March 26, 2014 At Work Translating Pushkin Hills: An Interview with Katherine Dovlatov By Valerie Stivers Photo: Nina Alovert Sergei Dovlatov, one of the great writers of the Soviet samizdat period, immigrated to New York City in 1978 and published his bone-dry, deeply thoughtful stories in The New Yorker all through the 1980s, until his tragic early death in 1990. Even in translation, Dovlatov’s work is a gateway drug to Russian humor: twenty percent booze, fifty percent understatement, and thirty percent bureaucratic despair. The writer is a household name in Russia, and the publication of Pushkin Hills—the first English translation of his 1983 novel Zapavednik, translated by his daughter, Katherine—has been greeted with celebration in the émigré literary scene. The autobiographical novel is narrated by an unpublished writer, Boris Alikhanov, who takes a job as a tour guide at Pushkin Hills, a group of estates affiliated with Alexander Pushkin. Alikhanov’s wife and daughter are leaving him for the West, and he is thus forced to weigh the merits of abandoning his country, his mother tongue, and even Pushkin, his literary heritage. The alternative is to remain in Soviet Russia, where almost everything external is false, and where the absurdities of the Pushkin estate function as a microcosm for the society. As the narrator observes: “Christ, I thought, everyone here is insane. Even those who find everyone else insane.” Using language to subvert the regime was one of Dovlatov’s specialties, and his novel is rich with characters who speak in tongues—the more insane you are, the more sane, perhaps, in a mad society. Dovlatov writes with a deceptive minimalism—in fact, his humor and linguistic dexterity have made him one of the most difficult Russian writers to translate. His daughter Katherine, who also represents his estate, was happy to discuss her technique with me. Pushkin Hills was originally published in 1983, after your father had emigrated to New York. But he wrote it in Russian. Can you talk about that? Father was “nudged” to leave Russia in August 1978. Like many émigrés of the Third Wave, he spent a bit of time in Vienna before coming to New York in the early months of 1979. He knew a lot of words in English, and he could get by on the street or supermarket, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he was fluent. He wrote everything in Russian. His writing is language driven, and so of course he wrote in the only language he knew well. Read More
March 26, 2014 Quote Unquote La Vie Bohème By Dan Piepenbring Robert Frost was born on this day in 1874. Robert Frost, the poet and novice martial artist. Photo: Walter Albertin FROST Among other things, what [Ezra] Pound did was show me bohemia. INTERVIEWER Was there much bohemia to see at that time? FROST More than I had ever seen. I’d never had any. He’d take me to restaurants and things. Showed me jujitsu in a restaurant. Threw me over his head. INTERVIEWER Did he do that? FROST Wasn’t ready for him at all. I was just as strong as he was. He said, “I’ll show you, I’ll show you. Stand up.” So I stood up, gave him my hand. He grabbed my wrist, tipped over backwards and threw me over his head. INTERVIEWER How did you like that? FROST Oh, it was all right. —Robert Frost, the Art of Poetry No. 2, 1960
March 26, 2014 On the Shelf Alice Munro Is Legal Tender, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Royal Canadian Mint Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize last year, which is neat and all, but what’s even cooler is that her face is going to appear on a five-dollar Canadian coin—an honor second only to having a New Jersey Turnpike rest area named after you. The world’s most expensive musical instrument: “a Stradivari viola, whose asking price will start at $45 million when it is offered for sale this spring.” If one loses the ability to speak, a prosthetic voice offers the chance to restore one’s vocal identity. What was on French television in the sixties? Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou discussing philosophy. Obviously. If you’ve got two left feet, scientists have done you a solid: they now know exactly which dance moves catch a lady’s eye. The Electric Slide is not among them, experts say.
March 25, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Shad Season By Sadie Stein “The Shad (Clupea Sapidissima)” from the First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game, and Forests of the State of New York, New York, United States: Commissioners of Fisheries, Game, and Forests of the State of New York, January 1896. The thermometer outside my kitchen window reads thirty-nine degrees, firmly on the leonine side of March’s spectrum. But in the park, trees are budding. In the greenmarkets, forsythia are rearing their heads. And, in restaurants, shad are running. Okay, they’re not actually running in restaurants. On my annual pilgrimage for shad roe, my better-informed dining companion told me that these particular egg sacs had likely traveled north from Washington, D.C.—maybe from the Potomac? The point is, shad are in season, whether one favors the bony fish itself or its slightly more approachable roe. Shad and shad roe used to be a common spring meal up and down the Eastern seaboard. Nowadays, it is the purview of traditionalists and evangelical seasonal eaters. If you are neither, it is still the kind of edible time machine that is worth seeking out when you can. At the Grand Central Oyster Bar, the roe is served with bacon and a broiled tomato. Newly cleaned, the restaurant’s famous Murano tiles gleam under the lamplight, and commuters come and go, and even if you secretly think the shad is pretty overcooked and you’re kind of relieved not to have to eat it on the regular, all is very much right with the world. Read More
March 25, 2014 Seidelathon “For Holly Andersen” By Lorin Stein On April 8, at our Spring Revel, we’ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. In the weeks leading up the Revel, we’re looking at Seidel’s poems. Bemelman’s Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, New York. Photo: Arvind Grover Over the weekend, I turned on Studio 360. A cardiologist was describing the health benefits of dance—and this cardiologist was none other than Holly Andersen, hero of a great poem by Frederick Seidel, from his 2006 collection, Ooga-Booga. Dr. Andersen is also the dedicatee of the poem. I guess you could say she is its muse, but hero is the better word. This is a poem about heroism: doing your job in the face of death. It happens also to be a love poem, for in Seidel’s work love and admiration are rarely far apart. I never have a drink at the Carlyle Hotel without thinking of the first lines, and I think of the last lines much more often than that. Seidel has never given a public reading, but he has made several recordings of his poems, including this one. I played it as soon as the segment was over. What could be more pleasant than talking about people dying,And doctors really trying,On a winter afternoonAt the Carlyle Hotel, in our cocoon?We also will be dying one day soon. Dr. Holly Anderson has a vodka cosmopolitan,And has another, and becomes positively Neapolitan,The moon warbling a song about the sun,Sitting on a sofa at the Carlyle,Staying stylishly alive for a while. Her spirited lovelinessDoes cause some distress.She makes my urbanity undress.I present symptoms that expressAn underlying happiness in the face of the beautiful emptiness. She lost a very sick patient she especially cared about.The man died on the table. It wasn’t a matter of feeling any guilt or doubt.Something about a doctor who can cure, or anyway try,But can also cry,Is some sort of ultimate lullaby, and lie.
March 25, 2014 Arts & Culture The Weather Men By Valerie Miles The life, times, and meteorological theories of Josep Pla. Josep Pla at his house in Llofriu, 1975. “I’ve attended the procession of my country with a match in hand. Not an altar candle, not a torch, not a candlestick, but a match.” Josep Pla (1897–1981) is a controversial figure in Catalan letters, and a well-kept secret of twentieth century European literature. If Barça is more than just a football club, then Pla—a political and cultural journalist, travel writer, biographer, memoirist, essayist, novelist, and foodie, whose collected works clock in at more than thirty-thousand pages and thirty-eight volumes—was more than just a writer. Now that his deceptively simple, earthy prose and mordant sense of humor are available to American readers, the best way to read Pla is to curl up with a crisp glass of cava and a few spears of white asparagus. It’s impossible to read Josep Pla and not fall in love with his Mediterranean landscape. His native Empordà, with its mushroom-laced winds and its hint of burnt cork, mesmerizes. Pla’s most important work, The Gray Notebook, is out now in a graceful translation by Peter Bush; the Daily published an excerpt yesterday. In the spirit of a bildungsroman and the form of a diary, the narrative chronicles 1918 and 1919, two crucial years in young Pla’s life. It captures the raucous energy of a precocious country boy who falls on his feet in the city, full of the spit and vinegar of youth. These were ebullient years in turn-of-the-century Barcelona; the city saw the first roiling curls of the belligerence that would lead to the Spanish Civil War, giving The Gray Notebook a tang of dramatic irony. But Pla’s masterpiece wasn’t actually published until 1966, after he had rewritten and reworked the material from his earlier diaries—a process similar to that of Proust, who returned to material written during Swann’s Way to fashion Time Regained. Read More