On Literature and Teaching

  In 1881, a Brazilian writer named Machado de Assis published in book form what had been serialized in a Brazilian newspaper: The posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas ( originally published in Portuguese as Memorias posthumas de Braz Cubas) . It was published in French in 1911 (the first translation of that novel), and only reached the English-reading world in 1953 (even today, the English-reading world is notoriously reluctant to publish translation of foreign works). In English it first appeared in an American translation under the name ‘ Epitaph of a small winner ’, a terrible title in many ways and a great one in others, but it seems that this first English translation was not up to scratch and so a new one appeared in 1997, and then two more in 2020, all under the new title ‘ The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas ’. Translating it was obviously difficult since so far there have been three different French translations, two Germans etc. – but the title The Posthumous Memoirs of ...

 '" Free as a bird ", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement. But, alas, we forget the dodo . Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings'. (A. Huxley) Victor Hugo once quoted an acquaintance of his, R. Girardin, who told him something that makes even more sense to us today: 'What is most dangerous and most to be feared is not the abyss, but the slope ’. Profound words, which remind us of what Montaigne said: ‘ La mort n’est rien, le mourir est tout ’ – Death is nothing; dying is everything . What Girardin pointed out to the French poet (and novelist) is that while one may fear the gaping hole and the unknown that lies at its bottom, the main problem is the descent in that hole, the sliding in towards that gaping hole – that fear, that unknown, that ending. ...

  Understated perfection:  a loving appreciation of Penelope Fitzgerald When Penelope Fitzgerald sat down to write her first novel, she was already into her 50s. Born in 1915, educated – among other places – at Oxford, having worked at the BBC, a theatre school and a crammer school, having had children and led a somewhat peripatetic life with her husband, she first published non-fiction and then a first novel in 1977, at the age of 52. After that came a remarkable series of nine novels, most of them short, some of them historical, several of them (partly) autobiographical. What happened? And more importantly: what makes her an exceptional writer? It's certainly not unusual for writers to, as the phrase goes in Writing Workshops, ‘use what you know’ to get started: use your own life, your own memories, the people you know or knew, situations you went through – then novelise it all, put it through the fictional grinder and there you go. Silly advice? Perhaps, but not in her ...