Writers No One Reads

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.

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

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

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 submission from fereshteh (blackflamedsun [at] gmail [dot] com), though I’ve wanted to feature him too: Ladislav Klima (1878 - 1928), an influential Czech writer brought into English by Twisted Spoon Press (who are also on tumblr!) in two books:

—The Sufferings of Price Sternenhoch (Twisted Spoon / Amazon)
—Glorious Nemesis(Twisted Spoon / Amazon)

TS list three additional books as forthcoming: The Blind Snake’s Wanderings for Truth, I Am Absolute Will, Tales of Weirdness. Bio from the TS website:

Ladislav Klíma was born August 22, 1878, in the western Bohemian town of Domazlice. His father was a fairly well-to-do lawyer. At first a top student, he became steadily more rambunctious (he lost two brothers, both sisters, his mother and grandmother during his youth), and in 1895 he was expelled from gymnasium, and all the schools in the Austrian monarchy, for insulting the ruling Habsburg dynasty. He attended school in Zagreb at his father’s behest, but came home after only half a year resolved never to subject himself to formal education again. Adamantly refusing to engage in any sort of “normal” life as well, he lived alternately in the Tyrol, Zelezná Ruda in the Sumava Mountains, Zurich, and Prague, never seeking permanent employment, burning through any money he had inherited and living off the occasional royalty or the sporadic largesse of his friends. He settled in Prague’s Smíchov district where he wrote his first work in 1904, The World as Consciousness and Nothing (published anonymously and at his own expense), in which he makes the case that “the world” is nothing but a fiction. His major inspirations were Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Czech symbolist poet Otokar Brezina. Klíma’s philosophy has been called radical subjective idealism, where all reality culminates in an absolute subject, and he developed this into the metaphysical systems of egosolism and deoessence (one fully understanding his substance and becoming the creator of his own divinity). These themes are also explored in his fictions, chief among which are The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch and Glorious Nemesis. His other major philosophical works are compilations of shorter texts: Tractates and Dictations (1922) and A Second and Eternity (1927). While only part of Klíma’s oeuvre was published during his lifetime, numerous manuscripts were edited and collected posthumously — stories, novels, plays, and a copious correspondence (it is estimated that Klíma, in a fit of disgust, destroyed some 90% of his unpublished manuscripts). And though his writing was marginalized and suppressed by the communist regime for many years it still managed to inspire a generation of underground artists and dissident intellectuals with its vision of one’s innate ability to achieve inner freedom, to pursue spiritual sovereignty through deoessence. As Jan Patocka put it : “He was our first, untimely absurdist thinker.” Klíma died of tuberculosis on April 19, 1928, and is buried in Prague. 

Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for literature as a profession?

Making a living by my writing? No! I have a job, and the writing I do is a sideline, a hobby. I use this belittling word on purpose. My literary endeavours bring in no more than pocket money… In some ways, I deserve to be mocked, not because I carry on writing literature without understand its posthumousness, but because I go on regardless of the very real material proof of its posthumousness!

There is something glorious about Kafka’s night-time writing in his room in his parents’ flat. Something wonderful about his obscurity, about the fact that he published so little when his friends published so much. We can read his diaries and letters and think: there’s a man of integrity! That’s what it means, really means, to be a writer! But our impression is dependent on Kafka’s eventual success, and on a culture, his culture, where there was a potential audience for his work all along.

There is, by contrast, something pathetic about my obscurity. The blog, Writers No One Reads, celebrates forgotten writers whose work is barely known in the English-speaking world. But I’m already a Writer No One Reads, whose work didn’t register sufficiently in general culture to be forgotten. I say this without self-pity, rather with a certain amusement. Nevertheless, it is pitiful in some strong sense. I really am wasting my time... Why bother?, I ask myself. But the challenge is to pose that question in the work itself.

On being a Writer No One Reads: Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, interview at Full Stop.

Cover by Hans Bellmer. Here’s a bio of Mynona (pseudonym for Salomo Friedlaender, 1871–1946), from The Golden Bomb:

While the Friedlaender part of him was a tireless philosopher, propagating a mixture of Stirnerian ideas and neo-Kantianism (his numerous philosophical included Kant For Children), his Mynona half (being the reverse for the German word for “anonymous”) wrote several novels and countless grotesques which were widely published in Expressionist periodicals. However, the two sides cannot be understood separately, for, as he wrote, “above all, the grotesque humorist has the desire to refresh the memory of the divine, mysterious primal image of true life….” Although friends with almost all of the Expressionists and a star attraction at their readings, this bohemian writer and “forerunner of the laughing Dada,” as one Dadaist described him, was too “uncomfortable” for many: he died in poverty in Paris after being refused help to emigrate to the United States by Thomas Mann.

Mynona has very few stories in English. There’s one in Jack Zipes’ book The Operated Jew. It looks like he also wrote a book on George Grosz. (See my Weimar Whiplash post for many Grosz book covers.)

A quote from Mynona’s “A Child’s Heroic Deed” (1913, included in The Golden Bomb):

Exactly nine months after this blood red sunset, poor Mathilde brought a monstrosity into the world: a creature as red as a hard-boiled crab, with spiny outgrowths instead of hair. But nonetheless it managed to live, and was known throughout its life as the red hedgehog.

I asked Professor Maria Manuel Lisboa to write this biographical note of Álvaro do Carvalhal after seeing that she just published an article titled “The end of civilization in Álvaro do Carvalhal: eating children is wrong” (in the Journal of Romance Studies). Her most recent book is The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture.

Álvaro do Carvalhal was born in Algeriz, in northern Portugal in 1844 and died in 1868, aged twenty four. He studied Law in Coimbra, where he met many of the up-and-coming writers, philosophers and polemicists of the group later known as the Geração de 70 (the Generation of [18]70), which numbered in its ranks the novelist Eca de Queirós, now recognized as Portugal’s foremost writer of the nineteenth century. The Generation of 70 instigated the polemic known as ‘A Questão Coimbrã’ (‘The Coimbra debate’) and subsequently ‘officially’ pronounced Romanticism dead, announcing the advent of Realism as the new intellectual paradigm. Although Carvalhal’s death preceded by three years the Conferências do Casino (Casino Conferences) of 1871, which officially outlined the paradigms of the new movement, his own stance remained elusive. Although at first glance his style and themes obey the tenets of high Romanticism and Gothic fantasy, it is also possible to argue for a discernible element of satire that pre-empts the mockery to which the Romantics were subjected by their successors, the proponents of Realism.

By the time of Carvalhal’s premature death he had published one play, O Castigo davingança (Revenge’s Punishment), written while still in secondary school, some poems published in various journals and periodicals, and six short stories published posthumously: ‘J. Moreno,’ ‘O Punhal de Rosaura’ (Rosaura’s Dagger’), ‘A Febre do Jogo’ (The Frenzy of Gambling’), ‘A Vestal’ (The Vestal Virgin’), ‘Honra Antiga’ (‘Ancient Honour’) and ‘Os Canibais’ (‘The cannibals’).

‘The Cannibals’ was adapted to the cinema by Manoel de Oliveira in 1988.

In English: I think just the 45 page story “The Cannibals,” in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy.

Herbert Pfostl at Blind Pony recently featured Fleur Jaeggy’s beautiful essay on Marcel Schwob. (Previous post on Schwob.) Don’t miss it.

Wakefield Press is bringing out some Schwob, starting with The Book of Monelle, hallelujah.

Probably coming soon to Writers No One Reads: Fleur Jaeggy herself.

Image found at Suspicious Patterns.