To Please a Shadow When a writer resorts to a language other than his mother tongue, he does so either out of necessity, like Conrad, or because of burning ambition, like Nabokov, or for the sake of greater estrangement, like Beckett. Belonging to a dif- ferent league, in the summer of 1977, in New York, after living in this country for five years, I purchased in a small typewriter shop on Sixth Avenue a portable "Lettera 22" and set out to write ( essays, translations, occasionally a poem) in English for a reason that had very little to do with the above. My sole purpose then, as it is now, was to find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I consid- ered the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan Hugh Auden. I was, of course, perfectly aware of the futility of my undertaking, not so much because I was born in Russia and into its language (which I am never to abandon—and I hope vice versa) as because of
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What is a Classic?
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WHAT IS A CLASSIC?: A Lecture In October of 1944, as Allied forces were battling on the Euro- pean mainland and German rockets were falling on London, Thomas Stearns Eliot, aged fifty-six, gave his presidential address to the Virgil Society in London. In his lecture Eliot does not men- tion wartime circumstances, save for a single reference—oblique, understated, in his best British manner—to "accidents of the pres- ent time" that had made it difficult to get access to the books he needed to prepare the lecture. It is a way of reminding his auditors that there is a perspective in which the war is only a hiccup, how- ever massive, in the life of Europe. The title of the lecture was "What Is a Classic?" and its aim was to consolidate and reargue a case Eliot had long been advancing: that the civilization of Western Europe is a single civilization, that its descent is from Rome via the Church of Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, and that its orig
The Particles of Order
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Fiction The Particles of Order By August 25, 2024 Illustration by Manshen Lo The guest from America was to arrive in the late afternoon. Ursula, having arranged the welcome platter, waited until she heard a car slowing down in the driveway, its gravel rinsed all day by the rain, before drizzling some honey in broad strokes on the cheese and the nuts. From the kitchen window, she could see the cabdriver—Timothy today—place a suitcase next to the door, heavy, as demonstrated by his eloquent grimace. Likely he had entertained his fare with one of his two America-related stories: the cousin who’d done life in Sing Sing or the great-granduncle escaping Alcatraz on a stormy night. Visitors from America were rare, or else Timothy would have invented more credible family legends. The woman, Lilian Pang, smiled tiredly as she got out of the car and thanked Timothy. She was between forty-five and fifty-five, Ursula estimated, a time when some people’s lives come into order while others’ fall