2001
The Telling wins the Endeavor Award for best book by a writer from the Pacific Northwest and the Locus Award. Le Guin is inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Publishes two short story volumes, Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind.
2002
Tales from Earthsea wins the Endeavor Award and the Locus Award. The Other Wind wins the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Receives the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Fellow winner Junot Díaz acknowledges her influence. Participates in artists’ rallies against the Patriot Act, passed the previous year; she writes, “What do attacks on freedom of speech and writing mean to a writer? It means that somebody’s there with a big plug they’re trying to fit into your mouth.”
2003
Translates science fiction novel Kalpa Imperial by Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer. Publishes Changing Planes, a linked collection of partly satirical stories about people who slip between realities while waiting in airports. Named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
2004
Changing Planes wins the Locus Award for best story collection. Publishes Gifts, the first of three volumes of the Annals of the Western Shore, a fantasy for young adults, in September. Receives the Margaret A. Edwards Award for contributions to children’s literature from the American Library Association and delivers the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture to the ALA’s subdivision, the Association for Library Service to Children.
2005
Gifts wins the 2005 PEN Center Children’s Literature Award.
2006
Publishes the middle volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, Voices, in September. The Washington Center for the Book awards Le Guin the Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for Writers for a distinguished body of work.
2007
Publishes the final volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, Powers, in September. Works through Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, ten lines a day, in preparation for writing the historical novel Lavinia, a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of the hero’s Italic second wife, who is silent in the original version.
2008
Lavinia is published in April and wins the Locus Award. Powers wins the Nebula Award.
2009
Publishes Cheek by Jowl, a book of essays on fantasy and why it matters. Brother Karl dies on November 8 of cancer, age eighty-two, in Brooklyn, New York.
2010
Cheek by Jowl wins Locus Award for Best Non-Fiction/Art Book. Is the subject of a festschrift, or celebratory volume, on the occasion of her eightieth birthday. 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin is edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin and includes essays and original works by many writers and scholars, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Andrea Hairston, Julie Phillips, Gwyneth Jones, Eleanor Arnason, and John Kessel. Publishes Out Here, Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country, with text, poems, and sketches by Le Guin, text and photographs by Roger Dorband.
2012
Publishes Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, her sixth book of poems. Publishes two-volume edition of selected short stories under the title The Unreal and the Real. Receives the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside.
2013
Interviewed in the Paris Review series “The Art of Fiction.” Publishes a translation of Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony (2013) by Romanian writer Gheorghe Sasarman, which is retranslated from the Spanish translation by Mariano Martin Rodriguez, with both translations being overseen by Sasarman.
2014
Awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her widely quoted speech she calls for “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
Note on the Texts
This volume contains all of Ursula K. Le Guin’s writings set in the country of Orsinia: the novel Malafrena (1979), three songs, the story collection Orsinian Tales (1976), and two additional stories.
Le Guin first had the idea for the country of Orsinia in 1949, while she was a student at Radcliffe. She began writing her first novel set in Orsinia, A Descendance, in 1951 while in Paris with her brother, Karl Kroeber. She submitted the manuscript to Alfred Knopf, who rejected it. She never sent the manuscript out again.
In 1952, Le Guin began another Orsinian novel, called in various drafts Malafrena or The Necessary Passion. The manuscript was set aside, and she later rewrote it in 1961, 1969, and February 1975. Finally, in 1978, after the publication of the story collection Orsinian Tales, a collection of linked stories all taking place in Orsinia, Le Guin’s literary agent Virginia Kidd encouraged Le Guin to try again. She revised the novel a final time, finishing in December of that year. It was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1979 under the title Malafrena. The following year Gollancz published an English edition in London using different plates; it incorporated Anglicized spellings, but the text was otherwise identical to the American edition. This volume uses the first American edition as its text, and incorporates three corrections made by the author: on page 79, “joined them” has been changed to “joined him”; on page 108, Battiste’s age has been corrected from four to six; and on page 212, “The next night, Christmas eve” has been corrected to “On Christmas eve.”
“Folk Song from the Montayna Province” appeared in The Prairie Poet, Fall 1959. It was Le Guin’s first published poem. The two songs written in Orsinian, “Red Berries (Montayna Province)” and “The Walls of Rákava (Polana Province)” are published here for the first time. The texts were provided by the author.
Orsinian Tales collects stories published from 1961 to 1976, including Le Guin’s first published short story, “An die Musik,” which appeared in The Western Humanities Review in summer 1961; Le Guin was paid with five contributor’s copies. Of the eleven stories in the volume, five had been published in magazines before being collected:
“The Barrow,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1976.
“Brothers and Sisters,” The Little Magazine, Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2, Summer 1976.
“A Week in the Country,” The Little Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 4, Spring 1976.
“An die Musik,” The Western Humanities Review, Vol. XV, No. 3, Summer 1961.
“Imaginary Countries,” The Harvard Advocate, Winter 1973.
The remaining six stories (“The Fountains,” “Ile Forest,” “Conversations at Night,” “The Road East,” “The House,” and “The Lady of Moge”) were first published in Orsinian Tales (Harper & Row, 1976). Le Guin sometimes continued to revise her stories between their magazine publication and book publication, in some cases quite heavily, for example with “Brothers and Sisters”; in other instances she restored readings that had been changed to conform to a magazine’s house style. Orsinian Tales was published in London 1977 by Gollancz using the plates from the Harper & Row first edition. This edition uses the first American edition as its text.
“Two Delays on the Northern Line” first appeared in The New Yorker, November 12, 1979, and was reprinted in The Compass Rose (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 47–60. “Unlocking the Air” first appeared in Playboy in December 1990 and was collected in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Both stories were revised by Le Guin between their magazine and book publications. This volume uses the first book editions as its texts.
This volume presents the texts of the original printings chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce features of their typographic design. The texts are presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographi
cal errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 35.28, “Estanskar; 61.21, Defend; 63.7–8, cannot to be; 114.18, than in; 124.6, course,; 129.15, hearby;; 138.40, bendiction; 140.3, imspirational; 140.19, rostrum. O; 141.14, indisciminate; 168.27, brother And; 170.37, was sighing; 174.26, comtempt; 178.24, the the things; 190.7, has gathered; 194.6. foxes’; 199.16, Article 15,; 203.8, no do; 205.29, at east; 213.32, Eleanora,; 215.27, heart;; 216.7, Given; 221.2, it,” my; 222.7, clamly.; 236.15, best, ”; 237.12, bethrothed;; 248.15, table, “Why,; 257.28, disguest; 264.4, “Hie uncle.; 272.27, her,; 278.12, Belavay; 297.15, long place; 300.33, swaing; 316.11, coming in; the fields; 329.2, health “There’s; 332.8, thin,; 341.40, sky the; 361.33, Goverment; 424.32, Karst; 514.33, hopefull,; 530.23, acheive.
Notes
In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of this volume (the line count includes headings, but not rule lines). No note is made for material included in the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, except for certain cases where common words and terms have specific historical meanings or inflections. Biblical quotations and allusions are keyed to the King James Version; references to Shakespeare to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blackmore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). For further biographical background, references to other studies, and more detailed notes, see James Bittner, “Persuading Us to Rejoice and Teaching Us How to Praise: Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales,” in Science Fiction Studies 16 (1978); Elizabeth Cummins, Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin, revised edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction,” in The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); and John Wray, “Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221,” The Paris Review No. 206 (Fall 2013).
MALAFRENA
7.28–29 the apostasy of Julian] Roman emperor Julian I (c. 331–363 C.E.) is known as Julian the Apostate for his attempt to revive Roman paganism in place of Christianity.
8.9 Müller, Von Gentz, and Von Haller!] Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829), a Prussian political economist, and Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832), a Prussian political journalist, served in the Austrian government as counsellors to Prince Metternich (1773–1859), the reactionary foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, 1809–48, and helped draft the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 that sought to repress nationalist and liberal thought in the universities of the German Confederation. Karl Ludwig von Haller (1768–1854) was a Swiss jurist and political theorist known for his reactionary views. (Like all references to persons outside of Orsinia, they are historical figures; inside Orsinia, names and personages are invented.)
9.11 “Luther had ninety-five theses,”] On October 31, 1517, German monk Martin Luther (1483–1546) began the Protestant Reformation by nailing ninety-five theses inviting discussion of clerical abuses and the sale of indulgences in the Catholic Church to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg.
9.24–26 Grand Duchess Mariya . . . Francis of Austria] The Grand Duchess is a fictional ruler. Her cousin is the historical Francis (1768–1835), emperor of Austria, 1804–35, and, as Francis II, the last ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, 1792–1806.
10.25 the Ostriches] A joking slur on Austria—in German, Österreich, or the Eastern Kingdom. The pun works in English and French, though not in German.
10.27–28 “Das würde ich auch gerne wissen!”] German: That I would also like to know.
12.35 the wrong side in ’13.] In 1813, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden formed an alliance against Napoleon, whose predominantly French army included contingents of Polish, Italian, and German troops. At the battle of Leipzig, October 16–19, 1813, the alliance defeated Napoleon and forced him to retreat into France.
13.23 the death of Stilicho] Flavius Stilicho (c. 359–408), half-Germanic Roman general who played an important part in the defense of both the eastern and western halves of the divided Roman Empire and who served as regent for Western Roman Emperor Honorius, 395–408. Accused of treason, he was arrested and executed. Soon afterward, in 410, Rome was sacked by Goths.
17.32 Prometheus in chains] According to the Greek poet Hesiod, the titan Prometheus, creator of mankind, was imprisoned by the gods for his theft of fire on man’s behalf. His punishment was to be chained to a rock and to have an eagle eat his liver every day, which would then regenerate overnight. He was eventually freed by Hercules.
17.39 the New Heloise] Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), by French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), a novel in letter form in which Rousseau propounded many of his ideas about freedom and the authentic life.
18.3 the Moniteur] La Gazette Nationale, ou Le Moniteur Universal, newspaper founded in 1789 in Paris that reported on the debates in the National Assembly during the Revolution. It later became a propaganda organ for Napoleon I, and continued publication until 1868.
18.9–10 M. Danton, M. Mirabeau, M. Vergniaud . . . M. Robespierre] George Jacques Danton (1759–1794), Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791), and Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud (1753–1793), leading figures in the French Revolution who opposed the radical Jacobin faction led by Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794). Danton and Vergniaud were executed during the Jacobin Terror, while Mirabeau died of natural causes.
18.15 “Vivre libre, ou mourir!”] French Revolutionary slogan, plausibly uttered by Vergniaud: Live free, or die!
20.37 University of Wilno] Founded in 1579 in Vilnius (in Polish, Wilno), Lithuania.
22.26 Vega] The fifth brightest star in the sky, part of the constellation Lyra.
24.35 Lot’s wife] See Genesis 19:26.
25.14–15 that whole book about Manfred!] Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (1816–17), by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824).
32.3–6 Falkone . . . Mazeppa] Falkone is “falcon” in Orsinian. “Mazeppa” (1819) is a poem by Byron.
35.15 Mandevilia suaveolens] Mandevilla laxa (alternatively suaveolens), or Chilean jasmine, is a tropical vine with fragrant white flowers.
38.37 Social Contract] Du Contrat Social (1762), an influential political treatise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
45.37–38 Non sogno questa . . . libertà!] Italian: Not a dream, this time, not a dream, O Liberty! Lines from “La Libertà a Nice” (1733) by Pietro Metastasio, the pseudonym of Italian poet Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi (1698–1782).
50.34 Dante’s Vita Nova] The New Life (1295), a collection of poetry and prose by Dante Alighiere (c. 1265–1321) on the topic of courtly love but also, because his beloved Beatrice died during the writing, on love as a source of redemption.
55.30 twenty kruner] The coins of Orsinia, like those of much of Europe, are called crowns, using the Orsinian word for crown, krone, from Latin corona.
60.40 Schiller] Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), German poet and philosopher.
62.9 Herder] Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), German poet and philosopher.
62.9 Weh ’st mir!] German: Woe is me!
63.14 iambic tetrameter] In English, iambic tetrameter is found in nursery rhymes and ballads: Shakespeare often shifts from his usual pentameter to mark lower-class characters. It is also the meter of the opening of the revolutionary French anthem “La Marseillaise.”
68.3–4 the Cathedral of St Theodora] As Le Guin mentions in her introduction to this volume, Theodora was her mother’s name. The Byzantine empress Theodora (c. 500–548), an actress who married Emperor Justinian I, is a saint in the Eastern church, though not in the Roman.
68.36 St Roch] Roch, or Rocco (c. 1295–c. 1327), was born in Montpellier, in the south of France, and traveled to Italy, where he tended plague victims. When he contracted the disease himself and fled to the woods to die, tradition says he was tended by a hunting dog, which licked his wounds and fed him until he recovered. After his death he was canonized and became the patron saint of dogs as well as the source of miraculous healings from plague.
69.6 St Anthony] Perhaps named for Saint Anthony
of Padua (1195–1231), a Franciscan friar. Other possibilities include Anthony of Antioch (d. 302), Anthony of Egypt (251–356), and Anthony of Kiev (983–1073).
69.6–8 “Credo in . . . Omni-potentem,”] Latin: I believe in one God . . . Almighty.
69.10 St Roch’s Day.] The Feast of St. Roch, August 16: traditionally the day of his death.
70.21 Mallenastrada] Throughout the Orsinian stories, Le Guin gives hints about the Orsinian language (derived from Latin, like Romanian, but similarly influenced by the surrounding Slavic tongues) and its dialects. Lower-class residents of Krasnoy slur the syllables of Magdalene to Mallena.
74.2 1789] The beginning of the French Revolution.
74.6 Desmoulins] Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794), a French journalist and orator who was one of the first to call for the creation of a republic in his radical pamphlet La France Libre, issued after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. He was executed along with Danton.
74.10–13 ‘As a preventative measure . . . Truth.’” Fredrich Gentz. See note 8.9.
74.32 the plains of Marathon] Byron wrote in “The Isles of Greece” (1821), “The mountains look on Marathon— / And Marathon looks on the sea; / And musing there an hour alone, / I dream’d that Greece might still be free . . .” An Athenian-Plataean army decisively defeated an invading Persian force at Marathon in 490 B.C.E. See also note 25.14–15.
75.28 presto] A musical passage intended to be played with extreme speed.
75.32 partie carrée] French: A party of four; literally, a square party.
76.26–28 ‘I have my Estates . . . home. . . .’”] See note 74.10–13.
77.19 Metternich] Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister; see note 8.9.
79.15 Buffon] Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), a French naturalist, noted for his elegant style as well as his magisterial pronouncements on the natural world.
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