Anne Carson published a collection called Wrong Norma in February The post Martha Going appeared first on TLS ..read more

Larry Backus is the sole survivor after his ship is sunk in a South Pacific naval battle during the Second World War. Naked and badly burnt, his facial features disfigured, he is rescued and taken to a Pearl Harbor hospital: What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance thereof, and went on from there. He has no ID, and naval officials wrongly identify him as Lieutenant Ben Davenant, whose wife, Ary, arrives in H ..read more

Allen Bratton’s debut novel, Henry Henry, is notionally a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Henriad, with the setting transferred to 2014. This is a world of grand houses, gilded youths and guarded secrets. There are also more than a few hat tips to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, not least in the courtesy title given to the protagonist, Hal, the Earl of Hertford, which refers to Waugh’s Oxford college. The novel concerns a triad of Henrys, with Hal at the centre. He is gay, in his early twenties and a classic wastrel. In contrast to him are his devout Catholic father, the repressed Henry, Duk ..read more

As we know from Covid, case numbers are only one measure of a disease’s impact. In 2001 Britain experienced its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth. To stop the spread, farms were quarantined, areas of the countryside were locked down and millions of livestock animals were culled and burnt. By the time the disease was stopped in its tracks in October of that year, just 2,000 infections had been recorded. But the cost to farmers’ wallets and mental health was immense. Scott Preston’s debut novel, The Borrowed Hills, is set in the epicentre of the outbreak: Cumbria. It begins in the early days ..read more

Anne Carson trained as a classical scholar, receiving her PhD from the University of Toronto in 1981 with her dissertation on longing and lack, the pain inherent in desire, in Sappho and other Greek writers, Odi et amo ergo sum (“I hate and I love, therefore I am”). This was reworked and published as her debut, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), and was a popular and critical success – an unusual achievement for a book of essays about classical poetry. Lyrical as a critic, scholarly as a poet, Carson has since carved out a very particular yet well-known niche in contemporary poetry. At the heart of ..read more

Poets like translating because it frees them from the onus of subject. And if poetry is (as Robert Frost said) what is lost in translation, then translating also frees poets from the onus of poetry – or at least poetry with a capital P. Hence the lightweightedness of Ned Denny’s Ventriloquise, whose very title disclaims much of the creative burden. He says all the right things, intoning from Friedrich Hölderlin, for instance, that “A poet not wielding his sacred might / in life shall find no quiet in Orcus”, but he normally cedes the “sacred might” elsewhere. Take the saccharine four-line “Mak ..read more

Yehuda Amichai, who was born a hundred years ago on May 3, was a rare literary phenomenon. A bestseller in his home country, Israel, he was also something of a sensation internationally, with translations in more than forty languages and an enthusiastic following, especially in anglophone regions. His unusual success can be explained in part by the engaging accessibility of his poetry, though there is more to it than meets the eye encountering it in translation. It also has to do with the humanity of his poems. He lived in a country beset by war and the constant threat of war. (He had come to ..read more

Rosalind Brown’s debut novel follows a day in the life of Annabel, an Oxford student writing an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Her routine is both peaceful and punitive. Annabel rises at 6am to “get the most out of each day”, and drinks mint tea, then coffee, before sitting at her desk to work for a number of hours without pause. On this particular Sunday Shakespeare’s poems are laid out before her, “tightly packed”, “like small jewels”. But though she desires a life of the mind, Annabel must deal with her body’s interruptions: the need to urinate, a creeping sensation of cold, a series of cl ..read more

In February 1497 the Aldine Press in Venice brought out the second volume of its great five-volume folio edition of Aristotle, one of the masterpieces of the swaddling-cloth era of print. On the last page, in both Greek and Latin, is a striking colophon: “Copy made in Venice by the metallic hand [manu stamnea] in the house of Aldus Manutius, Roman and scholar of the Greeks”. In contrast to other printers of the age who would emphasize the Daedalean intricacy of their craft, Aldus here seems keen to disown the mechanical aspect of his business. Rather, he is a scholar, diligently copying the ma ..read more

In front of the cement wall I saw you lit up in the last and wonderful sun in the first doubt. Clothes left to dry on the roof were forgotten clothes that had held the shape of your body. And like a man breaking into the words of his friend other seasons broke into us and did not allow us to finish. Translated by Robert Alter The post ‘In front of the cement wall I saw you’ appeared first on TLS ..read more