National literatures

Tim Parks’s questions about whether there is such a thing as a national literature, and whether, if there is, it deserves our attention, as well as his comments on translated novels (Afterthoughts, October 11), reminded me of a recent experience during a trip to Argentina. Faced, at a bookshop, with a large table full of local produce by a contingent of authors unknown to me, I was elated to read on the dust jackets that these novels and short-story collections had enjoyed huge international success and been translated into the most diverse languages: not just into what the French used to call, with imperial arrogance, modern langues de culture, but into Azerbaijani, Croatian, Finnish, Korean, Hindustani, Swahili, etc. Naturally I bought as many – in the original Spanish – as my pocket and luggage allowance permitted me, but they made, without exception, a disappointing read.

Further investigation explained the mystery: the last Argentine government, I was told, had an active policy of promotion of the country’s “national” literature, based on generous subsidies for translation, which could be negotiated, and received in advance, at places such as the Frankfurt Book Fair upon a contract for publication being signed. Whether the books were actually translated and, if so, by a human being, as opposed to a machine, remains a moot point.

What is now common, in signed literary translations, is to have a first version done by a machine, then have it corrected by the appointed translator. Sometimes, however, things go awry: in Paris, soon after the pandemic, I bought a copy of a highly praised recent French version of Robert Musil’s Young Törless, only to discover, in four or five paragraphs, usually separated by a few pages, the most extraordinary senseless renditions of the original pellucid German. What had obviously happened was that the (human) translator had accidentally skipped revising them, hence they appeared as the machine program had “thought” fit to translate them. But the quality of the senselessness was of a most strange and revelatory non-human character, evincing the kind of mistakes a human mind would be thoroughly incapable of making, and opening one’s eyes into a syntactical and grammatical (un)reality yet unimagined, and thus rendering them even more remarkable than anything Musil himself ever wrote. The author would, I imagine, have been delighted with this “improvement”. My suspicion is that the several critics who were unanimous in their praise of this version had not actually read it through.

Daniel Waissbein
Oxford

Tim Parks writes (October 11) that he wondered, back in 2018, whether it was not appropriate for Scottish publishers to publish mostly Scottish authors. He illustrates how such an attitude may not have found favour in the Netherlands, where readers believed foreign novels to be “better”. He does not say whether they read a translation or the original, the latter often accessible to (then) multilingually schooled readers with command of English, German and French. He mentions the writer Gerard Reve, who in the early 1950s abandoned his native Dutch to write in English. The result, The Acrobat (which contained four stories), did not find a UK publisher, although in 1954 the Paris Review printed two of its stories (“The Acrobat” and “Gossamer”), and Angus Wilson put in a good word. Geert van Oorschot, Reve’s Dutch publisher, with characteristic impetuosity and to keep Reve on his list, decided to publish The Acrobat in the original English. According to Arjen Fortuin, Van Oorschot’s biographer, a London bookshop ordered six copies. Sales were poor in the Netherlands: 793 in the year of publication, twenty-six the year after. Four stories in English by a Dutch author (though famous) did not interest Dutch readers at all, though critics were largely positive. To paraphrase Parks, perhaps the Dutch only enjoyed alternative, carefully nurtured identities when they could read the original. A Dutch-born writer had best stick with Dutch – it seemed appropriate. So Reve did.

Erik de Visser
Cambridge

Gaia

Andrew H. Knoll’s interesting review of The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts (October 4) does an admirable job of explaining Lovelock’s complex view of Gaia and his collaboration with Lynn Margulis. Although I met Lovelock in 1983 at an international conference on biodiversity at the Smithsonian Institution, Watts’s narrative on Margulis was of special interest to me because we were faculty colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for many years. She was always willing to be helpful to colleagues, and shared ideas and microbial cultures as well.

Watts sums up Gaia’s message well: it’s spiritual and not science. But I remain a staunch admirer of the Serial Endosymbiotic Theory offered and fearlessly defended by Margulis when challenged by the neo-Darwinian crowd, because it passes muster when run through the lens of evolution.

Guy Lanza
University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA

The Fortsas Hoax

Stephen Calloway (Letters, October 4) reminds readers of the once- famous Fortsas Hoax of 1840. However, this is by no means the last spoof catalogue of unique and desirable books and manuscripts carefully tailored to lure bibliophiles. In 2005 the bookseller R. A. Gilbert of Bristol issued his swansong Catalogue 100, A Century of Rare Books and Manuscripts in the fields of Freemasonry, Hermetica, Nineteenth Century Literature, Theology and Church History. Dr Gilbert is a specialist in what he calls “fringe masonry” and an authority on A. E. Waite and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, episcopi vagantes and Uranian schoolmaster poets. The catalogue was limited to 220 copies and dedicated to his late friend Ellic Howe, wartime master of the arts of deception. If this was not sufficient clue, Dr Gilbert’s preface claims that every one of the hundred items is unique, but that he is not prepared to enter into correspondence on matters of provenance. A further stricture is that he insists on determining “which person or institution is most suitable” as a purchaser.

Among the autograph letters are one from the explorer and spy F. M. Bailey, dated 1904 in Gyantse, Tibet, on masonic activity among Younghusband’s expeditionary force (£650); Dennis Wheatley’s typescript correspondence with the fraudster Rollo Ahmed, author of The Black Art (£450); and a letter from Thomas Langlois Lefroy (Dublin, 1836) to the Revd E. H. Hoare, mentioning his early friendship with Jane Austen (£300). A letter about the Agapemonite Revd J. H. Smyth-Pigott, before his cult’s move to Hackney, from the Abode of Love in Spaxton, Somerset, in 1898 (£135), would surely have appealed to John Betjeman. The books and corrected proofs link and connect figures such as Father Ignatius of Llanthony, Annie Besant, Lobsang Rampa, W. B. Yeats, J. A. Symonds, Arthur Machen, Aleister Crowley and others of a mystical persuasion, all catalogued with convincing and tempting detail. Some may still be available, but caveat emptor.

Paul Grinke
London N16

Jewish polygamy

Toby Lichtig (Letters, October 11) notes that polygamy, until the 1970s, was permitted in Israel, as it still is in certain Arab countries. Focusing on religion, there remain, indeed, many similarities between Islamic practices and orthodox Judaism’s: witness dietary laws, male circumcision and modesty of dress for women. The fundamental distinction is this: Islam actively seeks to win converts; Judaism does not.

Peter Cave
London W1

Henry James Trumped

Sarah Baxter’s review of books about the televangelists and Donald Trump (October 11) was masterly, but I am so tired of reading about Trump that in my desire to escape the inescapable I turned to Henry James’s The Bostonians, surely a place of refuge. But no. There in its pages lurked a proto-Trump in the person of Selah Tarrant, in whose mind,

the supremely happy people were those (and there were a good many of them) of whom there was some journalistic mention every day in the year. Nothing less than this would really have satisfied Selah Tarrant; his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a component part of the newspaper as the title and the date, or the list of fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not sufficiently effective.

James understood the possibility of such a person, a man so shallow as not to be a man at all, but rather a series of poses calculated to match the matrices of the publicity-making machine.

Stephen Brown
O’Fallon IL

Elizabethan attribution

I read with interest the essays on attribution of authorship (October 4), but I wish they had discussed how compositors’ actions might sometimes affect attribution study. For example, contractions (used as a test of authorship by two scholars cited in Brian Vickers’s review) could be created by compositors when they wished to save space.

G. T. Tanselle
New York

Compendious

Seamus Perry describes The Island, Nicholas Jenkins’s new book on Auden, as “compendious” (October 11). It’s a word misunderstood by many (including me, well into adulthood) to mean something like “expansive”, but the OED defines it as “Containing the substance within small compass, concise, succinct, summary; comprehensive though brief”. This is surely not an apt description of Jenkins’s 768-page tome.

Benjamin Friedman
New York

Statistics

Lisa Hilton might be felt to be using journalistic technique in her review of Hustlers in the Ivory Tower (October 4). To say that between 1870 and 1914, newspaper sales soared to 10 million, compared with 1.5 million between 1845 and 1870, is an inaccurate computation. The increase up to 1870 was nearly tenfold, compared to just over 6.6-fold between 1870 and 1914.

John Kelt
Manea, Cambridgeshire

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