July 1, 2015 Listen “Mumbling Like a Maniac”: An Interview with Robert Fagles By Dan Piepenbring At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordings of these interviews available at 92Y’s Poetry Center Online and here at The Paris Review. Consider them deleted scenes from our Writers at Work interviews, or directors’ cuts, or surprisingly lifelike radio adaptations. Because our new Summer issue has a focus on translation, we’ve dug up two interviews with translators to present this week. This one features Robert Fagles, who died in 2008—a prolific translator of ancient Greek and Roman texts, he’s remembered especially for his seminal editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Read More
July 1, 2015 On the Shelf Metaphor Map (from the Makers of Allegory Atlas), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The University of Glasgow’s Metaphor Map. Our Summer issue features illustrations by Jason Novak for the first installment of Chris Bachelder’s new novel, The Throwback Special. Now you can see them here—including a particularly enchanting representation of an oviraptor … With his suicide, David Foster Wallace set into motion a saccharine revisionism that has now, with the release of the movie The End of the Tour, reached full power. The film is “high-gloss true-story after-school special”; the writer is gone; a weird kind of self-help saint has taken his place. “A writer who courted contradiction and paradox, who could come on as a curmudgeon and a scold, who emerged from an avant-garde tradition and never retreated into conventional realism, he has been reduced to a wisdom-dispensing sage on the one hand and shorthand for the Writer As Tortured Soul on the other … ” Are you lost on the roadside of figurative language? Fumbling in the dark through the land of the simile? Friend, consult the Metaphor Map, “which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from four million pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700 AD.” If you’re feeling down, spend a little time with pro-Confederacy children’s books, and you’ll feel no better at all. In fact, you’ll enjoy only a sense of deep inner turmoil. In Debra West Smith’s Young Heroes of the Confederacy, for instance, “readers are told that the children of a particular plantation-owning family were always taught to respect their slaves; on the next page, the patriarch is horse-whipping a cook … In one of the book’s rare direct mentions of slavery, Smith compares slavery to a foreign diet: ‘Whether we grow up eating snails in France, sushi in Japan, or crawfish in Louisiana, the foods we know are what we consider to be “normal.” ’ True so far as it goes, but Smith never quite gets around to saying directly that slave-owners, ‘known from their diaries and letters to be moral people,’ were doing anything worse than eating something icky.” In which two “unbearably sad” newish novels with life in their titles face off: A Little Life versus Preparation for the Next Life. “In A Little Life, the dirt is on the inside, hiding in a shadowy group of monks and suburban pedophiles, and in the psyche if their victim; in Preparation for the Next Life, it’s on the outside—it’s on our streets and our food and our national conscience.”
June 30, 2015 Listen “I Will Unveil Myself”: An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz By Dan Piepenbring At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordings of these interviews available at 92Y’s Poetry Center Online and here at The Paris Review. Consider them deleted scenes from our Writers at Work interviews, or directors’ cuts, or surprisingly lifelike radio adaptations. Because our new Summer issue has a focus on translation, we’ve dug up two interviews with translators to present this week. The first is with the poet Czesław Miłosz—it’s his birthday today, coincidentally—whose translations into Polish include works by Baudelaire, Eliot, Milton, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Simone Weil. Read More
June 30, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Anxiety By Sadie Stein “Last night I had a dream”—there are few sentences more ominous. And not in an interesting way, either, although people seem to think listening to dreams is the sort of thing friends are happy—nay, obligated—to do, like helping them move house or giving medical advice (if the friends happen to be doctors). Imposing them on a stranger is merely unforgivable. For my own part, I can bear dream narratives—it’s stories of drug-addled antics I can’t stand. What I hate is that they’re always supposed to be uproarious. But many of the problems inherent to an endless drug tale—lack of relatability, the difficulty of conjuring the scene, the essential loneliness of the experience—are the same. I won’t say relating either a hilarious drug story or a dream is an actively hostile act—but alienating, certainly. Maybe antisocial. Certainly solipsistic. Read More
June 30, 2015 On Language Quote Unquote By Jesse Browner A sentence goes viral—why? Quinn Dombrowski, The Library, 2010. Image via Flickr I recently discovered that a sentence of mine, written many years ago in a book that had enjoyed some critical praise but disappointing sales, had gone viral. I suppose I google myself about as often as any writer does, and I hope not more often, but on the occasion of my discovery I was doing so at someone else’s behest: in preparation for a new book, my publishing house had asked me to compile a portfolio of reviews of my previous books. As I scrolled through the search results, hunting for newspaper and magazine URLs, I became aware that I was seeing the same words and sentence fragments over and over again in the highlights at the top of each hit. “Eating…” “…communion…” “ …hospitality in general…” The combination sounded vaguely familiar. I finally tracked down the full quote at Goodreads. The book, The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down, from 2003, is an anecdotal history of hospitality in Western civilization, in reverse chronological order from Nazi Germany to Homeric Greece. The sentence, hidden deep within the body of the book and in no way positioned to draw attention to itself, reads as follows: Eating, and hospitality in general, is a communion, and any meal worth attending by yourself is improved by the multiples of those with whom it is shared. Read More
June 30, 2015 On the Shelf We Fucked on a Volcano, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Emilie Eisenhut, Vulkanausbruch, 1827, gouache on paper. “One cannot read a book,” Nabokov famously said, “one can only reread it.” That’s pleasant and all—certainly it flatters our sense of elitism, suggesting that “aesthetic appreciation requires exhaustive knowledge only of the best”—but doesn’t it amount to sophistry? “No reader ever really takes complete control of a book—it’s an illusion—and perhaps to expend vast quantities of energy seeking to do so is a form of impoverishment … Is it really wise to renounce all the impressions that a thousand books could bring, all that living, for the wisdom of five or six?” Today in the age of mechanical reproduction: the Smithsonian is 3-D printing prehistoric skulls. They have no intention of trying to pass off the replicas as authentic—they just want to share more of their skulls with the world, and 3-D printing them is the easiest way to do so. “Still, the proliferation of replicas does stand to diminish the value of the real thing. The museums that own the original skulls depend on income from visitors and model making, so the Smithsonian will limit production and keep the skulls’ 3-D ‘blueprints’ to itself.” Great news for poets! Bots have obviated the need for your art. They are, in fact, your art. Condolences. “I was thinking of writing a poem about bots, but that’s already so ten minutes ago, and anyway, some bot has already written that poem. Does it matter? These days people are writing poems about fucking on volcanoes. ‘We fucked on a volcano.’ How does that help? … You can expand the poetic field to include ‘we fucked on a volcano’ or even ‘the whole week we fucked on a volcano,’ and you can expand it to include bots, and so what? It’s bigger now … everything is.” Relatedly: conversations between bots are nearly indistinguishable from Beckett plays. Bots are dramatists, too. Z.: Then leave. Y.: How did you know? Z.: Just leave. Y.: You leave. Z.: No. Y.: Yes. Z.: I don’t even know how. New to the Oxford English Dictionary: twerk, intersectionality, staycation, presidentiable, SCOTUS.