Shakespeare: the immortal bard(s)?

Were William Shakespeare's "Sonnets" the "Basement Tapes" of the Elizabethan age? The idea, suggests Clinton Heylin in "So Long As Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Sonnets" (Da Capo: 280 pp., $24), is not as farfetched as it sounds.

The first edition of the "Sonnets" -- which appeared 400 years ago today, on May 20, 1609 -- was put out by Thomas Thorpe, a fringe figure in Elizabethan London's literary culture, less a legitimate publisher than what Heylin calls a "booklegger." In that sense, the "Sonnets" may have been an early bootleg -- published without Shakespeare's knowledge or permission, much as "The Basement Tapes" were when they leaked out in the late 1960s and essentially started the rock 'n' roll bootleg industry.

As to why this is important, partly it's a matter of historical curiosity, because the provenance of the "Sonnets" has long been questioned, as has the identity of the "fair youth" to whom they were addressed. (Heylin believes the intended recipient was William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke.)

But more to the point, it has to do with the line between public and private art, between what writers (or singers) create for public consumption and what they create for themselves. In much the way Bob Dylan did with "The Basement Tapes," Haylin argues, Shakespeare used the sonnets to try new things, including writing in a nakedly autobiographical voice. Would he have been so daring if he had been writing for an audience? Would he have felt so free?

Heylin was on NPR's "All Things Considered" this morning, talking about his book. At the end of the segment, NPR asked listeners for their selections of works that might still stir people 400 years from now.

This is the sort of mind game for which I generally have no use, because it operates from a false premise: that the value of a work of art is in posterity. No, if "Sonnets" -- or "The Basement Tapes," for that matter -- have anything to tell us, it's that the power of art is its immediacy, its ability to speak to a particular moment or situation, and in so doing take on issues (love, longing, mortality) we all share.

But then, this afternoon, I came across the new book by Albert Goldbarth, a collection of poems called "To Be Read in 500 Years" (Graywolf: 186 pp., $16 paper), and I began to wonder if 400 years was not enough.

Of course, the premise of Goldbarth's collection (or one of them, anyway) is that the future is a place we can't imagine, which only makes the issue of posterity more elusive -- and the longevity of the "Sonnets" more profound.

-- David L. Ulin

Photo Credit: Folger Shakespeare Library

Cover me

A month or so ago, a friend of my son's made him a CD mix of songs by the band Fountains of Wayne; it's been living in the car ever since. The music is terrific, and also somewhat unexpected: Among other things, there's a cover of Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time," which, stripped of her cloying voice and studio overproduction, reveals itself to be (dare I say it) a pretty rocking little song.

Listening to it this morning, I was reminded of one of my enduring frustrations with writing — that you can't cover a book or story by someone else. You can quote, you can review, you can translate, you can pay homage, but to create a literal cover version? Literature has no mechanism for such an act.

Or does it? As I think about it, I can come up with two possible exceptions: Philip Roth's 1972 novella "The Breast," which spins off Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" to tell the story of a man who awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find himself changed into a monstrous breast in his bed, and Peter Kuper's "The Metamorphosis," a graphic novel version of the same Kafka story that, in its own odd way, is so faithful to the original that to call it an adaptation is to entirely miss the point.

Is it telling that both have their origins in the same piece of writing? Is it something about Kafka, or about "The Metamorphosis" itself? Are there other literary covers that I'm missing? Maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg, a subgenre waiting to be found.

— David L. Ulin

English literature at Harvard may get less English

A proposed curriculum change for English majors at Harvard would get rid of two required survey courses of British literature. The English department guide describes 10a and 10b, both lecture classes, as constituting "a full-year introduction to British literature from Beowulf to the twentieth century." The Harvard Crimson reports:

The demise of the lecture courses is the most pronounced feature of a proposed overhaul of the undergraduate English program, the first in more than two decades....

The department still needs to iron out the details before a final vote can take place on the proposal. It appears almost certain, however, that the current form of the "Major British Writers" series will go.

The classes don't seem to be very popular. In that article, one student complained that 10a and 10b did little more than "repeat a lot of what we learned in high school." Another said that "it's hard to have a relationship with the text" because so many books are assigned. The New Yorker's Book Bench found a 2006 note: "Many students give up when assigned a 500-page George Eliot novel in one week" -- editorializing, wickedly, "Oh, come on, you call yourselves Harvard students?"

Frustration with 10a and 10b aside, the real issue with the courses appears to be that they overprescribe a course of study. From the Crimson:

The plan would trim the number of basic requirements for concentrators from six to four, which members of the department said would allow students more leeway to design their own curriculum.

The published reports make clear that requirements will continue -- a course in Shakespeare, literature of different time periods -- but that this change will enable students to study, say, American literature in more depth. This does not sit well with everyone. One Harvard senior -- Christopher Lacaria -- is outraged by the proposed changes. In an opinion column at the Crimson, he writes:

While these innovations may bode well for the undergrads interested in plumbing the depths of postcolonial narrative, they only further point to the ongoing crisis in liberal education.

I do love me some postcolonial narrative, and I might point out that "postcolonial narrative" -- depending on your cutoff -- now constitutes almost 500 hundred years of literature and culture. Lacaria is a history major, so perhaps it's not surprising that he looks backward: 

The Greek and Roman classics, and the modern canon of "great books" of literature and philosophy, once occupied much of the intellectual experiences of Harvard students -- presumably because the study of such works imparted knowledge of the virtues, and made men's minds "liberal" in the original sense, not slavish....

But as concentrations continue to scale back their programs in response to the later declaration deadline and departments continue to obliterate common requirements, any semblance of a coherent academic purpose has disappeared.

It's the old Great Books debate, repeated by a twentysomething Harvard student. "These resentniks have destroyed the canon," Harold Bloom told the New York Times in 1994. "The rabblement, the barbarians have taken over the academy." Lacaria would have been 6 or 7, so it's no wonder that he's sounding the same chords. Those who don't read postcolonial literature are doomed to repeat it. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by zenobia_joy via Flickr

Tale of the Genji, robot-style

Murasaki-bot, a storytelling robot designed by Japan's Robo Garage, wants to tell you a story: "Tale of the Genji," one of the world's oldest novels. And it — she? — tells it with flashing eyes, moving arms and a retractable fan. Make Magazine has a video of the Murasaki-bot in action.

The only problem (for me, anyway) is that it tells the story in the original Japanese. To date, no Murasaki-bot is programmed to recount "Tale of the Genji" in English.

The English-language text is available, however. It can be downloaded, in its entirety, from Oxford University. UNESCO created a multichaptered online version, with lovely woodblock-style illustrations. A much less fancy online version is available from Globusz Publishing. All three versions are free.

The opening of "Tale of the Genji" is after the jump.

Carolyn Kellogg

Dickens, Collins ... Denis Johnson?

There’s something odd about the idea, isn’t there? That’s to say, the form of the serial novel doesn’t have the currency it did when Charles Dickens (above, left) and Wilkie Collins (above, right) were banging out monthly installments against a deadline for those magazines that Dickens ran and eventually owned. Such an undertaking has a gimmicky feel, and, in the case of the recent John Banville/Benjamin Black story in the New York Times Magazine, we were faced with a definitely wonky widget.

That said, the combination of Denis Johnson and Playboy feels much more promising. Was he winking in the direction of his own book, "Stars at Noon," when, early on in this first extract, a character says in a bit of dialogue: "Almost noon?" As usual, Johnson takes characters who start at the end of their tethers, a character situation that lends itself naturally toward noir and the pursuit thriller. Which is obviously, I hope, what we’re getting here — Denis Johnson channeling Elmore Leonard, with bits of "The Sopranos" thrown in, and making the gumbo his own.

For me, the thing got going with the scene break from the car so we get the look back at what just happened: "Standing at the pay phone, Jimmy Luntz punched a nine and a one and stopped. He couldn’t hear the dial tone. His ears still rang. That old Colt revolver made a bang that slapped you silly." It’s a lovely piece of writing, delivering a narrative surprise with observational acuity and making us smile besides.

Then there’s the scene where Luntz is trying to tie the tourniquet on the leg of the guy he’s just shot. "With surprising energy, Gambol suddenly tossed away his white hat. The wind caught it, and it sailed a dozen yards into the trees. Then he seemed to lose consciousness." He’s such a good writer. The sex scene at the end was great, and I look forward to seeing what Anita Desilvera gets up to with those Magnums she has stashed in the trunk of her car. Somehow the two main characters, Luntz and Anita, made me think of the kids in "Angels," Johnson’s first novel, now grown up in some spectacularly damaged way. At this point I’m definitely along for the ride — but then the set-up is probably the easiest bit of what Johnson is attempting here.

My 13-year old blinked when he saw me reading Playboy. "Hey, can I borrow that after you?" he said. He said he’d check out Denis Johnson too.

Richard Rayner

Before Lewis: What inspired his Narnia tales?

Well, it seems that C.S. Lewis doesn't hold the patent on inventing the magical wardrobe that transports children to other worlds. Edith Nesbit deserves more of the credit for her 1909 story, "The Aunt and Amabel," in which a young girl, banished by her aunt to a bedroom for committing some vague act of mischief, escapes her loneliness thus:

She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.

"I expect it's only shelves and people's best hats," she said. But she only said it. People often say what they don't mean, so that if things turn out as they don't expect, they can say "I told you so," but this is most dishonest to one's self, and being dishonest to one's self is almost worse than being dishonest to other people. Amabel would never have done it if she had been herself. But she was out of herself with anger and unhappiness.

Of course it wasn't hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon. The clock had no figures, only 'Now' in shining letters all round it, twelve times. ...

A train station too, huh? Shades of Mr. Potter. This delightful short story is among a rich selection that Douglas A. Anderson includes in "Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction." Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories" gives us not only a

Safe passage, Robert Fagles

Classics scholar Robert Fagles' bestselling translations from the Greek and Latin reminded us, as Seamus Heaney did with his "Beowulf," of the continuing power and appeal of epic poems. We may feel sorry to lose so important a translator as Fagles, who died March 26 at age 74. Yet one can't help but see his passing in the context of his career-long preoccupation, in "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid," with the necessity of journeys.

Good wishes and safe passage on your new travels, Mr. Fagles. Below are some words from a fellow student of Virgil that I think you'd appreciate.

The days that are past
And the others to come
Gathered, in the present.

For years and through the centuries
A surprise at every moment
In the knowledge we are still in life,
That living ever flows, always flowing,
Unexpected gift and pain
In the continuous whirl
of empty change.

Such in keeping with our fate
Is this journey I continue,
In the flash of an instant
Unearthing and inventing
Time from first to last,
Refugee like all the others
Who have been, who are, who are to come.

           Giuseppe Ungaretti  (translated by Andrew Frisardi)

Nick Owchar