Conjunctions #31: Radical Shadows

Conjunctions #31

by Bradford Morrow (Editor), Peter Constantine (Editor)

Edited by Peter Constantine and Bradford Morrow. 11 b&w and 28 duotones. 6 x 9 in.

400 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 1998

About the author

Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, to work as a rare book dealer. In 1981 he relocated to New York City to the literary journal Conjunctions, which he founded with the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and to write novels. He and his two cats divide their time between NYC and upstate New York.

Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.

Reviews

[Jimgosailing · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fourteen previously untranslated stories by Chekhov; early stories from “an immature’ writer, they are rich in colloquialisms and wordplay, and thus hard to translate, and they often depend on cultural context for their humor.”

“After the Fair” : “A merchant…had just returned from the Nizhgorod Fair, and in his pockets his wife found a bunch of torn and tattered papers covered with smudged writing…”

“First Incident”: “The gander ruined everything.”

“Second Incident”: “I divide mankind into two categories: writers and enviers.” And “…she’s now married to your neighbor, Karl Ivanovitch Wanze (À propos, in German, Wanze means “bedbug”, but please don’t tell Zhenya, she’d be very upset.)”

“Third Incident”: “[I hiccuped]”

“A Serious Step”: “the old man yawns, and his words stretch like rubber.”

It was fun to read some of Chekhov’s early work; certainly tongue-in-cheek. But he obviously has yet to attain the level in these stories that he rises to in later stories.
…..

Three previously untranslated stories by Bulgakov:
“Mademoiselle Janna”
“Jumping the Line”
“The Conductor and the Member of the Imperial Family”

“The seance in “Mademoiselle Janna” “reminds us of the varieté show in “Master and Margarita” in which the audience is duped

“Jumping the Line” voices themes similar those found in “Heart of the Dog” (and some Gogolian humor)

…..

Fragments and pieces of previously untranslated unpublished poems of Anna Akhmatova; and an insightful afterword written by Robert Reeder who discusses the ins and outs of publishing some of Akhmatova’s pro-Stalin pieces (and gives context to other writers who published pro -Stalin works) and she suggests that some of what Akhmatova wrote in this vein uses hackneyed tropes and she means to parody, not to praise.

…

The fragment- does it really even amount to a fragment? - of the Nabokov piece…

….

This collection would be enjoyed by true fans, maybe, of each of these authors; those people who have read the major works of these authors and are willing to take a deeper dive into the unknown. I’m not there yet.