Archive for August, 2012

I have joined the “world’s top thinkers” at last.  A few days ago I discussed the investigation into whether the woman on the left in the portrait above is Emily Dickinson, with her friend Kate Scott Turner at right.  The post received several comments, more tweets, and some other pick-up.

Janet Lewis, as she looked about the time I met her.

Yesterday, the post was mentioned on BigThink, which describes itself as “Blogs, Articles and Videos from the World’s Top Thinkers.”  I’m grateful to the post for something other than the promotion, however:  Thanks to my fellow “linkees” cited in the article, I found the putative portrait of Emily Dickinson, circa 1860, that I had tried to find several times in the past without success.

Here’s why:  Sometime in the 1980s, I made a visit to the Los Altos home of Janet Lewis, the poet, author, and widow of Yvor Winters.  The immediate reason for my interview I cannot recall – in any case, the article was never published, and remains somewhere in my garage on a 5″ floppy, along with the interview notes. I knew too little about the octogenarian writer at the time, but I am glad now I had the opportunity for the meeting, for whatever the reason – and yes, I remember the Winters’s legendary loquat tree.

"a gypsy face"

I also remember gazing up a photo in her kitchen, displayed high on the wall. Janet Lewis followed my gaze, and asked, “Do you recognize who that is?”  I didn’t.  “That’s Emily Dickinson, grown up.”  It was a matchless photo, attentive and sensual.  She told me it was included in the Richard Sewall biography of the poet, and that she had torn it out from the book and put it on her wall.  Years later I ordered the biography online precisely to recover that portrait.  But it had apparently been debunked in the meantime, and removed from later editions.

Now the photo has a new champion, poet Daniela Gioseffi, and author of a new biographical novel about Dickinson. From the comments section of an article about her book she writes (with some light editing on my part – it needs more):

The foreword to my book Wild Nights, Wild Nights, The Story of Emily Dickinson’s Master (at http://www.Amazon. com and plainviewpress.com) explains exactly how I researched the photo to include it. There is no doubt in many Dickinson scholars’ minds that it is Emily Dickinson at thirty years, as the features match when sized against that old 17-year-old photo that every one knows above, when the images are sized alike and put one over the other. What many non-scholars of Dickinson who have not read as fully as I have do not understand is that the well-known photo of her was taken when she was a sickly 17-year-old just arisen from a sickbed. She herself in later years is described by those who saw her a bright-eyed, clear-skinned, attractive and womanly. Yes, she was diminutive all her life, but she described herseld as having “a gypsy face” and this photo fits her own description of herself that her sister Lavinia agreed with.

I want the portrait to be true because I like it, and because it connects me, in an odd sort of way, with Janet Lewis.  To admit such a biased and unscientific judgment in writing, however, risks my removal from a blog for the “world’s top thinkers.” I am in something of a quandary.

"small, like the Wren..."

So let me throw in another red herring – the portrait at right that would date to about the 1850s.  Its defense is here, and the image would appear to fit Emily’s self-description: “[I] am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.”

And what about the new discovery above?  According to Austin Allen, one of the world’s top thinkers over at BigThink:

Of the two women, Kate is the one with a thousand-yard stare. (She’d been recently widowed.) But look closer at her friend: there’s something peculiar about that gaze. The pupils are asymmetrical, as they are in the known photo—Emily may have suffered from both astigmatism and iritis—but they’re also large, dreamy, and a little amused. Dickinson once compared her eyes to “the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves”; the woman in the picture just about lives up to the simile. …

Look: the mystery woman has even thrown an arm around her friend, a gesture we can hardly imagine the Recluse of Amherst making. If she was on the cusp of crisis, it doesn’t show yet. In my heart of hearts I doubt it’s Emily—that chin just doesn’t match up—but pending further reports on clothing samples, image records, nasolabial folds, etc., I’ll keep believing and disbelieving at once, which, as Emily said, “keeps Believing nimble.”

At least I’ve recovered the photo of “my Emily” at last.

Postscript on 9/5:  Some nice pick-up from the Poetry Foundation here.  I’m not only a W.T.T., but an “amateur sleuth” as well.

There’s lots of talk about online education nowadays, but there are some things online education will never do.  It can’t demonstrate how a man’s learning can ripen into wisdom.

Way back in 1966, Richard Macksey at Johns Hopkins University organized the international symposium that brought French theory to America – more particularly, it brought Jacques Derrida before the American public. “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” also featured prominent post-structuralists Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan.  Oh yeah, a young, up-and-coming French thinker René Girard was one of the movers and shakers behind the conference, too.  In fact, he and Martha Girard were the ones who told me about their Johns Hopkins friend in the first place, and directed me to this youtube video, which features a second reason to remember him: he also presides over one of the largest private libraries in Maryland, with well over 70,000 books and manuscripts:

A well-documented bibliophile, Macksey lives in a house that is literally submerged in books, one can’t travel more than a few feet in any direction without running into a bookshelf. Then there is his actual library, rooms of wall-to-wall volumes ranging from the classics to recent fiction. It is in this library, which doubles as a projection room, that Macksey teaches some of his courses. He hasn’t read “yet” all the books he owns, but according to some colleagues, he must have at least a couple of thousand volumes stored somewhere in his head. He recently announced that he will bequeath his 70,000 plus volume collection to the Sheridan Libraries of Hopkins. The shelves of English, Russian, French, German, Italian and Spanish texts, even Babylonian cuneiform, are matched only by his impact on the campus. Discourses exchanged over book-strewn tables with sharp-minded students was Macksey’s method of choice. An acknowledged polymath who can read and write in six languages, Macksey gives the impression that his mind is juggling a million things at once, said Neil Hertz, a professor of English and director of the Humanities Center, who likens Macksey’s thought processes to chain reactions. “The man’s right, he lacks focus…one thing leads him to another and that in turn leads to a third. And, given his astonishing memory, to a fourth, a fifth and so on. This could be a real drag if, say, you rolled down the window of your car at a traffic light to ask Richard directions to some place, while cars behind you began honking 1/25th of the way through his rambling, but no doubt interesting, answer.”

“He lived on three hours of sleep and pipe smoke,” one colleague recalled.  “There’s no topic in the world that bored him,” said another, in the youtube video below (okay, okay, it’s big on Johns Hopkins, but watch it, anyway, just for the books).  He’s published fiction, poetry and translations as well as academic works, in areas ranging from classical literature and foreign films to comic novels and medical narratives–all subjects he has taught at one time or another.

He’s still teaching.

His thought…

Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz‘s personal secretary Agnieszka Kosińska wrote the concluding essay, “Last Poems and Ars Moriendi,”  for my book, An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz.

Here’s the final paragraph, translated by Artur Rosman: “For me, working with Milosz, being with him all day long, was like being locked in a submarine: it was a total submersion in Milosz’s world, coupled with incredible pressure from within and without. Now, six years after his death, I continually test myself against the saying of Simone Weil that Miłosz liked to cite, ‘Distance is the soul of beauty,’ and I try to understand what I saw and heard while working with him.”

I’ve puzzled over Weil’s thought for some time. Then, a few days ago, I found Jonas Mekas‘s There Is No Ithaka: Idylls of Semeniskiai and Reminiscences.  The Lithuanian poet’s collection has a foreword by the Lithuanian-born Miłosz – I don’t think it’s been collected in any of his volumes of essays.  So years after Agnieszka’s comment, the maestro finally offers this elucidation:

…building on hers.

“‘Distance is the soul of beauty.’ This sentence of Simone Weil expresses an old truth: only through a distance, in space or in time, does reality undergo purification. Our immediate concerns which were blinding us to the grace of ordinary things disappear and a look backward reveals them in their every minutest detail. Distance engendered by the passing of time is at the core of the oeuvre of Marcel Proust. Distance in space and awareness that borders with their barbed wire separated him from his country allowed a young Lithuanian to write his Idylls.”

Mekas turns 90 in December, and is better known as an avant-garde filmmaker than as a poet.  “You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time,” he said. Poetry does the same, of course.

Malkovich ... the perfect Ivan Karamazov?

I’m not familiar with the writings of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, but my friend Artur Rosman posted this on his Facebook page, and I’ve been pondering it now for several days.

Remember the “Grand Inquisitor” segment of Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov?  Long story.  Jesus Christ comes to Seville at the time of the Inquisition and is arrested after performing several miracles.  But just before he does, Ivan Karamazov makes a speech to his brother Alyosha on the intolerable suffering of children:

“And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price. … I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. … And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. And it is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible. Which is what I am doing. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.”

Always seemed a bit of a put-up job to me.  Berdyaev finally explained why:

Law ... the perfect Alyosha?

“Ivan Karamazov is a thinker, a metaphysician and psychologist, and he provides a deep philosophic grounding to the troubled experiences of an innumerable number of Russian boys – the Russian nihilists and atheists, socialists and anarchists. At the core of the question of Ivan Karamazov lies a sort of false Russian sensitivity and sentimentality, a false sort of sympathy for mankind, leading to a hatred towards God and the Divine purpose of worldly life. Russians all too readily become nihilistic rebels out of a false moralism. The Russian takes God to task over history because of the tears of the child, returns back the ticket, denies all values and sanctities, he will not tolerate the sufferings, wants not the sacrifices. Yet he however does nothing really, in order to lessen the tears, he adds to the quantity of flowing tears, he makes a revolution, which is all grounded upon uncountable tears and sufferings.”

If you don’t have time for the 800-page book, you might try one of the films based on the book.  Like this one, with John Malkovich as Ivan Karamazov, and Jude Law as his brother Alyosha, and Sean Penn as Dmitri Karamazov, and Gerard Depardieu as their murdered father Fyodor Karamazov … whoops!  Movie was never made. I looked for it in vain.  Apparently, the Bernardo Bertolucci film is someone’s pipe dream of ideal casting.

While looking for a film clip telling me about this all-star film, I found this intriguing Russian miniseries by Pervyi Kanal seems to capture the spirit of the thing.

Getting ink (Photo courtesy Knopf)

Alfred Knopf tweeted this a few days ago, from Martin Amis, who novel Lionel Asbo has been getting a lot of ink of late:

“One definition of satire is that it’s militant irony: It’s irony brought to the pitch where you are actually hoping to bring about change. Irony brushes by a question and leaves you with a thought of it. Satire is meant to be much more vigorous and vehement – the suggestion being that you’re actually wanting to change reality. I don’t attempt to change reality. I would just say that satire is very exaggerated irony and that’s what I deal in.”

I googled, and found that he’d expressed a similar thought, in different ways on different occasions.  I like this one, from a Goodreads interview, which sounds a little less certain:

GR: Goodreads Author Steven Bauer asks, “What do you believe the place of satire is in a society and culture that always seems on the edge of satirizing itself?”

MA: I’ve never been sure what satire is. One of the definitions is that satire is militant irony, which sounds good. The suggestion, though, is that it’s militant and therefore sets the task of bringing about change. I don’t think that satire has actually ever done that. Satire attacks social ill and does it once the injustice has been cleared up, not while the injustice is going on, like imprisonment for debt in Dickens, for instance. I just don’t think that novels have that power. I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they’re not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

"Better than you"

Susan Sontag, I think, expressed the last idea better, from the point of a reader.  In her interview with James Marcus here she said:

“Reading should be an education of the heart … Literature is what keeps us from shriveling into something completely superficial. And it takes us out of ourselves, too. … But I really do think it’s necessary if you want to have a full life. It keeps you–well, I don’t want to say honest, but something that’s almost the equivalent. It reminds you of standards: standards of elegance, of feeling, of seriousness, of sarcasm, or whatever. It reminds you that there is more than you, better than you.”

Man after my own heart...

Proposition #1:  Translation is notoriously unheralded and underpaid.  Proposition #2:  Although Spanish is pretty much the United States’ second language, there’s tons of literature from the Spanish-speaking world that never makes it into English.

With those two statements in mind, this is cool news indeed:

A new award bearing the name of Spanish-born Mexican author, translator and poet Tomás Segovia (1927-2011) has been created to honor outstanding work in literary translation, Mexican cultural officials said.

The prize recognizes translations that “bring the Hispanic literary tradition to other languages,” National Culture and Arts Council, or Conaculta, president Consuelo Saizar said in a press conference Wednesday in this western Mexican city.

The honor carries a cash prize of $100,000 and is financed by Conaculta in partnership with Fondo de Cultura Economica – Mexico’s leading publishing house – and the Guadalajara International Book Fair, where this year’s award ceremony will take place in November.

In alternating years, the award will honor the work of professionals who translate from Spanish into another language and those who translate from other languages into Spanish, Saizar said.

That’s right. This is a hundred thousand smackeroos, which makes it about the biggest literary cash prize anywhere.  “This is an awesome thing,” according to Booktrade, reassuring us that it’s not always about money.

It’s about money.  M.A.Orthofer at The Literary Saloon is over the moon, and rightly so:

Yes, a translation prize that pays out $100,000.

A translation prize that merits inclusion in the Wikipedia list of the world’s richest literary prizes.

Sure, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award pays out €25,000 to the translator (into English) — if the winning book is a translation. The American Best Translated Book Award pays out $5,000. But $100,000 ? That is real money, and pretty much unheard of for an annual translation award.

(Of course, in the US the ‘major’ literary prizes — Pulitzer, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle — can get away with paying out between nothing and $10,000 (it’s apparently all about the prestige …).)
Yeah, I’m impressed. And jealous of the Spanish-speaking world, where even in these economically supposedly so troubled times money can be found (with government involvement !) for a prize like this.

I’ve always loved Mexico.  Now I love it more.

Thank you, Tomás Segovia, wherever you are.