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125 pages

English

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How can other people like the books we don't like? What benefit can we get from rereading a work? Can we read better? If so, how? These and many other questions, ranging from the field of writing to that of reading and translation, are given a comprehensive answer in a series of stimulating and challenging literary essays that will be a perfect read for all book explorers and practitioners of the pen.After delighting us with his novels and many volumes of non-fiction, Tim Parks - who is not only an acclaimed author and a translator, but also a celebrated literary essayist - gives us a book to enjoy, savour and, most importantly, reread.

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Publié par	Alma Books
Date de parution	26 avril 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781846884634
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Pen in Hand

Pen in Hand
Reading, Rereading and Other Mysteries
Tim Parks

ALMA BOOKS

ALMA BOOKS LTD
3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW 10 6TF United Kingdom www.almabooks.com
This collection first published by Alma Books Limited in 2019 © Tim Parks, 2019
Cover design: Leo Nickolls
Tim Parks asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN : 978-1-84688-457-3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
Foreword: A Weapon for Readers
How Could You Like that Book?
How Could You Like that Book?
Reading Is Forgetting
The Key to Rereading
Why Read New Books?
The Pleasures of Pessimism
Stories We Can’t See
The Books We D on’t Understand
Bo b Dylan: The Music Tr avels , the Poetry Sta ys Home
Italy: Writ ing to Belong
Clea ring Up Ambiguity
The Writer ’ s Shadow
Too Many Books?
Reality Fiction
Six Chair s in Search of an Au dience
Looking for Primo Levi
Reading and Writing
How I Read
In Search of Authenticity
D o Flashbacks Work in Literature?
Readin g: The Struggle
Rea ding Upward
How It aly Improved My Engl ish
How Best to Re ad Auto-Fiction
Wh y Write in English?
Malpractice
A Novel Kind of Conformity
Pretty Violence
Leave Novelists Out of Fiction
The Lim its of Satire
Stif led by Success
The Books We Talk About
References, Please
Raise Your Hand i f You’ve Rea d Knausgaard
My Life, Their Archive
Book Fair Hype
After Brexit
God’s Smuggler
Gained and Lost in Translation
In the Tumult of T ranslation
A Long Way from Primo Levi
The Translation Pa radox
Raw and Cook ed
When Not to Tra nslate
A No-Nonsen se Machiavelli
The Expendable Translat or
Gained in Trans lation
Does Litera ture Help Us Live?

Foreword: A Weapon for Readers
Imagine you are asked what single alteration in people’s behaviour might best improve the lot of mankind. How foolish would you have to be to reply: have them learn to read with a pen in their hands? But I firmly believe such a simple development would bring huge benefits.
We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliteration, assonance and rhythm. We rejoice over stories, whether fiction or “documentary”, whose outcomes are flagrantly manipulative, self-serving or both. Usually both. If a piece of writing manifests the stigmata of literature – symbols, metaphors, unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, structural ambiguities – we afford it unlimited credit. With occasional exceptions, the only “criticism” brought to such writing is the kind that seeks to elaborate its brilliance, its cleverness, its creativity. What surprised me most when I first began publishing fiction myself was how much at every level a novelist is allowed to get away with .
This extravagant regard, which seemed to reach a peak in the second half of the twentieth century as the modernists of a generation before were canonized as performers of the ever more arduous miracle of conferring a little meaning on life, is reflected in the treatment of the book itself. The spine must not be bent back and broken, the pages must not be marked with dog ears, there must be no underlining, no writing in the margins. Obviously, for those of us brought up on library books and school-owned textbooks (my copy of Browning bore the name of a dozen pupils who had used the text before me), there were simple and sensible reasons supporting this behaviour. But the reverence went beyond a proper respect for those who would be reading the pages after you. Even when I bought a book myself, if my parents caught me breaking its spine so that it would lay open on the desk, they were shocked. Writing was sacred. In the beginning was the Word, the word written down, hopefully on quality paper. Much of the resistance to e-books, notably from the literati, has to do with a loss of this sense of sacredness, of the vulnerable paper vessel that thrives on our protective devotion.
But the absolute need to read with a pen in one’s hand became evident to me watching my students as we studied the art of translation together. I would give them the same text in English and Italian and ask them to tell me which was the original text. Or I would give them a text without saying whether it was a translation or not and ask them to comment on it. Again and again, the authority conveyed by the printed word and an aura of literariness, or the excitement of dramatic action, or the persuasive drift of an argument, would prevent them from noticing the most obvious absurdities. They would read a sentence like “For a little while in his arms Maria was like a doll, she allowed herself to be undressed and turned in the bed without taking a breath” (from William Weaver’s translation of Rosetta Loy’s Le strade di polvere ) and be so captivated by the romantic context as to miss the fact that one cannot be undressed and turned in a bed without taking a breath; it takes rather longer to undress someone and have your way with them than most people can survive without breathing. This is a poor translation of an Italian mix of idiom and invention – senza emettere un fiato – which might best have been translated “without so much as a sigh”.
Or they would read, “Then came the train. It began by looking like a horse, a horse with its cart raised up on the rough stones” (from Isabel Quigley’s translation of Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires ), and amid the drama of the action they wouldn’t see how incongruous this image of a cart “raised up on rough stones” was, how unlikely it would be to raise up a cart on rough stones. It was just a poor translation of a horse and cart on cobbles ( un cavallo col carretto su dei ciottoli ).
But beyond these small technicalities, the kind of internal inconsistencies that someone like Beckett actually introduced into his work deliberately in order to wake the reader up (and again many students do not notice such deliberate inconsistencies), I would find that we had read a page of Virginia Woolf together without the students appreciating that we were being encouraged to think positively about suicide, or we would read D.H. Lawrence without their being aware that the writer was insisting that some lives were definitely worth more than others. I even remember a class reading this passage from Henry Green (admittedly as part of a larger scene) without any student being aware of its sexual content:
But in spite of Mrs Middleton’s appeal, the girl, with a “here you are” leant over to the husband and opened wide the pearly gates. Her wet teeth were long and sharp, of an almost transparent whiteness. The tongue was pointed also and lay curled to a red tip against her lower jaw, to which the gums were a sterile pink. Way back behind, cavernous, in a deeper red, her uvula seemed to shrink from him.
Aside from simply insisting, as I already had for years, that they be more alert, I began to wonder what was the most practical way I could lead my students to a greater attentiveness, teach them to protect themselves from all those underlying messages that can shift one’s attitude without one’s being aware of it? I began to think about the way I read myself, about the activity of reading, what you put into it rather than what was simply on the page. Try this experiment, I eventually told them: from now on always read with a pen in your hands, not beside you on the table, but actually in your hand, ready, armed. And always make three or four comments on every page, at least one critical, even aggressive. Put a question mark by everything you find suspect. Underline anything you really appreciate. Feel free to write “splendid”, but also, “I don’t believe a word of it”. And even “bullshit”.
A pen is not a magic wand. The critical faculty is not conjured from nothing. But it was remarkable how many students improved their performance with this simple stratagem. There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text. Like a hawk over a field, it is on the lookout for something vulnerable. Then it is a pleasure to swoop and skewer the victim with the nib’s sharp point. The mere fact of holding the hand poised for action changes our attitude to the text. We are no longer passive consumers of a monologue but active participants in a dialogue. Students would report that their reading slowed down when they had a pen in their hand, but at the same time the text became more dense, more interesting, if only because a certain pleasure could now be taken in their own response to the writing when they didn’t feel it was up to scratch, or worthy only of being scratched.
Looking back over a book we have just read and scribbled on, or coming back to the same book months and maybe years later, we get a strong sense of our own position in relation to the writer’s position. Where he said this kind of thing, I responded with that, where he touched this nerve, my knee jerked thus. Hence a vehicle for self-knowledge is created, for what is the self if not the position one habitually assumes in relation to