Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

Michael Hardt on The Common in Copenhagen

2009-12-21T11:26:45-05:00

HUP author Michael Hardt, who, along with his co-author Antonio Negri, has transformed over the past ten years our conception of what it means to live in a "globalized" world, has just returned from Copenhagen, where he was able to observe the goings-on around the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference from a different angle than the one usually adopted in news reports that focus on the official wrangling inside the conference center. Below is his report on the power dynamics he witnessed between the various tiers of concerned parties that gathered both inside and outside the event grounds during that hectic and exhilarating week.

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The Common in Copenhagen

By Michael Hardt

The common is quickly becoming the primary terrain of political struggle in the age of globalization. I have just returned from Copenhagen, where during the past two weeks the COP15 UN Climate Summit has been the scene of intense negotiations over the management of the common. Primarily at stake is how and to what extent we will share the common wealth in this world and also how we will counter the destructive forms of the common that threaten our societies and forms of life on earth.

When I say that the common is centrally in play in the processes of globalization I refer on the one hand to the land, the forests, the sea, the atmosphere—in short, something like what was traditionally called the commons. On the other hand, the common also names a range of results of human production and creativity, such as ideas, images, code, knowledges, information, and affects. The question of climate change refers primarily to the first of these but the relation between these two notions of the common was also an important factor in Copenhagen. I will return to this briefly below.

Once we conceive of the Copenhagen summit as a struggle over the management of the common, it is useful to separate this struggle into two relatively separate scenes. One scene took place inside the official meetings at the Bella Conference Center, where admission was strictly limited to government representatives, approved NGOs, some journalists, and other select participants. I spent most of my time, however, at the second scene, outside the official meetings, among social movements and activists, whose presence represented an important encounter between the activist traditions focused on environmentalism and those relating to the various aspects of globalization.

The official meetings were the stage for a series of intense, high-level negotiations about the form and hierarchies of the emerging structures of global governance that Antonio Negri and I refer to as Empire. It is even more clear today than ten years ago, when we starting thinking in these terms, that no single nation-state, like the United States or China, can "go it alone" and rule the global system. Any attempts at unilateralism are now doomed to failure. Instead we saw at Copenhagen an example of how the emerging structures of global governance are being constructed within and among three distinct tiers.

The top tier, which has received the most press, is the site of the conflicts and alliances among nation-states. The United States and China at times present themselves as the representatives of the "developed" and "developing" parts of the world, while the European nations (sometimes together, sometimes separately) carve out a more nuanced position. Some of the most interesting positions, though, are presented by other groups, such as the G77, a wide coalition of subordinated nations represented by Sudanese Ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping. The demands of the G77 and similar coalitions make it impossible for a small group of elite leaders to craft any global agreement in private. In addition, a number of Latin American nations, most vocally Bolivia, as well as a series of African nations, demand reparations for the climate debt incurred by the wealthy countries during their centuries of industrial dominance. This is not to say that all nations are equal on this tier (or, specifically, in the proceedings of the summit) but rather to point out that the hierarchies among them constantly have to be negotiated.

A second tier of the emerging system of global governance is the site where major corporations express their power. Corporate leaders, of course, were not officially part of the UN discussions at Copenhagen, but the COP15 was nonetheless clearly also a corporate event. Although much of the official discourse about climate change involves limiting destructive practices of production and consumption, "green solutions" are conceived of as an enormous field of business opportunities. This is illustrated in an anecdotal way by one of the most visible advertising campaigns during the summit, where billboards throughout the city bore the slogan "Let's Turn Copenhagen into Hopenhagen," in a campaign sponsored by Coca Cola, SAP, and Siemens. More substantial, though, is the prospect that the creation of enormous carbon trading markets (a likely component of any eventual accord) will provide an enormous expansion of opportunity for financial investment and profit.

A third tier was represented in Copenhagen by a widely varied group of NGOs, environmental advocacy organizations, media outlets, and, most interestingly, indigenous rights organizations. Some of these groups support the efforts of the nation-states on the first tier and/or the corporations on the second, while others attempt to counter them.

In Copenhagen, then, I saw how the emerging structures of global governance require a constant process of negotiation and collaboration within and among these three tiers. This is a complex process that involves a variety of strict internal hierarchies, as well as the exclusion of a wide range of voices and populations, but it also opens the possibility of refusal and rebellion of a variety of actors. Within these structures of global governance there constantly appear forces that can reorganize the hierarchies and even, at times, create ruptures within the system.

Outside the official summit in Copenhagen, in fact, at the second scene of struggle over the common, one of the most interesting strategies of the activists and social movements was to act on a division between the powers inside the meetings. The primary concept of the "Reclaim Power" coordinated actions on Wednesday 16 December was to link "walking in" with "walking out." In other words, protesters, attempting to break the restricted perimeter, as they have at summit meetings for over a decade, were to be met by dissatisfied delegates and participants who would express their objections by walking out. Together these two groups would then hold a "people's summit." The Danish police, through mass arrests and other tactics, made sure that the two sides did not actually meet, of course, but they did get to within about 100 yards of each other, close enough to wave across the fences and police lines. The conceptual significance of the effort, however, was clear to all involved, since "walking in” / “walking out" not only opens up the decision-making process but also highlights the kinds of alliances that are possible within and outside the structures of global governance—alliances that have the potential to create real alternatives.

We should keep in mind that the basis of such alliances rests on some fundamental conceptions of the management and institution of the common. For example, the primary mechanisms to address climate change promoted by the dominant forces, such as "cap and trade," involve transforming the common into private property and, specifically, transforming carbon emissions and pollution rights into commodities and establishing markets in which they can be traded. Such strategies are indeed consistent with neoliberal ideology and its belief that privatization always leads to efficiency. The various opposition groups that can potentially form alliances advocate a variety of different solutions, but they all agree in their hostility to the neoliberal strategy and the privatization of the common.

Finally, what interested me most at Copenhagen were the dynamic conceptual developments that took place among the different components of the protest movements. Everyone was well aware that this summit took place on the ten-year anniversary of the Seattle WTO protests, and it seemed natural to reflect on where we stand. Within the protest movements, one line of division or dynamic of negotiation that seems particularly relevant to me can be expressed in terms of the two forms of the common I mentioned earlier, which imply, at least seemingly, two divergent political approaches. On the one hand, those focused on the first form of the common (including the earth, the forests, the water, and the atmosphere) tend to highlight the necessary limitations of a future politics because, in fact, this first form of the common is indeed limited. One of the most clever placards at the mass demonstration last weekend, for example, declared "There is no planet B," meaning that we have no alternative but to address the limits of this earth now. On the other hand, those perspectives focused on the second form of the common (such as ideas, knowledges, images, codes, affects, and the like) concentrate on the ways that open access can realize our unlimited potential for creativity and production, because indeed, this second form of the common is unlimited. The slogan "We want everything for everyone," a favorite of alter-globalization movements for the last decade, emphasizes such limitless possibilities.

There was thus clearly potential for conflict in Copenhagen between environmental activists urging a politics of limits (arguing, in essence, "this world is still possible, maybe") and those alter-globalization activists advocating unlimited possibilities (chanting "another world is possible"). But such a conflict did not, in fact, take place. In the end, I suspect that the conceptual dissonance I recognize between limits and limitlessness is really a false problem, and that the movements will show us before long how these are not contradictory positions. It reminds me, in fact, of another false problem that seemed to burden the protest movements ten years ago, the seeming contradiction between the global and the local. Back then, those who opposed the neoliberal corporate globalization promoted by the dominant actors in the WTO were quickly labeled anti-globalization and thus in favor of maintaining borders and closed local relations. It took time for the movements to develop a substantial notion of alter-globalization, which proved the contradiction between global and local to be a false problem. Today, my sense is that the movements will develop a politics of the common that both recognizes the real limits of the earth and fosters our unlimited creative capacities—building unlimited worlds on our limited earth. The encounters at Copenhagen, in any case, were a first step in that direction.

Michael Hardt is, with Antonio Negri, the author of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. See him discuss the subject of their newest book in this talk, filmed at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City on September 17, 2009.

"Literature that has a particular resonance with someone has a vibrant, living quality": An interview with Stefanie Posavec

2009-12-17T12:53:45-05:00

When the affordable-original-print site 20x200 featured a piece based on The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, we were both seduced and intrigued. Who was this Stefanie Posavec, and how had she transformed Benjamin’s most famous essay into an organic form (tree? anemone?) with spreading multi-colored branches? Happily, Posavec, a London-based book designer for Penguin UK, proved willing to answer our questions via e-mail, and to share some images of the progression of the work, interspersed below.
The finished product
Q: Do you have an idea of what a visualization will look like before you begin your work, or does it evolve as your analysis progresses?
A: I have an idea of what the visualisation will look like up to a point: I keep experimenting with the data and try to see whether the shapes that I have in my head are feasible using this data set. Sometimes I have an idea in my mind, yet, when the data is actually gathered for this visual, I realise that the graphic that I was so fixed upon actually is impossible to create with the given data, which is part of the process, I suppose. Often I try to use forms to visualise the text that not only represent the data but also become a visual metaphor for some of the themes found within the text. For example, the Literary Organism method of visualising text, while merely a simple tree structure, was meant to look like a living and breathing organic being. I wanted to communicate how literature that has a particular resonance with someone has a vibrant, living quality. Also, comparing text and organisms works neatly as both are cellular in that they are complex structures produced of smaller and smaller components.

First image

Q: How did you choose "Work of Art" as a subject?

A: I worked with 20x200 for the selection of this essay. It was the first time that I ever read this essay, to be honest! Normally I either pick my favourite, most influential books to analyse or work with text that influences and inspires other people and use the project to understand their reasons for this love of the text.

Second image

Q: You've visualized both "Work of Art" and On the Origin of Species. How do they compare, and what insights can you glean about their respective styles from their differences?

A: 'Origin of Species' was a collaborative project between myself and Greg McInerny, a post-doc researcher at Microsoft Research (and my brother-in-law). Together, we decided to visualise insertions and deletions of text across the six editions of the book in order to communicate to the viewer the complexity and exceptional level of refinement to the text that Darwin undertook. [Ed.’s note: you can see the representation of the changes across the editions here; Greg McInerny’s description of the project is here.]

For 'Work of Art' I decided to visualise the basic structure of the essay and also tried to analyse each sentence according to its role within the essay, figuring out whether Benjamin was making a key point in a particular sentence, or whether he was providing evidence to uphold his point, and so on. I wanted to focus on making clear the structure of his argument in this essay.

So, while these methods of analysing the text could be applied to both texts, Greg and I/I selected which type of data we/I wanted to visualise based on what we wanted to communicate about the text to the viewer.

Third image

Q: Your First Chapters project seems to involve exclusively works of fiction, while you have charted several works of nonfiction using your literary organism method. How do you find that your representations of fiction and nonfiction differ?

A: For the First Chapters project I wanted to keep it consistent and only look at 20th century English-language fiction in order to compare it with On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, which was the focus of my 'Writing Without Words' project. Theoretically all the approaches that I use could be applied to both fiction and non-fiction, however, with non-fiction I think it would be less exciting for me to analyse on the basis of theme or upon the rhythm of the sentence because non-fiction is, as its name says, factual and less taken to expressive, poetic sentences (at least, in the small sample I have worked with, this is a generalisation!). I have noticed that when working with non-fiction I am more interested in the analysis of the structure of the text (how it is divided into chapters, sub-chapters, points, etc.) and the structure of the arguments and evidence within the text, whereas in fiction I am more fascinated with trying to represent the poetic style of language and the text's key themes.

Fourth image

Q: As a jacket designer, what do you see as the differences between the ways you represent written works-- jacket vs. visualization? Which kind of work did you do first, and to what extent does each type of your work inform the other? Do you enjoy one kind more than the other?

A: I created any of the Kerouac visualisations that you see around the internet on my MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, so I took this work into my interview at Penguin: I like to think that it helped me get the job! It also meant that I was given the opportunity to design covers for some unpublished Kerouac works at Penguin, which I never thought I would have the opportunity to do while I was painstakingly analysing On the Road a couple years previously.
My ultimate project would be to somehow merge book cover design and text visualisation, though I have yet found the perfect book cover to make this happen. As for which method of working with text I enjoy the most, I would say text visualisation as it is something that I do only for myself and is derived from my obsessive enjoyment of analysing text in a microscopic manner. Yet, I love book design as I think it is quite possibly one of the best commercially-centred jobs in the world: in book design you are helping to promote people's ideas, and to be part of this excites and inspires me daily. Both text visualisation and book cover design appeal to me because through both, I often become attached to the text and the project on a personal level, which is more than can be said for other jobs I've had.

Final image

...and detail of the key

Redefining classics for the 21st century

2009-12-03T16:09:23-05:00

We usually treat ancient Greece as a closed system, a discrete, limited set of texts with more or less established meanings. But a new generation of classicists, steeped in the insights afforded by contemporary theory, are beginning to show how that view cannot hold as much water as it once did. Shaking off the stuffy image traditionally attached to interpretations of ancient Greece, Page duBois here presents a series of case studies that explode the boundaries of what is still referred to as “classics.” In Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks, duBois, Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, shakes our conventional hierarchies of analysis by situating Athens not at the center of the Hellenic world, but as one set of voices among many, part of a web of connections that stretches from Vedic India to ancient China to the polyglot city of Alexandria. In encouraging us to think of the ancient Greeks as part of a universe rather than the universe itself, duBois expands the range of inquiry in a once-hidebound discipline across space and time, showing how an engagement with contemporary theory—reading Athenian tragedy and the poetry of Sappho alongside the works of Judith Butler and Alain Badiou—can illuminate the ways in which classical antiquity reaches into our own time. With Out of Athens, duBois has mapped an ambitious agenda for a new generation of classicists and shown us how rethinking our perspectives can make the oldest civilizations new once again.

||| Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks

NLHA Bookstore Display Contest -- results are in

2009-12-01T17:13:04-05:00

A while back we announced a contest whereby bookstores could create a display inspired by the now-much-lauded A New Literary of America, and we'd pick the winner and showcase it on the blog. Realizing that a coveted mention on the university press blog to end all university press blogs might not be enough to entice everyone, we decided to offer as a prize the world's most versatile gift -- US dollars, five hundred of them. The winner also gets a framed, limited-edition color silkscreen of Chuck Sperry’s cover for the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Marcus’ Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, signed by the artist. Two runners-up get copies of the poster as well. And now, the results are in.

WINNER:

57th Street Books in Chicago assembled a menagerie of tomes from NLHA contributors paired with the works they discussed in the book, complimented by a visual theme incorporating maps of the US and the pastel color scheme utilized in the book's cover design. Behold:

RUNNER-UP:

Skylight Books in Los Angeles, California, who made explicit the lines of connection between the NHLA and the works it addresses -- with ribbon! Witness:

RUNNER-UP:

Village Books of Bellingham, Washington built on the theme of building -- a country whose idea of itself was built as we went along, and a display whose architectural merits, complete with stacked cubes and hanging transparencies, stand unparalleled. Consider:

Many congratulations to our winners and many thanks to all those who submitted, an illustrious list that includes the Harvard Book Store of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sam Weller's Bookstore of Salt Lake City, Utah, Books and Company of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, Vroman's Bookstore of Pasadena, California, Chaucer's Books of Santa Barbara, California, Penn Book Center of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University Press Books of Berkeley, California, and The Booksmith of San Francisco, California. Those of you lucky enough to have an independent store in your area know that it's more than a place to buy and sell hunks of wood pulp -- as Clay Shirky explained in a recent article, bookstores, in their guise as social hubs, provide a whole range of services for their communities for which they are rarely remunerated, and without which those communities become poorer, barer places. Think of them as oases for the thoughtful, and keep them in mind this holiday season.

Hawthorne: A life in covers

2009-11-16T16:16:23-05:00

Since the covers in the newly-relaunched John Harvard Library consist of (rather haunting) portraits of the books' authors done by award-winning illustrator Robert Carter, the inclusion of five works by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the series presents a question of how to depict the man in a way that we can distinguish the books from one another. The decision was made to go with a unique portrait for each instance, showing Hawthorne at various stages of his life.
Thus, on the cover of The Blithedale Romance, we see a young, mustache-less Nathaniel:

While The Scarlet Letter sports a slightly-aged version:

And The House of Seven Gables gives us a portrait of the novelist as an rather elderly man:

There are two more Hawthorne volumes planned--Selected Stores, coming this fall, and The Marble Faun, due Spring 2011. Not sure yet what Carter's going to come up with now that we've traversed the life cycle, so to speak. But his covers have been winning awards so it's bound to be good.
||| More on the resurrected John Harvard Library

To Serve God and Wal-Mart panel discussion at NYU

2009-11-12T16:23:09-05:00

November 20, 4-8pm at NYU's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis:

A panel discussion and book party for Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (reviews: Bookforum, NYTBR, The Big Money) and Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century.

Host: Lisa Duggan (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU)

Kathryn Bond Stockton on The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, with comment by Professor José Muñoz (Performance Studies, NYU).

Bethany Moreton on To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, with comment by Professor Nikhil Pal Singh (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU).

Moderator: Michael Cobb (English, University of Toronto)

Books will be available for sale from Bluestockings Bookstore.

Co-sponsors: NYU Departments of Social & Cultural Analysis, American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, History, Performance Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Greil Marcus - "Lipstick Traces Live" @ Columbia November 19

2009-11-10T11:57:30-05:00

See Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, released this year in a new twentieth anniversary edition, as well as The Dustbin of History, In the Fascist Bathroom, The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books, not to mention co-editor of A New Literary History of America, out and making the rounds presently, deliver a "lecture as performance" live at Columbia University. "Lipstick Traces Live" is based on material from the book and will take place November 19 at 6pm, with a signing to follow.

click on flyer for full-sized image

More details here.

In Search of Walter Benjamin's Berlin

2009-10-20T12:17:30-04:00

Here at HUP, where we try to keep the flame for Walter Benjamin in some respects, we maintain connections with legions of Benjamin devotees throughout the academic world. One of them, Rachel Jacoff, Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian at Wellesley College and the editor of John Freccero's book of essays on Dante (HUP, 1988), wrote to us about a recent trip to Berlin during which she set out to locate some of the sites remembered by Benjamin in "A Berlin Chronicle" and Berlin Childhood around 1900, his extraordinary psychic inventory of the lost spaces of his childhood. Jacoff detailed her efforts as follows.
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When I agreed to take part in a Dante conference in Berlin this fall I found myself almost at once thinking about Walter Benjamin. I reread "A Berlin Chronicle" in Reflections and then read the whole of Berlin Childhood around 1900. This was going to be my first trip to Germany, a place I had scrupulously avoided, and the idea of turning the trip into a pilgrimage to Walter Benjamin’s home gradually took over my imagination. I thought about how he had not been able to return, and how he had written Berlin Childhood around 1900 precisely as a way of dealing with the irrevocable loss of the world of his childhood and its security. I thought, too, about another exile, Dante, whose cruel banishment from Florence comes to mind whenever I am in Florence and see that anyone can go there now, while he was never able to return. I was going to be able to visit Berlin, something Benjamin knew by 1932 that he would never be able to do again. Both Benjamin and Dante immortalized the cities that had rejected them, both writing bout their memories of earlier and safer times. When Dante meets with his great-great-grandfather at the center of Paradiso, Cacciaguida recalls the Florence of his time as "peaceful, sober, and chaste" (15. 99), a reposeful, beautifully civil and trustworthy community (15. 130-32) that no longer exists. This is the same ancestor who will predict Dante’s exile, defining it as "the loss of everything most beloved" (17. 55-56). Even though the Commedia is saturated with fierce attacks on the Florence, it is clear that Dante remains obsessed with it, longing to return to his "bel San Giovanni," the baptistery at which he imagines receiving the laurel crown. Benjamin, like Dante, is recalling a lost world. He selects a variety of places and spaces that contain or prompt memories of his childhood and the high bourgeois world that nourished his fantasies and predilections. By 1932 this world was gone, or at least inaccessible to Benjamin and other Jews like him.

Carmerstrasse, one of the several streets in Berlin that Benjamin called home.

Benjamin’s descriptions of the places dear to him in childhood made me eager to find the neighborhoods and the houses in which he had lived. Everyone assured me that the houses no longer existed, and it was difficult to find specific information. The neighborhood was Charlottenburg, still a wealthy residential area. From several sources I was able to gather that the family had lived first in Kurfurstenstrasse, then in Nettelbeckstrasse, and later in Carmerstrasse. It is easy to find Carmerstrassse since it runs out of Savigny Platz, a beautiful, leafy square with an elegant Spanish restaurant and a few upscale stores. Carmerstrasse is tasteful and serene, its domestic architecture both cozy and stylish. Walter Benjamin Platz is located in Kurfurstenstrasse, a commercial area west and south of Savigny Platz. As Benjamin’s father prospered the family kept moving further West, ultimately residing in Delbruckstrasse in the Grunewald district that bordered on the royal hunting preserve. It was to this parental villa that Benjamin, his wife and son, returned when he was unable to support the family in later years. Still later, in 1930, Benjamin came back to Berlin and lived in Prinzregentstrasse 66 in the neighborhood of Wilmersdorf where there is now a plaque in his honor.

Many of the other places about which Benjamin wrote—the Tiergarten and the zoo, the Victory column, and certain streets where various relatives lived—are still there. Whatever aura they have for me comes from their existence in Benjamin’s memory and his prose.
||| "A Berlin Chronicle" is published in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934, and Berlin Childhood around 1900 is published as a standalone paperback.

Resurrecting a Renaissance epic

2009-10-08T12:21:27-04:00

This month, we're publishing a new verse translation of a Renaissance epic, a poem that inspired Borges, Calvino, Vivaldi, Hayden, Handel, Shakespeare, Spenser, Byron, and a host of others. Its significance in Western literature simply cannot be exaggerated. But Orlando Furioso ("Mad Orlando," sometimes translated as "The Frenzy of Orlando"), Ludovico Ariosto's sprawling sixteenth-century masterwork, lies strangely neglected (part of the reason has to do with the poem's extraordinary length; we've offered here just over half of the total poem, and the result is a book of 672 pages). David Slavitt's new verse translation, the first in thirty years, restores the impishness and the sheer comedic energy of Ariosto's poetic language, rendering the Italian courtier's ottava rima into an English as playfully outrageous as the original. Below is Slavitt's short preface to the poem, "the greatest cock-and-bull story in literature," in which he explains why Ariosto deserves our attention and why he needed a translation as merry and mirthful as the one he's now got.

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Translator's Preface to Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation, by David Slavitt

In the early Renaissance, while the visual arts were traveling from Italy northward, there was also a reverse motion in which the telling of the tales of Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland became popular in Italy. Luigi Pulci published Morgante Maggiore in 1482, and Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote two parts of Orlando Innamorato. (He died in 1494, with Part III only just started.) Ludovico Ariosto followed upon these two and published the first version of Orlando Furioso in 1516. The third and definitive edition, in 46 cantos, appeared in 1532, a year before Ariosto’s death. It has been said that Ariosto took Boiardo’s minuet and turned it into a symphony. It is one of the great monuments of Renaissance literature, inspiring Vivaldi (with Orlando Furioso), Haydn (with Orlando Paladino), and Handel (with Rinaldo, Ariodante, Orlando, and Alcina) as well as Edmund Spenser and Lord Byron, whose Faerie Queene and Don Juan are both enabled by Ariosto’s poem and tributes to it.

What makes Orlando Furioso particularly appealing to the modern sensibility is its sense of fun, its self-consciousness, its attitude toward a series of already established characters from the English Arthurian poems and the French poems about Charlemagne and Roland. Ariosto’s object is to have fun with this huge cast, with their characteristic scrapes and Perils-of-Pauline escapes, but also to find ways of making relevant observations about the trials of life and the ways in which stylistic conventions (courtly love, primarily) form our ideas and our behavior. It is also a great show-off piece, with its ottava rima stanzas that are easier in Italian than in English—but I do them anyway, because in English one can have rhymes that are more startling and impish than in Italian, as Byron shows us. This seems to me altogether in consonance with the spirit of the piece.

The great lesson this work can have for students, and the one that they probably need more than any other, is that poetry can be fun. Of all the "great works" of the Renaissance, this is certainly the most enjoyable—the greatest cock-and-bull story in literature, but dazzlingly accomplished and endearing. It was Italo Calvino’s favorite book; as Cesare Pavese observed, there is virtually nothing in Calvino’s work that is not redolent of a sapore Ariostense. Or, putting it quite another way, it is very long and if I hadn’t loved it, I wouldn’t have knocked myself out for years bringing it into English in what I take to be its original playfulness.

There are other English versions. The best is that of Sir John Harington, whose mother, Ethelreda, was an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. Sir John, a godson of Queen Elizabeth, is best known for having invented the flush toilet. Apparently he annoyed the queen, who could have banished him for life but, in a friendlier way, sent him off to translate Orlando Furioso, saying that he could return to court when the job was finished. She never expected to see him again. But he actually completed most of it, and his version is lively and witty, although not easy to get hold of. It is also rather . . . Elizabethan. More recently William Stewart Rose, a friend of Sir Walter Scott, did a much too romantic and respectful version that lapses, often, into Scottish. Guido Waldman and Allan Gilbert have versions in prose that are handy as trots but are not the poem. They were both useful to me, but are of no conceivable interest to a reader unless he or she is working along with the Italian text. Finally, there is a version in verse by Barbara Reynolds, but it isn’t funny enough, or sprightly enough. Ariosto’s poem is often outrageous, sometimes serious, but often quite silly, and it wants to be fun in English. The ottava rima stanza is inherently humorous. Excessive earnestness, I’m glad to say, is not a defect I’ve often been accused of.

What we have in this volume is slightly more than half of what Ariosto wrote—primarily because the production costs of an enormous and unwieldy volume (or volumes) would have made for a discouragingly expensive book, which would have defeated my purpose of broadening Ariosto’s Anglophone audience. It is also true that with nearly seven hundred pages here, most appetites will be satisfied.

Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation is Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Pamuk delivers first Norton lecture; five more to come

2009-09-23T11:24:38-04:00

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925 by C. C. Stillman to honor the university's first Professor of the History of Art. In accordance with Stillman's desire that "the term Poetry shall be interpreted in the broadest sense, including, together with Verse, all poetic expression in Language, Music, or the Fine Arts," Norton Professors have included not just poets in the narrower sense, but novelists, critics, musicians, and accomplished polymaths of all stripes, including Umberto Eco, John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Northrop Frye, Lionel Trilling, Jorge Luis Borges, R. Buckminster Fuller, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, and a host of others.
And so Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk delivered the first of his Norton lectures yesterday afternoon in Harvard's Sanders Theater. Pamuk, the author of The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence, and many others, spoke primarily of what makes the novel a unique form and how we are to determine what happens to our minds as we read them. Pamuk, who started out as a painter, elaborated on Schiller's distinction between the naive and the reflective poet as it applies to his own experience with novels, both the Turkish ones he read in his youth (he once "raged" against those naive, unselfconscious storytellers as Schiller raged against the serene, untroubled genius of Goethe) as well as the classics that have shaped him as a novelist and as a person (Anna Karenina is his all-time favorite, we learn; he quoted extensively from the passage where Anna reads an English novel on the train back to St. Petersburg). He offered as well a set of nine points on what distinguishes the novel from other forms, the last and most forceful of which being that novels offer (and we seek in them) "a secret center," a buried object that we feel compelled to search out via clues in the narrative. This, of course, provoked questions about where exactly lies the periphery and how are we to locate that bit (hey, it's an audience of academics!), which Pamuk, a self-described autodidact, promised to address in future lectures.

The lectures, we should point out, are free and open to the public, and there are five more coming; here's the schedule, courtesy of the Humanities Center (each lecture begins at 4pm):

Norton Lectures: Orhan Pamuk on "The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist"

Tuesday, September 22 - "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels"

Tuesday, September 29 - "Mr. Pamuk, Did You Really Live All of This?"

Tuesday, October 13 - "Character, Time, Plot"

Tuesday, October 20 - "Pictures and Things"

Monday, October 26 - "Museums and Novels"

Tuesday, November 3 - "The Center"

||| Norton Lectures at the Humanities Center (PDF link)