#1952Club Candidates

Once again it's time for Kaggsy & Simon's year club and this spring its 1952:

 

I've heaped up a pile of books, not all of which I'll read:

Left, then top to bottom:

A. J. Liebling/Chicago

Liebling wrote several articles about Chicago for The New Yorker in early 1952; the book came out later that year. I've read this one before, but something I read recently about the Mob in Chicago referenced it and I've been thinking about rereading it. When I first read it, my thought at the time was, enh, a New Yorker writing about Chicago--what did he know? But we can see if that's true! (Liebling at his best is amazing.)

Angus Wilson/Hemlock & After

Bernard Sands is a 50-something novelist who wants to start an arts centre. Wilson's first novel.

Kurt Vonnegut/Player Piano

Also Vonnegut's first novel. I've never read it but I think it's harder sci-fi than a lot of his later novels.

Henry Green/Doting

Henry Green's last novel. Witty and dialog-heavy? I suspect. I've read a couple of Greens, but not this one.

Yasunari Kawabata/Thousand Cranes

Hopeless love and the Japanese tea ceremony says the cover. I've also read a couple of Kawabata's and not this one--the Other Reader is a fan and we have a stack, which I haven't made my way through.

Vassily Grossman/Stalingrad

Well, this one is here, but I'd have to have started it already to actually read it in time for this week. But I've been thinking about it since I recently read Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction and one of his chapters is devoted to this and the amazing Life and Fate. So I could be reading it soon.

Van Wyck Brooks/The Confident Years

Brooks' history of the American literary scene in the years 1885-1915. Late Henry James, Edith Wharton, Lafcadio Hearn, early Theodore Dreiser. Brooks' whole Makers and Finders series on the history of American literature is pretty great.

I've already read one and a half of the books on that pile (in addition to the Liebling which I read some years ago). First post on Monday!

But of course I won't read all of them this week, alas...

There's one book I've read from 1952 since I've started the blog:

Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light. It's a pretty great collection of Wilson's criticism, bookended by two essays he wrote in 1952, on Christian Gauss, the literary critic and his (and F. Scott Fitzgerald's) professor at Princeton, and on Edna St. Vincent Millay, with whom Wilson had been in love at one point.

Some other '52 books I've read and enjoyed in the past: Invisible Man, Martha Quest, East of Eden, The Old Man and the Sea, Wise Blood, The Cloven Viscount, Men at Arms (from Evelyn Waugh's Swords of Honour trilogy).

And if I want to sneak in a mystery toward the end of the week, some possible rereads:

I remember the Queen pretty well--well, it is one of his most striking solutions--so I probably won't reread that. The Lew Archer and the Perry Mason I scarcely remember and so they'd practically be like new mysteries. One of those is likeliest.

I'm pretty sure I've also read the two Christies from that year, but I don't have them and would have to hunt them up. Though the Poirot from that year seems vague to me and it's possible I've never read it.

Are you joining in? Which look good to you? Which should I be sure not to miss?

Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

 

Catullus 75 (#poem)

My beat up undergraduate text

Catullus 75

Huc est mens deducta tua mea, Lesbia, culpa

  Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo

Ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,

  Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.

 

-Catullus

 

Yikes, Latin! Fortunately my translation of the poem appeared in a web-based magazine here just last week. 

Catullus 75

Lesbia, I've been brought so low by your wayward ways--

  I'm also by my own nice-guy-ness cursed--

that I cannot like you when you try to be your best,

  or stop loving you, when you do your worst.

 

-Catullus (tr. Reese Warner--hey, that's me!)

 

The original is written in elegiacs--alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter. I've been translating these into a syllable-counting measure with rhymes (a style Marianne Moore often used, though not for elegiacs). 

A couple of other translations I happened to have lying around:

 

Catullus 75

 

My mind has been brought so low by your conduct, Lesbia,

  and so undone itself through its own goodwill

that now if you were perfect it couldn't like you,

  nor cease to love you now, whatever you did.

 

-Catullus (tr. Peter Green)

 

Catullus 75

 

Lesbia, you are the author of my destruction.

My heart is weary and defeated at the thought of life.

I will wish terrible things for you if you become great,

But I will always love you just the same.

 

-Catullus (tr. Ewan Whyte)

 

 

Peter Green was a British professor of Classics who mostly taught in the U.S. He died last year at the good age of 99. (!) His complete translation of Catullus came out in 2005. Ewan Whyte is a Toronto-based poet and essayist. His volume of Catullus translations came out in 2004.

 

 

Ostend 1936

"Letting barbarism assume rule bore fruit. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns."

-Letter from Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig

In 1936 several exiled writers and artists decided to summer in Ostend in Belgium. Not just Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth pictured on the cover, but also Irmgard Keun, Ernst Toller, and for a while Arthur Koestler (until he leaves for Spain to report on the Civil War).

Zweig and Roth are old friends and like to write in each other's company in order to bounce around ideas. Both are Jews born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but unable to live in Austria any more. Zweig, the more financially successful of the two, is already in Ostend and he encourages his friend Roth to come. Ostend is a beach resort.

Roth is already suffering from the alcoholism that will kill him in 1939 at the age of 44 and Zweig also hopes to wean him off alcohol (or at least eat regular meals). Schnapps, Roth's preferred tipple, is illegal in Belgium, and then, as now, Belgian beers are an acquired taste, one which Roth has failed to acquire. It takes Roth longer to sort the necessary visa for Belgium, but he does get there.

The writing is working for both of them. Zweig helps Roth edit his new novel Confessions of a Murderer, though neither can publish in Germany or Austria by then--their books will come out with German exile presses. Romance is also in the air: Zweig has separated from his first wife, and is travelling with his secretary, then his mistress, but later his second wife. Roth and Irmgard Keun become a couple; she's banned from Germany for her communist politics; the books of all three were burned by Nazi authorities. Unfortunately for Zweig's efforts at reform, it's mostly drinking that Keun and Roth have bonded over, and they've discovered an illegal source of schnapps.

This short book featuring a moment in the precarious lives of German-language writers in 1936 is both touching and alarming. The book came out in 2014--Weidermann is a German cultural journalist--and was translated into English in 2016 by Carol Brown Janeway.

Zweig (on left) and Roth in Ostend in 1936

 

Anabel Loyd's The Dervish Bowl

"The wandering Jew is a very real character in the great drama of history."

-Sir Edward Denison Ross, Jewish Travellers, 1930

"Arminius Vambéry's father had been a Talmudic scholar and failed businessman in the small town of St Georghen near Pressburg in Austria-Hungary." Pressburg is now Bratislava in modern Slovakia, but Vambéry thought of himself as Hungarian. He was born Hermann Wamburger in 1832--probably. He was never certain. His father died when he was less than a year old and his mother remarried so he had a number of half-siblings, but his stepfather was no more financially successful than his birth father and Vambéry grew up in poverty. He was deeply affected by Lajos Kossuth and the revolt of the Hungarians in 1848 and as a consequence he Magyarized his name to Armin Vambéry. Because of the Russian assistance in putting down the Hungarians at that time, Vambéry became a lifelong Russophobe.

Because of his poverty, his education was spotty. His family was so poor, he said, he was cast adrift at age twelve. But he was very good at languages. At age sixteen he knew Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, French and German. There was great interest in the relation between Hungarian and Turkic languages at that time and he was able to convince the Academy of Sciences in Budapest he should travel to the East to study that relationship and was awarded a stipend. So, in his twenties, he was in Constantinople, learning Turkish--and teaching Danish to the Danish consul. (Who was actually a Turkish native of German ancestry named von Hübsch.) He also tutored the sister of the future Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He writes a German-Turkish dictionary that becomes popular.

Nor did his Russophobia stop him from learning Russian along the way.

He's made good contacts in Constantinople and could have made a successful career there, but he's young and still imagines greater successes, greater adventures. His stipend was meant to take him further east. He's given the Sultan's tugra, an ornate calligraphic emblem that serves as a sort of diplomatic passport and with that in hand, he travels to Persia. He learns Persian. But where he really wants to go are the Khanates of Khiva and Bokhara, the capital cities of which are both now in Uzbekistan, but were independent countries until they fell to Russian imperialism.

He stays in Tehran for a while because a war in the Central Asian plains makes travel further east unsafe, but eventually he disguises himself as a dervish, a Muslim pilgrim and holy man, purportedly returning from a Hajj to Mecca, and sets off in the company of real dervishes. The year is 1863. 

Crossing the Caspian sea he reaches both Khiva and Bokhara. Muzaffar, the emir of Bokhara, is slightly more moderate than his father Nasrullah, who was famed for simply killing anyone from other countries who might look at him cross-eyed. Vambéry is the rare Westerner who visits and lives to tell the tale.

On his return to Europe he hopes to become a professor of Turkic and Iranian languages, but at first anti-Semitism and his lack of formal academic credentials prevent this. It's suggested he write a book about his travels and get it published in England, which he does; both the book (Travels in Central Asia, available at Project Gutenberg) and Vambéry himself become great successes in England. He's a famous man. 

With this under his belt, he returns to Austria-Hungary and petitions the Emperor Franz Josef to make him a professor, which Franz Josef does, while telling him he won't have any students. Vambéry settles down to life as a professor in Budapest with a few--but at least not no--students. He's on visiting terms with the Sultan Abdul Hamid II and with future Edward VII of England. He meets Queen Victoria several times and travels back and forth between England, his home in Budapest, and Constantinople. He wrote a bunch of books, mostly in German, but also others in English and in Hungarian as well.

He's also a spy, at least so-called, though I'd instead label him a paid intelligence analyst. He writes reports for the English government on the state of affairs in the East, and does what he can to promote friendship between the Ottomans and England. This is popular enough until it isn't, when English policy begins to shift from support of Turkey to accommodation with Russia in the years before World War I. By then the English foreign office is beginning to see him as a bit of a pest (despite his friendship with Edward VII) and amusingly enough Anabel Loyd the biographer kind of does, too.

He dies in 1913.

All in all, a pretty fascinating life, with the one (albeit only the one) great adventure. The book came out last year from Haus Publishing in the U.K.

 

European Reading Challenge 2025

 

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts a challenge to read books from 50 different European countries. I'm signing up again for the Deluxe Entourage level, which is five countries--I've usually done a bit better than that.

I never know what I'm going to read (which is part of the beauty of this challenge!) but I do know that the first book will be Slovakia, because I've already written the post.

Thanks again to Gilion for hosting!

O What Is That Sound

O What Is That Sound

O what is that sound that so thrills the ear

  Down in the valley drumming, drumming?

Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

  The soldiers coming.

 

O what is that light I see flashing so clear

  Over the distance brightly, brightly?

Only the sun on their weapons, dear,

  As they step lightly.

 

O what are they doing with all that gear,

  What are they doing this morning, this morning?

Only their usual manoeuvres, dear,

  Or perhaps a warning.

 

O why have they left the road down there,

  Why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?

Perhaps a change in their orders, dear,

  Why are you kneeling?

 

O haven't they stopped for the doctor's care,

  Haven't they reined their horses, their horses?

Why, none of them are wounded, dear,

  None of these forces.

 

O is it the parson they want, with white hair,

  Is it the parson, is it, is it?

No, they are passing his gateway, dear,

  Without a visit.

 

O it must be the farmer who lives so near.

  It must the farmer, so cunning, so cunning.

They have passed the farmyard already, dear,

  And now they are running.

 

O where are you going? Stay with me here!

  Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?

No, I promised to love you, dear,

  But I must be leaving.

 

O it's broken the lock and it's splintered the door,

  O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;

Their boots are heavy on the floor,

  And their eyes are burning.

 

-W. H. Auden

 

Why has this poem been running through my head lately? I'm sure I can't explain it. Though it's true I did almost lead with a picture of a 'Notorious El Salvadoran Prison'. 

Does this mean I'm going to be more active on the blog again? Hmm...maybe. But I have been lately thinking that that three-month blogging vacation I just took was what I needed, and that it's been long enough. We'll see.

Thomas Hardy's Afterwards

Afterwards

When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

  And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

  "He was a man who used to notice such things."?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,

  The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

  "To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

  When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures would come to no harm,

  But he could do little for them, and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

  Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

  "He was one who had an eye for such mysteries."?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

  And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,

  "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things."?

-Thomas Hardy

'Afterwards' comes from Thomas Hardy's volume of poetry Moments of Vision of 1917, when he was 77. The poem was later read at a memorial service after his death ten years later.

It's possible I've read it before, but I don't really remember. It shows up here now because I recently finished Nicholas Jenkins' biography of W. H. Auden's early years in England, The Island. 'Afterwards' was a favorite poem of the teen-aged Auden; he apparently liked it because it emphasized observation of the natural world, hedgehogs travelling furtively over the lawn, dew-fall hawks landing on wind-warped thorns. Though I suspect the general melancholy of the poem appealed to Auden, teenage boy poet, just as much.

(In fact, according to Jenkins, Auden was also reading Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts at the time, Hardy's unperformably long verse drama about the Napoleonic wars. Soldiers and mopery. Maybe Auden was a perfectly normal teenage boy after all?)

Jenkins' book came out in 2024 and definitely got some buzz, (Edward Mendelson: "a Copernican revolution in Auden studies.") I thought it was good, but not necessarily as amazing as that. His father was as important in Auden's life as his mother; given the usual clichés about gay men, this may be a necessary corrective, but since I wasn't all that up on Auden studies anyway... Still if you're interested in Auden, you might very well like it. I learned things.

Hardy's poem is my current memorization project, and, as I'm finding it difficult, I was hoping that typing it in would help. It hasn't seemed to yet. It's got rhyme, it's got meter--those usually help in memorizing. And it's clever about seasons and times of day--that feels like it should help, too. Why is it so difficult? Is it the recondite vocabulary? 'Dewfall', 'outrollings'? Or is it too much holiday season distraction?

European Reading Challenge Wrapup 2024

 

 

Another ERC wrapped. I signed up for the Jet Setter level of five books, and once again surpassed that. Here's the final list:

1.) Stephen Budiansky/Journey to the Edge of Reason  (Austria)

2.) Goethe/Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Germany)

3.) Konstantin Stanislavski/My Life in Art (Russia)

4.) Virginia Woolf/The Waves (U.K.)

5.) Carlo Levi/Christ Stopped at Eboli (Italy)

6.) Serhiy Zhadan/The Orphanage (Ukraine)

7.) Ana Blandiana/The Architecture of Waves (Romania)

8.) Josef Skvoreçky/The End of Lieutenant Boruvka (Czech Republic)

9.) James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room (France)

10.) Kurban Said/Ali and Nino (Azerbaijan)

11.) Sholem Aleichem/Wandering Stars (Moldova)

12.) J. G. Farrell/Troubles (Ireland)

13.) Kurban Said/The Girl from the Golden Horn (Bosnia)

14.) Tom Reiss/The Orientalist (Turkey)

15.) Henrik Ibsen/Rosmerholm (Norway)

The best countries this year for me were Azerbaijan and Ireland, with Ali and Nino in particular being a real surprise and delight. Troubles was a reread, so I knew the fun I was letting myself in for with that one. This is the first year since I've been doing this challenge (that's since 2018) that there's not a new country on the list, which is a little disappointing, especially since I've got a book set in Slovenia on my reading stack. 

Thanks again to Gilion for hosting! The signup for the new year is here.