A Different Stripe

Robert Walser translators disuss the author, dine on bratwurst

A lunch date with NYRB Classics (and Robert Walser)

Walser cover collage snagged from The Bridge, co-sponsor of the event

Wednesday, April 6th at 1PM
Swiss Institute
495 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York City
(212) 925-2035

Join NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank as he moderates a conversation between Robert Walser translators Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. $10 includes a lunch of bratwrust and kartoffel salad.

Click here for more information and to make a reservation

 

WALSER AROUND THE WEB
Susan Bernofsky's writes about Christopher Middleton in a recent blog post, "Reading with My Hero"
Find out more about Robert Walser at Wandering with Walser, a site devoted to his work
Walser's An Answer to an Inquiry, published by Ugly Duckling Press
"Robert Walser / did huge / things in / tiny spaces."—Eileen Myles
"3 Stories" by Robert Walser, translated by Damion Searls

Multimedia Monday: Sophia Jansson and Thomas Teal on Tove Jansson, Larry Korn on The One-Straw Revolution

Sophia Jansson (Tove Jansson's niece and the chairman of Oy Moomin Characters, Ltd) and Thomas Teal (translator of several of Jansson's adult novels) talked with Leonard Lopate last week about Jansson's life and work, and the recent publication of Fair Play.

Listen to the podcast

And One-Straw Revolution translator, editor, and friend of Masonobu Fukuoka, Larry Korn, talks on Paul Wheaton's permaculture podcast about the sensei's visits to the US, his view of Los Angeles,  the "green cement" of the American Lawn, why natural farming can feed the world, the inadequacy of traditional organic farming, and other things. Fukuoka is known for popularizing the seed ball (and essential element of guerilla gardening), but here we hear about his idea of eco-terrorism: fill you pockets with dandelion and mustard seeds, cuts holes in them, and wander around the golf courses of the world.

Listen to the podcast
(this production values of the podcast are suitably DIY, but be patient, there's lots of good information here)

 

"Pet cats, he believed, did nothing but behave badly."

Hotel Cat Tom isn't happy about Jenny Linsky, Edward, and Checkers ending up in his hotel.

The blood of the hotel cat boiled....
    "What a guest!" thought Tom. He's probably a spoiled pet accompanying his master on a pleasant little journey. Pet cat! Bah!"
    Tom hated all that he had ever seen of pet cats. Back in the days when he was a hungry kitten living ln the streets, he had climbed fire escapes and looked through windows. And often he had watched those darlings turn up their noses at platters of fine food and go off and scratch some furniture. Pet cats, he believed, did nothing but behave badly.

The Hotel Cat
Story and pictures by Esther Averill

"Except that it robs you of who you are, / What can you say about speech?," a poem by Kabir

The most recent issue of The New York Review of Books offers a preview of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translations of selected Kabir poems.

Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
[continue]

Seven additional poems from this volume appear in the March 2011 edition of Poetry magazine. You can read them at the Poetry Foundation's website.

Songs of Kabir
preface by Wendy Doniger
selected and translated from the Hindi by
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

cover image by Dayanita Singh, from Dream Villa

 

 

 

 

A Celebration of Tove Jansson, March 21

NYRB Classics and Scandinavia House invite you to an evening in celebration of the novels of Tove Jansson, Monday, March, 21st, 2011 at 6:30 PM. The event is free and open to the public, but reservations are recommended: call 212.847.9740 or email event_reservation@amscan.org.

Guest post: An Interview with The True Deceiver

Today we are very lucky to have Kenny Brechner, of DDG Booksellers in Farmington, Maine (an independent shop that is surely among the treasures of the state), offering up a guest post. Kenny somehow managed to score an interview with that fierce and prickly book, The True Deceiver. What dark magic he used to entice this work to speak with him, we'll never know. All we can say that the answers it gives show the book to be as gnomic as that great interview dissimulator, Bob Dylan. [microphone photo: Keith Bloomfield via Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons usage.]

 This interview originally ran on Three Percent, "a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester," as part of the run-up for the Best Translated Book Award, for which The True Deceiver has been long listed. To read the complete post, along with Kenny Brechner's endorsement of the book, visit Three Percent.

KB: Do you feel that this BTBA [Best Translated Book Award] will be conducted fairly?

True Deceiver: “You know nothing about Fair Play!”

KB: Perhaps not, but how can the awards committee reach truth?

True Deceiver: “The truth needs to be hammered in with iron spikes, but no one can drive nails into a mattress.”

KB: I see. Perhaps you’re right and the committee will need to take a firm line. Now do you feel that Tomas Teal handled his translation of you properly, considering how taut the prose is?

True Deceiver: “Cluttering the ground with Flowery Rabbits would have been unthinkable”.

KB: I see. Now if you had a word for a judge what would it be?

True Deceiver: “He must understand how hard I try, all the time, to put everything I do to a strict test—every act, every word I choose instead of a different word.”

KB: Is there any other objective data that would make the selection of any book other than yourself as the BTBA winner a danger to the future well being of the human enterprise?

True Deceiver: “I’ve given security where there was no security, no direction, Nothing. I provide safety!”

KB: I really appreciate your willingness to go on record and clarify these points. The stakes are terrifying.

True Deceiver: “I can assure you that you needn’t be nervous, there’s no cause for alarm.”

KB: I guess there’s nothing else to be said on the matter!

True Deceiver: “We’ve done what matters most.”

KB: Well I certainly hope so, for all human interconnection involves translation, and without an exploration of its dark possibilities we should all be much the poorer. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you really add something vital to the whole of Tove Jansson’s sublime body of work. After all the Moomins may demonstrate the delightful exercise of freedom, but your pages reveal both the cost and the means of losing it.

True Deceiver: “Thank you for calling.”

The True Deceiver
by Tove Jansson
Translated by Thomas Teal
Introduction by Ali Smith

The two Harriet Daimlers (includes mild, cartoon nudity)

All day, the blogger at Bella's Bookshelves has been tweeting about her pleasure in reading After Claude by Iris Owens. Which got us thinking that the book's heroine, Harriet Daimler, with her take-no-prisoners strategy and her viper-tongue, might make a good role model this winter. Let's not take this miserable season lying down, let's rally our wits and bitch at it until it relents. We're all Harriet Daimlers now.

[read Gerald Howard on Owens's "sublime snarkfest" at Bookforum]

Here Maxine, an old friend, tries to offer Harriet some advice:

“Well,” she demanded, “what’s happening between you and Claude? Isn’t he planning to marry you and take you back to Paris with him?”
    If there’s one thing on this earth that irritates me, it’s when a dumpy, frigid, former nymphomaniac assumes that my tongue is hanging out, thirsting for marital bliss. It goes without saying that though ideally suited and ecstatically happy, Jerry and Maxine had flown directly from their wedding ceremony to group therapy, paying top prices for the privilege of insulting each other in front of an audience.
    “I’ll make you a promise, Maxine, and then let’s adjourn this summit conference. I promise you that the day I decide to marry anyone I hate as much as you hate Jerry, one: you’ll be the first to know, and two: I’ll seek professional help.”
    Did Maxine get the message and leave me in peace? Not a chance. She sat there radiant with superior knowledge. “My dear, that is precisely your sickness. You think everybody hates their life. You’re wrong. I don’t hate Jerry. I love him. My heart may not palpitate when he walks into the room, but I’m happy with him. I appreciate his devotion and goodness. I love our child, our home.”
    “Excuse me very much, but if it’s love, sweet love, that makes you parade the streets like a crazed drag queen, if it’s happiness that drives you to come sniffing around here like a starved alley cat, give me hate and misery.”

Of course, Harriet Daimler was also the name under which Iris Owens wrote pornographic novels for the legendary Olympia Press. So maybe we should be looking to this young lady, who graced the cover of a reprint of Owens's notorious rape-fantasy novel, Darling (if not to the contents of the book). She radiates joy of the kind hard to find in bleak midwinter.

Multimedia Monday: Adam Haslett on Patrick Leigh Fermor, Werner Herzog as Roger Ebert on My Dog Tulip

Adam Haslett talked to NPR's All Things Considered about Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time to Keep Silence late last week. The segment was part of the "You Must Read This" series.

It replicates in style and rhythm the very experience that it seeks to describe. The writing is spare, exactingly precise, and then occasionally quite beautiful, just as the life of the monks we hear about are pared down, highly concentrated, and every now and then sublime. In short, it's a book about the contemplative life that delivers the reader into a contemplation of his or her own. [listen to the segment]

And here's a treat. Roger Ebert reviewed the film adaptation of My Dog Tulip on his new program, Ebert Presents: At the Movies. Because he cannot speak now, however, he enlists notable voices to read his reviews every week. So we're lucky enough to be able to hear Werner Herzog intone Ebert's very warm review. Just listen to that voice: "All humans desire one thing, and that is to be loved..." [watch the segment]

 

"As far back as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been this much snow."

© Tove Jansson (original cover art for The True Deceiver)

It had been snowing along the coast for a month. As far back as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been this much snow, this steady snow piling up against doors and windows and weighing down roofs and never stopping even for an hour. Paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out. The cold made work in the boat sheds impossible. People woke up late because there was no longer any morning. The village lay soundless under untouched snow until the children were let out and dug tunnels and caves and shrieked and were left to themselves. They were forbidden to throw snowballs at Katri Kling’s window but did it anyway. She lived in the attic over the storekeeper’s shop with her brother Mats and her big dog that had no name. Before dawn she would go out with the dog and walk down the village street towards the lighthouse on the point. She did this every morning, and people starting to get up would say, It’s still snowing and there she goes again with her dog and she’s wearing her wolfskin collar. It’s unnatural not giving your dog a name; all dogs should have names.

A passage from the opening of Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, posted in honor of the record snowfall we've had in New York this winter, as well as the inclusion of the novel in this year's longlist for the Best Translated Book Award, (one of two NYRB Classics that made the cut—the other is Albert Cossery's The Jokers).

More on the Best Translated Book Award
Damion Searls on Tove Jansson in Harper's

Pinocchio, a real girl?

E.M. Keeler reads Geoffrey Brock's translation of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (aka The Real Pinocchio) and is surprised by what she finds there:

"The Pinocchio that traipses around Collodi’s story is a real brat. Not only does he lie and skip school and take things that aren’t his, but he’s finicky and whiny and a picky eater to boot. He’s basically already a real boy, before some kind of scary fairy makes it so." [read more]

If you like the photo above, you might enjoy Corpus Libris
And here's more on Tim Rollins and K.O.S—the collective behind the artwork on the cover of our edition of Pinocchio.
Finally, Caustic Cover Critic covered our cover, as well as earlier visual depictions of Collodi's puppet, on his site.