Off the Axis
THIS year's grand event in paperbacks—in the field of translation, at least—has been the Four Square Classics, which were launched in April under the adventurous editorship of use Barea. Mrs. Bares has the great merit that she is independent of the Greek-Latin-French axis, to which publishers' taste has so long adhered. Among her most recent choices is Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (Four Square Classics, 5s.), about the best nineteenth-century German novel. Fontane had been a journalist, war correspondent and dramatic critic for more than thirty years be- fore he wrote his first, a historical romance. Effi Briest, which was published when he was seventy-five, is the story of a romantic girl who marries into the strictest Prussian circles, and brings disaster on herself and her middle-aged husband by having an affair with a dashing and
feckless major. Perhaps because of his Huguenot blood, perhaps because he had lived much of his life abroad, Fontane stood outside the German tradition; his master was Flaubert, and like Flaubert he created at least one un- forgettable young woman, poor silly Efli, so much less melodramatic than Emma Bovary, yet in her own way just as deluded. Fontane did not question the stiff Junker code very closely. He did not even think of himself as a liberal. Indeed when he came to Berlin to enjoy his old-man's triumph as a successful novelist, he was pained, as he observed in a poem, to find that his warmest admirers were the Jewish in- tellectuals. Though the novel is not tiresomely long in German, it has been cut in this transla- tion by more than a quarter, which limits the scope of the minor characters and the range of Fontane's shrewd social comment. Walter Wallich's English version reads easily.
Also new in this series are two novellen by Theodor Storm, The White Horseman and Beneath the Flood (Four Square Classics, 3s. 6d.). Storm was a poet inspired almost en- tirely by his native province of Schleswig- Holstein, and the first of these stories derives its strength as much from its evocation of flats and dykes and wide skies as from its supernatural plot. We have no such novellen in English. In fact they lie outside the mainstream of European fiction. Rather closer to our tastes is Adalbert Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (John Calder, 7s. 6d.), the tale of Mr. John, who sold his shadow to the devil and found that he could not do without it. Chamisso was a French refugee who did not acclimatise easily in Prussia. Though this is purely a tale of the supernatural, he may have intended, only half-consciously, to symbolise in the invaluable shadow, a man's roots in his country, which his own father had sacrificed for him to the devil of anti- Revolutionism. Chamisso has a faintly pre- Kaflca whiff. Robert Walser, a quite unknown Swiss who was writing in the first quarter of this century, was not surprisingly one of Kafka's favourite writers. The Walk (John Calder, 7s. 6d.) immediately conveys the sensation of false scale. Before Walser shuffles out of his rooms, he seems to have undergone a slight de- rangenient of all his senses. Everything on his walk is full of odd significances, as in a slight fever; and in the act of writing he performs a parody of a man writing. Christopher Middle- ton has reproduced this split-feeling extremely well in his translation of this and three shorter pieces by an author who, not unpredictably, spent the last thirty years of his life in a mad- house.
Penguins have produced only one new Classic, T. A. Sinclair's version of Aristotle's Politics (5s.), which performs the useful service of scrubbing down an ancient and much-starred monument. Mr. Sinclair's English is sound and up-to-date and his interpolated comments very useful to the serious reader. Otherwise, Penguins arc holding back for a burst of publication in the spring.
Reprints in the Four Square series include The Spendthrifts (3s. 6d.), by the Spanish novel- ist Perez Gald6s, an ironical comedy of life among the hangers-on of the Palace in the Madrid of the Sixties. Senora de Bringas, the central character, is a magnificently Spanish figure, so concerned with her social position that, like the poor gentleman in the first of
Spanish novels, Lazarillo de Tormes—which is also in the series as Blind Man's Boy (2s.)— she is prepared to eke and scrape and starve at home if she can look her best in the street. Leskov's Sinners and Saints (5s.), three stories of this second-rank—though - hardly so--
Russian novelist translated by David Magar- shack, and the seventeenth-century Japanese
story-teller Ihara Saikuku's Five Women who Loved Love (3s. 6d.) add to the variety to be found on the paperback stands.
One strong recommendation is a recent American anthology, Contemporary Italian Poetry (C.U.P., 17s. 6d.; in cloth, 40s.). This provides a good selection not only of the three greatest—Montale, Ungaretti and Quasimodo- who are well and more cheaply presented in the Penguin-Book of Italian Verse, but also of other interesting poets. The editor, Carlo Golini, has made most of the verse translations which face and do not disgrace the Italian originals. The overall impression is of a rich new poetry that derives more strength from tradition than modern French, and yet is not tradition-bound. New French Writing (Evergreen Books, 18s.) is, by contrast, a mixed parcel, made up of bits, and pieces from everyone's 'work in progress.' Only the poems are given in French, to the confusion, I hope, of their translator. 'MY Sweetness-in-the-night a-borning' is a line that anyone should be ashamed of. Those who like. their nonsense straight can get a paperback 01, surrealism's classic novel, Nadia, by Andre Breton (Evergreen, 7s. 6d.); those who are haPPY with synthetics will appreciate Kenneth Re/t- roth's Poems from the Greek AnthologY (Cresset Press, 12s. 6d.), crystal well rendered in polished perspex; and finally those with .3 strong stomach may take William ArrowsmIT only slightly American version of Petronnis (Cresset Press, 12s. 6d.): a classic not by merit but by chance of survival.
3- M. cones'
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