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Zagajewski’s Symphony
Adam Zagajewski’s extraordinary Slight Exaggeration, translated by Clare Cavanagh, has proven to be one of those books that require slow reading, pondering, backtracking, breaking out the dictionary on occasion, or the encyclopedia. Late in the book I realized that it seems to be structured symphonically. Themes are announced, interwoven, diminished for a time, then they resurface, converge, augment one another, reach a crescendo. The effect is inspiring. In any case, here are some final selections. Read some others here and here. Better yet: Buy the book.Read More
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Isms and the Liberation from True Knowledge
After observing that “someone who longs for particulars and seizes them in his writing is thinking in the best possible way,” Adam Zagajewski, a page or so later in Slight Exaggeration (as beamed into English by Clare Cavanagh), writes: We rarely consider how much we’ve lost by way of the systematization of intellectual life over the last century. In an age of ideology, systems, endless -isms, have taken hold everywhere, even, or rather especially, in universities.Read More
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Stendhal to Zagajewski to Me … to You
From Adam Zagajewski‘s memoir (self-investigation?), Slight Exaggeration, in Clare Cavanagh‘s beautiful translation: Stendhal in Souvenirs d’égotisme: “Le génie poétique est mort, mais le génie du soupçon est venu au monde” (The genius of poetry has left us, the spirit of suspicion takes its place—in my loose translation). Is it true? Yes, as to the spirit of suspicion, and it’s also true that poetry and suspicion must always do battle, a vicious war in which prisoners are slain without mercy, flouting Geneva conventions.Read More
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Folktale Blues
I don’t know what it is about that portion of Europe that in the 16th and 17th centuries was part of the Ottoman Empire, but the poets who spring from that soil often write in the manner of folktales. (Think of Vasko Popa and his famous pebble.) It’s a mode that largely vanished with the Renaissance in the rest of Europe, which embraced the Enlightenment and its Realism with fierce devotion and consigned the Fantastic to children’s literature.Read More
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Say Hwæt?
“It is perhaps the most important word in one of the greatest and most famous sentences in the history of the English language. “Yet for more than two centuries ‘hwæt’ has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day ‘yo!’ designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.Read More
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After Bolaño with Mónica Maristain
I look forward to Christmas like a little kid because I know that new books will come my way. I read mostly used books, a tactic aimed at keeping our household solvent, but over the past few years I’ve bought (or begged to have bought for me) each new book by or about Roberto Bolaño. The “about” books so far have proved illuminating in ways I didn’t anticipate. The one I’m reading now, which has occasioned this post, is Mónica Maristain’s Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations.Read More
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Interview with Ernesto Cardenal
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Knausgaard on Seeking Freedom
Two excerpts here from “At First Blush,” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, which appears in the December 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine (translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey): Many of my writer friends were bullied in childhood, which is not so remarkable, for being a writer is only possible if you are outside the community; only then are you able to identify it, to know it, and to describe it. It strikes me now that a world without bullying would be like a world composed only of writers and artists.Read More
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Poetry and Arms
This morning, after watching and reading about the protests over 43 missing students in México, intense resonance from Roberto Bolaño: Hills shaded beyond your dreams. Castles dreamt by the vagabond. Dying at the end of any old day. Impossible to escape violence. Impossible to think of anything else. Feeble men praise poetry and arms. Castles and birds of another imagination. What has yet to take shape will protect me. And here’s the original: Colinas sombreadas más allá de tus sueños. Los castillos que sueña el vagabundo. Morir al final de un día cualquiera. Imposible escapar de la violencia.Read More