Translations

Bertolt Brecht’s poem, ‘To those born later’, contains the following line: ‘For we went, changing countries oftener than our shoes.’ The publication of this translation of Brecht’s Journals 1934-1955 (written in an e.e. cummings-style lower case throughout) provides an abundant fleshing out of that line, giving a detailed sense of what it meant to Brecht to be an artist in exile, denied the comforts of his culture and language, denied the possibility of seeing the plays he was writing rehearsed or run-through, a process he always regarded as the final stage of writing: ‘all the plays that have not been produced have something or other missing. no play can have the finishing touches put to it without being tried out in production.’

Every adventurous reader of fiction ought to have a private hoard of novelists, preferably from a non-English writing background, who have escaped the appalling nonsense of Booker-style PR hype. Luckily, publishers like Collins Harvill set about promoting such writers; unluckily for Australia, though, our major literary pages often neglect to review the bulk of such output. You will have your favourites in such a category, but let this reviewer recommend the following: Jose Donoso, Etienne Leroux, Jose Saramago, Eduardo Mendoza, Saiichi Maruya, and Haruki Murakami.

The Australian Stage represents an interesting intersection between the academic world and the creative arts, between the long perspective of the historian, and the ephemerality of theatre performances. Its methodology is academic; it proceeds from an examination of documents, of written records of an art form only one aspect of which we think of as being written, the actual texts of plays. However, these are not the documents in question (although some bibliographical information about the plays is also included); rather it is the responses to performances, particularly reviews, written reminiscences, playbills, newspaper reports, which provide, collectively, the material for a historical survey of theatre in Australia.

 This volume of stories adds to the spate of books by or about Turgenev that have appeared recently yet it cannot be said to be redundant, as it provides an English version of five novellas not readily available in a collected form. Since the translator’s argument rests on the importance of the frequently neglected later part of Turgenev’s oeuvre (i.e. the shorter works appearing after the major novels) to a true understanding of Turgenev’s philosophical and spiritual history, then obviously the English-speaking world must have access to it, and they should be pleased to make the acquaintance of this accurate and easy translation.