I think Clarice is not well served by the book considered her best in the Anglophone world, and you probably do need to read her earlier work, in which she is spiritually closer in my mind to Joyce than Beckett. I like her last two books, but they’re missing the kind of Hermetic magic of what came before, and yes, probably are “brodernist” if we must use these execrable terms. If you ever get around to them, I’m very interested to know what you make of near to the wild heart or a passion according to GH!
My personal hope is that outlets such as Substack will allow independent authors to be picked up by independent translators, and will facilitate the kind of translation that inspired the German Romantics to claim translation as fundamental to their project.
But in contrast with the Romantic nationalism of Goethe et al., perhaps AI will dissolve linguistic barriers to such an extent that a "mother tongue" will become less obvious, and translation will move away from portraying foreign problems of national identity (how many translated works on about "what it means to be Chilean/Vietnamese/Uzbekistani in the current age"? In addition to aesthetic blandness, a good deal of fiction translated into English is politically bland in that it's only concern is balancing Western liberalism with a native culture...)
Anyways, I think the New Romantic movement needs to be cognizant of their non-English counterparts. I think the New Romantics need to actively reach out and translate them, bring them into their movement, search out and adopt contemporaries in Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe. It seems to me that every literary movement that has *really* mattered has worked in this way. And insofar as New Romanticism seeks to slough off the worst effects of publishing, a very easy improvement on the current system would be the adoption and incorporation of international voices. They would do well to consider that nearly all the German Romantics translated in addition to writing original works.
As someone who enjoys late modernist aesthetic probably more than you (and probably for having read less of it and not given it enough time to exhaust me), I am curious: are writers like Krasznahorkai, Melchor, and Fosse really taking away attention from American writers who are doing similar things stylistically (though to wildly different effects), or are people flocking to these because American publishers aren’t offering them something similar?
That's a good question, and probably the latter. But what I've heard, if I have this right, and I heard it word-of-mouth, is that there's also a market share issue in indie bookstores, where glamorous translated New Directions type books crowd out American small press material. The latter, though, as you say, may not offer the same attractions.
(I'll probably like Melchior and possibly like Krasz when I get around to them. To put some nuance on my complaining: in my old Murnane review, I talk about the Joyce/Faulkner and Kafka/Beckett paths for world literature. I usually don't mind people on the Joyce/Faulkner path, though some paragraph breaks would be nice, whereas on bad days I even have some questions about Kafka and Beckett themselves.)
I'm but a humble n=1, but I did learn about Major Arcana thanks to the storefront which is dedicated to stocking the Solenoids of the world. Their non-bro backlist moves rather more slowly, and the single copy of Krasznahorkai's Spadework (ND) was gone before I could buy it.
Once again, it seems like you made the right argument too early!
My gut response to claims that we have to write about the technological upheavals of our time is to reaffirm, with Faulkner, that when will I be blown up / microchipped / replaced with AI are not interesting questions to write about on their own, without dramatizing them through a quarrel with oneself that might very well take the form of a courtship ritual. But who knows, things do seem to be changing rapidly.
Though speaking of left-right confusion, I’m reminded that in The True and Only Heaven, Lasch recruits Emerson (and Milton and Carlyle) to his anarcho-populist paradise-of-small-business-owners, a vision that cuts against both nationalist-socialism and libertarian accelerationism. Perhaps that’s not on the table at the moment, but I suspect it will endure after the others have had their due, and that it might be best to borrow elements from the other configurations in the name of defending that vision of utopia (as I think you’re sometimes doing).
Thank you! Yes, I was deliberately overstating the matter for effect, and my own books all have various love stories. And I don't think anyone has to write about anything, but a novel set in the present day probably should somehow take account of these matters.
I've never read that Lasch book but I do think it's an attractive vision. I wouldn't want nationalist-socialism or libertarian-accelerationism in their pure forms, but, again, I sometimes use a forceful rhetoric to clarify the issue. My novels offer the fuller vision.
It's funny, I wrote about half of something making roughly the same argument as that essay and then was like "is this a real problem, or several dozen people on twitter who annoy me" and came away with the latter. I am happy the books are being made accessible after all, and it's not like anyone is making money off this. But I can't help but think I could have done it better and without coining such a hideous portmanteau.
Plus I'm still making my way through Marvel Universe -- where was the Solenoid crowd on this one?
Yes, I'm just making trouble. I have to write something mildly controversial once a week, you know? True about Wagner, though: buy American! (But Wagner himself was/is immersed in the Euro avant-garde, so ironies abound.)
I am loving it Mr. Pistelli, he is a major talent! I have Roar queued up for soon after and only critical and IC-related obligations have kept me from speeding through both. His description of being a normal guy at Erewhon as being "a spy in the city of God" has done for that activity what Joyce did for the snotgreen sea.
Someday I aspire to return to L.A. and go to Erewhon. In BW's novel I Met Someone from 2016, which I gather (from wiki) is a little before Erewhon got big, the rich and famous characters shop at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, which I found touchingly "just like me fr," not aspirational but relatable!
don’t really find Clarice interesting either & she has been checking many ppl’s boxes in terms of exploring brasilian literature even tho she seems very uninterested in exploring brasilian life & culture… U ever read Énard? in the Joyce/Faulkner path… think u would like Compass
I couldn’t disagree with you more on translated fiction but can’t be arsed arguing mostly because I’m a coward. All I’ll say is that there’s plenty out there to read, why limit yourself to one perspective even if it’s mediated into English. I genuinely don’t think translated work, given the higher cost of production, is crowding out anything. Oh, and while I’m not arguing and doing it poorly, genre spaces, where I mostly sit, needs that diversity in perspective-unless all you want to read is American science fiction.
Thanks, I truly don't disagree with you, especially in areas like genre or even social realism! As clarified in my reply to Owen above, my satirical target was a specific aesthetic, an offshoot of modernism, one practiced by Anglophone writers as well, that is often reductively associated with "translated fiction" in vanguardist literary/academic circles.
I’m still not sure I agree. But that’s mainly because Chad Post has been “mining” the Dalkey Archive (many examples of which were translated and of the modernist bent of which you speak) and each one sounds genuinely fascinating. It might have something to do with the fact that he knows how to sell a book. If the sort of books you were referring to were all that was discussed, then I think I’d agree with you. But the LARB felt to me like rant against a group of about ten people no-one especially notices. Or cares that much about.
I wonder why poets (with the exception of, I guess, Pessoa?) aren't really ever brought up in the translated literature/lit bro debates? The brodernism piece, for example, doesn't include any on its hitlist.
On a perhaps related note, it's particularly frustrating to see all these articles popping up about a New Romanticism that only make tangential reference to the actual poetry. Any consideration of the work usually amount to customary name-drops and if any poet is treated in-depth its Goethe which perhaps revives the whole exoticist fetish question again. This happens on both sides for what its worth. Ross Barkan simply copied and pasted his already meek skim of the English Romantics in his latest "Rise of the New Romanticism" post from his Guardian article from last year while Becca Rothfield's recent essay in The Point on "The Old Romantics" disappointingly confines her analysis of the period and its values to Schiller and Schlegel. I appreciate that these are manifestos more than anything, but when is someone going to actually persuade me as to why I should read "Prometheus Unbound" now (I have and I love it, ftr) instead of just telling me to throw away my phone because its what Shelley would've wanted? You, of course, have done this extraordinarily admirably with the IC. But I worry that the treatment of poetry and poets in these essays lead readers to latch on to the dogma on either side so that they think reading the manifesto is as good as acquiring the ideological value of the poetry. At the end of the day, is anyone who reads such more or less political-historical assessments actually persuaded to travel for themselves in the realms of gold? In this sense, the degradation of poetry and poets to mere a shorthand of history by those who are ostensibly eager to welcome a New Romanticism may actually just be repeating the contemporary disparagement of the medium (I'll let Barkan off the hook here because of his involvement with TMR, but I note that they too have avoided poetry for the time being). I dearly hope that those who read these pieces will pick up "The Fall of Hyperion" and learn its worth for themselves, but I am far from believing even the authors have read such works, much less their readers.
Anyways, your last line is perfect and reminds me of Bloom's assessment of Wordsworth's description of the mind where "internalization and estrangement are humanely one and the same process." I realize I may be in the minority here, but how much more novel an experience to confront "Tintern Abbey," the Lucy Poems, and the Intimations Ode than Krasznahorkai, Murnane, and Cărtărescu!
Thank you! Yes, I agree that there's a lack of actual Romantic literature in all its complexity in these discussions, which would dispel some of the over-simplifications even at the ideological level itself (they weren't simply anti-tech, they weren't all pastoral, they weren't all opposed to irony and sophistication, they weren't all nationalists, etc.). And, at the risk of a certain "nationalism" of my own, I do agree with your final paragraph as well. I am not opposed to reading literature in translation, obviously—my target was more a strain of attenuated late modernism Anglophone writers also practice extensively than the phenomenon of reading translated fiction—but I do think readers would find it more challenging in its own way to read the best that's been written in their own language rather than collecting disconnected specimens of pseudo-exotica they're only ever encountering in their contemporary idiom.
("Pseudo-exotica" because, though I didn't mention it in the post, there's a longstanding complaint in academic comp-lit circles about these late modernist aesthetics monopolizing what gets moved through the globalizing channels of Paris, London, and New York publishing. Granted the critics in this vein—e.g., my old grad-school prof Tim Brennan, later the biographer of Edward Said, as well as Pascale Casanova, mentioned in my Murnane review—are usually Marxists upset that depoliticizing or crypto-liberalizing modernist emphases cause texts of social realism and social protest to go untranslated or unappreciated by the cognoscenti when they are, not a critique I personally care about, but the point about a certain aesthetic sameness remains, Kafka/Beckett as global luxury brand, the absurd as accessory, the void as ornament, parfum d'atrocité.)
Re: a recent Tumblr response of yours, real heads know your top three influences are Hawthorne, Dickens, and Morrison. And like a bookish, deferential child of divorce, your unconscious drifts obediently, as with the tides, where it’s told: Toni Monday through Friday; Grant every other weekend.
(It’s probably Alan Moore or Dave McKean before Grant, but just go with it…)
Painfully accurate, David! (I wonder where ChatGPT got that answer. Maybe just because I wrote about a lot of those people's books on my site. I read Mann too late in life to be truly influenced by him the way I'm influenced by writers I started reading in my teens, but MA *was* a self-conscious attempt at a comic-book Dr. Faustus.)
You know, I think the "correct" response is that, since ChatGPT generates text by identifying and extending patterns in its training data, it's probably drawing from the most widely read essays on your site, and not excavating the catacombs of your fiction. But in this age of New Romanticism, the new "correct" response, I fear, is conceding that that mischievous fairy, like Shelley's Queen Mab, is interpreting our dreams. (The deficiency of our age, of course, is that Shelley's stops at analysis, as do most; but Mercutio's—for Shakespeare is greater than the gods—does not simply interpret but creates, galloping night by night through lovers' brains, to dream of love. But I digress...)
I believe the idea is that my work exhibits the same ideological symptoms as several anime and video games, while being at once slightly more sophisticated and slightly less entertaining than they are. But I am apparently too old to understand this in its entirety, also part of the critique, which is fair enough.
I think Clarice is not well served by the book considered her best in the Anglophone world, and you probably do need to read her earlier work, in which she is spiritually closer in my mind to Joyce than Beckett. I like her last two books, but they’re missing the kind of Hermetic magic of what came before, and yes, probably are “brodernist” if we must use these execrable terms. If you ever get around to them, I’m very interested to know what you make of near to the wild heart or a passion according to GH!
My personal hope is that outlets such as Substack will allow independent authors to be picked up by independent translators, and will facilitate the kind of translation that inspired the German Romantics to claim translation as fundamental to their project.
But in contrast with the Romantic nationalism of Goethe et al., perhaps AI will dissolve linguistic barriers to such an extent that a "mother tongue" will become less obvious, and translation will move away from portraying foreign problems of national identity (how many translated works on about "what it means to be Chilean/Vietnamese/Uzbekistani in the current age"? In addition to aesthetic blandness, a good deal of fiction translated into English is politically bland in that it's only concern is balancing Western liberalism with a native culture...)
Anyways, I think the New Romantic movement needs to be cognizant of their non-English counterparts. I think the New Romantics need to actively reach out and translate them, bring them into their movement, search out and adopt contemporaries in Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe. It seems to me that every literary movement that has *really* mattered has worked in this way. And insofar as New Romanticism seeks to slough off the worst effects of publishing, a very easy improvement on the current system would be the adoption and incorporation of international voices. They would do well to consider that nearly all the German Romantics translated in addition to writing original works.
As someone who enjoys late modernist aesthetic probably more than you (and probably for having read less of it and not given it enough time to exhaust me), I am curious: are writers like Krasznahorkai, Melchor, and Fosse really taking away attention from American writers who are doing similar things stylistically (though to wildly different effects), or are people flocking to these because American publishers aren’t offering them something similar?
That's a good question, and probably the latter. But what I've heard, if I have this right, and I heard it word-of-mouth, is that there's also a market share issue in indie bookstores, where glamorous translated New Directions type books crowd out American small press material. The latter, though, as you say, may not offer the same attractions.
(I'll probably like Melchior and possibly like Krasz when I get around to them. To put some nuance on my complaining: in my old Murnane review, I talk about the Joyce/Faulkner and Kafka/Beckett paths for world literature. I usually don't mind people on the Joyce/Faulkner path, though some paragraph breaks would be nice, whereas on bad days I even have some questions about Kafka and Beckett themselves.)
I'm but a humble n=1, but I did learn about Major Arcana thanks to the storefront which is dedicated to stocking the Solenoids of the world. Their non-bro backlist moves rather more slowly, and the single copy of Krasznahorkai's Spadework (ND) was gone before I could buy it.
Once again, it seems like you made the right argument too early!
My gut response to claims that we have to write about the technological upheavals of our time is to reaffirm, with Faulkner, that when will I be blown up / microchipped / replaced with AI are not interesting questions to write about on their own, without dramatizing them through a quarrel with oneself that might very well take the form of a courtship ritual. But who knows, things do seem to be changing rapidly.
Though speaking of left-right confusion, I’m reminded that in The True and Only Heaven, Lasch recruits Emerson (and Milton and Carlyle) to his anarcho-populist paradise-of-small-business-owners, a vision that cuts against both nationalist-socialism and libertarian accelerationism. Perhaps that’s not on the table at the moment, but I suspect it will endure after the others have had their due, and that it might be best to borrow elements from the other configurations in the name of defending that vision of utopia (as I think you’re sometimes doing).
Thank you! Yes, I was deliberately overstating the matter for effect, and my own books all have various love stories. And I don't think anyone has to write about anything, but a novel set in the present day probably should somehow take account of these matters.
I've never read that Lasch book but I do think it's an attractive vision. I wouldn't want nationalist-socialism or libertarian-accelerationism in their pure forms, but, again, I sometimes use a forceful rhetoric to clarify the issue. My novels offer the fuller vision.
It's funny, I wrote about half of something making roughly the same argument as that essay and then was like "is this a real problem, or several dozen people on twitter who annoy me" and came away with the latter. I am happy the books are being made accessible after all, and it's not like anyone is making money off this. But I can't help but think I could have done it better and without coining such a hideous portmanteau.
Plus I'm still making my way through Marvel Universe -- where was the Solenoid crowd on this one?
Yes, I'm just making trouble. I have to write something mildly controversial once a week, you know? True about Wagner, though: buy American! (But Wagner himself was/is immersed in the Euro avant-garde, so ironies abound.)
Not to imply I don't enjoy petty, small-stakes literary contretemps -- i very much do.
Same! Hope you're enjoying Marvel Universe, btw.
I am loving it Mr. Pistelli, he is a major talent! I have Roar queued up for soon after and only critical and IC-related obligations have kept me from speeding through both. His description of being a normal guy at Erewhon as being "a spy in the city of God" has done for that activity what Joyce did for the snotgreen sea.
Someday I aspire to return to L.A. and go to Erewhon. In BW's novel I Met Someone from 2016, which I gather (from wiki) is a little before Erewhon got big, the rich and famous characters shop at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, which I found touchingly "just like me fr," not aspirational but relatable!
Well, if you ever find yourself in Pasadena, I certainly owe you a $22 smoothie.
don’t really find Clarice interesting either & she has been checking many ppl’s boxes in terms of exploring brasilian literature even tho she seems very uninterested in exploring brasilian life & culture… U ever read Énard? in the Joyce/Faulkner path… think u would like Compass
No I want to read Compass, though, it sounds like the version of that sort of thing I'd enjoy.
I couldn’t disagree with you more on translated fiction but can’t be arsed arguing mostly because I’m a coward. All I’ll say is that there’s plenty out there to read, why limit yourself to one perspective even if it’s mediated into English. I genuinely don’t think translated work, given the higher cost of production, is crowding out anything. Oh, and while I’m not arguing and doing it poorly, genre spaces, where I mostly sit, needs that diversity in perspective-unless all you want to read is American science fiction.
Thanks, I truly don't disagree with you, especially in areas like genre or even social realism! As clarified in my reply to Owen above, my satirical target was a specific aesthetic, an offshoot of modernism, one practiced by Anglophone writers as well, that is often reductively associated with "translated fiction" in vanguardist literary/academic circles.
I’m still not sure I agree. But that’s mainly because Chad Post has been “mining” the Dalkey Archive (many examples of which were translated and of the modernist bent of which you speak) and each one sounds genuinely fascinating. It might have something to do with the fact that he knows how to sell a book. If the sort of books you were referring to were all that was discussed, then I think I’d agree with you. But the LARB felt to me like rant against a group of about ten people no-one especially notices. Or cares that much about.
I wonder why poets (with the exception of, I guess, Pessoa?) aren't really ever brought up in the translated literature/lit bro debates? The brodernism piece, for example, doesn't include any on its hitlist.
On a perhaps related note, it's particularly frustrating to see all these articles popping up about a New Romanticism that only make tangential reference to the actual poetry. Any consideration of the work usually amount to customary name-drops and if any poet is treated in-depth its Goethe which perhaps revives the whole exoticist fetish question again. This happens on both sides for what its worth. Ross Barkan simply copied and pasted his already meek skim of the English Romantics in his latest "Rise of the New Romanticism" post from his Guardian article from last year while Becca Rothfield's recent essay in The Point on "The Old Romantics" disappointingly confines her analysis of the period and its values to Schiller and Schlegel. I appreciate that these are manifestos more than anything, but when is someone going to actually persuade me as to why I should read "Prometheus Unbound" now (I have and I love it, ftr) instead of just telling me to throw away my phone because its what Shelley would've wanted? You, of course, have done this extraordinarily admirably with the IC. But I worry that the treatment of poetry and poets in these essays lead readers to latch on to the dogma on either side so that they think reading the manifesto is as good as acquiring the ideological value of the poetry. At the end of the day, is anyone who reads such more or less political-historical assessments actually persuaded to travel for themselves in the realms of gold? In this sense, the degradation of poetry and poets to mere a shorthand of history by those who are ostensibly eager to welcome a New Romanticism may actually just be repeating the contemporary disparagement of the medium (I'll let Barkan off the hook here because of his involvement with TMR, but I note that they too have avoided poetry for the time being). I dearly hope that those who read these pieces will pick up "The Fall of Hyperion" and learn its worth for themselves, but I am far from believing even the authors have read such works, much less their readers.
Anyways, your last line is perfect and reminds me of Bloom's assessment of Wordsworth's description of the mind where "internalization and estrangement are humanely one and the same process." I realize I may be in the minority here, but how much more novel an experience to confront "Tintern Abbey," the Lucy Poems, and the Intimations Ode than Krasznahorkai, Murnane, and Cărtărescu!
Thank you! Yes, I agree that there's a lack of actual Romantic literature in all its complexity in these discussions, which would dispel some of the over-simplifications even at the ideological level itself (they weren't simply anti-tech, they weren't all pastoral, they weren't all opposed to irony and sophistication, they weren't all nationalists, etc.). And, at the risk of a certain "nationalism" of my own, I do agree with your final paragraph as well. I am not opposed to reading literature in translation, obviously—my target was more a strain of attenuated late modernism Anglophone writers also practice extensively than the phenomenon of reading translated fiction—but I do think readers would find it more challenging in its own way to read the best that's been written in their own language rather than collecting disconnected specimens of pseudo-exotica they're only ever encountering in their contemporary idiom.
("Pseudo-exotica" because, though I didn't mention it in the post, there's a longstanding complaint in academic comp-lit circles about these late modernist aesthetics monopolizing what gets moved through the globalizing channels of Paris, London, and New York publishing. Granted the critics in this vein—e.g., my old grad-school prof Tim Brennan, later the biographer of Edward Said, as well as Pascale Casanova, mentioned in my Murnane review—are usually Marxists upset that depoliticizing or crypto-liberalizing modernist emphases cause texts of social realism and social protest to go untranslated or unappreciated by the cognoscenti when they are, not a critique I personally care about, but the point about a certain aesthetic sameness remains, Kafka/Beckett as global luxury brand, the absurd as accessory, the void as ornament, parfum d'atrocité.)
Re: a recent Tumblr response of yours, real heads know your top three influences are Hawthorne, Dickens, and Morrison. And like a bookish, deferential child of divorce, your unconscious drifts obediently, as with the tides, where it’s told: Toni Monday through Friday; Grant every other weekend.
(It’s probably Alan Moore or Dave McKean before Grant, but just go with it…)
Painfully accurate, David! (I wonder where ChatGPT got that answer. Maybe just because I wrote about a lot of those people's books on my site. I read Mann too late in life to be truly influenced by him the way I'm influenced by writers I started reading in my teens, but MA *was* a self-conscious attempt at a comic-book Dr. Faustus.)
You know, I think the "correct" response is that, since ChatGPT generates text by identifying and extending patterns in its training data, it's probably drawing from the most widely read essays on your site, and not excavating the catacombs of your fiction. But in this age of New Romanticism, the new "correct" response, I fear, is conceding that that mischievous fairy, like Shelley's Queen Mab, is interpreting our dreams. (The deficiency of our age, of course, is that Shelley's stops at analysis, as do most; but Mercutio's—for Shakespeare is greater than the gods—does not simply interpret but creates, galloping night by night through lovers' brains, to dream of love. But I digress...)
What the heck is that YouTube review? Can somebody more online than I explain what is going on there?
I believe the idea is that my work exhibits the same ideological symptoms as several anime and video games, while being at once slightly more sophisticated and slightly less entertaining than they are. But I am apparently too old to understand this in its entirety, also part of the critique, which is fair enough.