SCOTT ABBBOTT'S TRANSLATION OF HANDKE'S "TO DURATION"

Gabriel Josipovici’s discussion of his “book of the year” (today’s Times Literary Supplement) he wrote the following:

Peter Handke’s long poem Gedicht an die Dauer came out in 1986 and has
only just been brought out in English, as To Duration, in a fine
translation by Scott Abbott, from the small press, Cannon Magazine.
That the same person could write Offending the Audience, Essay on
Tiredness, Repetition and this poem is quite remarkable. Handke is one
of the shining literary lights of our time and it says a great deal
about the insularity of our culture that this profound and beautiful
poem has had to wait almost thirty years to appear in English.

SCOTT ABBOTT'S Translation of Handke’s “To Duration” Featured in this Week’s Times Literary Supplement   In Gabriel Josipovici's discussion of his "book of the year" (today's Times Literary Supplement) he wrote the following: Peter Handke’s long poem Gedicht an die Dauer came out in 1986 and has only just been brought out in English, as To Duration, in a fine translation by Scott Abbott, from the small press, Cannon Magazine. That the same person could write Offending the Audience, Essay on Tiredness, Repetition and this poem is quite remarkable. Handke is one of the shining literary lights of our time and it says a great deal about the insularity of our culture that this profound and beautiful poem has had to wait almost thirty years to appear in English. Josipovici is a brilliant novelist and thoughtful critic. See my thoughts on his novel The Story of a Moment   https://thegoaliesanxiety.wordpress.com/?s=josipovici

Handke's MORAVIAN NIGHTS scheduled for D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6!

Handke's 2007 MORAVIAN NIGHTS ( whose translation into all other major languages occurred years ago) will finally appear, hold your breath, in D E C E M B E R  2 0 1 6!

And let’s wait with bated breath whether Auntie’s NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW can find someone to do a halfway decent job on this complex assaying, as compared to the atrocities committed on Handke’s three other major epics, THE 1986 THE REPETITIOH, THE 1993 MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY, AND THE 2003 CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS. These three very different books were given to reviewers who were not only out of their depth when confronted with the effect that these texts have, but in the instance of the reviewer of Handke’s activist recherche, THE REPETITION, wanted a sixteen year old kid – the protagonist Filip Kobal - to inveigh against Marshal Tito when he encounters his photo during his peregrinations through Slovenia!

 There exist an account of the sorry job the NY Times has done in reviewing Handke’s prose and plays and informing its readers :

http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2015/04/peter-handke-ny-times-50-year-horror.html

However, the ruination of Handke's English language career is not entirely to be blamed on Auntie and a culture that isn’t that different from the old whore that made Pound’s HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLY puke about one hundred years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Selwyn_Mauberley

The august firm of FARRAR, STRAUS has contributed its share in mispublishing Handke and obviously continues apace in ruining something I started so nicely back in 1971 with KASPAR & OTHER PLAYS + GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK.

(vide http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2015/04/summa-farrar-straus-roloff.html

 for the whole miserable story where FSG, especially that skinflint chintz and crook Roger Straus bears the responsibility for a seven-year caesura – after a series of all around successes – and mispublication).

Farrar, Straus, ill-advised currently in the matter by Handke’s first-rate sometimes wondrous prose translator Krishna Winston (to translate and make literary judgment are two different matters), has been just as lackadaisical. During the current aeven year interim in publication of Handke – since the appearance of Handke’s DON JUAN – and while Handke himself has written a half dozen books and half dozen plays - FSG has turned down the amazing DER GROSSE FALL (The Big Fall) that Seagull Books in Kalkotta, with its University of Chicago distributor

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/publisher/pu3431381_3431382.html

which has taken up the slack, will do as well as what I regard as the absolute premier text of literary reportage, Handke’s THE CUCKOOS OF VELICA HORCA, that beats anything I have encountered of its kind in the English language. 

The now so mediocre New Yorker – in matters fiction – not in its critics – of course dropped the ball many years ago as well.

You might of course hold that Handke has only himself to blame what with the different tack he took on the causes for and manner in which the 2^nd Yugoslav Republic disintegrated, but even if he were mistaken, which [after a total of a year of my life’s investigations and well based skepticism of my exhibitionist’s tricks] I found not to be the case, rather the opposite: Handke ought to have inveighed far more strongly against neo-liberal economic warfare (on the part of by the then humanity hyenas who came out supporting all the old fascist regimes in Croatia and Bosnia and Albanians) than he did; or the manner in which Milosevics was treated. Of course the way Handke acted was in his surfeit uppity manner, but what does any of that really have to do with the literary evaluation or response to his work. Only in a single or maybe two, on the part of Richard Gilman’s very early piece in THE MAKING OF MODERN DRAMA, and William Gass’s review of N0-MAN’S BAY in the L.A. Times Book Review has Handke, indeed very much of an oddball but of Shakespearean or Faulknerian capacities, and very much historically bound, receive a response from someone of his peerage. Worse, Bob Silvers, who really might have known better, published J.L Marcus piece.

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2009/12/letter-to-robert-silvers-ny-review-of.html

Meanwhile, some preliminary material, German and foreign reviews and my  initial, very tough love, take on MORAVIAN NIGHT, are on line, to whet the appetite for those to whom literature matters.

https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4012491099567362012#allposts