![A guest post from Dan Visel of With Hidden Noise:
No one reads Charles Montagu Doughty. I first came across the man in Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, still one of the best pointers to underappreciated writers and artists around. In “The Symbol of the Archaic,” he writes:
… the great unknown of English letters, Charles Montagu Doughty, who suspected all writers after Chaucer of whoring after strange dictionaries, who went into the Arabian desert (or “Garden of God”)—the most archaic act of modern literature—to save, as he said, the English language.
That salvation is still one of the best of books, the Travels in Arabia Deserta, though we have neglected his masterpiece, The Dawn in Britain, with its archaic theme and its archaic English. (p. 23)
Davenport’s précis is surprisingly accurate. Doughty’s best-known work is a 600,000 word account of his largely solitary travels in the Arabian peninsula starting in 1872. Ostensibly taken with an interest in archaeology, Doughty discovered very little. Dead set in the correctness of his Christianity and the falseness of Islam, he refused both to proselytize and to pretend to be Muslim. His prose reads like nothing else in English:
I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Beduins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honourable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion. But I had eaten of their cheer, and might sleep among wolves. The fortune of the morrow was dark as death, all ways were shut before me. There came in a W. Aly sheykh and principal of that tribe’s exiles, he was a hereditary arbiter or lawyer among them, in the custom of the desert: the arbiter sitting by and fixing upon me his implacable eyes, asked the sheykhs of the Moahîb in an under-voice ‘Why brought they the Nasrâny?’ They said, ‘Khalîl was come of himself.’ (p. 551)
This did not go over immensely well with the reading public in 1884, but T. E. Lawrence was a fan of the book and brought about its republication in 1921. Andrew Taylor’s biography God’s Fugitive (1999) traces the life of this supremely prickly man who called himself Khalîl, focusing largely on Doughty’s trip to Arabia. Dover put out a two-volume edition of Travels in Arabia Deserta in 1980 which reproduces his illustrations nicely; a version abridged by Edward Garnett (sometimes called Wanderings in Arabia) can also be found.
Doughty’s later books are no less strange, though much harder to find, as none of them seem to have been reprinted. The Dawn in Britain (1906) is a six-volume epic poem presenting a new mythology of the founding of Britain. I have a copy of The Cliffs (1909), a chamber drama about the imminent danger of a German attack on Britain – Arabia made Doughty a patriot. The dramatis personae includes, among others:
SIRION, divine shining One from heaven; one of the Mighty Powers of the Universe.YAMÎN and SHEMÔL; two strong heavenly Spirits, with Sirion.TRUTH, (sunborn eternally on the Earth;) and a company of LIGHT ELVES with him.JOHN HOBBE, Crimean veteran, now a shepherd on the Cliff.TWO FOREIGN AERONAUTS, with their MACHINIST; that are Spies.A LITTLE DEFORMED MAIDEN, (a ladys daughter, living abroad.)MAKEPEACE, John Hobbes wife, (who does not speak.)SOULS OF BRITAINS SLEEPERS.GHOSTS OF ENGLANDS HERO-DEAD.FOREIGN GHOSTS; (BUONAPARTE and THE MAID OF ORLEANS.)
One can’t imagine that this was ever performed. The text, in blank verse, sends one scrambling for the Oxford English Dictionary from Hobbe’s first speech:
Now in my once young veins, begins to creepDull age, rheums too. I moun, these lambing nights,Lie out, in wind and wet, amongst the ewes,In fold; that now I’ve pitched gin the heath-croft.I feed them there of rapes, to give them strength. I may not rest, as I wor wont of sleep;So a wimble bores my brain, of busy thought:Wherefore, what though ’t be chill for an old wight,I’ve left them ruckling mother sheep; to paceAwhile here to and forth, longs the sea-cliff. (p. 3)
And so it goes for another 250 pages. With Doughty, there’s always the threat of crackpottery. But his English is like that of no one else, and he should not be forgotten.
[This is a guest post from Dan Visel of With Hidden Noise]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4e082TU5G1qf0717o1_250.jpg)
A guest post from Dan Visel of With Hidden Noise:
No one reads Charles Montagu Doughty. I first came across the man in Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, still one of the best pointers to underappreciated writers and artists around. In “The Symbol of the Archaic,” he writes:
… the great unknown of English letters, Charles Montagu Doughty, who suspected all writers after Chaucer of whoring after strange dictionaries, who went into the Arabian desert (or “Garden of God”)—the most archaic act of modern literature—to save, as he said, the English language.
That salvation is still one of the best of books, the Travels in Arabia Deserta, though we have neglected his masterpiece, The Dawn in Britain, with its archaic theme and its archaic English. (p. 23)
Davenport’s précis is surprisingly accurate. Doughty’s best-known work is a 600,000 word account of his largely solitary travels in the Arabian peninsula starting in 1872. Ostensibly taken with an interest in archaeology, Doughty discovered very little. Dead set in the correctness of his Christianity and the falseness of Islam, he refused both to proselytize and to pretend to be Muslim. His prose reads like nothing else in English:
I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Beduins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honourable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion. But I had eaten of their cheer, and might sleep among wolves. The fortune of the morrow was dark as death, all ways were shut before me. There came in a W. Aly sheykh and principal of that tribe’s exiles, he was a hereditary arbiter or lawyer among them, in the custom of the desert: the arbiter sitting by and fixing upon me his implacable eyes, asked the sheykhs of the Moahîb in an under-voice ‘Why brought they the Nasrâny?’ They said, ‘Khalîl was come of himself.’ (p. 551)
This did not go over immensely well with the reading public in 1884, but T. E. Lawrence was a fan of the book and brought about its republication in 1921. Andrew Taylor’s biography God’s Fugitive (1999) traces the life of this supremely prickly man who called himself Khalîl, focusing largely on Doughty’s trip to Arabia. Dover put out a two-volume edition of Travels in Arabia Deserta in 1980 which reproduces his illustrations nicely; a version abridged by Edward Garnett (sometimes called Wanderings in Arabia) can also be found.
Doughty’s later books are no less strange, though much harder to find, as none of them seem to have been reprinted. The Dawn in Britain (1906) is a six-volume epic poem presenting a new mythology of the founding of Britain. I have a copy of The Cliffs (1909), a chamber drama about the imminent danger of a German attack on Britain – Arabia made Doughty a patriot. The dramatis personae includes, among others:
SIRION, divine shining One from heaven; one of the Mighty Powers of the Universe.
YAMÎN and SHEMÔL; two strong heavenly Spirits, with Sirion.
TRUTH, (sunborn eternally on the Earth;) and a company of LIGHT ELVES with him.
JOHN HOBBE, Crimean veteran, now a shepherd on the Cliff.
TWO FOREIGN AERONAUTS, with their MACHINIST; that are Spies.
A LITTLE DEFORMED MAIDEN, (a ladys daughter, living abroad.)
MAKEPEACE, John Hobbes wife, (who does not speak.)
SOULS OF BRITAINS SLEEPERS.
GHOSTS OF ENGLANDS HERO-DEAD.
FOREIGN GHOSTS; (BUONAPARTE and THE MAID OF ORLEANS.)
One can’t imagine that this was ever performed. The text, in blank verse, sends one scrambling for the Oxford English Dictionary from Hobbe’s first speech:
Now in my once young veins, begins to creep
Dull age, rheums too. I moun, these lambing nights,
Lie out, in wind and wet, amongst the ewes,
In fold; that now I’ve pitched gin the heath-croft.
I feed them there of rapes, to give them strength.
I may not rest, as I wor wont of sleep;
So a wimble bores my brain, of busy thought:
Wherefore, what though ’t be chill for an old wight,
I’ve left them ruckling mother sheep; to pace
Awhile here to and forth, longs the sea-cliff. (p. 3)
And so it goes for another 250 pages. With Doughty, there’s always the threat of crackpottery. But his English is like that of no one else, and he should not be forgotten.
[This is a guest post from Dan Visel of With Hidden Noise]
![With only three books in print in English translation, it seems no one reads Juan Jose Saer (1937-2005). Believed by many to be the greatest Argentine novelist of the 20th century, Saer’s work, like his more well-known contemporaries Cesar Aira and Roberto Bolano, toys with the limits of genre, ultimately expanding our sense of what a novel can be. Befitting a novelist whose work straddled so many genres, Saer’s voice ranges from the lyrical to the hard-boiled.
Proof of his voluptuous lyricism is evident in the following passage from his novel of cultural dislocation and cannibalism, The Witness (trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Saramago and Javier Marias):
Amongst so many strange things: the predictable sun, the countless stars, the trees that resolutely put on the same green splendor each time their season mysteriously comes round, the river that ebbs and flows, the shimmering yellow sand and summer air, the pulsating body which is born, grows old and dies, all the vast distances and the passing days, enigmas which we all in our innocence believe to be familiar, amongst all these presences that seem oblivious to ours, it is understandable that one day, in the face of the inexplicable, we experience the unpleasant feeling that we are just voyagers through a phantasmagoria…. But, despite its intensity, that feeling, which we all have sometimes, does not last and does not go deep enough to unsettle our lives. One day, when we least expect it, it suddenly overwhelms us. For a few moments familiar objects are totally alien to us, inert and remote despite their nearness.
And his hard-boiled, gritty realism is evident in the opening of the recently published translation of Cicatrices (Scars, trans. Steve Dolph):
There’s this filthy, evil June light coming through the window. I’m leaning over the table, sliding the cue, ready to shoot. The red and the white balls area across the table, near the corner. I have the spot ball. I have to hit it softly so it hits the red ball first, then the white, then the back rail between the red and the white ball.
In addition to Scars, Open Letter Books has also recently published The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, which leaves us with the hope that we will one day be able to strike Saer from the roll of Writers No One Reads.
For more, see this appreciation in The Nation or this obituary published in the Guardian.
[Image via]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3xvgx3SbG1qf0717o1_500.jpg)
With only three books in print in English translation, it seems no one reads Juan Jose Saer (1937-2005). Believed by many to be the greatest Argentine novelist of the 20th century, Saer’s work, like his more well-known contemporaries Cesar Aira and Roberto Bolano, toys with the limits of genre, ultimately expanding our sense of what a novel can be. Befitting a novelist whose work straddled so many genres, Saer’s voice ranges from the lyrical to the hard-boiled.
Proof of his voluptuous lyricism is evident in the following passage from his novel of cultural dislocation and cannibalism, The Witness (trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Saramago and Javier Marias):
Amongst so many strange things: the predictable sun, the countless stars, the trees that resolutely put on the same green splendor each time their season mysteriously comes round, the river that ebbs and flows, the shimmering yellow sand and summer air, the pulsating body which is born, grows old and dies, all the vast distances and the passing days, enigmas which we all in our innocence believe to be familiar, amongst all these presences that seem oblivious to ours, it is understandable that one day, in the face of the inexplicable, we experience the unpleasant feeling that we are just voyagers through a phantasmagoria…. But, despite its intensity, that feeling, which we all have sometimes, does not last and does not go deep enough to unsettle our lives. One day, when we least expect it, it suddenly overwhelms us. For a few moments familiar objects are totally alien to us, inert and remote despite their nearness.
And his hard-boiled, gritty realism is evident in the opening of the recently published translation of Cicatrices (Scars, trans. Steve Dolph):
There’s this filthy, evil June light coming through the window. I’m leaning over the table, sliding the cue, ready to shoot. The red and the white balls area across the table, near the corner. I have the spot ball. I have to hit it softly so it hits the red ball first, then the white, then the back rail between the red and the white ball.
In addition to Scars, Open Letter Books has also recently published The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, which leaves us with the hope that we will one day be able to strike Saer from the roll of Writers No One Reads.
For more, see this appreciation in The Nation or this obituary published in the Guardian.
[Image via]
Robert Recorde introduced the equals sign (=) in 1557. From wikipedia:
Zenzizenzizenzic is an obsolete form of mathematical notation representing the eighth power of a number (that is, the zenzizenzizenzic of a number x is the power x8), dating from a time when powers were written out in words rather than as superscript numbers. This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th century Welsh writer of popular mathematics textbooks, in his 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte (although his spelling was zenzizenzizenzike); he wrote that it “doeth represent the square of squares squaredly”.
if I should go outside the wolves would come to eat out of my hand just as my room would seem to be outside of me my other earnings would go off around the world smashed into smithereens but what is there to do today it’s thursday everything is closed it’s cold the sun is whipping anybody I could be and there’s no helping it so many things come up so that they throw the roots down by their hairs out in the bull ring stenciled into portraits not to make a big deal of the day’s allotments but today has been a winner and the hunter back with his accounts askew how great this year has been for putting in preserves like these and thus and so and always things are being left behind some tears are laughing without telling tales again except around the picture frame the news arrived that this time we would only see the spring at night and that a spider crawls across the paper where I’m writing that the gift is here
by the great unknown writer Pablo Picasso
image: El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
This is Santiago Caruso’s illustration for a new Spanish edition of “The Bloody Countess,” a 1971 prose work by Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972), a writer I have not read (illustrator’s page / publisher’s page).
Pizarnik’s parents were Russian Jewish and she was raised in Buenos Aires. She published many volumes of poetry in the 50s and 60s (with titles like The Extraction of the Stone of Madness), studied painting, spent some time in France, translated Michaux and Artaud, and finally “died in Buenos Aires of a self-induced overdose of seconal.” (Check out some photos of the writer.)
Jason Weiss devotes a few pages to her in his book The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. César Aira wrote a book on her.
An English translation of “The Bloody Countess” can be found in Manguel’s anthology Other Voices. The book Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations contains translations of Pizarnik’s poems mixed with biographical details.
update: Chris at Dreamers Rise commented:
She was a good friend of Julio Cortázar and his wife. There’s some material about her in Jesús Marchamalo’s “Cortázar y los libros.” She inscribed a number of her books to him but towards the end you could see from the inscriptions that she was coming undone.
From the notes to Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Victor Shklovsky:
Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov (1877–1957), a brilliant and influential writer who attempted in his prose to strip the Russian literary language of its foreign derivatives and restore to it the natural raciness of the vernacular. He emigrated from Russia at the end of 1921 and settled in Berlin until 1923, when he moved to Paris, where he remained until his death. Remizov founded his monkey society as a lampoon on the official organizations and committees that proliferated after the revolution. Charter memberships were conferred by elegantly designed scrolls, signed by Asyka, tsar of the monkeys.
My favorite bit from his wikipedia entry:
Another striking work of this period is ‘The Sacrifice,’ a Gothic horror story in which “a ghostly double of a father comes to kill his innocent daughter in the mistaken belief that she is a chicken”.
I hope to explore his work more in the book Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. In Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism, Julia Friedman provides the first extensive examination of the dynamic interplay between text and image in Remizov’s albums, revealing their coequal roles in his oneiric and synaesthetic brand of storytelling.
From another note in the Shklovsky book:
“Kukkha” is a word defined by Remizov as meaning “moisture” in monkey language.
“He showed me his kabbalistic collection, and I admired the manuscripts. In my enthusiasm I said, quite naively: ‘How wonderful, Herr Professor, that you have studied all this!’ Whereupon the old gentleman replied: ‘What, am I supposed to *read* this rubbish, too?’ That was a great moment in my life.” — Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem (visiting Philip Bloch)
![No one reads Carlo Sgorlon (1930-2009).
From Jessie Bright’s introduction to The Wooden Throne:
Carlo Sgorlon was born in 1930 in Cassacco, a tiny village near Udine, capital of Friuli, a region in northeastern Italy near the Austrian and Yugoslav borders. He spent much of his childhood in the countryside, where he attended primary school only rarely but came into daily contact with Friulian peasant life. The influence of his grandfather, a retired schoolmaster with a strong literary bent, and his grandmother, a practicing midwife steeped in local folklore, formed the basis of his love of literature and his reverence for ancient peasant traditions.[…]He has written a number of novels in the dialect of Friuli, as well as twelve novels and numerous short stories in Italian. His fiction has been translated into French, Spanish, Finnish, German and certain Slavic languages. His literary scholarship, aside from translations from the German, includes two major critical works, one on Kafka and the other on Elsa Morante. […] The Wooden Throne, his most famous book, was a best seller in Italy and since it was first published in 1973 has gone through fifteen printings. In fact its publisher, Mondadori, has recently brought it out in a new edition as part of a special series entitled “Twentieth Century Masterpieces.”
I started reading this book today and it is very charming.
Also in English: Army of the Lost Rivers
Cover art by Alexandra Eldridge](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m24kbmh90Q1qf0717o1_500.jpg)
No one reads Carlo Sgorlon (1930-2009).
From Jessie Bright’s introduction to The Wooden Throne:
Carlo Sgorlon was born in 1930 in Cassacco, a tiny village near Udine, capital of Friuli, a region in northeastern Italy near the Austrian and Yugoslav borders. He spent much of his childhood in the countryside, where he attended primary school only rarely but came into daily contact with Friulian peasant life. The influence of his grandfather, a retired schoolmaster with a strong literary bent, and his grandmother, a practicing midwife steeped in local folklore, formed the basis of his love of literature and his reverence for ancient peasant traditions.
[…]He has written a number of novels in the dialect of Friuli, as well as twelve novels and numerous short stories in Italian. His fiction has been translated into French, Spanish, Finnish, German and certain Slavic languages. His literary scholarship, aside from translations from the German, includes two major critical works, one on Kafka and the other on Elsa Morante.
[…] The Wooden Throne, his most famous book, was a best seller in Italy and since it was first published in 1973 has gone through fifteen printings. In fact its publisher, Mondadori, has recently brought it out in a new edition as part of a special series entitled “Twentieth Century Masterpieces.”
I started reading this book today and it is very charming.
Also in English: Army of the Lost Rivers
Cover art by Alexandra Eldridge
Thank you so much for this submission, Book Storey!
No one reads Brigid Brophy (1929 – 1995) who was a writer, activist, opera enthusiast and animal lover. Fastidious with grammar, she was also an advocate of the Shavian alphabet, most notably in her spelling of show as shew. Her personal life was also unconventional: not only was she bisexual; but she also had an open marriage with Michael Levey, director of The National Gallery between 1963-1987, whom she married in 1954.
Brophy’s love of Mozart figures prominently in her writing. In 1964 she published the nonfictional work Mozart the Dramatist: A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age. In the same year she published what is arguably her masterpiece, The Snow Ball, which attempts to answer the question she poses in her nonfiction work: “whether, when the opera opens, Don Giovanni has just seduced or has just failed to seduce Donna Anna.”
In between writing, she also somehow found time to champion many causes. An article that appeared in the Sunday Times in 1965 credits her with having triggered the animal rights movement in England. Her most lasting legacy is her campaigning for Public Lending Rights (which gives writers a small sum each time their book is borrowed from a British Public Library) which led to the PLR Act being passed in parliament in March 1979. Tragically, just a few months later, Brophy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and her output soon after dwindled.
![No one reads the pseudonymous Jean Ray, author of the gothic classic Malpertuis, a modernist haunted house novel that contributed to his being called the “Belgian Poe.”
For a lucid essay on this bewildering book, see Michael Cisco’s piece at The Modern Word
Check out some scenes from the 1971 film adaptation starring Orson Welles
[Image via]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1xz59FxVZ1qf0717o1_500.jpg)
No one reads the pseudonymous Jean Ray, author of the gothic classic Malpertuis, a modernist haunted house novel that contributed to his being called the “Belgian Poe.”
[Image via]
This is another welcome submission from Nathaniel at Ausmalen. See his post Friedrich Achleitner as Beer-Drinker.
From wikipedia:
Friedrich Achleitner (born 23 May 1930 in Schalchen, Upper Austria) is an Austrian poet and architecture critic. Achleitner studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1950–1953. He joined the Wiener Gruppe in 1955, participated in their literary cabarets, and wrote dialect poems, montages, and concrete poems. In 1983 he became Professor of the history and theory of architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
He’s included in the early Station Hill collection The Vienna Group: Six Major Austrian Poets (along with previously mentioned H. C. Artmann).
“If we had to visualise this establishment, it would resemble an Edwardian board of aesthetic censors presided over by a stern TS Eliot–type figure inherently hostile to innovation…”—Geoff Dyer on “The Literary Establishment”
Image by Mahendra Singh
![No one reads Junnosuke Yoshiyuki (1924-94), a prolific Japanese author who wrote short stories, novel(la)s, essays, translations of stories by Henry Miller and Kingsley Amis, and, for a time, edited and wrote for—what he later described—a “third-rate” scandal sheet.
With the additional intent of briefly highlighting anthologies of Japanese literature, here is an annotated list of Yoshiyuki’s writings available in English translation:
“Sudden Shower” (Shūu), trans. Geoffrey Bownas, New Writing in Japan (Penguin, 1972). This is the anthology that Bownas compiled with the legendary Yukio Mishima, they completed their collaboration just a few months before Mishima’s coup attempt and seppuku. In the introductory essay, Mishima wrote: The delicacy of Yoshiyuki’s language and sensibility is probably more subtle and sophisticated than that of any Japanese writer since the war. “Sudden Shower” is not just a love story; Yoshiyuki gives us first-hand experience of the woman’s sensuality and we are made to feel somehow like skin-divers on the sea-bed of man’s passions and emotions. […] The lyricism of Yoshiyuki’s writing is semi-neurotic and, by restricting his subject, he is able to convey a deeply sensual experience in a world as confined as a bath-tub. The idée fixe of Japanese youth today—that love is impossible and impracticable—lies deep at the root of Yoshiyuki’s thinking. “Sudden Shower” was Yoshyuki’s first literary success, he was lying sick in a hospital bed when he was told that it had just won the 1954 Akutagawa Prize. (Also, this collection begins with Bownas’ translations of two excellent stories by other Japanese writers no one reads, “Icarus” by Taruho Inagaki and “Cosmic Mirror” by Yutaka Haniya.)
The Dark Room (Anshitsu), trans. John Bester (Kodansha, 1975; orig. 1970). Yoshiyuki’s only novel, thus far, available in English. It was awarded the Tanizaki Prize. With that said, he is often compared to Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and they do have much in common, but Yoshiyuki’s subdued style makes his writings bleaker and more haunting. The narrator’s pessimism toward domesticity and procreation is the basis of this disconcerting novel—however, I think Yoshiyuki achieves as much or even outdoes this novel with some of his shorter works.
“In Akiko’s Room” (Shōfu no heya; literally, “A Prostitute’s Room”), trans. Howard Hibbett, Contemporary Japanese Literature: An Anthology of Fiction, Film and Other Writing Since 1945 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). Another historic anthology; the 2005 reprint is a bit pricey and it only adds a two-page preface by Hibbett, so look for the older editions.
“Are the Trees Green?” (Kigi wa midori ka), trans. Adam Kabat, The Shōwa Anthology - Modern Japanese Short Stories, 1929-1984 (Kodansha, 1985). One of my favourite Yoshiyuki stories, and it’s only found in this must-have anthology, which features neglected authors and lesser-known stories by well-known authors, e.g., Kōbō Abe, Ōe, Kawabata. (Note: it’s common that sellers only have one of the volumes from the older, two-volume edition: Yoshiyuki is in the first book.)
“Three Policemen” (Sannin no keikan), trans. Hugh Clarke, The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories (1997). Even though this anthology covers a broader timespan, and it’s easier to track down, I prefer the overall selections in the aforementioned anthologies. “Three Policemen” is a quick and entertaining introduction to Yoshiyuki’s portraits of (postwar) nightlife.
“Personal Baggage”, trans. John Bester, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, vol. 2 of 2 (2007). The most ambitious and comprehensive anthology to date. (One of the editors, Van C. Gessel, also worked on the above Shōwa collection.) “Personal Baggage” is a clear example of what Yoshiyuki meant by “internal realism”, a term he proposed as a more accurate classification of his later works. The story is a nightmarish and disorientating account of the mind’s unsteadiness and unreliable self-righting mechanism.
Fair Dalliance: Fifteen Stories by Yoshiyuki Junnosuke and its companion Toward Dusk and Other Stories were published by Kurodahan Press in 2011. Fair Dalliance features two biographical essays on Yoshiyuki and fifteen previously uncollected stories that span his diverse career; “My Bed is a Boat”, “The Man Who Fired the Bath”, “I Ran Over a Cat”, “Three Dreams”, “The Flies”, and “Katsushika Ward” are my favourites from the collection. Toward Dusk and Other Stories opens with an interesting exegesis on Yoshiyuki’s fiction, and presents nine previously uncollected short stories, plus the title novella; “Burning Dolls”, “The Molester”, “Treatment”, and the seven (somewhat loosely connected) chapters of “Toward Dusk” are the standouts for me.
For more online material about Yoshiyuki and his works, see:
“Obituary: Junnosuke Yoshiyuki”, one of the three hundred obituaries the poet and translator James Kirkup contributed to The Independent. (Fittingly, here’s a snippet from The Independent’s obituary for Kirkup: “He was a one-man world literature necrology department, […] an evangelist for the untranslated […]”.)
Two reviews of The Dark Room: one by Nihon Distractions and another by Bibliophilia Obscura.
A review of Toward Dusk and Other Stories in The Japan Times.
(Image: the front cover of the first edition of The Dark Room: “Jacket design by S. Katakura, incorporating a pen-and-ink drawing by Masuo Ikeda from My Imagination Map (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974).” Ikeda was also a film director and an award-winning novelist, see: obituary (another by Kirkup), blog article, web gallery, and 50 Watts.)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxcchd1I9Z1qf0717o1_r1_500.png)
No one reads Junnosuke Yoshiyuki (1924-94), a prolific Japanese author who wrote short stories, novel(la)s, essays, translations of stories by Henry Miller and Kingsley Amis, and, for a time, edited and wrote for—what he later described—a “third-rate” scandal sheet.
With the additional intent of briefly highlighting anthologies of Japanese literature, here is an annotated list of Yoshiyuki’s writings available in English translation:
The delicacy of Yoshiyuki’s language and sensibility is probably more subtle and sophisticated than that of any Japanese writer since the war. “Sudden Shower” is not just a love story; Yoshiyuki gives us first-hand experience of the woman’s sensuality and we are made to feel somehow like skin-divers on the sea-bed of man’s passions and emotions. […] The lyricism of Yoshiyuki’s writing is semi-neurotic and, by restricting his subject, he is able to convey a deeply sensual experience in a world as confined as a bath-tub. The idée fixe of Japanese youth today—that love is impossible and impracticable—lies deep at the root of Yoshiyuki’s thinking.“Sudden Shower” was Yoshyuki’s first literary success, he was lying sick in a hospital bed when he was told that it had just won the 1954 Akutagawa Prize. (Also, this collection begins with Bownas’ translations of two excellent stories by other Japanese writers no one reads, “Icarus” by Taruho Inagaki and “Cosmic Mirror” by Yutaka Haniya.)
For more online material about Yoshiyuki and his works, see:
(Image: the front cover of the first edition of The Dark Room: “Jacket design by S. Katakura, incorporating a pen-and-ink drawing by Masuo Ikeda from My Imagination Map (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974).” Ikeda was also a film director and an award-winning novelist, see: obituary (another by Kirkup), blog article, web gallery, and 50 Watts.)
![From the 1947 edition of the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (purchased yesterday for $3 and opened at random):
Nikolai Maksimovich Minski [often Minsky] (pseud. of Nikolai Maksimovich Vilenkin, 1855-1937, Russian poet and philosopher), was born of poor Jewish parents at Glubokoye in the former Government of Vilna and took his degree in law at St. Petersburg. Minski began his literary career as a follower of Nekrasov [no one reads Nekrasov], but soon abandoned “civic” themes for an “art for art’s sake” attitude; he became the first of the Russian decadents, among whom he shared leadership with [Akim] Volynski and Merezhkovski, particularly as a philosopher. He was one of the organizers of the Religious-Philosophical Society (1902), which attracted the intellectuals among the believers. His ideas are set forth in the Nietzschean Pri svete sovesti (1890; By the Light of Conscience) and in Religiya budushchevo (1905; The Religion of the Future), which develops his concept of “meonism,” the religion of nonbeing, based on a mystic faith in conscience, sacrifice, and love, compounded with elements borrowed from Nietzsche and oriental mystics. His poetry is often a vehicle for his ideas, though in his later work he occasionally achieved a true synthesis of form and content. Minski was unfortunate in becoming a poet during a period of transition, and his chief importance lies in his preparing the ground for the later symbolists. Curiously enough, 1905 found Minski among the revolutionaries; he became the nominal head of Novaya zhizn (The New Life), Russia’s first legal Social Democratic newspaper, for which he wrote “A Hymn of the Workers.” His arrest terminated that period, and he left Russia for Paris. In exile, he wrote, among other things, a dramatic trilogy and a volume of criticism (1922, From Dante to Blok) and then lapsed into silence.
(Read more about Minsky. He also shows up in an article about the great Sologub.)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0aemzK3eK1qf0717o1_250.jpg)
From the 1947 edition of the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (purchased yesterday for $3 and opened at random):
Nikolai Maksimovich Minski [often Minsky] (pseud. of Nikolai Maksimovich Vilenkin, 1855-1937, Russian poet and philosopher), was born of poor Jewish parents at Glubokoye in the former Government of Vilna and took his degree in law at St. Petersburg. Minski began his literary career as a follower of Nekrasov [no one reads Nekrasov], but soon abandoned “civic” themes for an “art for art’s sake” attitude; he became the first of the Russian decadents, among whom he shared leadership with [Akim] Volynski and Merezhkovski, particularly as a philosopher. He was one of the organizers of the Religious-Philosophical Society (1902), which attracted the intellectuals among the believers. His ideas are set forth in the Nietzschean Pri svete sovesti (1890; By the Light of Conscience) and in Religiya budushchevo (1905; The Religion of the Future), which develops his concept of “meonism,” the religion of nonbeing, based on a mystic faith in conscience, sacrifice, and love, compounded with elements borrowed from Nietzsche and oriental mystics. His poetry is often a vehicle for his ideas, though in his later work he occasionally achieved a true synthesis of form and content. Minski was unfortunate in becoming a poet during a period of transition, and his chief importance lies in his preparing the ground for the later symbolists. Curiously enough, 1905 found Minski among the revolutionaries; he became the nominal head of Novaya zhizn (The New Life), Russia’s first legal Social Democratic newspaper, for which he wrote “A Hymn of the Workers.” His arrest terminated that period, and he left Russia for Paris. In exile, he wrote, among other things, a dramatic trilogy and a volume of criticism (1922, From Dante to Blok) and then lapsed into silence.
(Read more about Minsky. He also shows up in an article about the great Sologub.)
“A revolution to emancipate the individual must necessarily regard tradition, the control of the present by the past, as its enemy; if the human individual is to be really free, then time must also be individualized into a succession of immediate moments. The kind of society, therefore, which it tends to create, is an atomized society of individuals, with neither a common myth nor a common cult, but united moment by moment by what they are reading.”—W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, 1950, introduction to The Portable Romantic Poets
No comment.
I love that the “career” section for Norman Holmes Pearson on wikipedia seems to have been back-translated into English.