What does the word “utopia” mean to the battle-scarred denizens of the twenty-first century? A shockingly unscientific survey of the nine or ten people I buttonholed last week suggests that the key connotations of the word are: ideal, perfect, imaginary, unrealistic, and unattainable. I’ve arranged these terms purposefully in that order, so that they imply not a static and fixed definition but rather a narrative arc, a falling away from hope into disappointment: all of the people I spoke to (students and colleagues at the large Southern state-flagship university where I teach, so a fair cross-section of ages, races, ethnicities, and genders) firmly believed that the word “utopia” denotes an unrealistic or quixotic goal. It’s not my thesis here that disappointment is the necessary fate of any utopian project, but it might be a provisional thesis that most people living in Western cultures today think that it is.
As a Victorian literature scholar, I’m a little surprised at how pejoratively the word “utopian” is used today. Because I immerse myself in another historical period for my research and teaching, I am forced to move back and forth, somewhat vertiginously, between the Olden Times I study and the present moment; just like H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller, I sometimes find it takes a few moments to blink away the “veil of confusion” occasioned by my most recent trip home from the nineteenth century. For the Victorians the word “utopian” did not carry the negative connotations of impossibility, naïveté, and dunderheadedness that it does for us now—the writers and thinkers who used that word were for the most part engaged in actual utopian projects, whether literal or literary (or both).
Translator of Japanese literature Sam Bett once said that translating is the slowest form of reading. When translating, you need to consider the impact each word has on the whole text and, no matter how fast of a reader you are, there’s really no way around the time you’ll need to do such meticulous work. (Unless you’re translating at the most superficial level, in which case, Google Translate is coming for your job.) As translators, we have to slow down our reading and feed the text into the sausage machine of our target language generator—a machine that science doesn’t quite seem to understand yet—and hope the sausage arrives before our publishers’ deadline.
Sam’s observation came to mind when I happened upon yet another round of translator Twitter discourse around a particular topic that keeps coming back: Do translators actually read their books before they translate them? You might think it’s obvious that we do, but there are always translators in the replies—in wording that makes it seem they’re revealing a great, shameful secret—saying that they don’t. The reality is a little more complicated than that.
Does reading leave a residue? Whenever I’ve accumulated a stash of glossy magazines, I like to make strips from the perfume samples embedded in their pages. These I will turn into bookmarks, which will turn me into a voracious consumer of words. That, at least, is the promise contained in voluptuous notes of sunny daffodil and jasmine, or velvety sandalwood and iris. Also, violet, which, as it turns out, is a kind of aphrodisiac: when you get a whiff, volatile molecules momentarily stun your nose and leave you craving more violets — and, in my case, words.
To be honest, I still have a picture of my boyfriend taking a picture of the pizza on his phone. It was slightly caramelized along the tips of the bacon bits, as well as along the seams where the cheese met the crust. The cherry tomatoes had burst, the seeds glistening like little jewels. And then there was the pineapple — just a few taut, golden-yellow rings scattered across the top of the pie. They were sweet, a little acidic and a perfect complement to the inherent heaviness of deep dish.
"This is what pineapple pizza should taste like," I texted her. "I want to eat all the fruit on pizza now."
There was ease to our meals. Everything was more or less served at room temperature, so there was no rush to the table. We ate with immense relish and pleasure, but all of the elements seemed part of a larger ensemble. It was in bed at the close of our three days together that I noted the sheer amount of baking that had been done. Yet it was almost impossible to remember when any of the measuring and mixing had actually happened.
You could toss off a description of the book as “the portrait of the artist as a young woman,” but life is short and that’s awfully reductive. Martin’s book is too complicated, too messy, too specifically entangled with the sheer impossibility of art for art’s sake under capitalism, for that kind of catalog copy to apply.
Catching in the very rhythm of narration the pressures of 2020, letting us listen as Lucy tries to make sense of relationships in lockdown and political tensions deepening across the country, Strout has written another wondrously living book, as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for.
In their brief introduction to this handsome and enthralling volume, the editors, David Dawson, for many years Freud’s personal assistant, and Martin Gayford, a friend of the artist, begin by insisting that what they have produced is neither a memoir nor a biography, but a collection of letters. This is disingenuous, and does both men an injustice. Love Lucian is unique, a sort of biographical tapestry woven around a set of missives reproduced in facsimile that are at once skimpy, slapdash, funny and, in many cases, idiosyncratically but beautifully illustrated – works of pictorial art.
It fell about contest time
and a good time it was then,
when all who flail in meter’s lair
gathered with their kin.