Eliot Weinberger, Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, New Directions Publishing, 2009."Many of the twenty-eight essays in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale have appeared in translation in seventeen countries; some have never been published in English before. They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October. One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.
The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war."
"‘I only hope I’m not distracted by my dangerous habit of being all too many-sided, adaptable to all things, forever alien to myself and with no central core.’ – Fernando Pessoa.
Eliot Weinberger’s new collection of essays Oranges and Peanuts for Sale opens, tellingly, with ‘Oppen Then.’ This is a short essay about George Oppen, the Godfather of the 1960s Avant-garde and a poet who offered Weinberger’s generation “a model—an impossible inimitable model—of how to be a poet in shifting, disastrous, and what seemed to be apocalyptic times.” What Oppen was to that vibrant period, so too, Weinberger is to now. Weinberger offers a model of a writer that is politically engaged and always ‘making it new.’ An astonishing model for the 21st century: Weinberger Now.
Creative Writing in the English language has now stagnated. Modernism role as the avant-garde Guard of Literature — its subversiveness, its spit-in-the-eye of preceding forms — is now successfully used to launch a well paid and tenured career as a Creative Writing teacher. Octavio Paz once lamented* that “modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.” The modernist tradition has become paralysed. Paz goes on to say that “never before has there been such frenzied, barefaced imitation masquerading as originality, invention and innovation.” An entire generation’s novelists and poets have merely imitated while claiming originality. Essayists have followed the 18th century model of the Essay and its various genres; Travel Essay, Personal Essay, etcetera, while the Novel — its contemporaneous twin — has undergone revolutionary upheavals. Young writers today try to harness this energy and the results seem pedestrian and infuriatingly familiar. Meanwhile the Essay has remained unchanged except for a few rare examples (Pound, Lawrence and recent examples include Susan Howe and the subject of this review). Over his career Eliot Weinberger has been formulating an avant-garde of the Essay and the results are some of the most innovative work appearing in the English language. His new book Oranges and Peanuts for Sale will be released by New Directions in June.
After being born by Montaigne the Essay took a subject, ruminated on it, but ultimately, abandoned the subject when it became time to examine the Self. The things of the world were there to be used to examine the Self. The actual things themselves were held at a discount. The interior was the ultimate conclusion of the exterior. A character from a Paul Auster novel says “[m]y favourite writer was Montaigne. Even when his essays stretched out into abstract and far flung territory, they were ultimately an examination of the Self.” This has been the dominant methodology for essays. However, now we are witnessing something new. Both Montaigne and Weinberger are excited by the energy of the intellect. Montaigne champions the intellect, whereas Weinberger champions the energy, and utilises this energy to create a searing vision that saturates his work.
The keystone of Weinberger’s previous book (An Elemental Thing) is a chapter called ‘The Vortex’. A vortex is an act of creation. The movement of energy. A return to the origin of life. The point of regeneration and perpetual re-birth. All things reduced to a whirlpool. A circling primeval goop. Weinberger’s essays are best understood as poeticisations of the vortex. Nothing of the human or the natural world is unabsorbable. Every essay in An Elemental Thing is “[a] Vortex, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” Ezra Pound.
The root of Weinberger’s thinking can be found in Ancient Indian Philosophy. The Sanskrit word for a mind at rest is ‘chitta.’ The Sanskrit word for a mind in action is ‘vritta’ (the combination of mind and energy). The literal translation of ‘vritta’ is a vortex in the mind. Each of these essays, as they are absorbed by the reader, grow as a vortex within that reader’s mind. Nothing is safe from the insatiable appetite of the vortex (remember the reader and the vortex are now one-- the vortex enters the reader and becomes his central core. Now that reader moves through the world as a vortex and, subsequently, ideas rush in).
This movement–this energy–is so much more than an intellectual exercise. It is praxis and so the entire book is, itself, an Elemental Thing. (Previous reviews of Weinberger’s work have missed this point.) An Elemental Thing is an elemental thing as it examines the constitution of the world while at the same time resembling a great force (in this situation, the vortex) in nature.
By contrasting Montaigne with Weinberger we can see how the form of the essay has changed. Montaigne in his famous essay ‘On Cannibals’ fastens his gaze on the exotic being that was filtering back along the communication lines of Empire in the 17th century; the black skinned cannibal. Cataloguing its form then retracting away from a fixed gaze upon the object into the inner prism of the Self, Montaigne sees the cannibal as an Other that he then uses to refract the viewer’s own Self and culture. Weinberger’s methodology achieves something different in his essay ‘In blue.’ He launches into a cataloguing and a poeticisation of the roots of the word blue. The essay progresses to a point where, if it were Montaignian, it would retract away from ‘blue’ and reflect on the Self of the writer. Weinberger, refreshingly, sticks to the blue. He always sticks to the things of the world and rubs his prose against these things to illuminate the essay. It is telling that the title of the essay is not ‘On Blue’, but ‘In’, the essay enters the very concept of blue and follows the trail to its roots.
In other pieces of Oranges & Peanuts for Sale Weinberger offers us a much needed reassessment of E. B. White’s Here is New York (for Weinberger White’s nostalgia infused picture of New York incarnates that city out of its context (that is out of what it is that defines New York). New York defines itself by focusing its desire on the the here and now); the current literary scene; two speeches/manifestos to inspire rudderless poets and one on the texture of Barack Obama and his election campaign; translation as the life-blood of poetry; ethnopoetics and photography; critics; James Laughlin (the most influential publisher of 20th century American poetry) and more. Weinberger’s work can be effectively used as a gateway into the wonders of Literature from around the world.
The final piece in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale belongs in the territory that he explored in An Elemental Thing. Called ‘A Journey on the Yangtze River’ it stretches into prose poetry with a distinctive narrative, no ideas but in things and a myriad of wondrous details (each one independently verifiable). What does reading this final piece, where Weinberger uses the tools of Modernist poetry to disassemble and revamp the Essay? Well, he performs a sea-change within the reader’s consciousness, taking both the essay form and that essay’s reader to somewhere completely new. It is a long piece and extracting a small piece is, really, an act of violence (a little like chipping off a piece of a temple and later – back at home and performing for friends – trying to demonstrate the sacredness of the site you saw on your recent holiday). Yet, I will share some of it all the same:
I wrote:
Miserable at a miserable inn, lying in bed.
Water drips through the ceiling and extinguishes dreams.
I wrote:
Little mosquitoes, you and I have the same problem:
hunger keeps us flying around.
If Weinberger’s poetics filter out then Literature in this century could be less a mediation on the ‘interior’, ‘I” or ‘Self’ and more an examination of the ‘exterior’ (other cultures and the things of the world). This may go some of the way to explain why essays seem to resonate so strongly today. Weinberger’s essays focus less on the Self (and healing/helping/finding the Self) and more on the world/others (helping/healing/finding others).
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale reads like a state of the Union address (undertaken by an angry and roving Confucian sage, rectifying language and chastising prevailing norms, as opposed to the Head of State’s progress report.) Read, absorbed, discussed and adopted it could change our literary landscape. Here’s hoping to that." - Jeffrey Errington
"Eliot Weinberger, perhaps the nearest thing we have among American writers today as a ‘public intellectual,’ stands on the left in politics and is a major critical voice of at least a part (I would say the significant part) of the American poetry avant-garde from Pound, Williams, the Objectivists, Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York etc. down in time to his favorites: Rexroth and Rukeyser and on to Michael Palmer and Susan Howe. His 1993 American Poetry since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, shamefully out of print though needing updating, is a major anthology. Regarding the word “public,” Weinberger often claims he is better known and regarded in Europe than in the U.S. but one only needs to check, among the Acknowledgments, the number of places in which so many of the pieces here have appeared at home and abroad to doubt this.
While Weinberger writes brilliantly on politics — see the pieces on the recent presidential election here and on the XXIst century man Obama himself, one who with major savvy discovered cornucopias in the internet (he was and probably remains a self-defined Obamaniac) — Weinberger differentiates himself clearly from most so-called public intellectuals whom he defines as cultureless “policy-wonks” (p.226).
And while he has books on politics: e.g. What happened here: Bush Chronicles (2005), his favorite venue and subject is the poetry which a certain establishment in the U.S. — über-traditional, academic, anglophiliac, Master-of-fine-arts manufacturing, ergo careerist — continues to ignore in its interminable asinine blindness. An inveterate New Yorker (how much does he know of the rest of the States?) Weinberger nevertheless manages to slam, in ‘Where was New York,’ the unremitting mediocrity of The New Yorker’s literary attitudes and no doubt also slams somewhere in his work the absolute ignorance regarding contemporary poetry of the likes of Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler.
Our book follows a series of essay collections: Works on Paper (1986); Outside Stories (1992); Written Reaction (1996); Karmic Traces (2000) and An Elemental Thing (2007) — not his only collections by any means but important for considering Weinberger’s contribution to the genre of the essay. Anyone attempting a thorough study of that contribution should read all those works. This study has no claims to being “thorough.”
In our book’s first section, Weinberger offers meditations on his main field of interest. There are essays on George Oppen’s political as well as poetic greatness; the Niedecker-Reznikoff relationship (alongside the N.-Zukofsky one), teaching her the way to incorporate history into the poem; the hilarious coming together of Beckett and Paz in the making of a manic but uniquely perceptive anthology of Mexican poetry; Susan Howe’s epochal book on one of the very greatest — among three or four — American poets: Emily Dickinson. (Dickinson reminds me of Artaud’s Van Gogh; suicide de la societe). Others cover “foreign” poets: Huidobro, whose Altazor Weinberger translated; the Chinese poet Gu Cheng’s hallucinating life and death. Many others are reviewed in this or that other essay.
We have a gracious portrait of James Laughlin, poet and founder of New Directions as per Ezra Pound, and cannot help noting that in many ways Weinberger, as author, translator, editor, contributes to the continuation of Laughlin’s work at that publishing house. The description of New Directions in a nutshell is worth quoting: “It is an old-fashioned way of doing business — the long-term investment — applied to the most unlikely product, avant-garde literature” (p.81).
In the wake of his (in)famous older essay on an establishment “political” woman poet, we have devastating attacks on bad or indifferent work — e.g. the essay on Robert Alter’s allegedly “de-Christianized” translation of the Psalms which Weinberger sees as totally failing to match the King James’ version or any of the multitudinous other versions in English from other poets (Wyatt, Golding, Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Campion, Crashaw, Watts, Milton, Smart — not to mention a handful of contemporaries like Thomas Merton). We also have ever-recurring thoughts on the subject of translation itself.
Weinberger is a major expert on the art or craft of translation outside the academy. In a sense, these essays carry translations of other cultures than ours over to those in our consumer society, unable or unwilling to face the scholarship of say, on China, a Joseph Needham, a Jacques Gernet, or Edward Schaffer, or David Seyfort Ruegg, or Michel Strickmann — their names are many (though far from legion alas!) and they are the repositories of a poetry of scholarship Weinberger clearly loves. The culture of China, and especially, but not uniquely, classical China, is Weinberger’s anchor — partly as a matter of personal predilection, partly because of how Chinese poetry via Pound and his successors contributed to radical changes in the history of American poetry. This is a major theme in a book which examines the contributions of many translators including the great Burton Watson and his younger colleague David Hinton.
The key essay here is ‘The T’ang’ devoted to a major exhibition at the Florentine Palazzo Strozzi as well as A.C.Graham’s translations from the late T’ang: giving us a cataract of miraculous beauty from that extraordinary period which should dazzle, amaze and astound anyone looking for aesthetics in general (period) — or the aesthetics of Buddhism’s arrival from India into China (in particular). Weinberger deplores the marked lack of translations, after the golden 1960s, from American poets of the 1970s and 1980s, associating this with a massive lack of interest in other cultures and indeed in the matter of politics altogether, those poets having fallen from such interests into “identity politics” on the one hand and desiccated, French-inspired, “theory” on the other (see p. 169). Weinberger is acid on the corprolization (my word) of the arts and humanities since the 1960s, with the National Endowment of the Arts as guilty of shutting the arts up by buying them off (p.225). Students have become “consumers;” the arts “niche industries.”
An important piece on translation is the essay on the “gloires et servitudes” of the translator’s profession, one which, until relatively recently, was infamously anonymous — so many books and commentaries long refusing to name a translator at all (‘Anonymous Sources’). Fascinated by transcultural effects in his beloved XXth century Modernism for instance — Hu Shihs’ rediscoveries (p.24) or Gu Cheng’s (p.54 ) — Weinberger mainly senses a new openness to the rest of the world at the start of the present century, noting both increased interest in others, in others’ cultures and in world politics fed by a very great good: the internet. For him, this allows of the translation — in the sense of the transport — of any information, including the cultural, from anyone to anyone and any place to any other.
I value the internet but, from decade-long personal misery “at the hands of” obstreperous computers (my come-putas), a basic Luddite and abominator of all machines — especially the alledged communicators — I consider as criminal those who foisted such systems on populations bound to remain ignorant and incapacitated if they have not the time, money, desire or talent to become “geeks.” More radically, I also have very many doubts about the future of culture in general in those “hands.”
Furthermore, nationalism, the source of a great many of our disasters, remains a force in matters of language and we are not likely to enjoy an “Esperanto” in the foreseeable future. However, translation, of course, works against this wall so that the “post-national writer” that Weinberger sees as contributing to salvation is a possibility. I am not as optimistic as our author but his typology of present models of the “post-national writer” will be of major value to critics. A question: would Weinberger be interested in uni-lingualism — English after all is conquering the world? I doubt it.
Not wishing ab initio to be judge and party, I have extremely rarely “done reviews” so that I see this writing as more of an interested questioning than a “review.” This anthological volume is the sixth book of essays in which Weinberger has discussed the “ten thousand things” but concentrated on poetry and translation. Now the jacket of a penultimate book, An Elemental Thing, states that “E.W. has taken the essay into unexplored territories on the borders of poetry and narration where the only rule, according to the author, is that all the information must be verifiable.”
Weinberger has always behaved as a poet although he does not, to the best of my knowledge, regularly write poems. Possibly he did not want to be a poet fearing the “interference of the otherwise all-consuming ego” (p.181) mentioned when discussing his view of the enviable anonymity of translators. He would, in this fear of the ego, be the relative of many poets. His essays are often referred to as a poet’s essays. In our time (not a poet’s time as Holderlin continues to say from beyond the grave), Weinberger’s essays reach a larger and more diverse public than poets’ poems. Thus the problems raised by the essayistic medium or genre arise anew.
The jacket-quote just mentioned continues: “With An Elemental Thing, E.W. has created a unique, open-ended serial essay whose individual pieces — on an astonishing array of topics — converge in one ever-expanding ideogram, a chamber of echoes, or a hall of mirrors.” So that, in more than one sense we seem to have here Weinberger’s Cantos. So also come the implication of reams of scholarship — and the memory of a scholar at the apex of his/ her powers is needed to work them out.
Aged 81, I am not sure I can manage this. Also, the essays have no bibliographies – incidentally causing endless wonderment in reviewers as to where on earth the author finds his often superiorly recondite matter. The problem is: because “all the information must be verifiable.” Much in the Cantos is not open to verification in a scholarly sense — only in a reactive poetic sense. Clues to Weinberger’s position may doubtless be looked for in the very beautiful piece #26 ‘The Vortex’ in An Elemental Thing.
One aspect of all this resides in Weinberger’s treatment of critics — the main piece here being that on Susan Sontag. Weinberger sees Sontag, though anti-consumerist an omnivorous absorber of the “now,” as trapped in her later life in day to day affairs, “the current,” the meat and drink of journalism, so that, after an admittedly brilliant career as a forerunner “public intellectual,” she often harmed herself by claiming to be right at one time “even when that rightness contradicts the right things she had said before.” Eventually Weinberger sees her rather tragically as “a Roland Barthes who dreamed of being a Walter Benjamin, and moreover, a Walter Benjamin who dreamed of being a Russian novelist. But she was born too late, and in the wrong place.” (p. 102). Weinberger almost always ends with a dramatic flourish.
To what extent does Weinberger himself avoid being trapped in journalism and in “the current”? Here much depends for me on what he does with the facts he so brilliantly but also relentlessly brings onto his stages. I call this, when speaking to myself, the “factoid rush.”
The dazzling enumerations of little-known facts provide continual delight. As a child, I loved the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, perhaps not all that generally known today. I discover that Gu Cheng’s favorite book in his 13th year (during the Cultural Revolution) was Fabre’s (p.50). There is the great T’ang imperial courtesan Yang Kuei-fei always walking around with a jade fish in her mouth (p.115). As an ex-pilot and aviation writer, I find on p. 124 a line by T’ang poet Meng Chao which runs: “A poet only suffers writing poems / Better to spend your life learning how to fly” — his meaning different from mine but who am I to argue? Quoting James Laughlin’s description of T. S. Eliot’s extremely slow delivery when conversing, Weinberger reminded me of Arthur Waley’s similar excruciations (p.81). Laughlin’s famous quote on the abundance of “irritating people,” much beloved by Weinberger, makes one look forward to what a reader of our man’s eventual biography will discover!
On page 134, I find the “factoid” Weinberger himself cites as his own favorite (though perhaps apocryphal): “if China becomes an entirely middle-class country, and every Chinese person decides to spend only one week of his or her life visiting Paris, there will be an extra 400.000 people a day trying to get into the Deux Magots.” He is, of course, talking of contemporary China, a subject he deals with most entertainingly though painfully in ‘Postcard from China,’ a wry account of going all the way to Chengdu for a festival only to find the festival cancelled. I note, amused myself, that all these examples are indeed from China.
Weinberger, an omnivorous reader, has a detective’s extraordinary memory for the apposite and unusual fact — before writing a review or introduction for instance, I am sure he re-reads all the author’s works. Of Oppen, he says (p. 6) that his universe was “an immense heap of little things” (Coleridge) and this seems to be also true of him. Necessary to this kind of writing, Weinberger makes many rapid-fire judgments, is not much given to changing his mind but can very rarely be refuted or corrected (I think him wrong on Bergman’s lessened importance for one thing) (p.95).
A problem for me, however, is that, quite often, the facts run away with themselves and turn into a cataract of factoids. However entrancing — as in the essay on the T’ang — this can become off-putting as any surfeit might. There are, admittedly, circumstances under which a catalog of facts is generated in a particularly fascinating way as when Weinberger lists the strange superstitions that the classical Chinese peasantry wove around the luxuries enjoyed by contemporary elites (p. 116).
But apart from a very few pieces which are not very informative without the book they introduce (e.g Hans Faverey’s) and could have been omitted, as well as some which are too short — the Susan Howe introduction is one — there are many examples of pure “rush.” Take the life of French poet and archaeologist Victor Segalen in the piece ‘Epstein : Exote’ (p.141). By rapid, almost simultaneous, recital of Segalen’s strange biography, Weinberger exoticizes but relentlessly simplifies the life — thus joining it up with Segalen’s own view of exoticism as ‘the keen and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.” (p.142). But was Segalen incomprehensible? Something similar happens with Huidobro (p. 36). Sometimes a whole essay, e.g. the title one, will seem to turn into “rush.”
Where a whole piece becomes a “rush,” one factoid may seem to drop uneasily out of same. In ‘In Blue’ for instance, what is the relevance of the Armenian Yazedis’ taboo on eating lettuce to the theme of blue? Well — it is almost impossible to fault this author — it is true that, as is pointed out, blue and green are seen as one in a great many Asian, African and Middle American indigenous languages. But the game begins to have a Ripley effect sometimes — the “Believe it or not” effect — and may raise questions on the ultimate point of so much “rush”?
Readers can enjoyably detect mystery in how Weinberger comes upon /goes in search of/ eventually finds information. Very occasionally, as in the important essay on “Photography and Anthropology” (we are, pretty finally all “us” even if Amazon Indians, for instance, may well doubt this) a source is revealed, e.g. the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland (p.151). On the other hand, the piece ‘Questions of Death (1892)’ has no attributions. British anthropologists will sense that the source is probably the book Notes and Queries, a guide to fieldwork (which Weinberger does cite at p.152 in the previous piece) but how many of them are Weinberger readers?
There is one essay or piece (lord how I hate the word “piece”) — longest in the book — which seems to me to fall headlong into the “rush” syndrome and thereby to become tedious. While it undoubtedly details dramatically the inconsequential, nightmarish and mendacious horror of the Bush-Cheney era and its Middle Eastern adventures, my own sense, contrary to truly universal opinion and disregarding its huge international diffusion, is that, as text, the interminable repetition of the title phrase ‘What I heard about Iraq in 2005’ in the form of “I heard that” or a close variant (followed by a news item) leads to Weinberger’s weakest though admittedly most “popular” effort.
Am I sure that all this amounts to serious criticism of Weinberger’s method? No. But I do question. The ‘What I heard’ piece dips him into “the current” he has doubts about elsewhere. He may a little too easily drift into journalism and/ or criticism and I wonder if this does not weaken what I have suggested may be his chosen path as “serial essayist.” The choosing of one’s subjects in such a way that the essays do not bounce out into the boundless arbitrariness of outer space (an obsession of my own I have to admit and, of course, if a book is anthological like this one, much of this cannot be helped) is the essayist’s great methodological problem.
It is also, of course and despite a number of theories, the poet’s. The concept of “serial essay” (is it in fact essay or essays?) is, doubtless, an antidote to this — but only one piece here, the final one, is defined as part of that effort. Then, in what way do a serial essay or serial essays differ from a one-topic book, most books being de facto/ de jure one-topic books?
This is where I have to admit defeat for, without a great deal of further reading that I cannot do now — going back over all the previous books and trying to find sources — I cannot tell how that piece, ‘A Journey on the Yangtze River’ fully and consistently fits into the overall pattern. At one point, the speaker in the piece — a T’ang official it would seem — says “All my life I’ve been obsessed with searching for that which is hidden” (p.249). That which is hidden and that which is verifiable… We are left with a mystery: how much is quote, how much is invention? Or, a technical point, let us say: how much might the “rush” be related, consciously or not, to the quick press of the poetry Weinberger admires? Questions here do not end.
It is impossible to give an adequate idea in a “review,” or even a “questioning,” of this book’s richness. One ends up expecting him to talk of everything and is surprised, for instance, that there is nothing on the environment. I could easily quote passage after passage, page after page. So that, in a sense, we are back at the ‘Cantos.’ There is a book of Weinberger’s called The Stars, an exquisite letterpress production of the great printer Leslie Miller (the Grenfell Press) for the Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Based on prints by the artist Vija Celmins, Weinberger elaborates a text by assembling “a catalogue of descriptions of the stars drawn from around the world, and from an array of historical, literary, and anthropological sources.” (book-jacket description). The text is not only given in English but also translated and then printed in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Maori!
The stars are out there in the “boundless arbitrariness of outer space.” Or is it arbitrary? Humankind in the little time that it has left will continue to debate this until its end. The Stars as a tour de force continue the author’s “game.” Is it a “game”? Weinberger, following Benjamin (p.93), is clearly interested in founding a genre. We are back in the mysterious. I recall a French cheese farmer visiting a farm in Wisconsin in the 1950s, seeing the sanitary arrangements for the cattle and exclaiming “What’s a cheese without a bit of shit in it?” Weinberger suggests somewhere that there is no genius without a bit of stupidity (p.103) — maybe there is no poetry without a particle of shit. Certainly, there is no poetry without hope: Weinberger is a fiercely hopeful writer. There is no poetry without a modicum of mystery: Weinberger, a mysterious person, is a mysterious writer and his course continues.
Heraclitus: “The real constitution of things is accustomed to hide itself.” The mystery of the real (the ever-eventually “verifiable”) is Weinberger’s Ultima Thule. The more mystery, the more poetry — for only in the perpetually mysterious nature of the ten thousand options (which does not forbid holy precision) can true poetry survive. Eliot Weinberger deserves the recognition as a poet he has looked for all his creative life. He is finding it." - Nathaniel Tarn
"Ah, the impetuous dispersals (unfocus’d) of the weekend—like tossing seed into the wind (good for the consequent prosperity of the species). (Refreshment arrives with its inamorata of high rhetoric—these cheesy lung-emptying outbursts about nothing in particular.) I finish’d La Sontag’s journal, skimpy though it be. Sontag deigns insert the Sontag brand of elitism even into the sex acts of others: “American idea of sex as hard breathing (passion). They’re indicating, not doing. They think less breathing = less passion, coldness.” (I love the nearby idea, however, of a writing that “indicates” writing in lieu of writing, a faked writing. The motions of a late style. “(Pages of illustrations.)”) I read several essays in Eliot Weinberger’s new Oranges & Peanuts for Sale (New Directions, 2009). In a piece originally written to review the recent reprinting of A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang (NYRB, 2008), Weinberger talks about the poet Li Ho (791-817), “who did not fit any of the traditional categories assumed for Chinese poets”:
He was neither a Confucian civil servant restoring meaning to language nor a Taoist adept out in nature, neither a libertine nor a Buddhist monk. He was a Crazy Poet—the Chinese refer to him as the “ghostly genius”—who rode his donkey all day and wrote scattered lines that he tossed into a bag. At night, he emptied out the bag and put the lines together as poems, which he threw into another bag and forgot. His mother complained that “this boy will spit his heart out,” which he did at age twenty-six.
(Graham himself notes how seeing the “peculiar qualities” of Li Ho’s poetry—“recently rediscovered after long neglect”—required “the breakdown of traditional literary standards in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”) The story of the bag of lines recalls the Wittgenstein of Zettel (the book of fragments wherein one finds, amongst others: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”) and the Marcel Duchamp of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box)”—full of Duchamp’s notes and scraps, verbal compliment if not “explication” of what it’s made to accompany: “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).” Or—Jonathan Edwards. The ineffable Jonathan Edwards of Susan Howe’s Souls of the Labadie Tract:
As an idea occurred to him, he pinned a small piece of paper on his clothing, fixing in his mind an association between the location of the paper and the particular insight. On his return home, he unpinned each slip and wrote down its associated thought according to location.
How I love that! Here’s a Li Ho poem out of the Graham anthology:
Dawn in Stone City
The moon has set above High Dike,
From their perch on the parapet crows fly up.
Fine dew damps the rounded crimson
And the cold scene clears of last night’s drunkenness.
Woman and herdboy have crossed the River of Heaven,
Mist in the willows fills the corners of the wall.
The favoured guest snaps off his tassel for a pledge:
Two eyebrows, smudges of green, knit.
Spring curtains of flimsy cicada-wing gauze,
Spread cushions braided with gold, and a flower which hides away.
In front of the curtain light willow fluff hovers, crane’s down—
No, for spring’s passion there is no simile.
Weinberger notes in the essay how “Women in the courts of the T’ang Dynasty (618-907) painted their eyebrows green; the standard of beauty was brows as delicately curved as the antennae of moths.” Too: “Foreheads were powdered yellow with massicot, a lead oxide, for yellow was the color of vitality.” And, again, talking about horse-riding women (Weinberger’s reviewing, too, an art exhibition call’d “China: At the Court of the Emperors” at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence—“one Renaissance paying tribute to another”—the exhibit containing ceramic horses, some with riders), he notes: “(It was later, during the Sung Dynasty, that foot-binding was introduced and languorous inactivity become the feminine erotic idea; the T’ang aristocratic male apparently preferred equestrian and acrobatic women.)” " - John Latta
"Eliot Weinberger says he never makes anything up. His essays, poetic and imaginative as they are, are always, he insists, based on facts that are “independently verifiable.”
The first thing to banish from your mind when you hear that Weinberger’s prose is “poetic” is any notion of purple or gushing prose. His essays are tough, lucid, and compressed: ideas, images, and emotions expressed vividly and concretely.
He might be known more for his wonderful translations of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, but Eliot Weinberger happens to be America’s greatest living essayist, probably the greatest living English-language essayist as well. He also comes up with better titles than just about anybody: Works on Paper, Outside Stories, Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, and his new collection of mostly commissioned pieces, Oranges and Peanuts for Sale.
But is he really an “essayist” in all of his works? Isn’t much of what he writes less “essays” than pieces of unclassifiable prose, vivid and strange? What is an essay anyway? Montaigne, as we all know, was simply “trying” (assayer) to get his idiosyncratic exploration of certain subjects down in words. Weinberger does the same. Actually, he pigeon-holes himself best: he always refers to himself, winningly I think, as a “literary writer,” much like how W.G. Sebald always called what he did “prose.”
Montaigne’s essays were an attempt “to try.” What is Weinberger trying? To embody his subjects in words. Critics and reviewers are right to suggest that Weinberger’s focus is more on the outside world than on himself, but isn’t that true of all the great essayists, even the ones who use the first-person singular obsessively? Montaigne, Hazlitt, Emerson, and Ruskin were doing the same thing, and like them Weinberger’s primary interest is in writing great sentences.
His words are like things. This has always been the ideal of essayists; looking over literary history you don’t have to wait for William Carlos Williams’ formula about “no ideas but in things.” Think of Hazlitt praising Edmund Burke because of all English prose writers, “his words were the most like things.” Or Emerson praising Montaigne: “cut these words and they would bleed.” Or Thoreau, extending Emerson’s visceral imagery: “Our style must be vascular...”
Weinberger’s words are more like smooth, many-colored pebbles. He is certainly trying new things, though, shaping and bending the essay into beguiling new forms.
Outside Stories and Karmic Traces might be the best places to start, though all of his output is worth reading. His previous book, An Elemental Thing, was probably his most imagistic and “poetic” book so far, full of strange and marvelous tales and hypnotic prose poems. Weinberger’s writing has always had a poetic/dreamy strain, but his other collections combine those kinds of essays (many of them historical or mythological reveries written with no stage-setting context, with no hint of an authorial first-person essayist speaking) with more straightforward, recognizable essays about literature, history, culture, and politics. His book What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles is probably the best polemic (really a selection of articles he’d written for foreign newspapers throughout the Bush-Cheney years) about this past decade’s high crimes: Weinberger throughout is lucid and sharp, and he often writes with a grim gallows humor.
He’s excellent in both of these areas--direct and indirect essays--a 21st century century cross between William Hazlitt and Jorge Luis Borges (whose “non-fictions” Weinberger has famously translated). He writes in all kinds of different registers, from the elliptical dramatic monologue of a 900s Chinese river traveler to his own voice as a witty, unusually perceptive, erudite, and (this is most rare in criticism) fun to read essayist.
His new book Oranges and Peanuts for Sale continues his marvelous work.
In the past, Weinberger’s books have given us glimpses of Sarasvati along a river that might symbolize poetry itself, a classic journal of his impressions during the Salman Rushdie affair, three marvelous sketches of Iceland past and present, a report from Hong Kong on the eve of its handover to the People’s Republic of China, a haunting meditation on naked mole-rats (“their hearing is acute”), a lovely piece on the Hindu concept of “karmic traces,” and a stark and devastating account of the history of the modern race theory that led to genocide in Nazi Germany and 1990s Rwanda, political analyst dogs, lovelorn poetry-writing donkeys, a portrait of Empedocles, and totally idiosyncratic versions of renga. He’s also given us classic essays on literary figures like Kenneth Rexroth, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.R. Ackerley, Octavio Paz, and Jorges Luis Borges. What does he offer in his newest book?
A piece on T’ang China--its huge and cosmopolitan capital city Chang’an, the art and poetry of China in its golden age--is ridiculously tantalizing, full of vivid images (sabine coats, green eyeshadow, wine-markets), a hilarious and wonderful short piece on Shiva as a poet, a much-argued-about (and, to my mind, basically correct and fair) assessment of the late Susan Sontag, a review of Robert Alter’s new translation of the Psalms (Weinberger’s not a fan, and he uses Psalm translations by the likes of Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion, and John Milton as grenades to toss at Alter), a “postcard from China,” a meditation on the color blue, a dreamlike prose poem on the “oranges and peanuts for sale” of the book’s title, two pieces (both, in their way, calls to arms) on his vision of translation as the lifeblood of imaginative literature, and a jeremiad against the insular, politically-detached, navel-gazing literature of present-day America.
There’s also an interesting revelation about his own work here: An Elemental Thing (possibly Weinberger’s life’s work, his chef d’oeuvre?) is a “serial essay,” continued here by the book’s final piece, “A Journey Down the Yangtze River.”
It’s a mistake to join some in the poetry world in calling Weinberger a “poet.” He’s not a poet; he writes and innovates prose. He’s akin to Borges, Calvino, Chatwin, Sebald, Davenport and current innovators of the form like Geoff Dyer, and Rebecca Solnit. Taking the essay to new places, as it were.
Or, to put it another way: Why should every book review begin “the New York Review of Books’ new edition of A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’Ang will please anyone with a...” and every introduction to a poet begin “X is a poet of silences. He was born in...”? Weinberger has said that his ideal reader is someone who reads a piece of his, falls asleep, and has a great dream. He excels at dream-making essays, and at organizing the dreams of others: travel accounts, folk tales, history, literature, myth. He does all of this, though, via the medium of prose, not poetry.
His more straightforward essays are sparkling. His essays on translation are superb, particularly the ones in Oranges and Peanuts for Sale His ideas about translation are so much more exciting and space-opening than the tired old cliches about how “poetry can’t be translated.”
He collects stories and poems, often from remote and not-much-charted areas of history and the world, like an archaeologist collects artifacts, or perhaps more like an art historian collecting vases and figurines and arranging them into a strange and beautiful gallery exhibition. Sometimes the stories and poems are curiosities, sometimes they’re works of art, sometimes they’re both. They are always interesting, though, and often downright beguiling. Weinberger---according to an essay in Written Reaction about his discovery of poetry (Paz’s Sun Stone in the Rukeyser translation)---wanted when to be archaeologist when he grew up.
Grown up, Weinberger is like the polymath T’ang poet Li Shang-yin, whom he describes in my favorite essay in Oranges and Peanuts for Sale as “the most scholarly and sensual poet of the T’ang.” Why so? Because Weinberger clearly delights in images of Chinese noblewomen painting their eyebrows green (for such was the fashion), of desolate and terrifying gorges along the Yangtze, of a “pasteled marriage of heaven and earth” in a poem from Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz’s classic and weird anthology of Mexican poetry, and in the resonant oranges and peanuts of his title. He is a connoisseur of poetry and the poetic in life, but he is also propelled by a larger vision of cleansing and renewing the English language. A celebrant of evolving literatures and open cities--both of which open worlds--he is also a warning to his age, a Confucian rectifier of names. But above all a brilliant and imaginative writer.
A confession: even though Weinberger is hardly unknown, especially abroad (look at the prizes he’s won, the pieces he writes for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, etc.) I think of him like I think of my favorite underground indie rock bands. I selfishly want his writings all to myself, and I half-dread the day when the rest of the world catches up to his genius." - Greer Mansfield
Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing, New Directions Publishing, 2007.If you dream of a jaguar, people are coming.
If the jaguar bites you, they are not people. —Eliot Weinberger, from "Lacandons"
"Internationally acclaimed as one of the most innovative writers today, Eliot Weinberger has taken the essay into unexplored territories on the borders of poetry and narrative where the only rule, according to the author, is that all the information must be verifiable. With An Elemental Thing, Weinberger turns from his celebrated political chronicles to the timelessness of the subjects of his literary essays. With the wisdom of a literary archaeologist-astronomer-anthropologist-zookeeper, he leads us through histories, fables, and meditations about the ten thousand things in the universe: the wind and the rhinoceros, Catholic saints and people named Chang, the Mandaeans on the Iran-Iraq border and the Kaluli in the mountains of New Guinea. Among the thirty-five essays included are a poetic biography of the prophet Muhammad, which was praised by the London Times for its "great beauty and grace," and "The Stars," a reverie on what's up there that has already been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and Maori."
"An Elemental Thing comes with a black and white cover photograph showing the ocean floor as it looked several millions of years ago. [See photo, below.] It is a strange world of polyps, corals, cephalopods, and trilobites consuming each other. The water is so clear as to be virtually absent, allowing viewers to perceive every detail without distortion, as if they had been specially arranged for our eyes. At the same time, the idea that human observers could be really present to this scene is absurd.
In a sense, it is the same with Eliot Weinberger’s latest book: Weinberger manages to draw crystal-clear ‘pictures’ of the past, which seem both strangely realistic and at the same time distant and enigmatic. Although it does not move as far backwards in time as the jacket photograph, An Elemental Thing is a book containing marvelous things, scenes and people as unfamiliar to us as the ocean of the Devonian period.
Of course, Eliot Weinberger is not a photographer but an essayist, and the essay as a genre is not famous for imaginations of pre-historical landscapes without human beings. Quite to the contrary, it has often been conceived as one of the major ways of expressing human subjectivity. Although it is difficult to say what actually ‘defines’ an essay, the subjective, individual ‘I’, with its personal voice and its unique style, is perhaps the one feature we expect to find in every essay. In his latest collection of essays, however, Weinberger seems to directly oppose this notion of the ‘personal’ essay. There is virtually no autobiographical content, no private reflection, no personal experience. In An Elemental Thing, the ‘I’ seems to be absent.
Additionally, and in contrast to many of his earlier essays (most obviously the ‘political’ ones in the recent What Happened Here), we do not get any polemical comments on the latest obscenity of the Bush administration, nor furious anti-war prose poems like ‘What I Heard About Iraq’, nor comments on recent developments in the poetry scene. Instead of scrutinizing his immediate surroundings, the author of An Elemental Thing finds his subjects in regions historically, or culturally, far away from the here and now.
In ‘The Tree of Flowers’, for example, the story of a 16th century Portuguese explorer hearing the story of an Indian girl who can be turned into a blooming tree by pouring water over her is told. In ‘Abu al-Anbas’ Donkey’, a dead donkey appears in the dreams of his former keeper, ‘a man named Abu al-Anbas’, who lives in Baghdad ‘during the reign of Mutawakkil’, and recites ‘donkey poetry’. In ‘Empedocles’ we learn that this man, who was ‘a student of Parmenides or of Xenophanes or of Anaxagoras or of Pythagoras or of Pythagoras’ son, Telauges’, believed that ‘a skull consists of four parts fire, two parts water, and two parts earth’, and that ‘in the time of unity there is no difference between the sexes’.
What matters most in these pieces is the sheer abundance of exotic detail, as well as the simple beauty of the stories. Often, they contain wonderful mysteries, which, however, they do not explain but only circumscribe, so that they remain enigmatic at heart. For example, there is perhaps some deeper meaning in the story of ‘Guiseppe’, a 17th century boy ‘who would sit for hours with his eyes rolled upward, gaping’, who could ‘stop a furious storm by shouting ‘Dragon! Dragon!’, who ‘loved everything about the Church’, and who ‘could fly’. Rather than being an edifying biography of a saint we might want to imitate, this story conveys a sense of awe at the incomprehensibility of the life described.
The impression of this essay, as well as many other examples, as describing a life somewhat outside the norm is to a great extent due to the special combination of ordinary and extraordinary, natural and supernatural elements. Weinberger has said elsewhere that everything he writes is ‘verifiable’, and the list of sources supplied at the end of the book underlines this basically ‘non-fictional’ nature of his essays. It would certainly be rewarding to compare Weinberger’s essays with his sources in detail, to see which parts of the texts that he has read he actually selects and how he combines the selected elements.
But we might as well believe without examination that Weinberger’s essays are ‘factual’ in the sense that their content has not been invented by the author, but is based on other writings. Still, fact and fiction are continually blended, or juxtaposed, or both. For example, to the narrator/essayist of ‘Guiseppe’, the idea that a boy can fly because ‘devotion has reduced his body and his mind to a state of physical zero’, seems perfectly credible, and on the same level as the fact that ‘Guiseppe’s father was a carpenter’. There is no comment on the credibility of either information. If readers find something hard to believe, they will have to acknowledge that their judgment will be based exclusively on their own assumptions.
The question of credibility also arises in the biographical narrative of ‘Muhammad’ (see also Cliff Fell’s review of the chapbook edition in Jacket 33). Although one of the longest pieces, it is even more condensed than the other stories, even more stuffed with supernatural events, and even more enigmatic. Its protagonist is the ‘founder’ of Islam, of whom everyone in the world has heard of — but probably not in this way:
As a boy, he slept in a room with his uncle, but changed his clothes in secret. At night he could be heard uttering prayers. Often, a beautiful man would appear by his bed, stroke his head, and disappear. He was usually alone, with a light beaming from his head to heaven.
Rather than being comprehensively informed about the life of an extraordinary individual, we are confronted with numerous collisions between fact and fiction, history and myth. The most ordinary thing, being alone, is put next to the most extraordinary, a light beaming from one’s head. If, however, we want to make a difference between the two levels, we must make it for ourselves. The narrator seems completely unimpressed by this obvious clash of different conceptual spheres.
But questions also arise concerning the nature of storytelling itself: Who, for example, is this ‘beautiful man’ appearing at Muhammad’s bed? What is his function, or why is he mentioned at all? It seems that something crucial is missing: Muhammad’s life story is told, it would seem, without an underlying plot, without causal connections between events, without suspense or insights into the characters’ psychology. ‘Muhammad’ remains incomprehensively strange to us, as if it would just not fit into a conventional narrative structure, or as if the narrative just fails to cover the really important aspects. Consider the following passage:
On the night Muhammad was born, every idol toppled over. The palaces of Kesry, emperor of Persia, trembled, its dome split in two, and fourteen towers collapsed. Lake Sawwa, which had been worshipped as a god, disappeared, and became a salt plain.
The events, or rather, elements, of its protagonist’s life are simply presented one after another, connected, so to speak, by way of sequence, but not consequence. It seems that instead of telling a proper story, Weinberger is more interested in making a list of events. The connections between these events, however, are left out, so to speak. Instead of a tight narrative web, there is a loose compilation of elements, the spaces between which are more or less empty.
This phenomenon of list-making can also be found in many other of the 34 essays in An Elemental Thing. Although at first glance many appear as ‘normal’ prose essays describing, exposing, or reflecting on some interesting subject matter or point, they quickly turn into strange cascades of information, for example ‘Winter’:
The flavor of winter is salty; its smell is putrid. The Emperor lives on the Dark Hall side of the Hall of Light. He wears black robes and black jade ornaments, rides in a black chariot pulled by black horses with black manes, trailing black streamers. He eats millet and pork; his vessels are wide and deep. The imperial ladies move to the Northern Palace, wear black clothes trimmed with black, and play musical stones.
We recognize the mode of writing, we know the words and understand the syntax — but still, there is something peculiar going on. Similar to making a list of events rather than telling a story, Weinberger here takes information and puts it together, without, however, building an ordinary text. The elements, it seems, are simply stacked up, but without an underlying argument. Remembering that Weinberger generally uses information found in other books, it becomes clear that he does not intend to ‘summarize’ their content in a usual way. There
is no real adaptation to our expectations of a ‘proper’ historical account of ancient China, no real cultural translation between the ‘exotic’ subject matter used and the ‘ordinary’ readers. The effect is the same as in ‘Muhammad’. Instead of getting neat information, we are confronted with questions: Who is this ‘Emperor’? What is the ‘Hall of Light’, and why is the color black so important? Who, after all, is speaking, and why does he think readers will need this information? The risk of readers getting a little exhausted with so much strangeness and so many questions is avoided by adding more ordinary essays in between, which work with more familiar techniques, as argument, exposition, and comment, like ‘The Desert Music’, ‘Wind and Bone’, and ‘The Vortex’. Readers can take a rest here and entrust themselves to this ‘expert guide through history’s labyrinth’, as B. F. Dick has called Weinberger in an earlier review. Although linguistically and structurally more typically essay, these too are brilliant explorations into miracles, other cultures, and myth.
But some pieces seem even less suited for the label ‘essay’, as they appear in the form of collages rather than prose texts. The visual structure of such essays is a marker of their rather fragmentary nature. ‘Changs’, for example, lists thirty-four men named ‘Chang’, picked from all over Chinese history, separated by blank spaces:
Chang Chu, a poet in the 13th century, wrote a line, ‘The cataclysm of red sheep,’ that no one has ever been able to explain.
Chang Hsu-ching, a Taoist, no one remembers exactly when, obtained the elixir of life and discovered that tigers would do his bidding.
Chang Jen-hsi, in the 18th century, wrote a treatise on ink.
‘The Stars’ is another a brilliant assemblage of religious and profane notions, separated by tab spaces: ‘they are the lights of the palaces where the spirits live’ is followed by ‘they are of different sizes’, which is followed by ‘they are funeral candles, and to dream of them is to dream of death’. In such collages, there is no overall argument to be found, just elements following each other, the sequence of which does not seem to be in any way compulsive.
Weinbergers essays have been labeled the results of ‘condensations’ of information. If we would want to find a more precise term that grasps the special literary technique employed for this effect, and which goes for most essays in An Elemental Thing, whether narrative or collage-like, we might well call it ‘enumeration’: a kind of lining things up, of constructing a text without any structure but the simplest. In fact, the ‘collage’ or the ‘list-making’ of essays like ‘Changs’ seems to be very close to the ‘hyper-description’ of ‘Winter’, as well as to the uneasy biography of ‘Muhammad’. In a sense, they can all be conceived as ‘word-piles’, which leave out many things we feel are important for understanding a ‘text’. However, the result, as I have tried to show, is the creation of numerous rich layers of possible meaning and mystery. Enumeration seems the ideal way to say very little and very much at the same time.
The overall effect is a maximum reader stimulation. Weinberger’s essays create countless empty spaces by presenting elements in a kind of free movement, leaving enough room for the audience to continually wonder, to continually experience amazement. (Mark Hutchinson has described the effect of the earlier Karmic Traces as ‘it makes you sit up in your seat.’) It is almost impossible not to want to find out more about all the strange beings and occurrences shown — but not exhausted — in this book. (Another reason for consulting the ‘sources’ oneself.) Sieglinde Geisel has said elsewhere that Weinberger ‘gives the world back its secrets’, and he has obviously understood that in order to do that, they must also be given to us.
With enumeration in mind, something more can be said about the obvious absence of the ‘I’: Weinberger’s essays often seem so unearthly because he relies on enumeration — a technique which to a great extent leaves out argument, exposition, or explanation. In other words, he dispenses with the usual textual strategies of producing meaning. It is little wonder that there seems to be no ‘I’ in many of these texts, no human observer, just ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ lists containing one thing after another, without, it seems, any consciousness in control. Our usual ways of meaning-making seem as misplaced in the worlds of ‘Muhammad’, ‘Guiseppe’, and ‘Empedocles’, as they would be in the Devonian ocean displayed on the cover.
Looking again at the photograph, we know of course that what it shows is a fully artificial scenery, and that the landscape we see is completely human. The spikes we discern on the back of the monstrous trilobite crawling, as well as the little spots on a squid’s tentacles might seem ‘realistic’ to us, but they do no more belong to the ‘real’ Devonian period than to the artist’s head. (The artist, incidentally, is the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, who took the picture in New York City’s Natural History Museum. The background, more closely examined, reveals itself as a painted wall, while the animals and plants in front of it are made of plastic.)
In a sense, it is the same with Weinberger’s essays: They are, of course, no more ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ than any text by any writer. To the contrary, we become aware that all the narrative gaps and questions that pop up after every sentence are fully intended, and that the seemingly unorganized word-piles are in fact masterfully organized texts. The subject, although structurally absent, is at the same time very much present: It is ‘there’ in every selection and every combination of elements, invisible but indispensable, as the results are unthinkable without an ordering instance. But by placing the subject in the background, by reducing its existence to an implicit presence, rather than saying ‘I’ all the time, Weinberger manages to create a new and unique perspective on the world. By appearing in a very simple but at the same time very open form, it can be seen in a different, beautiful light, untainted, as it were, by traditional ways of seeing. " - Michael Duszat
Robert P. Baird's review
Read the book at Google Books
Eliot Weinberger, Karmic Traces, New Directions Publishing, 2000."Karmic Traces contains essays as entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poetry, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe. For the past twenty years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay far beyond the borders of literary criticism or personal journalism and into the realm of poetry and narrative. Full of stories, yet written in a condensed, imagistic language, his essays are works of the imagination where all the facts are verifiable. As entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poems, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe or forgotten moments in human history, erudite, politically engaged, and acerbically witty, there is nothing quite like his work in contemporary writing. In Karmic Traces, Weinberger's third collection from New Directions, twenty-four essays take the reader along on the author's personal travels from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong on the verge of the handover to China, as well as on imagined voyages in a 17th-century Danish ship bound for India and among strange religious cults or even stranger small animals. One never knows what will appear next: Viking dreams, Aztec rituals, Hindu memory, laughing fish, or prophetic dogs. And, in "The Falls," the long tour-de-force that closes the book, Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history in a cascade of telling facts to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence.
"A vortex for the entire universe." - Boston Review
"Karmic Traces is a fascinating collection of essays featuring twenty-four of Eliot Weinbergers writings taking the reader along his personal travels ranging from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong. Here are also to be found imagined voyages among strange religious cultures and even stranger animals. The capping work is "The Falls", wherein Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence. Karmic Traces is a highly recommended body of writing that is as vivid as poetry, as entertaining as fiction, and as informative as any travelogue of mind and body." - Internet Book Watch
"(A) characteristically mixed bag (.....) Every style has a price to pay, and given the scope of some of his essays, there are sentences that will grate with some readers. (...) (T)he most fitting compliment I can pay his work is to extend to it what a diplomatic attaché in Iceland once said of Auden's poetry -- that it makes you sit up in your seat." - Mark Hutchinson
"Many people have wide-ranging interests, but few seem to pursue them as far and as closely as Eliot Weinberger does. Weinberger is not interested in absolutely everything, but those areas he has turned his attention to he delves into and wallows in with abandon. There is poetry - a constant preoccupation - and literature more generally. Politics -- cultural and otherwise. And the world at large.
Weinberger's essays are full of the exotic and obscure. Locales and literature dominate: Weinberger has both travelled and read far and wide. It is a nice combination. In a rare personal note he writes (in a piece on Omar Cáceres):
At sixteen, for no particular reason, I was hitchhiking and jumping freight trains in the Atacama desert in the north of Chile, staying at mining camps where the workers, astonished and amused by this sudden apparition of a gringo naif, would feed me and let me sleep in the barracks.
Weinberger never entirely gave up the aimless rambling in exotic locales -- geographic or literary -- and his collections of essays allow readers to enjoy these as well.
Karmic Traces ranges from odd Iceland (with four variations on the subject making up the first section of the book) to ever-popular India to the zócalo in Oaxaca. There are pieces on the incredibly prolific Hugh MacDiarmid and on Omar Cáceres, only fifteen of whose poems (and one brief statement) survive. Weinberger refers to The Ocean Made of Streams of Story ("the 11th-century Kashmiri precursor to The Thousand and One Nights"), quotes Lu Chi's Wen Fu ("an extraordinary ars poetica written in the 3rd century"), Plotinus, and the Chin P'ing Mei (the 17th century Chinese erotic classic, famously translated into English by Clement Egerton with all the fun parts rendered into Latin), among many others. He strays far and wide, each essay interweaving facts and thoughts (often from far afield) into a compressed piece of connexions.
Weinberger's fact-filled essays -- most fairly short (though bursting with information) -- are entertaining. It is neat to see where he goes with an idea (or where he comes from). And he has an agreeable style, the juxtaposition of facts generally working to good effect (as, for example, in the opening piece, Paradice (which can be found online, along with two other pieces from the first section, in Ísland)).
Several of the pieces were written as introductions to books: that on MacDiarmid, as well as On 'Hindoo Holiday' (by J.R.Ackerley). These are among the more complete essays, though his other portraits of individuals -- On Omar Cáceres, and a tribute to James Laughlin (founder of New Directions) -- are also excellent. There are also broader swipes -- a fun critique of a poetry anthology (in What was Formalism ?) or MTV (in Vomit), for example.
Fakes and forgeries are of interest to Weinberger: he writes about the Araki Yasusada affair, as well as about Genuine Fakes (but note that there is an unfortunate error in that piece: see the article Facts and Fakes at the complete review Quarterly for a closer examination).
Small pieces consider Naked Mole Rats (more than you wanted to know, but oddly fascinating), the cults of yesteryear, the teeth of his pet rabbit, and Similes of Beauty.
There are also more ambitious pieces, notably Renga and the interesting title piece. The long concluding piece, The Falls, traces racism from the 12th century B.C.E to modern Rwanda. Weinberger's approach -- historic and literary citation, the presentation of facts without explicit commentary (though lots of implicit commentary) -- is very effective here, making for a very strong piece.
Weinberger is certainly among the most interesting essayists writing in the United States today (note that many of the pieces in this collection were, however, first published in Australia, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Hungary, and elsewhere). This far-ranging collection is both thoughtful and almost always entertaining. Weinberger's take on things is invariably an interesting one, and more significantly he takes on subjects (and writers and works of literature) that are too often overlooked or ignored or forgotten. Certainly recommended
Note that a number of these piece (most of those in the third section) also appeared in Weinberger's previous collection, Written Reaction. But they are just as good a second time round." - The Complete Review
Read it at Google Books
Eliot Weinberger, Muhammad, Verso, 2006.
"Muhammad is a shimmering, lyrical biography of the Prophet, composed from the words of Muslims throughout the centuries. Drawing on a variety of Islamic sources, from the hadith, or sayings of Muhammad and his companions, to Abbasid and Persian texts, Weinberger weaves a subtle, mystical prose poem, spanning Muhammad's birth and childhood; his adolescence, miracles and marriages; to the isra and miraj, his journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and ascent into heaven, with the angel Jibril (Gabriel) as his guide. The result is a vivid triptych that presents the final prophet of Islam with extraordinary clarity.
At a time when the Muslim world is being demonized in much of the media Muhammad provides a sense of the awe surrounding this historical and sacred figure."
Eliot Weinberger, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, New Directions Publishing, 2005.
"Written for publication in magazines abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and collected here for the first time, Eliot Weinberger's chronicles of the Bush era range from first-person journalism to political analysis to a kind of documentary prose poetry. The book begins with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 200l—and an eerie prediction of the invasion of Iraq—and picks up on September 12, with an account of downtown Manhattan, where Weinberger lives, on the "day after." With wit and anger, and sometimes startling prescience, What Happened Here takes us through the first term of the "Bush junta": the deep history of the neoconservative "sleeper cell," the invention of the War on Terror, the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the often bizarre behavior of the Republican Party. For twenty-five years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay form into unexplored territory. In What Happened Here, truth proves stranger than poetry. "
"American readers admire Weinberger (Words on Paper; Karmic Traces) as a literary essayist and for his indefatigable, influential translations from Spanish and Chinese. Many Europeans and Mexicans know him as a political writer, explaining U.S. events from a clear (and clearly appalled) left-wing perspective. Inspiring in its integrity, but grim in some of its conclusions, this brief volume collects 12 essays, a speech and an interview offered to overseas audiences between December 2000 and January 2005. (A preface dates from the first Gulf War.) Weinberger compiles a hymnal-sized chrestomathy of outrages, an elegantly acrid summary of all that he believes has gone badly wrong in the past five years, including "the first coup d'etat in American history" (the Supreme Court's 2000 presidential decision) and the awful lessons of 9/11 (he lives in lower Manhattan). He argues that the Bush administration, rather than learning those lessons, has used them as excuses for large-scale carnage in Iraq. Weinberger has nothing like the American name recognition of thinkers whose critiques he echoes-he does, however, have a superb prose style: both far-left skeptics and worried moderates might appreciate his work once they find it, and New Directions' unusual pocket-sized format may help the collection get into those readers' hands." - Publishers Weekly
"The first part of What Happened Here, chapters describing New York on the day after, three weeks after, etc. ("after" referring to 11 September 2001), has been previously available in (conveniently and attractively pamphlet-sized) book form, in the marvellous Prickly Paradigm Press series, as 9/12 (see our review). This remains among the most significant literary takes on the events of 11 September and after to date (and one hopes it will reach a wider audience in this format).
What Happened Here essentially continues the story, Weinberger continuing his efforts to describe the state of America under the jr. Bush administration (or the Bush junta, as he likes to call it) to foreign audiences. ("These essays were written for publication abroad", he notes, but in condensing the doings of specifically the jr. Bush administration (as well the Republicans more generally) they are useful summary-accounts and analyses that deserve a large American readership as well.)
Weinberger tackles Bush the (non-)poet, describing the infamous verses Laura Bush claimed he had penned for her (and then admitted he hadn't), answers general questions about the state of the country two years after 11 September, and offers similar short discussions of aspects of what the jr. Bush administration has wrought. All these pieces are entertaining, though in some of the shorter opinion-piece-like ones there's perhaps a bit too much over-simplification. At the very least, however, he brings up points that should be food for thought.
The stark black-and-white painting is certainly effective, if not always entirely fair (or, ultimately, useful). While it may be true that, at this time, for example: "Anti-Americanism today is really anti-Bushism" (a fact that is, indeed, too little focussed upon, especially in the American press), it conveniently ignores the fact that even before and after the jr. Bush anti-Americanism (of, admittedly, a slightly different strain) was and likely will remain widespread. And while it's nicely expressed, it's surely also just too simplistic to say:
Half of America is clearly deranged, and it has driven the other half mad.
Though he often makes a good case in the opinion pieces, the most powerful of Weinberger's pieces are the ones most solidly grounded in fact. "A Few Facts & Questions" -- which still manages to be quite polemical -- makes a stronger case than most opinion pieces (though some of the 'facts' and interpretations will be decried by jr. Bush-partisans), and "Republicans: A Prose Poem" devastatingly and simply shows the many errors of their ways (though in all fairness a similar prose-poem ridiculing fringe-Democrats could be assembled almost as easily).
By far the strongest piece in the book is "What I Heard about Iraq" (first printed in the London Review of Books and available online there), a devastating chronicle of the changing story of the administration regarding the war in Iraq. Quote after quote, fact after fact, essentially everything the jr. Bush administration has claimed is shown to unravel here.
Weinberger's positions -- that Osama bin Laden is simply a thug and that the jr. Bush administration's making a war out of the events of 11 September (especially a war against Iraq) was an over-reaction and mistake (for the country, though perhaps not for them), the widespread dishonesty of the administration, how the jr. Bush (and Republicans generally) have used the fear of terrorism (and misplaced notions of 'patriotism') to consolidate power despite otherwise implementing widely unpopular policies -- certainly deserve attention, and, especially when he focusses on the facts, Weinberger makes an often compelling case.
What Happened Here is worth reading for "What I Heard about Iraq" alone, but the entire collection is of interest and considerable power. Some of the simplistic statements might tempt some to dismiss it all as a liberal's tirade, but there are too many ugly and unadulterated facts for even the most ardent supporters of the administration to ignore.
An impressive (and appalling) chronicle of the jr. Bush years." - The Complete Review
Eliot Weinberger, Outside Stories, New Directions Publishing, 1993.
"Polemics there are in abundance but one receives the unmistakable impression reading his sentences that he has no brief other than for the quality and literary implications of the work or issue under discussion. (...) Of his two previously published essay collections, the second, Outside Stories, is probably the more florid and satisfying. The pieces are more confident, the leaps and swoops and recombinations of the essay form more daring and successfully achieved." - Eli Gottlieb
"I can't tell whether the choppiness of the style is just a hangover from the fashionably impressionistic, in-between-modernism-and post-modernism, journalistic style of the British, whether it is a deliberate attempt to create bricolage, or whether Weinberger simply needs a freshman English class. (...) This is the value of Outside Stories: the sweep of cultures coming together, the contextualizing or the lack of difference. (...) An odd book, on an odd assortment of topics." - Feroza Jussawalla
"Outside Stories collects fifteen pieces Eliot Weinberger wrote between 1987 and 1991, including some of the longest contained in any of his now four volumes of essays: the pieces Paz in Asia, The Month of Rushdies, and The Camera People are each about thirty pages long. None of the pieces in either Written Reaction (see our review) -- not even the revised Paz in Asia (re)printed there -- or Works on Paper (see our review) approach that length, only two do in Karmic Traces (see our review). There is not quite as much reactive vigour here as in the pieces collected in Written Reaction, but this is also a worthwhile collection.
Weinberger divides his Outside Stories into two sections: Rivers of Poetries and World Beat. The topics covered do not surprise: there's poetry (though there is little emphasis on the modern American stuff), India, Latin America, politics (cultural and global).
Vicente Huidobro's Altazor is introduced; the piece was originally written for Weinberger's translation of Huidobro's poem. There is a long piece on Paz in Asia, a worthwhile introduction from the man who has extensively translated the Mexican Nobel laureate's work (and has considerable familiarity with Asia himself).
There are a number of pieces on unusual aspects of poetry. A portrait of James Jesus Angleton tells an unusual and too-little known story about an unusual and too-little known man. "There is a book to be written on poetry and espionage", Weinberger suggests, and this piece certainly offers some rich material.
One of the 3 Notes on Poetry considers Translating -- clever little thoughts on the subject, though in fact they are somewhere between being too clever and not clever enough. Example:
Translation theory, however beautiful, is useless for translating. There are laws of thermodynamics, and there is cooking.
Note the feint: "however beautiful" ? Come on ! Who has ever considered any translation theory beautiful ? Then the witty statement -- so clever ! But surely no one believes that the laws (or principles) of thermodynamics have much of anything to do with cooking, do they ? Equally significantly: note the semantic difference "translation theory" and "laws of thermodynamics" -- translation theory is only theory (and bad, bad theory, generally), while thermodynamics can be relied upon. The big question is whether one will be able to cook -- pardon: translate -- once the laws of translation have been figured out. (Okay, there are lots of small questions there, too: do such laws exist ? can they ever be figured out ? can they ever be applied ? But Weinberger prefers to go for what looks like pithy truth rather than even consider the real issues.)
So: are these witty aphorisms ? Empty aphorisms ? Persuasive thoughts ? There are some clever ideas here -- and some cleverly expressed ones (two very different things which are too often confused). Some do ring true (or at least not entirely hollow) but we prefer a bit more foundation to bold statements. (Note: we admit a particular bias against -- and deep and lasting suspicion of -- translation. But then Weinberger, a professional translator, can, of course, hardly claim much objectivity either -- all the more reason for him to prove his points.)
The second section of Outside Stories looks at the world at large -- though this generally means the world at the time Weinberger was writing these pieces. The Present covers January to June, 1989, a familiar listing of unsettling facts and events. Well-done, it has still become something of a distant period piece.
A Month of Rushdies gives a day-by-day account of the period when the furor over Salman Rushdie's "blasphemous" book The Satanic Verses first began: "the sprawling metafiction that is being engendered by that sprawling metafiction", as Weinberger says. Postscripts added to the original piece take events up to 1992; it all makes for a decent survey of the bizarre saga, too much of which is already forgotten.
The Tiananmen Square massacre and the Persian Gulf troubles (man, 1989-90 was a happening time) also get discussed -- useful takes.
Travels in the Federated Cantons of Poetry offers the obligatory tour through the depths of modern American poetry. The Camera People is a longer piece on ethnographers.
They are interesting places, where Weinberger takes his readers. Fact-loaded, making unexpected connexions and leaps, written straightforwardly (though on occasion briefly spiraling and looping away from his points) the pieces are always enjoyable to read. Outside Stories is somewhat uneven, but there is a wealth of material here. Worthwhile, and recommended." - The Complete Review
Read it at Google Books
Eliot Weinberger, 9/12: New York After, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003
"Weinberger discerns Chinese boxes apparently owned by Pandora, and his agile mind draws from a wealth of sources. (...) The last page of the impassioned, often brilliant 9/12 disappoints a bit, as Weinberger writes, "We no longer have the words to even think about what is happening." But we do, and he does." - Ed Park
"9/12: New York After offers a prelude (about how the junior Bush became President in 2001) and then five glimpses from New York in light of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center (from the day after to sixteen months after). In a brief introductory statement Weinberger describes them as "snapshots of what one person who reads the newspapers was thinking on six given days in recent history".
Weinberger is a New York City resident who lives close to where the buildings stood, and -- aside from the prelude -- the essays are written in the shadow of the World Trade Center attacks; it is, however, the Bush jr. administration that is the main focus almost throughout. Weinberger is not a fan.
Weinberger includes a discussion of the junior Bush's problematic election-victory because he sees those events as central in considering what came after. The piece questions the legitimacy of how Bush became President ("the United States has suffered the first coup d'etat in its history"), quickly going over the main contentious decisions made by various actors and courts, and then briefly offers sketches of the man who became President ("the least qualified man ever to become President", "he may be the least curious man on earth") and what can be expected from his administration. It's eerily prescient -- a useful reminder that Bush (or rather his cronies, using Bush as figurehead) have always had a very specific programme in mind and have done their best to implement it.
In the essays that then follow Weinberger focusses on how the "White House Team" has both presented and used the events of 11 September to re-shape American policy and foist it on the American people. The President is not solely to blame; as he sees it, "George W. Bush has exactly the same relationship to the policies of his government as Britney Spears does to the operations of the Pepsi corporation", and Weinberger usefully reminds readers of the backgrounds and histories of various actually dominant figures in the generally shadowy background (Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and the like).
Weinberger was obviously affected by the events of 11 September. Living nearby, he experienced those first days from near the centre of the storm -- and captures well how New York and New Yorkers dealt with it. Already the day after, however, his concern quickly shifts to the the possible consequences, particularly as suggested by the worrisome initial reactions of the Bush jr. administration.
As is well known, most of the fears were realised, and things have only gotten worse (and Weinberger doesn't even focus much on the jr. Bush's ill-advised (and very ill-conceived) tax-'cuts', now enacted). Weinberger notes that even the scrap steel from the World Trade Center will be turned into a: " 'state of the art' amphibious assault ship. In Bush America, every ploughshare must be beaten into a sword."
These pieces were written for international periodicals, and first published in a variety of foreign languages. There is some simplification, as these are broad overviews for an audience that might not have the everyday-familiarity with these events and characters that could (?) be expected of an American audience. There are occasional rhetorical flourishes, and the jr. Bush gets almost no respect whatsoever, but Weinberger is working with the facts -- employing them to his ends, certainly, but undeniable nevertheless. Impressive (or scary) too: that Weinberger has such a good sense for what is to come: the early pieces suggest what he sees will happen, and lo and behold it came to pass (which does not bode well for the future).
9/12 is a polemic, and there will be those who disagree with how Weinberger sees things; the US as Banana Republic isn't an idea a large part of the population will likely even want to consider (though Weinberger makes a nice case for it). Clearly, a number of Americans like the jr. Bush administration's 'vision' (or at least what they perceive of it) -- and don't care much about the consequences. It's not surprising that Weinberger's pieces were first published abroad, where they are much more likely to find an audience; noteworthy among the post-11-September reactions has been the willingness of a large segment of the American population to watch their words and uncritically follow their appointed leaders, rather than engage in any sort of dialogue about what has happened and the road (or dark alley) the country is being led down. Weinberger's voice is part of the small if vigorous debate about events -- but he's surely preaching to the converted, and will likely not be able to reach the greater American public.
Remarkable, too, as Weinberger notes, is how difficult debate has become: "there are no words to describe this Administration", Weinberger finds -- "All the pejoratives, however accurate, that might be applied (...) have been drained of their meaning by decades of propaganda." And one can only shake one's head in wonder that the Bush administration has yet to be held in any way accountable for a multitude of shameless and dangerous lies -- from the reasons for invading Iraq (and the provision of funds for that military operation) to the tax benefits supposedly accruing to all citizens (never mind the ridiculous reasons proffered for those cuts in the first place). The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is particularly instructive: it was an exercise that can now only be viewed as entirely illegitimate, given that the administration's reasons for it -- as presented to the UN and the American public -- have all turned out to be completely without basis. (That the invasion had positive aspects -- such as the removal of the ridiculous (and -- except to his own people -- almost entirely harmless) one-time American ally Saddam Hussein -- in no way justifies the misrepresentations of the administration. The American people should have been told the truth -- and would likely have supported such actions anyway (the international community would, of course, however have protested considerably more forcibly against an infringement of national sovereignty of this sort).)
Weinberger's presentation of the facts (and his opinions) is good: a great deal in a short space, without just cramming information in. He has a nice way with the uncomfortable facts -- those quirky biographical details that reveal how fanatical some of those in power are (or, in the case of the man nominally in charge, how limited), those moments when the President says one thing but does essentially the opposite -- though, of course it's easy to get carried away to score the easy point, as when Weinberger writes about the jr. Bush:
The person he resembles most is Osama bin Laden: both the formerly dissolute sons of rich families; both called by the One God (who seems to be contradicting Himself); both cut off from the world, on in a cave and one on a ranch in the middle of nowhere; one who reads no books and the other who presumably reads one book. Is it any wonder that their families are business partners?
Weinberger offers a world-view: what America has done and is now doing from the perspective of one very internationally oriented and aware New Yorker. He describes what he sees, the people he encounters, and the stories he hears, and digests that along with the information gathered from new-scources. He is bewildered and deeply disturbed by what it amounts to.
For the most part the personal antipathy is tempered -- the jr. Bush is ridiculed, but then the jr. Bush is an entirely ridiculous figure; as Weinberger puts it: "Bush is the first [President] who is universally recognized as a fool. (Even his supporters maintain he's just an okay guy, but surrounded with excellent people.)" -- and the many facts cited do support Weinberger's conclusions. But will anyone's eyes be opened by this sort of thing ? Many readers are apparently likely to disagree with Weinberger's interpretation, fully (and apparently blindly) committed in their support of the Bush administration's plans, actions, and world-view: for them the facts, even as presented and discussed by Weinberger, speak for the jr. Bush's doings, and not against them. (There's the rub, of course: that so many think that all the horrible things Weinberger describes are reasonable and acceptable.)
The small minority who agree with Weinberger will find validation for their views in this pamphlet. Small consolation, however, as the US continues down this path.
A worthwhile little volume. here's hoping it finds an American readership." - The Complete Review
Eliot Weinberger, Works on Paper, New Directions Publishing, 1986.
"From modernist poetry he has learned, as an essayist, about collage and the need for concision and exactitude. He has taken to heart poetics' fluid conflictions between the public and the personal, its conflation of the contemporary and the archaic, and its taste for the encyclopedic. (...) Many of the essays from the first two books, Works on Paper and Outside Stories, are not essays as we know them, but rather dismantlements and explorations of the essay form." - Eli Gottlieb
"Works on Paper, the first of now four collections of Eliot Weinberger's essays, is divided into two parts: Inventions of Asia and Extensions of Poetry. Here are two of Weinberger's favourite areas of interest, and he presents a variety of pieces dealing with them with the usual aplomb.
Weinberger can and does write fairly straightforward essays, but he often also tries to do more. The first piece in the collection is just one example of how he approaches a subject: the piece is titled The Dream of India [c. 1492], and it consists of descriptions of India, many only a single line in length, a few slightly longer. Only at the end of the piece is it revealed that "all of the imagery and some of the language are derived from works written in the five hundred years prior to 1492" -- a surprisingly effective device and one that, due to its air of authenticity, lends the piece considerable resonance.
Other essays are more traditional in form and content, but Weinberger always likes to pile on the facts and let them speak for themselves. (As he carefully selects the facts there is, of course, no objectivity to these accounts, despite their apparently neutral appearance. The facts are not speaking for themselves, they are speaking for Weinberger. This is the one aspect of his essays that is somewhat unsettling, especially given a readership that tends to be uncritical and ignorant (at least of the facts that Weinberger works with )).
In the section on Asia Weinberger also offers a portrait of Matteo Ricci, a worrisome look at Chogyam Trungpa and the Naropa Institute in Colorado, a neat piece on Paper Tigers (considering tigers from a variety of perspectives), some pieces on Chinese poetry, and a brief look to Kampuchea/Cambodia. There is also consideration of a book of photographs by Mary Ellen Mark of Bombay's (Mumbai's) notorious red light district, Falkland Road, with Weinberger considering "the chasm between Falkland Road and Falkland Road", i.e. reality and its photographic representation.
The section on poetry focusses mainly on modern American poetry. There are pieces on George Oppen, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Rexroth (beginning with Weinberger recounting the travails of simply getting an obituary of the man published), and Clayton Eshleman. There is a short portrait of Octavio Paz, much of whose work Weinberger has translated (and who he devotes longer pieces to in some of the other collections he has published). There is a short piece on the weird life of Whittaker Chambers (the piece, A Spook in the House of Poetry, can be found online here).
The political also has its place in this collection. Weinberger discusses Carolyn Forché's The Country between Us which deals, in part, with El Salvador, and was acclaimed as important political poetry (and achieved considerable popular success). Weinberger will have none of that, fortunately, opining that the poems "belong, rather, to the genre of revolutionary tourism."
Peace on Earth and The Bomb examine how modern poetry addresses (or fails to address) war and the nuclear threat. The longer last piece also looks at modern American poetry, and how one experiences "both exhilaration and dread" when one considers the works and the lives of the poets - none more than Pound, "who, above all, embodies both the flower and the venom".
Anyone with an interest in Asia and/or modern American poetry should enjoy this collection (or, if they disagree with Weinberger's politics or poetical judgements, be invigoratingly upset by it). Others might find some of what he writes about of lesser interest -- though Weinberger almost always strays enjoyably far afield in his pieces, and tells good stories throughout the collection.
Works on Paper is certainly recommended." - The Complete Review
Eliot Weinberger, Written Reaction: Poetics, Politics, Polemics: Poetics Politics Polemics, Marsilio Publishers, 1996.
"Written Reaction (...) is composed of the disjecta membra of a writing life -- catalogue essays, reviews, notes, and some extended articles. The pieces are more topical, "occasional," and often crackle with polemical fire. As in any book composed of occasional writings, there are times when one wishes he went a little further (.....) Written Reaction is a worthy companion to the first two books and, with its articles on East Berlin and contemporary Chinese poets, and important pieces on translation and multiculturalism, rounds out our understanding of the range of Weinberger's interests and affections." - Eli Gottlieb
"In between three collections of essays published by New Directions Weinberger slips in this volume of "poetics politics polemics" (published by Marsilio), collecting pieces written between 1979-1995. There is some overlap with the other volumes -- a fresh look at part of Paz in India (originally published in Outside Stories (see our review)) as well as pieces on MacDiarmid, the zócalo in Oaxaca, Genuine Fakes, Naked Mole Rats, and his pet rabbit's dental troubles (all eventually republished in Karmic Traces (see our review)) -- but Written Reaction is all vintage Weinberger, and well worth perusing.
The biggest difference between this volume and the New Directions collections are the "Notes for Sulfur" included here, pieces generally "written for the back pages of Sulfur". These twenty-five pieces are literally just notes, some only a single paragraph, the longest only a few pages. In them Weinberger addresses single issues, weighing in with his two cents. "Best first book I've read recently ...", notes on various editions of various works by various poets (Lorca, Zukofsky), bits about the NEA, the new poet laureate (in 1992), a tribute to Mircea Eliade, and similar matters. Quick, caustic, often spot-on, they make for fun reading -- though those unfamiliar with modern American poetry may not find all the notes too fascinating.
There is a sharp and often critical tone to many of these pieces -- the Sulfur notes especially, but also others. Hell, the collection begins with a review of a book of poetry by Robert Bly, which Weinberger begins: "Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in language." In an introductory note, Weinberger acknowledges:
Nearly all the essay in this book are reactive: indignation, investigation, celebration, written in response to topics that were suggested by editors or merely happened to surface.
So the contemplative calm of many of his more carefully conceived pieces (as are found in the New Directions collections) is not always present. But there is also a vibrancy to these pieces -- as well as the sheer fun of his attacks and analyses.
There are a number of book reviews here, in most of which Weinberger doesn't focus as much on the books under consideration as the subject matter: in a review of Mary Emma Harris' The Arts at Black Mountain College, for example, he focusses on Black Mountain College far more than the book. In a review of The Poetry Anthology he neatly skewers Poetry magazine editor Daryl Hine, both for the anthology and for his stewardship of the magazine generally. ("The Hine section is swiftly read, for only those in solitary confinement with only this book could get past most of the first lines.")
Written Reaction is not all an all-out attack, however. There are a number of more leisurely pieces: a conversation about drugs, a piece on translation (of particular interest, since Weinberger is best known (and most likely first encountered by most readers) as a translator), two pieces on Paz (much of whose work Weinberger has translated). There are political pieces: on the invasion of Panama ordered by George Bush ("an act of personal vendetta"), on the situation in (ex-)Yugoslavia (in 1994). There is a speech given in 1994 -- The Revolution at St. Mark's Church -- which apparently caused a considerable furor.
The pieces Weinberger chose to also include in Karmic Traces (see our review) are all solid, the MacDiarmid-profile particularly interesting. Weinberger's consideration of forgery and plagiarism, Genuine Fakes, is also of interest, but note that it contains an unfortunate error. (See Facts and Fakes at the complete review Quarterly for a fuller discussion of this piece.)
Parts of Written Reaction are dated (referring to specific events that might no longer be remembered) or obscure (modern American poetry is much discussed in these pages -- what could be obscurer ?), but Weinberger's pieces are almost all entertaining. Perhaps a bit too reactive in places, it is still a fun and worthwhile collection. Recommended." - The Complete Review
Eliot Weinberger, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated, Moyer Bell, 1995.
"Nineteen different translations of a single poem with comments on each version by Eliot Weinberger and introduction contributed by Octavio Paz."
"Unless we have a mind of God, or hundreds of years at our disposal (fat chance), we may never fluently learn all languages whose literature attracts us. Some try, and the effort is
noble, but somewhere along the way, even the most intrepid of polyglots will succumb to the necessity of translation as a gateway to original, illusive sources. Since the apocryphal fall of the Tower of Babel, and the concomitant scattering of tongues, translation has been the only way to divine meaning of foreign languages, and for better or worse, it is the sole handmaiden of Truth, however lopsided, subjective, culturally informed, and myopic a version of truth it may offer.
What do peoples of differing lands and epochs look for in a poetic translation? Some seek scholarly fidelity, if that were ultimately possible, through "literal" translations combined with footnotes and elaborate discussion to bear out the untranslatable. Others want a new version of the truth, sung well in their own language, that may at times forfeit the intent and nuances of the original. Others want a compromise: a new poem in their own language that both captures the essence of the original, and yet that does not take too many liberties in conveying the ideas. All translators have to grapple with these questions, and most realize that their choices at every turn face the Scylla of slavish, wooden "literalizations" on the one hand, and the Charybdis of infidelity through elaboration on the other. For what it’s worth, my ideal is to have poetically interesting but faithful translations facing their originals so that we can negotiate between the two, perhaps learning something of the foreign language as we go, in effect, making it less foreign until we can eventually dispense with translations.
Eliot Weinberger and the celebrated Mexican poet and essayist, Octavio Paz, bring great thoughtfulness and ingenuity to bear on the thorny topic of translation with their co-edited "Nineteen Ways of Looking At Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated," (1987). The slender volume (a brief but potent 50 pages) gathers together sixteen different translations of a four-lined poem by Wang Wei (c.700- 761), most of these in English, with a couple in French and Spanish (Paz’s own entry). Numbered in nineteen sections, the first three are devoted explicitly to the original: 1) Wang Wei’s text in Chinese characters, 2) its transliteration using the Pinyin system of rendering Chinese sounds with our alphabet, and 3) a word-for-word gloss of each character, including numerous potential translations. Weinberger provides excellent commentary on all nineteen sections, and Paz adds a little essay at the end. While ostensibly concerning Wang Wei’s philosophical, spiritual poem and the many ways it can be transmuted, and in some cases, utterly ruined through translation, the authors’ text can easily serve as a mini-course on the vicissitudes of translation in general. The universal applicability of their conclusions to any notion of poetic translation is an added bonus to what is first and foremost a guide to the challenges and demands of translating classical Chinese poetry. The book tells as much about "bad" translation practices as it does about good ones. In fact, it appears that the history of translation from Chinese (the versions are printed in chronological order) is one of learning to be less obtrusive as a translator.
One of the immediate difficulties in translating Chinese poetry is that a single character can be a noun, verb, or adjective, depending on the context. More challenging yet, it often lacks words specifically indicating person. Weinberger writes, "The first person rarely appears in Chinese poetry. By eliminating the controlling individual mind of the poet, the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader" (7). Nevertheless, the early translators of the poem (and some more recent ones, as well), add person, thus destroying the spiritual ambiguity of self and selflessness that permeates the original. One example of this tendency comes from Soame Jenyns, whose 1944 translation runs:
"An empty hill, and no one in sight
But I hear the echo of voices.
The slanting sun at evening penetrates the deep woods
And shines reflected on the blue lichens."
It is not until 1970 that, in the editor’s apt opinion, a truly poetic translation arrives (this, from Kenneth Rexroth.) Criticizing him for inventing words, Weinberger nevertheless discerns the poetic sensibility that can create this:
"Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far off voice.
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss."
The editor writes, "It is closest to the spirit, if not the letter, of the original: the poem Wang might have written had he been born a 20th Century American" (23).
By gathering such divergent translations together in a single volume, Weinberger and Paz give us the rare opportunity to uncover precisely why the successful ones work. That is the gift of this book. It encourages us to think poetically, to search out the original source and its meanings, and perhaps to venture forth our own versions of the truth. Nothing is as humbling, nor as helpful in accessing a foreign poem, as attempting to bring it to life in our own language. There are no obvious answers: how can we account for the success of these two very different kinds of translation, the first by the scholar Burton Watson, the latter by the poet Gary Snyder?
Deer Fence
"Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again."
"Empty mountains:
no one to be seen.
Yet— hear—
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods;
Again shining
on the green moss, above."
Writing about what makes for good translation, Weinberger offers a vision worthy of Heraclitus, who taught that we can never step in the same river, twice: "The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes different— not merely another— reading. The same poem cannot be read twice" (43).
To consider the varying degrees of success of translations is in to begin to think poetically. It is to concentrate on the importance of sounds; the clash of synonyms fighting over meaning; the spirit of the line, assonance, and rhyme; etymological values; the allusions and cultural baggage words may carry; the value of metaphors, symbols, and similes; the use of ambiguity and puns. It is to discover what is essentially translatable, and that which is impossible to convey in any other method, language, or sound than the original source." - www.ciao.co.uk
"The idea behind this book is interesting - it's a collection of different translations of one haiku, with commentary on each. It begins with the original, discussing the way the letters look on the page, then provides a trot (what they call a word-for-word rendering, in the translation biz, heh heh), and then 17 different translations.
Now, it is of course (well, to me) fascinating to read so many different versions of one thing. Furthermore, to people such as myself who are unfamiliar with Mandarin, the trot itself is kind of intriguing, just as a perspective on how difficult the translation process is - particularly in the case of poetry.
However, Weinberger's commentary is more annoying than anything else. Yes, he has some interesting observations, but he's so grating that they almost get lost in the mix. As one goodreads reviewer put it - he's just LOUD, especially alongside the tranquil, placid nature of the poem.
I still recommend the book, because hey, it's barely 50 pages - basically the poems, and then a page or so of commentary for each - just be prepared for Weinberger to annoy you, and try to appreciate the good bits." - Culture Vulture
Interview with Eliot Weinberger
Eliot Weinberger in conversation with Kent Johnson
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