Lit Pickup

Given the ludic vitality of Kinbote’s portions of the book, it is not surprising that Shade’s subtle, meticulously wrought poem should have received short shrift. Most readers tend to think of the poem as the grace that must be perfunctorily said before we sit down to the meal of the commentary. It is this imbalance that a new edition of “Pale Fire” seeks to redress. In a move that is likely to irritate and scandalize many, Gingko Press has lifted Shade’s poem from Nabokov’s novel and published it as a separate book.

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Except from: The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Jane Gallop. Duke University Press, 2011.

I go back to Roland Barthes to see what he meant by the catch phrase and also to get a fuller sense of his theory of the author. In Barthes’ writing about authors, we find actually two deaths — the abstract, polemical death of the slogan and a moving, more bodily death of the mortal author. I attempt to connect the two deaths, to think the abstract theoretical death along with the real loss of the author. The title of my book, “The Deaths of the Author,” is meant to refer to both the literary theoretical concept and the real life drama, to make it impossible to think about either separately, to insist we think them together.

Read more.

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Tim Parks, NYRblog:

Why do those “usual reliable translators” often give us work that we feel is wooden or lackluster, thus inviting the poets to get involved? Teaching translation, I frequently deal with students who write well in their mother tongue, but whose translations into that tongue lack fluency. This brings us to a paradox at the heart of translation: the text we take as inspiration is also the greatest obstacle to expression. Our own language prompts us in one direction, but the text we are trying to respect says something else, or says the same thing in a way that feels very different. We have come to what Paul Celan meant when, despairing of translating Baudelaire, he remarked that “poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language.” All the same, what often frees the student to offer better translations is a deeper knowledge of the language he is working from: a better grasp of the original allows the translator to detach from formal structures and find a new expression for the tone he is learning to feel: in this case, however, every departure from strict transposition is inspired by an intimate and direct experience of the original.

All this to arrive at the obvious conclusion that while expression and creativity in one’s own language is crucial, a long experience in the language we are working from can only improve the translations we make. But having hit that rather easy nail on the head, we can now ask the really interesting question: why are such intelligent writers as Eliot, Lowell, Pasternak, Robertson, and McKendrick unwilling to consider the question more carefully. Is it because, to return to Tranströmer, “We must believe in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature.” There is no point, that is, in examining what we do too closely if we’ve already decided what we want our conclusion to be.

Comparative Literature Studies, vol.48:3, 2011

Special issue: Trials of Trauma

Guest Editors: Michael G. Levine and Bella Brodzki

Articles:

• Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences / Judith Butler 

• Legal but Criminal: The Failure of the “Russian Nuremberg” and the Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Memory / Sergey Toymentsev

• The Klaus Barbie Trial: Traces and Temporalities / Christian Delage

• Australian Trials of Trauma: The Stolen Generations in Human Rights, Law, and Literature / Rosanne Kennedy

• “We the People,” Who?: James Baldwin and the Traumatic Constitution of These United States / Shireen R. K. Patell

• In the Name of Trauma: Notes on Testimony, Truth Telling and the Secret of Literature in South Africa / Rosalind C. Morris

• Literary Justice?: Poems from Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp / Elisabeth Weber

Vient de paraître:

L’écrivain rêvé de Casanova est une figure du dégagement. Le Vénitien veut communiquer ses idées, mais esquiver leur imputation ; écrire sa vie, mais éviter les conséquences de la reddition de compte et du dévoilement. L’écrivain en ses fictions, entre objet social, enjeu moral, instance imaginaire et figure impliquée par les textes, vise à comprendre la construction de cet écrivain éludant idéalement les identifications, son articulation avec une pensée et une éthique du « faire comme si », les relations entre l’Histoire de ma vie et la fiction comme fait anthropologique, cadre pragmatique et institution au sein d’une culture. Trois formules de Casanova organisent l’enquête : savoir écrire, communiquer ses idées, communiquer ses actions.

Classiques Garnier, coll. L’Europe des Lumières, 2011.

N° 9, 474 p., 58 € TTC

ISBN: 978-2-8124-0288-3

www.classiques-garnier.com

Tim Carmody at Wired:

When I saw that French was one of the supported interface languages for the new entry-level Kindle, I knew that a new Kindle store en français would not be far off. Now it’s here, with 35,000 French-language titles for Kindle available now and the 99-Euro Kindle shipping to Amazon.fr customers on October 14.

If you read French, whether you live in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, many nations in Africa, Haiti (and elsewhere in the Caribbean) or scattered parts of Asia and South America — or even if you picked some up in high school or college and would like to stay sharp — this is a pretty big deal. (The store looks good, with a nice mix of new bestsellers and classics, and is likely to grow.) But let’s say you don’t. Why should you care?

I’ll give you three reasons.

NYTimes. By Alexandra Horowitz:

The footnote jousting could soon be moot, as the e-book may inadvertently be driving footnotes to extinction. The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.” Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom. A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.

Balzac himself was an early devotee of authentic cuisine. His gastronomical ideal consisted of fresh ingredients with no added spices, and no complicated sauces. He wanted vegetables picked straight out of the garden, poultry raised in the backyard, stock simmered for hours and thickened only by the gelatin extracted from the bones. Needless to say, he did not think much of Parisian cooks. True gastronomes lived in the provinces, where a simple dish of haricots verts could be exquisite and a modest omelette divine. Still the omelette had to be done carefully, and Balzac deems that of Dr. Rougon, one of his gourmand characters, sufficiently worthy to be the only recipe to appear in his work.

Comment on essays from October 6th to November 14th, 2011.

Has the digital revolution transformed how we write about the past — or not? Have new technologies changed our essential work-craft as scholars, and the ways in which we think, teach, author, and publish? Does the digital age have broader implications for individual writing processes, or for the historical profession at large? Explore these questions in Writing History in the Digital Age, a born-digital edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series of its digitalculturebooks imprint.

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