Dust and diamonds
Daniel Karlin isn't impressed with William C. Carter's Proust in Love:
Carter's main problem is a perennial one in modern literary
biography, which can neither let go of the 'literary' nor truly do
it justice. [...] Literary criticism which relies on biography
attracted Proust's scorn - the original title of his novel was
'Contre Sainte-Beuve', the critic who he considered to epitomize
this failing - but biography which relies on literary 'evidence' is
in an even more parlous state, since it reverses the alchemical
process by which experience gets transmuted into art, and offers us
a handful of dust as compensation for the diamonds it has
pulverised. Carter cites the opinion of Benjamin Cr�mieux that 'To
take the true measure of Proust's achievement, it is perhaps a
great advantage not to have known him' but fails to transpose the
paradox: 'To take the true measure of Proust's life, it is perhaps
a great advantage not to have read his book.'
From the latest TLS, not online.
at 8:56 PM 5 comments
More new Kafka translations
Penguin Classics has collected in one volume new or newish
translations of the stories Kafka published in his lifetime. Michael
Hofmann is the only named translator, but that's enough to make me
covet the new edition.
It's a shame Kafka's work is published so haphazardly in English. So
many different translations of the stories and even the novels now,
but since the 1949 translation of Max Brod's expurgated Diaries, not
one new version.
at 8:40 PM 0 comments
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