Dorothea Lange’s America

Library of Congress file card, circa 1936. Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 



Like many others I suppose, I have this Dorothea Lange photograph, mostly referred to as “Migrant Mother”, imprinted on some region of my brain. For me, it has come to represent the extreme rural poverty of the United States in the Great Depression years between the World Wars of the 20th century. When, then, I was writing about Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila” last year, it seemed like an appropriate visual representation of the itinerant life Lila led as a child and young woman.

My copy of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, 1939.

And whenever I think about John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath I also have such images in my mind’s eye; going now to look, I see the cover print is in fact not from Lange rather includes one from Walker Evans of a farmer family – one not unlike the Joads perhaps.

It is interesting to note that both Lange and Evans worked for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration during the 1930s. Whether their paths crossed I can’t say, but it is as a consequence of this government employment and many of their images therefore falling in the public domain, that we may thank for their continuing presence today.

Not living in NYC nor likely to get there anytime soon, this NY Times magazine piece on the current MoMA exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (through May 9 2020) is informative only indirectly, but does provoke anew thoughts on internal migration, and the underlying circumstance of economic hardship abetted by the unholy alliance between the machinations of big capital and the vagaries of climate and land, and its more sinister iteration when it is driven not only by economic needs but by racism and segregation – the great migratory movements of African-Americans out of the South, northward and westward, in search of jobs and dignity.

On the MoMA website are some wonderful resources that hopefully will remain available long after the exhibition finishes. And here is a trailer that gives some sense of an extraordinary woman who sought and found the human condition in every face, and whose photo-journalism has become art without losing the power of the very real moments she captured with her eye and camera.

Trailer to “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures” exhibition at MoMA

Jack’s story

“Jack” by Marilynne Robinson, pub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Expected, but still thrilled by the formal announcement of Marilynne Robinson’s new Gilead novel – the fourth. Finally (and is this the final word?), we are going to hear Jack’s side of things – at least the St. Louis story, for I recall Robinson stating last year that the new instalment would go to Gilead; though in some respects the place “Gilead” – real and mythical – and its effect on the characters, is always present.

stories that move & shape

Writing about Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire the other day, I remembered that it was on a list from the BBC of so-called “Novels That Shaped Our World” that turned up at the end of last year. Returning to look at this list again now, it seems to me that it is an interesting resource. They are all English language novels, that in itself minimising the selection, and the choices (from a group of literary sorts – writers, critics, etc.) are as idiosyncratic as one would expect, but certainly well worth perusing just the same. The books are organised thematically – for instance, identity, society, romance – and there are also lots of internal links to related media.

BBC 100 Novels That Shaped Our World

On reflection, I must also say that it was often not the absolute classic that meant so much to me at a particular time in life and that I remember still, so that perhaps explains some choices that I see as somewhat abstruse. There are a also a few selections that surprise and delight me.

My Picador paperback copy of “Cloudstreet”

For instance, Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, chosen by someone (whom?) and included in the “family” section. Should I be asked to name my favourite books, or those having had a profound effect on me, I would not have immediately thought of it. But now prompted, it occurs to me that long ago it having been sent to me from the opposite end of the world somewhere, reading Cloudstreet was a little like carrying all the grandeur and smallness, all the cruelties and generosities of a whole continent around in my pocket. I loved it. It positively reeked of Australia, and maybe it didn’t “shape my world” exactly but it certainly gave me good company when that was sorely needed. And what more can one ask from a good read?

A folk’s jester goes to war

“Tyll” by Daniel Kehlmann, original pub. Rowohlt, Germany, 2017

Coming to my notice via The New York Times is publication of the English translation of Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll. Only a couple of years old in original, I seem to recall it as being well received, and ‘Daniel’ is a bit of a “Publikum” darling anyway – hence the familiarity of a first name being enough to identify him by many literary minded sorts in Germany. My interest piqued, I have just visited the local library and duly got myself a copy; begging the question exactly where to fit it into my reading agenda!

Coincidently some of my favourite UK podcasts have recently lured Kehlmann into their studios for interesting chats that further whet my appetite. Firstly, the Arts & Ideas podcast available directly from BBC Radio 3 or at Apple Podcasts, and then there is the Times Literary Supplement Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon podcast also at Apple.

For a little more context and historical background, here are the Wikipedia entries for the Thirty Years’ War and Till Eulenspiegel. I’m very much looking forward to the read.

Home fires burning

My paperback edition ( Bloomsbury Publishers, 2018)

Wanting to make clear that I do read beyond the precious canon of sorts that I have created for myself; Kamila Shamsie’s highly acclaimed Home Fire comes to mind as a recent example. I must say I often shy at a crescendo of superlatives, so whilst I do agree this is a terrific read I don’t necessarily consider it an extraordinary literary highlight as some would have it – just a really good contemporary novel (finding its way onto the BBC list of “Novels That Shaped Our World”) with a lot more depth than most; exploring the themes of belonging (or not) to nation, family, religion, and what is to be done with the divided loyalties that may almost certainly arise in our globalised world amongst the many of us moving on from the place of our birth. And courageous it is, especially as a British-Pakistani Muslim woman, to write a novel in which the jihadi, ISIS, and so-called “home-grown terrorism” are central themes. And the latter leads one to consider all the connotations to be imagined in the title; “home” is just one of those words I guess – where the heart is, where fires are kept burning, that has an Office and a Secretary. And who has the right to claim a place as home, and who has the right to take it away. And how many homes can any one person have. A concept I would suggest that may very well have lost its place in our contemporary world – too tainted by a multitude of identity crises gone haywire.

Spoken in the varying participant voices, the narrative is well paced and succinct. A British Muslim family is drawn, through circumstance or design, into the cesspool of Islamic fanaticism, and must navigate the conflicting loyalties of family and state, tradition and reason. So confronted, the sisters, Isma and Aneeka, react differently in their attempts to extricate their brother, Parvaiz, from his dangerous predicament – Isma, the senior member of this fractured family, places hope in the machinations of the state, and Aneeka, the younger and Parvaiz’s twin, distrusting of government and its institutions, and its prejudices, either real or perceived, seeks to intervene directly. Neither woman will save Parvaiz, but his death is only the prologue – for Aneeka, if she can not save her brother’s life, is determined to save his death.

Bringing home Parvaiz’s body becomes for Aneeka more than just a religious ritualistic gesture, but an act of defiance against the State that deprived her brother of his statehood and right of burial. The personification of that despised entity is satisfied by Karamat Lone, who has seemingly conquered all the societal and institutional hurdles placed before him and risen to the political heights as new Home Secretary; at the expense of being ostracised from the Muslim community. The relationship Aneeka forms with Lone’s son, Eamon, in the first instance as a means to secure Parvaiz safe return, is ultimately the fatal link between two families, two traditions on collision course.

Antigone in front of the dead Polynices by Nikiforos Lytras 1865

We know – from author, blurb, review – that this is a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and a reading of the tragedy, or even a summary of, confirms that. Shamsie is not alone in turning to the classics as a narrative device, but her elegant fitting of a very contemporary story within the frame of an ancient drama works I think very well. Striking are the parallels between Antigone’s and Aneeka’s respective acts of civil disobedience and the accepted consequences. One may wonder that, two and half thousand odd years after Sophocles, the repatriation of the dead to their nearest and dearest remains a matter of contention – and a tool of statecraft.

& still more from Mecklenburgh Sq.

This must be it surely it! The TLS podcast Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon has a bonus episode (an Apple link is the best I can do) of their extended interview with Francesca Wade about book Square Haunting that I have previously blogged on. Nothing here that she hasn’t necessarily said elsewhere, but just another nudge in the direction of reading about this really interesting collective (of four people – women) that Wade has put together (in one place – a London square).

Until I read the book, one final thought, it occurs to me how often Virginia Woolf uses “haunting” and associated words – things like “my old haunts” or “something/somebody haunted by” and of course “haunted houses” – and there is a wonderful 1927 essay entitled Street Haunting (I would guess this inspires Wade’s book title) which I know from The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays a collection published in 1942 by Leonard Woolf after his wife’s death, and which takes us on a delightful walk of London – and at the haunting hour! (A beautiful 1930 US edition is at The British Library, and here digitally.) I will keep this in mind as an idea to be pursued further, because I think there is a lot more to be said about Woolf and the ghosts that haunted her, and those that haunt us all.

Virginia Woolf’s Birthday

Celebrating the 138th anniversary of the birth of Virginia Woolf (born 25th January, 1882)! Would she be flattered or embarrassed at the attention posterity has granted her? Who knows, but …

Woolf has been an interesting part of my reading life for some years now, but in recent times I have been thinking about her more than ever. And re-thinking her contribution to literature and her legacy, and discovering aspects to her life and her writing that were previously unbeknownst to me. The following 2014 video featuring her biographer Hermione Lee, is therefore a find and a treat on this day.

Lee focuses in her lecture on how Woolf’s shifting, slanting representation of fragmented time in her fiction, encapsulated as it is in memory, is often framed with some temporal precision – dates and seasons are important. An obvious example is Mrs. Dalloway; set on a Wednesday in mid-June 1923, and perhaps less obvious; the time span suggested in Night and Day where a Sunday evening in October must be 1911, and winter turns to spring. And actual historical events are indicative; Lee refers for instance to the mention of a general election and suffrage bill in The Voyage Out, dating the narrative to 1910.

Given my familiarity with her diaries, and the continued scrutiny I apply to them, I recognised well Woolf’s preoccupation with questions of mortality, her own and that of others, her predilection to relate her present with specific dates in days gone (often the deaths of the near and dear, family and friends), and how these memories found their way into her literary works. And I was always amused by her simple arithmetical doodlings, which I interpreted as resulting from a weakness in mental arithmetic but may well have been Woolf’s idiosyncratic way of measuring time gone (and remaining); of balancing her book of life.

Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture, Hermione Lee, University of London, 2014

This video has inspired even more thought – I swear every time I am about to move on to other things, something else relating to the Woolf comes my way! Virginia Woolf may not have thought much of H.G. Wells, but she was as interested in the vagaries and possibilities of time travel as he – just in another, less mechanical, more mysterious manner. When I think about how, in much of Woolf’s writing, time ebbs and flows and overlaps and turns back on itself, I wonder whether it is not Woolf’s non-mechanical approach that better captures the essence of relative time, and that in some ways is more compatible to the precepts of modern science. [I remind myself here to look into a certain French philosopher called Henri Bergson – mentioned in response to a question in the last minutes of the video.]

The Odyssey (1)

Introduction

pp. 1-79

A fairly long but very fine introduction that should inspire any interested reader, and certainly further kindled my enthusiasm. Emily Wilson seriously wants me (and you, and you, …) to go on this journey, for not just its literary and cultural worth but as an exploration of the underlying themes that are deeply relevant to our contemporary human condition and concerns.

We are reminded of just how small an epic story or life can be, and conversely the grandiosity of each and every ordinary life. The epic hero Odysseus is, when it’s all said and done, just a man.

Wilson discusses the narrative structure, the vast tableau of characters – gods and human and neither one nor the other, and geography – getting home is never easy, and time – beginning as it does in medias res – of this great epic tale.

She ponders Homer in depth, but in words and tone accessible to we, the non-classicists; authorship, reception, oral tradition, dialectic and folkloric influences. And his world – the whens and wheres. The temporal; debated vigorously but some consensus at about 8th – 7th century BCE, and place (places!); all at sea, but certainly the Mediterranean and Aegean, and as muddled as the peoples that populate them.

The pages relating to “hospitality” – to somewhat abbreviate the discourse – are especially interesting. It says something I think that the ancient Greek word, xenia, meaning hospitality and a particular sort of friendship, is now associated with the negative connotations of xenophobia, and all the turning away and keeping out that it implies (p.23). It is hard to overlook an analogy in our own time – the plight of refugees on the aforementioned seas and their reception which is more often less than welcoming.

I read with interest the precision in which Wilson defines xenia as “guest-friendship”, differing it from the more familiar, intimate “friendship” but going beyond the somehow rather clinical notion of “hospitality”, and not used very much in everyday English. Living in Germany, I note that “Gastfreundschaft” is very much a concept and a word often used (though practiced or not to various degrees!).

Much more is discussed in the introduction. Women, for instance. Of course as characters – Penelope, Calypso, Athena – but Wilson also sketches how it could have been to be a woman in the ancient world, as an elite or as a slave. And the coming of age and father and son story identified in respect to Telemachus. And the multitude of translations, versions, adaptations of The Odyssey, that continue to inspire.

Translator’s notes

pp. 81-91

Given in the context of this scholarly work but informing well beyond the particular, there is a short essay on the technical aspects of translation, especially as pertaining to classical works, and the choices that have to be made by a translator, and the choices made by this translator.

I am learning here, so I will record just briefly some of Emily Wilson’s comments. The Odyssey was originally composed in dactylic hexameters, that is, in six-footed lines, the conventional meter of ancient Greek verse. Previous English translations have used a variety of techniques, for instance, George Chapman (1615) in iambic pentameter, Alexander Pope (1715) went a step further with rhyming couplets, but most modern translators like Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Robert Fagles (1996) have shied away from a regular beat in favour of free verse or prose.

Wilson returns to the iambic pentameter, being the convention of “…regular English narrative verse…of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats..”[p.82] To my mind that makes absolute sense, for this is the “sound” that many people have “heard”, however fleetingly, at school or university, in theatre or film. I haven’t got this far yet, but I imagine that familiarity and the regularity of beat may well provide parameters for a good reading aloud (privately!).

The translator also is firm in her commitment to forgo rhetorical flights of fancy in favour of plainer language and contemporary speech patterns, but I certainly don’t understand that to mean simplification or rigidity; in fact perhaps the opposite is achieved through precision in language, varying metaphors and epithets and what she describes as “a wide range of stylistic registers” [p.84]