The Romanian poet Liliana Ursu's first book in English, The Sky behind the Forest (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), which she translated with Adam J. Sorkin and Tess Gallagher, was named a British Poetry Boo...

A Path to the Sea by Liliana Ursu

1. Ginzburg, “My Vocation,” 58. 2. Boyers, “An Interview with Natalia Ginzburg,” 14. 3. Ginzburg, “My Vocation,” 61. 4. Ibid., 60. 5. Ginzburg, “Prefazione,” in Cinque romanzi brevi e altri racconti, 10. 6. Garboli, introduction to Cinque romanzi brevi e altri racconti, viii. 7. Lewis, “Introduction,” in Ginzburg, The Complete Short Stories, 5. 8. Boyers, “An Interview with Natalia Ginzburg,” 12. 9. Quoted in Paulicelli, “Natalia Ginzburg and the Craft of Writing,” 154. 10. Boyers, “An Interview with Natalia Ginzburg,” 13. 11. Ginzburg, The Complete Short Stories, 56. 12. Ginzburg, Cinque romanzi brevi e altri racconti, 383. 13. Boyers, “An Interview with Natalia Ginzburg,” 29.

Songs of Kabir by Kabir

Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing. New York: New Directions, 2007. 192pp. $16.95 In a recent essay for the New York Review of Books, Eliot Weinberger wrote, "One always knew exactly what [Susan] Sontag was saying, even if one didn't think it was true." It would be imprecise to suggest that the sentence is vintage Weinberger, since vintage Weinberger more often looks like this-"Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in the language"-or this-"Daryl Hine took America's most successful and prestigious poetry magazine and drove it to ruin." But that sentence, which so capably gives with the left hand even as it takes with the right, does adequately capture the two sides of Weinberger's critical persona. Weinberger loves and hates in fair measure, and the equilibrium he struck early on between celebration and condemnation has long made even his vituperations seem credible. Weinberger's essay is a masterpiece of critical back-and-forth, far from the nihil nisi bonum you'd expect for one of the nyrb's most distinguished alumnae. But there's justice here: Sontag wrote a similar piece on the passing of Paul Goodman, another nyrb mainstay. And judging from the two essays, what Goodman was for Sontag is roughly what Sontag is for Weinberger: not the ideal, but the example to be studied and then surpassed. In her essay Sontag says that Goodman was the critic she was reading at seventeen, and I imagine the same was true for Weinberger vis-a-vis Sontag: that at seventeen this precocious man of letters (who would publish his first translations of Octavio Paz just two years later) could scarcely have ignored Against Interpretation, which was published that year and was, in his words, "surely the best-known book of cultural criticism of its time." Despite the various enthusiasms of the three critics, there are similarities among them worthy of note. All three wrote widely, on subjects political and literary, foreign and domestic. For this breadth all three suffered what Sontag called the "terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things." Sontag and Weinberger share even more. He detects in her work the "sign of a certain insecurity, as though she still needed to prove that she had arrived and that she was the best informed in the room." That same arriviste arrogance, however, is no stranger to Weinbergers own writing. Nor is he the only one with a well-placed backhand. Sontag, too, liked the art of qualified praise: "[Goodman] was capable of writing sentences of a wonderful purity of style and verbal felicity, and also capable of writing so sloppily and clumsily that one imagined he must be doing it on purpose." The most obvious difference between Sontag and Weinberger is her celebrity, of which he makes much in his essay. He calls her "that unimaginable thing, a celebrity literary critic"-a pardonable hyperbole, for as Weinberger knows, the celebrity literary critic predates Dr. Johnson. Less pardonable is his we've-been-here-before diminishment of Sontag's accomplishments, as when he calls the "structuralist analytic overkill" of "Notes on Camp" "something new in the us, though the French had been doing it for years." It takes more than a passport stamp for an idea to flourish in a new cultural setting, and even if importing foreign ideas were the whole of Sontag's achievement it would be an important one-of the kind, it should be said, that Weinberger has advocated for years. But "Camp" is more than Barthes in blue jeans: it's a brilliant and original analysis of a phenomenon that had not been considered, let alone analyzed, since Oscar Wilde. Nor do I agree that the essay has dated badly. It's true that "the word 'camp'...has long since reverted to its summer leisure connotations." But when I read, in Sontag, that "Camp sees everything in quotation marks," or that "the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves," or that "the traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness-irony, satire-seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled," I hear something true about the world in which we live. …

The Path to the Sea

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The Path to the Sea