We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

by Shirley Hazzard

  22. Robert Burns, “O Why Should Honest Poverty,” in Burns in English: Select Poems of Robert Burns, ed. Alexander Corbett (Glasgow, 1892), 109–110.

  23. Lord George Gordon Byron, “Don Juan,” in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page and revised by John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Canto 11, 799.

  24. Thomas Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with His Lordship at Pisa in the Years 1821 and 1822 (New York, 1824),

  25. Byron, “Don Juan,” in Byron: Poetical Works, Canto 6, 731.

  26. William Shakespeare, Richard II, act 3, scene 2.

  27. Translation is Hazzard’s. Cf “And [the Romantics] do not see that this great ideal of our times—this intimate understanding of our heart, analyzing, predicting, identifying each of its tiny emotions one by one, in short this psychological art—destroys the illusion without which poetry will never exist.” In Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi, trans. and ed. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (London: Penguin, 2013), 16.

  28. Eugenio Montale, Otherwise: Last and First Poems of Eugenio Montale (New York: Random House, 1984), 70.

  29. Eugenio Montale, “La fama e il fisco,” in Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1973), 75.

  30. Arthur Hugh Clough, “Easter Day. Naples 1849,” in Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (London: Clarendon Press, 1974), 201.

  31. Charles Baudelaire, “Spleen,” in Fleurs du Mal, ed. Enid Starkie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1942), 73.

  32. Victor Brombert, The Romantic Prison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 5.

  33. T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 38.

  34. Edwin Muir, “The Combat,” in Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 179–180.

  35. W. B. Yeats, “The Statues,” in Finneran, Yeats, 337.

  36. W. B. Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” in Finneran, Yeats, 320.

  37. W. H. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron,” in Auden: Collected Poems, 93.

  38. Editor’s note: I have been unable to trace the source of this quotation in Hazzard’s papers or in the published works of Montale. It is likely that it was originally published in an Italian journal or newspaper and has not been republished.

  39. Cecil Day Lewis, “The Dead,” in The Complete Poems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 338–339.

  40. Eugenio Montale, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1975, available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1975/​montale-lecture-i.html.

  41. Eugenio Montale, “Per finire,” in Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (Milan: Mondadori, 1973).

  42. Ibid.

  43. Tennyson, “To Virgil,” in Tennyson: Poems and Plays, 530.

  44. Montale, It Depends, 28–29.

  45. Jaeger, Paideia, 13.

  46. W. B. Yeats, “Mehru,” from “Supernatural Songs,” in Finneran, Yeats, 289.

  47. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/​solzhenitsyn-lecture.html.

  48. Montale, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

  49. Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, ed. David S. Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), v.

  50. Tennyson, “To Virgil,” in Tennyson: Poems and Plays, 530.

  51. Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (London: Vision Press, 1956), 45.

  52. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Shakespeare, A Poet Generally,” in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: 1836), 59.

  53. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Auden: Collected Poems, 197.

  54. W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1905,” in Explorations, ed. Georgie Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962).

  55. Quoted in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857–1880, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), xii.

  56. Norman Douglas, Three of Them (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), 40–41.

  57. Pater was a nineteenth-century author and art critic. Douglas, Three of Them, 40–41.

  58. Paul Valéry, “Entre deux mots il faut choisir le moindre,” Tel Quel (Tome 1), cited in François Richaudeau, “Paul Valéry: Précurseur des Sciences du Langage,” Communication et Langages 18, no.18 (1973): 16.

  59. Broadcast, June 18, 1940, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/battleofbritain/11428.shtml.

  60. Broadcast, December 11, 1936, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/edward_viii/12937.shtml.

  61. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 177.

  62. Flaubert to George Sand, March 10, 1876, in Steegmuller, Letters, 1857–1880, 231.

  63. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 25, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: A and C Black, 2010), 161; Richard III, act 1, scene 4, line 55; Antony and Cleopatra, act 4, scene 10, line 25.

  64. Shirley Hazzard, “A Jaded Muse,” in From Parnassus: Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun, ed. Dora B. Weiner and William R. Keylor (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 121–134. Hazzard uses this quotation from Barzun as epitaph, noting that it was said “in conversation.”

  65. Samuel Johnson, “The Preface to the Dictionary,” in Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), ProQuest ebrary, December 4, 2014, 246.

  66. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 689.

  67. Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, A Journal of Conversations with Lord Byron (Boston: 1858), 46.

  68. Alexander Pope, “Dialogue II,” from “Epilogue to the Satires in Two Dialogues,” in Pope: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 421.

  69. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 2003), 302.

  70. Ibid., 298.

  71. Ibid., 199.

  72. Ibid., 71.

  73. Ibid., 310.

  74. Ibid., 312.

  75. Ibid., 141.

  76. Catullus, Fragment LXXXIV, in The Poems and Fragments of Catullus, trans. Robinson Ellis (London: 1871), 91 (Project Gutenberg).

  77. “So wise he judges it to fly from pain / However, and to scape his punishment. So judge thou still, presumptuous, till the wrauth, / Which thou incurr’st by flying, meet thy flight / Sevenfold, and scourge that wisdom back to Hell,” in John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Dennis Danielson (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2012), bk. 4, lines 910–914. Hazzard’s paraphrase.

  78. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), 127.

  79. Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 527.

  80. Eliot, Middlemarch, 99.

  81. Seneca, “And I hold that no man has treated mankind worse than he who has studied philosophy as if it were some marketable trade, who lives in a different manner from that which he advises. For those who are liable to every fault which they castigate advertise themselves as patterns of useless training,” from Letter 108, “On the Approaches to Philosophy,” in Moral Epistles, trans. Richard Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917–25): available at http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_3.html.

  82. William Shakespeare, Richard II, act 5, scene 4.

  83. G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto,” in Collected Works (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 10:550.

  84. Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (New York: Knopf, 1961), 234.

  85. Byron, “Don Juan” in Byron: Poetical Works, Dedication 9, 636.

  86. Alexander Pope, “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One Volume Edition of The Twickenham Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge, 1989), 262.

  87. Byron, “Don Juan,” Byron: Poetical Works, Canto 14, 822.

  88. Lo
rd George Gordon Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in Byron: Poetical Works, 245.

  89. “During my life, I have passionately loved, / Cimarosa / Mozart / and Shakespeare only.” Stendhal, Memoirs of an Egoist, ed. David Ellis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), 88.

  90. John Keats, Letter to Fanny Brawne, February (?) 1820, in Letters of John Keats, vol. 2, 1819–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 263.

  91. Translation is Hazzard’s. See n. 19 in Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 382.

  92. Translation is Hazzard’s. Giacomo Leopardi, “La Ginestra,” in Leopardi, Canti, 290.

  93. Translation is Hazzard’s. Leopardi, Canti, 290.

  94. “Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, / But all went down unmourned, unhonoured into the smothering darkness / For lack of a minstrel to be their glory-giver.” Odes of Horace, 247, 249; Montale, It Depends, 29–32.

  95. William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 65,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: A & C Black, 2010), 241.

  96. Byron, “Don Juan” in Byron: Poetical Works, Canto 3, 696.

  97. The more usual translation is by Richard Lourie, “You who wronged a simple man/…Do not feel safe. The poet remembers,” from “You Who Wronged,” in Czesław Miłosz, The Collected Poems, 1931–1947 (New York: Ecco Press, 1988), 106.

  98. James Kirkup, “On a Tanaka by Ochi-Ai Naobumi (1861–1903),” New Yorker, October 3 1959, 46.

  99. “But sweet desire hurries me over the lonely steeps of Parnassus.” Virgil, Georgics, in Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, trans. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), bk. 3, 174–175.

  100. Francesco Petrarch, Some Love Songs of Petrarch, trans. William Dudley Foulke (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1915), 225, available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1341.

  101. Quoted in R. Z. Sheppard, “Truth and Consequences,” Time, January 18, 1982, 77.

  102. Guido Gozzano, The Man I Pretend to Be: “The Colloquies” and Selected Poems of Guido Gozzano (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 66–97.

  103. Eugenio Montale, “The Lemons,” in Montale: Collected Poems, 1920–1954, trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 8–11.

  104. Eugenio Montale, “La mia musa,” in Diario, 30.

  105. “The posthumous castigation of Shelley began the…day [after the public announcement of his death] when the conservative Courier announced, ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no,’” in James Bieri, Percy Shelley: A Biography—Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 338.

  106. Wallace Stevens, “Mozart, 1935,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 2011), 132.

  107. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in W. H. Auden: Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, exp. ed. (New York: Vintage International, 2007), 90.

  108. W. H. Auden, “The Poet and The City,” in The Dyer’s Hand, 85.

  109. Randall Jarrell, “The Obscurity of the Poet,” in Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf, 1953), 34. “But this has been said, better than it is ever again likely to be said, by the greatest of writers of this century, Marcel Proust; and I should like to finish this lecture by quoting his sentences: ‘All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must remain forever unknown and is barely identified under the name of Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—and still!—to fools’” (35).

  110. “A reconciliation with [a] death.” John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, ed. Reavley Gair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 62.

  111. Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems, ed. Miller Williams, trans. Fernando Alegría and others (New York: New Directions, 1967), 148.

  112. Dubuffet’s comment is quoted in John Russell, “Art View: The Many Aspects of Jean Dubuffet,” New York Times, May 26, 1985. available at http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/26/arts/art-view-the-many-aspects-of-jean-dubuffet.html.

  113. Jean Dubuffet, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1973).

  114. Marcel Proust, The Captive, in Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, with the assistance of Andreas Mayor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 386.

  115. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 146, Saturday, August 10, 1751 (Troy, NY: Parfraets, 1903), 211.

  116. Byron, “Don Juan,” in Byron: Poetical Works, Canto 11, 795.

  117. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 180.

  118. Eugenio Montale, “The Artist’s Solitude,” in The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale, ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Ecco, 1982), 25–28.

  A MIND LIKE A BLADE: REVIEW OF MURIEL SPARK, COLLECTED STORIES I AND THE PUBLIC IMAGE

  First published September, 29, 1968, in the New York Times Book Review, 1.

  1. “Sybil was precocious, her brain was like a blade.” From “Bang-bang You’re Dead,” in Muriel Spark, Collected Stories I (London: Macmillan, 1967), 80.

  2. Palinurus (Cyril Connolly), The Unquiet Grave (London: Penguin, 1999), 21.

  3. “Come Along, Marjorie,” in Spark, Collected Stories, 206.

  4. “Bang-bang You’re Dead,” in Spark, Collected Stories, 97.

  5. Spark, Collected Stories, 110.

  6. Muriel Spark, The Public Image (London: Virago, 1979), 67.

  7. “The Father’s Daughters,” in Spark, Collected Stories, 286.

  REVIEW OF JEAN RHYS, QUARTET

  First published April 11, 1971, in the New York Times Book Review, 6.

  1. Jean Rhys, Quartet (New York: Norton, 1997), 130.

  2. Ibid., 60.

  3. Ibid., 61.

  4. Ibid., 61.

  5. Ibid., 81.

  6. Ibid., 118.

  7. Ibid., 114.

  8. Ibid., 113.

  9. Ibid., 64.

  10. Ibid., 110.

  11. “Il est assez puni par son sort rigoreaux; / Et c’est être innocent que d’être malheureux.” Jean de La Fontaine, “Élégies I—Pour M. Fouquet: Aux Nymphes de Vaux,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Jean de La Fontaine, ed. Jean de La Fontaine and Charles Athanase Walckenaer (Paris: 1835), 518.

  THE LASTING SICKNESS OF NAPLES: REVIEW OF MATILDE SERAO, IL VENTRE DI NAPOLI

  First published December 21, 1973, in the Times Literary Supplement, 1558.

  1. Translation is Hazzard’s. Giacomo Leopardi, “La Ginestra,” in Canti, trans. Shirley Hazzard, ed. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 286.

  2. See the references to “La Topaia” in Giacomo Leopardi, Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (Paris, 1842), 35.

  3. Curzio Malaparte, The Skin, trans. David Moore (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 39.

  4. Matilde Serao, Il Ventre di Napoli (Scrivere ebook, 2012), part 1, chap. 1, “Bisogna sventare Napoli,” 6.

  5. Serao, Il Ventre,
part 1, chap. 1, “Bisogna sventare Napoli,” 12; part 1, chap. 2, “Quello che guadagnano,” 72.

  6. Arthur Hugh Clough, “Easter Day. Naples 1849,” in Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (London: Clarendon Press, 1974), 199.

  7. Serao, Il Ventre, part 1, chap. 1, “Bisogna sventare Napoli,” 4.

  8. Serao, Il Ventre, part 2, “Adesso,” chap. 1, “Il paravento,” 49–50.

  9. Serao, Il Ventre, part 1, chap. 1, “Bisogna sventare Napoli,” 7.

  THE NEW NOVEL BY THE NEW NOBEL PRIZE WINNER: REVIEW OF PATRICK WHITE, THE EYE OF THE STORM

  First published January 6, 1974, in the New York Times Book Review, 1, 12.

  1. Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm (New York: Picador, 2012), 85, 72, 121.

  2. Ibid., 72, 367, 79.

  3. Ibid., 414.

  4. Ibid., 500.

  5. Ibid., 135.

  6. Ibid., 285.

  7. Ibid., 64, 44–45.

  8. Ibid., 561.

  9. Ibid., 93.

  10. Ibid., 415.

  11. Ibid., 424.

  12. Ibid., 424.

  13. Ibid., 414.

  14. Ibid., 451.

  15. Ibid., 300.

  16. Ibid., 465, 466.

  17. W. H. Auden, “The Novelist,” in W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 147.

  18. White, Eye, 93.

  19. Patrick White, Voss (New York: Viking, 1957), 234.

  20. The Nobel citation for White is available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1973/​presentation-speech.html.

  ORDINARY PEOPLE: REVIEW OF BARBARA PYM, QUARTET IN AUTUMN AND EXCELLENT WOMEN

  First published September 10, 1978, in Book Review, 2.

  1. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 81.

  2. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 105.

  3. Ibid., 69.

  TRANSLATING PROUST

  First published in The Proust Project, ed. André Aciman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 174–181.

  1. Quoted in “Reflections: Gustave Flaubert’s Correspondence,” in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857, ed. Francis Steegmuller (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), xii.