On Being Reviewed
On Being Reviewed
In which I quibble about a good thing that is happening to me
My recent book of Wolfgang Hilbig translations has gotten some good reviews recently. You can read them here, here, and here. I’m a little surprised by this—not that I thought I did a bad job, more that it’s exceedingly difficult for a new book to get any attention at all, especially a book of translated poetry, so I feel an obligation to seriously consider what people have to say about it. There’s some danger in doing this. Reviews, especially positive reviews, can have a distorting effect on your thinking as a writer. You begin looking at it as a stable source of motivation and self-worth, rather than finding those things at the task at hand.
Even so, was particularly happy about Joseph Schreiber’s review, since it gets to the heart of why I value Hilbig and wanted to translate him—his command of texture. “He can evoke an atmosphere so heavy and gritty one can almost taste it,” Joseph writes. Whenever you read Hilbig, you are immediately confronted by overwhelming tactile sensation: the rough face of decaying masonry, the airless humid atmosphere of an overgrown quarry, the choking dust kicked up along a forest path. This tactile quality, at least in English and German, comes from exactness, the capacity of those languages to form or acquire immense vocabularies. Hilbig’s punctuation and syntax also convey the rough, discontinuous terrain in his fiction—dashes, ellipses, long sentence fragments break up what would otherwise be the flat terrain of the page.
Other writers I admire, like Mauro Javier Cardenas, have spoken about how elaborate settings leave them cold, but for me it’s the main thing. I will sacrifice plot and character, sacrifice them easily, for a description of an industrial forest or abandoned factory yard, since for me, those settings are plot, those settings are character. The language of their description gives them sense of agency that equals or surpasses individual human life, because, in reality, they do. Nature always wins.
Lovecraft the Lib
Last weekend I attended, NecronomiCon, an international festival of weird fiction, held every other year in Providence, Rhode Island. I came there in support of Eric Williams, who edited Night Fears, an anthology weird fiction in translation that I published early this year. Eric was moderating a panel on that very subject, with a wide variety of writers, editors, and translators, and weighing in. I especially enjoyed Gabriel Mesa’s point on how genre distinctions are largely absent in Latin America, where mainstream publishing houses are content with offering, say, a straightforward vampire novel as literary fiction, so far as the writing merits it. I regretted not signing up to be a speaker myself, wanting, like all translators, to have my say about what it means to be a translator, though it’s probably for the best, since discourse by, for, and about translators continues to multiply, to what effect, I don’t know. What I do know is that Eric did an excellent job guiding the panel discussion, very likely likely because he’s not a translator, which is usually for the best, unless it can’t be helped. — Other panels of interest were on the work of Michael Moorcock, Leonora Carrington, and Herman Melville’s influence on H.P. Lovecraft, particularly through Moby Dick, which Lovecraft read immediately prior to writing The Call of Cthulhu, yet another example of how so-called literary and genre works influence each other.
Following the conference, I visited a few Lovecraft landmarks in Providence. One of his houses, at 598 Angell Street, had a Kamala Harris for President sign conspicuously displayed in a window. My joke about this, that Lovecraft, still living apparently, had recanted his racist past and was supporting a black woman for president, went modestly viral on the social media app formerly known as Twitter, though it was pointed out by multiple people that Lovecraft had actually undergone a similar ideological conversion late in life, coming out in support of FDR, the New Deal, and denouncing the race laws of Nazi Germany. How he would have viewed Japanese Internment and the nascent Civil Rights Movement is anybody’s guess, but Lovecraft’s ethical and intellectual capacities have been consistently underrated, both by his racist reactionary fans and by the liberal critics of that racism. He understood that the world could change in radical ways. He wrote of the past as well as the future in the mode of science fiction. The people living in his houses and the readers reading his books do not think as he did and that fact would not surprise him in the least, I’m certain. The generations are wiped out, the critic Victor Skovsky wrote, like chalk from a chalkboard, the good along with the bad.
A Storm while Heading Homeward
Sometimes I think I’m put on this earth to gaze at various atmospheric phenomena, but driving home from the convention didn’t present much of an opportunity for that sort of contemplation. There was the omnipresent traffic of the New York City metro area, along with a severe thunderstorm broke as we were crossing the George Washington Bridge out of Manhattan. The sky was so low and thick with rain that the lightning flashed sourceless, without sound, illuminating nothing, a brief smear along the windshield. It didn’t let up until more than an hour later, as night fell over the interstitial landscape of northern New Jersey, the lights of harbor cranes and chemical tanks reflected the pools of water, which, even as the rain departed, still halted traffic to a slow crawl.
