re: DON JUAN REVIUEW AT: http://bookforum.com/review/5350

Here my comment to the Bookforum review:

http://bookforum.com/review/5350

which I also sent to the reviewer at Faster Times, he is an editor at the sorry publication.

"This is an atrocity!

1]
Let me address the Yugoslavia/ Milosevic/ Serbia canard first.
Your reviewer appears to be medianized and not be able to think on his own.
Yugoslavia became a tinderbox, in part because of some Reagan are
National Security directives to commit economic warfare against the East bloc; in part because Socialism, also the kindlier one in Yugoslavia, was being hollowed out; it was being replaced by resurgent nationalist tribal identity formations of all kind; and then the German foreign minister Gentscher  recognized the Croatian fascist successor state under Tjudman; andTjudman made the Serbians into 2nd class citizens - that was the signal for all the murderous ghosts of WW II and older to come out of the closet: the blame game gets no one anywhere; understanding might. Handke for
personal reasons was always close to Yugoslavia as a whole, especially because he is half Slovenian: he was absolutely correct in coming to the  defense of the Serbians once they started being blamed - it is hard to say who is to blame more: everyone became murderous. The U.S. supplied Croatia with arms, the Bosniak Muslims with 300 mujaheddin and also with arms. Handke can be said to have behaved like a crazily  wounded love child, not attractive at all. The only matter that can be held against him in his extraordinary act of exhibitionism is that when asked by Milosevic to testify as an expert witness at his trial in Scheveningen, that he then blinked. That is bad enough as far as I am concerned and I will neverbe again in a position where I might have to rely on him - not that Handke's testimony in Milosevic's case might have made an iota of a difference in the foregone conclusion of a guilty verdict on the
part of a kangaroo court that might more usefully have put various US  generals and statespeople on trial. If you and your reviewer are interested in more detailed version of the above, I suggest that my  http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/ you where I will also post
2] a long piece on Don Juan. The reviewer is  40 years behind in his Handke. Even if he weren't I doubt that he would catch on to the
game that Handke is playing. As a former New York publisher I wouldn't hire him to read and evaluate a single book! He doesn't understand either the game, nor the form, nor the underlying sorrowful tone on which the artist plays so merrily. He is also wrong on the details he mentions - such as Don Juan not exchanging glances with his various lovers; sometimes it is just a glance where both parties are set aflame; sometimes it is a mating; his sidekick chauffeur with whom he reverses roles at moments is a wonderfully gross Caliban type; there is also a Juanita at one point.
This is such a hopeless review, one is then glad of the philistine job
that Joel Agee did in the New York Times Book Review http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/review/Agee-t.html?scp=1&sq=joel%20agee&st=cse

I have a page devoted to Don Juan at:

http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/photo5.html]

.MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html 

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

"Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ 
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/.
http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/

A ;POSTING AT http://crosscut.com/2010/03/07/crosscut/19650/ WHICH WAS THERE BRIEFLY ENOUGH

TO DRAW A FEW COMMENTS ITSELF, BUT THEN PROVED A BIT TOO TOUGH FOR THE GENTLE FOLKS THERE!


http://crosscut.com/2010/03/07/crosscut/19650/


I tried completing that monstrous poll you guys sent
 out some time ago and when i was done with page 2
it said i had failed to answer something on the first
page; going back to the first page all previous
answers were erased, nonetheless i ploughed through the idiocy
once again only to see that the answers on page 2... and so i said fuck this, and anyhow you need a far simpler questionnaire.
to wit:
[1] how often to you click through from our e-mail;
[2] do you think we contribute anything? yes - no - sometimes-
[3] are we or are we not infinitely boring
[4] what if we ceased publication, would you miss us, and for how long?
[5] suggestions

that would have done the trick - besides, you can fathom the answers from the number of comments and hits you get; so the questionnaire is/ was fundamentally superfluous except
to indicate a kind of hypocritical interest in the readers and as a form of self-advertisement, and for that you avail yourself of a questionnaire that a big time paper might send out!

i click through maybe once or twice a week, it is certainly not
essential to my news needs in seattle that I dont' feel sufficiently
served by the local paper and the PI's life as a blog,
or the two weeklies, the Stranger being the only one with
some  pizzass. Crosscut is a soporific.
It has Seattle's most boring writers, the only thing it is a cross section of is of the the most boring part of the middle class,
with the exception of mossback, except when he is riding his land use hobby horse. the art coverage does not really supplement or improve on the lack or lousy nature of a in a city without critics or a tradition of critical discourse, again the Stranger at least has sprouts that might yet flourish.

crosscut is not only a repository of intellectual laziness,
it is so day  in day out in not linking to possibly interesting
matters in regional rags of all kinds. it is entirely seattle based and basically moderately republican in as much as that term has meaning.once in a blue moon it ventures to Portland and Vancouver.
probably most folks who take the time to visit crosscut also read orat least glance at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal
and the PI, for reasons that are beyond me your link collection is pretty much confined to Joel Connolly who recently tied for second place among the most boring national pundits, with Roger Cohen winning first hands down, and to David Brooks a truly insidious purveyor of  intellectual treacle whom you must evidently admire!
that is of the wealth of material to which
one can link both regionally and nationally and internationally.
ted van dyke is a perfectly nice pundit, but pundits of that
kind are a dime a dozen on national affairs, and when you do stories of that kind like today's on healthcare, not even "johnny come lately" would seem to be the proper description
for such laggardness.
  i have enjoyed one or the other piece of yours about the farts
in seattle. you yourself came to my attention sometime in the  mid-90s when you sought to keep downey from reviewing plays at ACT because your wife was on the boardthere or something like that. ACT at that time was even a worse
outfit than it is now. here a link to a piece of local interest
that you might have found on your own:http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/09/starbucks-midlife-crisis
I'll get back to you anon on some other gorier specifics,
as to joining crosscut, i doubt that you have the funds
to pay me to attend your functions to be processed there.
Sincerely,
.MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

RUMINATIONS ABOUT A PROPOSED "HANDKE READER" + FIRST RESPONSES

With a mediocre publisher in FS + G, a by and large even more idiotic reception there occurs to me yet one further idea [the moment I run out of ideas is the moment I die] and that is for a "HANDKE READER"....

It wasn't until Malcom Cowley put out his Faulkner Reader at about the time that Faulkner won the Nobel Prize that people started to read Faulkner - and Handke, who will win the Nobel, for writing, not for his anything but sterling character, can be regarded as the writer of the Yoknapatawpha County of his own SELF. There is something to be said for having an elephantine memory, about the only good thing to be said for aging. Doing analysis [self now] certainly freshens it, but not like me billy goat!

So give me your ideas, and then we'll whittle it down to a final, excerpts would be fine,

not just individual complete works, i.e. I think the Alaska chapter of A Slow Homecoming [Langsame Heimkehr] belongs.

  

 =========================================================
ROUND UP + COMMENT ON THE FIRST REsPONSES:

Thanks Edmond, the first one of two other endorsers to "commit" - no, SORROW is essential
after all,  you want a volume that is tailored for teachers, students, for the general reader, and for
writers. That's what so great about "readers' - they are up to 750 or more pages long...

I would add to "excerpt from weight of the world" - excerpts from the further three increasingly
large diary volumes... [with a separate long headnote, explaining the rake's progress along that line of work]

The New Yorker ran a finely made excerpt from The Repetition at the time..

Jim Krusoe wishes for inclusion of  poems from Innerworld and Nonsense... and has my
agreement, Life Without Poetry from the latter, and someone could translate his "Gedicht
an die Dauer", thus making that long poem available uniquely only there! [Poem to Duration]

Some of the gems from "For Thucydides"!!!

I would have a major section with excerpts focusing on "sheer" writing from the big novels
including Morawian...

On the Jukebox belongs as an example of that kind of "assaying" as I call those Versuche ...
Difficult to excerpt from the later plays except from Villages, and so I would put in something
light and delightful like La Cuisine, the first of his two plays that he originally wrote in French.

So much for my own thinking so far.

Michael R.

MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html 

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

"Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ 
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/ 

A LETTER TO THE HEADS OF HOLZBRINCK PUBLISHER, WHO VIA F.S. _+ G ARE HANDKE'S PUBLISHERS IN THE U.S. ONLY THE PART THAT PERTAINS TO HANDKE

This is a Kopie of a letter communicated directly via the respective publishers on-line contacts to Holzbrink and John Sargent at McMillan

http://us.macmillan.com/TellAFriend.aspx?subject=MacmillanSite%20News:%20New message%20from%20Macmillan%20CEO%20John%20Sargent

http://www.holtzbrinck.com/artikel/779466&s=de

Sehr geehrte Frau Schöller, und Dr. von Holzbrinck:

,,

Ich trete an Sie heran in zwei Angelegenheiten, die erste [1] betrifft meine ehemalige Anstellung bei Farrar, Straus & Giroux; die zweite [2] das Verlegen dort von dem von mir da eingeführten und übersetzen Suhrkamp Autor Peter Handke – ja, dadurch dass Farrar Straus einen Haufen dort von  diesem Kuckuck da eingelegte Suhrkamp Autoren macht, sowie andere schöne und wichtigen deutschsprachigen Sachen, ist Holzbrinck ja der Amerikanische Verleger von Peter Handke, des gros von Hesse, Nelly Sachs, Hans Erich Nossack   deswegen Kopien dieses Brief an Suhrkamp, Residenz, Jung und Jung, und an McMillan USA, ihr Schirm in New York....

Hier folgt jetzt ein Brief den ich an New Directions gerichtet habe da dieser schöne Verlag schon einmal Erfolg mit einem Handke Titel hatte. Ansonsten habe ich auch Handke Gedichte bei Continnum und Urizen Books verlegt, Ueber die Dörfer hat hier Ariadne gemacht, und Yale University Press die zwei grossen Stücke Als wir noch nichts voneinander wussten &Die Kunst des Fragens.

Ein Grund für diesen Brief ist auch dass FSG es ploetzlich nicht mehr in der Lage sind mir Handke Bücher zu schicken, zum rezensieren, ich habe die Leute da, auch Herrn Galassi mehrmahls dazu gebeten, koenne ja auch meinen Account zur Abrechnung gebrauchen.

Ich bitte um Entschuldigung für mein inzwischen eher holpriges Deutsch. 

“I wanted to call your attention especially to a recent marvelous title that Farrar, Straus declined, Kali [note of mine attached which can also be found at the page devoted to this novel at 
http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/

FSG it appears  consulted Handke's current chief translator Krishna Winstonwho said it was like some other Handke that had already been done, and also that she did not want to be completely overwhelmed. While I entirely understand the second of her reservations, I also entirely disagree with the first,  as is spelled out in detail in my "Note". Handke prides himself on not repeating himself, and can be said, with all the other contradictions he has committed, not  to have done
so in this instance, so far.

 Moreover, there are other important Handke titles on which Farrar, Straus has passed, most importantly the second volume of his spontaneous diary notations, Die Geschichte des Bleistifts [The History of the Pencil, L'Histoire de Crayon and also in Spanish and Portuguese,  etc.,  published by Residenz Verlag, Salzburg in 1981] which details not only Handke's then troubled state of mind, as in the first diary volume Weight of the World, but, more importantly, details his thinking on how his art is changing, focusing on what would become "the change" to what is called his "homecoming" period,
and on Walk About the Villages. This, aside Villages, happens to be my 
favorite - that is valuable to me - Handke title! There are two further diary volumes Am Felsfenster Morgens and Gestern Unterwegs [Mornings, at the Boulder Window + Yesterday, On My Way] that were published by  former Residenz editor Jochen Jung at his own firm Jung & Jung, also Salzburg at about 1989 and 2005 respectively. As an American publisher I would combine the two into one volume, and edit them with the English speaking public in mind. 

Scott Abbot has just completed a wonderful translation of Handke's great 1999 play Voyage by Dugout: The Play about the Film About the War and some marvelousplays remain untranslated: La Cuisine   [and unusually delightful text that he did for the Serbian director Materic] ; Zurüstungen für die Unsterblichkeit [Preparationsfor Immortality 1996] and the most recently produced playAls der Tag uns scheidet, a pendant to Beckett's Krapps Last Tape that has received wide notice and, being a two character play, is beloved by cash-strapped theaters for that reasons alone! And another, about guerrillas! partisans! -Storm Still - is about to premiere in Vienna.

Scott Abbot wants to do a combined edition of all of Handke's Yugoslavia texts
aside the one that was published by Viking, Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia that is, to combine that with the first Abschied vom Traum vom 9ten Land, Sommerlicher Nachtrag,and Unter Tränen Fragend as well as Daimiel & Rund um das Tribunal as well as the most recent of those texts, one which deserves to be published as a stand alone it is so extraordinary [see the prose site for a discussion of it, also the Handke blogs] Die Kuckucke von Velica Hoca [The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca] where Handke, the old cusser of journalists, shows how to do it right.

Farrar Straus started to mispublish Handke about the time that they
combined the novel A Slow Homecoming with the diary of walking The Lesson of Saint Victoire and the memoir of Handke raising his daughter Amina, A Child's Storyinstead of doing these very different books separately. This made for an entirelyconfused reception, which persists, vide Benjamin Kunkel's introduction to therecent NYRB Books reprint of A SLOW HOMECOMING where he speculates in true postmenstrualist fashion on how these texts [which were never meant to be published together or regarded in that dried Tampax fashion] how that space between them exist in sprung rhyme, I am kidding]

That FSG passed on three of Handke's greatest texts Walk about the Villages and The Art of Asking  and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other done respectively by Ariadne Books and Yale University Press, doing so despite the fact that Kaspar and Other Plays had gonethrough more than ten editions by then, that the second play collection, They Are Dying Out
and Other Plays had sold out, and actually ought to have been reprinted.
 
Fault for this mis-publication lies chiefly with the now deceased Runyonesque Culture-Vulture Roger Straus. Scott recently called my attention to a letter that Straus, in the early 90s,, sent to Siegfried Unseld and which Unseld gave to Handke who showed it to Scott -a daisy chain  now coming full circle - which says that he's got a major problem: Handke .... and it appears in usual fashion that Rogah failed to reflect that Handke sales or the lack thereof - which is what the problem was then about, prior to Rogah! Dissociating himself from Handke's undertakings in matters Yugoslavian – were certainly  in good part of his very own making since FSG had sold semimasspaperback editions of prior work several times over, and the first book of plays had had 10 + editions. Rogah and his succession of Handke editors who get Handke piled on their desk on joining the firm, imagine being settled with the re-incarnation of Goethe as you a very junior thingstart to work at such an august firm... well Handke must have had at least ten of them by now at Farrar. A couple of the earlier ones, one of whom also was mine, and Nancy Meiselas,  were fine, and so was the recently departed Annie Wedekind... but how can
one even keep up and how can they poor things with having this towering
work bestowed on them, a tower that keeps on growing. Elizabeth Sifton
fresh out of Radcliffe got Saul Bellow and swam, did not sink, and I can
see why Saul would have been happy too... after possible initial apprehensions....
read Ms. Sifton's delightful account of the experience at:http://www.slate.com/
However, two editors who were not really Handke's editors, Michael DiCapua,
who if he had had his druthers initially would have blackballed Handke
as he did so many other of my projects, as well as Steve Wasserman who
when he ran Noonday Books, the forever stepchild paperback line, and
Hill + Wang, the designated  play-publishing wing, appear not to have
known either what do to do with these plays or the prose. Thus it continues to be amateur time, and I am Jonah ambergris that survivedthat experience who realized early on translating the early plays and directingthem and participating in their production that the kid from Griffen was a genius,and it would have taken a genius to guess how he developed, a matter that Siegfried
Unseld, too, then had his hunches.

I myself have no interest in translating any of these, as a matter, since I have
to complete some of my own scribblings, the only author for whom I would
interrupt these is last year's Büchner Prize winner, Josef Winkler,
one of whose books I did for Ariadne. His work gives me a great charge.
 However, there is a bunch of what look like fine translators from the German, a whole new generation  has sprung up in the meanwhile. Perhaps even Mr. Joel Agee who commented unfavorably on Krishna Winston's translation of Handke's recently published Don Juan might want to try his hand at one of these. He did a fine enoughjob with a Nossack whom I introduced at Farrar, Straus these many years ago.

If anyone wants to republish my translations of INNERWORLD and of NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS and add the wonderful long poem GEDICHT AN DIE DAUER, as Bartelsby in Spain did just now in Spain with their complete Handke poems.... I can’t imagine the world not welcoming it, the original editions are extremely valuable now.

I will send this on also to a few other American publishers that have sprung
up to do translations once I have their e-mails.

The first Robins are back in Seattle but no early morning mating calls yet
to ease me out of my dreams into the day.

 MICHAEL ROLOFF

4616= 25^th Ave NE # 357

Seattle, WA 98105

206-612-34576

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html 

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ 
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/ 
 

HANDKE THE FRIEND OF PRINCES, PRESIDENTS, OF MILOSEVIC AND KARADIC AND BURDA THE MEDIA KING

Schon wieder ist er mit einer Obrigkeit!
HANDKE THE FRIEND OF PRINCES, PRESIDENTS, OF MILOSEVIC AND KARADIC AND BURDA THE MEDIA KING

Bundespräsident empfängt Peter Handke =

   Wien (OTS) - Bundespräsident Dr. Heinz Fischer hat heute den
österreichischen Schriftsteller Peter Handke, der sich gegenwärtig in
Wien befindet, zu einem Gedankenaustausch empfangen. Das Gespräch
fand in der Präsidentschaftskanzlei statt. Unter anderem sprachen
die Herren ueber folgendes:

Fischer [lachend]: Ja, und verdreschen Sie noch ihre Weiber, Herr Handke?

Handke: [lachend]: Nein, dazu bin ich jetzt zu alt.

Fischer:[lachend]: Schade. Die gehören doch einmal am Tag, und einmal am Tag in den Arsch.

Gemeinsames schallendes Gelächter.

Fischer: Also, was wünschen Sie sich von mir?

Handke: Dass Sie sich für den Karadic einsetzen, in Scheveningen.

Fischer: Ich dachte das wäre Ihr Ressort?

Handke: Meine Wenigkeit kann in diesem Fall nichts nutzen... Dabei funktioniere ich nur als eminence Grise
       ....
Fischer: Sie habe die Macht des Faktischen im Sinn?

Handke: Genau nach meinem Sinn gesprochen, wie ich schon immer sage: Das faktische sieg, wie bei Stalingrad,
        der Sieg der Fakten....

Fischer: In dieser Hinsicht hat sich einiges bei Ihren Ansichten verändert seitdem wir zum letzten Mal
        gesprochen...

Weiteres durch 
Rückfragehinweis:
   Österreichische Präsidentschaftskanzlei, Presse- und Informationsdienst
   Tel.: (++43-1) 53422 230
   
- 
pressebuero@hofburg.at
   http://www.hofburg.at

- 

A LETTER TO VARIOUS AMERICAN PUBLISHER TO TAKE UP THE SLACK

WHERE FARRAR, STRAUS LEFT OFF

I wanted to call your attention especially to a recent marvelous title that Farrar,

Straus declined, Kali [note of mine attached which can also be found at the

page devoted to this novel at 

http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/

FSG it appears  consulted Handke's current chief translator Krishna Winston

who said it was like some other Handke that had already been done, and also

that she did not want to be completely overwhelmed. While I entirely understand

the second of her reservations, I also entirely disagree with the first,  as is spelled out in detail in my "Note". Handke prides himself on not repeating himself,

and can be said, with all the other contradictions he has committed, not  to have doneso in this instance, so far.

 Moreover, there are other important Handke titles on which Farrar, Straus

has passed, most importantly the second volume of his spontaneous diary 

notations, Die Geschichte des Bleistifts [The History of the Pencil, L'Histoire de Crayon and also in Spanish and Portuguese,  etc.,  published by Residenz Verlag, Salzburg in 1981] which details not only Handke's then troubled state of mind, as in the first diary volume Weight of the World, but, more importantly, details his thinking on how his art is changing, focusing on what would become "the change" to what is called his "homecoming" period, and on Walk About the Villages. This, aside Villages, happens to be my  favorite - that is valuable to me - Handke title!

There are two further diary volumes Am Felsfenster Morgens and Gestern Unterwegs [Mornings, at the Boulder Window + Yesterday, On My Way] that were published by 

 former Residenz editor Jochen Jung at his own firm Jung & Jung, also Salzburg at about 1989 and 2005 respectively. As an American publisher I would combine the two into one volumeand edit them with the English speaking public in mind. 

Scott Abbot has just completed a wonderful translation of Handke's great 1999 play

Voyage by Dugout: The Play about the Film About the War and some marvelous

plays remain untranslated: La Cuisine   [and unusually delightful text that he

did for the Serbian director Materic] ; Zurüstungen für die Unsterblichkeit [Preparations for Immortality 1996] and the most recently produced play

Als der Tag uns scheidet, a pendant to Beckett's Krapps Last Tape that has received wide noticeand, being a two character play, is beloved by cash-strapped theaters for that reasons alone!

And another, about guerrillas! partisans! -Storm Still - is about to premiere in Vienna.

Scott Abbot wants to do a combined edition of all of Handke's Yugoslavia texts

aside the one that was published by Viking, Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia that is, to combine that with the first Abschied vom Traum vom 9ten Land, Sommerlicher Nachtrag, and Unter Tränen Fragend as well as Daimiel & Rund um das Tribunal as well as the most recent of those texts, one which deserves to be published as a stand alone it is so extraordinary [see the prose site for a discussion of it, also the Handke blogs] Die Kuckucke von Velica Hoca [The Cuckoos of Velica Hoca] where Handke, the old cusser of journalists, shows how to do it right.

Farrar Straus started to mispublish Handke about the time that they

combined the novel A Slow Homecoming with the diary of walking The Lesson of

Saint Victoire and the memoir of Handke raising his daughter Amina, A Child's Story

instead of doing these very different books separately. This made for an entirely

confused reception, which persists, vide Benjamin Kunkel's introduction to the

recent NYRB Books reprint of A SLOW HOMECOMING where he speculates 

in true postmenstrualist fashion on how these texts [which were never meant

to be published together or regarded in that dried Tampax fashion] how that

space between them exist in sprung rhyme, I am kidding]

That FSG passed on three of Handke's greatest texts Walk about the Villages and The Art of Asking  and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other done respectively by Ariadne Books and Yale University Press, doing so despite the fact that Kaspar and Other Plays had gone through more than ten editions by then, that the second play collection, tThey Are Dying Out and Other Plays had sold out, and actually ought to have been reprinted.

 

Fault for this mis-publication lies chiefly with the now deceased Runyonesque Culture-Vulture Roger Straus. Scott recently called my attention to a letter that Straus, in the early 90s,, sent to Siegfried Unseld and which Unseld gave to Handke who showed it to Scott....a daisy chain  now coming full circle - which says that he's got a major problem:Handke .... and it appears in usual fashion that Rogah failed to reflect that Handke sales - which is what the problem was then about, prior to Rogah! dissociating himself from Handke's undertakings in matters Yugoslavian - of his very own making since FSG had sold semimasspaperback editions of prior work several times over, and the first book of plays had had 10 + editions. Rogah and his succession of editors who get Handke piled on their desk on joining the firm, imagine being settled with the re-incarnation of Goethe as you a very junior thing start to work at such an august firm... well Handke must have had at least ten of them by now. A couple of the earlier ones, one of whom also was mine, and Nancy Meiselas were fine, and so was the recently departed Annie Wedekind... but how can one even keep up with the whelming and how can they poor things with having this towering work bestowed on them, a tower that keeps on growing. Elizabeth Sifton fresh out of Radcliffe got Saul Bellow and swam, did not sink, and I can

see why Saul would have been happy too... after possible initial apprehensions....

read Ms. Sifton's delightful account of the experience at:

http://www.slate.com/

However, two editors who were not really Handke's editors, Michael DiCapua,

who if he had had his druthers initially would have blackballed Handke

as he did so many other of my projects, as well as Steve Wasserman who

when he ran Noonday Books, the forever stepchild paperback line, and

Hill + Wang, the designated  play-publishing wing, appears not to have

known either what do to do with these plays or the prose.

 Thus it continues to be amateur time, and I am Jonah ambergris that survived

that experience who realized early on translating the early plays and directing

them and participating in their production that the kid from Griffen was a genuis,

and it would have taken a genius to guess how he developed, a matter that Siegfried

Unseld, too, then had his hunches.

I myself have no interest in translating any of these,  as a matter, since I have

to complete some of my own scribblings, the only author for whom I would

interrupt these is last year's Büchner Prize winner, Josef Winkler, one of whose books I did for Ariadne. His work gives me a great charge.

However,  there is a bunch of what look like fine translators from the German, a whole new generation  has sprung up in the meanwhile. Perhaps even Mr. Joel Agee who commented unfavorably on Krishna Winston's translation of Handke's recently published Don Juan might want to try his hand at one of these. He did a fine enough

job with a Nossack whom I introduced at Farrar, Straus these many years ago.

If anyone wants to republish my translations of INNERWORLD and of NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS and add the wonderful long poem GEDICHT AN DIE DAUER, as Bartelsby

in Spain did just now in Spain with their complete Handke poems....

I will send this on also to a few other American publishers that have sprung

up to do translations once I have their e-mails.

The first Robins are back in Seattle but no early morning mating calls yet

to ease me out of my dreams into the  day.

Michael Roloff

A SECOND LETTER TO THE NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW RE AGEE AND MENTION OF TRANSLATIONS

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/review/Agee-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
Perhaps the NY Times Book Review could make it a practice of asking reviewers of translations
if they comment on the translation, whether favorably or not or interestingly, to cite chapter and verse and make reasoned comments. * That way, among other matters, my better, Krishna Winston, won't have to ask me whether maybe there is is something to Agee's reservations or whether they are merely the gratuitous carpings of a fellow translator as  one encounters them with such frequency especially among the amateurs of that caste who do not reflect on the fact that most cats can be skinned at least in two and often nine ways. Since the publisher, however, to whom I brought and for I whom translated three volumes of Handke, including a dozen plays had failed to heed my several requests to send me a copy of the book and if need be charge my account, I was unable to reassure Krishna or express agreement with Mr. Agee's assessment except to tell her that in her translation of the 350 K words CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS unfortunately I encountered two words that struck me as wrong and one awkward passage, lucky man that Handke is to have found her
to take up where Ralph Mannheim left off, some of whose work, especially when it came to matters of linguistic contemporaneity since he had lived abroad for so long, and the rhythms of Handke's prose, since after all Handke can be approached, ought to be as a prose poet, made me anything but happy.

As I mentioned in my first communication on the Agee review, which to be found on-line at
  http://adswithoutproducts.com/2010/02/13/the-nyt-continues-its-campaign-against-low-testosterone-levels-in-male-writing/
and at: http://handke-trivia.blogspot.com/
Mr. Agee's was in many ways the best review that Handke has received in your pages, not that that is unfortunately saying very much, although Joel's review can let itself be seen even without making such a baleful comparison,  to, say that criminal act of non-reading that your Neil Gordon perpetrated in your pages on the occasion of CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS or the piece of idiocy done there by Lee Siegel - Agee pretty well got what Handke was up to, except for that non-pertinent last paragraph. I was not left too unhappy that he does not know nor did mention into what line of Handke's Don  Juan assaying fits; or that he failed to appreciate the pure virtuoso nature of the danse that Handke performs, two steps forward and one back, as Handke also explores PLACE [the last dramas ] a place near his No-Man's-Bay, the foret de Chaville, as is his custom; that is, the nature of Handke's formalism, the sheer performance of that... at that point, after all, we are getting into deeper waters than one needs to as a reviewer. Or that there
is a "Don Juan" who "appears with the same woman" in Handke's My Year in the No-Man's-Bay, which is a nice enough joke that happens to refer to the in many ways enviable genuine reincarnation Erich Wolfgang Skwara  who has had four, several of them extraordinary, novels published in translation, especially his Don Juan novel, The Plague of Siena, of none of which the Book Review has taken any note,
perhaps because they were done by that small publisher of no end of Austrian treasures, Ariadne Press, who also happen to be the publisher of Handke's greatest and richest work Walk About the Villages, which
also seems to have passed you by and many another East Coast Publication and reviewer. Or...

Sincerely yours,
Michael Roloff  [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/

*I will always recall a moment when both Helen Wolf, a most distinguished old time publisher,
and I a comparative novice, both members of the PEN AMERICAN CENTER's Translation Committee
cast the most baleful of looks at each other, with amazing simultaneity,  as that committee proceeded well into a second meeting to wrangle over the placement of a single comma in its mission statement, as though their lives depended on it, as it does in only one instance I have encountered during my nine lives,
in a passage in Robert Musil's great novella THE PORTUGUESE WOMAN.