B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S |
Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne
[1902]
Lady Gregory’s retellings of the ancient Irish epic tales, many of which are
evoked in Yeats’s plays and poems.
A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend and Folklore includes her book plus
Yeats’s Irish Fairy and Folk Tales.
The Mabinogion
Fascinating medieval Welsh tales, somewhat similar to the Irish ones but
perhaps even more mysterious, magical and dreamlike.
The best edition is that translated by Jeffrey Gantz. If you like it, you
might also enjoy Evangeline Walton’s four-volume series of retellings. But read
the original first.
The Kalevala
This delightful folk epic was put together in the early nineteenth century by
the country doctor Elias Lönnrot, based on the
ancient folksongs that he had collected in the remotest regions of Finland and
Lapland. The three shamanistic heroes — Väinämöinen
the ageless sage and singer, Ilmarinen the blacksmith and craftsman,
and Lemminkäinen
the brash and boastful adventurer — wander
through
landscapes that shift and metamorphose as in a dream; yet the whole environment,
people, animals, plants, are described in vivid and loving detail. Even
“inanimate” objects come alive — a little tree, addressed with the right
spell, will answer a question; a harp, misplayed, will insist on being returned
to its master.
Avoid the old translations by Kirby and Crawford, which have a monotonous,
Hiawatha-style rhythm. I recommend the version by Eino Friberg — it’s a bit
pricy, but it is a superb idiomatic translation and includes some delightful
illustrations. Also quite acceptable are the poetic rendering by Keith Bosley
and the literal scholarly edition by Francis Magoun. Compare their versions of
the sample passage here and see which you
prefer.
[Rexroth essay on The Kalevala]
Njal’s Saga [ca. 1280]
This medieval Icelandic story is one the most intense novels
ever written. It is not at all “primitive”
in the way that The Kalevala or the ancient Irish tales are. Though the harsh environment
produces a rather simplified social structure (somewhat like
pioneer America), the characters and motivations are delineated with the
greatest sophistication and profundity. The plot — a feud that builds up to a
tragic climax — involves the unsuccessful effort of a magnanimous
individual to
overcome the spites and pettinesses of some of the other characters — much the
same theme that recurs in so many other great works from The Iliad to
Parade’s End.
Dante, The Divine Comedy
[1321]
Repugnant though Dante’s religious perspective may be, there are many
qualities in The Divine Comedy that make it worth
reading. The author’s imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and
Paradise
touches on every aspect of life — aesthetic, psychological, ethical, political,
philosophical, spiritual. Though he is as egotistic and vindictive as his
Biblical God, Dante is far from being conventionally pious. He puts a
considerable number of Popes in some of the hottest sectors of Hell, for
example.
His poetry is brilliant and subtle enough that it is very hard to translate,
especially if one tries to preserve the original rhyme scheme. It’s probably
best to get one of the literal prose translations (Charles Singleton’s or John
Sinclair’s). And resign yourself to reading the notes — otherwise you won’t
understand who the characters are or why they have ended up where Dante finds
them.
[Rexroth
translation of a Dante poem]
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
[ca. 1350]
Classic collection of one hundred
medieval tales, many of them risqué, all of them
quite entertaining.
I recommend the translation by G.H. McWilliam (Penguin).
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
[1615]
This is one of the most wonderful books in the world. A middle-aged country
gentleman, brain addled by reading too many chivalric adventure stories, adopts
the trappings of a medieval knight and sets out to rescue damsels in distress
and otherwise right any wrongs he may come across. He convinces a naïve
but commonsensical neighboring peasant, Sancho Panza, to accompany him as his
squire. Their conversations as they travel along are even more entertaining than
their predictably amusing adventures. The novel may have started out as a mere
satire of the already largely outmoded genre of chivalric romance, but Don
Quixote and Sancho soon took on a life of their own and became two of the
best-loved characters in world literature. The significance of their adventures
and of their relation to each other has lent itself to endlessly different
interpretations, like life itself.
Many of the older translations are not so good.
There are reasonably good modern ones by Samuel Putnam, Walter Starkie, Burton
Raffel and Edith Grossman. You can sample each of them
here.
Because of the many interpolated stories in Don Quixote — mildly
entertaining but not really essential to the work as a whole — this is one case
where reading an abridgment is a good idea, at least the first time around.
If you want to go that route, I suggest The Portable Cervantes, which
includes a somewhat shortened version of Putnam’s translation with summaries of
the omitted material.
(In general I do not recommend reading abridgments — you’re likely to miss
the full scope or context of a work. However, in some cases it may be better
than nothing. Anthologies such as the Viking “Portables” can be a good
introduction to an author’s best works, or to a certain period or genre. Just
bear in mind that editors have their own biases, so the selection or the
introduction may present a distorted view.)
[Rexroth essay on Don Quixote]
Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
[1798]
Casanova’s memoirs are not just about his innumerable love affairs, though he
does indeed recount plenty of them. (Incidentally, the reason so many women
loved him so well was because he always treated them with the greatest respect
and consideration. He was quite the opposite of the Don Juan
collector-of-conquests type.) He was an all-round adventurer — writer,
translator, musician, soldier, actor, dancer, gambler, occultist, theatrical
producer, con man, secret agent. While Restif de la Bretonne gives us a view of
French society from the bottom up, Casanova was a cultivated cosmopolitan who
moved with ease in every circle of European society. Among other accomplishments
he translated Homer into Italian and Ariosto into French, wrote a small part of
the libretto of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, authored a utopian novel and
several histories, organized a national lottery for the king of France, and was
the only person to ever escape from the notorious Piombi prison in Venice. His
autobiography is as thrilling as an adventure novel (when it was first published
in the 1820s some people thought it was really a fictional work by Stendhal),
yet subsequent research has verified virtually everything he recounted.
Get the superb illustrated and annotated edition translated by Willard Trask
(6 vols.). The earlier translation by Arthur Machen was based on a less
authentic text.
[Rexroth essay on Casanova]
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
[1869]
Set in Russia during the Napoleonic wars, this is one of the world’s greatest
novels. The scope is vast, yet the characters are not lost in it; each is
delineated with particularity and sympathy. They are real people, not “larger
than life,” yet somehow Tolstoy manages to portray them with a thrilling,
almost superhuman glow.
Anna Karenina is Tolstoy’s other masterpiece. I also recommend his
powerful final novel, Resurrection, which was written after his
conversion to a pacifist-anarchist form of Christianity. If you believe in the
prison system before you start it, I don’t think you will by the end.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
[1880]
Dostoyevsky was one of my earliest literary enthusiasms. Then Rexroth
convinced me that he’s not so profound as he seems, or rather that there’s
something pretentious and silly about the way his characters are constantly
discussing supposedly profound topics and wearing their existential anguish on
their sleeves.
Still, he’s undeniably a penetrating
psychologist and a vivid depicter of the absurd aspects of the human condition. The Brothers Karamazov
is his greatest work, but The Possessed (a.k.a. Devils or
Demons), The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment are also very
good.
Anton Chekhov, Plays and Stories [1860-1904]
Conversely, Rexroth taught me to appreciate Chekhov for his quiet,
understated insights. Read his four major plays and some of his short stories.
They may not bowl you over at first — Chekhov has had such a pervasive influence
on subsequent writers that his innovations no longer seem particularly striking
— but I think you’ll find that as the years go by you will return to his
low-keyed narratives with a satisfaction that few other authors can provide.
[Rexroth essay on Chekhov]
Henrik Ibsen, Selected Plays [1828-1906]
Ibsen almost single-handedly created the modern drama, introducing a new
psychological realism in the presentation of characters and at the same time
turning the theater into a forum for the debate of controversial social issues.
The themes of The Doll’s House (about a woman who leaves her husband in
reaction to being treated as a domestic object) and An Enemy of the People
(about a community’s attempt to silence a whistleblower who threatens their
economic interests) are obviously still relevant, but many of his less
“social” plays are just as good in their own way.
If you get into Ibsen, you may enjoy Lou Salomé’s
Ibsen’s Heroines, which attempts to deduce the earlier and later lives of
his female characters. However speculative such attempts may be, they are a good
way to deepen one’s understanding of the characters’ personalities and
motivations. (Lou Andreas-Salomé, friend of
Nietzsche, lover of Rilke and colleague of Freud, was herself a fascinating
character.)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems [1875-1926]
To my taste, Rilke’s quest for ecstatic interior visions sometimes seems
rather narrow and cloying — the sort of evasion of concrete personal relations
and responsibilities that Martin Buber turned against. But
over and over you come across truly wonderful lines, lines that open you up to whole new ways of looking
at things.
The best single Rilke volume to get is probably the Selected Poems
translated by Stephen Mitchell, which includes an insightful introduction by
Robert Hass.
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; Steppenwolf; The Glass Bead Game
[1922,
1927, 1943]
Hesse was one of the authors who most excited us during the sixties — he
seemed to present such illuminating glimpses into the new psychedelic worlds of the
imagination that we were seeking and to some extent already experiencing. My
enthusiasm has diminished a bit since that time, but I still like these three
novels, each remarkable in its own way. Siddhartha is a tale of a young
man’s spiritual journey in the time of Buddha. Steppenwolf is a more wild
and conflicted modern psychological journey. The Glass Bead Game depicts
an imaginary future society dedicated to subtle aesthetic-psychological-spiritual “games.”
Note that The Glass Bead Game is a better translation (by Richard and
Clara Winston) of the novel previously translated as Magister Ludi.
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera; Stories of Mr. Keuner
[1928,
1920s-1956]
Breaking with the traditional practice of leftist propaganda, striving
instead to provoke spectators into thinking for themselves by undermining the
usual audience identification with hero and plot, Brecht is the founder of modern
radical drama. In certain respects he anticipates the yet more radical attack on
the spectacle-spectator relationship launched by the situationists.
The Threepenny Opera (with music by Kurt Weill) is a bitter-sweet
delight. Listen to the German-language recording (Die Dreigroschenoper)
produced by Lotte Lenya and see the original film directed by G.W. Pabst (Brecht
thought it distorted his work, but it’s still one of the all-time great films).
There is also an interesting Threepenny Novel, which has some of the same
characters as the Opera but a completely different plot and setting. The
other great Brecht-Weill collaboration is The Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny.
Of Brecht’s other plays, try Mother Courage,
and perhaps also The Good Woman of Szechwan
and The Life of Galileo.
And don’t miss his superb little radical parables, Stories of Mr. Keuner.
A few of them are online here.
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
[1921]
This is another ground-breaking challenge to the traditional
spectacle-spectator relation. Reading it or seeing it is a disorienting
experience, you become utterly confused about what is real and what is the play.
Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk
[1923]
This hilarious novel, about a World War I soldier who gets by by being (or
appearing to be — one is never quite sure which it is) a totally clueless
klutz, is not only the best satire of war ever written, it’s a truly great
picaresque and humanistic work, worthy of being set alongside Don Quixote
or Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Note: Get one of the “Svejk” translations: the earlier one with the name
spelled “Schweik” is abridged and somewhat bowdlerized.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
[1942]
This immense unfinished work, a satirical “novel of ideas” set in Vienna
in the years just before World War I, is distinctly more interesting than that
other much-vaunted opus of the same period, The Magic Mountain. Musil’s
book tackles more modern issues, and it tackles them in more modern ways. The
narration goes off on all sorts of social, psychological
and philosophical tangents. Sometimes it’s illuminating, sometimes it’s amusing,
sometimes it seems cold and tedious. But I found it interesting enough that I
recently reread the whole thing,
and would have kept going if there had been more.
If you decide to tackle it, get the new two-volume edition translated by
Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, which includes all the posthumous material
(Musil’s notes and drafts for later chapters, some presenting studies of the
characters, some mulling over alternative directions that the plot might take).
Constantine Cavafy, Poems [1863-1932]
Cavafy is a modern Greek-Alexandrian poet who seems to carry on the urbane,
world-weary sensuality of classical Hellenism. Like many readers of my
generation, I discovered him through Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
I slightly prefer the Theoharis translation (entitled Before Time Could
Change Them), but the other two, by Rae Dalven and by Keeley and Sherrard,
are also fine.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novels and Stories
[1904-1991]
This Polish Yiddish writer who moved to America is one of the few modern
fiction writers I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. I think he’s as
great a storyteller
as any of the classic masters of the past. He alternates between
traditional life in the Jewish quarters of Poland (a tight-knit communal
society dominated by religious and sometimes even magical themes) and
contemporary Jewish life in New York City, where the characters are more
secular, isolated and alienated.
Try one of his story collections and see if you
like him. The Collected
Stories contains the cream of the crop.
[Rexroth essay on Isaac Singer]
Section from Gateway to the Vast Realms: Recommended Readings
from Literature to Revolution, by Ken Knabb (2004).
No copyright.
Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org