Young schiller. The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson. Threepenny: Magris, Reflections on Blindly. Every text is wiser than its author, who is not always the one best qualified to speak of it, let alone interpret it.
Perhaps he can only tell how and why it came about. The first, vague notion came to me in 1988. I was in Antwerp to launch a translation of Danube, and had seen some ship’s figureheads, female figureheads. I was struck by their open, dilated gaze, directed at the beyond as if perceiving calamities invisible to others.
Don’t be beguiled by Orwell: using plain and clear language is not always a moral virtue. Orwell season has led me back to his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”, first published in 1946.
It is written with enviable clarity. But is it true? Orwell argues that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words.”