Harvard University Press Blog

Prison Blossoms for May Day

As May Day nears, let’s remember Alexander Berkman, the Russian-Jewish anarchist who Howard Zinn once called “one of the lost heroes of American radicalism, a rare pure voice of rebellion.” Berkman committed, in his words, “the first terrorist act” on American soil with his attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick in 1892. As an assassin Berkman wasn’t tops (Frick lived), but he was a prominent and eloquent spokesperson and writer in the international anarchist community, a close and intimate companion of Emma Goldman throughout his life.

Berkman’s attack on Frick was the apogee of a period of labor unrest in Homestead, Pennsylvania, where Andrew Carnegie had locked workers out of his steel mills. By the time of Homestead’s escalation, workers all across the country were rising up against the sudden wage reductions and job losses that resulted from the wild flucutations in market prices for their output. Governors in several states had recently called out their National Guard, but the unrest in Tennessee, Idaho, New York, and Louisiana couldn’t match the well-organized Homestead strike.

When Frick declared that he’d rather see strikers dead than yield to their demands, it was, for Berkman, the last galvanizing straw. Berkman, who was steeped in the anarchist theory of Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, planned to kill Frick as an attentat, a form of “propaganda by deed.” Among European anarchists there was a theory that through an act of violence, class vengeance could be brought upon the oppressor, and the crumbling base on which the powerful stood could be exposed for all its vulnerability.

We remember Berkman not for his act of violence, though, but for what came after. He was arrested and convicted, as were two German anarchists, Henry Bauer and Carl Nold, who had in fact had no involvement in the plot. The three were held in the Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary, where through the sort of ingenious delivery system that often springs up among people confined, they got access to paper and began to pass writing among themselves. Before long other inmates were also reading and contributing. Berkman, Bauer, and Nold fashioned these odd scraps of paper into a tiny “magazine,” just three inches by five, written in German and English. They called the booklets Zuchthausblüthen, which translates literally to “Prison Blossoms.” A striking phrase, for the way it conjures little shoots of clean beauty in the most unlikely context.

The men in that prison wrote in these Prison Blossoms about politics, capitalism, and economic exploitation. But they also told stories, wrote allegories, and recorded the overheard conversations of prison life. They used these communiqués to strengthen their resolve through their incarceration, to hold tight to their hopefulness. Many of the Prison Blossoms have been lost to history, but others survived the cell searches, police raids, and later itinerancy of their principal authors. Twenty five of an original corpus of sixty booklets are housed now in the archive of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. They were included in a collection of Emma Goldman’s papers that came to the Institute after her death in 1940.

We’ve just published the text of these surviving Prison Blossoms in their entirety for the first time, in a John Harvard Library volume titled Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past. Along with the text of the Blossoms, the book includes an introductory essay by Miriam Brody, who edited the volume along with Bonnie Buettner. The essay outlines Berkman’s life, and the context of the labor struggles of his era. It also functions as a really concise introduction to Anarchism, succinctly explaining its principles, and its difference from Communism and other political belief systems.  Brody also recreates life in prison for Berkman, Bauer, and Nold, to show us how they managed to publish this amazing body of writing through cleverly clandestine measures.

While in prison Berkman also wrote his legendary Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, which is available in print from New York Review Books. Later in his life Berkman would grow away from his support of the attenat strategy, and would work to dispel the stereotype of the mad, bomb-throwing anarchist that his act had helped to create. “Anarchism is not bombs, disorder, or chaos,” he wrote in 1926. “I consider Anarchism the most rational and practical conception of a social life in freedom and harmony. I am convinced that its realization is a certainty in the course of human development.”

Changing How We Talk About Habitat Preservation

The Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1973. Surprisingly, from the vantage point of today’s political climate, it was an act passed with a great deal of bipartisan support. Protecting animals just seemed like the right thing to do. What quickly became clear, though, was that the act was about preserving habitats, which sometimes overlapped with land held by people and developers. And so the Endangered Species Act became a controversial lightning rod in a country that’s always been deeply concerned with its property.

In the most infamous clash, the Supreme Court was compelled by the act to block construction of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River because it would destroy the habitat of a three-inch fish called the snail darter. That innocent little swimmer with its silly little name became a much-mocked emblem for all that anyone could dislike about conservation. In response to the kerfuffle, Congress maneuvered to change the rules of the E.S.A. Al Gore sided with the dam, while Newt Gingrich voted for the fish. Conservation and constituencies make for strange politics, no? The E.S.A. was changed, the dam was built, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee.

In Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act, the organismic and evolutionary biologist Joe Roman makes a new case for why the E.S.A. is so important, and why the debates still surrounding it need to be reshaped. In a recent episode of the HUP Podcast, which you can hear below, Roman succinctly explained the root of the issue:

“People can sort of rally behind the idea of protecting species… If we could just protect species in zoos, then there would probably be no conflict. You could invest a little bit of money and put all these species aside and if that was the goal then that would be fine. The issue is that of course it really is about ecosystems. You can’t protect a species without protecting its ecosystem, and you can’t protect an ecosystem without protecting its species, so it’s a combination of the two. That’s the only sustainable way of really protecting species, is by protecting their habitat. Now, that can put (protection) at conflict with private landowners, for example.”

You can use the player below to hear the podcast, or point your browser here.

HUP Podcast - Joe Roman

 

The key argument of Roman’s work is that we should shift the conversation from the economic costs of protection to the economic benefits, for which he says there is overwhelming evidence. In the book he describes any number of these, from Florida communities whose entire tourist industry is built around visitors clamoring to see the endangered manatee, to coastal areas where whale watching ventures have helped to replace some of the jobs and money lost by the decline in fisheries, to the storm-protection benefits of preserving Louisiana’s wetlands.

The current issue of Harvard Magazine includes an excerpt adapted from Listed that tells another one of these stories. This one’s about, well, whale poop.  And, for real, from now on when you hear “whale poop” you should think “Joe Roman,” because he’s been the leader in imagining and then documenting its benefits, both ecological and economic. It’s a great story of how a eureka moment becomes a game-changing scientific finding. As Roman put it, “One of the great joys of science has to be turning a thought that surfaced one night over a few beers into a full-blown field project.” You can read the story online here.

Due Date: Fall 2011

Today let’s see how far we can take a publishing/parenthood analogy before it forces us into indelicacy or just plain falls apart.

Well, let’s see, there’s conception. And then… are there such things as pregnancy announcements? Do parents do that? Tortured from the start, this analogy. Well, publishers do it. We like to be all formal about it, so when we’ve got books in the oven we figure out their names and we predict their birthdays and we guess how tall they’ll be and only then do we send out our pregnancy announcements. We just call them catalogs, though. And it just so happens that our Fall 2011 catalog is here, with everything you could want to know about our whole new brood. You can take a look through the catalog over at Scribd, or if your browser is friendly enough you can flip through it right here (use the + and - buttons to zoom in and out):

Harvard University Press Fall 2011 Catalog

 

But where else can we take this analogy? Jacket design, we could say that’s like buying baby clothes. Our Sales Conference, taking place today and tomorrow, we could call that a super early baby shower with no presents. Then all these books will have birthdays, one after the other, from August through February. And as soon as they’re born we’ll pack them up lovingly in cardboard boxes and send them off to be sold. Yikes, okay, let’s stop there. Publishing—not so much like parenthood.

There is the pride, though.  Because—seriously, now—we’re tremendously proud to be bringing out this new list, and it’s a particularly strong collection for us. We have books coming this fall that help to remind each of us at HUP why we’re here. Books like No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems from the Nobel Prize-winning jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. And Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, a work of critical history that refutes popular attempts to pit religion and evolution at odds. And American Oracle, a new book examining how four American writers addressed the Civil War at the time of its centennial, by Bancroft Prize-winning historian David W. Blight. And On Rereading, in which Patricia Meyer Spacks meditates on the comforts to be had and knowledge to be gained from reading the same books over and over.

That takes us just to page eight of the catalog. We’ll have plenty more to say about all of these new books throughout the coming year. In the mean time, please do take a look through the catalog.  

Teaching the Civil War to Young People

This past fall we published Peter H. Wood’s Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War. The book is a masterpiece of historical detective work, a meditative parsing of the Homer painting with which it shares its title. Near Andersonville is a rarely studied portrait that, at first glance, may not strike viewers as being among Homer’s strongest works. It’s also largely unfamiliar; it was painted in 1866, but as Wood explained in a post here last fall, it was forgotten and mostly unknown until its discovery in a New Jersey attic in the early 1960s.

What Wood does in the book is create a life for the woman at the portrait’s center. He also uses the clues in the painting—the woman’s clothes, the items around her, the Union soldiers being marched to the Andersonville prison camp over her shoulder—to persuade us that Homer himself had a deep empathy for Africans Americans at that transitional moment in history. Wood’s book is a rich and surprising study with much to offer to anyone thinking about the Civil War.

But how best to share that information with young people? Wood’s book is accessible and certainly jargon-free, but it’s also a brisk and scholarly piece of art history, the brevity of which requires assuming familiarity with much of the context.  Wood’s analysis shows Homer’s portrait to be a rich resource for teaching the Civil War to young students, but how do you cut right to the core?

If you’re the Newark Museum, home to Near Andersonville, you turn the painting into “a living portrait.” In collaboration with an actor named Tia James, the museum produced the video below as a component of its “Civil War @ 150” curriculum, a teaching resource recognizing the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.  It’s a pretty creative teaching tool, and along with Wood’s book it helps turn a long-forgotten and still easily overlooked portrait into a really useful aid for understanding the experiences of enslaved African Americans, a necessity in any attempt to understand the American Civil War. Take a look:

 

Peter Wood was recently a guest on the Studio 360 radio program. He discussed the work that illustrators like Winslow Homer did in documenting the Civil War, and why, in those early days of photography, a painter could still do things that a photographer could not. You can listen to that conversation and see some accompanying paintings and photographs here.

Earth Day with E.O. Wilson

Today, in recognition of Earth Day, let’s spend a little time with E.O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American biologist and author of The Ants, Sociobiology, and The Diversity of Life, among many other influential works. In 2007 Wilson was awarded one of the much-coveted TED prizes, given annually as a means to leverage the sprawling TED community’s talents and resources. In his acceptance speech, which you can watch below, Wilson discussed his own development as a scientist, from a young child to a pioneer in the study of the endlessly diverse species on Earth.

He discussed the great danger facing those species and our earth:

Each of these species, even the tiniest, are masterpieces of evolution. Each have persisted for thousands and millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form the ecosystems on which are own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine. We will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence. And unfortunately, we are destroying them, with ingenuity and ceaseless energy. 

Here’s the speech. It’s worth your time.

 

Along with the prize comes the invitation to make “one wish to change the world.” Wilson’s wish, as he explained in the video above, was for the creation of the “Encyclopedia of Life,” a tool to inspire the preservation of earth’s biodiversity. He got his wish:

 

Dusting Off Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

The ten letters that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to an aspiring young poet from 1902 through 1908 comprise a much-loved trove of advice on living a purposeful life in or out of the arts. We’ve just published a handsome little edition of the letters, newly translated and introduced by Mark Harman, a Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College whose translations of Kafka have been widely acclaimed. In a recent episode of The Book Show podcast (which you can listen to here), Harman explained his view that translation can be like a coating of dust on a painting, lending a patina that doesn’t actually reflect the underlying work. He undertook this new translation in an attempt to remove some of the accretion he saw in other English translations, so as to let the original art of Rilke’s letters show through.

Rilke’s writing is notoriously difficult to do justice in translation. The letters were written in German, but Rilke himself was multilingual and once wrote in French that “pour dire tout, il faudrait savoir toutes les langues” (to say everything, one would need to know every language). In his Introduction to the Letters, Harman remarks further on Rilke’s relationship to language:

Rilke’s conception of language resembles that of other great multilingual writers such as Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett. Like his fellow Prague-born writer Kafka, he was always intensely aware of languages other than German. Having learned French at the prompting of his mother, Phia Rilke, young René took a keen interest in Czech literature and culture, an unusual predilection among German-speaking literati in late-nineteenth-century Prague and one of which his social-climbing mother did not approve. Having grown up in that multilingual city, he was aware of the advantages of living abroad, where his German would be removed from everyday usage and could, as he put it in a letter to Countess Margot Sizzo in March 1922, acquire a “distinctive concentration and clarity.” He also prized the differing personality, as it were, of each language: Two years later in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé he notes that on the few occasions when he wrote about the same subject in French and in German it “developed very differently in the two languages: which argues strongly against the naturalness of translation.”

The famous letters were written throughout a particularly tempestuous period of Rilke’s life. He was torn between three different women, often on the move, and battling the failing health that would eventually shorten his life. Through that, though, he managed to write incredibly thoughtful advice to the young Franz Kappus, who was eager to find his voice as a poet. Rilke counseled Kappus to be patient with his development, but urgent in his pursuit. From Harman’s translation:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have already asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and are upset when certain editorial offices reject your efforts. Now (since you’ve permitted me to give you advice) I ask you to abandon all this. You look outside yourself, and that above all else is something you should not do just now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There’s only one way to proceed. Go inside yourself. Explore the reason that compels you to write; test whether it stretches its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if the opportunity to write were withheld from you. Above all else, ask yourself at your most silent hour of night: must I write? Dig inside yourself for a deep answer. And if the answer is yes, if it is possible for you to respond to this serious question with a strong and simple I must, then build your life on the basis of this necessity; your life, even at its most indifferent and attenuated, must become a sign and a witness for this compulsion.

Editions of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet often surface on the bookseller’s “Graduation Gifts” table, but covering art, love, fear, doubt, and patience, the letters have a broad reach. Indeed, Billy Collins praises Harman’s “fresh translation” for reminding us that “Rilke is addressing not just his young correspondent but everyone, and that his advice is not only about how to write poems but how to live a deliberate, meaningful life. In these overly excited times, it is inspiring to listen to the patient counsel of this meditative man, this champion of solitude.”

Mark McGurl Awarded 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

We’re excited to share the news that UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl has been awarded the 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his 2009 HUP book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. The $30,000 award—the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism—is administered for the Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Past winners of the award include Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney, and Seth Lerer.

“I am truly honored by this award and delighted by the irony that it is made in the name of a wonderful writer, Truman Capote, who contradicts most of the generalizations about postwar American fiction made in my book,” McGurl said. “I’m proud to think that I have helped move the conversation about creative writing and the university forward a few steps and shed new light on recent literary history, but humbled by this reminder that contemporary literature is a much larger and richer enterprise than any one book or critic could grasp.”

Many critics have strong opinions about the general effects of the now-ubiquitous creative writing programs that McGurl studied. They’re often accused of having ushered in a formulaic approach and standard tone which detractors suggest now dominate and degrade American fiction. McGurl doesn’t hold that view himself, but wrote The Program Era because he recognized the lack of an objective study of the effects of their prominence:

“It is only a small exaggeration to say that the rise of the creative-writing program has been entirely ignored in interpretive studies of postwar literature,” McGurl wrote. “Discussion of the writer’s relation to the university has instead largely been confined to the domain of literary journalism and to the question of whether the rise of the writing program has been good or bad for American writing.”

Rather than a mere history of these programs, then, The Program Era became a major study of American fiction. Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, observed, “McGurl’s book is not a history of creative-writing programs. It’s a history of twentieth-century fiction, in which the work of American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Bharati Mukherjee is read as reflections of, and reflections on, the educational system through which so many writers now pass.”

In the video below, produced by UCLA, McGurl discusses the book and outlines his take on American fiction in the era of the creative writing program.

 

On Tagore, As A Way Of Not Letting Go

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of India’s Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate, we have just published The Essential Tagore, the largest single volume of his work available in English. Tagore was as prolific and diverse a writer as the world has known, and this volume presents selections of his work across many genres, with new translations by Tagore scholars and others, including Amitav Ghosh and Amit Chaudhuri. Below, HUP’s Sharmila Sen reflects on Tagore, and on “separation” as a foundational aspect of the modern Indian self.

-----

When my parents and I first came to the United States we could only bring five suitcases with us. In the one suitcase allotted to me, I chose to bring the following: some dresses, my collection of miniature plastic animals, a red View-Master that my father had bought for me during a work trip to Bombay, an old atlas, and a few books in Bangla, my native language. Those are the only things I brought from my Indian childhood to my American life. Everything else was either sold or given away.

One of those Bangla books sits on my desk as I write this. It is a copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of poems titled Shishu (literally, Child). The book, a paperback issued by Viswa Bharati University Press, is lovingly covered with brown paper. On the half-title page I see that the original owner’s name has been carefully erased, probably scraped with a razor blade, from the top right hand corner. At the bottom of the yellowed page is a dedication. Dated exactly two days before I left India for the first time, and addressing me by a name that few people recall these days, it says (I will transliterate here first):

Bidheshe giye amader edesher kobiguruke majhe majhe ei boita pore shoron korish.

The young girl who signed her name underneath these words used a name for herself she rarely uses these days. I have read this line numerous times over the years and still admire the penmanship, its elegance and self-assurance. I am struck by the maturity of the language, which came so easily from the pen of a young girl called Sujata. She and I, a few weeks apart in age, grew up together in Calcutta during the 1970s. In the West, we would be called cousins. But in India, we do not use that word. She is simply my sister. We cannot remember a time when we did not know each other.

When I left India, this was her parting gift to me. For precocious girls who grew up in a bookish family, a volume of poetry is an obvious gift. But Tagore is also a classic gift—almost a clichéd one—that any middle class Bengali girl would give. Indeed, the power of that gift lay not in its singularity, but in its ubiquity. This was my sister’s way of saying goodbye and asking me never to forget our shared language.

Decades later, Jill Breitbarth’s design makes this old Bangla book reappear on the jacket of The Essential Tagore, a ground-breaking new anthology edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty. As I look at Jill’s elegant design, I am reminded of another poem, one not included in Shishu. This poem is called “Jete Nahi Dibo” (“I Won’t Let You Go”) and it appears in a collection called Sonar Tari (literally, The Golden Boat). Here is an excerpt from Fakrul Alam’s crisp translation of the poem:

Someone trying to snatch from darkness

The flame of a dying lamp exclaims

A hundred times, “I won’t let you go!”

It’s the oldest cry resounding from earth to heaven

The solemnest lament, “I won’t let you go!”

And yet, alas, we have to let go; and yet,

Of course, we must go. And this is how it has been,

From time immemorial. Since creation’s currents

Began streaming relentlessly towards extinction’s sea

With burning eyes and outstretched arms

We’ve all been crying out in vain endlessly,

“Won’t let go, won’t let you go!”

Filling earth’s shores with laments

As everything ebbs inexorably away.

The waves up front cry out to the ones in the rear,

“Won’t let go, won’t let you go!”— But no one listens. . . .

The Dorian Gray That Wilde Would Want Us To Read

The controversy spurred by the initial publication in 1890 of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is fairly well known. The novel ushered in great and disruptive changes in the way that people understood their Victorian world. What’s less known, though, is that the text that caused such outcry was a censored version of Wilde’s work. Portions of Wilde’s typescript were excised by its first publisher, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and then Wilde himself made further edits before its publication in book form. Our beautifully illustrated new annotated edition of Dorian Gray represents the first publication of Wilde’s original text.

Scholars have known of the existence of the original uncensored Dorian Gray since at least 1976, but academic attitudes towards textual authority worked to prevent its publication until now. However, as Nicholas Frankel, the editor of our edition, explained in a recent blog post, this is almost certainly the version of the novel that Wilde would want us to read today. Its restoration of Wilde’s previously censored work makes plain much of the homosexuality that in previously published editions has been coded.

In a recent episode of the HUP podcast, Frankel elaborated on the response to the initial publication of Dorian Gray and on the history of this edition of the text. You can listen via the player below or by heading here.

 

HUP Podcast - Nicholas Frankel

As Frankel details in the book’s introduction, in the Victorian era sexual preference was less clearly seen as identity, and he points out that the word homosexual did not even enter the English language until 1892. At the time of the writing of Dorian Gray, same-sex encounters were considered “unclean” vices rather than identity-defining acts. Given that Wilde’s life and work are, as Frankel states, “widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity,” it’s only fitting that we should finally have access to the original work at the center of this shift.

Through its extensive annotations and lush illustrations, Frankel’s book doesn’t just present an analysis of Victorian society. Rather, his remarks on the various incarnations of Dorian Gray through the years serve to annotate a broader evolution in societal attitudes towards sexuality. The image at right, for example, is a publicity poster for the 1945 MGM movie adaptation of Dorian Gray. Its caption reads “Why did women talk about Dorian Gray in whispers?” The film, like the poster, emphasized heterosexuality and expanded the role of the novel’s female characters.

As Frankel's notes and Introduction make clear, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that has been made to serve various purposes since the very moment of its publication. This new edition of the text finally lets Wilde’s own original intentions be known.

New Edition of the World-Renowned Washington Haggadah

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. Among the countless editions that have been published, few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which was created in Germany in the 15th Century by the artist and scribe Joel ben Simeon. One of ten surviving Hebrew manuscripts that bear Joel ben Simeon’s signature, the Washington Haggadah resides in the Library of Congress, where it has long been considered a centerpiece of the Hebraic Section collections.

Though a beautiful work of art, the Washington Haggadah was, of course, intended to be used at the seder table, as indicated by wine stains on the parchment. So that this document can be both widely appreciated and used as intended, we have worked with the Library of Congress to produce a beautiful new full-color facsimile edition of the codex.

The image below, depicting an entire family balanced on the back of a donkey, is typical of the enchanting, sometimes-mysterious images that illuminate the pages of the Washington Haggadah.

A selection of additional images from the volume can be viewed online here.

In addition to its faithful, right-to-left reproduction of the original manuscript, our new edition includes introductions and commentary from the scholars David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. In their hands, the manuscript reveals the contours of an evolving Passover ritual; the nature of European Jewish life in the 15th century; and the practice of religious and secular art in the early modern era. This edition also includes a translation of the text, along with notes on the illustrations.

In celebration of the publication of this facsimile edition, the Library of Congress has lent the Washington Haggadah to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is on display through June 26th within the context of the museum’s permanent medieval collection. Peggy Pearlstein, Head of the Hebraic Section of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division says of the loan: “Like the new facsimile edition itself, this unprecedented loan is a wonderful opportunity for us to share the crown jewel of the Library's Hebraic Section collections with a wider audience, and to make the public aware of the richness of the Library's holdings in this field.” Its presentation inaugurates a series of loans planned for the next several years, each of which will focus on a single, illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscript.