Remembering Keith Waldrop
Also: Translating Dostoevsky's mumblings, on not teaching Shakespeare in Florida, Adam Kirsch on the Gen X novel, and more.
I can’t remember when I first read the poetry of Keith Waldrop, who I have just learned has died at 90, but it didn’t strike me until I heard him read in the Beinecke Rare Book Library on a rainy evening sometime in 2005 or 2006. He had a life-long love of theatre, and he knew how to read his work subtly but dramatically to give it a structure it sometimes lacked on the page. Here he is reading his poem “Conversion” in that particular voice of his from his first book of poems, A Windmill Near Calvary (1968).
Waldrop’s mother was a fundamentalist Christian who moved the family around after her divorce in search of the perfect church. In a review of Waldrop’s “autobiographical novel,” Light While There Is Light, a couple of years ago, Ben Lerner wrote this:
He certainly is not consoled by his mother’s religious fundamentalism, which is the source of many of the misadventures, absurd and affecting, recorded in this understated masterpiece. Her religion, like the poetic imagination, is motivated by a fear of the emptiness of the given world:
“The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle towards a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.”
Waldrop’s remarkable patience with the unforgettable cast of characters in his “fictional memoir” derives, I think, from how he understands their suffering and shenanigans and occasional cruelty as issuing from that fear of emptiness—a fear he takes seriously, shares. This allows Waldrop to depict but not demean his mother’s idiosyncratic zealotry, her speaking in tongues, her dragging the family across the Midwest and South in search of a sufficiently severe church (and potential husband for Waldrop’s older sister); it allows him to write with humor and pathos and sometimes subtle exasperation—but without judgment—about his brothers Charles and Julian, whose plans to improve the world, or at least their lot in it, involve a variety of idiotic and occasionally illegal schemes, ranging from improvised indoor poultry farming to a used-car racket to a fraudulent medical practice. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read a less judgmental book, let alone a less judgmental family history. Waldrop refuses to psychologize or allegorize, to excuse, pity, or condescend. Someone looking for a conventional novel or memoir might experience this as a kind of imaginative poverty, but it’s his restraint that allows Waldrop to depict so powerfully the world “as it was and as it is.”
He was, according to those who knew him, a self-effacing man. In the obit at The New York Times, we are told that when he won the National Book Award for Poetry for Transcendental Studies (2009), “he and his wife were low-key about it. They traveled to New York for the ceremony, but his wife went to the opera instead of the presentation. ‘I almost went to the opera myself,’ Professor Waldrop told The Christian Science Monitor.”
Despite Waldrop’s sometimes disconnected verse (he has said that he uses collage techniques to write at least some of his poems), his best work is deeply humane. We have poems like “Lullaby in January” (1979) and “Around the Block” (1979), as well as “Below the Earth” (2009), to note a few favorites available online. (A full list of works available online can be found here.)
You might be surprised to learn, given Waldrop’s more experimental verse, that he did his Ph.D. under the direction of Austin Warren at the University of Michigan—Warren being, of course, the co-author with René Wellek of Theory of Literature, the textbook of the New Criticism. What did Waldrop write his dissertation on? Aesthetic Uses of Obscenity in Literature, in which he makes this distinction between obscenity and pornography:
An obscenity must be in some sense public. According to a dubious etymology, it would be something done on the stage that properly would not have been done—on the stage. There are words we call obscene, none we call pornographic. Sex is not, as such, obscene; divorce proceedings often are. I have known men who seemed to appreciate obscene jokes as much as anyone become indignant on seeing the same sort of thing in print. Private printings, real or fake, appeal to pornography-hunters because they seem more virginal . . . There are differences, of course, from person to person and great differences from culture to culture. What is shocking at one moment is bland at another and a face exposed in one land causes as much embarrassment as an uncovered podex elsewhere. Modesty and shame, however, have been studied objectively (not to say scientifically) even though their outward patterns and certainly their triggering vary quite as much.
There is a lot of dross in Waldrop’s work, but there is also quality silver and some solid translations of French poetry, including Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. May he rest in peace.
In other news, it is being reported everywhere it seems that the Hillsborough School District in Florida will teach only excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays because of Ron DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act, or “Don’t Say Gay” act. Whatever you think of the law, what’s odd is that school district itself has said that they cut the full plays to give more space to other texts to prepare students for exams that will be determined by the new Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.). “School district officials,” The Tampa Bay Times reports, “said they redesigned their instructional guides for teachers because of revised state teaching standards and a new set of state exams that cover a vast array of books and writing styles.” The school district spokeswoman then adds that cutting Shakespeare was “also in consideration of the law”—i.e., the expanded Parental Rights in Education Act—but as Ryan Mills notes in National Review, B.E.S.T. explicitly recommends schools teach several of Shakespeare’s plays in their entirety:
Florida teachers looking to expose high-school freshmen to some of the great works of literature and history should consider assigning William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or maybe the St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V.
Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two other Shakespeare classics, would be good choices for sophomores. Julius Caesar would likely be good reading material for juniors, and Hamlet and King Lear would be appropriate for high-school seniors.
That is according to Florida’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, or B.E.S.T standards, a framework for Florida educators to help them “nurture students by immersing them in the study of the great works of literature, history, and the arts.”
But even though the standards are clear that works of Shakespeare are appropriate for a “meaningful curriculum that ‘uplifts the soul,’” one Florida school district will no longer assign full Shakespeare plays, in part because of “new state laws” designed to protect students from materials that are pornographic, not age appropriate, or that depict or describe sexual conduct.
Mills reports: “‘The Florida Department of Education in no way believes Shakespeare should be removed from Florida classrooms,’ spokeswoman Cassie Palelis told National Review, noting that eight works by Shakespeare are included in the B.E.S.T. standards as recommended readings.”
Enough politics. Whether you’re a fan of Dostoevsky’s work or not, you might enjoy this piece by Michael Katz on how translators have dealt with the mumblings and idiosyncrasies of his narrators and characters:
Constance Garnett’s classic translation of The Brothers Karamazov (1913) has endured and been a frequent choice of readers for over one hundred years. It has been revised several times and has served as the text in two Norton Critical Editions, revised and edited by Ralph Matlaw (1976) and again by Susan McReynolds (2011). Garnett’s translations of Russian novels were a remarkable achievement for their time. Altogether, she translated more than seventy volumes of Russian literature, many of which are still in print today. Although her Victorian English was admirable, her knowledge of Russian was less than perfect. Moreover, she liberally adapted Dostoevsky’s novels to the aesthetic demands of her English readers. She wrote: “Dostoievsky [sic] is so obscure and so careless as a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him—sometimes it needs some penetration to see what he is trying to say.”
One result of her “clarifications” was the elimination of the narrator’s various mutterings and prevarications, which combine to lend an air of rumor and unspecified intrigue to the narrative and thereby enhance the plot.
The other most popular version of the novel is by the American-Russian team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published over twenty years ago, the first of their long series of translations of the Russian classics. Their translation is characterized by a too close adherence to the Russian text that results in a word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax style that sacrifices tone and frequently misconstrues a passage’s overall sense.
Critics have noted that previous translations are often lacking in the specificity of individual speech. They seem to use one common level of English diction and syntax. Dostoevsky’s characters must be seen as unmistakably distinct individuals—not only the main figures (Fyodor, Dmitry, Ivan, and Alyosha) but also the minor ones (Katerina, Grushenka, Lise, and Rakitin). Each character speaks in his or her own Russian idiolect. It is the translator’s job to try to capture their individual speech patterns.
Here’s Adam Kirsch on the Gen X novel in the latest Harper’s:
Writers of this cohort do sometimes try to imagine a better world, but they tend to do so in terms that are metaphysical rather than political, moving at one bound from the fallen present to some kind of messianic future. In her 2022 novel Pure Colour, Heti tells the story of a woman named Mira whose grief over her father’s death prompts her to speculate about what Judaism calls the world to come. In Heti’s vision, this is not a place to which the soul repairs after death, nor is it some kind of revolutionary political arrangement; rather, it is an entirely new world that God will one day create to replace the one we live in, which she calls “the first draft of existence.”
The hardest thing to accept, for Heti’s protagonist, is that the end of our world will mean the disappearance of art. “Art would never leave us like a father dying,” Mira says. “In a way, it would always remain.” But over the course of Pure Colour, she comes to accept that even art is transitory . . . Tao Lin’s unnerving, affectless autofiction leaves a rather different impression than Heti’s, and he has sometimes been identified as a voice from the next generation, the millennials. But his 2021 novel Leave Society shows him thinking along similar lines as the children of the Seventies. In Taipei, from 2013, Lin’s alter ego is named Paul, and he spends most of the novel joylessly eating in restaurants and taking mood-altering drugs. In Leave Society he is named Li, but he is recognizably the same person, perched on a knife-edge between extreme sensitivity and neurotic withdrawal. In the interim, he has decided that the cure for his troubles, and the world’s, lies in purging the body of the toxins that infiltrate it from every direction.
Like Heti, Lin anticipates a great erasure. All of recorded history, he writes, has been merely a “brief, fallible transition . . . from matter into the imagination.” Sometime soon we will emerge into a universe that bears no resemblance to the one we know . . . Zadie Smith has always been too deeply rooted in the social comedy of the English novel to embrace autofiction, yet she also registers this disconnect, as can be seen in the way her influences have shifted over time.
Should professors engage in “outreach” (by writing for newspapers and publishing trade books, for example) as well as teaching, research, and service? Alan Jacobs thinks so: “Some students want to attend the Honors College here at Baylor because they have encountered the public work, the outreaching work, that I and several of my colleagues do. We can in a similar way help with the recruitment of faculty also. But I suspect that there may be other benefits to my kind of public-facing work, benefits that are more strictly academic — even if the work itself isn’t academic, or not in the familiar ways.”
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