Monday, July 18, 2016

Lists



The End of the World, Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame, Blaise Cendrars, 1919
Three Fantasies, John Cowper Powys, 1985
Vathek, William Beckford, 1786
The Sundial, Shirley Jackson, 1958
Something by Nathalie Seurat
The Lost Ones, Samuel Beckett, 1971
Topology of a Phantom City, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1977

Topology of a Phantom City, Alain Robbe-Grille, 1977
Justine, the Marquis de Sade, 1791
Bound to Violence, Yambo Ouologuem, 1971
The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, Sarah Fielding, 1757
Clarissa, Samuel Richardson, 1748
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein, 1925

The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein, 1925
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young, 1965
Rhode Island Notebook, Gabriel Gudding, 2007

Rhode Island Notebook, Gabriel Gudding, 2007
Speech! Speech!, Geoffrey Hill, 2000
Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife), Christina Stead, 1976

Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife), Christina Stead, 1976
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726

A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud, 1873. [suggested by Scott GF Bailey]


7 comments:

  1. I've read six of these authors but only one of these books, so of course I have only a vague idea of what these linked lists point to. Does the Swift loop back around to the initial list of fantasies? Gulliver's Travels to A Season in Hell to The End of the World, maybe?

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    1. No, but it could. I like that. I'm going to add A Season in Hell at the end & credit it to you, if that's all right.

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    2. If the lists had headings then I think they'd look something like this;

      1. Fantasies with frenzy and restraint

      2. Similar to 1., but either sadistic or (sadism's relation) moral.

      3. Books that try to shake themselves apart

      4. Angry, grinning, talkative books

      5. Satirical books

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  2. Thanks for the outline. I'm rereading the Rimbaud to see if it's what I remembered it being. I might move on to the Cendrars after that.

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  3. What would you recommend as a translation of the Rimbaud? I have Wallace Fowlie who makes the lines brusque and stable: he takes dashes away and turns them into full stops. There must be better versions out there but I don't know what they are.

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  4. The translation I read yesterday was from 2010, by Simon Elmer & Eliot Albers. It was not so fine. I'm pretty sure that the first time I read Season, it was in Delmore Schwartz's translation. Schwartz's introduction is pretty good; I'm told that it's a bad translation, though. I'm trying to find whatever version we have at the house, but our poetry collection is scattered around. Oh, the Paul Schmidt is pretty good; it feels like poetry.

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    1. I might see what our library has, then. I wish I could ask Fowlie why he changed the punctuation in his translation: I know how his Rimbaud seems to me, but how does it seem to him?

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