April 15, 2019 Arts & Culture The Royally Radical Life of Margaret Cavendish By Michael Robbins Peter Lely, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1665. Public domain. To Virginia Woolf, she was “a giant cucumber” choking the roses and carnations in an otherwise orderly garden of seventeenth-century literature. Several of her contemporaries felt similarly. Samuel Pepys found her “dress so antick, and her deportment so ordinary, that I do not like her at all.” Dorothy Osborne said of her that “there were many soberer People in Bedlam,” while Mary Evelyn was “surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.” This was the Margaret Cavendish I first encountered, through Woolf’s exquisitely savage portrait in The Common Reader: Nevertheless, though her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some nonhuman creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And, later, in A Room of One’s Own: “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!” Read More
April 15, 2019 Arts & Culture As Certain as Death and Taxes By Souvankham Thammavongsa Norman Rockwell, The Accountant, 1924 I lost my job of fifteen years, and as I was filling out my tax return to explain this loss, I thought, Well, this was the one constant that had never changed. Taxes were always there. Every April, the forms explained what had happened to me that year, where I was living and what I was doing. There was a box for every loss and every gain, and there was a box for the things that would always remain the same. There was a record of everything. I signed up for classes at a tax-prep company. In the first session, we went around the room to introduce ourselves. Many of the other students had been accountants in other countries, others had degrees in economics, some had MBAs or owned their own businesses. All said they didn’t know how to prepare a Canadian tax return and just wanted to learn. The job I had before was for an investment advice publisher, where I learned that I liked numbers. I liked that the number four was always four and no one could argue with you about that. Every number had its own narrative power, even if you couldn’t see it right away. When a number changed, or when you expected it to and it didn’t change, that meant someone out there in the world had done something to make that happen. People made big decisions because of a little number. Everyone had a theory and a prediction about it. I had been an English major, but I didn’t feel out of place in the class. The theories we read and studied were really about people, and the tax return was a way of telling their stories. Read More
April 12, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Horses, Heaney, and Hypebeasts By The Paris Review Still from Věra Chytilová’s Daisies. Courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music. You’ve probably seen Daisies, Věra Chytilová’s dizzying 1966 masterpiece, especially if you were a young woman in the early aughts browsing LiveJournal or Tumblr, where screenshots of its two heroines dancing, throwing food, and declaring themselves “spoiled” abounded. But it’s difficult to find the rest of Chytilová’s films. Over the years, I’ve seen only two: the aforementioned Daisies and 1963’s Something Different, available via the Criterion Collection. That’s why I’m excited to spend the next few days essentially living inside the Brooklyn Academy of Music for their series “The Anarchic Cinema of Věra Chytilová.” What does a teen horror movie–meets–metaphor for authoritarian repression look like under a director like Chytilová? Or a comedic critique of the aging male libido? I guess I’m going to find out this weekend—and maybe you will, too. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
April 12, 2019 On Translation Ms. Difficult: Translating Emily Dickinson By Ana Luísa Amaral Emily Dickinson, ca. 1848. Photo: public domain, courtesy of Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Digital Images Database, via Wikimedia Commons. When she was translating Rilke into Russian, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in a letter to Boris Pasternak: And today I want Rilke to speak—through me. In the vernacular, this is known as translation. (How much better the Germans put it—nachdichten!—following the poet’s path, paving anew the entire road which he paved. For let nach be—(to follow after), but—dichten!, is that which is always anew. Nachdichten—to pave anew over instantaneously vanishing traces. But translation has another meaning. To translate not just into (the Russian language, for example), but across (a river). I translate Rilke into the Russian tongue, as he will someday translate me to the other world. To speak through another always sets us down in a place of no return, a place of exile, translation’s natural habitat. However, precisely because it is a place of exile, translation allows for the confluence of several voices. And suddenly, sometimes, the almost-miracle occurs, as Rilke writes in the fifth of his Duino Elegies: In this troublesome nowhere, suddenly, the unsayable point here the pure too-little is changed incomprehensibly—, altered into that empty too-much. Translating poetry requires both a deep knowledge of the original language and of the poem’s historical, cultural, and literary context; more than anything, though, it requires a still deeper knowledge of the language into which it’s being translated, the translator’s own language. Added to this must be a love of that language, the language of the person receiving and then transforming the poem into a new poem—creating a new path. Read More
April 12, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Anzia Yezierska By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. At one of my first jobs in New York, I worked with an elegant, slim, freakishly tall young woman who occupied a cubicle by a window. She said things like, “I want to work for a couple of years before I get married and have children.” Men sent her flowers at work, and she had several handbags, rumored to be gifts, that were worth our month’s salaries. To me, this was an unimaginable alternate world, horribly antifeminist but also seductive. Where did one find men who sent flowers? Was there really a magic trick by which one could stop working? I knew better than to want such things. So why did it seem like this girl—her name, I’ve just recalled, was Suzanne—knew something I didn’t? Suzanne and I weren’t friends, but I occasionally lurked by her cubicle, looking at the graceful lines of her shoulders and the back of her head, wondering about her. I thought of her recently while reading Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), a Polish Russian Jewish immigrant to New York in the 1890s, whose best-known work is the novel Bread Givers (1925). As the Columbia University professor Alice Kessler-Harris puts it in the foreword to that book, Yezierska writes about being an immigrant and a young woman “in a world where ambition was the path to Americanization and ambition seemed designed for men.” In a distinctive and vibrant vernacular, Yezierska’s books capture the life of a now-vanished Jewish Lower East Side. She experienced brief acclaim in her lifetime, died in obscurity, and since 1975 (in part thanks to Kessler-Harris’s tenacity) has been back in print, slowly becoming a part of the new feminist canon. Read More
April 11, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Ordinary Sex By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, I am in the happiest, healthiest relationship of my life, which is still going strong despite a period of long distance. My boyfriend is currently searching for a job, his first “adult” job since graduating, but seems to be falling at the last hurdles each time. He is usually a very upbeat and optimistic person, but rejection and his current job in the hospitality industry are having an effect on him that is hard to watch for someone who loves him. I am doing my best to reassure him that “the right opportunity will come along” and “you’re doing all the right things,” but this feels very easy to say without knowing what he’s going through. I have so much faith in him; he’s intelligent and passionate. I’m struggling to know how to help. Everything I say sounds clichéd or false, so until I can work out how to put my feelings into pragmatic advice, I’m hoping there’s a poem that might give him some hope for the future, and make him see himself the way I do. Best, An Optimist for Two Read More