I wanted to take the opportunity to point out some excerptable sections in Peter
Handke's The Moravian Night, which Krishna Winston is currently translating.
Before doing so, however, I wanted to express some surprise at not seeing any excerpts at the New Yorker, or anywhere for that matter, from his last major novel to be published in translation, Crossing the Sierra del Gredos where I think I pointed out at least that extraordinary section that memorializes the hurricane that struck northern France around the year 2000 and, knowing my man and how fond he is of the Forêt de Chaville, knew he would take particular notice of its aftereffects, and I had even had my friend and associate Franz Angst send him a shoebox full of our famous North West spruce and pine cones, to make that forest which apparently [by account of My Year in the Noman's-Bay has one palm!] even more exotic. That five thousand word section might just be [or have been at the time] the best five thousand word I had read in nearly 70s years of reading... meanwhile there are a few sections of pure writing in Moravian that literally give me the willies they are so good - not that I feelMorawian is anything as successful formally overall, an entirely different matter. However, in the opening section which has a trip by some Serbian mourners to a cemetery that holds their murdered brethren in the Kosovo there is a bus driver where the anger and deep rumbling at the injustice is transmitted' while he drives and keep listening along to a metal song called Appachethat is as astonishing as anything Faulkner ever wrote along those lines. There is a great section on a conference on noise in Soria, Spain. I could go on, have someone look through it.
There was a time when the New Yorker did Handke excerpts and it also published
quite a few of my translations of Handke's poem. He is one of your authors really, and do not be dismayed in case you are by Handke's involvement in Balkan messes, I spent the better part of December crafting a long letter to Bob Silvers and then decimating the worst thing the New York Review ever published, by some J.S. Marcus about Handke, and if you and your colleagues are interested it is all on line at assiduous length and devastating detail at the handke-watch.blog spot [link below].
The only thing really to be held against Handke in all that is that he then flinched when it came to being a defense witness for Milosevic, but nonetheless exhibited himself famously at the funeral.
You also may have gotten wind of Handke cussing the media and journalists, as far as I am concerned after years of research, he did so very justly. Meanwhile, perhaps to prove that he can also function as a journalist, not just as a narrative lyrical writer,and great dramatist, he wrote something called Die Kuckucke [the cuckoos] of Velica Hoca and shows what a caring careful reporter he can be, and as far as I am concerned
sets the bar impossibly high for such reportage.
I have a page with some translated excerpt to Velica Hoca at http://www.handkeprose2.
A slew of links below.
As a matter of many years of fathoming the various aspects of the why and wherefores of Handke's involvement in the matter I reached the conclusion that it might really be both useful and interesting' to hold a symposium of some kind on why the Serbs and Milosevic,
and now Karadic were so exclusively demonized. These readings brought me to something that might be called "The Tinderbox" theory of the disintegration of Yugoslavia; it is not Hegelian inevitability, and no one really comes out looking great, but some come out looking a lot worse than others, and it is not the Serbs or Milosevics.
Yours sincerely,
MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
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.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
"MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS! +
THE FIREPLUG OF FILIALITY REINSURE YOUR BUNGHOLE!" {J. 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.
