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ReadySteadyBlog
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Thursday 04 March 2010
The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating 'Infinite Jest' into German
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to him.
Last summer, Blumenbach finally reaped the benefits of his efforts when the novel was released in Germany to great critical and commercial success, and he was awarded the Hieronymusring for Exceptional Achievement in Literary Translation, as well as the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize for his work (more...)
From Publishing Perspectives.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, language
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Tuesday 02 March 2010
38 Plays: 38 Days -- The Taming of the Shrew
Today is the second day in the 38 Plays: 38 Days challenge to read a Shakespeare play every day for the next thirty-eight days. This evening I shall be pleasuring myself with The Taming of the Shrew (which is online at e.g. Project Gutenberg; I'm using The Oxford Shakespeare).
Wikipedia's synopsis reads:
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1594.
The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a drunken tinker named Sly is tricked into thinking he is a nobleman by a mischievous Lord. The Lord has a play performed for Sly's amusement, set in Padua with a primary and sub-plot.
The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship, but Petruchio tempers her with various psychological torments – the "taming" – until she is an obedient bride. The sub-plot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's less intractable sister, Bianca.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, technical, william shakespeare
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Tuesday 02 March 2010
Death as a puzzle to be solved: Jon Fosse on crime fiction
At the launch event for Best European Fiction 2010 a few weeks ago, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse made some wonderfully cutting and dismissive remarks about crime fiction.
Here, exclusively for ReadySteadyBook, Jon expands on his thoughts about what he calls the "pornography of death": Literature is basically a personal, and at the same time universal, asking into the fundamentals of existence, made possible by the aesthetic possibilities of language. The more personal it gets, the more universal it becomes. When literature gets private, it looses its quality, as it does if it ends up as universal in this sense: something everyone agrees about.
Of course, one can learn about life in literature, for instance to see how life is for other persons, perhaps in another time, in another culture: in the novel everyone has the right to be understood, nowhere else. And to me dramatic literature is about getting a glimpse of the forces that somehow, in their invisible way, direct life. But more than this, literature is about learning to die, as Harold Bloom has put it.
What then about crime fiction, so highly esteemed as literature, at least here in the Scandinavian countries? Is it at all literature? No it isn’t. The aim of this literature is not to ask into the fundamentals of existence, of life, of death, it is not to try to reach the universal through the unique, it is a try to avoid such an asking, such unique universality, by stating already given answers that are not really answers, but just something one has heard before. It therefore feels as a pleasant and safe answer, and what feels pleasant and safe one could also call entertaining.
Death, perhaps literature’s basic concern, at least when doubled with what cannot exist without it, love, is in crime fiction made into a kind of puzzle which can be solved. Death is made safe by being looked at as something which might well not exist, if it wasn't for a murder, and then is reduced further by making this murder, death, into a puzzle to be solved. And which will be solved.
And when even the aesthetic ambition, this never-ending process of saying it all again, seen from a new perspective, is replaced by filling out a plot with variations, how can one possibly see crime fiction as literature? Add some political correctness to this plot, and we live in a perfectly safe and stupid world.
Literature is writing so strong that one sees life as something else after meeting it. It has to do with the uniqueness in every human being, and with this truth: the most unique is the most universal. Crime fiction is the opposite, to see life as the same all the time and feel safe in one's lie. It's pornography of death, and much less honest than the pornography which has to do with the beginning of life.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, literary criticism, rsb
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Monday 01 March 2010
Christopher Reid, Wapping, this Thursday
Christopher Reid will be reading from The Song of Lunch, A Scattering and perhaps others at the Wapping Project bookshop, London, E1W 3SG, this
Thursday, 4 March, at 7.30. The space is small; to ensure a place, email lydia.fulton@mac.com (via SonofaBook; thanks Charles!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, poetry
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Monday 01 March 2010
A ReadySteady round-up
A quick ReadySteadyBook round-up...
The latest three book reviews:
The latest three articles:
Three from me on Shakespeare:
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: rsb
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Monday 01 March 2010
The Quarterly Conversation (and its new blog)
The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation has landed "with essays on Nobel laureate Herta Mueller, Jonathan Swift, Per Petterson, and more, plus 19 reviews, includin William Gaddis, Jose Manuel Prieto, and Gilbert Sorrentino, and interviews with David Shields and others."
They also have an all-new blog: "The Constant Conversation [has] a group of contributors drawn from TQC's ranks, the site delivers book news, reviews, and fresh links every day."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Monday 01 March 2010
38 Plays: 38 Days -- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Pinch, punch, first of the month... And thus the first day in the 38 Plays: 38 Days challenge to read a Shakespeare play every day for the next thirty-eight days (or thirty-nine if we read on and bag The Reign of King Edward III).
Today, we start with The Two Gentlemen of Verona (which is online at e.g. Project Gutenberg; I'm using The Oxford Shakespeare). Wikipedia's synopsis reads:
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1590 or 1591. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and tropes with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. Two Gentlemen also has the smallest cast of any of Shakespeare's plays.
The play deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: philosophy, theatre, william shakespeare
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Thursday 25 February 2010
A question suggests itself: Derrida, Shields and Capitalist Realism
A question suggests itself -- and I'm certainly not the
first to ask it: why in a book ostensibly about Karl Marx does Jacques
Derrida divert himself, and us, at such considerable length,
considering 'Hamlet'? If we choose not to accuse Derrida of bad faith
or wilful obscurantism -- which, anyway, would only show our own bad
faith, or an obscure lack of understanding concerning his project --
then we must take him absolutely at his word. We read Spectres of
Marx and note that 'Hamlet' allows Derrida to think, and to think of
Marx. 'Hamlet' supplies him with the metaphors that allow him to unpack
Marx's own metaphors and allow us to see how these metaphors structure
Marx, structure 'Hamlet' and could deconstruct (unstructure) our idea
both of Marxism and the destructive reality of our capitalist present.
But is
something more happening here? Should we ask: can the political only be
thought about via/with fictional narrative and the metaphors it lends?
Further, can we only think progressively about our collective present
and other possible futures if the metaphors we use are deeply embedded
in our collective life? Jacques Ranciere, in The Aesthetic
Unconscious, problematises our understanding of Freud's use of the
Oedipus myth. Did Freud use the Oedipus myth as a metaphor for the
unconscious, or was the unconscious already shaped by Oedipus's story?
Did Freud use the story or did the story use Freud? Bluntly, I don't
think we can think without literature. I don't think we do think
without literature. Further, I don't think we can possibly think
ourselves out of our current impasse, and the impasse of our thinking,
without it.
One of the very many obtuse things about David
Shields' obtuse "manifesto" Reality Hunger -- an obtuse book which contains
many wonderful quotes about literature and life and which could have
been simply a very fine commonplace book -- is its obtuse and strident
assertion that the line between the real and the fictive was in any way
ever absolute and that the commingling of these two supposedly separate
realms will save literature from redundancy.
Mark
Fisher describes the foreclosing of (political) thought that could
envision different (social) futures as Capitalist Realism. His short
book is highly recommended: not least to someone like Shields who seems
to think that reality is a given rather than a perpetually socially
constructed fiction which we half-wittingly recreate each and every day
of our lives.
If the recent banking crisis showed us anything it
was that the make-believe is at the heart of what we tell ourselves is
real -- and that fiction becomes fact when we have faith enough, or
fear, in the (empty) lies that keep us in our places. Those who rule
our world kill to maintain the presence of this absence every single
day. Every day thousands starve or go cold, kids are bombarded in Iraq
whilst neoliberal bloggers cheer, countless bore themselves stupid in
offices -- all so that bankers in Saville Row suits are maintained and
preserved, and maintain the fiction that thinking beyond a system
predicated on their maintainance and preservation is an impossibility.
What
is deconstruction? Or, perhaps, that better question from earlier: what
was Derrida saying it was when he wrote a book about Marx that was
actually much about 'Hamlet'? He was, surely, demonstrating -- more
than that, he instantiated it in the very weft and warp of his argument
-- that the political is structured by the fictive; is, indeed, always
fictive, and needs to be read and understood like this to be undermined
and disbelieved.
Things are ever not right here in the 'state of
Denmark'. The palace stinks of corruption. The need for change haunts
Elsinore; a ghost harrows the corridors and halls. And a spectre is
haunting Europe, too: it is called fiction. It is reality's own bad
faith. Pace Shields, there is no need to mash-up the fictive and the
real to reinvigorate narrative, but there is certainly a need to read
the real as always already fictional and thus detonate reality's
murderous presumptions.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, philosophy, politics, rsb, william shakespeare
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Tuesday 23 February 2010
Self on Sebald (and Mitchelmore on Self and Bernhard)
The centrality of melancholy to Sebald's work is probably the equivalent of Bernhard's cynicism; manifestations, that is, of contingent facts of life: the peace of the East Anglian landscapes, for example, compared to the venal denial of Vienna. Writers become who they are for many reasons, some more obvious than others. Self's thesis is that distance from Germany and closeness to the Jewish community in Manchester guided Sebald's determination to bare witness to the Holocaust and thereby help to remove the taint on Germany. But more than that: to bare witness to the presence of destruction in the peace of the English present. He writes about the destruction of German cities by the Allies and the destruction of nature in the abattoir of industry. Self's lecture is particularly welcome for bringing the English taint to our attention (more...)
Excellent post over on This Space which ranges from Amis through to Bernhard and W.G. Sebald...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, w g sebald
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Monday 22 February 2010
38 Plays: 38 Days
I'm not a great one for reading challenges (it is, as I've written before, sometimes quite enough of a challenge simply to read anything at all), but as 2010 has seemingly become my "Year of Shakespeare" I'm thinking of joining the folk over at 38 Plays: 38 Days in their effort at reading each of Shakespeare's 38 plays in as many days...
Yes, it is a somewhat brutal rush through a corpus that should be lovingly savoured but, at the same time, I'm rather excited by the idea that by early April I could have read the whole lot and then I might know which ones I need to return to (to do the loving savouring bit) sooner rather than later.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, personal, william shakespeare
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Serendipoetry
Sea Rose
Rose, harsh rose
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,
more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem --
you are caught in the drift.
Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.
Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?
-- H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
-- View archive
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