Matthew Spencer
@unpaginated
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Writer, translator, general semantic drudge. Brick for stone. Slime for mortar.
Kelpius Cave, PA
Joined June 2011
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Friends, my translation of Territories of the Soul/On Intonation is available today via
@sublunaryeds
, a collection of lyric poems and lyric prose by Wolfgang Hilbig. Is it horror, is it autofiction, is it literary criticism? Yes:
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It really helps to think of writing as a product of your relationship with language and with the world at large, rather than some fixed capacity. If you view these things as exhaustible, then you probably don’t have any good personal essays in you.
most writers have three—MAYBE four or five, at most—good personal essays in them. any more than that and you're just throwing out 2,000-word diary entries. identify your 3-5 and ration them out with care
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Asaroton (or "unswept floor") a style of mosaic popular in Greek and Roman antiquity, in which a dining room would be decorated with images of food scraps
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This is just a variant of the tumblresque demand that all media be tailored according to some boutique fan community. Fascism plays the same role here as BTS or Steven Universe, an occasion for headcanon and callout posts.
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English-speaking readers forget that Borges was as much of a poet as he was a short story writer. This recent privileging of long novels as the literary form par excellence is, quite literally, a prosaic tendency that doesn’t hold in other cultures.
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RIP to Cormac McCarthy, who took the landscape I grew up in and made a literature out of it. Tomorrow I’ll have a long-gestating essay out on the parallels between his work and Heinrich von Kleist’s, but for now:
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A century ago, the world lost the brilliant Czech satirist Jaroslav Hašek. To celebrate his life, I’m launching a new press, Paradise Editions, with a collection of his short stories, translated by Dustin Stalnaker (
@Jaro_Hasek
).
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Important to note, I think, that both Cormac McCarthy and Robert Gottlieb had dissenting views on canonical authors, something actively discouraged on Book Twitter, and increasingly rare in formal criticism too:
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These memes are fun but obviously not made by anyone with significant exposure to raw nature
"I can't believe the Demiurge did this, it's horrible. I need to achieve gnosis to escape this hellscape. Everything is imperfect and evil"
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My dad used to complain the about vagrancy and petty crime in Portland, fear going into the city, until he had a public breakdown himself and was picked up by the police. Now he barely speaks at all, but I'm still glad some random bystander wasn't deputized to kill him.
Most of us are far closer to having a public mental breakdown or being homeless than we are to amassing money and power in this society. The fact that we have lost all empathy for people in distress and have replaced it with groundless fear and disgust is unbelievably dark
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Heinrich von Kleist died on this day, at the age of 34. You can read, or listen, to my translation of his short story "Saint Cecelia or The Power of Music", one of the last works of fiction published during his lifetime:
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@no_earthquake
It's really only even accurate in Ezekiel. Most of time they just look like normal guys. They're wearing business casual.
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Happy Birthday to Herman Melville, who advanced American writing into world literature with a single novel, though it was an abject commercial failure at the time. But along with Pierre, he also wrote Bartleby, Moby Dick, and other fictions.
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Dracula was a fun reread but Dr. Jekyll is on a whole other level. There's a reason why Borges and Nabokov loved this novella. Stevenson is every bit their equal in it: a face "so ugly it brought out the sweat on me like running". Phrases like this everywhere. Remarkable.
Reading Dracula again for the first time since adolescence. Man what a fun book.
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Novalis' formulation of a translator as "the poet of the poet", from Miscellaneous Observations:
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In October,
@sublunaryeds
will publish Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by me. This volume collects the short fiction and miscellaneous prose that appeared in his newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter. You can preorder or subscribe here:
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I don't have some lamp or sex toy to flog but I do have a book. The Anecdotes of Heinrich von Kleist is out next month through
@sublunaryeds
and contains, among other things, some charming and charmingly gruesome tales about the Napoleonic Wars.
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Today marks the 210th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist. He committed suicide with Henriette Vogel, a close friend, shooting her and then himself, on the shores of the Kleiner Wannsee, a lake in the forested outskirts of Berlin. He was 34, she 31.
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Two ominous poems by Sakutaro Hagiwara (translated by Hiroaki Sato) from the collection Cat Town
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In early 2024,
@sublunaryeds
will publish On Music/Territories of the Soul, two collections of prose, poetry, and prose poetry by the late German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by me. It will be the first time his verse has appeared in English.
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The release day for Anecdotes has been immensely gratifying. I’m so glad this weird little book has already found its way to so many excellent readers.
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most heteronyms have three—MAYBE four or five, at most—good impersonal essays in them. any more than that and you’re just throwing out 2,000-word factless diary entries. identity your 3-5 and ration them out with care
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My translation of Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist is now available for preorder through
@sublunaryeds
. The book collects the short prose and fiction published in the Berliner Abendlätter, Kleist's daily newspaper:
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Major works by minor writers, minor works by major writers
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It's so funny that OP cites Ernst Jünger, as if badgering Netflix for personalized content was a radical act of conservative self-sufficiency.
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"Even to himself he was a dream."
I recommend reading Lenz by Büchner today. It can be done quite easily, in a single sitting, ideally from late afternoon into early evening, when the melted snow begins to freeze as the sun goes down.
“On the twentieth of January Lenz went through the mountains.”
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For the Almanac, I have a translation of Jean Paul Richter, whose birthday is today, one of the most bizarre and difficult writers I've had to translate, a key influence on Melville, Dickenson, and Borges among many others:
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You may now preorder my book of Kleist translations:
At long last, the ANECDOTES of Heinrich von Kleist (tr.
@unpaginated
) are available for pre-order. Publishing October 26. You won't want to miss this one.
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Next year
@sublunaryeds
will publish Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by yours truly. The book will collect the short stories and miscellaneous prose that appeared in Kleist’s daily newspaper, The Berliner Abendblätter, from 1810 to 1811.
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RIP Yukio Mishima, who would have loved TikTok
the guy in those tiktoks where one man throws a random object at another man who has to guess what is it looking exactly like saint sebastian
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“Unthrifty grass” is the real masterstroke here, along with the punctuation. It embodies Puritan values and their decay in a single phrase, a concrete image that visual media can’t record.
Since we're discussing The Scarlet Letter, I just want to remind HS English teachers everywhere that it's the worst book in the typical American literature class.
Look at this first sentence. 136 words. And all the sentences are like that.
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Happy birthday to László Krasznahorkai, who wrote one of my all time favorite openings for a novel in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming
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I have so little patience for this kind of emptyheaded chin scratching. Yes, I have a moralistic stance on people like my father getting murdered in broad daylight.
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Brecht: Stories of Mr. Keuner, The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Büchner: (just read everything)
Bobrowski: Samaritan Time, Shadowland
Elisabeth Lasker-Schüler: Poems
Trakl: Poems
Stifter: Motley Stones, Indian Summer
Walser: Berlin Stories, Jakob von Gunten
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In June
@sublunaryeds
will publish my translation of Territories of the Soul/On Intonation, a collection of prose and lyric poetry by Wolfgang Hilbig, ten pieces that seamlessly move in and between working-class realism and gothic horror. Preorder here:
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For the
@PoetryFound
, I wrote about Wolfgang Hilbig, lyricist of coal mines and soap factories, whose "strange interest in bad places" put him at odds with the East German government as well as with the post-communist order:
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Apropos of the nihilism in literature discourse, here’s a book that tackles the subject head-on, forthcoming from
@Wakefield_Press
in an excellent translation by
@a_nathanwest
.
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Finally getting around to this one. Ready to be wonder-smitten with its trance-like aspect
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You’re on an alpine ridge. You see the Brocken spectre. How do you open?
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Borges' anthologies are justifiably regarded as classics, but not enough attention has been paid to him as an anthologist, how his arrangement of texts by others was an extension of his own writing.
Another Borges banger-compilation. Interesting to consider the impact of this focus on anthologisation as a poetic form in itself on figures like Bajarlía (Historias de monstruous/Canto a la destrucción), Clemente (Historia de la Soledad) & Bolaño (La literatura nazi en América).
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It’s arrived: my complete edition of Robert Walser’s “Pencil Country”, writings he composed in a microscopic script.
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I asked Can Xue which animal she liked writing about the most and this was her answer:
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Some of the Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist are now available to read via
@Harpers
, translation mine.
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Absolute gem of a book here, typeset and edited by
@jsief
. No small feat. 17th century spelling intact.
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Some paintings by Casper David Friedrich with megaliths in them:
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The young Glenn Gould, how I imagine him in The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, just untouchable.
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You can't point these people to the recruiting booth. They don't go to the state fair. The armed forces are "cucked" and by that they mean "not a part of my fan community".
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On this day, in 1810, the Austrian and French Empires begin fighting at Aspern-Esslingen, on the outskirts of Vienna. I've translated Heinrich von Kleist's grimly humorous account of the battle:
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For Saint Lucia's Day, I have a translation of "An Unexpected Reunion" by Johann Peter Hebel, a favorite story of Kafka, Bloch, Benjamin and many others. Perhaps you'll enjoy it as well:
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This presupposes that writers, especially those starting out, have a clear idea about what will resonate. Better to just present what you have with all humility and then move on with your life.
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Also, who would want to read a 2000-word diary entry? (Examples pulled from the shelves at random)
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Has anyone written an Oulipo-style novel in Escher sentences?
In linguistics, Escher sentences are sentences which initially seem acceptable but upon further reflection have no well-formed meaning.
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Don't quit now with the discourse about household appliances under communism. I'm sure we're getting somewhere.
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Pynchon would be the counterexample, except for the nonzero chance he has a low to mid-tier anon shitposting account
Joyce Carol Oates is interesting because she proves isomorphism between different epochs of production ('60s literary celeb culture and Posting)
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Benn: Morgue
Bernhard: The Loser, Correction
Goethe: Faust, Elective Affinities
Hilbig: Old Rendering Plant
Kleist: Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile
Musil: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, The Man Without Qualities
Kafka: (just read everything)
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But paradise is locked and barred, and the cherub is behind us; we must take a journey around the world, to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.
Kleist
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Two Stories by Jean Paul is out, with translations by me and
@wordkunst
. You won’t read a stranger book this year, I’ll bet, unless it’s another by him.
What’s black and white, and red all over, etc.
Our next three Empyreans are here and will ship over the coming days. This brings the Empyrean Series to a tidy 30 titles!
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Whatever else can be said of Jünger or D'Annunzio, they had higher ambitions than squabbling about who "ruined the franchise". The existence of groyper fan-accounts in their name represents a second, far more lasting defeat of their ideology.
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It's not even LARPing, since that would require some basic level of sociality—just stans talking to stans.
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Present tense conveys an informal contemporary affect but Hebel, Kleist, and Kafka used it for opposite purposes, as a kind of mythical register.
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Speaking of unproblematic, wholly unobjectionable writers, my first Sorokin has arrived
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Dreamt that video games had a history stretching back to the 18th century and that Tristram Shandy was an “annoying indie platformer” that zoomers played for clout
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A bunch of terrible poems are going viral, and then I was reminded of this good one by Pynchon, from Gravity's Rainbow.
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Lice infestations aside, Solenoid is sort of a cozy read. For me it’s the length, which envelops rather than overwhelms, and the schoolteacher/aspiring-novelist narrator, a very familiar type.
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How wonderful it is to float above the earth, above the workaday mire. If only there was a system that repudiates bourgeois morality left and right, a third position if you will.
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I think Murnane is wrongheaded and pedantic here about Pynchon, but his dislike is part of what makes Murnane Murnane, same with Lowry for Gottlieb, same with Proust for McCarthy:
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When people wonder what "experimental translation" means, I think editing and anthologizing are too often left out of that conversation. This was such a weird and wild book, one that really expanded my notion of what a book of translations could do.
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For the Almanac, I wrote about Fernando Pessoa and
@disquietradio
, an internet radio program about his life and work:
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In honor of Heinrich von Kleist, born on this day in 1777, here are some pieces by him, translated by me, all of them collected in Anecdotes via
@sublunaryeds
: "Late Edition" at
@Harpers
:
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The Swiss writer Robert Walser was born on this day in 1878. I wrote about My Heart Has So Many Flaws, a collection of his early poems, translated by
@KristoforMinta
and published by
@sublunaryeds
:
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Alexander Grothendieck, mathematician, lists the stages in his spiritual life. From When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (t.
@a_nathanwest
)
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It's a real shame that "I could do that!" is seen as a final judgement rather than a positive, productive point of departure. Yes, by all means, you can and should.
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I'll be reading in Brooklyn this Sunday (7/17) at Unnamable Books alongside some other wonderful authors (
@rob_rubsam
,
@emilyhallnyc
,
@MarkdeSilva1
). Come by and say hello.
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This review is supposed to be pan but just makes the book and NYRB Classics seem even more cool. Yet another subcanonical instance of Europe's endlessly dying modernism or an American imitation? Yes please!
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I have translations of two prose poems by Eugene Jolas, from his collection I Have Seen Monsters and Angels (
@EmpyreanSeries
). Jolas serialized Finnegans Wake in his literary magazine transition, Joyce being a key influence on these pieces:
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In May,
@EmpyreanSeries
will release Prefaces by Jean Paul, your favorite writer's writer's favorite writer, featuring translations by me,
@genese_grill
,
@fliglman
,
@the_germanist
, among other distinguished others:
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This passage, from Prefaces by Jean Paul, is one of the things I’m most proud of for having translated.
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There ought to be a word for a nightmare that doesn’t actually frighten you.
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More than just a misapprehension about writing, this take is dismissive and incurious. Writing is the best tool we have for exploring other people's lives. Why yawn performatively about work you haven't even seen?
respectfully, i don't really care if you have written dozens of crappy or genius personal essays, please stop trying to prove to me that you're built different, that's why i put a qualifier in the first place
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I’m going over my Kleist translations for a new printing of Anecdotes and, of course, good grief, still noticing fresh detail in the original work. We always translate too soon. At least I do.
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The Man Without a Transit Pass collects 15 stories, written across Hašek's brief but productive career. All of them were previously unavailable in English.
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Calling this polite request by civic authorities "gatekeeping" is obtuse. Viral posts cause surges in visitors that overwhelm infrastructure, damage habitat, and create safety hazards.
Apparently people are trying to gatekeep Shell Ridge Open Space preserve, so let me be clear, the below photo is Shell Ridge. It’s great, you should go there and enjoy the public land available to all
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Mother Foucault’s is the best bookstore in Portland, one of the best in the country. Picture unrelated.
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