WRB—Nov. 19, 2025

“infinite divisibility”

It arrived, in truth, the Washington Review of Books, late at self-consciousness; but it has done its utmost ever since to make up for lost opportunities. The flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole field of letters, as would often seem, with submersion. It plays, in what may be called the passive consciousness of many persons, a part that directly marches with the rapid increase of the multitude able to possess itself in one way and another of the newsletter.

Links:

• In The Paris Review, an interview with Naomi Harris about her translation of a Hittite poem:

  The Paris Review: What was the challenge of this particular translation?

  Harris: It was difficult to bring the text far enough into conventional poetry in English, to make it recognizable to a culture removed by distance, millennia, and language from the original Hittite audiences. I have made a number of poetic translations of the Disappearance of Telipinu. For “Telipinu went,” I chose a form that would be familiar to readers who may never have heard of the Hittites. My translation is repetitive, rhythmic, and rhyming, relying on literary strategies which are not the dominant in the original Hittite composition.

  For the words that we don’t perfectly understand, like šalḫiyanti- and mannitti-, terms that refer to some kind of good thing in nature, I substituted butter and chocolate. There was definitely no chocolate in Bronze Age Anatolia. I translated Hittite concepts of growth, abundance, and good things into the necessities, comforts, and luxuries of life, some of which have been constant for three thousand years, like housing, water, agricultural production, and love, and others that have been left behind—like messages from the gods inscribed on sheep entrails—or found along the way, like chocolate.

  [Some of us are still receiving messages from the gods through sheep intestines; I recently ordered sausages at a restaurant (in what I guess our British friends would call “bangers and mash”) and received the message “it is good when a sausage has a lot of rosemary in it.”

  I am not particularly concerned about the chocolate, or lack thereof, in Bronze Age Anatolia, but “Hittite concepts of growth, abundance, and good things” glosses over interesting questions. The growth and abundance in the original are clearly agricultural growth, and “an abundant harvest” is not really an abstraction. For most of us “growth” and “abundance” are buzzwords more or less devoid of content—“concepts,” if you will—and to impose this on the poem is to sand it down for the sake of sanding it down. —Steve]

• In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Hannah Smart on diagraming a 900-word David Foster Wallace sentence:

  In even fewer words: Terry Schmidt, so desperate for something to happen in his life that a poisoning scandal is preferable to stagnant nothingness, is fantasizing about tainting a batch of snack cakes. He’s envisioning himself as the protagonist of his own story—the hero (or villain) who finally spurs some kind of change. But while this fantasy takes up much page space, it, like everything else in the story, never comes to fruition.

  What Wallace does, here and throughout “Mister Squishy,” is perpetually suggest to readers that something will happen if we simply sift through enough meaningless data, but the gratification we’re promised never arrives. Thus, the data-sifting becomes our whole purpose—we become like Terry Schmidt, whose ultimate job, we’re told, is “not to provide information or even a statistical approximation of information but [ . . . ] a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed.” The central meaninglessness of Schmidt’s job induces a frustration at his own inability to “make a difference”—a sense of “terrible and thoroughgoing smallness”—and reading “Mister Squishy” forces us to experience this smallness as well.

  [It’s like the late Henry James, if the late Henry James had written 900-word sentences mostly concerned with the forces acting on a man with an office job, most of which emerge from his knowledge of past corporate PR moves. A little while ago Greg Gerke, prompted by the first sentence of The Wings of the Dove, wrote this:

  One can ask, Is a novel a painting?—and the answer might change from a different angle, into a different form. There are several arts because some people like words, some like paint, some sound. Wittgenstein writes: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Is this true? But that’s the wrong question. Maybe it’s when we get outside of language that we enter into a different byway of perception.

  Not just when we get outside of language, I think, but when language is used in ways we do not expect, in ways we have to adapt ourselves to. (One of the things meant by “She waited, Kate Croy” in that opening sentence of The Wings of the Dove is “I am tripping you up.”) And DFW’s 900-word sentence, taken all at once, never quite lets the reader come up for air. It forces the reader, for a decent enough amount of time, to experience the world as Terry Schmidt sees it. It would be one thing to read that Terry Schmidt’s thought is bound by the world of corporate PR to such a degree that his idea of how to burn it all down is to do a version of the Tylenol poisonings, which are prominent in his mind purely because of Johnson & Johnson’s response. It is another thing to live this for the duration of a 900-word sentence. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Peter Huhne reviews a collection of Henry James’ essays (On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays, edited by Michael Gorra, April) and a book about his trip to the United States in 1904 (Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age, by Peter Brooks, April):

  “It arrived, in truth, the novel, late at self-consciousness” begins an early sentence in James’ essay “The Future of the Novel,” a kind of temperature test for the validity of his earlier prescriptions. Arriving at the abstract noun in its own belated fashion—and only after the wavelike series of clausal oscillations have been navigated—the progress of the sentence doesn’t need to be labelled as self-conscious to be felt as such. The sense that James is sorting through a series of potential (and unsatisfactory) lexical combinations, correcting himself as he proceeds, is instigated by the expletive beginning (“It arrived”)—a classic weapon in James’ late-stylistic armory, which pushes the clarification of the image as far along as possible to create the feeling of an immersive search, whose discovery may surprise its author as much as its reader.

  At least, that’s the feint. In reality, even James’ most serendipitous-seeming lexical hesitancies are loaded with intention and meaning. When he began The Wings of the Dove with one of the most famous (and bizarre) of literary openings—“She waited, Kate Croy”—James was building a sense of narrative hesitancy into the the syntax: from the ordering of the clauses the reader knows to associate Kate Croy with waiting, to think of this waiting as an unnatural trap from which her own brazen schemes are a defensible reaction, and so to think of consciousness as embedded in the relationship of words. Self-conscious and even self-reflexive moments such as this lend James’ texts their air of deserving more than the ordinary scholarly attentiveness: taken together, they suggest why even his more superficial language-choices have attracted the sorts of academic scrutiny that are usually the exclusive reserve of poets.

  [Henry James Comes Home was the Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 9, 2025; we linked to an excerpt in WRB—Apr. 5, 2025, a review of On Writers and Writing in WRB—July 19, 2025, and a review of both books in WRB—Apr. 2, 2025.

[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:

• How to create literary community by yourself

• A number of explorations motivated by the Four Tops’ “It’s The Same Old Song”

• A Poem by Fulke Greville and comparing women to ancient Rome

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. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]