Chekhov’s Mistess

Boston Review

I came for Alissa Valles’ (translator of Herbert’s Collected Poems) article on Zbigniew Herbert “The Testament of Mr. Cogito:”

“Herbert represents the fate of the poet-prophet or national bard when his or her society collapses. Observing this drama while in Poland translating Herbert’s poems, I have been struck by just how completely it reverses Plato’s account of the relationship between the poet and the city in The Republic. For Plato, the ideal city, the polis, is a bastion of reason from which the poet should be banished. But in Herbert’s poetry intellectual discipline and a strong sense of measure and hierarchy hold sway, and the city that part of the community to which he is most intimately connected, acts on Herbert as an irrational, irresponsible, and destructive force.”

and stayed for W. Martin’s review of Ms. Valles’ translation where he also took on Michael Hofmann’s review last May in Poetry Magazine:

“It does not matter for Hofmann that he cannot read Herbert’s poems in Polish and therefore must transpose the sacrality of the original onto an already existing translation. In his view, Alissa Valles, the primary translator and editor of The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, should, like a 21st-century William Tyndale, be burned at the stake.”

and Catalina Holguín’s piece on Haruki Murakami:

“Murakami’s novels are characterized by tolerable ambiguity and imaginative abundance. His characters inhabit both reality and fantasy: the boundaries are permeable. As characters flow easily from one space to another, they discover that the underworld is always present, already part of the seemingly normal world. Uncanny doubles, coincidences, and parallelisms are Murakami’s preferred vehicles for revealing repressed truths about individual people, the social forces that shape their lives, and the history of their country.”

and a piece on H.G. Wells from Vivian Gornick “The Beginning of Wisdom”:

“Like many other writers of his time, Wells thought of himself as a Man of the Future, but his style of self-presentation remained Victorian. His was a life, he insisted, no different in its beginnings or potential than millions of others. He wished only to put his “personal origins into the frame of human history and show how the phases and forces of education that shaped me . . . were related to the great change in human conditions” that had been gathering force for three centuries “to disperse the aristocratic estate system . . . promote industrial co-ordination . . . necessitate new and better informed classes . . . break down political boundaries everywhere and bring all men into one planetary community.” To see his own life in this light—as the exemplar of an ordinary, representative brain alive at a telling moment in social history—was to understand the times in which he and his readers were living.”

and from a previous issue, I found a poem by Roberto Bolaño and a review of Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga, and interesting piece on Spike Lee. The list goes on. For no good reason other than I’ve never seen it online before, I’ve not been a Boston Review reader, until now. The site’s not very well organized, but I imagine that will change in time, so I’m just happy to see more publications with content available online.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: December 06, 2007
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: journals

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