October 28, 2015 From the Archive Donna Reed in the Old Scary House By Tom Disch Donna Reed, being spooky. Tom Disch’s poem “Donna Reed in the Old Scary House” appeared in our Fall 1995 issue. A prolific poet, novelist, science-fiction writer, and author of children’s books—including The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances—Disch frequently published his work in the Review. He died in 2008. —D.P. At first she is only mildly annoyed: the carwon’t start, it’s happened before. She’ll phoneher husband—what is his name?—at his office,and he’ll come pick her up. Another cup of coffee,meanwhile, in that funeral parlor of a living roomwith old Mrs. Marbleheart, who haunts this old house. Read More
October 22, 2015 From the Archive Portable People By Paul West From the cover of Portable People, illustrated by Joe Servello. Paul West, whom the New York Times once praised for his “unsettling nonuniformity,” died this week at eighty-five. An absurdist with a formidable, playful, idiosyncratic style—“we become inured and have to be awakened by something intolerably vivid,” he wrote, defending purple prose—West published some fifty books of fiction, poetry, and memoir. He suffered two strokes later in life, which slowed him down but couldn’t deter his ingenuity with language. “He would come out of the bedroom and say, ‘Where’s my cantilever of light?,’ ” his wife, Diane Ackerman, told the Guardian. “I suppose you can only know that this means a velour tracksuit when you have been living with someone for four decades.” The Review published nine of West’s stories, the first in our Summer 1971 issue. The excerpts below are from “Portable People,” a satire of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives from our Summer 1990 issue; later that year, Paris Review Editions published an expanded version of eighty-five “portable people” portraits, illustrated by Joe Servello. —D. P. Read More
October 13, 2015 From the Archive I Have Gone to Bed Early: Translating Proust By Dan Piepenbring Proust, looking saucy. Richard Howard first appeared in The Paris Review in our thirteenth issue—from the summer of 1956. Since then, several of his poems and translations have found their way to these pages, and in 2004, J. D. McClatchy interviewed him for our Art of Poetry series. In our Summer 1989 issue, George Plimpton spoke with Howard about translating Proust. GP The first line of Remembrance of Things Past is one of the most famous in literature. How does your version differ from the others? RH Three versions of Proust’s first sentence—“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”—have been published. The Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” James Grieve (an Australian professor): “Time was, when I always went to bed early.” And mine: “Time and again, I have gone to bed early.” GP And what is the thinking behind your version? RH To begin with, “time and again” seems one of those cell-like phrases which sums up a meaning of the whole book, as long-temps does in French. I admire Professor Grieve’s “time was”, but it doesn’t have the notion of recurrence that I wanted. It seemed to me that what was needed was not only an opening phrase which would reveal the book’s meaning, but one that would begin with the word “time”, which would be the last word in the book as well, as it is in French. Read More
September 30, 2015 From the Archive Aunt Alma By Dan Piepenbring Judith Mason, Self Portrait Age Ninety (detail), 1985. “Aunt Alma,” a poem by W. S. Merwin from our Spring 1958 issue. Merwin is eighty-eight today. Read More
September 15, 2015 From the Archive My Bitterness, My Mission By Dan Piepenbring A man disappearing into a cracked chamber pot with the legs of a woman, 1791. Image: Wellcome Library From a series of poems by David Ray in our Fall 1977 issue. Read More
September 3, 2015 From the Archive How to Name Your Baby By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Elmar Ersch Whenever anyone frowns upon the Daily for publishing work they find obscene, frivolous, or otherwise undeserving of the prestigious Paris Review name, I want to direct their attention to our seventies issues. Readers who think we’ve published sixty-two years of Hemingway interviews and gentle sestinas will be surprised by the magazine’s irreverence. The Review of the seventies was, if the archive is any indication, a relaxed, profligate, and singularly fun place to work. It published some great literature. It also published, in the Summer 1976 issue, fourteen pages of silly names. John Train’s “How to Name Your Baby,” republished in full below, is one of my all-time favorite finds from the archive. Referring to the work of a certain Office of Nomenclature Stabilization—an office that has since lapsed into obsolescence, I regret to learn from Google—it’s gloriously inessential, though I guess you could argue that it predicted the rise of the listicle. Train, who is eighty-seven now, cofounded the magazine and was its first managing editor; this piece only burnishes his legacy, and in the eighties he turned it into a line of books, including John Train’s Remarkable Names, Even More Remarkable Names, and Remarkable Names of Real People. Read More