WRB—Apr. 19, 2025

“erudite citation”

O God, I could manage to edit the Washington Review of Books and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

N.B.:

April’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 22 to discuss the question “Is curiosity dangerous?”

And the N.Y.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, April 25 to discuss the same question.

Links:

• In The New Criterion, Mark LaFlaur on Joseph Joubert’s aphorisms and Paul Auster’s translation (The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, 1983, 2005):

  I first happened upon Joubert in the mid-1980s in the Viking Book of Aphorisms in a maxim that read: “Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.” I copied this into a notebook because I liked the simplicity. A few years ago I looked for more by this Joubert fellow. A quick search online led me to the Notebooks that had been translated by Paul Auster—this sealed the deal—and I ordered a copy of the 2005 New York Review Books paperback. I had read Pascal and La Rochefoucauld for years and copied down many of their maxims, but that one quotation was all I had seen of Joseph Joubert. Auster’s introduction made me feel I had found an author with a biography I could relate to, one who wrote every day for decades but for all practical purposes had not published in his own lifetime, even though his literary friends, such as Fontanes and Chateaubriand, encouraged him to try to get his work into print.

  [If only the email newsletter had existed at the time. Or the microblog. —Steve]

• In Harper’s, an excerpt from an essay by Isaac Bashevis Singer, appearing for the first time in English in a new collection of his essays, Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: A Spiritual Reappraisal, 1946–1955 (translated and edited by David Stromberg, March):

  But there’s one big difference between the old concepts and the new ones that have replaced them. The words “righteous” and “wicked”—tsadik and roshe—were very clearly defined for Jews, very precisely delineated and determined. But the modern words that have replaced them are vague. During elections one group calls the other by all kinds of bad names that no one takes too seriously, neither those that do the name-calling nor those called by such names. The same is true of words of praise. You may read that people are “noble,” “positive,” “useful,” “creative”—then writers turn things around with a “but,” and it turns out that they’re “bothersome fools,” “losers,” or “swindlers.” The thousands of words that have replaced “righteous” and “wicked” somehow have no substance—they’re far more relative, far more vague and blurred. When you called someone a tsadik, you could not add a “but.” But words today, both good and bad, have lost almost all meaning. First people praise someone to the skies, and then they sling mud at them. Very often this is done together by the same writer using the same pen.

  [“Losers” you still hear today, of course, but I think we could do with reviving “bothersome fools” and “swindlers.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Boris Dralyuk reviews a collection of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry (Selected Poems, selected and introduced by J. M. Coetzee and Alissa Valles, 2024):

  Amazingly, this most subtle of craftsmen was able to wrest those tones from what seem to be the plainest materials: strings of direct statement, mostly in lower case, entirely devoid of punctu­ation. Coetzee described the “vivifying shock” that the “deliberately plain” early translations of Herbert’s poems gave to the “rather torpid and insular British poetry scene” of the 1960s, at the same time signalling that, plain though they were, the poems were in no wise simple: “What impressed readers in the West was the directness with which [postwar Polish poets] dared to address life-and-death issues, a directness achieved more often than not by strategies of ironic indirection.” Irony and indirection are indeed Herbert’s favourite tools, and he uses them not merely to evade the censor, but also to render the human condition as he understood it: complex and unchanging.

  [Herbert supplied the Poems in WRB—Apr. 20, 2022 and WRB—Feb. 25, 2023.]

  • Herbert (translated by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott):

    Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project

    and a decree on prostitutes and beggars

    I must also elaborate a better system of prisons

    since as you justly said Denmark is a prison

  • Eliot:

    We think of the key, each in his prison

    Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

    Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

    Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Garry Wills and Henry Adams

• George Jones and Tammy Wynette

• K. T. on a Poem by Mónica Gomery about the dawn

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much; I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on their word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers into the fold as a recommendation from a friend.

—Steve]