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ReadySteadyBlog
One of the Guardian Unlimited Books' top 10 literary blogs: "A home-grown treasure ... smart, serious analysis"
Blog entries on '26 September 2005'
Monday 26 September 2005
WLT Top 40 List
World Literature Today have published a list of the Top 40 Most Important Works in the World 1927 - present. I was thrilled to see, for 1945, SY Agnon's The Day Before Yesterday (this Princeton University Press edition is called Only Yesterday, but it is the same book.)
SY Agnon (1887-1970) was born Shmuel-Yoysef Tshatshkes in the Jewish town of Butshatsh in eastern Galicia, formerly a Polish region. In 1908 he went with the Second Aliya to Palestine, where he published several early masterpieces in Hebrew. In 1912-1924 he lived in Germany and was regularly supported by the publisher and Zionist Sh.-Z. Schocken. From 1924 Agnon lived mostly in Jerusalem. In 1966 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (along with Nelly Sachs). Among his works translated into English are A Simple Story, The Bridal Canopy, Days of Awe, In the Heart of the Seas, and Shira.
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956) by João Guimarães Rosa is also listed. I keep hearing great things about this novel. I also heard, ages ago, that Verso were thinking of reprinting it.
The Rake has lots of knockabout comments on this (via Scott).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Monday 26 September 2005
Four-eyed Bitch
Four-eyed Bitch (the blog at Suicide Notes) has had a bit of a facelift. Neater, cleaner look, but just as much fun as ever: take a look.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Monday 26 September 2005
eratio
The Fall 2005 issue of eratio postmodern poetry is online (via the ever-wonderful Wood s Lot, which also brings to my attention Christopher Benfey's essay Mark Rothko's floating abstractions of despair).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Monday 26 September 2005
No fair!
It's not fair! I wanna play!
Sam, Sandra, Steve and Stefanie have been comparing their obsessiveness (posting lists of multiple volumes in their collection by or about single authors). My books are all over the place (in storage in Oxford, at my parents' house, in sealed boxes in the in-laws's loft, in the flat ...) so there is no way I can count, no way I can join the game! My list would look more like Steve's than Sandra's, as you might expect, but until the day when they are all in one place, I'll never know.
Sandra (Mrs BookWorld) has been posting some wonderful blogs of late (especially Shakespeare-related ones) so, if you haven't already, get over there.
And then there is Steve (who is due congratulations on the first anniversary of the peerless This Space) with this on Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
What drew me to this novel, of course, was its extraordinary title. I remember reaching for it on the library display in January 1986, the day of my birthday in fact. The book could easily have been like the movie: shallow and pretentious. And it probably got its notoriety anyway for its promiscuous sex and political sexiness rather than its literary daring. What made the book extra special for me - took it beyond the merely fashionable - was the way it began. Yes, there’s the opening section on Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence (which I didn’t understand), but more importantly for me there’s also the passage where Tomas is introduced looking out of a window, introduced, that is, looking out of a window as seen through the writer’s imagination; not as an obvious figment or a postmodern plaything, but a living presence who begins the narrative. This simple moment of honesty felt like a gift; the key to the door.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Monday 26 September 2005
Weird words
Ross brings my attention to some words he hopes will soon enter the English language, including: Nakhur (Persian origin) - a camel that won’t give milk until her nostrils are tickled; Torschlusspanik (German origin) - fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Monday 26 September 2005
Rilke's politics
In a letter dated in 19th August edition of the TLS, Fred Bridgham writes of Rilke's politics:
Leo Lensing understandably laments the omission of a sentence (explaining how "Rilke lost his head for a few days in August 1914") from an essay of his published in A New History of German Literature, which allowed the poet's "Funf Gesange" to be construed as "an attack on war" (Letters, August 5). These little-known cantos welcome the sudden "authoritative" appearance of "the God of War", the intoxication of a communal mission, even the naturalness of "the human harvest" about to begin, before the celebrant has second thoughts, retreating into some of the most remarkable linguistic contortionism in the language. Yet Rilke's analogical thinking, further buttressed by the quasi-divine "dictation" of the remaining "Duineser Elegien" in 1922, allowed him to welcome Mussolini, too, as an "authoritative" dictator.
I mention this as I've been dipping into Rilke again (Duino Elegies) recently whilst impatiently waiting for Michael Hofmann's The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems to land.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
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Serendipoetry
To a Stranger
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me
as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours
only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
-- Walt Whitman
-- View archive
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