Psychic maculation

Andre Aciman on Stefan Zweig and George Prochnik's new book.

Ruined by a passion for the Russians

From P.J. Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger:

Whatever my self-dissatisfaction I knew I had one gift for sure, an ability to recognise the best when my nose was rubbed into it. Indeed it was sometimes more like a curse, accounting for my restless disappointment with almost everything. But the best I was willing to give my life to, and it needs that kind of service. It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it needs recognition to be fully itself; appreciation gives it a patina, helps it to bloom.

Another aside that snagged my attention: "(It was about this time that I realised my greatest single literary influence had been Constance Garnett. Any chance of a decent style I'd ever had, ruined by my passion for the Russians.)"

I liked David Remnick's piece some years ago on translation:

As a literary achievement, Garnett’s may have been of the second order, but it was vast. With her pale, watery eyes, her gray hair in a chignon, she was the genteel face of tireless industry. She translated seventy volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication, including all of Dostoyevsky’s novels; hundreds of Chekhov’s stories and two volumes of his plays; all of Turgenev’s principal works and nearly all of Tolstoy’s; and selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. A friend of Garnett’s, D. H. Lawrence, was in awe of her matter-of-fact endurance, recalling her “sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high—really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.”

But I want to read someone's more ruminative essay on Garnett, Moncrieff and the other incredibly productive and influential translators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (James Strachey's Freud should be in there too?). Andre Aciman prefers the Moncrieff translation to Lydia Davis et al.

The Proust brouhaha

Aciman on Proust at the WSJ:

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things, but about our impression of things, not about facts, but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust, because nothing is ever certain. He isn't interested in characters the way Tolstoy and Dickens are interested in characters; he is interested in the vivisection of identity, in people who turn out to be everything they claim they are not, in relationships that are always inscrutably opaque, in situations that conceal an underside that ends up flattering neither the betrayer nor the betrayed. It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.

I am slightly promising myself a month with relatively little else on (next summer, maybe?) in which I read straight through In Search of Lost Time from start to finish - I've read much of it at one time or another, but never in a marathon binge....

"Gosh, I could do with a bathe"

At the Guardian, John Mullan lists ten of the best literary swimming scenes!

(Hmmm, I am thinking he has not read Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, or it would be there too...)

In a happy development, I received a copy of the Folio Society edition of The Go-Between as a birthday present - time for a re-read, I think...

(Aciman alert: Eight White Nights: A Novel will be published in February 2010, certainly on my list of most desired things....)

(Oh, I stopped by the office today to take care of several mundane and long-overdue administrative tasks and discovered several things in my mailbox of UTTER DELIGHTFULNESS - namely, new books by Charlie Williams and Peter Temple - if I have self-control, I will save them for the Caymanian interlude that begins next Thursday, but they may prove IRRESISTIBLE!)

E di tutto questo mare, cosa faccio?

From Andre Aciman, "In Search of Blue," in False Papers:

Thinking - as any bookish man is always reminded when confronted by the hard-and-fast business of life, of the body, of pleasure - comes after, not before, and certainly not during. To the question "What am I to do with all this water?" the answer should have been "Swim."