The national reading lamp

Dear Editor,

Mr Carmody was concerned by what he saw as the limits of the dedicated books program on Radio National. Can we assure John Carmody that the bookshelves of ABC Radio National presenters and producers are full to overflowing – with more and new titles, journals, submissions, poetry and analysis coming in every day. Australian and international writing is addressed in all its forms by many programmes on the network (everywhere from the Religion Report to the Science Show, Late Night Live to Hindsight, Life Matters to First Person).

In addition, Mr Carmody may be interested to know that we are proposing to launch a new daily books program next year. Every weekday morning, we hope to have Ramona Koval presenting a show on reading and writing – both Australian and international, fiction and non-fiction – dealing not only with writers but also with the practice and culture of reading. Jill Kitson and other RN specialist broadcasters would also present reviews, interviews and other exploratory material to help shed a reading lamp on words on the page, words on the net, and even perhaps the words of speechwriters, librettists and designers. The best of this material will also be heard on the weekend.

We do hope ABR readers are also Radio National listeners.

Kate Evans, Editor, Weekly Programs, ABC Radio National

Fetishism

Dear Editor,

Over a long career as a second-hand and antiquarian bookseller, I have seen many changes, none more noticeable than the rise in popularity of collecting Modern First Editions. I always felt a little uneasy with this trend, which has become more of an investment field than almost any other. With ‘antiquarian’ books, condition is always important, but to the ardent collector of Modern Firsts the most desirable component has become the dust jacket. The obsessive respect given to this piece of protective paper nowadays amounts to fetishism.

This would hardly matter if it were only a game between collectors and dealers, but unfortunately it has entered the awareness of publishers. All too often they can get away with a binding case which shows little care in its design so long as it wears a striking jacket. Probably, few buyers look at the actual cover of a new book, though if they are worldly-wise, they will try to keep the jacket in pristine condition. They might even buy two copies if they intend to read one (not always the prime intention if their interest is money rather than literature).

When I bought Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River, I found that the idea of content being subsidiary to packaging is now being taken to the extremes: removal of the colourful dust-jacket revealed a cloth case which was not just badly designed but not designed at all, nor even identified. When I returned this obviously misbound copy to the booksellers, they and I were astonished to find that their entire stock had the same deficiency. A call to Text Publishing elicited the information that it was a ‘production decision’. I wrote to Text to express my puzzlement, but have so far had no response. Would the author have been party to this decision? Surely not. And if not, why not? I’m hoping the publishers were misquoted, and that there is a saner explanation.

This cult of the dust-jacket is, as P.H. Muir wrote as long ago as 1931, ‘assuming a sinister and indefensible aspect’. Whatever collectors may think, for publishers to assume that a protective wrapper has the durability to absolve them from their need to even identify the book it covers, is absurd.

Jack Bradstreet, Hawthorn, Vic.

The shadow of nature

Dear Editor,

As another writer of bird poems, I applaud John Kinsella’s essay ‘Parrotology: On the Necessity of Parrots in Poetry’ in the October issue of ABR. But I’d like to elaborate on one point. Kinsella writes, ‘I suppose one has to get out from beneath the shadow of nature to really come of age – something I doubt I will ever do!’ The shades of numerous Western thinkers leap out from that statement: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Lévi-Strauss. Nodding and winking to those figures, the statement reads as deeply ironic. But the irony’s a pearl mustered around a real piece of cultural grit, as Kinsella understands extremely well. ‘Coming of age’ implies human ethical maturity, the acceptance of full responsibility for one’s own life and its effect on other lives. So what if ethical maturity could only be attained by remaining in the ‘shadow of nature’? What if full ethical maturity entails shedding egocentrism and anthropocentrism and developing the capacity for imaginative empathy with both human and non-human to the deepest degree?

Giorgio Agamben, writing in The Open: Man and Animal, described the work of the great twentieth-century zoologist Baron Jacob von Uexküll as ‘express[ing] the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences and the radical dehumanisation of the image of nature’. Uexküll concluded from his studies of Umwelts that ‘[t]he fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us – or with each other – the same time and the same space’. This is one enormous mode of ‘difference’ whose implications we have hardly begun to consider. The corella culls Kinsella mentions in this essay, and elsewhere, the kangaroo culls that leave joeys to die, happen because we do not deeply respect these other life-worlds, but believe our own imperatives have the right to override all others: then we kill these creatures when their life-imperatives, embattled, come into conflict with our own.

If remaining in the ‘shadow of nature’ means learning to negotiate – really negotiate – with the life-worlds and life-imperatives of other creatures, that, to me, would be a true human coming of age.

Judith Bishop, Sydney, NSW

The question of accuracy

Dear Editor,

Leith Morton, in his letter in the October issue, makes an interesting point concerning my essay on translation (ABR, June–July 2005). The correct scholarly procedure in discussing Harold Stewart’s translation of classical Japanese haiku would have been to make a pony for each of the poems I quoted, and to compare Stewart’s translations of those poems with others’. However, in the first part of the essay I was after something else. After all, there are many other versions of classical Japanese haiku readily available, and those interested can easily check them against the originals, along with those of Stewart. My own aim was to give an overview of Stewart’s whole oeuvre in translation as it occurs in his two collections.

With James McAuley, my focus was to show how fine his version of one Rilke poem is in itself and as a translation by comparing it to the much-praised one by Stephen Mitchell, and I therefore gave them a close analysis. No one, to my knowledge, has written in detail on this aspect of McAuley’s work to this date, and I trusted that it might be useful to do so.

These two very different emphases in the essay seem to me quite defensible. I was trying, in all, to come at the whole question of ‘accuracy’ by offering a notion of the ‘geist’ of a poem as the essential quality that a translator has to deal with. I’m sharply aware of the difference, and of the complex relations between a poem and a translation. That, I thought, was the whole point. Having said that, let me add that I think Mr Morton’s point is an excellent one for another essay, and I hope someone might see fit to take it up.

Keith Harrison, Mitcham, ACT

Jane Goodall

Dear Editor,

At the risk of single-handedly redressing the gender imbalance of ABR’s Letters page, I was surprised to read the Australia Council’s Ben Strout describe Jane Goodall as an emerging writer (ABR, October 2005). Jane Goodall has published two crime novels, The Walker (2004) and The Visitor (2005), but she is also the author of the meatier, but no less enjoyable, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (2002) as well as Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (1994).

Jill Dimond, Stanmore, NSW