Thursday, October 8, 2020

Louise Glück / Where to start with an extraordinary Nobel winner



Louise Glück


Louise Glück: where to start with an extraordinary Nobel winner

Poet Fiona Sampson explains why she admires the 2020 Nobel laureate and picks her favourite poems from a long career



Fiona Sampson

Thu 8 October 2020


I

have been reading Louise Glück for more than 20 years, longer than the many poets whose star has risen and waned in the meantime; longer than I’ve been writing poetry. Perhaps this is why I’m so moved and excited by today’s announcement that the 77-year old American has won the Nobel prize in literature.

But I think it’s much more than this. The 12 collections (and two chapbooks) of poetry that Glück has published to date vary enormously in style and theme, from the domestic and familial stories of her first books, 1968’s aptly-titled Firstborn and her breakthrough second collection The House on Marshland (1975), to the fabular and increasingly philosophic writing of later work like Averno (2006) – named for the entrance to the Classical underworld – and her most recent collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). But what unites all this work is a quality of lucid, calm attention. You read a passage by Glück and think, Ah yes, of course, this is how it is. She has the extraordinary writer’s gift of making clear what is, outside the world of her poem, complex.

Here she is in the 10-part poem Ripe Peach, on arriving at middle age:

There was
a peach in a wicker basket.
There was a bowl of fruit.
Fifty years. Such a long walk
from the door to the table.

This is classic Glück, distilling time, beauty, and emotional ambivalence in a single clarifying gesture. Only the literary allusion betrays the complexity behind the apparent ease: no poet can avoid hearing George Herbert’s “Love bade me welcome…” in the offering, although the reader doesn’t need any such knowledge for the poem to work. That single gesture is an inclusive, not exclusive, one. Through decades of Anglo-American poetry alternating between over-intellection and misery-memoir confession, Glück has continued to write poetry that is accessible, despite its huge sophistication.Ripe Peach is published in The Seven Ages (2001), a book I’ve always loved. Where, in As You Like It, Shakespeare has Jacques’s famous Seven Ages tell the story of a man’s life; with equal lightness of touch, Glück has the confidence to assume that a woman’s experience can provide the human example. By doing so she’s already managed, without polemic, to assure several generations of women that their lives are as real, and as mighty a measure of the human, as any man’s. She’s neatly shown a path through the canon for everyone who feels themselves excluded by that white male norm we should be past questioning.

Descending Figure (1980), another cunningly-appropriated title, reveals some of how this is done – like in the poem Portrait:

A child draws the outline of a body.
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows
that life is missing…

This quiet, but steely feat of readjustment to lived experience runs through Glück’s work. The House on Marshland, a book full of sibling and filial jostling, starts the poetic lifework of revealing how extraordinary everyday life is. “Even now this landscape is assembling. /The hills darken. The oxen /sleep,” it opens. There’s nothing passive or pastoral about this, but the sense of something thrillingly about to happen:

and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Writing such hair-raising poetry by just her second collection, it’s no surprise that Glück would receive the US’s leading literary honours, starting with two Guggenheims and multiple National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her fierce and grief-struck fourth book, The Triumph of Achilles (1985), won the National Book Critics Circle award: “The city rose in a kind of splendour /as all that is wild comes to the surface,” it prophesied. And Glück continued, and continues, to come to the surface. In 1993, The Wild Iris won a Pulitzer prize. In 1999, she received a Lannan award; in 2001, the Bollingen prize; in 2003, she became US poet laureate. And this year, as well as the Nobel, she’s received the Tranströmer prize, awarded in memory of the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer – the last poet to receive the Nobel prize, back in 2011.

Of course, it’s not that she is suddenly “big in Sweden”. What Glück shares with her fellow laureate Tranströmer is a compassionate, comprehensive vision of human understanding and destiny. Much of what powers her work is explored in her two books of essays, Proofs and Theories (1994) and American Originality (2017). “The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness,” she tells us in th essay Education of a Poet; their life “is dignified, I think, by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement. In the actual work, a discipline, a service.” Glück’s poetry, for all its huge distinction, its vibrant intelligence and its beauty, has never lost the ability to serve society, or the reader.

  • Fiona Sampson is a poet. Her latest collection is Come Down (Corsair 2020).

THE GUARDIAN





FICCIONES
Casa de citas / Manuel Borrás / Louise Glück


MESTER DE BREVERÍA





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Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature


 An ‘unmistakable poetic voice’ ... the poet Louise Glück. Photograph: Sigrid Estrada/

Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature

The Swedish Academy has chosen the American poet, citing her ‘unmistakable poetic voice’


Alison Flood
Thu 8 October 2020

The poet Louise Glück has become the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in 27 years, cited for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

Glück is the 16th woman to win the Nobel, and the first American woman since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993. The American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was a surprise winner in 2016.One of America’s leading poets, the 77-year-old writer has won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award, tackling themes including childhood and family life, often reworking Greek and Roman myths.

The chair of the Nobel prize committee, Anders Olsson hailed Glück’s “candid and uncompromising” voice, which is “full of humour and biting wit”. Her 12 collections of poetry, including her most recent Faithful and Virtuous Night, the Pulitzer-winning The Wild Iris, and the “masterly” Averno, are “characterised by a striving for clarity”, he added, comparing her to Emily Dickinson with her “severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith”.

“In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self,” Olsson said. “But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet.”In a short interview conducted in the early hours of Thursday morning, Glück told the Nobel prize: “My first thought was, I won’t have any friends because most of my friends are writers. But then I thought, that won’t happen. It is too new, you know? I don’t know what it means. It is a great honour. There are recipients I don’t admire. But I think of the ones I do.”

She said the winnings – 10m Swedish kronor (£870,000) – would help her buy a home in Vermont. “But mostly, I am concerned for the preservation of daily life, with people I love … it is disruptive. The phone is ringing now, squeaking into my ear.”

When asked where new readers should start, Gluck said, “I would suggest they don’t read my first book unless they want to feel contempt. But everything after that might be of interest. I like my recent work. Averno would be a place to start, or my last book Faithful and Virtuous Night.”

The news was welcomed by her fellow poets. Claudia Rankine told the Guardian that she was “so pleased”.

“Something good had to happen!” Rankine said. “She is a tremendous poet, a great mentor, and a wonderful friend. I couldn’t be happier. We are in a bleak moment in this country, and as we poets continue to imagine our way forward, Louise has spent a lifetime showing us how to make language both mean something and hold everything.”

Praising Glück’s poem The Wild Iris, Imtiaz Dharker said: “There is no easy comfort in it (or in any of her work, when I went to find more of it). What she offers instead is uncompromising clarity, especially about the slide of all living things towards death. Yet she often turns that awareness on a pin and tilts the poem to catch a different light.”

Kate Clanchy said it was “great to have a woman poet win the Nobel”.

“She is a very quotable poet – you can look her up on Instagram,” Clanchy said. “But it’s worth noting that her resonant aphorisms are always spoken by ironised voices – a wild iris, for example. Her poems are austere, difficult, very much alive. I’ve always admired her.”

Born in New York City in 1943, Glück grew up on Long Island and attended Columbia University. She has taught poetry in many universities, and is currently an adjunct professor of English at Yale. In an interview with Poets and Writers magazine, she spoke about the balance between her life and work, arguing “you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work”, because “your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake”.

“When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art,” Glück said. “I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly – the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching – the minute I had obligations in the world – I started to write again.”

President Barack Obama presents poet Louise Glück with the National Humanities Medal in 2016.Pinterest
 President Barack Obama presents Louise Glück with the National Humanities Medal in 2016. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The award will mark a change for a writer who has often avoided the spotlight. When Glück was appointed as US poet laureate in 2003, she said she had “no concern with widening audience”, and that she preferred her audience “small, intense, passionate”.

At Glück’s UK publisher Carcanet, which has published the poet for more than two decades, Michael Schmidt said staff were “completely surprised” at the news but also “astonished at the justice of the win”.

“What the Academy seems to have done is they’ve gone for a poet who is, in a sense, aesthetically, imaginatively, at odds with the age,” Schmidt said. “She’s not a cheerleader. She’s in no way a voice for any cause – she is a human being engaged in the language and in the world. And I think there’s this wonderful sense that she is not polemical, and maybe this is what’s being celebrated. She’s not a person trying to persuade us of anything, but helping us to explore to explore the world we’re living in. She’s a clarifying poet. There doesn’t seem to be much political engagement in her poems. They’re really about the individual human being alive in the world, and in the language.”The prize is awarded by the 18-strong Swedish Academy to the writer they deem has fulfilled the condition laid out in the somewhat murky words of Alfred Nobel’s will: to “have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

After enduring almost three years of scandal, observers had predicted the Swedish Academy would go for a safe choice this year, with Canadian poet Anne Carson, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami and perennial contender Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright, named as possible winners.

The august and secretive voting body was rocked by allegations of sexual abuse and financial misconduct in 2017, culminating in the conviction of Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of academy member Katarina Frostenson, for rape in 2018. Frostenson subsequently left the Academy after she was discovered to have leaked the names of previous winners, and a string of resignations from Academy members followed, with the 2018 award postponed.

Announcing the 2018 and 2019 winners last year, the Academy was hoping for an end to criticism, with Olsson promising that the prize was moving away from a Eurocentric, male-oriented focus. Instead, they chose two European writers, the widely-acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, and the Austrian writer Peter Handke, a choice which was widely criticised over Handke’s denial of Serb atrocities during the war in the former Yugoslavia.

THE GUARDIAN





FICCIONES
Casa de citas / Manuel Borrás / Louise Glück


MESTER DE BREVERÍA


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Wednesday, October 7, 2020

A book that changed me / Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar





A book 

that changed

 me 


BIOGRAPHY


Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

Silvia Rothlisberger

Every book I have read has influenced my life, but a book that changed my future was Hopscotch by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar.
I was 15 years old when I found Hopscotch in my house library and I was drawn to open it by the chalk hopscotch on its cover. Wondering what a book with that name could be about, l discovered that it could be read in two different ways. One, starting at chapter one and finishing in chapter 57. Or the other starting at chapter 73 and following the order shown at the end of every chapter. Now I was intrigued.
The following year I couldn’t stop reading its pages. Even acquiring the habits of the characters. Like Horacio’s superstition that you have to lift an object that falls to the floor immediately before a person whose name starts with the first letter of the object suffers a misfortune. Or trying to be like La Maga, absorbed and distracted.
Half of Hopscotch is in Paris, a city that I had never been to or even dreamed of. After reading this book I knew I had to go there and discover the bohemian Paris depicted by Cortázar.
Two years later, after I finished high school, I was on a twelve-hour flight from my home country Colombia to France with the aim of walking through the same bridges and boulevards where Horacio and La Maga loved and lost each other.




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'The great African novel of the 21st century' / Namwali Serpell wins Arthur C Clarke award

 

 ‘At last, an African book of unarguable universality’ … Namwali Serpell. Photograph: Yanina Gotsulsky


'The great African novel of the 21st century': Namwali Serpell wins Arthur C Clarke award

The Old Drift takes prestigious science fiction award with what judges called ‘an extraordinary saga that spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall’

Alison Flood
Wed 23 September 2020

Namwali Serpell has won the UK’s top prize for science fiction, the Arthur C Clarke award, for her first novel The Old Drift, which judges described as “stealth sci-fi”.

The Zambian author’s debut tells the stories of three families over three generations, moving from a colonial settlement by Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century, to the 1960s as Zambia attempts to send a woman to the moon, and into the near future. A mix of historical fiction, magical realism and sci-fi, Serpell saw off competition from authors including previous winner Adrian Tchaikovsky and Hugo best novel winner Arkady Martine to take the prize. Originally established by the author Arthur C Clarke with the aim of promoting science fiction in Britain, the award goes to the best sci-fi novel of the year.

Chair of judges Andrew M Butler called The Old Drift “an extraordinary family saga that spans eras from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall, and beyond”, praising it for “interrogat[ing] colonialism from within and point[ing] to the science fictionality of everyday events”.

“The Old Drift is, as one of our judges put it, ‘stealth sci-fi’, with inheritance and infection at its heart,” said Butler. “Our pandemic-ravaged world reminds us how connected our world has been for the last century or more – and this book points to the global nature of science fiction.”

Last year’s winner of the prize, Tade Thompson, called The Old Drift “the great African novel of the 21st century”.

“At last, a book that acknowledges that the African lives with the fantastic and mundane. At last, an African book of unarguable universality,” said Thompson. “Serpell has created something specifically Zambian and generally African at the same time. The Old Drift is everything fiction should be, and everything those of us who write should aspire to. Hats off. Well-deserved win.”

Serpell was born in Zambia and moved to the US as a child. According to analysis by Clarke judge and author Stewart Hotston, she was one of just 14 people of colour whose work was submitted for the prize in 2020, from 121 submissions. Just three of the 14 were British, according to Hotston.

“In my view there were actually more books with problematic depictions of race than there are books by authors from those very communities,” Hotston wrote in the Bookseller in July. “British genre publishing has a problem and it’s structural and that structure is, as they always are, leading to screening of non-white authors because they ‘don’t fit’. They don’t fit the idea of what an author is or what kind of content they should be producing to be acceptable.”

Hotston said it was encouraging to see white editors asking to see more manuscripts by authors from a more diverse range of cultures and races. “Those manuscripts definitely exist,” he said. “However, this willingness has to translate into actual action.”

THE GUARDIAN




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Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)

Bruno Schulz


Bruno Schulz

12.07.1892—19.11.1942

Writer painter, illustrator and graphic artist known for short story collections that bring back the magical reality of Poland's pre-war shtetl's.


Born 12.07.1892 in Drohobych (present Ukraine), died there 19.11.1942 in tragic circumstances.

Bruno Schulz was born in Drohobych, a town of modest size located in western Ukraine, not far from the city of Lvov. He spent nearly his entire life there and was generally unwilling to travel. His voyages outside of his native city were sporadic and brief. He viewed Drohobych to be the center of the world and was a acute observer of life there, proving himself an excellent "chronicler." His writings and his art are both saturated with the realities of Drohobych. His stories are replete with descriptions of the town's main streets and landmarks, as well as with portraits of its inhabitants.

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20 Things You Didn't Know about Bruno Schulz




20 Things You Didn't Know about Bruno Schulz


Twenty-five years after UNESCO announced that 1992 was to be the year of Bruno Schulz, interest in the writer is still constantly growing. New letters of his being uncovered, his work is continually being reinterpreted and more biographical information being unearthed – all of these factors have led to the creation of a discipline dedicated specifically to the prominent writer’s life and work: Schulzology. 


ALEXIS ANGULO

Mars 1, 2017

 

While you may think you know a lot about Bruno Schulz, we have found some facts about him that you may have missed. He was really quite an extraordinary person – and these tidbits will make you want to find out more about him:

1. He was obsessed with horses

In his early school days, he had a homework assignment – he was supposed to write a story on a topic of his choice. He ended up filling a whole notebook with a tale about a horse. His Polish teacher was so proud of him that he even showed the homework to the director of the secondary school: Józef Staromiejski. The director kept it and showed it to his colleagues. He became very well known… at school. He was also known to help others with their homework and make drawings for his classmates.  When he became a teacher, he would often sit on his chair backwards – as if riding a horse and would begin to tell stories to his class.

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Monday, October 5, 2020

Zadie Smith / What Do We Want History to Do to Us?

 

Zadie Smith

What Do We Want History to Do to Us?

Zadie Smith
FEBRUARY 27, 2020 ISSUE

This essay appears in somewhat different form in the catalog of “Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission,” an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, October 2, 2019–April 5, 2020; the catalog is edited by Clara Kim and published by Tate Publishing.
what I want history to do to me, 1994; drawing by Kara Walker
Kara Walker: what I want history to do to me, 1994

Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition?

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Sunday, October 4, 2020

French prosecutors open rape inquiry into author Gabriel Matzneff



French prosecutors open rape inquiry into author Gabriel Matzneff

New book describes sexual relationship between Matzneff and 14-year-old girl

Agence France-Presse in Paris
Fri 3 Jan 2020 15.44 GMT

Paris prosecutors have opened a rape investigation into the author Gabriel Matzneff, a day after the publication of a book detailing his sexual relationship with a girl of 14 more than three decades ago.

The case has attracted huge interest in France, which is only now beginning to scrutinise decades of what are seen by some as permissive attitudes towards sexual exploitation and paedophilia.

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Saturday, October 3, 2020

Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991)




Jerzy Kosiński

14.06.1933—3.05.1991

Jerzy (Nikodem) Kosiński (born under the surname of Lewinkopf, also used the pseudonym of Joseph Novak) was born on June 14, 1933 in Łódź, died in 1991 in New York.


Kosiński studied under the supervision of Józef Chałasiński at the University of Łódź. He graduated with a diploma in political science and history. After earning his degrees, he became an assistant at the Institute of History and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). In 1957, he left Poland with a scholarship to the United States where he stayed permanently. In 1965, he received the American citizenship. Kosiński obtained grants from the Guggenheim Fellowship (1967), Ford Foundation (1968) and the American Academy (1970). Kosiński graduated from Columbia University. He lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, Davenport University and Wesleyan University. Among many honours and distinctions, Kosiński received the prestigious National Book Award (1969), National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1970) and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (1966). He was also honoured by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1973, he was appointed the President of the American PEN Club. He held the chair for two terms. Kosiński was the President of Oxford Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies.
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Friday, October 2, 2020

Jerzy Kosinski / Art

 

La voix du sang
René Magritte

ART

by Jerzy Konsinki


The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.




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Thursday, October 1, 2020

Tim Parks / The Writer-Translator Equation

 

Rijksmuseum
Jan Ekels (II): A Writer Trimming his Pen, 1784


The Writer–Translator Equation



By Tim Parks
September 21, 2020, 7:00 am

The translator is a writer. The writer is a translator. How many times have I run up against these assertions?—in a chat between translators protesting because they are not listed in a publisher’s index of authors; or in the work of literary theorists, even poets (“Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text,” observed Octavio Paz). Others claim that because language is referential, any written text is a translation of the world referred to.

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‘The Story I’m Telling’ / An Interview with Archie Shepp

Accra Shepp
Saxophonist Archie Shepp performing with the pianist Jason Moran at the Whitney Museum, New York City, September 27, 2019


‘The Story I’m Telling’: An Interview with Archie Shepp


Accra Shepp
September 29, 2020


My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the details of melody, harmony, and rhythm are all improvised to create a grand conversation: voices rise and fall, sometimes echoing one another, sometimes dissonant and discordant. In the 1970s and 1980s he wove the blues into his music, extending our understanding of this tradition. His cultural influence reaches far beyond the realm of jazz, touching artists as diverse as Ntozake Shange and Chuck D.

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