April 5, 2022 Redux In Memoriam: Richard Howard By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. “The translator’s relation to his to-be-translated writer, or victim,” observed Richard Howard, the poet, translator, and longtime Paris Review poetry editor, in his 2004 Art of Poetry interview, “is essentially erotic and an exchange of mental fluids that cannot be entirely justified or explained.” Howard, who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Untitled Subjects. His impact on American letters was immeasurable. He published, in addition to his many volumes of poetry, landmark translations of Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes, Emil Cioran, and André Gide, among others. You can find here an oral history of his life and work that appeared on the Daily in 2017, when he won our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada. This week, we’re unlocking his 2004 interview as well as his poem “On Tour,” his translation of Baudelaire’s “Parisian Dream,” and an excerpt from his translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, accompanied by a brief conversation with George Plimpton. As Craig Morgan Teicher, our digital director and a former student of Howard’s, writes, “To sit with him was to sit in the glorious eye of a thousand-year literary storm, to be guided through its currents, to be invited in.” If you enjoy these free interviews, poems, and translations, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Poetry No. 86 Richard Howard History and high culture were indeed my real home, and I found them right there in our house—in the library which became, indeed, my precocious playroom. Reading was an interior exile, so that I didn’t have to look away from home, as you put it, just further in. From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) Read More
April 4, 2022 At Work How Do We Stop Repeating Ourselves?: A Conversation with Caren Beilin By Sheila Heti Photograph by Jean-Paul Cauvin. Caren Beilin’s slim novels are marked by a distinctive dizzying logic—as if she had invented her own variation on realism—that allows the narrators’ imaginations, feelings, locations on earth, and personal symbologies to stretch and twist the plot. In The University of Pennsylvania (2014) and Spain (2018), she emphasizes the ways we are trapped within our own realities, but also suggests that these realities can be wondrous and huge. Beilin makes the experience of living seem private, wild, abysmal, and buoyant, and implies that we need other people because without them our inner landscapes would become too overwhelming—they would keep expanding and devour everything. Her new novel, Revenge of the Scapegoat (out this month from Dorothy, a publishing project) follows Iris—a creative-writing professor much like Beilin herself—from her receipt of a package of hurtful old letters from her father (detailing criticisms he had of her, ways he blamed her for the family’s problems) through her eventual attempt to escape from her life by portraying a cowherd at an experimental art museum. I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing—so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves. Read More
April 1, 2022 In Memoriam Remembering Richard Howard By Craig Morgan Teicher Richard Howard receiving the 2017 Hadada Award. Matteo Mobilio. Richard Howard, poet, translator, critic, and poetry editor of this magazine from 1992 to 2004, died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. He was the last of a certain type of literary person, of which I am tempted also to call him the first—I can think of no one like him, except perhaps Robert Browning or Henry James, two of the writers whose work most profoundly animated his life. His approach to literature was both comprehensive and conversational—he lived in the books he loved, all the time, was ever in the midst of talking about them, ever encountering the great writers in his imagination, and reawakening them in poems that staged impossible meetings between literary and historical figures. These were his favorite fantasies: Richard Strauss addressing Arnold Schoenberg, Henry James reviewing a film released in 1942. Such figures (he loved that word) were his toys, and poetry his lifelong playroom, though in addition to the goal of finding and spreading joy in literature, he was committed to stewardship; he made it his business to ensure that the giants of the past weren’t forgotten. His most frequent and vehement complaint about other people was “They don’t read.” Read More
April 1, 2022 The Review’s Review What Our Spring Issue Writers Are Looking At By The Paris Review Image © Ra Boe / Wikipedia, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0 . Gary Goldschneider compiled the character traits of over fourteen thousand people to create The Secret Language of Birthdays. This bible was Goldschneider’s crowning achievement, though he had others. A self-described “personologist,” he was also a pianist notorious for marathon performances: he played all of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas, in chronological order, in one sitting (twelve hours), and all of Mozart’s sonatas in one sitting (six hours, three water breaks). The Secret Language of Birthdays follows the same gloriously logical yet irrational ordering principle of this kind of marathon performance. The 832-page volume devotes two-page spreads to every single day of the year. Goldschneider’s pronouncements rely heavily on the twelve zodiac signs—indeed, the book’s introduction provides the layman with a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of sun-sign astrology—and so the year begins on the first day in Aries, and the vernal equinox. Each day gets an enchanting definite article; August 24 is not just any old Day of Astute Examination but the day, the only one that could possibly be thus. Each spread presents an equitable overview of the personality traits of people born on that day. Take mine (thanks for asking!): I’m December 16, the Day of Soaring Imagination. The description of those born on the day begins with the positive—“among the most imaginative people”—but doesn’t fail to offer the flip side: “December 16 people are not the easiest to live with … some born on this day must be in their own world to work effectively.” The back-and-forth continues, in a Dagwood-sized compliment sandwich. Ultimately, “the highs of laughter and the depths of deep silence are all colors found on the December 16 palette.” Goldschneider also presents celebrities born on your day, as well as a tarot card and a mantra (“The storms of life eventually blow over”). An interactive web version of the book is explorable here. During the pandemic, the birthday book became one of my trusted methods of marking time. Hours felt oversignified, weeks became muddled, but the book’s Days—whose defining characteristics existed vertically through the years, like a tree trunk’s rings—gave the calendar a symbolic consistency that had nothing to do with anything going on yet was always oddly relevant. My friend unexpectedly went into labor on February 4, the Day of the Curveballer, and it blew straight through February 5, the Day of Quiet Eloquence; she birthed her son on February 6, the Day of Popularity. (“A popular kid?” she lamented.) The book has both the joy of revelation and the comfort of continuity. In high school, my Latin teacher sometimes began our class by opening an almanac and recounting what had happened on that day in history. The moral of the story, always: Nihil novum sub sole. Nothing new under the sun. —Adrienne Raphel, author of “Felix by Proxy” Read More
March 30, 2022 Arts & Culture David Wojnarowicz’s Home in the City By Hannah Gold David Wojnarowicz, Oct. 22nd postcard, from the Jean Pierre Delage Archive of Letters, Postcards and Ephemera, 1979–1991. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York. David Wojnarowicz’s final home was on the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street on the Lower East Side. He moved in after the prior tenant, his mentor and former lover Peter Hujar, died of AIDS. A few months later, in 1988, David was diagnosed with AIDS himself; he’d die in the Second Avenue apartment four years later at the age of thirty-seven. Read More
March 29, 2022 Redux Redux: The Best Time for Bad Movies By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. IMAGE VIA THE PARIS REVIEW ARCHIVES. PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW BY HILTON ALS. “With a picture that doesn’t work, no matter how stupid and how bad, they’re still going to try to squeeze every single penny out of it,” the legendary director Billy Wilder remarked in 1996, in the Review’s first-ever Art of Screenwriting interview. “You go home one night and turn on the TV and suddenly, there on television, staring back at you, on prime time, that lousy picture, that thing, is back!” How many filmmakers might have been quietly struggling with similar emotions on Sunday night? We wouldn’t want to speculate, but we certainly did tune in to the Oscars. This week, why not revel in the kind of old-school glamour that’s beyond good or bad? Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Taj Mahal” dissects a cast of Hollywood actors, directors, and other eccentrics; the poet Chase Twichell conjures the anarchic spirit of a darkened theater in the afternoon; and in words and a series of ravishing photographs, Hilton Als allows himself “to dream the kind of movie [he] would make” about James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and his late sister. And don’t miss Wilder’s account of what Claudette Colbert said to her director, Frank Capra, when they wrapped the film that won her the Academy Award … If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Screenwriting No. 1 Billy Wilder I remember those days in New York when one writer would say to the other, I’m broke. I’m going to go to Hollywood and steal another fifty thousand. Moreover, they didn’t know what movie writing entailed. You have to know the rules before you break them, and they simply didn’t school themselves. I’m not just talking about essayists or newspapermen; it was even the novelists. None of them took it seriously … Pictures are something like plays. They share an architecture and a spirit. A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what’s wrong with the third act. What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act. From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) Read More