Summer reading: From garbage to witchcraft to Moby-Dick's progeny, our critics recommend books for nourishment, instruction & edification.
Feitlowitz, Marguerite
Marguerite Feitlowitz Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford). A translator of French, Spanish, and Catalan, she writes...
...One of the great poets of Spain's Generation of 1927, Jorge Guillen went into permanent exile during the Spanish Civil War...
...Ransome had learned to call it)" and returned home to bicker quietly over whether they have just been "burgled" or "robbed...
...Set in Iceland, Hong Kong, India, and Mexico, and spanning three millennia, these essays are rife with vivid particulars and astounding oddities...
...There is no hint in Franzen's work of the difficult choices presented in every line...
...His portraits of the poets Hugh MacDiarmid, James Laughlin, and Omar Caceres—contrasting figures, to put it mildly—are finely etched in terms of character, place, and time...
...In this season of sun, let there be light on Cola Franzen, one of our finest living translators...
...In Manhattan, he exults among the skyscrapers only to exhort: "Look: space...
...In "Sex Objects," Weinberger leads up to Sappho with a catalogue of the fancy mating habits of birds and fish and a couple of pintsized mammals...
...Everything calls out to be relearned, including conjugal desire...
...Woman...
...The sedate Mr...
...is the third volume of essays by Eliot Weinberger, translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, among other authors...
...These are the establishments that had replaced the ones of the defining years of her marriage: Miss Dorsey's for baby gifts and knitwear...
...The twenty-four pieces gathered here reflect voracious curiosity, wanderlust, and encyclopedic knowledge of peoples, places, rituals, and religions...
...The poplar's stirring makes a visible breeze, in a circle of peace the evening encloses me, and a soaring sky adapts to my horizon...
...As a reader, Franzen has the penetration of a laser...
...Ransome, who will soon stride out into the unfamiliar depths of her Notting Hill neighborhood, worlds upon worlds are about to open...
...the eternally hushed tea shop on the corner...
...is every inch a novel...
...The world, Mrs...
...When fair between the freckles I am reminded of ripe wheat, witness of summer...
...But for the clothes they are wearing, the Ramsomes suddenly have nothing, not even (they can barely say it) a square of paper for the loo...
...Karmk Traces (New Directions, $15.95, 192 pp...
...Written by one of England's most prominent playwrights, it is layered and razor-sharp, hilarious and moving...
...a grammarian, she knows how to pick her way among the landmines...
...The plot twists and turns...
...a poet herself, she knows that poetry is borne on the breath...
...The Ransomes' little world looks as it did before...
...From "A Window": There are polished words, But I would like to know as the June air knows...
...That whiteness...
...On literature and politics, Weinberger is informed, edgy, and tart: In "What Was Formalism," he lambasts an anthology called Rebel Angels as being full of "wimps, cafe Republicans measuring out their lives in coffee Commonweal 27 June 15,2001 spoons that keep changing size" (that is, not one of these so-called formal poets can reliably create a sonnet, let alone a villanelle...
...Every single thing they own is gone—every lamp and switch and fixture, every hairbrush, toothbrush, light bulb, and battery...
...Winner of The Academy of American Poets Prize for Translation, this bilingual collection is at once faithful and inventive, elegant and immediate...
...is a landmark...
...Smaller than my own hand, lighter than a wineglass, and slim enough to read within the frame of a single hour, Alan Bennett's 77k Clothes They Stood Up In (Random House, $13.95,161 pp...
...A translator of French, Spanish, and Catalan, she writes often about literature and art...
...Timothy White, across whose counter one whispered the sizes of one's intimate foundations...
...Commonweal 28 June 15,2001...
...But everything is different...
...Pending settlement from their insurers (handled with opportunistic aplomb by her husband, a solicitor whose only passion is Mozart) she sets out to re-feather their nest, but temporarily, with maiden visits to secondhand markets (where she buys an Afghan prayer rug), the Asian grocer, the Egyptian chemist...
...And it is marvelous, full of "characters" with new ways of speaking and moving and eating...
...Here is "Freckles," seasonal and entire: Mallarme, pen-brush, compares the dry leaves of autumn to skin with freckles: Sun loves that skin so much...
...Weinberger is a rare treat: Montaigne, who invented the essai, would love him...
...Let us now praise promiscuity, by which I mean a spirited romp through the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry...
...The burglary (or robbery) turns out to have been an error of baroque complications, and is repaired...
...Ransome have been to the opera...
...Guillen has been translated before and well, but Horses in the Air and Other Poems, translated by Cola Franzen (City Lights, $15.95,248 pp...
...His bent is metaphysical and literary, but his (very modern) eye is focused on the world...
...So bright it needs a shelter of golden shadow...
...and Mrs...
...The history of the world is in great measure the history of translation...
...For Mrs...
...Cost, as Mrs...
...Ransome suddenly sees, had turned over...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 12
