NYPL Blogs: Blog Posts by Subject: Criticism and Theory

Not Your Grandmother's Hamlet

Jay Barksdale, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, General Research Division — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:56:41 -0400

That is, the kick-off to Shakespeare Week—April 15 to 20 here at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Schizophrenia, nomadism, Lacan (oh the joys of serendipity—I just ordered his Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Profession), Deleuze, all the quite-cut edge philosophers and concepts.

However, if you wish to go the other way, look at our Digital Gallery, under Shakespeare Hamlet. You'll see, in addition to the likes of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, stills of once-notables such as Edwin Booth, Herberft Beerbohm Tree, Johnston Forbes Robertson, Ellen Terry—the venerated Greats when John Gielgud (he's there also) was young. This is your Grandmother's Grandmother's Hamlet.

Here's a slide show, which if Mr. Fowler allows, I'll run before his presentation. The Ancients before the Moderns.

Cheers - Jay

What is the Post-Secular?

Trevor Owen Jones — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 07:49:27 -0500

The opinions expressed herein are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of NYPL.

Jurgen Habermas famously addressed the controversial subject of post-secularity in his "Notes on a Post-Secular Society." Therein, Habermas concludes to think and understand the post-secular concludes with a Kantian limit, "So, if all is to go well both sides, each from its own viewpoint, must accept an interpretation of the relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live together in a self-reflective manner." This is all well and good.

Of course in order to move forward conceptually here we must accept one conceit, agreeing with Haberas, that a) an event called "secularity" definitely did occur in some countries of the Western world following World War II.

Taking a step beyond Habermas, we should address an assumption that b) an event called
"modernity" has occurred in the past, and is now receding from public, if not private, life.

However, these 'events' are not totalities, and are not zero-sum games of hegemoney, as if to
think of human history epochally could warrant such clear-cut distinctions. No, to accept the
event of one or another is to admit the seepage, influence and reaction from one epistemic sequence
to the next (and by no means should we "cognitively map" them as linear and chronological sequences).

So, in order for us to think about "the theological turn" in the humanities, the prevalence
of religious discourse in politics over the past decade, the clash of fundamentalisms, we should investigate
our terms and our immanent terrain more clearly...

In the introduction to After the Post-Secular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler address the notion of the previous century's dominion
of "imperial secularity", a supposedly neutral, generic zone of being in which "the secular in the
hands of Western powers becomes an imperialist weapon, for the secular is always already interpreted
as a particularly Western and post-Christian secular, rather than anything approaching a generic secular that can be located equally in all religious traditions." The history of missionary work, colonialization, slavery, and the advancement of "Christianity" throughout the world does not admit of a "Christian" civilization gaining global ground in the 19th and 20th centuries: such material processes were (paradoxically) exploitative coercions into modernity and the global marketplace, thoroughly secular enterprises (arguably).

Of course, globalization and various, even questionable alternative modernities today may more or less
accept the multicultural paradigms of the secular: to acknowledge, tolerate and even appreciably understand
or engage with differing religious beliefs and practices. This is not a static condition, of course, and
the post-secular here can either split into either true or false propositions about its dynamic
throughout the world: a) to sustain, splinter and proliferate the particularities of religious and post-religious
modes of being throughout the world, negating either one's ability to universally claim itself sovereign as both are immanent and concurrent with our own forms of being, first, foremost and in the last instance anyway; or b) to encourage and promote a vulgar return of religious domination over all forms of life and thought.

There is no going back, and although theological resistance to secularity are rife in the media and overwrought, the secular backlash, notably the "Four Horsemen": Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are only worth mentioning as defenders of Enlightenment (in their minds, anyway) for how wrong they are about the entire issue. For just as there are many theisms, there are many atheisms, and the analytic, positivist handwringings of the "New Atheists" fail to understand the nature of faith, and instead propagate new doxas and new dogmas. Indeed, oftentimes they seem to argue for what Thomas Hardy lamented of and wanted to escape from, the "God-shaped Hole."

Feuerbach and Freud argued religion was essentially an anthropomorphic projection of possibility and agency
alienated into a transcendant sphere of being; these projections credibly eroded as material life through technology, capitalism and negative dialectics were brought to bear on the Western world, with the resultant collapse of universalities. This is arguably what Nietzsche pointed toward when he said "god is dead", a statement many people deeply understand today (even if very few admit to it).

The death of god is not just denying the god, it is denying the god-shaped hole. Postmodernity
produced the post-secular. The post-secular is its own route of escape and insurrection into new secular formations of being, appropriations of religosity and secularity that don't lament their own automutations, but instead delight in their emancipatory potential and attempt to accelerate them.

An atheist public relations campaign in Britain a few years ago point to the choice we possess today. Advertisements on the side of city buses read "There probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Rather we should say the proper survey of today's terrain could read as follows, "There is certainly not a god. Now start worrying and change your life forever."

The Art of Browsing

Trevor Owen Jones — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:04:50 -0500

I had not seen my friends S. or F. for quite some time.

We were standing outside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 5th Avenue; traffic buzzed and halted around us. Sitting on the steps like the boys and girls in Rome who hang around the Spanish Steps, smoke cigarettes and behave like the images they see on television who are modelled after them, I think to myself, we are encumbered in one city by Ghostbusters, in fiction parading out before us, haunted in another at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Citizens take heed of your cities that hallmark events that never happened, I think. I see a stray dog wander by; perhaps it had found some undiscovered corner of Bryant Park to sleep in?

We slowly walk to the Mid-Manhattan Library. We walk slowly, the speed of your walk is your freedom indexed. In ancient Greece F. tells me you could tell the free from the slaves by their stroll. We whisper through the stacks, catching up on old times, wondering at the inert morasses of our lives before us, neither young but certainly not old yet. Browsing, we think without thinking, not a higher-order thought, but just thought perhaps, thought wherein things come and things go...

S. will go on and on if you let her. She asks me, Do I name drop? One could tell all the downtown and uptown bourgeois to stop namedropping celebrities they know, shameless, are they ever called on it? Perhaps like George Bernard Shaw said of horseracing, no I am not quite sure why people might think it fascinating one starlet or actress is more or less glamorous than another? As if all reality has a spectrum disorder now I think, we are in the 000s, lists of lists, Guinness Book of World Records, how-to-be-a-librarians. F. chimes in, we were running, and we still are—in the late '90s and the early 2000s the Internet busted. Humanities majors found no jobs, and they became librarians.

Yes, I think. The 100s, philosophy, spirituality. Are there gurus for the dysphoria my friends feel today? We pass through one section, spy at the people on the computers: chess, Facebook, resume, resume, reading the news, resume, email, resume. The rich get richer, the poor can wait for their computer appointments. That was a generation that lost itself from itself. Now they cannot stop burying and enshrining something called a hipster. Ressentiment.

The 300s, politics, political science. We hear a jet overhead. F. excuses himself to use the restrooms. S. goes to check the catalog.

Browsing is the art of raising the non-sequitur to the position of narrative. The case being that we only tell ourselves stories, and the anomalies of these stories always inject the irony or tragedy there; people are left to pick among the rubble of the remaining plasticity. Of course, we are addicted to telling ourselves stories, but know these are just stories: in effect, we have floating image after image now—not so much that the world embraced the Internet, but that the Internet is now our world, our consciousness. S. whispers to me, apropos of nothing, "The spirit is a bone."

Table, desk, chair. Laptop, lamp, window. Person, book, book, person. Poetry, health, the 700s and stadiums of fans adorning each shelf.

Wiseblood. “I know things I ain't never learned.” And now today, I think, I learn things I don’t know. People get carried off like debris in life if you’re not careful. Hold everything dear.

Huston directed the film version. Moral isolation can warp the vocabulary of love into the hideous and beautiful together. The warp and weft though can be found in the latter day heart’s desire—now externalized and fragmented. A monster you’ve created but it is our beautiful monster now.

We are an image from the future. F. tells me, the stakes are very high today. A Chinese curse says, May you live in interesting times. But they are always interesting times. If you tell yourself so. Or at least recognizing it. A higher-order thought. And Sartre said, perhaps, by just saying you are dialectical then you are being dialectical.

Eleanor Roosevelt biography. Baby block books. The Medea Hypothesis. War. Peace. The big things. Eric Satie and small, absurd things: Poincare, cooking, how does one sleep? Africa.

The contingency in every chance encounter with love and information, which are tantamount to the same thing, because knowledge is indexed underneath desire, not scholarship, the contingency appears exactly nowhere in networks with walled gardens and pay-as-you-go pipelines. S. tells me all this, first in Spanish, then in Russian, and third in Arabic. People think you ask for the book, then find it, but the truth is the other way around.

Henry Adams thought he could write a history of humanity tethered to the second law of thermodynamics. He was wrong. While we still undergo the slow explosion of history and physics still remains somewhat legal, there is a lot in between to glance at. A thousand shattered mirrors: the cow in the tornado, Walter Benjamin at the Orange Julius, the Dreamtime and people who are no one in particular and the things they love. Random things, in between, and how they happen.

We are done browsing. We checked out some items. I thought I would read Franzen’s new Freedom, to keep up with all those Brooklyn literati I think (I guess), F. found a title on peak oil and long, sustained emergencies. S. will not show me what book she selected, although I suspect its Dewey number. She says goodbye, says her friend Chris said, “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.”
We say our goodbyes very slowly; everyone on 5th Avenue hurries on their way to nowhere.

I’m on the subway now. A man in a suit listens to his iPod and his flipping through an e-reader. What is on the news today? Some disaster and we will all feel some heavy generic dread? Next to him is very visibly a person without a home, next to him invisibly a woman who has been unemployed for several months. A bankrupt student, no way to pay his loans is sitting across from me, staring at the ceiling, curiously smiling. Wolves, Iceland, meat, flowers, noodles, stars, Sagan, volcanos, barricades and category theory, one after the other I think: there are dangers in reading I think and not all the reading to be done is in books, not all the browsing is done in the stacks, not all things that are lost are the things that are eventually found.

The black space strobes in and out of the car as we all move to the next station, never to speak to one another, floating amidst wreckage and the multiplicities of miscellany.

Subversive Imagination: The Short Circuits of José Saramago, 1922-2010

Trevor Owen Jones — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:27:13 -0400

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical, stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if that beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and that all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end...
—The Cave

This piece is not meant to be an obituary but rather, an excavation, an archaeology of sorts, of Saramago's florid, rambling art. By "short circuit," we mean (like one of Saramago's interlocutors, Slavoj Žižek), an erroneous connection, a disruption of the routine operations of a network: one of the few Communists and militant atheists awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Saramago's presence among some of the world's official producers of "nuggets of wisdoms" was a jarring intervention against establishment mores. In his Nobel Prize speech, he said, "Now I can clearly see those who were my life-masters... Common people I knew, deceived by a Church both accomplice and beneficiary of the power of the State and of the landlords, people permanently watched by the police, people so many times innocent victims of the arbitrariness of a false justice." A man who came late to write literature in life, he worked in several different occupations as a result of the Portugese dictatorship's red-baiting; he later rose to an assistant editorship only to be disenfranchised once again after the Carnation Revolution's demise. One might say his 'last laugh' was without smiling, as he explained in his speech, "the author" was in service to his "characters," his life-masters, insomuch as his creations were based on real people. He read, "Blind. The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures."

The "powerful" often proves a generic term for the more noodlespined of would-be humanist writers. Here Saramago's short-circuit once again served him well, for his antagonists had real faces and names: globalization was the new totalitarianism, full-stop. Now whether one believes literature should only "teach and delight" or if it may dovetail with nobler aspirations for social justice, one has to admire Saramago in continually confronting what he believed to be the sources of inequity. In 2006, he co-signed a condemnation of the Lebanon War with Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn. With Zinn and Pinter's voices now silenced as well, we might ask where we can expect new cries of dissent and resistance? Perhaps newer generations are too busy attempting to become Outliers ? Regardless, if you truly believe The World is Flat, then why is it we are so plainly surrounded by mountains?

The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.
—All the Names

Another short-circuit to address Saramago's influences. While some posit Borges and Garcia-Marquez, Saramago often discounted his work as "magical realism," and simply did not accept the generalization. Here we may identify a trans-Atlantic "jump-cut" (if you'll indulge this writer) that mirrored magical realism's lyricism against itself: while his prose was never explicitly political, the conjuring of the unconscious and the 'play' of images placed Saramago canonically with the Latin American surrealists and radicals. The excavation here links the present—the 1998 Nobel Literature Lecture, June 18th's obituary—with the past of the marriage between Marxism and Freud. Dominated by macroeconomic and world-historical durations, prognostications and analyses, Marxism's sorely needed supplement into individual human consciousness required the "short circuit" of psychoanalysis. The Frankfurt School dutifully undertook the task of explaining such a link because they couldn't explain the rise of fascism and Nazism without such theoretical tools. In time, Wilhelm Reich's orgone boxes fueled the Sexual Revolution, Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man inspired revolt on college campuses and in the streets, and later Jurgen Habermas rationally communicated the rationally communicative.

In the novel, Seeing, Saramago tells of an election in which voters unanimously and anonymously simply do not vote. Collective action coagulates into a phenomenal nothingness. By "doing nothing," the public short circuits the vicious cycle of electing yet another gladhanding sycophant. The corrupt officials, used to playing good cop and bad cop, are beset with disbelief. Strangely, the elite's continual contempt for lazy, do-nothing "masses" actually comes true, thereby slashing away the fantasy of electoralism at its very root. With no public body left to legitimatize their power, the facade is broken. Here, the surreal proves truly iconoclastic—Saramago's "fictional" situation isn't a poetic make-believe, it is "more real" than reality itself, displaying and destroying the very "fictions" that make "reality" what it is.

A positivist vision of the nature of dreams and the 'unconscious' leaves us little to look forward to, or look back on; what is more, it simply capitulates to the myopic economist's idea of humanity as windowless monads in aggregate. A language that combines, sutures, or short-circuits the worlds of social justice with those of the surreal and hallucinatory imagination isn't merely "content provision;" its the necessary construction of a platform from which future possibilities occur.

Saramago knew this much; as literary critic Evan Calder Williams writes, "Saramago was a Communist, an atheist, an anti-fascist and a hater of bull****. He'll be missed." Missed, but not forgotten. Another nugget of wisdom.

Silence, Exile, Cunning: The Anonym as Celebrity: A Critical Bibliography

Trevor Owen Jones — Tue, 25 May 2010 06:40:00 -0400

"What ails you, Polyphemos? Why do you cry so sore/in the starry night? You will not let us sleep./Sure no man's driving off your flock? No man/has tricked you, ruined you?/
Out of the cave/the mammoth Polyphemos roared in answer:/
'Nobody, Nobody's tricked me, Nobody's ruined me!'"

—The Odyssey, Book IX

As any librarian today knows, to live in the post-9/11 world is to live in the post-Patriot Act world. As Web 2.0 websites rise and fall, "reality television" reigns paramount despite obvious suspensions of verisimilitude, and datamining and "social networking" continue to marry questionable interests, in something of a theoretical reversal this era's geist could arguably be located in the antagonistic universal singularity (its gegensätzliche Bestimmung) of the anonym.

The disavowal of civil liberties, the erosion of rights to privacy, and the bastardization of cultural subjectivity all in the name of "security", celebrity and spectacle have amassed a great many responses from myriad political viewpoints, although one symptom of the fallout remains somewhat without comment, conspicuous by its own absence: as Chris Marker cryptically poeticizes in his film, Sans Soleil, "Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show. The code is the message. It points to the absolute by hiding it. That's what religions have always done." So too then is the anonym the 21st century's obscure object of celebrity par excellence.

[Case in point: British graffiti artist Banksy's subversive, emphatically public, art.]:

What do we mean by anonym? Not simply the pen name or nom de guerre of a mere author or another (the widespread knowledge that Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens, Stephen King is Richard Bachman, Nora Roberts is J.D. Robb, etc.), no. Rebranding this is not.

Consider sci-fi author John Twelve Hawks: in sporadic, spare interviews, Twelve Hawks claims to live "off the grid". His Fourth Realm Trilogy pivots on the Orwellian supposition of surveillance logic's inevitable conquest of all human activity, and he has even published a short essay, titled "How We Live Now", that explains his concerns over technology and power. In the nineties, public discourse ran rampant with wild claims about the "Information Superhighway" and the potential of the Internet to change the very fabric of social life.

While we may look back fondly on the naive rhetoric of that era, the early days of the Internet also brought one of its most secretive phenomena to bear: Luther Blissett. Famously, the "non-person" that was Luther Blissett committed seppuku December 31st, 1999, and in his stead Wu Ming was born. Wu Ming (in reality four Italian authors who refuse to be photographed, although their real names are known) means "anonymous" in Chinese. These collective personas are more than the sum of their parts: their resistance to invasive scrutiny in itself is part and parcel of their artistic content.

More complexly, one forebear of the anonym might be considered Portugese poet and modern mystic Fernando Pessoa's innovative category of the heteronym (a name for a fully-formed character). Conceptually crossed with notoriously reclusive literati such the late J.D. Salinger, the elusive B. Traven and the hermetic Thomas Pynchon, the anonym is a fiction created not to promote speculation, investigation and notoriety, but to curb it. Rather than "celebrity" - the gloss of nothingness indexed over a presumably emotionally aware human being ("Celebrities! They're Just Like Us!" and so on) - the anonym uses the invisible materials of nothingness to call everything else into ultimatum with it: Anonymity is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show.

Another contempory 'anonymous' author is Torsten Krol. Very little is known about this working writer, although there is some speculation he may be someone more famous using a pseudonym. His The Dolphin People is a dark family drama set in the jungle and features indigenous Amazonians and Nazi war criminals butting heads, while Callisto reads like a hilarious satire on paranoiac post-9/11 America.

Finally, I draw on Virginia Woolf for a closing thought. In "A Room of One's Own", Woolf argues that it was not until women's suffrage and emancipation that men began to pronounce an exaggerated manliness, their masculinity adopting ridiculously performative measures and dimensions to contrast with the modern roles of women.

So too then, in our contemporary constellations of commodification, political personality cults, dwindling attention spans, Hollywood gossip and quarterhours of fame, the figure of anonymity is not simply a negation of pop culture's hegemonic control, but a positive, pronounced, public admittance that the only remaining point of authenticity is obscurity itself.

I thank you.

Wilbur, the Translator

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:34:05 -0400

In Chapter 18 of Candide, our hero and his valet Cacambo arrive in the utopian kingdom of El Dorado, where the streets glitter with precious stones. The people of El Dorado speak Cacambo's mother tongue, a Peruvian dialect indecipherable to Candide, and Cacambo becomes the sole communicator and interpreter. Candide relies on his valet to communicate with the natives of this strange and beguiling country.

The travelers are invited to dine at the King's palace. The dinner proceeds merrily, led by their affable royal host:

"Cacambo explained the King's bon-mots to Candide, and notwithstanding they were translated they still appeared to be bon-mots. Of all the things that surprised Candide this was not the least.

Voltaire hits on an especially vexing difficulty of translation here. Translation is by nature imperfect. Even the most skillful translations reveal the incompatibilities between the languages bridged. The writer R .S. Gwynn regards the translator as a diplomat, who must "make the best of a bad compromise between languages", just as nations must account for their myriad cultural differences in acts of negotiation. On the one hand, a translation has the potential to exultantly innovate, to take the essence of a literary work and express it in another key. On the other, translations will always be duplicates--diluted copies of a choate original.

As a translator, Cacambo possesses a rare power. Not only has he proved an effective interpreter, but he's also managed to spin what is clever and witty in one language into what is clever and witty in another. The king's charm and skill in wordplay are no less powerful after translation. In the eyes of Richard Wilbur, lyricist of Bernstein's operetta Candide and a renowned translator himself, this is translation's most desirable effect.

The literary critic Dana Gioia counts Wilbur, along with Longfellow, Pound and Fitzgerald among the four greatest American translators of poetry. Wilbur's reputation as a poet is common knowledge, but his role in reviving seventeenth-century French drama for English-speaking audiences is less well-known. The poet first encountered Moliere's work in 1948, at the Comedie-Francaise (In chapter 22, Candide has his first encounter with Corneille's work here). Seeing Cyrano de Bergerac gave Wilbur the idea that old French plays could be relevant for the American theater. Since 1952, the year he began work on Moliere's Misanthrope, Wilbur has translated half a score more and has added to his belt two plays by Racine and three by Corneille. Corneille's El Cid and The Liar, were just published late last year.

Moliere's greatness stems from his facility with comedy in all forms: he is equally adept at satire, farce, comedy of manners, romance and tragicomedy. His plays are remarkable for their timeless characters, and their author, for casting a discerning but gentle eye on human frailties. Moliere relies on meter for much of his work's potency: for musicality, for drawing contrast between his characters speeches, and for enhanced snap and rhythm in his rapid fire dialogue.

For Wilbur, the English translation is no different. The poet insists that Moliere's alexandrines must be rendered as rhymed pentameter, and not in prose form. Brian Bedford compares the effect of Wilbur's couplets to a ping pong ball afloat on a jet of water, where the couplets buoy the text up and fizz delectably.

Wilbur's approach to translation, detailed in a 1975 interview, is instructive. At times, he uses a gamer's language to describe his process, invoking the importance of "rhyming solutions" and likening the work of translating a Moliere speech to completing one corner of a crossword. To the claim that the Russian poet Yevtushenko once estimated only one or two unused rhymes left in the world, somewhere in Argentina, Wilbur agrees. He argues that creating natural verse is a matter of exercising patience, and of creating rhymes that sound fresh, even if they've been well used. Even so, he refuses to see English as a rhyme-poor language. Wilbur recounts looking at an already-published English verse translation of Moliere's School for Wives after finishing his own, somewhat fearful that he might have unintentionally duplicated the rhymes within. The first two rhymes were the same. After that, the rhymes in the two translations rarely overlapped.

Racine, often characterized as untranslatable, was more challenging. Wilbur admits to finding him harder going, and here, takes the position that a more faithful translation of his work is the most viable. He has emphasized that the translator's role is not to recast Racine as if a contemporary soap opera: In a Fall 1984 issue of The Sewanee Review, Wilbur is quoted as saying,

"Our best hope, I think, is to see whether a maximum fidelity, in text and in performance, might not adapt us to it [author's emphasis]."

Wilbur admits that after completing an 1800 line Moliere play he's been known to spend the next few months thinking in couplets--an intriguing side effect for one already predisposed to creating original verse. He has said in interviews that writing the libretto for Candide did not infect his brain nearly to the extent that translating the seventeenth-century dramatists did. Wilbur translated his first play, The Misanthrope, without attention to how it would sound spoken aloud, but after working with the actors for its maiden production, he revised his process. For his next Moliere project, he began to sound out every line in his head, selecting of all possible iterations the one that an actor could speak most effortlessly. He credits his translation work with making his own poetry more dramatic.

Wilbur has spoken about the responsibilities of the translator--responsibility both to the original text, and to its writer. By his own account, choosing the words doesn't always come easily. One is reminded of "The Writer" at the heart of Wilbur's poem of the same name, a poem in which Wilbur recalls his daughter Ellen in the act of composing:

A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

Last year, Wilbur spoke of his own aptitude for the task at hand:

"My chief virtue as a translator is stubbornness: I will spend a whole spring day, a perfect day for tennis, getting one or two lines right."

Fiction as Art as Fiction

Ryan Haley, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Art & Architecture — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:41:26 -0500

Now that the art economy has collapsed and followed the mortgage derivative finance home boom bust buy now pay later consumption as a way of life whatever whatnot economy into the dumpster of ideas, I’d like to recommend a very sound investment for the young artist class: Get a Library Card and check out Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino. Or if you need a place to keep warm, come read it here. & if you’re a contemplative fellow or gal and find yourself mulling over the heroic American Art-Culture Scene of the 50’s & 60’s: read Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.

As my Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC monthly statements used to say: “Be better informed, so you can make better decisions.”