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 :
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
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 2nd 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.
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
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