A Different Stripe

Commonplace: Advice for the poet

"Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits!”

—Wei T’ai (eleventh century), epigraph to Poems of the Late T’ang, edited and with an introduction by A.C. Graham, on sale today, January 22, 2008

Reminder: Zadie Smith, Gary Shteyngart & Erica Jong at McNally Robinson on Friday

Come by McNally Robinson booksellers this Friday, January 18th to hear Zadie Smith and Gary Shteyngart read from Gregor von Rezzori's complicated and darkly humorous novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. Erica Jong introduces the work.

Event information

Download Deborah Eisenberg's introduction to Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The Gyulas, or, two of six degrees of Frigyes Karinthy

 

Photo: Statue of Karinthy in the rose garden in Siófok, Hungary

Those of you who follow the Classics list might be aware that the next few seasons will be full of the best Hungarian literature to be had (this is a purely commercial decision: we're convinced that Budapest will finally dethrone Paris as the destination Americans dream of). Our first Magyar masterpiece was Gyula Krudy's Sunflower. Gyula appears to be a common Hungarian name, both first and last, as a certain Mr. Gyula Gyulas could no doubt tell you. I had assumed that the name was the Magyar version of Julius, but a note at the start of "The Gyulas Hold a Council" chapter in Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull got me wondering about its origin:

In very early times, the "gyulas" were counselors who advised the Magyar chieftain on matters of war and policy. The word is now of frequent occurrence as a Christian name."

In fact, more research shows that in the 9th century Hungary practiced a dual Kingship system: with the gyula as military ruler and the kende as religious leader. According to Miklos Menar's Concise History of Hungary, the Magyars borrowed this formation from the Khazars. In the division of secular and religious rule, the system sounds not unlike those of present-day Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Since Karinthy himself is often credited with the idea that any two people are connected by no more than six degrees of separation (in the story "Chains"), it's worth noting that he also adapted one of Steven Leacock's Nonsense Novels, "Sorrows of a Super Soul" for the stage. Katalin Kürtösi quotes a description of the meeting of these two absurd minds in an essay about a recent revival of the production:

Leacock wrote an almost absurd parody ... This was translated by Karinthy so that he made a parody of the parody.

Andrey Platonov in The New Yorker

The jacket to a Soviet-era children's book titled Poezd (The train)

Soul, our new collection of stories by Andrey Platonov, is still at the printer, but "Among Animals and Plants, " one of the newly translated stories in the book, appears (in somewhat abbreviated form) in next week's New Yorker, and is available now on the magazine's web site. And, as a bonus, the New Yorker's also posted a Q & A between translator and all-around-Platonov-expert Robert Chandler and fiction editor, Deborah Triesman.

Soul will be available in early December. Although many of the 8 stories collected in the volume have been published in the US before, they've never appeared in complete, uncensored form. And who is the most recent publisher of these bowdlerized versions? Oh, that was us, too.