From our Mailbox
May 2002
Emily Dickinson "Poems" by Gary SloanApril 2002
reading Poe and "Eureka"March 2002
Brecht "The Enterprises of our Mr. C." Don Quixote our postmodern parochialism 2000 years of anti-semitismFebruary 2002
something to be consideredJanuary 2002
the latest outbreak of tolkinitis "Njal's Saga" "Don Quixote"
we welcome responses
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the latest outbreak of tolkienities
Having looked at your website, which is elegantly designed and certainly full of food for thought - I have to admit that I gave up on "The Golden Ass" after Lucius got turned into the ass. I was rather enjoying the sex scenes with Fotis. But then, I was younger in those days (about five years ago).
Have to admit, too, that I really liked the Lord of the Rings movie. I was once a pre-teen Tolkien fan, then totally hated it in my early 20s, quite like it now (aged 31). It's clumsily written and humourless (I thought the film a lot better than the book in these respects) but the story is not quite so pre-chewed as you imply. Granted, the good guys win - but then, all that they've fought for passes away. Frodo himself slopes off gloomily "Over The Sea," all but forgotten by the people he wanted to save. (Incidentally, Tolkien's job was not all that cushy. One reason why it took him 17 years to write the book was because he had so much exam-marking to do in the meantime, plus teaching, lecturing, editing texts et cetera, and he was, as anyone can tell, a ferocious pedant about such things. Plus, he did fight on the Somme. Not that it probably matters. But I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it. I think it's a fun book, and quite a thoughtful one - not the best novel of all time, or even of the 50s, but not a bad one, either.)
But I know you can't persuade people
to like a book that they don't already like, or at least that
they aren't afraid that
they might like.
A.J.
You're right about Tolkien being "anti-technology." He is basically involved in a rant against "the machine" and I wonder if he ever stopped to think that trees were "killed" in order to print his book! (Of course, it is an open secret that 80% of the paper used for printing in this country comes from trees planted expressly for that purpose. So all this talk of "tree-killing" makes about as much sense as "corn-killing" or "lettuce-killing.)
I read somewhere that Tolkien loathed Shakespeare, and he was obviously very hostile to anything French (including, unimaginably, French food). But it strikes me as extremely eccentric for an Oxford don to loathe Shakespeare, preferring Beowulf in its stead.
Looking through the books recently, it struck me that I fell in love with them when I was around 12, and then read them again around the age of 32-33, when I was reading them aloud to a teen-aged boy. The style strikes me as "designed to be read aloud" more than anything else; it is easy to read aloud, and it is easy to follow when being read aloud. Therefore it may not be so much a "book for adults" as it is a book for adolescent males which can be comfortably shared with an adult.
It still strikes me as a ripping
yarn with great characters and an incredibly detailed world, but
clearly it puts a number of people right to sleep. ...
G.P.
... I too get kind of bored of all the blood in Njålssaga, but I do like the terseness, sort of like reading a math paper. The most beautiful sagas state no more than is absolutely necessary, and the reader is left to infer the rest from between the lines. Being a Scandinavian myself I may suffer to some degree from the same sort of autistic misanthropy as the authors. So I wonder whether you've misinterpreted the reason for the arid style in those sagas.
It reminds me of a friend in the fjordland of Western Norway. She lives in a teeny little settlement of considerable antiquity consisting of six houses, and inaccessible from anywhere but the sea. The place is perhaps the most beautiful on earth; the mountains tower all around to the sky, the foot of them lies at sea level, and the peaks, covered in eternal snow, are reflecting in the fjord. This settlement covers an area of perhaps 15 acres which is regard as farmable and from which it is impossible to get away except by boat. But even those 15 acres lie on hillsides far too steep for a horse to walk and with almost no topsoil. The only public building, in the center of this 'village,' is a very small church, almost 1000 years old, one of the first built in Norway. Inside, around the walls you see written in a sort of spiral, "Lord God, preserve us from famine, plague, frostbite, avalanches, foreigners, plunderers, drownings, floods, high winds, etc., etc. It goes on and on and on, and one is left with the distinct impression that life here was quite hard in 1000 AD.
My friend's husband, hardly spoke during my entire stay. Indeed, I learned that his sister had died when she attempted to retrieve one of their goats from a mountain ledge; she fell 1000 feet into the fjord to her death. So life there remains difficult, though not as bad as in 1000 AD certainly. Magne was about 30, father of 3 children, a vestige of the original vikings. It was normal not to talk much in this village. He had never been outside his fjordland, never as far as Bergen even. So I mean, by the time you've spent 30 years with the same people in the same 6 houses, I can't imagine there is much left to say. By the third day of my visit, I started counting his sentences. I heard him say an average of perhaps 12-15 sentences a day, to the point where I wondered whether his language was fully evolved. (So you see, Njålssaga is positively verbose).
But when I'd sit in the evening and
chat with his wife, he followed every detail about Middle Eastern
politics and music theory. He had a decent secondary education
as required by Norwegian law, though when I think about it, it's
not clear to me where he got it. He'd sit and listen attentively,
and every half hour or so, interject a single sentence that struck
to the heart of the matter, and always did lend some clarity to
the conversation. But he spent most of his life outdoors with
his water and wind and mountains, tending in silence the miniscule
farm that his family had had from as far back as anyone could
remember. His last name was the same as the name of one of the
mountains ... .
Ma.
In an Amazon.com review you recommend
Motteux's translation of Don Quixote. There appear to be several
revisions and even co-translations of Motteux out there. Any suggestions
about which of these versions might be best?
T.
I use an edition based on the old Everyman text from 1906, which preserves all the orthographic idiosyncrasies of Motteux. Old Everyman had begun as a copyright pirate and then decided to create a series of "classics." Now there is no such thing as a "classic" in literature, whatever the pundits may say, who drag a living out of the marrow of dead authors. There are only authors, good or bad, who ran out of copyright protection. And that's what on the turn of the century had had elevated them to the status of an "Everyman Classic."
As for "Don Quixote," Cervantes is the type of author who is singularly unconcerned with his turn of phrase, which from a translator's point of view, especially if he is moderately apt, looks like a good thing: he will never get it completely wrong. However, Cevantes' style of expression is still the style of a period, the way how people of the time think, feel, and use their five senses. Trying to polish off the patina here really maims the intent and purpose of the author. So why did I not recommend to go back to the earliest translation by Thomas Shelton (1612), who produced his rendition when the author was still alive?
Simple: it's a bad translation.
It catches the tone and aroma of the original but not much else.
Motteux was a more ambitious and conscientious translator who
in his footnotes often referred to the howlers by his predecessors.
He was a Frenchman and child of the 18th century with his own
rationalistic bias, but still too early to become infected by
the romantic virus of interpreting everything in the light of
Rousseau's constipation of the heart. Motteux may err a bit on
the dry side, but this doesn't really distort the book. Motteux
saw himself carrying on a tradition that from his point of view
had
started with Cervantes and Montaigne. Not a bad pedigree.
Michael
Sympson
I am quite amused by your concept
of "a classic is a book fallen out of copyright." If
I understand you "right," basically once the author
looses his or her copyright then every publisher can print their
own version and make pure profit of it, so every publisher has
a version, the field is saturated, there are no legal issues.
(I naivly was puzzled when I first learned that proffessors must
get publishers permission to hand out copies of journal articles
and shortstories; fortunately I had some rebel professors who
bent the rules - what risk takers - the main problem with this
permission issue is the bueraucracy, the time issue, how long
does it take for a publilsher to get back and say, no or yes if
you pay us) and thus the laythinker such as myself assumes, "ahh,
if there are all these translations and publishers publishing
this, then it must be a classic, it must be of such import that
all these various professionals all feel it necessary to bombard
so much space with its presence."
D.M.
Handing out copyrighted
material without permission? Hmmm. Bad example! Not every author
has Stephen King's income, in fact only Stephen King has Stephen
King's income. Personally I can sympathize, especially when revenues
go to an estate or publisher, who is no longer directly connected
to the author. However even writers have family, and often this
is their source
of income.
Michael
Sympson
... In your blurb about five great
geniuses, you make the statement that three were gay, one ambiguous
and one positively straight. You should be aware that Leonardo
was only accused of pederasty by one of his bitterest enemies
- never by anyone else in his entire lifetime! - and, even then,
he was acquitted by the most bloodthirsty assembly ever to come
to power in Europe: The Inquisition. They found absolutely no
substance to the accuser's claims and put it down to jealousy
and slander. Furthermore, scholars believe that Leonardo
fathered a son (who died around the time he was merely twenty
years-old) a difficult feat for a man who only sleeps with men!
... Noticeably absent from your list of "greatest geniuses"
are Descartes, Nietzsche, Francis Bacon, Aristotle, Goethe, Isaac
Newton ... or were you only [selectively] going for the gay ones?
(For not a single one of the people I just mentioned is known
to have been homosexual.) ...
A.N.
I don't mind admitting,
that I might be ill informed about Leonardo. Yet the reasoning
does not necessarily hold water: Oscar Wilde, for instance, was
married and fathered two sons, but was undeniably gay. Descartes,
Nietzsche, and Francis Bacon are absent for a reason; they are
simply not in the same league. (Besides: who told you that Nietzsche
wasn't gay?) Isaac Newton seems to be a similar case as Immanuel
Kant;
both didn't show any sexual inclination either way.
Michael
Sympson
Bertolt Brecht's "The Enterprises of our Mr. C."
I do quite like your
site and reviews, what is this "Mr. C" by Brecht you
speak so highly of, I like the brief tranlation of yours. I want
more. I noticed you said you feel it is worthy of a full translation
but no publisher has bitten yet. Could you give me a brief plot
summary or do you know where I could find one?
D.M.
I shall give a synopsis
in the next issue.
Michael
Sympson
So did you change
your mind about Brian Lamb? He got the House and Senate on TV.
Hosts the single most intelligent hour of television ever (Booknotes).
And turned the House of Commons' Question Time into an American
spectator sport. Not bad...
O.J.
I made
a quick poll in my circle here and collected an impressive number
of shrugs and two very bland faces. Do you really think, Mr. Lamb
will be remembered in posterity? No matter how good his intentions,
he is a media economist, the most forgettable character in the
media spectrum imaginable. Hardly a cultural icon. (Same applies
to Bill Gates - and he certainly has made a much deeper impact
on the day to day routine of our lives, than Lamb ever will.)
To put it in perspective: nobody remembers the ancient equivalent
of Brian Lamb who invented the synagogue as institution and medium
- only the author's behind the synagog's actual output. I grew
up before Marshall McLuhan (now there is an icon for you) made
his pronouncements. However I never really bought into this media
thing. Even if it is all-pervasive, by the same token it is expendable,
and replaced in a blink by the next technological innovation around
the corner. Whether classic or just successful pulp - as times
go along the item surfs and swaps media like a cork on a running
stream.
Michael
Sympson
But if we knew who
invented the synagogue, he'd be famous. Gates didn't actually
do anything. His product tries to make a PC look like a Mac--big
deal. Absent Bill Gates we'd all still have PCs, they'd just work
better. Lamb made it possible for ius to see our democracy in
action--for good or ill--and no one else would have. He's a unique
figure and the change he wrought will live forever.
O.J.
"For ever" is
a big word my friend. As it is, the commercial telecasters are
already nibbling away on the allocated time of Lamb's channels. I wish him luck,
but I am not optimistic. As for Gates - well, I am using a Mac.
Michael
Sympson
two thousand years of anti-semitism in five minutes
Excellent points in your article about anti-Semitism. But there are some more points to take into account: Mark Twain, for one (in his own article on the "International Jewry"), wrote that anti-Semitism is far older than Christianity. Before Christ was ever born, the Romans were persecuting Jews; and, before the Romans, the Persians; and - if we believe the Bible - even the Egyptians enslaved them after their numbers and influence were perceived as a threat to the State. All of these historical instances cancel out the much-bandied about assumption that Jews are only hated "because they killed our Lord".
And, before we assume that the Catholic Church was solely to blame in Germany, remember: Germany is a mostly protestant land - not Catholic. (Certainly, Hitler - as an Austrian, from the South - was a Catholic, and several key Nazis. But, on the whole, the nation to which they preached were, since the days of Martin Luther, protestant.)
Also remember this: Jews only fled
to Germany in the first place because it was the most enlightened
country in Europe. As a result, they fled pogroms in Russia and
Poland to make it there. So, why the drastic turn-about in German
sentiment? - You fail to take into account two massive historical
events: The 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Jewish financiers
promised to help alienate and destabilize Germany, if England
helped procure for them Palestine (something that the Germans,
after WWI remembered and deeply resented); and, second, the fall
of the Russia to the Bolshviks.
20th Century anti-Semitism in Germany was inspired by very
real concerns and fears brought about by expansionist Marxist
Russia. Hostility by one identifiable ethnic group toward another
has always existed - but in the Nineteenth Century the lowest
form of anti-Semitism (which consisted of myths regarding Hebrews
drinking baby's blood, plots to take over the world, etc.) was
confined to raving cranks and xenophobic crackpots. The majority
of policy-makers and statesmen were far more sophisticated, hence
more even-handed toward Europe's Middle Eastern guests. But
then something happened: The collapse or Russia, anarchism, Marxism
- movements behind which there never failed to be a Jewish apologist.
My wife's grandfather, who lived in Germany at the time, said, "But in the United States today, you don't understand. America was an ocean away, with countries and countries between it and the Soviet Union. Germany, though, was right there, right against Russia. The Communists were in the streets here. There was machine gun fire from roofs. They were trying to take over."
So, in this atmosphere of fear and possible social collapse, it did not help the German Jews that most of the Communists in Russia at the time were Jewish and that many of the Communists within Germany - collaborating with the Marxists in and around the world - to bring down Germany, were Jewish, too.
This is not to imply that all
Jews were Communists or that they made up some "Fifth Column" of
disloyal aliens plotting the destruction of all Western Civilization.
But there were just enough Jews to give that impression to almost
anyone who looked on.
As a result, all the visceral distaste that already existed between
Indo-European Germans and Semitic Jews--which was based on
a narrow religious and ethnic basis--found a new and more powerful
dimension when it expanded into Politics. Seeing how very few
people it required to take over Russia and realizing that Germany
(the birthplace of Karl Marx) already had more Communists
working within it than there existed at the time of the Russian
Revolution understandably made nervous Germans very, very fearful of what
a small, but influential, minority could really do.
A.N.
I had no intention to be comprehensive, just to tell the story of the leading intellectual force in the West for at least 1,500 years, and that was Catholicism. You are right the Protestants had picked up on the paradigm. "... set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn... I advise that their houses be razed and destroyed... I advise that all their prayer books... in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them... that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb... that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews... that all their treasure of silver and gold be taken from them... But if the authorities are reluctant to use force and restrain the Jews' devilish wantonness, the latter should, as we said, be expelled from their country and be told to return to ... Jerusalem where they may lie, curse, blaspheme, defame, murder, steal, rob, practice usury, mock, and indulge in all those infamous abominations which they practice among us, and leave ... our Lord the Messiah, our faith, and our church undefiled and uncontaminated with their devilish tyranny and malice," says who? None other than Luther ("On the Jews and their Lies," 1543). But the Catholics had been there before.
And yes, the exchange of curses was mutual. As Luther had correctly observed, the Talmud (Sanhedrin 57a) contains its fair share. But despite of Mark Twain, Romans did not persecute Jews per se. In fact they followed a complicated policy of locally protecting the Jewish population from their assailants, while suppressing insurgences in other places. They had to run a multi-ethnic empire and couldn't afford the luxury of discriminating for racial reasons. But of course the Roman authorities were not exactly thrilled when they faced Eleazaar's and Bar-Kokhba's atrocities in Al-Qaeda style. Neither were the Greek authorities in the Maccabeean episode, before the Romans took charge. On the other hand the Babylonian exile was a matter of indiscriminate warfare, and the Egyptian "captivity" is probably sheer myth. It is a chilling thought to consider the true identity of that strangely selective "Angel of Death" who killed all the first born. Moses' band of terrorists would have had a lot to atone for, if this wasn't just the fantasy by an exilic or post-exilic author who tried to fancy a way of escaping from a more recent and more real captivity.
So yes, the coin has two sides. It was a give and take throughout history, and in every round the stakes rose a bit higher. But given the actually available resources of manpower and money on both sides, it is also undeniable that the Jewish side had to compensate for a considerable handicap in order just to survive the next round. They learned to do it brilliantly. They stood their ground from a position of comparable weakness and managed to survive and thrive in a competitive environment. You become like this, if this is your only way to make it through. But there is a downside to this: without these external pressures we probably wouldn't have a subject for our little exchange on anti-Semitism. There wouldn't be (in a cultural sense) "Semites" or Zionists in the first place.
The combination of anti-Semitism
and fear of Communists can be very potent, no doubt. I do not
ascribe to your tacit premise that such combination had been inevitable
and anti-Semitism in Germany had been largely a response to current
atrocities in Marxist Russia. If you keep track of the data, you
easily can see, that this is nonsense. Hitler picked up his ideas
in the decades before - there always was a vociferous anti-Semitic
sentiment in Germany and Austria and it goes a long way back -
to Luther and the medieval pogroms. If nothing else, the testimony
of Heine and Börne should suffice. In fact such enlightened
and intelligent man of the 18th century as C.G.Lichtenberg, sprinkled
his notebooks with rabidly anti-Semitic remarks. So in the end,
your record of the 20th century has to be qualified and seen in
a larger context: the soil allowing this weed to grow had been
prepared for a long time. And the pattern was introduced in the
West by the one force which held for more than a thousand years
the monopoly over the Western mind-set: the Catholic Church.
Michael
Sympson
Having a source from which one launches a story, even borrowing some plot elements is not necessarily plagiarism. Source studies exist for the majority of works of fiction. If one thinks about it, there exists no thought that is entirely original, unless it be that of God. For humans, all is cause/effect, based upon experiencial data. Without stimulation, the mind of the newborn would not develop any astounding ideas, perhaps no ideas at all.
If you doubt Poe's originality, no one is likely to change your mind. Personally, I believe that he expanded the embryonic realm of science fiction and horror, and was instrumental in launching two other literary types: psychological fiction and the detective story. That he also created a synthesis based upon the known science of his day, then catapulted that knowledge forward to the modern age (black holes, big bang theory) is something one finds in no other literary figure that I know of.
Whatever one accepts as the critical
assessment of Poe's poetry, he created several monumental works
in this genre, as well. I must take issue with your interpretation
of the very term "originality," since what I believe
is this: Originality stems from a uniqueness not in individual
datum, but in the arrangement and scope of data. In this, I find
Poe one of literature's most original writers.
D.G.
I neither ascribe to the doctrine of the newborn's mind being a blank slate, nor to your definition of "originality." If the individual datum is lacking in originality, then it is not original. The creative spark is more than a mere re-shuffle of accessible data. I consider the "House of Usher" to be Poe's artistically most satisfying accomplishment. This doesn't change the fact that Poe had lifted the entire thing from a, for the American reader safely obscure, original - plot, detail, characters, even dialogue and overall structure. If you and I would do this sort of thing, somebody would spank us for it, and rightly so.
In fact some of his critics from that period had in some cases already blown the whistle on him. The irony is, Poe himself did censor hacks of his period for plagiarism and catalogued the tell tale signs to look for in a copy. "The House of Usher" has it all, even a piece of superfluous plot that shouldn't be there at all, but is in the original. As for "Eureka," again, I don't question that Poe may have put some thought into the matter, but his views are not so far ahead from the science of his period as it may appear a century and a half later, when we begin to lose sight of Poe's primary sources.
1783 Professor John Mitchell published a paper at Cambridge on a spherical astronomical body which confines so large a mass within so small a radius that the speed that must be attained to escape completely from the gravitational field of the body was equal to the speed of light. This is very well in accord with Newton's theory of gravity if one regarded light as composed of little particles. Michell's paper received the accolade of the Royal Society, whose president, Sir Joseph Banks, in letters to American scientists of the period, mentions it as the most interesting recent scientific idea.
So Laplace was not the
first to suggest black holes in 1798. In fact it must have been
around as a moot suggestion since the late 1600s, when otherwise
serious mathematicians spoke in oracles about "the dark lords"
behind the stars. In Boston Poe may have looked like a strange
bird indeed, from a European perspective he had himself firmly
entrenched in a recognizable tradition. ("The Man of the
Crowd" picked up on ETA Hoffmann; Poe was also acquainted
with Ludwig Tieck.) Borges coined the phrase: "Every writer
creates his own pedigree," but in some cases Poe went much
further than that.
Michael
Sympson
I am taken by your idea of the "non-blankness"
of the mind of the newborn. I will amend what I said. The will
of the newborn and his potential is not "blank." The
mind may or not be blank (experiencially), depending upon variables
which I have not worked out in my own experience, i.e. reincarnation,
prescience, etc.)
D.G.
Try something more down
to earth: Kant's table of intuitive categories. The mind could
be a "blank tablet" no more than a bathtub full of silicon
chips could be a digital computer. Perceptual input must be processed,
i.e. recognized, or it would just be noise: "less even than
a dream," as Kant puts it. Even the infant's mind is an active
originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient
of perception. Behavioral studies establish the infant's capacity
to scan communications before it is even able to communicate.
We may be born without any knowledge of the world, but a baby
lacking in inborn skills of reading and manipulating the surrounding
will have a critically lower survival chance, especially in low
tech societies with a low life expectancy. Advanced societies
with high survival rates accomplish this for a price: more children
with behavioral disorders and attention deficiency.
Michael
Sympson
Emily Dickinson "Poems" by Gary Sloan
If I must make an ass of myself -
and I suspect I must - what better than a golden ass. The world
of literary scholarship will be astonished to learn Emily Dickinson eschewed
perfection. Her copious revisions, I take it, were
designed to undo the perfection of the first drafts. Thanks for
assifying me.
G.
My pleasure! But seriously
- Emily's prosodic preferences seemed never have left the subterranean
mansion of hallmark greeting cards. Given the fact that she had
the learning and the linguistic powers to step out of this murky
area, it appears to some scholars as if she indeed consciously
labored on an esthetic scheme or theory of her own, that seemed
to have centered around a prejudice against "pure beauty."
We know of other artists, who revelled in throwing grit by the
handfuls into their lines, or painted with deliberately rough
brush strokes. Personally I am neither a fan of Van Gogh nor of
Emily Dickinson - but I think it was more than a mere coincidence
that the two had been contemporaries. Each of the two in their
own field represented something that seemed to have been in the
air at the time. Just to think of an other example: Tolstoy in
translations is coming across much sleeker and more elegant than
is intended in the original. Tolstoy too spent laborious hours
over revisions to whip out the "merely" beautiful phrase,
in the name of some notion of "truth." This thing really
happens. Best wishes
Michael
Sympson
Whatever Emily did, it worked. She
is perhaps the most anthologized American poet. She is, I think,
one of only a handful who merit the appellation "genius."
Thanks for your thoughts.
G.