Paradise Bulletin (Oct 1st)
Last week, I finished reading Isabel Fargo Cole’s new translation of Motley Stones, the classic novella collection by the 19th century Austrian writer, painter, and educator Adalbert Stifter. Stifter is perhaps best known, both in the German and English-speaking world, for his Christmas tale “Rock Crystal” about two children trapped in the mountains after visiting their grandmother.
Never quite an obscure figure in translation, Stifter’s anglophone admirers include W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore, who wrote an introduction and helped translate a standalone edition of “Rock Crystal” respectively. Later on, W.G. Sebald reintroduced Stifter to a more contemporary audience, especially through a classic interview on Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt’s longrunning literary radio show.
I’ll write more about Stifter in the future, certainly, but for now will share this excerpt from “Rock Crystal”, wonderfully translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, which gives a sense of how Stifter’s prose, though not quite as formally inventive as his early Romantic predecessors, does have its own unique character and hypnotic beauty:
All around the snow clouds had sunk away behind the mountains and an utterly dark-blue nearly black vault stretched about the children, filled with thickset blazing stars, and through the midst of these stars was woven a wide shimmering milky band that they had seen before from the valley but never with such clarity. The night drew on. The children did not know the stars advance westward and move onward, or they could have told the hour of the night by their progress: new ones came and the old ones went, but they thought it was always the same stars.
I’ve been watching quite a few long movies (or films) lately. This started, appropriately enough, in June with Edward Yang’s brilliant A Brighter Summer Day. This week, I watched Kenneth Branagh’s full-length version of Hamlet for the first time since, I don’t know, since I was teenager, and this go around raised the question of how old the character is supposed to be. Seeing the play again in my thirties, Hamlet seems a to me a very teenage character, brooding and passionate, although the graveyard scene confirms that he is in his third decade as well. “Here's a skull now,” says the clown gravedigger, pointing to the remains of Hamlet’s childhood friend, the jester Yorick, “this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.” Other people have forgotten this detail too, as an article in the TLS demonstrates.
Hamlet the movie, not quite a film, is good, justifiably popular. Many of the classic scenes, especially when Hamlet confronts Ophelia—“Get thee to a nunnery!”—are fantastically performed and staged. I have no major contrarian takes about it, except to say that some of the Hollywood cameos work better than others. I get the feeling the Branagh just loved Some Like It Hot and casting Jack Lemmon as the guard Marcellus was an afterthought. Robin Williams does well as the fool courtier Osric, but his own particular comedic persona (and his own eventual not-to-be) distracts from the performance, unfortunately. Charlton Heston is prefect as the Player King, stagey and grave.
During my editing and translation work, I’ve been listening to recent releases by the longstanding drone band Growing. They were among that second wave of bands in the late 90s and 00s, along with Boris and Sunn O))), that pushed forward the style droning rock music pioneered by the Melvins and Earth. As far as I could tell, they never enjoyed the (modest) success of their contemporaries, despite some great records and support from influential labels like Kranky and even, strangely enough, Vice Media. After almost a decade of semi-dormancy, they’ve started releasing new material, and have, since the pandemic started, grown (cough) quietly prolific. They did a higher profile album release, Diptych, on Silver Current records, which is very good, but my favorite stuff has been their various home recorded songs and sketches, the latest volume in particular.
I also recommend the band’s more rhythmic, less droning releases, which don’t seem to get as much love as they should, even by fans of this fantastic but underloved band.