The Christmas season brings interesting surprises through the mail – and this year was no exception. Dana Gioia‘s new monograph Psalms and Lament for Los Angeles arrived in my mailbox, letterpress and hand-bound by Providence Press in Ojai. The press was founded by the celebrated printer Norman Clayton, who publishes some of the special editions for the Book Club of California. It’s not the poet and the publishers’ first collaboration: Providence printed The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz in 2018 as its first-ever project. (The book is now in its second printing.)

The three long poems in Psalms and Lament represent Dana’s “late style,” composed between 2018 and 2020 – the first two before the pandemic, the last one, “Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels,” praising his Latino origins (“a mutt of mestizo and mezzogiorno/The seed of exiles and violent men”), at the height of coronavirus.

They were previously published in The Hudson Review, Rattle, and First Things.

Here’s the first part of the second poem in the monograph, “Psalm of the Heights,” describing his native Los Angeles:

PSALM OF THE HEIGHTS

I.

You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles
Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark.

Up in the heights of the Hollywood Hills
You can mute the sounds and find perspective.

The pulsing anger of the traffic dissipates,
And our swank unmanageable metropolis 

Dissolves with all its signage and its sewage— 
Until only the radiance remains. 

That’s when the City of Angels appears,
Silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.    

The boulevards unfold in brilliant lines.
The freeways flow like shining rivers. 

The moving lights stretch into vast
And secret shapes, invisible at street level.

At the horizon, the city rises into sky,
Our demi-galaxy brighter than the zodiac.

The dedication for the monograph is to his friend Scott Timberg, the gifted Palo Alto-born journalist, culture writer, and editor who committed suicide two years ago this month – all too young at 50. He is best known for his 2008 book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press). You can read a retrospective of the writer over at the Los Angeles Review of Books here, or on the Book Haven here and here.

Here’s some exciting news: Dana Gioia’s dedication precedes another announcement: my publisher Heyday in Berkeley, Steve Wasserman, will be publishing Scott Timberg’s essays, in a collection called Boom Times at the End of the World. I’m looking forward to it. Hope you are, too.

Purgatory seems to be on people’s minds this year – we have several new translations of Dante’s canticle to consider in time for Christmas. Fortunately, we have Dantista Robert Pogue Harrison to do the considering for us in the current holiday issue of the New York Review of Books.

Your choices: a Graywolf Purgatorio translated by poet Mary Jo Bang, another translation by Scottish poet and psychoanalyst D.M. Black (with a preface by Harrison himself – read about it here) from New York Review Books, and finally After Dante: Poets in Purgatory: Translations by Contemporary Poets edited by Nick Havely with Bernard O’Donoghue and published by Arc in Yorkshire. Harrison gives especial attention to a different kind of translation, from words into art: Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno by the late Rachel Owen, edited by David Bowe and published by Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Why the abundance of translations? “Given Merwin’s excellent version of Purgatorio, plus dozens of others in English, the only reason to undertake yet another translation of it—or any other part of The Divine Comedy, for that matter—is love. ‘Love makes me speak,’ as Dante said…”

Purgatorio is the most approachable of the three canticles of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It has always been my favorite. As Harrison points out, it is the only one of the three in which time matters. And effort matters, too – its inhabitants are all in the struggle to work out their own salvation.

But there’s more. As Harrison writes: “Whereas Hell has no stars, sunsets, or seashores, on Mount Purgatory we are once again under the open sky, where the sun’s movement marks the hours and seasons; where night gives birth to day, and day dies into night; and where the shimmering seas of the southern hemisphere surround the island from all sides.”

“A palpable terraphilia informs the canticle. We find here a love of the planet and everything that makes it our cosmic home—its rivers, valleys, seas, and mountains; its diurnal cycles; its ever-changing light and color; and above all its celestial dome. Not to mention its plant life. After Dante enters the earthly paradise of Eden at the summit of Mount Purgatory, the fair Matelda informs him that he has risen above Earth’s zone of meteorological disturbance. The gentle breeze that graces the ancient forest of Eden comes, she says, from the heavenly spheres as they move from east to west around the planet. This rotational wind scatters seeds from the flora of that primal place to the rest of the planet below: ‘And then the Earth, according to its character/and where it is beneath the heavens, conceives/and by its various powers bears various plants.’ In sum, all the plant life of our burgeoning, self-renewing biosphere has Edenic origins.”

Harrison suggests that Dante had roamed Hell as an insomniac, and that his nightmarish visions were the result of extended sleep deprivation. “

In Purgatory he and Virgil are under strict orders from the angelic guardians of the realm to halt their ascent of the mountain toward evening and, at least in Dante’s case, to sleep at night. On each of the three nights he spends on Mount Purgatory, Dante has vivid dreams, and with each new dawn he wakes up restored.

“Indeed, restoration marks the very purpose of the purgatorial process. While Hell figures as a great gash in the body of Earth, where all the vices that disfigure the soul and human history fester, Purgatory is where the slow, laborious work of healing takes place. Dante, whose pilgrim arrives on the realm’s shores on Easter morning, calls it the soul’s rebeautification (“Creature who cleanse yourself/to go back beautiful to your Creator,” he addresses a penitent in Purgatorio 16). The penitential ordeals of Dante’s Purgatory—many of them as harsh as the punishments in Hell—are intended to restore the prelapsarian probity of human nature and prepare the way for a return to Eden, which Dante locates at the mountain’s summit. Dante himself will enter Eden at the end of his journey through the second realm, and so will all the other penitents after completing their purgation. From that garden of recovered innocence they too, like Dante’s pilgrim, will ascend into heaven.”

Read the whole thing here.

Postscript: Here’s poet and psychoanalyst D.M. Black talking about his translation with NYRB’s Edwin Frank. It’s fascinating.

The Book Haven was born with a post on an English professor and friend on November 19, 2009. As I wrote then: “I recognized Stanford English Prof. George Hardin Brown years before I knew who he was. I would run across the dapper, bearded scholar in the bowels of Stanford’s Green Library, while I was doing my own research.  I assumed he was someone on the library staff — until someone finally introduced him to me as one of the world’s preeminent scholars on the Anglo-Saxon monk-scholar, the Venerable Bede, ‘teacher of the whole Middle Ages.’”

George, friend, scholar, and “creature of the library” died on November 6 in Sacramento, California. He was 90. You can read the Stanford obituary here. I can do no better than to run the story I ran so long ago with the Stanford News Service, on Stanford’s “Bedemeister.” He discusses Bede, not himself, and shows the intensity of his focus on this extraordinary monk. George was an unassuming man, would probably have wished it that way.

Stanford celebrates the ‘Father of English History’ Venerable Bede

“Bedemeister” George Brown has published a new book on England’s earliest polymath, and Stanford’s library is celebrating recent Bedan acquisitions.

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN

Chaos had reigned in the northern kingdom, and chaos would come again. But for a few short decades, peace had a toehold. In these years, one of history’s greatest minds flourished.

The Northumbrian monk known as “Venerable Bede” (c.672-735) has been called “the teacher of the whole Middle Ages” and “the father of English history.” For English Professor Emeritus George Hardin Brown, one of the world’s leading Bede scholars and author of the newly published Companion to Bede, he is something more: The early scholar has been Brown’s lifetime’s work.

Bede was the ultimate polymath – a master of every subject of his time: poetic principles and practice, mathematics, astronomy, history, theology, grammar. Most famously, he is the author of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, considered one of the most important sources on Anglo-Saxon history.

“The reason I have worked with him and his works for years is that it takes a long time to cover all he did and the history he made,” Brown said at a “Bede Celebration” recently at Green Library, which also showcased recent Bedan acquisitions. “Others have written on him as an historian, or computist, or scripture scholar, and so forth. I’m one of the few who has tried to encompass all he wrote, and I have tried to digest that knowledge succinctly in this book.”

At a recent celebration, Special Collections displayed about two dozen Bedan volumes from its holdings.

Scholar of many subjects

Bede was the author of more than 40 works. “In his time, there was no one like him,” said Brown of the largely self-taught author of biblical commentaries, saints’ lives and homilies, as well as works of science and mathematics and the “reckoning of time.”

He not only wrote and taught, but he made the copies as well.”I myself am at once my own dictator, stenographer and copyist,” Bede wrote to a friend.

Brown is the founder of Stanford’s Medieval Studies program, which he chaired for a dozen years. He was recently named a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, in addition to being a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. But the title he cherishes most is an unofficial one: “Bedemeister.”

Brown’s prominence at Stanford triggered a series of library acquisitions. “With an eminent Bede scholar such as George Brown here on our faculty, important antiquarian editions of Bede seemed very sound acquisitions for us,” said John Mustain, rare books librarian and classics bibliographer at the Stanford University Libraries.

Although the collection remains “relatively modest” at less than two dozen volumes, all on display at the celebration, the library has added them “fairly aggressively over the past 10 years, as part of an effort to strengthen our holdings in antiquarian editions of medieval authors in general, and antiquarian editions of Bede in particular,” Mustain said.

Bede likely would have approved. He was, as English Department Chair Jennifer Summit said, “a creature of the library.” Book collections are not usually associated in the public mind to the rough world of Beowulf, a work that may have come from this period, yet Bede was privy to a library that included nearly 300 books, making it one of the best in Europe. “It was a terrific library. Because of it, Bede was able to read and write his work,” said Brown.

A study of Bede’s scholarship has been Professor Emeritus George Brown’s lifetime’s work.

Rare time of peace

There was hardly any need to leave home: In his lifetime, Bede stayed within 30 miles of his base at the remote but well-endowed Northumbrian monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow. Although murder and treachery had been the norm during the time Britain was governed by warring chieftains, Brown said that the years Bede lived were uncommonly safe. Bede himself  wrote that a woman and child could walk across England unmolested.

The goal of Bede’s quiet life was to “bring people close to God,” said Brown. “He wasn’t going out preaching – but it was the message in everything that he was doing. Everything was directed to the Kingdom of God.”

Peace didn’t last long. By the end of the eighth century, Wearmouth-Jarrow was the second target of the Vikings, after the island jewel of Lindisfarne. “They all got bumped by the Vikings. They were easy marks, with undefended wealth,” said Brown. Within decades after that, the Danes would demolish what was left of Bede’s monastery.

Many of his original manuscripts were destroyed, but the Vikings were too late to destroy his legacy. Bede’s work had been in high-demand since his death, and his popularity ensured survival.

Bede’s renowned saintliness created a few other distinctions in the ensuing centuries: He is the only monk who is named a doctor of the Church – and Dante made him the only Englishman in Paradiso. He’s in Canto X, the “Circle of the Sun” – one of three men “who in contemplation exceeded Man.”

One wonders what Stanford Prof. John Freccero, one of the world’s leading Dante scholars, would have made of his own death, during the year the world is celebrating as the 700th anniversary of his Florentine master’s demise. No doubt he would have been honored and gratified. The author of the seminal Dante: The Poetics of Conversion had long since disappeared from the scene, quietly retreating within his home on Amherst Avenue. He died on Nov. 22.

“It seems natural that Freccero chose to devote his academic studies to Dante,” according to Johns Hopkins Magazine in 2008. “In one of his earliest memories, he’s a boy sitting on the lap of his Italian immigrant grandfather, staring at the frightening images accompanying The Inferno. ‘There is no Italian of my grandfather’s generation who didn’t know Dante,’ Freccero says. ‘That’s one of the things that’s so bizarre about him, that he is at once the most learned and the most popular of poets. Can you imagine a barber in Baltimore reciting Shakespeare? Of course you can’t. But you can’t imagine a barber in Italy not knowing Dante.'”

I interviewed him in the summer of 2012, and those encounters are cited in my book about his close friend and colleague, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. (“I feel sometimes I am not worthy” of the friendship, he told me.)

Going back through those interviews this morning, I was surprised at their offhand depth and range, the casual erudition. (I’ve written about him before: Early sci-fi: how Dante warps time and space, and “By Love Possessed”? René Girard and John Freccero on Francesca da Rimini, among other places.)

I had studied with the Dantista some years before, in the late 1980s or early 1990s. As I wrote in Evolution of Desire:

“I met John Freccero at Stanford decades ago, when I attended his lectures on Dante—I remembered a potent concoction of urbanity, insight, and endless erudition. He assigned the multi-volume Charles Singleton prose translation of The Divine Comedy, urging us to buy the epic poem and commentary by Singleton as the definitive translation in English. Because of him, I still regularly refer to the thick gray volumes I found secondhand at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. “Why not a poetic translation?” a plaintive voice had queried from somewhere at the back of the large lecture hall. Freccero volleyed back with an appealing smile, “Because you should never give up on learning the Italian.”

“He disappeared from my life after the course was over, and returned when I realized that he had been a friend of Girard’s for nearly sixty years. He was a pivotal figure during Girard’s time at Johns Hopkins. Years later, Freccero helped bring Girard to Stanford. His observations were persuasive, and helped shape my understanding of the theorist I knew only in his last decade. Girard acknowledged the role of two Dantisti in his life during these years …”

The outpouring since John Freccero’s death has been subdued – it occurred during Thanksgiving week, and the 90-year-old Dante scholar had long been in frail health. So far, the only comments I’ve seen have been on Twitter. (See below.)

In a life as intellectually radiant as his own, such a quiet death seems out of place – but perhaps one could say the same of Dante’s own malarial death, on returning from Venice, in 1321.

Let us quote another maestro, “Rest perturbèd spirit,” may angels guide thee… Dante described so many of them, after all.

Postscript on 12/3 from Stanford Prof. Grisha Freidin: Farewell, John. Your Dante course I sat through at Stanford in 1980 changed my life. For one, it was clear to me that one ought to be ashamed of teaching lit in a university without a serious study of Dante. I was fortunate to be able to audit his course at the outset of my career. It shaped my research, too, in many ineffable ways. John was also a good friend during his stint at Stanford that ended tragically when he lost his wife, a ballet dancer, to cancer. We lost touch after that, though I ran into him on occasion. Robert Harrison was his student, too, and held him in great esteem. Passing of a giant, who was part of the great tradition of Dante scholarship going back to Curtius and Auerbach.

It seems to be the season for Robert Pogue Harrison. A few weeks ago, journalist Janet Albrechtsen ran a profile in The Australian, the continent Down Under’s leading national news paper. This weekend, Scott Anderson’s “Podcast an intellectual dig through past plagues and future tech” appeared on the website of The San Francisco Chronicle. Christmas is coming early for one of Stanford’s most high-profile professors.

An excerpt:

Though he’s also an author and the guitarist for the rock band Glass Wave, the professor’s international following mainly comes from the creation of a pioneering podcast that’s now in its 16th year. “Entitled Opinions” is available on Apple Podcasts, where it consistently ranks in the top five most popular shows for literature globally.

Aqsa Ijaz was teaching literature in her home country of Pakistan when she discovered the show in 2012.

Ijaz would listen at night after finishing her teaching duties at Government College University in Lahore. She was hooked on the probing method that Harrison and his guests used in examining humanistic issues. Ijaz began playing the shows for her students.

“Robert has really influenced my own work, partly because he has a reverence for the past, but it’s not a cheap reverence,” said Ijaz. “The show was a strange expansion of my world.”

Harrison’s singular approach to the podcast’s lyrical monologues and long-form interviews is rooted in his early life. He was born in İzmir, Turkey, to an American father and Italian mother. His childhood was spent playing under umbrella pines and in overgrown ruins scattered through the countryside. At 12, he and his family moved to Rome, where he learned five languages and became entranced by the poetry of Dante.

***

Glass Wave has its fans, but Harrison admits his biggest following comes from “Entitled Opinions.” It started with the idea of him interviewing fellow professors for a radio hour on Stanford’s KZSU FM. A writer at heart, Harrison began scripting intense opening monologues read over music, which evolved into an ongoing prose performance that he recites to Glass Wave’s blistering song “Echo.”

In the fall of 2005, a few weeks into the show’s run, a tech-savvy assistant producer uploaded it onto iTunes’ then-nascent podcast service. It wasn’t long before admiring messages were coming in from places as far-flung as Kobe, Japan. Harrison decided not to limit the show’s topics to literature. He’s since trod territory as varied as the historical Jesus, the Rwandan genocide and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.

***

Lena Herzog, a Russian-born photographer and visual artist, has appeared twice on the show.

“Even though I’ve been interviewed by places like the New York Times, these are the interviews I was most excited about — over the moon, really,” she said. “With Robert, it’s always a high-level conversation. … Intellectuals can be incredibly conformist, especially in the United States. Robert is not codified. He changes his opinions if warranted, and that comes from extreme rigor and discipline of thought. He makes for a very unusual intellectual.”

Recently, Harrison has brought that freethinking approach to questions about science and technology. He’s done shows with experts on cybersecurity, internet addiction, artificial intelligence and controversial biotech ethics. His most recent show, released on Oct. 8, featured an interview with renowned environmental landscape architect Thomas Woltz and focused on using outdoor design for better custodianship of the earth.

His conversations have been so probing that, in June 2017, Harrison was invited to give a presentation to some of the top gene-editing specialists in the world, including Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Anne Doudna of UC Berkeley. True to form, Harrison took the opportunity to recap Dante’s story of Ulysses sailing out beyond the Mediterranean Sea, only to meet his death in the Atlantic — a metaphor for where the scientific luminaries’ ambitions might be heading.

For fans, it was another sign that “Entitled Opinions” will continue as one of the most brazenly intellectual shows on the digital airwaves.

Read the whole thing here.

A stunning tweet today from Belfast-born poet Adrian Rice, who wrote: “Loving Cynthia Haven’s new book on Milosz, and it brought me back to one of my personal treasures, a letter from Milosz. Reading Haven’s remarkable new book about a remarkable poet, has restoked the Czeslaw fires within.”

And what a letter it is. Read below. Keep in mind that Czesław Miłosz had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, sixteen years earlier.

Adrian Rice promised to tell me the story of how this letter came about, after he finished his classes. He has done so, via a Twitter message. Here it is:

The letter came about after I had bought his latest book – Facing The River – which had just been published at the time, in 1995. I was going through a stressful life-changing time, and I was living in Canada, Dundas, Ontario, thus the address on the envelope. I was feeling particularly down on that day, and headed out in the snow to a local bookshop, not expecting any treasures on the poetry shelves. However, I was surprised to see copies of new books by two poets who meant the world to me – Joseph Brodsky, and Czeslaw Milosz – Brodsky’s essays On Grief and Reason, and Milosz’s latest, Facing The River.

I took them back to the apartment and was astounded by both, but particularly by Milosz’s book of poems, from that very first serious self-reflection in “At A Certain Age,” right on to the end of the book. The poems simply, somehow, “helped.” I was also working on a chapbook –Impediments – back then, and decided to use a few lines from his book as an epigraph. (I have made sure, ever since, to use a Milosz epigraph in all of my books.) But what really hit me was the ending poem, “In Szetejnie,” and especially those lines near the end of that poem: “If only my work were of use to people and of more weight than is / my evil.”

Working as a freelance poet/teacher back home in innumerable settings, I had used Milosz’s poetry and essays to challenge, and inspire, countless students and ordinary folk of all types of ages and backgrounds, right across the spectrum of Northern Irish/Irish society. And I had seen his work mean a lot. It had mattered, especially given our situation living and learning throughout the ongoing Ulster “Troubles.” So, not being given to any kind of “fan” mail, I nevertheless sat down determined to write Milosz’s publishers to tell them to pass on from me my admiration for his work, and to please make sure that he knew that his work was of great use, to me personally, and to those I shared it with back in Belfast and beyond.

I tried to express just how useful it was to so many folk he would never meet, but who had been changed and helped. Anyway, I sent the letter, and expected that would be the end of it. Imagine, as I know you can, my amazement to return to the apartment in the snow a few weeks later, and to see a letter sticking up out of the mailbox with his address on it. I actually thought it was a joke, that someone back home was playing a wee trick on me, but I knew that no one knew of the letter I had sent.

When I opened it inside the apartment, I was, well, staggered, in the nicest way possible; and have been, on and off, ever since. I only stayed about a year in Dundas, then returned to Belfast. In 1998, I believe it was, an Irish poet friend made me aware that Milosz was appearing at Galway University, and that I could “get in” if I could drive down from Belfast in a hurry. So, I jumped in the car, drove the big distance, and when I entered the auditorium, he had already started, and I walked in to hear him beginning “A Song on the End of the World.” I sat down and enjoyed every minute of the reading. A few questions were taken afterwards, and I think Robert Hass was on stage to help, and then a signing began on stage.

Now, I have mixed with great poets before, but even with Seamus Heaney (who gave me my first book blurb!) I was always shy about presenting too many books for signature, knowing how pressed they can be. But, I knew that this might be my only meeting with Milosz, and despite his advanced years, I was going to at least ask him to sign most of my (substantial!) collection. When I approached him, he smiled, and then kind of joked at the armful of books to sign, but set about it so graciously. I also dared to hand him my chapbook to sign under his epigraph I had used, and he looked at the book, read my name, and then looked at me saying – “Ah, you’re Adrian Rice.” I wasn’t going to mention my letter, but he did. What a man. I blushed, we exchanged a few more words, and off I went.

Well, that’s the story for you, Cynthia. Treasured moments. Goodness, we miss him, and the likes of Seamus today. But at least we have the example, and the words to keep us going. Again, so magical to connect with you today, and to know that you’ve seen the wee letter, and to have your new book, keeping him alive in our hearts and minds. Huge congrats. I’ll spread the good word of it to all I know, especially to my college students. Keep up the important work. Slainte! Adrian x