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R12 ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW By Stephen Greenblatt ERHAPS people will soon be per- suaded that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic Goe- the wrote in 1826, toward the end of his long life. belong, like everything good, to the whole world and can be promoted only through general, free interaction among all who live at the same noble words lie at the heart of what Goethe called Weltliteratur world literature, which he conceived of as a ceaseless process of exchange across the borders of nations and cultures. At the center of this process is the work of translators, for, though it is highly desirable to be multilingual, the range of cultural access even among gifted linguists is in- evitably small in relation to the enormous number of lan- guages in the world. In addition to the flood of new works in translation, classics from the Iliad and the Odyssey to in constantly translated anew. None of this could occur without a huge cohort of go-betweens, many of them virtually anony- mous, through whose incessant labors something one might term is facilitated.

Cultural mobility is the process by which the symbols, self-conceptions, modes of expression and ritual actions of people rooted in a specific place, timeand society are detached from those roots and set in motion, to reach other places, different times. There is a paradox, or per- haps a tangle of paradoxes, here: People tend to admire cultural forms that seem autochthonous, sprung from their native soil. These forms have a distinctiveness, a rich specificity bound up with their origins. And yet such distinctive forms are also appreciated away from their native soil and hence require a whole range of displace- ments, repackagingsand transformations that enable them to travel. Even on home ground, this principle of displacement applies after the lapse of only a few years the past, in the novelist L.P.

words, a foreign country; they do things differently under careful scrutiny, it turns out that the supposedly native and unchanged forms are them- selves products of a prior translation process, less visible but no less real than that which allows us to encounter whatever is alien to us. The emblem of world Goethe, was his ability to be drawn into a Chinese novel, recognizing a surprising at-homeness among characters who superfi- cially seem entirely different: An apparently unbridge- able distance vanishes, and very soon feels oneself as one of This experience, the sense of entering an alien world and eerily feeling oneself at home in it or, al- ternatively, the sense of being addressed directly and per- sonally by people you could not possibly have known, from a world outside your own is at the heart of literary culture. It is also, as St. Paul understood, close to the heart of any text-based religion: Reading the Hebrew Scriptures, written centuries earlier in a strikingly differ- ent cultural and political setting, Paul nonetheless felt that were written directly to him. In turn, generations of the faithful who read words not in the original Greek but in languages that did not even ex- ist in the time he wrote have had the same experience.

What this means is that cultural mobility is pervasive and that it quickly hides its own traces. There may be markers of distance exotic settings, unfamiliar turns of phrase, novel concepts but the successful work of translation almost always renders these markers inci- dental, in order to promote the absorption that fasci- nated Goethe or the startling intimacy that fascinated St. Paul. Both pervasiveness and concealment have been greatly abetted by the increased speed of modern com- munication that Goethe already marveled at 200 years ago, so that people everywhere in the world seem to share the same moment of time. If such global simultaneity runs the risk of flattening everything out onto a single plane, as if history had come to a standstill and all human differences had been erased, the triumph of the present moment can be at least partly restrained by continually looking back at what has been left to us and reminding ourselves that what we are encountering is the product of people and cultures long dead.

The effect, Goethe ardently hoped, would be a new cosmopolitanism, an unregulated free trade in expres- sion and feeling, an epoch of global respect founded on the conviction that is the common possession of humanity and that it emerges everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of The German mentality and the German language, he felt confident, were particularly well suited to this capacious, tolerant encounter with the unfamiliar. Since these words were written, there have been mur- derous wars almost too numerous to count, wars in which the Germans for whom Goethe reserved a particularly honorable role in the coming Weltliteratur have played aparticularly terrible part. So it is possible to dismiss his vision as an idealistic illusion. A global culture, however robust, is no substitute for democratic institutions and respect for the rule of law. But it would be a mistake to aban- don the hope that lurks in the ceaseless enter- prise of translation.

We should not underestimate, though, the enormous difficulty of the task. Certainly, translators themselves do not underestimate it. In the that accompany almost all new translations (and that very few people bother to read), one theme recurs with numbing regularity: the virtual impossibility of translation. closer I got to feeling that I was beginning to a line or a writes W.S. Merwin in his recent verse transla- tion of the words by memory, repeating some stumbling ap- proximation of the sounds and cadence, pon- dering what I had been able to glimpse of the rings of sense, the more certain I became that the ordinary and obvious impos- sibility of translating poetry or anything else the translation of Dante had a dimension of impossibility of its ordinary and obvious impossibility of translating poetry or anything is treasured for its rootedness in the life-world of particular people in a particular time and place.

An elderly Sicilian I chatted with years ago in Agrigento categorically denied that any- thing called could possibly resemble what he lovingly called pane he simply re- fused to believe it. And translating complex literary masterpieces not only Dante, with the special prob- lems posed by the interlocking rhyme pattern known as terza rima, but also novels by Proust, Dostoevskyor only intensifies the sense of impossibility. The syntax, the intimate rhythms, the diction everything that makes the works seem distinctive and irreplaceable to those who love them in their native language must inevitably be lost in translation. But Merwin and others who declare the impossibility of translation go ahead and cheerfully prove themselves wrong by producing works that bear more than an acci- dental relation to their originals and that have in many cases extraordinary literary power. The pessimism re- peatedly voiced in the notes gives way to what a recent translator of Edith Gross- man, calls the that fuels such a uto- pian task: in the sense intended by Ortega Gasset when he deemed translations utopian but then went on to say that all human efforts to communicate even in the same language are equally utopian, equally luminous with value, and equally worth the Ihave never struggled through in my faltering Spanish, but I am convinced that I have read and admired not a novel by Edith Grossman but oneby Cervantes.

I cannot read a word of Russian, but I believe I have heard in voice of Tolstoyand not of the most recent translators, Richard Pevearand Larissa Volokhonsky. Though I would surely be a better (or at least a better-educated) person if I could read an- cient Greek, I console myself with the thought that blind Homer still sings for me in the English of Robert Fitzger- ald, Stanley Lombardoor Robert Fagles. If I gave up all other pleasures, I might, before the dawn of a new dec- ade, be able to read in German all 1,770 pages of Robert Words that shrink distances between cultures Stephen Greenblatt is university professor of the humanities at Harvard University and the author of in the World: How Shakespeare Became a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. Henrik Drescher For The Times R5 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW By Gavin J. Grant Lovecraft Tales Edited by Peter Straub The Library of $35 OWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT fans including August Derleth, who co-founded a press, Arkham House, in part to posthumously pub- lish Lovecraft have always argued that weird tales belonged squarely in the center of American lit- erary his style was a natural descendant of 19th century writers such as Edgar AllanPoe and Natha- niel Hawthorne.

Besides, Lovecraft was given the literary stamp of approval in 1928 when Edward J. listed ColourOut of (published in Amazing Sto- ries magazine)in the of in his annual an- thology, Short For of stories were rare and expensive. Even when Arkham House reissued them in the 1980s (coincidentally just after the formation of the Library of were printed in small runs and were hard to find.How exhilarating for fans of horror storiesthat after years on the blasted heath of literary critical Library of America has admitted him to the critical fold and restarted the conversation over his legacy with the 155th volume in itsseries. The Library of America series harks backto an earlier style of publishing in which hardcovers were made to be read carefully by many readers. This volume is probably the size of most entries on the bestseller list, but with its full-cloth cover and conservation-grade onionskin pages, it will last longer and will still be a pleasure to read.

is organized in loosely chronological casual Lovecraft readers(whose very existence, before this volume, would be hard to imagine) might prefer to pick and choose their points of entry. ColourOut of is a prototypical Lovecraftian tale recounted by an unnamed narrator about a man who has undergone a mind-altering experience. Forty years before, a meteor landed the well at the in darkest north central Massachusetts. On examination, local scientists noted that heating before the spectroscope displayed shining bands un- like any known coloursof the normal Composed of a plastic-like substance, the meteor melted and disappeared. Over the next year or fields failed, then the animals began dying, until finally the Gardner health degenerated.

The tale teller heard it from Gardner, the last survivor so now we are in a story of a story of a story! who told him of the ungodly light that pours up from the well nightly. In the time, the area is to be flooded for a reser- it is his fear that whatever is in the well will in- fect the water and eventually all those who drink it. This open-ended, nebulous fear, the important events ignored in quiet corners of the country and the possibility of spe- cies-level danger are among the reasons for fervent fan base. oft-parodied style (all those adverbs) is in full, glorious effect, starting with his earliest, clunky sto- as Statement of Randolph and Music of Erich Lovecraft reveled in the Eng- lish language: This is a writer whose thesaurus, if marked up, would make excessively, affrightedly good reading. However, if read after the perfect age (which anecdotal evidence suggests is in the early lives up to his reputation for overblown, occasionally repetitive descriptions.

daemoniacalof all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbeliev- Indeed. But right there is another of at- tractions. For outside of a of us touch wood! might never expect to experience such a shock. amazingly atmospheric tales, his great eye for detail, the slow and unending buildup of dread: not to like? Lovecraft also should be considered in the context of post-World War I fiction. Although he attempted to enlist in the National Guard in 1917, his always-poor health let him down.

Lovecraft was influenced by writers who brought the real horrors of modern war to fiction. (He be- gan to find an audience around the same time as the pub- lication of Erich Maria Quiet on the Western and Siegfried of an Of course, instead of long-distance bombardments and men as cannon fodder, nightmarish creations were beings from beyond the as the incomprehensible-to-the-human-brain shoggothsin the Mountains of were infamous, nightmare sculptureseven when telling of the age-old, bygone things; for shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any Literary horror author Peter Straub has selected 22 stories from Arkham S.T. Joshi-edited editions. Straub also contributes an absorbing Lovecraft chronol- ogy and 13 pages of illuminating textual as this about the Yezidis in Horror at Red Yezidis, or Yazidis, are a Kurdish sect who worship Malek Taus, a fallen angel who was reconciled with God and now rules over the world with six other Refer- ences such as these can encourage readers (especially of the curious teenage persuasion) to dig further into secret and unknowable histories, and perhaps this is another reason why Lovecraft had been shunted from the literary stage. For those amenable to the idea that Lovecraft is worthy of canonization, perhaps it would help to peruse earlier genre entries in the Library of America cluding Raymond Chandler, and vol- umes on American noir during the 1930s and Even with the Library of blessing, however, likely that will be appreciated primarily by those al- ready in the fold.

However, readers willing to keep an open mind, readers willing to be swept away on a wave of unknowable dread, will find much to enjoy. 8 Steve McAfee For The Times That delicious feeling of dread Gavin J. Grant is a co-editor of the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best Fantasy and published by St..