Domingo no mundo (110)

Florinne Stettheimer, Picnic at Bedford Hills, 1918.

And we have no more beginnings

Como dizia Jane Austen, estamos 24 horas por dia na vida.

Miguel Esteves Cardoso numa entrevista.

Domingo no mundo (109)

Éric Rhomer, Le genou de Claire, 1971.

Literatura e Tradução

How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn’t really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Sometimes, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there. 

What we can go to literature for is both larger and smaller than any cliché about how it makes us more empathetic. Literature does not stop the persecution of humans or the prosecution of humanitarians. It does not stop bombs. It does not, no matter how finely wrought, change the minds of the little fascists who once more threaten to overrun the West. So what is it good for—all this effort, this labor, this sweating over the right word, the correct translation? 

I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time. Perhaps at 4 AM when you get out of bed and pull a book of poetry from the shelf. Perhaps over a week in summer when you’re absorbed in a great novel. Something deeply personal happens there, something both tonic and sustaining. 

When I describe literature’s effect in these terms, I speak stubbornly in the singular. But I also know I am not alone in the world, and that none of us is. In a speech Albert Camus gave in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1957, he described the collective value of our seemingly disconnected lives: 

Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. 

And this ever-expanding power of a single life brings to mind a thought that has echoed through the ages. We find it for instance in a codex of the Mishnah written in Parma in the mid-thirteenth century: “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” Exactly the same thought is expressed in Surah Five of the Qur’an.  

Contrary to the general noise of the culture around us, writing has reminded me in some modest but essential way of things that people don’t want to be reminded of. Inside this modest thing called literature, I have found reminders to myself to negate frontiers and carry others across, and reminders of others who carry me, too. Imagine being in an emergency: a house on fire, a sinking boat, a court case, an endless trek, a changed planet. In such an emergency, you can no longer think only of yourself. You have to carry someone else, you have to be carried by someone else.

Teju Cole, aqui. 

O Tempo, corrida de estafetas

My father, George Isserlis, would have been 102 today. Curious to think that in a way he represents a link with musical history: he remembered meeting Josef Hoffmann, Josef Lhevinne, Medtner, etc — and, in a story I've told countless times, meeting someone who'd met Beethoven.

O violoncelista Steven Isserlis, no Twitter.

Mudar de ares

“At the beginning of the Sixties we had to go back to London, and not being able to find a house that we could afford, we settled for a boat; it was moored on Chelsea Reach, between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, so that we were in one of the very grandest parts of London. On the other hand, we were living on an old wooden barge which for many years had carried cargoes [of coal] up and down the east coast under sail, but was now a battered, patched, caulked, tar-blackened hulk, heaving up with difficulty on every rising tide. Her name was Grace, and she had never been fitted with an engine, so that there was plenty of room for us in the huge belly of the hold. There was a very old stove, in which we burned driftwood. Driftwood will only light when it has paint or tar on it, and we knew its bitter fragrance well from the foreshore at Southwold, just as we were used to a more or less permanent state of damp and to the voices, at first light, of the seagulls.” 

Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald, Random House Inc.