1987

In the 1980s Carcanet branched out into fiction, both in English and in translation, with a particular emphasis on Italian fiction. Stuart Hood (1915–2011), a Scottish novelist and translator, also an influential television executive and producer, an academic and a radical activist, published his novel A Storm from Paradise with Carcanet in 1986. He translated Pasolini’s essays and Dino Buzzati’s novel The Tartar Steppe (reprinted by Carcanet in 1985). The story of his wartime experiences as a POW and then as a resistance leader in Italy had first been published as Pebbles in My Skull in 1963, and was reissued as Carlino by Carcanet in 1985.¹

 FROM STUART HOOD

Brighton

28 January 1987

Dear Michael,

You will be pleased to know that on Monday I handed the MS of Busi into the London office of Carcanet.² I hope you like it.

      This was one of the most difficult translations I have ever tackled. Reasons: Busi’s love of oxymorons; his way of slipping in and out of realism; the occasionally baroque nature of his style. The problem was how to translate rather than paraphrase or interpret.

      There are (as you will see) a couple of points where I cannot ‘read’ him and have asked him for elucidations. He is not averse to a certain mystification of the reader!

      To translate a book is to submit it to a severe test in that one lives with it, dissects it, finds oneself drawn into a critical examination of the author’s thought processes. I found that Seminar on Youth stood up to the test so that it was with regret that I finished the work.

      I seem to remember Mike saying that there had been an interesting notice of the book in the TLS (?).

      I wonder whether he has a photocopy of the article. It would interest me.

      When shall we talk about The Upper Hand?³

All best wishes for 1987,
Yours,
Stuart

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

2 February 1987

Dear Stuart,

I started reading the translation of the Busi on the train back from London on Monday with considerable puzzlement and fascination. It is a very difficult text and I feel a prefatory note by you explaining some of the difficulties of style might deflect certain forms of mis-reading. I have not yet finished it. I can see how impossible the task must have been, not least because of the sentence structure. I have queried one or two places where the oxymorons seem to me unfunctional – or at least where there may be excessive use of negatives, for example six which makes three affirmatives unless I am mistaken!

      I think you have done a very heroic job and I expect, by the time I have completed the reading, that I will like the book as much as you do at the end of the task of translation.

      I will ask Mike to send you a copy of the TLS review.

      Let us get together and talk about ‘The Upper Hand’ as soon as we can. February is more or less a write-off now but March would be a good time. Indeed we may have to talk about it in February, come to think of it, given the publication schedule. Perhaps we could be in touch some time during the next week?

With every good wish,
Michael

FROM STUART HOOD

Brighton

1 May 1987

Dear Michael,

Appropriate greetings for May Day!

      You may remember that Gini Alhadeff in New York got on to me through Carcanet and expressed interest in some excerpts from Busi.⁴ I sent her the passages in which she was interested and thought you might be cheered – as I was – to have her reactions. She writes: I am still reeling from the beauty of your translations of Busi. I know how difficult it must have been but you really do find his voice in English and it is him. It felt precisely as though I were re-reading it in Italian.

      Since we spoke last Busi has answered some of my outstanding queries.⁵ When we meet to look at the MS I can insert the answers.

All best wishes,
Stuart

PS The Scottish Arts Council event went off painlessly in John Smith’s in Glasgow.⁶ The sticker you had managed to get on to the copies on display impressed everyone!

      PPS Am deep in various Italian authors. Brancati is interesting and funny! At least he makes me laugh. Will be reporting soon.

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

16 July 1987

Dear Stuart,

I will shortly be sending you a photocopy of Octavio’s speech and some other material from the Congress.⁷ I was very grateful for your telephone call. The thing that interested me with Vargas Llosa was the nature of his speech to the Congress. He was one of the few writers who took the occasion to make, as it were, an aesthetic statement which was not entirely bound up with ethics and politics. Not that his speech was without its political dimension. Part of that political dimension was in the relative absence of ideological content. In fact, it was a beautifully structured talk and very trite in content. In the television debate which I mentioned, the intellectuals generally played up to Paz[,] and Semprún and Vargas Llosa were the main contributors.⁸ Vargas Llosa was hauled over the coals by Octavio because of his rather sentimental meliorism and one had the feeling that while Paz had lived his politics, with some rather devastating consequences in his own life, Vargas Llosa, despite the turbulence of Peru, had somehow become too westernised and had forgotten the lessons [of] his own history and the history of his continent.⁹ It was rather like seeing Madero in conversation with Porfirio Diaz!¹⁰ You know which is the greater of the two!

      I will do my best to see Busi and make him feel less unloved, though not more loved I hope!

Yours ever,
Michael

*

Stuart Hood wrote one of the most powerful Italian books we published, the memoir of his time in Italy after being released from POW camp in 1943, his time in the hills among the peasants and the Partisans. It was a world familiar to me from Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli and Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays, as well as from Hood’s own translation of Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe – probably the best novel Carcanet published – and the fact that Carlino can be mentioned unapologetically in the company of those books says something about the quality of Hood as a memoirist. He was also one of that great, unostentatious and dedicated generation of translators that made English readers aware of the modern world. His politics were an aspect of his culture.

      His translation of Busi was not without its comic side: the author came to visit the translator and was arrested for what he described as an Oscar Wilde crime in the public conveniences at Oxford Circus. It appears he had propositioned a policeman. He insisted on returning to London for the hearing of his case and asked me to appear as a character witness. I only met him when I got to court, and the proceedings were comically English. A representative of the gay press was there (Busi had given a gay newspaper quite a candid interview, including statistics of how many sexual encounters he had had), hoping for an exemplary scandal. But the magistrate was disobliging. He proved sympathetic to the accused and said in a tone which Aldo might have chosen to misread as flirtatious, ‘Well, Mr Busi, I’d like to give you an unconditional discharge…’ Stuart Hood and I drifted apart, as I remember, when I turned down a novel he had written.

NOTES

1. Dino Buzzati (1906–72), Italian novelist and journalist, is best known for Il deserto dei Tartari (1940), originally published in English in 1952, and widely acclaimed on its Carcanet reissue.
2. Seminario sulla gioventù was the first novel by Aldo Busi (b. 1948); the New York Times reviewer of the American edition (published by Farrar, Straus in 1989) suggested that he had ‘come to represent the successful misfit, the all-too-articulate, exhibitionistic incarnation of marginality and iconoclasm in a country where flamboyance has long been a sure ticket to fame and fortune.’ Hood translated two more of Busi’s books, which were published by Faber and Faber: Sodomies in Elevenpoint and Uses and Abuses: journeys, sleepwalkings and fool’s errands.
3. Hood had written to MNS in 1984 that he was turning over ‘the thought of another book on the Blunt generation (to which I belong). I have always been interested in the mole – not in the thriller sense – but in the sense of the man or woman who leads the schizoid existence required for the penetration of an organisation, whether it be a governmental one or a left-wing one.’ The Upper Hand was published in 1987.
4. The writer and translator Gini Alhadeff founded and edited Normal: a quarterly of art and ideas, published by Rizzoli; the first issues came out in 1986, so she may have been considering an excerpt for the magazine.
5. Busi had written to MNS the previous year to ask him to make the translator aware ‘that I am totally at his disposal’; as a translator himself, he would ‘understand any, but really any, demand of explanation (slang, two-level-meaning of sentences etc.).’ He was then working on Sodomie in Corpo 11, ‘a demented essay on literary critics and literary sex’ (26 May 1986).
6. Hood was awarded the Royal Bank of Scotland/Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year for A Storm from Paradise. The Glasgow Herald headlined an article by one of the judges, Alan Taylor: ‘Marxist view wins premier book award’ and the subhead began: ‘A major Scottish book award has been given, after much animated debate, to a seventy-one-year-old, little known author born in Edzell, Tayside’ (22 November 1986). This event would have been a reading at John Smith’s bookshop, once a Glasgow landmark in St Vincent Street (closed down in 2000).
7. The International Congress of Intellectuals and Writers was held in Valencia in June 1987, the fiftieth anniversary of the Second International Congress of Writers held in Valencia, Madrid and Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, with a later session in Paris. The writers Stephen Spender, André Malraux, Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda were among the participating delegates of the 1937 Congress, as was Sylvia Townsend Warner. MNS reported on the 1987 event for the BBC in a programme broadcast on 3 July, and printed in PN Review 59 (January–February 1988).
8. MNS described the television debate in his report:

   Paz was Voltaire, enlightened, devil’s advocate, corrective, rejecting the pieties of progress and the seductions of fashionable politics. Vargas Llosa emerged as a very young man, charming but intellectually out of his depth. Semprún, who fought in the French resistance and spent years in a German concentration camp, was emancipated from the Communist Party but still played by its rules. This was a brilliant confrontation of rhetorical styles. It also brought the Congress into focus – a focus it never achieved in its own debates.

9. The Peruvian novelist Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) was already famous in 1983 when he was asked by the Peruvian President to sit on the Investigatory Commission into the killing of eight journalists in the village of Uchuraccay, and was widely criticised after its findings were released.
10. Francisco Madero challenged the Mexican President Porfirio Diaz (running for his sixth re-election) in the elections of 1910, as a candidate seeking social justice and reform. Madero was elected President but assassinated in 1913, aged 39.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      John Ash, Disbelief

      John Ashbery and James Schuyler, A Nest of Ninnies

      Sebastian Barry, The Engine of Owl-Light

      Eavan Boland, The Journey and Other Poems

      Nicolas Bouvier, The Scorpion Fish, translated by Robyn Marsack

      Emmanuel Bove, Armand, translated by Janet Louth

      Charles Boyle, Sleeping Rough

      Aldo Busi, Seminar on Youth, translated by Stuart Hood

      Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair, translated by Joseph Green

      Arthur Hugh Clough, Selected Poems, edited by Shirley Chew

      Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (eds), A Various Art

      Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Selected Poems, edited by Denys Thompson

      Natalia Ginzburg, Valentino & Sagittarius, translated by Avril Bardoni

      Natalia Ginzburg, The Manzoni Family, translated by Marie Evans

      Guido Gozzano, The Colloquies and Selected Letters, translated by J. G. Nichols

      Ivor Gurney, Severn and Somme & War’s Embers, edited by R.K.R. Thornton

      Michael Hartnett, Collected Poems: Volume II Denis Hirson, The House Next Door to Africa

      Gert Hoffman, Our Conquest, translated by Christopher Middleton

      Molly Holden, Selected Poems, edited by Simon Curtis

      Stuart Hood, The Upper Hand

      Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck

      Gabriel Josipovici, In the Fertile Land

      Frank Kuppner, The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women

      Djanet Lachmet, Lallia (Le Cowboy), translated by Janet Still

      Jorge Lewinski, Portrait of the Artist: twenty-five years of British art

      Grevel Lindop, Tourists

      Richard Lovelace, Selected Poems, edited by Gerald Hammond

      Cecily Mackworth, Ends of the World

      Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: self-taught poets and poetry in Victorian Britain

      Ian McMillan, Selected Poems

      Alistair Niven (ed), Under Another Sky: The Commonwealth Poetry Prize Anthology

      Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others, translated by Michael Schmidt

      Umberto Saba, Ernesto, translated by Mark Thompson

      Delmore Schwartz, The Ego is Always at the Wheel: bagatelles, edited by Robert Phillips

      Leonardo Sciascia, The Moro Affair & The Mystery of Majorana, translated by Sasha Rabinovitch

      Leonardo Sciascia, One Way or Another, translated by Sasha Rabinovitch

      Sir Philip Sidney, Selected Writings of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Richard Dutton

      C.H. Sisson, God Bless Karl Marx!

      Jon Stallworthy (ed), First Lines: Poems Written in Youth from Herbert to Heaney

      Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: pictures of a life

      Michael Westlake, Imaginary Women

      Malachi Whitaker, And So Did I

      William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems volume I 1909–1939, edited by A.Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan