The Washington Review of Books is no different whined at than withstood.
Links:
Two in Lit Hub:
An excerpt from Francesca Wade’s new biography of Gertrude Stein (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, October 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 4, 2025; we linked to reviews in WRB—May 3, 2025 and WRB—Oct. 1, 2025.]:
In the Autobiography, Stein described this impulse as her “intellectual passion for exactitude,” and linked it to her need to realize a thought perfectly before putting it into writing: “The more exactly the words fit the emotion,” she wrote elsewhere, “the more beautiful the words.” Later, Stein defined this urge as her reaction to the falsity she had begun to see in purely representational art, and the alternative possibilities being put forward by Picasso, who was by now experimenting with geometric compositions (soon to acquire the label “Cubism”) which invite viewers to identify familiar shapes but reject straightforward imitation of the object in favor of fragmentary distortions. “I was alone at this time in understanding him,” Stein wrote later, “perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.” Just as Picasso sought to convey the essence of a person or object without simply creating a replica, Stein wanted her writing to feel not like a description of sounds, colors, or emotions, but an “intellectual re-creation” of the “thing in itself.”
[“The more exactly the words fit the emotion, the more beautiful the words” is a not-so-well-expressed version of Pope:
True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,
Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
There’s a nice little ambiguity there in the shift from “nature” to “the image of our mind,” one which beats Eliot to the objective correlative by two centuries. And “to advantage dress’d” gets at the idea that the artist is not quite depicting things exactly as they are seen; in fact, depicting them otherwise might reveal more about them. I have this experience every time I go through the European painting section of an art museum in chronological order; most of the Renaissance and Baroque has become familiar enough through exposure (no doubt this is complacency on my part), but when I get to El Greco I see something new in his distortions. —Steve]
Bryan Alistair Charles talks to Charlotte Mandell about translating Proust:
And she made a suggestion that threw me.
“You should try translating something. Pick a passage that you really like and then look at what Grieve did. That’s really the way to see how someone thinks. Just do it yourself. And don’t cheat,” she laughed. “Don’t think about whether it’s good or not, just do it.”
I immediately demurred. My French is poor. Mandell insisted I give it a shot. In fact, there was an apt precedent: Marcel Proust himself spent six years translating the work of English art critic John Ruskin, despite being unable to speak or read English! He had access to something greater than a translation app: his mother. Jeanne Proust, so devoted to her son, wrote the first drafts of his Ruskin translations, which he would heavily revise and annotate, then send to a friend to polish, only to alter them yet again. According to Jean-Yves Tadié’s Marcel Proust (2000), the writer “felt that translation was a marvellous school for style.” In constantly reworking his drafts, “[t]he structure of Ruskin’s sentences, which were long, rich in incident and imagery, supple and musical . . . impregnated his style, which since Jean Santeuil [Proust’s abandoned first try at a novel], had been groping around in search of a model.”
[The note is Charles’.
I once spent a while fooling around with translating a decent portion of Catullus. Hardly anything I produced was any good, but I console myself with the thought that Ezra Pound had the same problem: “I personally have been reduced to setting [Catullus and Villon] to music as I cannot translate them.” His Catullus 85 is probably the best I know, though:
I hate and love. Why? You may ask but
It beats me. I feel it done to me, and ache.
(Honorable mention to the Zukofskys: “O th’hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am for that’s so re queries. / Nescience, say th’fiery scent I owe whets crookeder.”) I’m not quite sure what I took away from the experience. Whether I acquired any particular trait by working with Catullus or whether it was already in me from some other source and drew me to his work is a question I cannot really answer. What we owe to our most intimate influences is always hard to gauge—we are too close to them, and so much of influence is a subconscious affair. When future academics and critics start going through the Washington Review of Books they can figure it out for me. —Steve]
In The Woodlot, Chris Banks on Canadian long poems:
I guess this is why it is hard to talk about what makes a long poem successful, because any poet who undertakes a long poem kind of makes it up as you go along. That is both the source of its power, and its own weakness. The long poem is not concerned with utility; is this working or not?
I think the poet who writes the long poem is stepping out beyond the safety of orthodoxy, and is stretching out their poetic imagination, and asking, what lies beyond the safety of the short lyric? In essence, I think the long poem is a reaction against contemporary poetry aesthetics, and is looking to create something new, something hybrid, something at the very least different, and hopefully quite wonderful.
Whether a long poem is successful or not really depends on the reader as much as the writer. Is the reader up to the demands the long poem places upon her? I admit I like to read poems in snatches of stolen time, so it is hard for me to sit with a long poem and to read one start to finish. Often, long poems are playing with structure, with lines rivering all over the page from left to right, or maybe they have two different “voices” amplified side by side on a page, or they position one short passage in large font alone on a page, or conversely, the very next page is a dense accumulation of historical documentation and adroit imagery.
[Whenever I think about CanLit I recall a conversation I once had with a Canadian about the bleakness and misery that characterizes it. I, trying to think of the bleakest and most miserable American work I could think of, and one set in a place where agriculture is difficult, asked if Ethan Frome could be considered spiritually CanLit. I was told that it could not; Ethan and Mattie’s half-hearted suicide attempt constituted an attempt to change their situation by taking action (I would like to reiterate that the action taken was a half-hearted suicide attempt), something no true CanLit characters would ever do.
This discussion of long poems being a conscious attempt to do something beyond short lyric poetry makes me think of Jeremy Wikeley’s () recent notes on the decline of the “middle-distance poem”:
Whatever it is or was, the middle-distance poem is clearly endangered. It takes time, stamina and more than a passing interest in meter to write one. The middle-distance poet needs to work up an intensity of feeling, an energy they aren’t entirely in control of, but perhaps most importantly they need a sense of structure. Craft isn’t enough, technique isn’t enough: the middle-distance poet has to be able to build at scale, like the architect, the set designer or the engineer.
And
Moul’s response to him:This kind of poetry can be highly quotable—Horace’s famous bit about how when you travel you change the weather, not your heart, is from the Epistles; I can never write a London postcode without thinking about Larkin’s “postal districts, packed like squares of wheat” (from “The Whitsun Weddings”); and Pope is full of delicious quotations—but all the same its real power is cumulative. You can’t sum up the effect of poems like these with an excerpted line or two. It’s worth at least attempting to learn a couple to get a feel for this: Larkin’s “Aubade” is one of the poems I say to myself most frequently (as I admitted in an unguarded moment in a recent interview, I always recite this one to myself at the dentist), but I don’t find that brief quotations from it occur to me very often. The poem works as a whole, and when I start thinking about it, I “listen” to the whole thing. The same is true of Tony Harrison’s wonderful “A Kumquat for John Keats” (his best single poem, in my opinion, and a fantastic modern example of the sermo-poem).
Surely when you travel you change your sky, not your soul—I like alliteration. And my father Philip Larkin’s (not actually my father) “Death is no different whined at than withstood” (speaking of alliteration) comes to my mind on its own a lot, but no matter. The key to the middle-distance poem, I think, is that despite its length it can still be read all at once. Poe says a lot of nonsense in “The Philosophy of Composition,” but this is certainly correct:
If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.
This would account for both Wikeley’s suggestion that “the middle-distance poem goes on a journey” and Moul’s building on it with “the intuitive and perhaps rather banal [thought] that the ‘journey’ in question is, most properly and characteristically, the journey to death.” These poems go on specifically unbroken journeys, and life is one. —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:
In praise of the romantic comedies of Old Hollywood and against Nora Ephron
Americans in Europe, American feeling about the concept of Europe
A Poem by E. A. Robinson and more about his middle-distance poems
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]
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