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January 20, 2006

NEW BANVILLE PLAY

Todtnauberg, a new play by John Banville "specially commissioned" by the BBC aired today, and can be heard here.  (Many thanks to Rory O'Connor, who sent the link and inquired - as have others - about the concluding installment of our own Banville interview.  We swear to God, we'll get it out.)

A fictional drama inspired by the meeting between the poet and holocaust survivor, Paul Celan, with the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, at Heidegger's mountain retreat in 1967. No record was kept of this momentous meeting in the mountains, and the only mention is an obscure poem by Celan, "Todtnauberg", which is the name of Heidegger's place.

It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work, was a Nazi. One cannot even say 'had been a Nazi' because he never said anything that amounted to a renunciation. Late in life, Heidegger became interested in Celan's work. He attended public readings given by the poet, and in 1967 invited him to his famous Black Forest retreat at Todtnauberg.

Posted at 06:01 PM in Obsessions |

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Comments

Sinéad

Mark, no doubt you've heard that Banville is nominated for for Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards?

Posted by: Sinéad | January 21, 2006 at 06:38 AM

Babelfish

So relieved to find someone else who rooted for Banville at the Booker. It's too bad that the one time the Committee seems to have taken an apolitical decision--one that actually rests on literary merit--they've taken so much flak for it... And thanks for the marvellous interview; like everyone else, I'm waiting for the last bit too.

Posted by: Babelfish | January 22, 2006 at 12:21 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

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