proximoception | Entries tagged with 2011

10. Troilus and Cressida

Found myself giving Pandar the voice of Eric Idle's "Nudge nudge" guy. I still like this play a lot. Its intentions are half send-up but half indescribable. It's from Shakespeare's eclipse-dark midlife crisis, so much like Bergman's three hundred and sixty-five years later, but one of the more buoyant examples. His language, in particular, is about as on as in any of the Four Tragedies. It put me onto:

11. Kings

This is Christopher Logue's adaptation of The Iliad 1 & 2 and it is fantastic. Everyone who would know says it's fantastic and it turns out they do know. Can his original verse be this good? My only exposure to him was as Swinburne to Oliver Reed's D.G. Rossetti in Dante's Inferno.

I have all his other Iliad installments - collectively called War Music - here but Cold Calls which I hope Julie's library's got. There's a final section he's still working on, which despite the fact he's only adapted about half its 24 books is apparently not based on any section of The Iliad (!). He's an octogenarian, started this thing in the 1950s.

I have never cared the slightest about The Iliad but he is giving it the full Carson and I'm excited now.

8. Heinrich Heine (Everyman Poetry Library), tr. Cram & Reed

Am I remembering that right? Cram? Wow.

Translation seemed fine. I like Heine.

9. Memories of My Melancholy Whores

First Marquez I've actually gotten through, which isn't saying much - this is a sparsely printed gift-size book. And really, disarmingly lovely. He makes silly and otherwise dubious things feel perfectly respectable.

I've been reading such light things, and short ones. Time to open my Desmond book, Resurrection.

6. Boris Godunov & Other Plays, tr. Falen

I liked the other plays but not Boris Godunov, which I also didn't like the first time I read it. It's readable, the historical events are interesting, but that's about it. The Little Tragedies are a bit better, and the other two pieces, "Scene from Faust" and "Rusalka" were better still. Pushkin's at his best representing his own - usually self-inflicted - miseries, however obliquely. And misers, oddly.

7. Gilgamesh, tr. Ferry

I liked this and didn't think I would; it starts out seeming just dumb and epical, but it goes somewhere, at least as reconstructed by Ferry. A number of very striking details. Heartening to realize people always had brains: implies they always will. Some of them.

2. Rock 'n' Roll, Stoppard
3. The White Deer, Thurber
4. Selected Lyrical Poems, Pushkin, tr. Falen
5. The Gypsies & Other Narrative Poems, Pushkin, tr. Wood

Good, not peak Stoppard. Very amusing Thurber, maybe not quite as good as 13 Clocks written in that same mode. I read both the Pushkins yesterday, and find I like Falen as a translator but not Wood; I stumbled with Stanley Mitchell's version of Eugene Onegin last year - it's very highly praised but struck me as awkward, so I might try Falen's instead. They say it's at least as good as Johnston's, which I liked a lot, as well as his Narrative Poems of Pushkin and Lermontov which held up when I reread it last year, esp. his "Bronze Horseman" and "Novice" versions.

I read Nabokov's translations of his lyrics last month, which were interesting but very strange - clearly he was caught between two languages at a lot of points. You can see why he'd need his son to help him translate his own books. Falen's versions were better, and better than Arndt's, too, though you could probably cobble together a superior collection from the stray happy efforts of various people over the years, including a couple of Nabokov's.

Wood just sucked in comparison, and you find out he's a horrible pedant in his preface, introduction, notes and afterword (the word count of which must have at least tripled Pushkin's in the volume). Awkward, even ugly stabs at Pushkin aren't uncommon: D.M. Thomas' selection of mostly narrative poems had a lot of infelicities, as I remember. Clearly this has to do with Pushkin, with something people want to get across but strain trying to. Thomas' version of Onegin will be out this spring.

(Actually, a lot of Russian translators are horrible pedants, for some reason - Arndt, Guy Daniels, obviously Nabokov. And they're usually pretty mean, maybe channeling that strain of savagely insulting verbosity that pops up a lot in Slavic culture - John Simon, Ayn Rand and Dostoevsky are big offenders.)

Falen's edition of his plays has also been praised, and I actually have that volume up here so maybe I'll hit that next. I barely remember anything about Boris Godunov.

Wood lists the translations he approves of in his afterword - nearly all British - while implicitly condemning all others to hell:

The Gypsies, George Borrow
Fountain of Bakhchisaray, William Lewis
Some lyrics by Donald MacAlister, Frances Cornford, Alan Myers & Thomas
Nabokov's non-Onegin ones
The Bronze Horseman, A.D. Briggs
Tsar Nikita and His Daughters, Ranjit Bolt
The Prophet, Ted Hughes
Arion, Seamus Heaney
Eugene Onegin, Mitchell ("excellent", though Johnston and Falen did "pretty well")

I agree about Briggs, whose "Gavriliad" is also very good. But I think Johnston did even better with "Horseman," probably Pushkin's best poem.

I know I'll never read him in Russian. They had us memorize "Ya vas lyubil, lyubov eshcho bwyt mozhet" - his most famous lyric - and I still retain most of it. But I forget what half the words mean, after that easy first line. My Russian's just gone.

1. Antony and Cleopatra

I never think I'll like this play but it always wins me over. Which is a strange thing to have happen again and again, so I suspect it must instead be that the play gets better as it goes, or maybe relies on accumulation for some of its effects. It's kind of ending even before it begins, and the end of the end is, what, the whole last two acts? It's drawn out to a degree comparable only to the ends of Ghost and A League of Their Own, which are both intolerable to me (and to all males? or all humans?). But A&C earn it because it really is all about back story, a back story that draws in a lot of history, geography, prior Shakespeare. Maybe this is another of his experiments: the two don't show their best sides early on, and you're soon pretty much on Enobarbus', who's shown getting very sick of them. It's not like their annoying sides disappear later, either, it's just the other ones show up. What happens with Eno works as a kind of sacrifice of those parts of the audience mind that want A&C to die for their obnoxious sins against plot. They're worse than procrastinators, who are absolutely intolerable in narrative (a challenge Shakespeare took up a few plays earlier), because they are perpetually distracted - they simply don't notice the obvious. The most difficult thing pulled off may be that they don't come across as idiots. They're drunk on who they are together, and we eventually come around to finding that valid - maybe by becoming drunk on their rhetoric. Marvell's "Coy Mistress" poem is practically an epitome of this play, even down to the different speeds of the two halves. The most used word in the play may be "world." The world is their ball. They make Augustus run.

What are my favorites? I love Julius and Romeo, but I'm not sure to what extent that's just because I feel I understand them. Midsummer probably likewise. Love's Labor's Lost I need to read again; it was my favorite of his comedies once. Winter's Tale is fascinating.

I'll reread it shortly to check, but ever since I first experienced it I've felt Othello is even better than Hamlet. It must be the best play in the world. Despite what those others and Peer Gynt and Prometheus Unbound mean to me.

I'm also going to reread Troilus, Comedy of Errors, Richard II and Cymbeline, all of which I remember liking.

Bloom ranks the plays something like this: Lear, Hamlet, Henry IV (both together), Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night. Then Othello, Midsummer, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice and maybe Tempest in the runner-up group.

I'm fond of all those, possibly excepting Merchant.

Final 2011 reading plan is 10,000 pages. This way I won't just read short books, and I won't be discouraged from reading individual stories and poems and whatnot; that way I can finish the Chekhov stories I've missed, which are scattered over a number of volumes. But what I read has to be complete in some sense, to count toward the total. I think the completed reading from 2010 ran to about 10,000, so this shouldn't be a strain. I'll have to keep track of what's read somehow; I should probably write down what page I'm at in the various books I'm still reading. Though I guess I could encourage myself to finish those books by including their whole page count toward the '11 total. These simple schemes get complicated fast.

Toying with requiring half that total come from the ten or twelve core authors. Yes, why not: half, 5000. Proust plus War and Peace and Anna Karenina would cover it. Or just Emerson's unabridged journals. Though neither of those projects is likely. And we'll make it the ten.

Strict enough to get you somewhere you wouldn't have by yourself, free enough that you don't fight or much regret the rules, is the idea.

What do I want to read at the moment? The Chekhov. Several Shakespeare plays. A long novel - I've missed those. Some Alice Munro, since she and Carson are the local powers. To help cope with my first Ontario winter (delightful so far, I've missed this kind of cold).

Maybe a lot of short stories at first, by random people, now I'm free to. Poems? Might drive me crazy to count little individual ones. Rule: they can only count if ten plus pages or in a sequence that is or as part of a collection.

Okay, party to go to.

Just now coming to myself, really - my wife's still knocked down. Haven't had for-real flu, as compared to the traditional cold plus fever, in quite a while. That is some nasty stuff. Had no idea who I was or what was happening most of the last two nights, and have barely been able to move all day for kidney pain. And those are just the undisgusting components.

Had an idea during a lucid spell about a reading plan for next year, since this year's arguably worked. Well, everything arguably anythinged - what a useless word. Anyway, why not take myself seriously about these c. 12 authors I claim are best, not prettiest or most consistent but best grasp for some moments the things needful, and just read them? Cutting Borges and Calvino, since I read pretty near every word of both so recently, leaving Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Kafka, Stevens. And adding Crowley, who I need to reread, and Abe, who I want to read something else by - and maybe learn if I'm deranged to put Woman in the Dunes up with Kafka.

I read bits of most of them this last year, but it's high time I went back to Proust and Tolstoy - been like ten years. And it fits that plan to go through Emerson, Dickinson and Kafka chronologically. And if I need novelty there's some undergrowth works I've never gotten to (the unspellable Jean Santeuil, Four Freedoms, probably lots of Leaves of Grass sections) or through (The Excursion, the prized Resurrection, I think Necessary Angel). As well as tons of weird Abe, presumably. If by Autumn I'm down to late moralistic prose by Tolstoy, so be it.

Actually I'd probably need an 'out' for something as austere as twelve writers. Maybe for every ten or five books by these people I get to pick some other one. A sanity clause, apologies to Kelly. Ever try to set yourself that kind of incentive goal, e.g. a minute of cleaning for every minute of television?

Or renew it after six months. Or three. Or never really take it seriously. Or end up reading just magazines.

Probably more important things I should be resolving. Like to not use the word 'arguably'- hey, maybe no qualifiers period. And no generalizations or over-broadening imagery. I am a serial abuser of 'world' for example. Does 'for example' count as a qualifier by diffusion?

I'd thought of more extroverted reading schemes too, like reading only female writers for a year, or non-Western, or non-fictional prose, or pre-1500 literature, or books only by people I've never read - all comparatively weak points of mine, though the last less shamefully since it's by logical necessity.

But the intensive scheme meets immediate personal needs, and sounds kind of fascinating from this end. With the out included.

What to read next year?

I don't want to try to beat 75. I'd probably have to turn to Dr. Seuss to. And the number goal, combined with an internet-atrophied attention span, meant I read very few even mid-length books this year, most of which were collections of shorter pieces.

One thing I'll do the same will be rereading a lot: well over half of this year's books were rereads. I've just reached a point where that's become a much more reliable source of great experiences; I guess I'm reaping the reward for the wider reading I did when younger. I'm sure a point comes when you can burn out on rereading too, but I'm not near it.

Or maybe I just needed comfort this year? And last year, now I think of it, with all the Borges and Calvino. Maybe that need will pass with what inspired it.

As a compromise between reading new and reading old, I think I might try tackling consecutively a few authors I usually read around in: Emerson, especially, maybe going through his journals in order, and the relevant collections of poems and essays as I get up to when he's writing them; Dickinson's letters likewise, reading each year of her poems in the Franklin edition concurrently with that letter year; ditto Kafka, though maybe just with his diaries and stories, since most of his letters don't do much for me.

I imagine I've read all Dickinson's poems by now, but perhaps I missed a few. I used to read her for hours on end on plagiarist.com, despite owning the various print editions, because of the 'random' button they had there. She was something like twenty percent of their whole database, so you only had to click through a few non-her poems, usually by Robert Service, to get back to Dickinson. I liked there being just one poem highlighted on the page, giving everything she wrote a special attention. But I want to annotate her. I'm trying to annotate now, and she's one of the few writers where I do feel like making lines and circles and drawings on her poems.

For rereading, I need to revisit Lawrence and see what I make of him now. Women in Love at least. The Magic Mountain I keep thinking about, and Emperor and Galilean. I didn't get around to much Shelley in the summer. A complete run through is in order. As is seeing what Volokhonsky and Pevear make of Tolstoy, Lydia Davis of Proust.

Of the new things read this year, most of the best were Chekhov stories. There's a number of his I still haven't read.

I'm not sure I can hold off from Little, Big until the anniversary edition's out.

Reading Shakespeare makes it hard to read non-Shakespeare. I might do a few more of his aloud these next couple weeks: Antony, Love's Labour's, Comedy, Winter's Tale, Othello, Troilus, Midsummer. Haven't read some of those in ages.

It's time for Resurrection, the book I've been saving since 2000. Maybe I'll start the new year with it, or use it to end 2010 if I've hit 75 by c. Christmas?