http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/slawomir-mrozek-the-elephant/
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php
There has been a welcome resurgence of interest in the German novelist Hans Fallada (1893-1947):
http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=14845
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/opinion/04iht-edcohen.html?ref=opinion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Fallada
Stuart Evers at the Guardian Book Blog discusses recent political fiction:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/06/what-happened-political-fiction
Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading explains why it's a good idea to "stick with" difficult texts:
http://conversationalreading.com/its-not-really-translation-that-they-hate
I couldn’t agree more. I remember when I first read Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, and was having a tough time, that around a hundred pages in, exactly the point that Esposito mentions, something just clicked and I got it; the rhythm of the prose had sunk in, and it all started to make sense. I read the remainder of the novel in an enthralled state.
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Some works need to be re-experienced altogether to yield up their treasures. I didn’t care for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker the first time I saw it, but it stayed with me and nagged at my memory. I gave it a second shot, and was mesmerized. Knowing what to expect helped a lot.
Simone Weil said that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” and she was right. But there is a pay-off. Works that need close attention and patience often have the most to give back.
An author that has largely fallen out of general discussion because he demands intense attention is the 19th century English art critic John Ruskin. Steve Donoghue reminds us of why he matters:
One hundred and fifty years ago, he ruled the Western intellectual world with a breadth and thoroughness that hadn’t been seen in centuries. Socialist workman’s groups, lace-curtained Mayfair reading rooms, rough and tumble Colorado mining towns, and not only the lecture halls of Boston and Oxford but their boarding houses as well – all these were conquered by Ruskin in the 1840s and 1850s. Conquered many times over, for Ruskin’s writings extended to many different fields of interest, but conquered mainly by the same instrument: Ruskin’s magnificent prose, at once hortatively beautiful and grippingly personal (as when writing about the humble barn swallow: “It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout”).
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-nautilus/
Contemporary critic and novelist Michael Moorcock weighs in (literally) with a huge collection of non-fiction, Into the Media Web, beautifully designed by {feuilleton}'s John Coulthart. Handling and reading this book is an experience that no Kindle could duplicate:
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/05/06/into-the-media-web-by-michael-moorcock/
Rock musician and author Jim Bob put together a nice list of "illustrated books for adults," slanted toward recent books:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/05/jim-bob-top-10-illustrated-novels
In a more historical survey, Phiz's illustrations for Dickens and Thackeray's illustrations for himself, among many others, would rank high.
Animalarium found a beautiful old children's illustrated book, The Noah's Ark Book:
http://theanimalarium.blogspot.com/2010/05/fun-and-tragedy-on-noahs-ark.html
Among notables born on this date are psychologist Sigmund Freud, film directors Orson Welles and Max Ophuls, film producer Ross Hunter, cinematographer Lucien Ballard, painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, singer/songwriters Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Bob Seger, novelists Gaston Leroux and Harry Martinson, poets Randall Jarrell, Erich Fried, and Christian Morgenstern, journalist Theodore H. White, explorer Robert Peary, baseball player Willie Mays, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and actors Rudolph Valentino, Stewart Granger, and George Clooney. The German Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) is one of the greatest "nonsense poets" in any language; that sort of poetry is of course difficult to translate, but still, why Morgenstern isn't better known in the English-speaking world is a persistent mystery. Max Knight, among others, has done fine English versions of Morgenstern's Gallows Songs:
Die unmögliche Tatsache
Palmström, etwas schon an Jahren,
wird an einer Straßenbeuge
und von einem Kraftfahrzeuge
überfahren.
"Wie war" (spricht er, sich erhebend
und entschlossen weiterlebend)
"möglich, wie dies Unglück, ja- :
daß es überhaupt geschah?
"Ist die Staatskunst anzuklagen
in Bezug auf Kraftfahrwagen?
Gab die Polizeivorschrift
hier dem Fahrer freie Trift?
"Oder war vielmehr verboten,
hier Lebendige zu Toten
umzuwandeln, -kurz und schlicht:
Durfte hier der Kutscher nicht-?"
Eingehüllt in feuchte Tücher,
prüft er die Gesetzesbücher
und ist alsobald im Klaren:
Wagen durften dort nicht fahren!
Und er kommt zu dem Ergebnis:
Nur ein Traum war das Erlebnis.
Weil, so schliesst er messerscharf,
nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.
The Impossible Fact
Palmstroem, old, an aimless rover,walking in the wrong direction
at a busy intersection
is run over.
"How," he says, his life restoring
and with pluck his death ignoring,
"can an accident like this
ever happen? What's amiss?
"Did the state administration
fail in motor transportation?
Did police ignore the need
for reducing driving speed?
"Isn't there a prohibition,
barring motorized transmission
of the living to the dead?
Was the driver right who sped . . . ?"
Tightly swathed in dampened tissues
he explores the legal issues,
and it soon is clear as air:
Cars were not permitted there!
And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
for, he reasons pointedly,
that which must not, can not be.
http://www.jbeilharz.de/morgenstern/morgenstern_poems.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Morgenstern
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