Managing to edit the Washington Review of Books therefore is neither mystery nor mathematics: it cannot be learnt either like the catechism or like the multiplication table.
N.B.:
The WRB’s third birthday sale is still ongoing; paid subscriptions are 20% off through the end of the month. That works out to $4/month or $40/year. [You figure we send out around ten newsletters a month—that’s under fifty cents a newsletter. You can’t get anything that cheap these days. —Steve]
Links:
In the Times, Katie Roiphe on Janet Malcolm:
The more people I talked to, the more I struggled with the question of how much of this persona, this aura of steeliness, was intentional. As a master craftsman, Malcolm was in such consummate control of her presence on the page that it is hard to imagine this harshness was not deliberate—that she did not in some way create the “Janet Malcolm” the newspapers were referring to, “the austere, driven woman” people perceived. As her book editor Ileene Smith put it, “I don’t think she accidentally did anything on the page.” In The Silent Woman manuscript, she crossed out a line that might seem soft or sentimental about having so much sympathy for Ted Hughes that “my eyes actually filled with tears.”
But there are also plenty of signs that this forbidding persona wasn’t calculated and entirely within her control. She often expressed surprise or bemusement about it to her friends. She talked about it as something funny, absurd, completely outside of herself. She said in one rare interview: “I really don’t know whether the people who don’t like my writing, don’t like it because of their perception of me as a tough, not-nice woman. It seems kind of ridiculous—I think of myself as a completely ordinary, harmless person—but what people think of your writing persona is out of your hands.”
[This is also just a useful persona for getting your subjects to tell you interesting things—like Robert Caro’s writing notes to himself to shut up so the other person will feel compelled to break the silence and hopefully with something useful, but made into an entire self-presentation. You don’t realize how much of a conversation is dependent on paying attention to the other person’s small reactions until they’re not there, and their absence leads to a kind of flailing around to induce one to know where you stand.
People used to describe me as mysterious—they do it less often now, maybe because I’ve been mining my personality for material I can use to fill out this newsletter. —Steve]
In The Dial, Jhumpa Lahiri on translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
As I write this, I am halfway through a revision of the first full draft; it took Yelena and me two-and-a-half years to complete it. This second phase of translation, more arduous than the first, is an act of retrospection: a looking back, but also an effort to leave behind the Latin—or at least put some necessary distance between the Latin and our evolving English text. It is also a crucial return, the start of a new journey. For while many of the episodes (over 250) and passages and images are by now etched in my memory, I also realize, as I adjust and readjust the English, that I barely have any recollection of others. There is simply too much to hold in the mind. It’s not only the poem itself we are symbolically leaving behind, but so much, on the granular level, that it contains. Away with his hexameter! Away with his penchant for passive constructions! Away with his playful zeugmas and golden lines, his complex ways of naming characters, his hapax—features that surely dazzled Ovid’s readership but would stymie our modern one! Away!
[Pound seems to regard the Metamorphoses itself in part as a useful translation:
Ovid is for us a store-house of a vast mass of matter that we cannot NOW get from the Greek.
He is uneven. He is clear. His verse is as lucid as prose. Metrically he is not a patch on Catullus or Propertius.
Later in ABC of Reading he recommends Golding’s translation, “the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).” —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication across the pond: first, Adam Shatz reviews two books about Messiaen (Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography, by Robert Sholl, 2024; and Messiaen in Context, edited by Robert Sholl, 2024):
Messiaen’s four-hour opera Saint François d’Assise, premiered in 1983, depicted the life of one of his heroes, a bird lover who, he believed, resembled Christ with his “poverty, his chastity, his humility, and, bodily, by the stigmata that he received on his feet, his hands and side.” It featured only nine solo vocal parts but was written on a grander scale than any of his previous works, with a choir of 150 singers and more than a hundred musicians, including 22 woodwind players. Messiaen travelled to Assisi and New Caledonia to do research for the sixth scene, St Francis’ sermon to the birds, “Le Prêche aux oiseaux.” The opera had no overture (“Overtures are symphony numbers nobody listens to”) and some grumbled that, as Messiaen put it, “There is no sin in your work.” (“I prefer flowers,” he said.) And yet, as Sholl writes, Saint François is a story of “desire and longing,” even if they are “eschatological” rather than sexual. The lyricism of the writing for female voice exceeds even his Poèmes pour Mi. As the composer Nathan Shields suggested to me, “You feel as if you were wandering in some monolithic temple, where the symbols are alien and perplexing, but where you can feel the devotional energy radiating from the stones.”
In The Lamp, an essay adapted from a new book about St. Francis (Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint, by Volker Leppin, translated by Rhys S. Bezzant, January):
Whoever honors Francis in their writing must be aware that knowledge can only be fragmentary. And yet we cannot avoid using the fragments and putting them together. From the many fragments there emerges a story that, like all stories about Francis’ life, remains a gamble, and that has its surest basis where the preserved original texts by his hand contain something about Francis himself and the depths of his soul, always looking and searching for God. If you look at the intense faith in Christ and love of the Bible that can be seen through it, he might have approved a confession of the fragmentary nature of life on this earth in the words of the apostle Paul: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”
[As the man says,
Praised be you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whom no one living can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin.
Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.
I personally think that you should imagine the WRB arriving in your inbox with the sound of Messiaen’s Apparition de l’Eglise éternelle (1932). —Steve]
[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:
My one sentence about Joan Didion
An investigation into the diet of ancient Germans
Hannah on a Poem by Sophie Jewett about separation in the New England landscape
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; I appreciate it. —Steve]
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