toninelli (who also scripted many stories of Zagor, one of the superhero comics I collected as a child). Who knows, I might even publish this comics version of the Inferno one day.

Now back to my cyber-crawl.

AG

Ernst Weiss

A close friend of Kafka, Ernst Weiss, who was born in the Czech town of Brno (then in the Austro-Hungarian empire), produced a considerable wealth of novels and stories in German which are generally considered to be milestones in the genres of Expressionism and New Objectivity. However, his œuvre is nowadays not given the recognition it undoubtedly deserves, especially in the English-speaking world.

He came from a prosperous Jewish family which was also very open to all things artistic, and studied medicine in Prague and Vienna, becoming a surgeon in 1908. His profession would have a significant impact on his fiction, which not only featured many doctors among its characters and questions of science and ethics among its recurring themes, but was also keenly analytical in its narrative approach, displaying a marked interest in the basic drives that motivate human endeavour (he was strongly influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis). In some respects one could draw parallels with other early twentieth-century writers who came from the medical profession, such as Chekhov, Schnitzler, Bulgakov and Céline. His first novel, Die Galeere, published in 1913, centres around a morphine-abusing Austrian scientist whose research into x-rays results in a repulsive tumour on his hand (which was very scientifically prescient for its time), an affliction which mirrors his moral shortcomings in his relationships towards his family and his mistress.

During the First World War, Weiss worked as a doctor on the front, receiving a golden cross for bravery. He would later combine medicine, journalism and fiction-writing, and lived mostly in Prague and Berlin, although his job as a doctor took him as far as Japan and India. He published over twenty books, garnering widespread acclaim which culminated in the Adalbert Stifter Prize and the Silver Medal for Prose Fiction at the Amsterdam Olympic Games. Due to the rise of Nazism, Weiss went into exile in Paris in 1934, and tragically took his own life when German troops marched into the city in 1940. According to legend, a suitcase of unpublished manuscripts vanished after his death. Nazism haunted his later works, a logical extension of his continued literary interest in crime and the corruption of society in general. His final and arguably most famous novel, Ich: Der Augenzeuge [The Eyewitness], written in 1938 but first published posthumously in 1968, deals with a doctor who, racked with guilt because he has cured Adolf Hitler of temporary blindness, flees Nazi Germany for Paris.

There are unfortunately very few English translations of Ernst Weiss’s writings still in print, but Pushkin Press has begun to restore his legacy, publishing a translation of Jarmila, a rediscovered manuscript which Kafka described as Weiss's finest work. Franziska, a tale of music, venereal disease and a love triangle, set in an evocatively rendered Prague, was published by Pushkin last year to great critical acclaim.

CM

Dante at the Calder Bookshop

I hope you will be able to join us for an exceptional Thursday night reading at the Calder Bookshop tomorrow. Prize-winning translator JG Nichols – who has translated some of the greatest masterpieces of Italian literature in recent years, from Petrarch to D'Annunzio, and from Foscolo to Verga – will talk about his translation of Dante's lyrics (the only edition currently available in the English language) and read some of his translations.

I will read a selection of Dante's lyrics in Italian and join the discussion. Tickets are £6/4, for which you also get a free glass of wine and a unique reading experience. Please reserve your seat by calling 020 7620 2900 or email amiddleton@calderbookshop.com.

Here's a link with some further information about the book:

http://www.oneworldclassics.com/shop/rime-p-292-book.html

I hope to see you tomorrow night!

AG

The challenges for a modern biographer

Last Friday I went to a talk at the East Sheen Library, where Lydia Syson was in conversation with biographer Anne Sebba, author of Jennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother. I was very pleased by the turn out, especially considering that it was a mid-afternoon event.

Even more interesting than the talk itself, which focused on the role and responsibility of the modern biographer, was my chat with Anne during the tea break. Anne confided her worries about the current state of historical biographies, with fewer books being commissioned by publishers and fewer and fewer readers. The advent of ready-at-your-fingertips information on the web – Wikipedia leading the way – as well as the ever-growing interest in celebrity biographies, has resulted in a constant decline in more serious general-interest publications.

Another big problem is the sheer amount of information that modern biographers have to go through. For a biographer studying authors such as Pinter or Updike, for instance, traditional letters, diary entries and newspaper articles are no longer enough: radio and TV appearances, emails and even blogs, just to give a few examples, have to be taken into consideration to retrace the author’s life with accuracy. Anne mentioned, during her talk, that the British Library’s very concept of cataloguing is going through a complete overhaul as they face the mammoth task of storing this multi-platformed avalanche of information.

Historical and literary biographies have traditionally been very popular in the English world – whereas in European countries such as Italy or France this genre is virtually non-existent. This may in fact reflect the attitudes of British people, who are notoriously jealous of their own privacy, but at the same time seem to be incredibly nosy about the life of others.

Elisabetta

“A pair of boots is preferable to the poetry of Pushkin.” (Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev)

Channel 4 News’ coverage of the sale of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon to the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery in London for fifty million pound (£50,000,000) was brilliant and, as usual, entertaining. They invited Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery and some Scottish bureaucrat or politician whose name I didn’t catch, and asked them: “Is it really worth, in such a time of crisis, to spend fifty million pound on a single painting?”

As it might be expected, the guests’ opinions were at opposite poles of the spectrum, but more than their arguments and replies, I loved to study their faces and body languages. Dr Penny had a worn-out face and dark shadows under his eyes, yet he seemed relaxed after what must have been a complex and extenuating negotiation and fund-raising process. The politician’s piercing eyes and stiff posture betrayed the bad temper of someone who suffers from haemorrhoids, and his face – oh well, his face was certainly not a romantic face – not the face of a poet!

Their brief exchange reminded me about the following passage from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment:

“And tell me, please, what do you find so shameful even in cesspools? I should be the first to be ready to clean out any cesspool you like. And it’s not a question of self-sacrifice: it’s simply work, honourable, useful work which is as good as any other and much better than the work of a Raphael and a Pushkin, because it is more useful.”

Which is a subtle reference to Pisarev’s words in the title of this blog entry. Difficult to say who’s right and who’s wrong, because both sides – the nihilists and the cynics on the one hand and the idealists and artistic-minded on the other – can put forward very valid arguments.

Whilst I adore Titian, I must admit that fifty million pound is an obscene amount of money to pay for one painting. And it is arguable whether “saving” this work for the nation is more in the public interest than, say, open a few more schools, libraries or hospitals. Still, I am delighted the painting hasn't ended up in some Russian billionaire's living room and is for everyone to see and admire – not just for now, but hopefully for generations to come.

AG

Fantastic Night & other stories by Stefan Zweig – the jury is in

Stefan Zweig is incredibly popular on the Continent, and thanks to Pushkin Press many of his works are now available in the English-speaking world. I read a positive review of Zweig’s The Post Office girl (published by Sort Of Books) on the Times yesterday, and was glad to see that it has reached number seven on the Small Independent Publishers’ chart. But I was shocked beyond words when I read the publisher’s strapline “Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig’s posthumous classic” and an endorsement by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. There seems to be no more decency in the publishing world.

Anyway, Pushkin Press has published around a dozen Zweig volumes so far, including his masterpiece, Beware of Pity – which Tibor Fischer recently described as “one of the best books I have ever read” – as well as various novellas and collections of short stories, most of them newly translated by acclaimed translator Anthea Bell. Having read no Zweig before, I thought I’d begin with Fantastic Night & other stories, and here’s my verdict:

Did I like the book?
Overall, yes. But Zweig’s style is not entirely to my taste, and I liked some stories better than others.

What did I like most?
The short story ‘The Invisible Collection’.

What didn’t work for me?
Particularly in the title story – but also in some of the others – there’s a tendency to verbosity and too much reported speech and action. The dialogue is unconvincing. There’s about a hundred million similes, and inevitably many of them are clichéd.

Would I publish it?
I wouldn’t dream of competing with Pushkin Press. They are doing an excellent job, and I couldn’t beat their lovely package.

What if it came as an unsolicited manuscript?
I would probably be tempted to publish the book, but only with some editing.

Did it sustain my interest throughout?
My interest ebbed and flowed depending on the story. The one I struggled most with was the title story. The action is slow and there’s lot of repetitiousness.

The best bit in the book?
The last page of The Invisible Collection.

The best scene in the book?
In that story, when the collector is showing his “invisible” Dürers.

Comments on the package, editing, typesetting?
The package is lovely (although this is one of Pushkin’s “mass-market” editions, not one of the small volumes printed on Conqueror paper and with flaps). The paper in this edition is about twice as thick as any Penguin Classics book – the typesetting is lovely. It was a joy to read. I found a couple of obvious typos and a few other things that I would either check against the original or query with the translator.

My final verdict?
A good book overall. It left me wanting to read more Zweig, which is a good sign. But not exactly my cup of tea. My next read will be a book by either Flan O'Brien or John Updike.

AG