Like the rest of the world, I have watched with fascination the events unfolding in Russia with regard to l’affaire Prighozin. The latest bit of news, as yet not entirely confirmed, but terrifying nonetheless, is that as the Wagner forces marched north toward Moscow, one unit broke off to the east and headed for a Soviet era base housing nuclear weapons. It is unclear from the reports whether the Wagner unit actually reached the base, although one report has it that they made it all the way to the locked door behind which the weapons were stored.
The threat of nuclear weapons was the first political issue
that fully engaged me, 65 years ago, and I have written about it on numerous
occasions on this blog. There are by my count nine nations that possess nuclear
weapons: the United States, Russia, China, France, England, Pakistan, India,
Israel, and North Korea. It has been 78 years since the United States used the
first two primitive fission bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the
intervening years no nuclear weapon has ever been used in war.
I have tried on a number of occasions to explain why the
notion of a “tactical nuclear weapon” is incoherent and I shall not repeat my
explanations here. It was obvious two thirds of the century ago that so long as
nuclear weapons exist there are no good policies with regard to them, only
policies that are less rather than more disastrous.
Meanwhile, I note that two regular grand juries have been seated
in Fulton County, Georgia and I eagerly await their decisions with regard to
the cases that the DA shall present to them.
43 comments:
How can you outlaw nuclear war without first outlawing war itself?
The dynamic in a multipolar world differs from a bipolar world, isn't it?
Worth a try, but you have to do more than make a moral case to have impact
Interesting but I doubt the Wagner folks would have been able to get the codes necessary to actually use the nukes.
A short 4-minute video simulation showing how using tactical nukes would escalate to a full-blown nuclear exchange. (Cool graphics and sound)
PLAN A
Our team developed a simulation for a plausible escalating war between the United States and Russia using realistic nuclear force postures, targets and fatality estimates. It is estimated that there would be more than 90 million people dead and injured within the first few hours of the conflict.
"Get me the fudge off this planet!"
Okay, maybe technology brings some hope for the future in the form of robot A.I.
https://www.google.com/search?q=united+nations+ai+robot+press+conference+youtube&client=ms-android-verizon&biw=360&bih=592&tbm=vid&sxsrf=AB5stBiiEMPxaObGoet1llRNmfir4LjSfQ%3A1689114214988&ei=ZtatZKqDPIjBkPIP6IGlqA8&oq=united+nations+ai+press+conference+youtube&gs_lcp=ChBtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXZpZGVvEAEYADIICCEQoAEQwwQyCAghEKABEMMEMggIIRCgARDDBDoECCMQJzoFCAAQogRQ0R1Y9DZgsFZoAXAAeAGAAeQCiAGiGpIBBzAuOC42LjKYAQCgAQGqARBtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXZpZGVvwAEB&sclient=mobile-gws-video#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:bd4883c0,vid:m9IN14e-PLk
From today's NYT:
"Milan Kundera, Czech Literary Star and Communist Party Outcast, Dies at 94"
"The author of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' he was known for sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in his native Czechoslovakia."
I read Kundera's novel, the Joke, quite a few years ago and I don't recall it as being
"sexually charged".
It's about a guy who writes "long live Trotsky" in a letter to a friend as a joke and the letter of course is read by the authorities and the guy's life is completely ruined.
Worth reading. Kundera has a good sense of how group-think functions and how heretics are
hounded down and socially condemned by idiotic group orthodoxy. That functions under capitalism and under socialism, on the left and on the right.
I haven't read Kundera but the phrase "sexually charged" is vague enough that it can cover a lot of ground. (Haven't read the obit yet either.)
'Sexually charged' is hardly the most prominent characteristic of most of Kundera's novels (or critical writings). I suspect that NYT-type liberals like to use that sort of phrase to wake themselves up and/or keep folks from noticing that they haven't read the books.
Also NYT obituaries can vary in quality. Some are well researched and written, while others are terrible.
I read the Joke almost 40 years ago and I don't remember much besides the general plot. I don't remember any sex scenes, but there may be a few.
I read Henry Miller 60 years ago, yes, and I do remember it as "sexually charged" and I even remember at least one sex scene.
Why? Because sex scenes tend to leave stronger memory traces than scenes of people taking country walks. Ask Freud about that.
So, as John Rapko says above, the folks at the NY Times probably haven't read any Kundera.
I read "The Unbearable Likeness of Being" years ago, and don't remember much about it other than that I liked it very much. It might be time to go back to it. I've had "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" for years, and it sits unread. Maybe it's time to get to that one too.
I know a woman at OLLI (Osher Lifelong Institute") who reads only 19th Century English female writers--Jane Austin, George Eliot, the Brontes etc.-- over and over again. She told me "I forget what they're all about; the only thing I remember is that I liked them, so I read them again and again."
In my old age, I find myself doing a lot of re-reading too. I find it amazing how much more I get from a book the second or third time through. In school, that's called "studying." Too bad I discovered that so late in life.
David Palmeter,
100% agreement!!!
In the early-mid 1980s Kundera was pretty much my favorite living novelist, and I continually read and re-read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in particular. By 1990 it seemed to me that he was largely repeating himself (almost certainly an unfair and stupid criticism) and I stopped reading him. I remember a friend describing The Unbearable Lightness of Being (book and movie) as 'The Unbearable Longness of Sitting'. His unvarying mood, wherein personal, cultural, and political despair seemed indistinguishable, was starting to feel like a relic of a dying late modernism. It was one of the options that Roberto Bolaño consigned to the past, just as The Savage Detectives and 2666 put an end to Gabriel García Márquez's clouds of butterflies and clairvoyant virgins.--Kundera added something important to world literature. I hope that his death re-ignites interest in The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
John Rapko,
I arrived in Latin America 46 years ago, bewitched by Garcia Marquez.
The best anecdote I've found, besides life experience, is Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral.
Don't be put off by Vargas Llosa's obnoxious political beliefs. As the great Marxist critic Lukacs said, if you want to understand 19th century European capitalism, read the reactionary Balzac who wrote with his eyes open rather than the progressive Zola who wrote with a political program.
Vargas Llosa, first of all, is a literary craftsman, he knows how to tell a story like no one else.
Second, he has an incredible ability to put himself in the shoes of anyone, in spite of his obvious class prejudices outside of his fiction. If you said to him, Mario, write me a novel about a homeless trans Native American in the slums of Bogotá, in 6 months he'd hand you the best novel ever written about a homeless trans Native American in the slums of Bogotá.
s. wallerstein,
Excuse me while I run to the bookstore for Conversation in the Cathedral.
It takes a while to get into it because it's not a linear narration and there are various narrative voices, but once you get into it, it's great.
It's the best depiction I've read of what is the central Latinamerican "sin", class prejudice.
I must confess that I have not read Kundera, although I perceived him as intellectual. I remember that "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was so famous that it became a paraphrase in everyday speech.
The comments here tempt me to ask everyone a question and I hope the professor will forgive me for the disdainful abuse of the comment function of his blog.
The question is:
What literary work has left the deepest impression in your life? I mean, is there a reading you remember that literally pulled the rug out from under you? In the fog of my memory, the time when I read a newly published translation of Joyce's "Ulysses" as a 16-17 year old student keeps coming up. That was like taking drugs. While reading it, my whole environment changed, and I would bet my body temperature was at least 1 degree higher than normal. To this day, my mind is the only one that tells me: boy, you've never been to Dublin in your life, and Buck Mulligan and Stephan Dedalus were never your friends.
in reference to Prof. Wolff's concerns about the situation in Russia: Unfortunately, it is not only the Wagner hordes that give cause for concern. If Putin's regime implodes, a great number of many paramilitary groups will be standing unattached on Russian territory. The question is also how the military hierarchy would behave in such a case. At the time of Stalin's death, there was still a subaltern power apparatus that settled the question among itself. Hitler had the Walkyre Plan, which was supposed to keep the Nazis in power.
To A.K.:
A new translation of "Ulysses"? From (Joycean) English into what language?
The deepest impression?
Probably Albert Camus's The Stranger, read at age 18, when novels can leave a deeper impression.
I was blown out by the guy who does not play the games everyone plays, who does not cry at his mother's funeral (I wouldn't have at age 18 either) and who refuses to feign contrition in his trial even though that will save his life and who finally tells the priest who comes to comfort him on death row to go fuck himself.
I had never read anything like that before. The books we read in high school were mostly moralistic 19th century Victorian "masterpieces" like Dickens who I could not stand then and still cannot.
I don't agree with s.w. about Dickens. I read David Copperfield in around 5th grade and liked it a lot. Much later I read Little Dorrit, which, in its depiction among other things of the prison, the Marshalsea, in which one of the main characters is confined for debt, is extraordinary. Dickens combines satire of Victorian society with sharp characterization in a way that is pretty much unmatched.
A partial list of novels that have had an impact on me, for one reason or another: Middlemarch; certain of Iris Murdoch's novels; McCarthy, Blood Meridian; Naipaul, Guerrillas; and -- something I hadn't looked at in so long I'd forgotten how good it is until pulling it from the shelf just now -- E. White, A Boy's Own Story.
P.s. re Dickens: not just satire but biting critique (at least in books like Little Dorrit, and, I assume though haven't read this one, Bleak House).
And if you were going to pick the most memorable characters in 19th-cent fiction, surely one would be Micawber in David Copperfield (whose definition of misery vs. happiness as turning on income vs. expenses is both comic and, at some level, inarguable).
SW would also appreciate Dickens's "Dombey and Son" for its critique of 19th century capitalism.
The worst book I've ever been assigned to read is the Christmas Carol, closely followed by Tale of Two Cities.
If there is one unforgiveable literary sin in world history, it's having written the Christmas Carol.
DZ -- no doubt.
Though to qualify what I said above a little, I recall reading somewhere that certain things Dickens criticized had already been reformed or abolished by the time he published the critique -- I think that was the case w/r/t the debtors' prison.
Btw the trans of Ulysses was presumably into German, since A.K. is from Germany.
Well folks, I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree about Dickens. ;)
As suggested by A. K. and s. wallerstein, perhaps it's late adolescence when a literary work makes the deepest impression. I remember that at ages 15-17 (in Virginia and Hawaii) my friends and I read and discussed Lord of the Rings, On the Road, Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse 5. I liked bits of those, but none made a big impression. The closest thing for a novel to A. K.'s late adolescent experience was reading at 17 Samuel Beckett's Molloy, for the way humor, bleakness, a sense of the picaresque, and style suggest a way of living that isn't massively shameful. From memory: "All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead." But the literary work that made the greatest impression then was without a doubt William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for its visionary qualities, its confounding of platitudes and common sense generally, its humor and punchiness, its anti-moralizing, all in the service of the imagination. "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise."
To LFC:
Thank you for the clarification of A.K.'s remark about a translation of "Ulysses."
Wow--- a German translation.
@ David,
... it was a translation of Ulysses into German by a translator named Hans Wollschläger.
I remember that I heard a reading of his translation of his Ulysses in Cologne (about 1976-77) in the so-called "Amerika House".
There’s always this question present in reading a translation: How much of what you are reading is the author and how much is the translator. Here are two translations of the battle cry of the Greeks in Aeschylus’ drama “Persians”:
“Come on, sons of the Greeks, for the freedom of your homeland, for the freedom of your children, your wives, the temples of your fathers’ gods, and the tombs of your ancestors! Now all is at stake! (Allen H. Sommerstein, Penguin 2009)
O Greek
Sons, advance! Free your fathers’ land,
free your sons, your wives, the sanctuaries
of paternal gods, the sepulchers
of ancestors. Now the contest’s drawn:
all is at stake. (Seth Benardete, Chicago 1956, 2013)
Both carry the story, but do they reflect the poetry of Aeschylus? I have no idea.
There’s a passage in War and Peace in which Tolstoy uses the Russian word for “now” 21 times in single sentence. Most translators reduce that number greatly by using synonyms or combining clauses etc. The two leading current translators are at the opposite extremes: Pevear and Volokonsky are true to the text; they use “now” all 21 times. The other, Anthony Briggs, uses none at all.
What would be even more interesting than a single translation of Ulysses into German would be a second translation into German. A reader fluent in English as well as German could make an informed judgment as to which of the two more accurately reflects Joyce. A German reader without English would be like me with Aeschylus and Tolstoy and all the rest—without a clue.
"If there is one unforgiveable literary sin in world history, it's having written the Christmas Carol."
And, yet, of all of Charles Dickens' novels the Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, & A Tale of Two Cities are probably the most well known of his books...
"It's a far better thing than I've ever done before...
A far better resting place than I've ever known..."
"You okay, Jim?
How do you feel?"
"Young...
I feel young..."
--Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan
(DeForest Kelley & William Shatner)
David P.
Actually I think it's possible to make some judgments about translations even if one doesn't know the language in question.
The first issue, though, is what are the criteria of evaluation? Strict faithfulness to the original? Readability or elegance in the translated language (here, English)? Some combination of the two?
In the case of the Aeschylus passage, the two translations you quote are not radically different. Bernadete looks like it's set up as poetry and Sommerstein not. Benardete also has a phrase ("now the contest's drawn") that Sommerstein doesn't. My guess, w/o knowing the original, is that Bernadete is likely a more literal translation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a better translation, unless your only criterion is literalness.
I happen to have three different translations of The Prince. One is more literal than the others, but I don't think it's always better, though sometimes it is.
LFC
Someone once commented before on Amazon that there are some similarities between The Prince & The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián. That person also said that he liked the latter more than the former. And that an individual will likely choose one over the other. Ever since I got hooked on The Prince during college, I've always adored it. I find though that I can't stomach The Art of Worldly Wisdom, and that I would rather read Machiavelli instead.
Michael L.
I'm not familiar with The Art of Worldly Wisdom but will make a note to check it out at some pt.
David Palmeter,
I spent a few hundred pandemic hours reading Aeschylus's Agamemnon in Greek for the first time, and one thing one learns from such suffering is that there's no 'reflecting the poetry' of Aeschylus's choruses in English. There's the atmosphere of mystery, the obscurity of diction and syntax, the context-specific religious imagery, the pervasive allusiveness, and the meter, all with a heavy dusting of hapax legomena such as I'd never seen before. I don't have the Greek text with me, but I would think going with the Benardete is a good bet, as it's part of the serviceable Grene and Lattimore series, updated by Glenn Most and Mark Griffiths (in whom I have great faith from personal experience). One place to go for a feel of the language is Lattimore's book The Poetry of Greek Tragedy.--Even Chaucer is greatly diminished in modern English. Whenever I can, I read poetry outside of English in bilingual additions, although sometimes it's the route of despair: recently I've been reading through such an edition of the collected poems of Lorca, and as far as I can tell there are odd and misleading phrasings and added words on almost every English page, with occasional outright mistakes.--For me the greatest illustration and discussion of the issues you raise is Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.
John Rapko,
Since you read Greek, what is the best Homer translation?
In college we read Lattimore, which you say is a good translation of Aeschylus. Is he still standard?
I decided at some point not to worry about the quality of translations, or rather the fact that they are translations at all. It may be that something is lost. And of course there are better and worse translations. But will you really feel the loss when the density of the plot and events, the believability of the characters, and the extraordinary view of the world and people capture your attention?
Perhaps there is "the incommensurable" between languages, but, if the limits of our language are the limits of our world, then there is no point in worrying about it, especially when you are reading something that pushes those limits outward.
LFC,
I agree that we can make a judgment as to which translation we prefer, but—not knowing the language of the original text—I don’t think it can be an informed judgment as to closeness to the original. Translators have to make constant judgments as to when to depart from strictly following the text, and when not to. Translating “chat noir” as “black cat” no doubt is an easy decision; others not so easy.
Unlike John Rapko, I have no knowledge of the original language, so I cannot judge for myself.
I also agree that the Sommerstein and Benardete translations do not differ radically in the substance of the translation—the reader gets essentially the same information. But what of the poetry? The literary style? That which makes Joyce’s prose more moving than mine?
The terza rima in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a good example the problem. It is has proved impossible for translators to retain his ABA BCB CDC rhyme scheme and at the same time accurately translate the words he using. To be true to his text, the translator sacrifices the rhythm—the music. To stay true to these is to sacrifice text.
One wag, I can’t recall who, observed that the reason it’s impossible to translate Dante successfully is that 80% of the words in Italian end in a vowel that are always pronounced the same way. In English, only 20 % of the words end vowels, and half of those are silenet e’s.
DP
I take the pts. Poetry often poses translation problems that prose doesn't, but even prose can be difficult I suppose.
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