David Slavitt is
the most wide-ranging man of letters of our time. Any of his careers—as
novelist, poet, and critic—would be more than enough for one person to have as
their life’s work. That he has fully established himself in all the above
categories as well as being our era’s most skilled and curious translator is
truly stunning. This may indeed by a great age of translation; but it is often translations
of already-established classics: Don
Quixote, Dante, Dostoevsky. While not neglecting the obvious masterworks—his Aeschylus, from which
I have taught many times, is especially outstanding--Slavitt’s true merit ahas been translating obscure works from the
medieval and early modern period, which have either not been rendered into English
at all or have only received dry, scholarly translations Sometimes one feels as
if the few in these writers resent any potential broadening
of interest. In a particularly scabrous review, Laurance
Wieder presumably not (a relation of Carlos Wieder in Roberto Bolaño), writing for the ultraconservative
journal First Things, says of
Slavitt’s Prudentius translation “The
urbane surface of his introductory prose can’t hide the vacancy of his
aesthetic pose.” Even if true, )which it is not), why not applaud the fact that
this important fourth century Christian poet, a pivotal figure in the
transformation of the Roman world from classicism through late antiquity to the medieval, has been
translated? Why not hail Slavitt for not being intimidated by repeated
assurances in literary history, that Prudentius is dry as dust and only for
scholastics and that the true, well-rounded reader should be content
with the list of Great Books given them by the likes of Mortimer Adler, never
to rove into obscure crevices frequented by true scholars such as Gibbon and
Huysmans and Curtius? He should be so hailed.
The remarkable
achievement,though, of Slavitt's work is that this erudition is organized and
controlled by classicism in another sense-the sense of the writer knowing his
limits, of preferring concision to verbosity, of keeping their knowledge all
under control. Slavitt, though far more wide-ranging than previous American
classicists such as Rolfe Humphries or Dudley Fitts or Stark Young, has their
willingness to harness their creativity (which one must have creativity in the
first place to do). Postmodernism and magical realism have made it easy to be erudite and
swath one;s knowledge in a mantle of allegedly transgressive form, but Slavitt
takes the harder task of writing a wild, prodigious, extravagant work which
still possesses a sense of self-possession—decorum and equipoise are not quite
the right words-amidst all its intellectual richness. Of major writers, the one most comparable is Borges: not that Slavitt is on this level, nor has particular Borgesian idiosyncrasies, but the mixture of erudition and discipline is analogous. The much duscussed brogue genre of "Menippean satire"--something that is a bit of a mixture of everything, and is self-ironizing--is also pertinent,
Walloomsac, Slavitt's latest work, may well be his bravest and most idiosyncratic. It is subtitled a roman
fleuve, a river-novel, and its course indeed delightfully eddies from subject to subject, from the curiosity that Sir John Harington, the acclaimed Elizabethan
translator of Ariosto, also invented the water-closet, to the history of
syphilis and the Wasserman test (I am a bit surprised that Slavitt does not
mention Fracastoro, the great poet of syphilis), to the novels of Sir Walter
Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, novelists whom Slavitt’s novel does not
resemble in the least but who he respects for their ability to meld fact and
fiction and their knowing sense of what they were trying to do as writers.
Literary strains that Waloomsac does
evoke more concertedly are the deeply felt opulence of the George Garrett of The Succession (Garrett was a good
friend and literary sparring partner of Slavitt’s), the wry self-discernment of
an Italo Svevo, the mania and inventiveness of Thomas Pynchon with far more
serenity and control, and, given that the Walloomsac, and the other river
mentioned, the Hoosic, are in the Taconic Hills just across the border from the
Berkshires of Meivlle’s Pierre, and Walloomsac
emulates that bitter attempt of
the great American writer to be as misunderstood as possible. (The third
section is called “Tomahanack,” which is a slight misspelling of a reservoir
near Troy ,but is probably just meant to
be fictive and to burst the frame a bit). We learn about disease, the relations
between men and woman, Shakespeare, disappointment, fonts and their origin, and
the perils of misunderstanding. We are exasperated, dazzled, and confused, but
always sure of our guide: our most underrated major American writer, and
someone who combines learning with a sensibility truly—for once---conscientious.
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