Showing posts with label Arabian Nights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arabian Nights. Show all posts

Monday, August 29, 2022

Sir John Lubbock's 100 Books


Sir John Lubbock: The Pleasures of Life (1887)


One fateful evening in 1886, the Principal of the London Working-Men’s College, Sir John Lubbock, gave a speech to that institution. In it he outlined a list of 100 vital books which, if read attentively, might in themselves constitute a liberal education.

The idea took off with a vengeance, and after the list was reprinted in his essay-collection The Pleasures of Life, earnest self-improvers everywhere started to collect the various volumes.


Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913)


Lubbock himself never attended university, though he came from a privileged background, and had been educated at Eton by his wealthy family. A banker by profession, his real passions were archaeology and evolutionary biology, and he wrote extensively on both subjects.

Amongst other achievements, he was the the first to coin the terms "Neolithic" and "Palaeolithic" in one of his books about early man.


Antoine Galland: The Arabian Nights' Entertainments (London: Routledge, 1865)


The very first copy of the Arabian Nights I ever owned (rather similar to the one pictured above, but more battered and dogeared) proudly proclaimed itself as one of these "hundred books" - which gives some clue to the bonanza this must have constituted for enterprising publishers in the late nineteenth century.


Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure (1894-95)


It's easy to see how this idea of self-betterment through focussed reading informs Hardy's last prose masterpiece Jude the Obscure, with its almost unbearably poignant account of rural autodidact Jude's attempts to enter the sheltered cloisters of Christminster University through sheer effort and application. All in vain, of course (it is, after all, a Thomas Hardy novel).

There's a particularly poignant scene where Jude is sitting miserably by the side of the road realising the folly of his grand ambitions, and longing for someone to come by and comfort him:
But nobody did come, because nobody does: and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.



18 of the 100 Books (London: Routledge, 1890)
[The Shi King of Confucius; The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer; Darwin's Journal of Discoveries; The Origin of Species; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I and II; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; Captain Cook's Voyages; Humboldt's Travels I-III; Scott's Ivanhoe; La Morte D'Arthur; Spinoza; The Arabian Nights' Entertainments; Bacon's Novum Organum; The Nibelungenleid; Thackeray's Pendennis]


Here, in any case, is a slightly tidied-up list of the original 100 books. It's rather hard to make the numbers fit consistently, given Lubbock's habit of listing multiple works under one author or, alternatively, listing separate works by a writer under different categories. He also published different versions of it at different times.

Each entry has been linked to a free online text wherever possible.


LIST OF 100 BOOKS
[Works by Living Authors are omitted]

  1. The Holy Bible
  2. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
  3. Epictetus
  4. Aristotle’s Ethics
  5. The Analects of Confucius
  6. St Hilaire’s Le Bouddha et sa religion
  7. Wake’s Apostolic Fathers
  8. Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ
  9. Confessions of St. Augustine
  10. The Koran
  11. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
  12. Comte’s Catechism of Positive Philosophy
  13. Pascal’s Pensées
  14. Butler’s Analogy of Religion
  15. Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying
  16. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
  17. Keble’s Christian Year
  18. Plato’s Apology, Phædo, & Republic
  19. Xenophon’s Memorabilia
  20. Aristotle’s Politics
  21. The Public Orations of Demosthenes
  22. Cicero’s Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
  23. Plutarch’s Lives
  24. Berkeley’s Human Knowledge
  25. Descartes’ Discours sur la Méthode
  26. Locke’s On the Conduct of the Understanding
  27. Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey
  28. Hesiod
  29. Virgil
  30. Lucretius [1]
  31. The Mahabharata & The Ramayana [Epitomized in Talboy Wheeler’s History of India]
  32. Firdausi’s Shahnameh [Included in Persian Literature]
  33. The Nibelungenlied
  34. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
  35. The Shi King [or Book of Songs]
  36. Kalidasa’s Sakuntala [or The Lost Ring]
  37. Aeschylus’ Tragedies and Fragments & Trilogy
  38. Sophocles’ Oedipus
  39. Euripides’ Medea
  40. Aristophanes’ The Knights & The Clouds [In Comedies]
  41. Horace
  42. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
  43. Shakespeare
  44. Milton’s Paradise Lost & minor poems
  45. Dante’s Divina Commedia (Cary’s translation) (Longfellow’s translation)
  46. Spenser’s Faerie Queene
  47. Dryden’s Poems [vol 1 & vol 2]
  48. Scott’s Poems [The Lady of the Lake & Marmion]
  49. Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer & The Curse of Kehama [vol 1 & vol 2]
  50. Selected Poems of William Wordsworth
  51. Pope's Essay on Criticism; Essay on Man; Rape of the Lock and Other Poems
  52. Burns
  53. Byron’s Childe Harold
  54. Gray [in The Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett]
  55. Herodotus [vol 1 & vol 2]
  56. Xenophon’s Anabasis
  57. Thucydides
  58. Tacitus’ Germania
  59. Livy
  60. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  61. Hume’s History of England
  62. Grote’s History of Greece
  63. Carlyle’s French Revolution
  64. Green’s Short History of England
  65. Lewes’ History of Philosophy [vol 1 & vol 2]
  66. The Arabian Nights
  67. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
  68. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
  69. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield
  70. Cervantes’ Don Quixote
  71. Boswell’s Life of Johnson
  72. Molière
  73. Schiller’s William Tell
  74. Sheridan’s The Critic, School for Scandal, & The Rivals
  75. Carlyle’s Past and Present
  76. Bacon’s Novum Organum
  77. Smith’s Wealth of Nations
  78. Mill’s Political Economy
  79. Cook’s Voyages
  80. Humboldt’s Travels [vol 1, vol 2 & vol 3]
  81. White’s Natural History of Selborne
  82. Darwin's Origin of Species & Naturalist’s Voyage
  83. Mill’s Logic
  84. Bacon’s Essays
  85. Montaigne’s Essays
  86. Hume’s Essays
  87. Macaulay’s Essays
  88. Addison’s Essays
  89. Emerson’s Essays
  90. Burke’s Select Works
  91. Smiles’ Self-Help
  92. Voltaire's Zadig & Micromegas
  93. Goethe’s Faust & Autobiography
  94. Miss Austen’s Emma, or Pride and Prejudice [2]
  95. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair & Pendennis
  96. Dickens' Pickwick, David Copperfield
  97. Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii
  98. George Eliot’s Adam Bede
  99. Kingsley’s Westward Ho!
  100. Scott’s Waverley Novels



Notes:

1. Lubbock notes that this is “less generally suitable than most of the others in the list.”
2. Lubbock chose later to omit this entry, commenting that English novelists were “somewhat over-represented.”

A revised version of the list was published in 1930, after Lubbock's death, with the following substituted entries:
  • Comte’s Catechism [no. 12] was replaced by Seneca
  • Dryden’s Poems [no. 47] was replaced by Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
  • Hume’s Essays [no. 86] was replaced by Ruskin’s Modern Painters




Even making due allowance for the era in which it was compiled, it remains a somewhat surprising selection. There are only two female authors - both English novelists - and Lubbock eventually chose to omit Jane Austen and retain only George Eliot. Even there, it's her first novel Adam Bede, rather than the more mature Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda, which makes the cut.

There's also what would now seem a disproportionate emphasis on Christian theology, ancient and modern. I count no fewer than ten such volumes, ranging from Saint Augustine to Keble's Christian Year. By contrast, there's one book on Buddhism, another on Confucianism, one on Hinduism, and another on Islam.

There are ten British novelists there, too. But who would now think to include Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley among their number? Cervantes, Goethe, and Voltaire are the only other fiction writers on the list. It's odd, moreover, to see the latter represented by Zadig and Micromegas rather than the more obvious Candide.

It's only to be expected, given Victorian ideas on education, that the Greek and Roman classics should make up a substantial part of the listings - Poets such as Homer, Hesiod, Horace, Lucretius & Virgil; Dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides & Aristophanes; Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius; Historians such as Herodotus, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Thucydides & Xenophon; Orators such as Demosthenes & Cicero ... In total, they make up almost a quarter of the readings.

To do him justice, Lubbock himself was the first to admit the limitations of his project:
It is one thing to own a library; it is quite another to use it wisely. I have often been astonished how little care people devote to the selection of what they read. Books, we know, are almost innumerable; our hours for reading are, alas! very few. And yet many people read almost by hazard. They will take any book they chance to find in a room at a friend's house; they will buy a novel at a railway-stall if it has an attractive title; indeed, I believe in some cases even the binding affects their choice.

The selection is, no doubt, far from easy. I have often wished some one would recommend a list of a hundred good books. If we had such lists drawn up by a few good guides they would be most useful. I have indeed sometimes heard it said that in reading every one must choose for himself, but this reminds me of the recommendation not to go into the water till you can swim.

In the absence of such lists I have picked out the books most frequently mentioned with approval by those who have referred directly or indirectly to the pleasure of reading, and have ventured to include some which, though less frequently mentioned, are especial favorites of my own. Every one who looks at the list will wish to suggest other books, as indeed I should myself, but in that case the number would soon run up.
He goes on to specify:
I have abstained, for obvious reasons, from mentioning works by living authors, though from many of them — Tennyson, Ruskin, and others —I have myself derived the keenest enjoyment; and I have omitted works on science, with one or two exceptions, because the subject is so progressive.

I feel that the attempt is over bold, and I must beg for indulgence, while hoping for criticism; indeed one object which I have had in view is to stimulate others more competent far than I am to give us the advantage of their opinions.
There's a lot more detail about his specific choices in chapter 4 of The Pleasures of Life, which makes very interesting reading. His reservations about some of the inclusions are particularly revealing. For instance:
Nor must I omit to mention Sir T. Malory's Morte d'Arthur, though I confess I do so mainly in deference to the judgment of others.
Or, on the subject of which novelists to include:
Macaulay considered Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne the best novel in any language, but my number is so nearly complete that I must content myself with English: and will suggest Thackeray (Vanity Fair and Pendennis), Dickens (Pickwick and David Copperfield), G. Eliot (Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss), Kingsley (Westward Ho!), Lytton (Last Days of Pompeii), and last, not least, those of Scott, which indeed constitute a library in themselves, but which I must ask, in return for my trouble, to be allowed, as a special favor, to count as one.

Pierre de Marivaux: La Vie de Marianne (1731-45)


Strangely enough, I've actually read La Vie de Marianne. It's a surprisingly entertaining novel, given that its principal subject is the endless rehearsal of the sufferings and woes of the title character - whom I'd always assumed to have been suggested by Samuel Richardson's Pamela in his 1740 novel of that name. Now, however, I see that the dates don't fit, and that if there was influence, it must have been in the opposite direction.

I'm not sure that I'd put it in any lists of must-reads, mind you, but then that just illustrates the invidiousness of such choices. The moment you start to legislate about such things, you end up putting in bizarre tomes such as Samuel Smiles' Self-Help rather than, say, Marx's Das Kapital.

Would it do a modern reader any harm to sit down and start reading their way through Sir John Lubbock's hundred books? No, I don't think so. At the very least it would give you quite a good idea of the classical idea of the canon - as it stood in the late nineteenth century.

I'm not sure that it would do you all that much good, though. You'd have to substitute more reliable texts on the world's great religions, more up-to-date histories than Carlyle's or Grote's, and a greatly increased number of books on economics and science. In fact, you might end up with something like this:




Britannica: Great Books of the Western World (1990)


The Britannica Great Books of the Western World series was first published, as a set of 54 volumes, in 1952:
The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series drawn from Western Civilization: the book must have been relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read repeatedly with respect to liberal education; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 "Great Ideas" as identified by the editor of the series's comprehensive index, ... dubbed the "Syntopicon".
A second edition, enlarged to 60 volumes, was published in 1990. Among other revisions, "Four women authors were included, where previously there were none."

You can look at the original lists in the Wikipedia article above. I suspect that most of us probably have a few odd volumes of the series kicking around. The double-columns of print and large format make them difficult to read, but they are a useful source for otherwise difficult to locate texts. I see that I myself own ten of them - marked below in bold - though I've never consciously collected them:
  1. The Great Conversation
  2. Syntopicon I
  3. Syntopicon II
  4. Volume 4: Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)
    • The Iliad
    • The Odyssey
    Homer. The Iliad & The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. 1898. Great Books of the Western World, 4. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. 1952. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1989.
  5. Aeschylus / Sophocles / Euripides / Aristophanes
  6. Herodotus / Thucydides
  7. Plato
  8. Volume 8: Aristotle I
    • Categories
    • On Interpretation
    • Prior Analytics
    • Posterior Analytics
    • Topics
    • Sophistical Refutations
    • Physics
    • On the Heavens
    • On Generation and Corruption
    • Meteorology
    • Metaphysics
    • On the Soul
    • Minor biological works
    Aristotle. The Works, Volume 1. Ed. W. D. Ross. Great Books of the Western World, 8. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  9. Volume 9: Aristotle II
    • History of Animals
    • Parts of Animals
    • On the Motion of Animals
    • On the Gait of Animals
    • On the Generation of Animals
    • Nicomachean Ethics
    • Politics
    • The Athenian Constitution
    • Rhetoric
    • Poetics
    Aristotle. The Works, Volume 2. Ed. W. D. Ross. Great Books of the Western World, 9. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  10. Hippocrates / Galen
  11. Volume 11:
    • Euclid
      • The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements
    • Archimedes
      • On the Sphere and Cylinder
      • Measurement of a Circle
      • On Conoids and Spheroids
      • On Spirals
      • On the Equilibrium of Planes
      • The Sand Reckoner
      • The Quadrature of the Parabola
      • On Floating Bodies
      • Book of Lemmas
      • The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems
    • Apollonius of Perga
      • On Conic Sections
    • Nicomachus of Gerasa
      • Introduction to Arithmetic
    Euclid. The Thirteen Books of the Elements / Archimedes. The Works, Including the Method / Apollonius of Perga. On Conic Sections / Nichomachus of Gerga. Introduction to Arithmetic. Trans. Thomas L. Heath, R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Martin L. D’Ooge. 1926 & 1939. Great Books of the Western World, 11. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  12. Lucretius / Epictetus / Marcus Aurelius
  13. Virgil
  14. Volume 14: Plutarch
    • The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by John Dryden)
    Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (The Dryden Translation). Great Books of the Western World, 14. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  15. Tacitus
  16. Volume 16:
    • Ptolemy
      • Almagest, (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)
    • Nicolaus Copernicus
      • On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
    • Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
      • Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V)
      • The Harmonies of the World (Book V)
    Ptolemy. The Almagest / Copernicus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres / Kepler. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy: IV & V; The Harmonies of the World: V. Trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Charles Glenn Wallis. Great Books of the Western World, 16. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  17. Plotinus
  18. St. Augustine
  19. Volume 19: Thomas Aquinas
    • Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
    Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica, 1. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1941. Rev. Daniel J. Sullivan. Great Books of the Western World, 19. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  20. Volume 20: Thomas Aquinas
    • Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
    Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica, 2. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1941. Rev. Daniel J. Sullivan. Great Books of the Western World, 20. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  21. Dante
  22. Chaucer
  23. Machiavelli / Hobbes
  24. Rabelais
  25. Montaigne
  26. Shakespeare I
  27. Shakespeare II
  28. Gilbert / Galileo / Harvey
  29. Cervantes: Don Quixote
  30. Sir Francis Bacon
  31. Descartes / Spinoza
  32. Milton
  33. Pascal
  34. Newton / Huygens
  35. Locke/ Berkeley / Hume
  36. Swift: Gulliver's Travels / Sterne: Tristram Shandy
  37. Fielding: Tom Jones
  38. Montesquieu / Rousseau
  39. Adam Smith
  40. Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I
  41. Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire II
  42. Kant
  43. American State Papers / Hamilton, Madison, Jay: The Federalist / John Stuart Mill
  44. Boswell: Life of Johnson
  45. Lavoisier / Fourier / Faraday
  46. Hegel
  47. Goethe: Faust
  48. Melville: Moby Dick
  49. Darwin
  50. Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels
  51. Tolstoy: War and Peace
  52. Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
  53. Volume 53: William James
    • The Principles of Psychology
    James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Great Books of the Western World, 53. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
  54. Volume 54: Sigmund Freud
    • The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
    • Selected Papers on Hysteria
    • The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
    • The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
    • Observations on "Wild" Psycho-Analysis
    • The Interpretation of Dreams
    • On Narcissism
    • Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
    • Repression
    • The Unconscious
    • A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
    • Beyond the Pleasure Principle
    • Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
    • The Ego and the Id
    • Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
    • Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
    • Civilization and Its Discontents
    • New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
    Freud, Sigmund. The Major Works. Great Books of the Western World, 54. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.



Again it seems, in retrospect, 70 years on, quite an odd list. It's very anglocentric, for a start: Boswell's Life of Johnson, a whole slew of novels and other literary works easily available elsewhere ... but it does represent a certain advance on Lubbock, insofar (at least) that it admits upfront its 'Western' orientation - if you'll forgive the pun.

The editors were well aware of this, however, so when they revised it in 1990, they added six new volumes of more contemporary material: one on Philosophy, one on Science, one on Economics, one on Anthropology, and two on Modernist Literature (you can see further details here).

Like all such grand intellectual enterprises, however, it looks now more like an index of the blind-spots in the late twentieth-century mind than a truly satisfactory summary of the best of Western thought.




Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)


So what's my conclusion? "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes," as Henry Thoreau put it so succinctly (or, as in this case, new book-bindings). But he went on to say: "and not rather a new wearer of clothes" - which is perhaps the nub of the matter.

No set list of readings will produce an original, free-thinking intellect, whether it be Sir John Lubbocks's 100 books, the Britannica Great Books, the Harvard Classics, or The Sacred Books of the East. That's not to say that such collections of books have no abiding usefulness, however - it's probably better to take them as a series of local guides than as a grand, overarching index to the nature of the universe, however.

And, in the meantime, it can be useful - and salutary - to skim through such lists and remind yourself of just how far you've fallen short of the minimum knowledge expected of either a nineteenth-century or a more contemporary 'common reader'!




David Morrell & Hank Wagner: Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (2010)


Thursday, February 03, 2022

Retirement gift



Unity Books
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd (31/1/2022)]


My colleagues at Massey University were kind enough to have a bit of a whip-round when I left the building (or rather the zoom-room) a couple of weeks ago now. Friday, 14th January was my official last day, if you're curious.

I have to say that I was impressed by their intuition that what would suit me best is a book-token, and their choice of locations - Unity Books in High Street - was also right on target. Where else can you go in Auckland to find "brainy stuff"? (Believe it or not, that's the label above one of the bookcases in the shop).

I won't be rude enough to reveal how much the book-token was for, but suffice it to say that it covered the four brand-new books above. They are (in alphabetical order):
Nasrullah Munshi. Kalila and Dimna. Trans. Wheeler M. Thackston. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2019.

Vladimir Nabokov. Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor. Ed. Brian Boyd & Anastasia Tolstoy. 2019. Penguin Modern Classics. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2020.

Pablo Neruda. The Complete Memoirs: Expanded Edition. 2017. Trans. Hardie St. Martin & Adrian Nathan West. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Carol Angier. Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald. London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2021.
I guess that the nice thing about them was that - either by coincidence, or through the serendipities of personal psychology - each one of them encapsulates a strong area of interest for me:




Nasrullah Munshi: Kalila and Dimna (2019)


The first, for instance, a new translation of a classic set of Arabic fables, adapted and transmuted from their Sanskrit originals, falls into the class of books related to the Arabian Nights, a work which fascinates me so much that not only do I maintain a website devoted to the subject, but I've also devised - and taught - an entire fiction writing course centred on the collection.

Bidpai, the Indian sage who tells the stories - hence their alternative title The Fables of Bidpai (or 'Pilpay' in French) - focussed them around two ambitious jackals, Kalila and Dimna, employed as servants by the King (a Lion). They consist of a series of intertwined beast fables designed to illustrate the pitfalls in the way of just and effective rule.

Their immediate predecessor was the Sanskrit collection The Panchatantra, also available in a variety of recensions and forms. Behind that lie the Buddhist Jātaka Tales, the Kathāsaritsāgara [Ocean of Streams of Story], and The Hitopadesha. In its turn, Kalila and Dimna would go on to influence the numerous beast fables included in the Thousand and One Nights itself.


Kalila Upbraiding Dimna (16th century)

Kalīla wa-Dimna
(c.8th century)

    The Panchatantra [Pañcatantra] (c.3rd century BCE)

  1. Ryder, Arthur W., trans. The Panchatantra. 1925. Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1964.
  2. Edgerton, Franklin, trans. The Panchatantra. London: Allen & Unwin, 1965.
  3. Visnu Sarma. The Pancatantra. Trans. Chandra Rajan. 1993. London: Penguin, 1995.
  4. Olivelle, Patrick, trans. The Pañcatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.


  5. The Jātaka Tales (c.5th century)

  6. Rhys Davids, T. W. trans. Buddhist Birth-Stories (Jātaka Tales): The Commentarial Introduction Entitled Nidāna-Kathā, The Story of the Lineage. 1880. Broadway Translations. London & New York: Routledge & Dutton, 1925.
  7. Cowell, E. B., ed. The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births. Trans. R. Chambers, W. H. D. Rouse, H. T. Francis & R. A. Neil, W. H. D. Rouse, H. T. Francis, E. B. Cowell & W. H. D. Rouse. 6 vols in 3. 1895-1907. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1990.


  8. Kalīla wa-Dimna (c.8th century)

  9. Benalmocaffa, Abdalá. Calila y Dimna. Introducción, traducción y notas de Marcelino Villegas. Libro de Bolsillo: Clásicos 1512. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1991.
  10. Kalila and Dimna: Selected Fables of Bidpai. Retold by Ramsay Wood. Introduction by Doris Lessing. 1980. London: Granada, 1982.
  11. Munshi, Nasrullah. Kalila and Dimna. Trans. Wheeler M. Thackston. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2019.


  12. Somadeva (c.11th century)

  13. Penzer, N. M., ed. The Ocean of Story: Being C. H. Tawney’s Translation of Somadeva’s Kathā Sarit Sāgara (or Ocean of Streams of Story). 1880-87. 10 vols. London: Privately Printed for Subscribers Only by Chas. J. Sawyer Ltd., Grafton House, W.1., 1924-1928.
  14. Penzer, N. M., ed. The Ocean of Story: Being C. H. Tawney’s Translation of Somadeva’s Kathā Sarit Sāgara (or Ocean of Streams of Story). 1880-87. 10 vols. 1924-28. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968.
  15. Somadeva. Tales from the Kathāsaritsāgara. Trans. Arshia Sattar. Foreword by Wendy Doniger. 1994. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.
  16. Somadeva. Océan des rivières de contes. Ed. Nalini Balbir, with Mildrède Besnard, Lucien Billoux, Sylvain Brocquet, Colette Caillat, Christine Chojnacki, Jean Fezas & Jean-Pierre Osier. Traduction des ‘Contes du Vampire’ par Louis & Marie-Simone Renou, 1963. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 438. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.


  17. Narayana (c.12th century)

  18. Chandiramani, G. L., trans. The Hitopadesha: An Ancient Fabled Classic. 1995. Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 1999.




Vladimir Nabokov: Think, Write, Speak (2019)


Shortly before I went to High School in the 1970s, the revisionist teachers at Rangitoto College decided to replace the more traditional Latin and French with Russian and Indonesian - more practical choices, or so they thought, for the contemporary world.

I never studied Indonesian, but I did learn Russian - along with French, which had fortunately survived their cull. I wouldn't say that I learnt it well, but I can follow it a bit, and I can certainly manage Cyrillic letters, which are actually the easiest part of the whole business. The complexity of Russian grammar was certainly challenging, but probably no more so than Latin would have been.

The abiding result of all that is a fascination with Russian literature and culture, which has manifested itself in endless porings over such 'Silver Age' writers as Mandel'stam and Pasternak, as well as the more obvious Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy. Nabokov has never been one of my main heroes, but his brilliance as a bilingual commentator as well as a writer makes him an inevitable subject of interest for me.

Brian Boyd's numerous books on the subject have (I suspect) all made their way into my collection by now. His two-volume biography is, of course, paramount, and - while it did come as a bit of a surprise to discover just how new material remained to be collected in the book above - I certainly welcome this new addition.


Giuseppe Pino: Vladimir Nabokov (1960s)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
(1899-1977)

    Collections:

  1. The Portable Nabokov. 1968. Ed. Page Stegner. Viking Compass Edition. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1971.
  2. Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight / Bend Sinister / Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1941, 1947, 1951. Ed. Brian Boyd. The Library of America, 87. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.
  3. Novels 1955-1962: Lolita / Pnin / Pale Fire / Lolita: A Screenplay. 1955, 1957, 1962, 1974. Ed. Brian Boyd. The Library of America, 88. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.
  4. Novels 1969-1974: Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle / Transparent Things / Look at the Harlequins!. 1969, 1972, 1974. Ed. Brian Boyd. The Library of America, 89. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.

  5. Novels:

  6. Mary: A Novel. [‘Машенька’, 1926]. Trans. Michael Glenny in collaboration with the Author. 1970. A Fawcett Crest Book. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1971.
  7. King, Queen, Knave. [‘Король, дама, валет’, 1928]. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the Author. 1968. London: Panther Books, 1970.
  8. The Defence. [‘Защита Лужина’, 1930]. Trans. Michael Scammell in collaboration with the Author. 1964. Panther Books Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973.
  9. Glory. [‘Подвиг’, 1932]. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. 1971. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
  10. The Eye. [‘Соглядатай’, 1932]. Trans. by the Author. 1965. London: Panther Books Ltd., 1968.
  11. Laughter in the Dark. [‘Камера Обскура’, 1933]. Trans. by the Author. 1938. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
  12. Despair. [‘Отчаяние’, 1934]. Trans. by the Author. 1937 & 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
  13. Invitation to a Beheading. [‘Приглашение на казнь’, 1936]. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the Author. 1959. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
  14. The Gift. [‘Дар’, 1938]. Trans. Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the Author. 1963. London: Panther Books Ltd., 1966.
  15. The Enchanter. [‘Волшебник’, 1939]. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. 1985. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.
  16. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. 1941. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971.
  17. Bend Sinister. 1947. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.
  18. Lolita. 1955. A Corgi Book. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1965.
  19. The Annotated Lolita. 1955. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. 1970. Rev. ed. 1991. Vintage Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1991.
  20. Pnin. 1957. Penguin Books 1491. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960.
  21. Pale Fire. 1962. A Corgi Book. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1964.
  22. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971.
  23. The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). Ed. Dmitri Nabokov. 2009. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2009.

  24. Stories:

  25. Nabokov's Dozen: Thirteen Stories. 1958. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1959.
  26. Nabokov's Quartet. 1966. London: Panther Books, 1969.
  27. A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. 1973. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
  28. Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. 1975. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
  29. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. 1976. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
  30. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. 1995. Vintage International. New York: Random House, Inc., 1997.

  31. Plays:

  32. The Waltz Invention: A Play in Three Acts. [‘Izobretenie Val'sa’, 1938]. Trans. 1966. A Pocket Cardinal Edition. New York: Pocket Books, 1967.
  33. The Man from the USSR and Other Plays. With Two Essays on the Drama. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Bruccoli Clark. San Diego & New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1984.

  34. Poetry & Translation:

  35. Aleksandr Pushkin. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary. Revised Edition. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov. 1964 & 1975. Bollingen Series LXXII. 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
    1. Translator's Introduction / Eugene Onegin: The Translation
    2. Commentary on Preliminaries and Chapters One to Five
    3. Commentary on Chapters Six to Eight, "Onegin's Journey, " and "Chapter Ten" / Appendixes
    4. Index / Evgeniy Onegin: Reproduction of the 1837 Edition
  36. Aleksandr Pushkin. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary. Revised Edition. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov. 1964 & 1975. Paperback Edition in Two Volumes. 1981. Bollingen Series LXXII. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
    1. Translator’s Introduction / Eugene Onegin: The Translation
    2. Commentary and Index
  37. Poems and Problems. 1970. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972.
  38. Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry. Ed. Brian Boyd & Stanislav Shvabrin. Introduction by Brian Boyd. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Florida: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008.
  39. Collected Poems. Ed. Thomas Karshan. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. 2012. London: Penguin, 2013.

  40. Non-fiction:

  41. Nikolai Gogol. 1944. Oxford Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
  42. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1967. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
  43. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1951, 1967, 1998. Introduction by Brian Boyd. Everyman's Library, 188. London: David Campbell Publishers Limited, 1999.
  44. Strong Opinions. 1973. Vintage International. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1990.
  45. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Introduction by John Updike. 1980. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1983.
  46. Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. 1981. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1983.
  47. Lectures on Don Quixote. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Foreword by Guy Davenport. 1983. A Harvest / HBJ Book. Bruccoli Clark. San Diego, New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1984.
  48. Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. Ed. Brian Boyd & Robert Michael Pyle. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Allen Lane. London: The Penguin Press, 2000.
  49. Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor. Ed. Brian Boyd & Anastasia Tolstoy. 2019. Penguin Modern Classics. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2020.

  50. Letters:

  51. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. 1979. Harper Colophon Books. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1980.
  52. Selected Letters, 1940-1977. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov & Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1989. London: Vintage, 1991.

  53. Secondary:

  54. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. 1990. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990.
  55. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. 1991. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.
  56. Boyd, Brian. Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
  57. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Part. 1977. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1977.
  58. Field, Andrew. VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. 1967, 1977 & 1986. A Queen Anne Press Book. London: Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1987.
  59. Quennell, Peter, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute. His Life, His Work, His World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1979.
  60. Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). 1999. Picador. London: Macmillan Pubishers Ltd., 2000.




Pablo Neruda: The Complete Memoirs (2021)


The third book on the list takes me back to a vital part of my life: the four years I spent at Edinburgh University, working on my Doctorate on Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day.

Catchy title, huh? Agonising over the precise wording of the subtitle, the selection of authors, and (of course) of so curious a choice of subject-matter in the first place, were all the part of the general atmosphere of tension which accompanied my years in Graduate School.

Not that I didn't have fun, too. Edinburgh is a delightful city to live in, and it's a cultural treat just to walk around its streets. I got to know it pretty well - or so I thought - during those years. Even now I could navigate it blindfold.

As far as my studies go, I guess that the residue they've left behind is mostly just a love for Latin American literature in general. I picked up a reading knowledge of Spanish while I was there - enough for a nodding acquaintance with the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Octavio Paz. Pablo Neruda, too. I was blown away by parts of his epic Canto General (1950).

This new edition of his memoirs probably adds little to the picture given by the posthumous Confieso que he vivido (1974), but then you never know: in any case, for a completist such as myself, it was a necessary purchase.


Pablo Neruda (1963)

Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto ['Pablo Neruda']
(1944-2001)


    Poetry:

  1. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. [‘20 Poemas de amor y una Canción desesperada’, 1924]. Trans. W. S. Merwin. 1969. Cape Editions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971.
  2. Residencia en la tierra. 1933, 1935. Ed. Hernán Loyola. Letras Hispanicas, 254. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1987.
  3. Residence on Earth. [‘Residencia en la tierra’: I, 1933; II, 1935; III, 1947]. Trans. Donald D. Walsh. New York: New Directions Press, 1973.
  4. Canto General. 1950. Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Barcelona; Editorial Seix-Barral, 1983.
  5. Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems. 1947. Trans. 1950. Introduction by Christopher Perriam. Illustrated by José Venturelli. London: The Journeyman Press Ltd., 1988.
  6. Canto General: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. [‘Canto General’, 1950]. Trans. Jack Schmitt. Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría. Latin American Literature and culture, 7. 1991. A Centennial Book. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000.
  7. Extravagaria: A Bilingual Edition. 1958. Trans. Alastair Reid. Cape Poetry Paperbacks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
  8. 100 Love Sonnets. [‘Cien sonetos de amor’, 1960]. Trans. Stephen Tapscott. Texas Pan American Series. 1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
  9. Fully Empowered: A Bilingual Edition. [‘Plenos poderes’, 1962]. Trans. Alastair Reid. A Condor Book. London: Souvenir Press, 1976.
  10. Isla Negra: A Notebook. A Bilingual Edition. [‘Memorial de Isla Negra’, 1964]. Afterword by Enrico Mario Santí. Trans. Alastair Reid. 1981. A Condor Book. London: Souvenir Press, 1982.
  11. Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. Ed. & trans. Ben Belitt. Introduction by Luis Monguió. 1961. An Evergreen Book. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963.
  12. Selected Poems: A Bi-lingual Edition. Ed. Nathaniel Tarn. Trans. Anthony Kerrigan, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, & Nathaniel Tarn. 1970. Introduction by Jean Franco. Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
  13. The Book of Questions. [‘El libro de las preguntas’, 1974]. Trans. William O'Daly. 1991. A Kage-An Book. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2001.
  14. A Basic Anthology. Ed. Robert Pring-Mill. Dolphin Books. Oxford: The Dolphin Book Co. Ltd., 1975.
  15. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Ed. Ilan Stavans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

  16. Plays:

  17. Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta. [‘Fulgor y Muerte de Joaquín Murieta’, 1966]. Trans. Ben Belitt. 1972. Noonday Press. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

  18. Prose:

  19. Hacia la Ciudad Espléndida / Toward the Splendid City: Nobel Lecture. 1972. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
  20. Memoirs. [‘Confieso que he vivido: Memorias’, 1974]. Trans. Hardie St. Martin. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
  21. Passions and Impressions. [‘Para nacer he nacido’, 1978]. Ed. Matilde Neruda & Miguel Otero Silva. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1983.
  22. The Complete Memoirs: Expanded Edition. 2017. Trans. Hardie St. Martin & Adrian Nathan West. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.



Which brings us to the last (though certainly not least) of these books: a recent biography of German writer W. G. Sebald by Carol Angier, author of equally impressive lives of Primo Levi and Jean Rhys.

Recently I had the experience of co-supervising a Doctoral student who was working on Sebald's novel Austerlitz, and it was very interesting to revisit it in detail, and to realise how large an influence it had had on my thinking, even though I'd only read it once, many years before.

When the Sikh writer Jaspreet Singh was staying with us a few years ago, too, I recall that the word 'Sebaldian' was a frequent feature of his conversation. He was trying to accomplish a shift to a similarly half-scholarly, half-personal mode of narration, and while his ostensible subject was the German minimalist Robert Walser, it was Sebald alone who seemed to offer a way forward.

My interest in German writing goes back long before I ever actually studied the language. In fact, a good deal of the motivation to do so came from my desire to get closer to authors such as Kafka or Rilke (or, later, Paul Celan) whom I could only dimly make out through the dark glass of overlapping translations. The bilingual Sebald probably got as close as a German-born writer could to assimilation into English culture, but even that apparent closeness can be misleading. He may have spent most of his adult life in Essex, but his themes remained profoundly German to the end.



W. G. Sebald

Winfried Georg Sebald
(1944-2001)


    Poetry:

  1. After Nature. 1988. Trans. Michael Hamburger. 2002. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
  2. For Years Now. Images by Tess Jaray. London: Short Books, 2001.
  3. [with Jan Peter Tripp] Unrecounted: 33 Texts and 33 Etchings. 2003. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2004.
  4. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001. 2008. Trans. Iain Galbraith. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2011.

  5. Prose:

  6. Vertigo. 1990. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.
  7. The Emigrants. 1992. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1996. London: Vintage, 2002.
  8. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.
  9. A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser and Others. 1998. Trans. Jo Catling. 2013. London: Penguin, 2014.
  10. On the Natural History of Destruction: With Essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. 1999. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2003. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.
  11. Austerlitz. 2001. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2001. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.
  12. Campo Santo. Ed. Sven Meyer. 2003. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2005. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006.


W. G. Sebald: A Place in the Country (2013)




So there you go. That's my roll call of volumes. I suppose that it'll do no harm to reveal that I also bought another book - with my own money - while I was in the shop. I hope it shows no disrespect to my colleagues to admit that alongside all these impressive-sounding 'show books', I also picked up a copy of the latest Neil Gaiman collection.

Strangely enough, that seems to be the one I find myself reaching for most often in the long summer afternoons:






Sunday, August 15, 2021

Fast Thinkers and Ghost Writers



Britannica: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)


A bit of wisdom here from Pierre Bourdieu:
Fast-thinkers ... think in clichés, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about - banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem. But whether you're talking about a speech, a book, or a message on television, the major question of communication is whether the conditions for reception have been fulfilled: Does the person who's listening have the tools to decode what I'm saying?
Like most people (I suppose), I used to worry about my inability to shine in contests of quick-flowing wit. I remember once meeting a friend who'd been at Graduate School in America, and had returned to New Zealand to show off some of what he'd become. The talk came thick and fast, with nary a space to insert a word of one's own, or query exactly what it was we were talking about.
When you transmit a "received idea," it's as if everything is set, and the problem solves itself. Communication is instantaneous because, in a sense, it has not occurred; or it only seems to have taken place. The exchange of commonplaces is communication with no content other than the fact of communication itself. The "commonplaces" that play such an enormous role in daily conversation work because everyone can ingest them immediately. Their very banality makes them something the speaker and the listener have in common.
- Pierre Bourdieu, 'On Television' (1996/98)
[reference courtesy of Australian novelist Christine Howe, who quoted it at the 'Critical Futures' symposium I attended a couple of years ago at the University of Wollongong]
Now, however (thanks largely to Christine Howe), I worry about it less.





Dorothy L. Sayers: Whose Body? (1923)


At one point the conversation with my friend-recently-returned-from-the-US shifted (for some reason I've now forgotten) to the detective novels of Dorothy Sayers. Now I'd read all of these, in sequence, on more than one occasion, and could easily have answered any random question on campanology or heraldry drawn from her books.

My friend dismissed her quickly with a wry reference to the naming of the evil surgeon Sir Julian Freke ("Freak" - get it?) in her very first novel, Whose Body?, as well as a claim that the book was anti-semitic, given that the murderer's victim was a wealthy financier called Sir Reuben Levy.



Sir Frederick Treves: The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923)


Now this seemed (and seems) - to me - rather a complex matter. The name of Sir Julian Freke had, to my mind, been carefully chosen to recall to the reader that most famous of British surgeons Sir Frederick Treves, discoverer (and promoter) of Joseph Merrick, the (so-called) "Elephant Man."

Treves certainly seems a far more sympathetic figure, so perhaps 'Freke' is supposed to hint at the Mr. Hyde-like double nature lurking in any God-like surgeon. Or perhaps Sayers knew more gossip about Treves than we do now.



Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)


As for the claims of anti-semitism, they don't seem to me to have that much behind them, gruesome though the details of this particular murder undoubtedly are. Certainly Freke is presented as being intensely anti-semitic.

The subject is canvassed interestingly in the Wikipedia article on Dorothy Sayers. Later, in 1936, when "a translator wanted 'to soften the thrusts against the Jews' in Whose Body?, Sayers, surprised, replied that the only characters 'treated in a favourable light were the Jews!'"

In other words: "How can I be a racist? Some of my best friends are [fill in as required ...]."

I guess the overall point I'm trying to make is that my friend, a fast thinker if ever there was one, was onto the next point before any real consideration could be given to this one, wrecked reputations left smoking in his wake. Dorothy Sayers - anti-semite; T. S. Eliot - anti-semite; Pound - Fascist ... and so on and so forth. A label for everyone and the mouth constantly moving on to new aperçus and subtleties: quick subtleties, mind you, so that no-one (such as myself) stoutly bringing up the rear, could be permitted any time to break down or examine the ideas presented.

Talking people down in this matter - battering down their resistance with a shower of facts and figures, flimsy literary and cultural parallels, and random contemporary events, is, of course, one of the more effective ways of ensuring victory in debate. On paper it can seem to work equally well just as long as no-one really reads what you write.

As long as they skate over it in the same way, and at the same speed, that you composed it, the knockdown argument is almost guaranteed.



I'm sorry to say that British cultural critic and historian Marina Warner does seem to me to exemplify some of these traits. Don't get me wrong: I've read a great many of her books, and have received much profit from them. They certainly cover many areas - European folklore and fairy-tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights - which are of profound interest to me. And yet they continue to frustrate me, perhaps because of the speed at which her mind moves from subject to subject.

Here's a list of the books by her I own:
  1. The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of T’zu-hsi (1835-1908), Empress Dowager of China. 1972. London: Cardinal: 1974.
  2. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. 1975. London: Quartet Books, 1978.
  3. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
  4. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. 1985. London: Vintage, 1996.
  5. The Mermaids in the Basement. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994.
  6. [Edited] Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Illustrated by Sophie Herxheimer. 1994. London: Vintage, 1996.
  7. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995.
  8. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. 1998. London: Vintage, 2000.
  9. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  10. Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature & Culture. 2003. London: Vintage, 2004.
  11. Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights. 2011. Vintage Books. London: Random House, 2012.

As you can see, they're a eclectic bunch: history, fiction, literature, folklore ... She certainly covers a lot of ground.



Her ideas on transformation, cultural fluidity, gender roles, are all very persuasive, and tend to get quoted approvingly by other like-minded writers. But is she reliable? Can you trust her when it comes to tedious matters such as facts and dates?

Not always, I'm sorry to say. Let's take one small example:



In her introduction to the Folio Society's sumptuous six-volume edition of the Mardrus/Mathers translation of the Arabian Nights, she mentions that:
In the Victorian era, adventure-explorers such as Hugh Lane and Richard Burton, both ardent lovers of Araby, produced translations based on these Arabic compilations. Their editions reflect their own attachments: Hugh Lane's is stuffed full of ethnographical details of Old Cairo (some of it densely researched and nostalgic, other parts rather fanciful): Burton's version is an almost Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues, prolix and rococo, and is also truffled with lore (much of it salacious, earning Burton his nickname, 'Dirty Dick.'). [p.xiv]
But who is this "Hugh Lane" she is speaking of? There was a Hugh Lane (1875-1915), drowned by the sinking of the Lusitania, who is famous for having attempted to leave his priceless collection of impressionist paintings to his native country, Ireland, only to be rebuffed by the local Dublin authorities.

But the Lane Warner means is clearly Edward William Lane (1801-1876), who was indeed the first major translator of the Nights from Arabic into English. I don't think anyone has ever accused him of writing especially "nostalgically" about "Old Cairo", though - let alone "fancifully". On the contrary, his classic work on the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), remains a most informative and detailed guide to the city, compiled - as it was - in consultation with a number of local Sheikhs. His main claim to fame, however, is the comprehensive Arabic-English Lexicon, which occupied him from 1842 until his death.

Warner is on safer ground with Richard F. Burton. Her description of his work as a "Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues" is certainly accurate enough. Fans of his version - such as myself - may feel a little affronted by her casual dismissal of this massive labour of love, but she is (of course) perfectly entitled to her opinion, which is by no means an uncommon one.



Marina Warner: Stranger Magic (2012)


A few years later, in her book Stranger Magic, she admitted having mainly relied on the most recent French translation of the Nights - by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel, 3 vols (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2005-7) - in preference to any of the English ones. Had she actually read them? She certainly implies as much. Here, for instance, is her revised version of the paragraph quoted above:
In the Victorian era, adventure-explorers such as Edward W. Lane and Richard Burton, both ardent Arabophiles, produced translations that reflected their own attachments. Lane's, published in 1838-41, followed close on the heels of his ethnographical description of contemporary Cairo (The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1835); Lane added a huge apparatus of notes on Arab Society (some of it densely researched and nostalgic, other parts rather fanciful). The three-volume set of 1850 includes 600 engravings based on Lane's experiences in Cairo; my copy, which came originally from my great-grandmother's library, is one of the few books that I've owned and read since I was a child, and though it is pretty fustian, with Lane tranquillising so much of the book's agitated emotions and adventures, it is readable to a degree that Richard Burton's lurid and archaising version, made fifty years later, never reaches. [p.18]
It's not for me to cast any doubt on the passage referring to her childhood reading of Lane. It just seems a bit odd that someone who didn't even know (or bother to check) his first name a decade before, should treasure a copy of his translation as "one of the few books that I've owned and read since I was a child."

The snap judgements of the first version of the passage remain - "rather fanciful," "translations that reflected their own attachments" - though she has softened some of the more egregious epithets: "lovers of Araby" has become "Arabophiles", and Burton's version is now "lurid and archaising" rather than "an almost Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues, prolix and rococo ... truffled with lore (much of it salacious ...)."

I certainly don't question Warner's choice of texts to base her discussion on. I, too, am an admirer of the wonderful new French translation: It's just difficult to continue to believe in the reliability of a scholar who was hazy about E. W. Lane's first name - and certainly seems never to have read extensively in Burton's work - as a reliable guide to the intricacies of one of the world's longest books, with a complex textual history which spans cultures and continents as well as millennia of analogues.

In other words, beguiling as so many of Warner's generalisations and juxtapositions are, none of her statements - especially those centred around dates and names - can be trusted without further research. Which is really not much use. Even historical and cultural popularisers (a very worthwhile calling, IMHO) should be careful to check their facts. What exactly are they popularising, otherwise?





Helen Sword: Ghostwriting Modernism (2002)


My final exhibit is the book Ghostwriting Modernism, by Auckland University Academic Helen Sword. Like Warner's, Sword's pages are plastered her pages with allusions and lists of possible parallels. Unlike Warner's, though, her notes are a carefully composed repository of bibliographical leads and further information.

In terms of readability, it's probably no accident that Warner's book flew off the shelves whereas Sword's is obtainable only in university libraries and from specialist booksellers. If it weren't for my fascination with its subject-matter - the manifestation of spiritualist tropes in such canonical authors as Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, H. D., Plath and Hughes - I probably wouldn't have bothered to read it myself.

But, having now done so, I've shelved it close to hand for further consultation. This is a book which is more than the sum of its parts. It opens perspectives on masses of further work on such fascinating exhibits as James Merrill's Ouija-board epic The Changing Light at Sandover, or the spirit messages from dead RAF pilots which H. D. collected in the latter years of the Second World War, which have proved such an embarrassment to many of her admirers.

Everyone already knew that Yeats was a convinced Occultist, but simply collecting - in convenient form - so much data on the phenomena of 'ghostliness' in such mainstream twentieth century writers makes it almost impossible to continue to sideline it as some kind of individual aberration on the part of each of them.

That's not to say that there isn't something a bit loony about Sylvia and Ted crouched over the Ouija board receiving messages from the great unknown. But it certainly isn't nearly as odd and uncommon as many critics would like to believe. Did they do it, like Yeats, to access new "metaphors for poetry"? Or was it something more serious for them? All this, and much more, is discussed judiciously, and with ample cross-referencing, by Helen Sword.



Fast-thinkers or Ghostwriters? So many books now fall into the first category, I'm afraid. You start to read them, only to become gradually aware that they're little more than condensations of the idées reçues [received ideas] mocked so thoroughly by Flaubert in the "Dictionnaire des idées reçues" in his posthumous novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881). The research is sloppy and second-hand, the editing perfunctory, and the whole thing a mere "interruption to our studies," in A. E. Housman's devastating phrase.

Think of all those war books which keep on flopping out year after year: Martin Middlebrook's The First Day on the Somme (1971) was regarded as a seminal and revisionist work when it first appeared some fifty years ago now. Now, of course, further research has thrown in doubt many of its conclusions, but do we really need successive legions of books with more or less the same title, gloatingly recounting the same devastating events?

There's a furtive voyeurism about the worst of these books. They look like real books - their publishers try hard to make them resemble genuine historical works - but actually they're just rehashes of the same tired clichés. How many hacks have written books designed to show that Sir Douglas Haig was a great general, a genius on the level of Napoleon or Marlborough? He won, didn't he? And he was British, after all.

The trouble is that the real books concealed in this crimson tide of white noise, those based on real research and genuine new thinking, increasingly seldom emerge from the ruck. Ghostwriting Modernism is such a book. It's not perfect by any means - but it's certainly based on careful reading over many years. Stranger Magic, despite all the extravagant encomia reprinted on its cover ("a flying carpet of a book" - Jeanette Winterson), is, I'm afraid, not. It's hard, even, to say what it's actually about. Does it have a point? Or a theme? If so, I'm not really clear what it is, despite having read it assiduously from cover to cover.

And, when it comes to new books about the Arabian Nights, I can assure you that I'm not a particularly critical reader. Pretty much any and all authors of such can rely on me as a captive audience!