Do we need another Tolstoy translation?

Rosamund Bartlett on her translation of Anna Karenina

Ilya Repin, Portrait of Vera Repin, the Artist's Wife (1878)

From Rosamund Bartlett (The Guardian):

Do we really need another English translation of Anna Karenina? This is a bit like asking whether we need a new recording of Beethoven's Ninth. There is no English translation of the 1970 Academy of Sciences edition of the novel currently in print. This version contained a host of small differences from earlier versions; these may not amount to much individually, but cumulatively they add up to a new reading. And just as conductors and performers can produce revelatory new interpretations after intense listening, so translators have the potential to allow the author to speak more clearly. It's all about the detail.

[...]

Do such details matter? Tolstoy certainly thought so. After helping him prepare the text for publication in book form in 1878, Nikolay Strakhov recalled his friend staunchly defending the slightest expression, and opposing even the most innocuous changes. Strakhov realised that "in spite of all the apparent carelessness and unevenness of his style", Tolstoy had "thought over every word, every turn of speech no less than the most fastidious poet." Such informed comments give the lie to the perception that Tolstoy was somehow indifferent to questions of form and style. In 1887, a year after the first woefully inadequate English translation of Anna Karenina was published, Matthew Arnold voiced the opinion that we are to take the novel as a "piece of life rather than as a work of art". Henry James, who identified with his friend Turgenev's elegance and consummate artistic restraint, in turn railed against Tolstoy's "lack of composition" and "defiance of economy and architecture". [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Secrets of Leo Tolstoy
• Anton Chekhov on Leo Tolstoy
• Leo Tolstoy: Stepan Arkadyich reads a newspaper
• Leo Tolstoy Speaks
• Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits

Lydia Davis on Literary Influence

From an interview in The Quarterly Conversation

Lydia Davis

From an interview between Dan Gunn and the writer and translator Lydia Davis, published in The Quarterly Conversation:

Dan Gunn: Proust’s narrator deduces that, to convey the priority of sense-impressions over pre-formulated conclusions, he needs to write à la Dostoevsky. When I read your work I am, in fact, made to think less of Dostoevsky than of Kafka, and of the way in which the familiar becomes strange in his work—his story “Hands” for example, where his narrator’s two hands appear suddenly to be alien and potentially at war with one another. If one may provisionally call such writing “phenomenal,” do you feel that part of your own work which is “phenomenal” to be working within a tradition? Or is it rather something that you developed privately and intuitively?

Lydia Davis: I think influence is a complicated thing. I am influenced by a kind of writing because I am drawn to it, open to it. I am drawn to it because there is already an affinity between my own sensibility and sense of formal structure and those of the author I am reading or studying. I would not be influenced by a writer alien to me. I really see an ongoing process that starts in earliest childhood. The very first picture books and nursery rhymes have their effect, as do songs and the lyrics of songs. My sensibility as a child is affected by these and then my changing sensibility and sense of structure show in my writings, even the stories written as assignments in grade school. And of course the influences of interactions with family and friends and teachers continue to have their effect.

I certainly read Kafka very closely and constantly for a few years—though I was reading many others at the same time, of course, like Hawthorne, Melville, Evelyn Waugh, R.L. Stevenson, Malamud, Dickens, Mary McCarthy, Poe, Emily Dickinson, James, and slews of mysteries. Something drew me to Kafka’s work, and in turn I’m sure I absorbed something of his sensibility and style. Clearly something drew me to Kafka more than to James, for instance—the spareness, the humility (whether assumed or real, or a combination), the bizarre imagination. He was interested in the possibility of two hands suddenly alien to each other; James’s interests lay elsewhere. For years I found James hard to read; I found that his prose left me no breathing room. Now I admire him. But the affinity still is not there. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Ricks on Lydia Davis
• Lydia Davis Wins Booker International Prize 2013
• Lydia Davis on Madame Bovary and Vladimir Nabokov
• Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary
• Editing Beckett's Letters: An Interview with Dan Gunn

The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema

A new title from Edinburgh University Press

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From Edinburgh University Press: Places the performative gesture at the point of intersection between literature, theatre and cinema

This study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, ‘the speech-gesture complex’, Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema.

Key Features

• Provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, James, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema
• Establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo
• Analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch on Surrealist Cinema
• James Joyce and Walter Benjamin
• Sold: Samuel Beckett's Murphy Manuscripts
• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno

On Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady

Greg Gerke evaluates James as 'a master of terror'

Henry James

From Greg Gerke (3:AM Magazine):

To my mind Henry James is a master of terror. Without bloodshed or the threat of guns, germs, or steel, James’s microscope fixes on the motivations that kill the human spirit. At the apex of the first half of his writing life is The Portrait of a Lady, a unique and pulsating work of art on the order of Leonardo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven—a novel about what James called “a certain young woman affronting her destiny.” Two versions exist: the original 1881 version and the revised New York Edition of 1907—both circulate freely today. How could this 130-year-old book slay me? How could its wisdom impact like a detonation? Not just with story, not just with character, but with sentences as stately as Dante’s terza rima in The Divine Comedy—lines like “She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet were still upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely…” “She” is Isabel Archer, the heroine, and she is looking at the ruins of Rome. James’s style flares and flowers out, compounding the story and sending the characters into a unique motion and awareness with each ornate sentence. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• New York Writers
• When Dickens Met Dostoyevsky
• Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide

Colm Tóibín on Samuel Beckett and his mother

Dan Barrett on New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Colm Tóibín, New Ways to Kill Your Mother

In Dan Barrett's (Pop Matters) review of Colm Tóibín's recent work, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, he draws attention to the essay on Beckett and the uneasy relationship with his mother, May:

Another character who will stick in my memory is Samuel Beckett. Toibin writes about Beckett when he was in his early adulthood, and suffering under the oppressive influence of a rather provincial, rather narrow-minded mother. What to do with young Samuel Beckett? He was listless, rude, and self-loathing. He spent a great deal of time sleeping and loitering in the National Gallery. He claimed that he struggled to produce a single sentence; he thought of his work as “turds”.

Learning this, it’s gratifying to think about what this young man eventually did with his life, and it’s an inspiring story for any writer in his 20s (or 30s, or even 40s) who is panicking about the struggle to “find a voice”. This struggle is as old as time. Just because you’re taking long naps and feeling desperate today, it doesn’t follow that you won’t one day produce a Happy Days, or a Waiting for Godot. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Colm Tóibín on Fiction and Reality