Giving thanks in a small world

This is from Terry Glavin's Substack. I've taken the liberty of extracting a few lines past the subscription wall (and adding a couple of hyperlinks), as it made me nostalgic about the early days of this blog and about some of the friends we have lost along the way. 

In memory of Peter Ryley and Norman Geras, and in hope for the possibility of liveable life to return for all the people who dwell in the land between the river and the sea...

The war has not ended, U.S. president Donald Trump was rightfully passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize, Hamas has declared that it will not give up its guns, and its death squads are doing a roaring trade in the slaughter of dissidents and anti-Hamas insurgents in Gaza. And Trump seems to think that’s understandable.

Whatever happens in the course of the summiteering at Sharm El- Sheikh we should savour the great events of the day. Never mind for now that the shifting formulae for Israeli-Palestinian peace is less a matter of Trump having brought the Arabs around than of the Arab States and Europe having talked some sense into Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

The hostages are home, and in Canada, it’s Thanksgiving Day. During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep. My favourite cooks prepare my meals, my body cleans and repairs itself, and all my work goes well.

That’s from Leonard Cohen’s poem "I have not lingered in European monasteries", which is here in English and Hungarian. I closed last Thursday’s newsletter with Cohen’s "Hallelujah" so I begin this post with Cohen today, but why link a version with an English and Hungarian translation? Well. . .

I’m reluctant to detract from the euphoria about the emancipation of the captives and I’m loathe to begrudge the American president for the part he’s played in the effort to force Hamas to surrender its remaining captives. There’s a sordid backstory to all this, and I’ll be about it in due course. But bear with me for now, in the spirit of thanksgiving.

It’s a small world where good things happen to good people

The Nobel Peace Prize has gone quite rightly to the courageous Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado (I really should pull together an entire newsletter on Machado’s Venezuela). The decision has prompted “outrage” in the White House, at least according to Fox News, as in White House slams Trump’s perceived Nobel Peace Prize snub.

The Hungarian bit is about the Nobel prize that isn’t getting so much attention - the prize for literature. It’s gone to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

A very small world altogether

It just so happened that it was raining on Thursday. I’d been up most of the night, and after I filed to the National Post, Trump puts the Israel haters in a corner and sent along the newsletter A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah, I did not ride my Triumph Bonneville T100 to my usual Thursday lunch rendezvous with my biker chums. I drove instead, and as is my custom, I was listening to the BBC on the radio, and. . . wait, is that George Szirtes I hear?

An old acquaintance and fellow traveler from long ago, last mentioned in this newsletter in Remembering the Eustonards: Is it still possible to imagine a “decent Left”?, George was in conversation with a BBC presenter about Krasznahorkai and his work. And fitting, too.

George is a brilliant poet whose The Slant Door won the Faber Memorial Prize, and his Reel took the T.S. Eliot Prize, and George’s translation of Krasznahorkai’s debut novel Satantango won the Best Translated Book Award in 2013.

A fun thing: there was once a notoriously punkish webzine of sorts back in the day called Drink-Soaked Trotskyist Popinjays for War, Internationalism and All-Day Opening Hours, edited by the formidable characters Will Rubbish and Hak Mao. George and my pal Peter Ryley and I were among the half-dozen or so contributors. It was a blast.

Yesterday I was trying to sort out when it was exactly that I fell in with that crowd and I came upon an email from Peter in 2009: “Went to a reading by George Szirtes in Manchester last night, got invited for a meal and ended up sitting next to Martin Amis. We talked about your writing. George is an admirer.” Gosh! Forgot about that.

I’d known Peter from well before I met him in person the first time in 2007, at the launch in London for my own The Lost and Left Behind, and I’d interviewed George for a piece I wrote for Macleans in 2017, Losing the Struggle for Europe.

Anyway, it just strikes me that George deserves some thanks and praise today for having introduced Krasznahorkai to the English-speaking world, so I thought I’d point that out here.

George Szirtes reads "My father carries me across a field"