The first book I read by Cynthia Ozick was The Messiah of Stockholm, in which she channels Bruno Schulz, whose letters to Yiddish poet-philosopher Debora Vogel which became Cinammon Shops (which became Street of Crocodiles in English) are as lost as Continue reading ‘{Interlude: Rabid Reading}’
Archive for the 'alliteration ad nauseum' Category
{Interlude: Rabid Reading}
Published on September 15, 2007 in Bruno Schulz (& Debora Vogel), Cynthia Ozick, Dara Wier, Debora Vogel (& Bruno Schulz), alliteration ad nauseum and translation. 0 Comments
CONTEST Comment 2: Ozick’s omnibuses
Published on September 8, 2007 in Cynthia Ozick, alliteration ad nauseum and translation. 0 Comments
Although not as bus-sized as those of another author she admires, Ozick’s own collections of essays are as authoritative as anyone’s: Art & Ardor (1983), Metaphor & Memory (1989), Fame & Folly (1996), Quarrel & Quandary (2000),
and, breaking the mold, The Din in the Head (2006), in which the tête-bêche title-piece Continue reading ‘CONTEST Comment 2: Ozick’s omnibuses’
CONTEST Comment 1: Ozick on Openings
Published on September 1, 2007 in Cynthia Ozick, Robert Alter, alliteration ad nauseum and translation. 0 Comments
Ozick too compares Alter’s opening with the King James.
1611:
In the beginning God created the Heaven, and the Earth. And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darknesse was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God mooved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light: and there was light.’
Max Frisch’s dream de-peared
Published on August 28, 2007 in Walser and alliteration ad nauseum. 0 Comments
As promised in my pearless post, here is the New Yorker letter that could be better:
With the help of Benjamin Kunkel’s marvelous essay on Robert Walser, Walser readers will finally fulfill—or the world will fail—Herman Hesse’s hope: “If Robert Walser had 100,000 readers, the world would be better.” But beyond bringing tens of thousands from the wider world to Walser’s winnowed one, Kunkel’s work serves scholarship besides, or—as Walser is a writer’s writer—authorship itself. With a most original observation, Kunkel précises the parallel to Kafka more pellucidly in a paragraph than unrelated unrelenter Martin Walser did in many pages. His observation that The Assistant anticipated Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” is no less original, if itself anticipated: at the Robert-Walser-Archiv[e] in Zürich, one can read the transcript of a conversation between Woolf and Walser. That it is authored does not make it less authentic. Analagously, Kunkel reports: “When Walser met Lenin in Zürich, during the war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’” Although Walser and Lenin both lived on the famous Spiegelgasse—where Lavater also lived, and Büchner died, and Dada was born—they did so a decade apart. (Walser left in 1905, Lenin arrived in 1916.) What Walser actually asked was, “Do you, too, like Glarner pearbread so much?” Lenin’s answer didn’t make it into the journal of the writer Max Frisch (born 1911, in Zürich), who, in 1968, recorded his dream in which “someone reported an authentic encounter between Walser and Lenin …whereby Walser asked Lenin a single question.” Reminding us, as Walser’s writing does, of the dream people call human life, Frisch adds, “I didn’t doubt the authenticity in the dream and sided with Robert Walser when I woke—I was still siding with Robert Walser as I shaved.”
Arcane (and artless) alliteration aside, Kunkel’s periscopic piece is the perfect preview of New Yorker book reviews to come, now that James Wood will be presiding. If Walser didn’t have 100,000 readers before, he surely will now. (That’s just 1/11th of NYer subscribers.) Plus: Kunkel should be applauded for publishing one of the two funniest Walser prose pieces on the web. (Kudos too to translator Damion Searls.)
NOTES: The Walser-Woolf dialogue is in Gerlind Reinshagen’s novel Göttergespräche. Martin Walser’s “Unrelenting Style” (as translated by Joseph McClinton) can be found in Robert Walser Rediscovered. Max Frisch’s dream is from his Tagebücher 1966-1971: “Jemand berichtet von einer verbürgten Begegnung zwischen Robert Walser und Lenin an der Straße in Zürich, 1917, dabei habe Robert Walser eine einzige Frage an Lenin gerichtet: Haben Sie auch Glarner Birnbrot so gern? Ich zweifle im Traum nicht der Authenzität und verteidige Robert Walser, bis ich erwache–ich verteidige Robert Walser noch beim Rasieren.” The translation is my own, but a professional rendering can be found in Sketchbook 1966-1971.
P. S. The Self Divider has written a better letter, less oblique and more (or better) obsequious(ness: less Kunkel, more Kafka.)
CONTEST! Win the beginning…
Published on August 23, 2007 in Cynthia Ozick, Robert Alter, Spotlight, alliteration ad nauseum and translation. 0 Comments
ALL’S WELL THAT BEGINS WELL; OR, BEFORE ALTER’S WELTER
From the beginning, the genius of Robert Alter’s Genesis has been roundly, and rightly, resounded, but amidst all the attention the origins of an allusive alliteration have eluded even expert exegesis:
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.”
While some readers wondered whether “When” (instead of “In”) is the b‘ in b’reshit, reviewers were undivided in finding, “welter and waste”, Alter’s rendering of tohu-vavohu, uniformly–or, rather, unformly–wonderful.
Of all who were astounded by Alter’s achievement, it was another author–and alliterative authority–who offered the most consonant commentary. In an enchanted essay, Cynthia Ozick observed:
What genuinely startles is the inspired coupling of “welter and waste,” with its echoes of Beowulfian alliteration perfectly conjoined, in sound and intent, with the Hebrew tohu-vavohu. A happening of this kind is one translator’s own little miracle; no committee could hope to arrive at it.
Indeed, James Wood compared Alter’s choice favorably to the only committee unworthy of the name:
The King James Version has “without form and void” for Alter’s Anglo-Saxonish “welter and waste”, but Alter, as throughout this massive work, provides a diligent and alert footnote:
“The Hebrew tohu wabohu occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Tohu by itself means “emptiness” or “futility”, and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.”
Alter was not the first to use an “Anglo-Saxonish” alliteration to approximate the rhyming pair. In fact, although nowhere do his notes attest to it, his careful choice of W-words is almost certainly a covert allusion to the first book in any language to translate tohu-vavohu with double Ws. And that is not all: the allusion itself is double. For the words themselves–welter, waste–are a certain allusion, and (although no reviewer I know has noted it) one that can scarcely be called covert, to a well-known English poem.
The first reader to respond with What the first book was, What those W-words were, and, what’s more, Whither Alter is absolutely alluding (that is, to Which poem) will receive a complimentary copy of the first edition of the scarce sefer. It is presumed that anyone answering will already possess the poem.
Send your answers to schoen@schoenbooks.com. (The Comments section will remain closed until the contest is complete.) Commentary concerning the contest and complementary content complimenting Robert Walser coming soon.