79.37–80.1 Lancaster system or Pestalozzi’s works on education.] The monitorial system of education, developed independently in India by Scotsman Andrew Bell (1753–1832) and in England by Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838), involved having older or more advanced students help teach their less advanced peers. Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) advocated an educational system based on children’s interests and activities.
83.40 the new “English” addition] Formal and symmetrical French-style gardens were gradually replaced in the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the cultivated wildness of the English style of landscaping. Part of that English style was the use of “follies”: fake temples, caves, or ruins, reminiscent of the settings of Gothic fiction.
84.24 St Christopher] Legendary Christian martyr of the third century C.E. In the most popular story about St Christopher, he carries a child across a stream; the child then reveals himself to be the Christ child and causes Christopher’s staff to burst into bloom. He is the patron saint of travelers.
85.18 Montesquieu] Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), French philosopher whose writings on the separation of powers within governments influenced the American Revolution and Constitution.
86.30 Spielberg prison] Špilberk Castle, in Brno, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), was a notorious prison for political offenders.
87.4 St Stephen’s] A Hellenistic Jew who became a deacon of the early Christian church in Jerusalem, Stephen was accused of blasphemy and stoned to death in 34 C.E., becoming known as the first Christian martyr. Cf. Acts 6–7.
89.30 und so weiter, und so weiter] German: and so forth, and so forth.
92.38–39 “Que je vinsse!” . . . “Que tu vinsses! Qu’il vînt!”] French: That I had come! That thou hadst come! That he had come!
93.1–2 “Mais viens donc! . . . Vient-il?”] French: Come on, then . . . Is he coming?
97.14 The New Heloise] See note 17.39.
98.8 the moto perpetuo or the tarantella] Moto perpetuo (Italian: “perpetual motion”) is a musical composition or pattern of continuously repeated rapid notes. The tarantella is a popular dance form in triple time (3/8 or 6/8), named for the belief that dancing oneself into a state of exhaustion would sweat out the poison of a tarantula bite.
116.33 th-there is balm in Gilead.”] Cf. Jeremiah 8:22.
124.36 haute bourgeoise] French: upper middle class.
127.7–8 Piedmont revolt of 1820] Inspired by the 1820 revolution in Naples, an insurrection in Piedmont in 1821 sought the promulgation of a liberal constitution and the liberation of Lombardy and Venetia from Austrian rule. The revolt was suppressed by Austrian troops.
139.6 The Assembly of the Three Estates of the Kingdom] As in France before the Revolution, Orsinian society was divided into three unequal conditions, or estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the commons.
140.19 “O miserere, Domine!”] Latin: Lord, have mercy on us.
140.25 “Mugitusque boum!”] Latin: And the lowing of cattle. A phrase from Virgil.
140.35 Germanic Latin] In Germanic-speaking countries, Latin was pronounced with German phonetics, as opposed to ecclesiastical or church Latin, which retained an Italianate pronunciation.
143.32 “Sic et non,”] Latin: Yes and no.
145.13 the Social Contract] See note 38.37.
145.17–18 Paris in ’93 . . . Vienna in ’15] The Reign of Terror began in 1793; the Congress of Vienna in 1815 sought to prevent future revolutions in Europe.
145.23–24 cut to pieces . . . Leipzig] See note 12.35.
146.34–35 the Deputy from the Fourth Estate] Edmund Burke (1729–1797) coined the term “Fourth Estate” in 1787 to refer to the press.
157.27 König von Ungarn] Grand hotel in Vienna in operation since 1746 and located next to St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Stephansdom, or the Dom).
165.22–23 the Lion . . . the Swan] The constellations Leo and Cygnus.
167.27 the War of the Three Kings] See “The Lady of Moge,” pages 505–516 in this volume.
172.25 vincam] Latin: I shall overcome—a suitably Byronic boast for Estenskar.
189.34–35 St Lazar Prison] Named for Lazarus, the man raised from the dead in the Gospel of John. St Lazar(e) is also the name given to many hospitals associated with the Order of St Lazarus, a Catholic order founded around 1119 at a leper hospital in Jerusalem.
193.14–15 The workman . . . named Fabbre.] The Fabbre family reappears in other Orsinian tales, such as “Brothers and Sisters” and “A Week in the Country.” Fabbre is “Smith” in Orsinian, a common working class name.
213.22–27 the old carol . . . Deo!] Evidently an Orsinian translation of the eighteenth-century French carol “Les Anges dans Nos Campagnes,” best known in English in its 1862 translation by the Anglo-Irish bishop James Chadwick as “Angels We Have Heard on High.”
214.4–5 Count Orlant discoursed on hollytrees, standing stones, and druids] Orsinia’s pagan past—and the way elements of the older belief survived into a nominally Christian era—is explored in “The Barrow,” page 363 of this volume.
214.12 San Larenz] Saint Lawrence of Rome (225–258), early Christian martyr.
214.18 In te Domine speravi.] Latin: In thee, Lord, I trust.
226.21 the bright dog at heel.] Sirius, sometimes called the “dog star,” is the brightest star in the night sky, and is part of the Canis Major (“Greater Dog”) constellation, below the Orion constellation. In mythology, Orion is a hunter and Canis Major his hound.
226.33 Epiphany night] Christian feast day commemorating the visit of the three wise men to the Christ child, when Jesus was revealed to be the son of God. In the Western church it is traditionally celebrated on January 6.
233.15–16 how many Pleiades there were.] There are over one thousand stars in the Pleiades star cluster, up to fourteen of which can be seen with the naked eye. Traditional names for the cluster disagree on whether there are seven sisters, as in Greek myth, or six, as in Japan and India.
245.10–11 the service of All Saints] All Saints’ Day is a festival celebrated in honor of all saints, known and unknown. The Roman Catholic Church holds it on November 1, and the Eastern Orthodox Church on the first Sunday after Pentecost.
278.39 like a scene from Othello?] Cf. Othello, III.iv.
279.25–26 The Ultras, Royer-Collard, Article Fourteen] The Ultras (Ultra-royalists) were conservative supporters of the restored Bourbon dynasty. Pierre Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845) was a leader of the Doctrinaires, a group of political thinkers who had reconciled the liberal principles of the Revolution of 1789 with the legitimacy of the monarchy. Article Fourteen of the Charter of 1814 gave the king the power to promulgate legislation by decree during an emergency. The invocation of Article Fourteen by Charles X on July 25, 1830, led to an insurrection in Paris and his forced abdication
280.10–11 Danton . . . Talleyrand.] For Danton see note 18.9–10; Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), French politician and diplomat whose career spanned successive regimes from Louis XVI to Napoleon to Louis-Philippe. He served as foreign minister of France, 1797–1807, and represented France at the Congress of Vienna, 1814–15.
280.12 wooden shoe instead of a silk stocking—] Talleyrand was mistrusted by Napoleon, who berated him in front of his marshals as “shit in a silk stocking.”
281.13 “To fresh fields and pastures new. . . .] From the end of John Milton’s pastoral elegy “Lycidas” (1637).
281.25 the Spielberg] See note 86.30.
281.26 Silvio Pellico] Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), Italian poet and patriot. His literary review, the Conciliatore, was suppressed by the Austrian authorities and he was arrested in Milan in 1820. Convicted of treason in 1822, he was held in the Spielberg prison until his release in 1830.
281.30 the Piombi in Venice] Formerly a prison inside the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Its most famous prisoner was the writer and libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725�
��1798).
282.16 Vergniaud] See note 18.15.
287.40–288.1 Mr Aphasis, the Deputy from Karnak.] Similarly, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) reported on the British parliamentary debates from 1741 to 1744 for The Gentleman’s Magazine. Forbidden to report the debates directly, Johnson adopted the guise of “Debates in the Senate of Lilliput,” using Jonathan Swift’s imaginary miniature kingdom to stand for England.
288.11 “Cheops,”] Fourth dynasty Egyptian pharaoh (2589–2566 B.C.E.), also called Khufu, who commissioned the Great Pyramid at Giza.
290.9–10 The Duke of Bordeaux] After the July Revolution of 1830, which overthrew Charles X, Charles’s grandson Henri of Artois, Count of Chambord and Duc de Bordeaux (1820–1883), was declared by conservative Legitimists to be Henri V, King of France. As heir to the Bourbon monarchs, he continued to be the pretender to the throne until his death.
295.9 the new king of France] Rather than selecting the Duke of Bordeaux, the French Chamber of Deputies named his distant cousin Louis Philippe d’Orléans (1773–1850) as King Louis Philippe I.
299.26–27 “The light shineth . . . it not!”] John 1:5.
322.38 “Oimè!”] Italian: Alas!
332.22–23 “Un soave non so che. . . .] Italian: “A sweet something or other. . . . ,” from the start of a love duet in La Cenerentola or Cinderella (1817) by Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868).
332.24 The Holy Alliance] Though Rossini was not an admirer of the reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, he did accept a commission from Metternich to write two cantatas for the Congress of Verona in 1822, one of which, La Santa Alleanza, or “The Holy Alliance,” is now lost.
332.26–27 pippin apples] The product of unintentional breeding of two varieties.
337.16–17 play at Petrarch] Francesco Petrarca, also known as Petrarch (1304–1374), helped to make the sonnet into a vehicle for expressing courtly love with a volume of poems praising a woman (real or ideal) named Laura. Some identify the beloved in the sonnets as Laura de Noves, a married aristocrat with whom Petrarch had very little actual contact.
340.25 “Except the Lord build the house,”] Laura is quoting from the psalm that stands as epigraph to the novel, with a line that reinforces her role as the unsung maintainer of domestic order.
347.8 fratello mio] Italian: my brother.
347.9–10 “Stay him with flagons . . . with apples.] Cf. Song of Solomon 2:5: “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.”
SONGS
351.1 Folk Song from the Montayna Province] In this lyric, the first Orsinian text published by Le Guin, she uses imagery that will reappear in other works: hawks, white light, widening circles. A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) begins with lines from the imaginary epic The Creation of Ea: “Only in silence the word, / only in dark the light, / only in dying life: / bright the hawk’s flight / on the empty sky.”
352.1 Red Berries] This and the following poem offer more extended samples of Orsinian, which has words recognizable as cognates to French or Italian (“rosce” red; “matine” morning; “ankor” again) but with distinctive elements such as the more typically Slavic letter K rather than C.
STORIES
359.1 The Fountains] The internal chronology of the Orsinian stories is indicated by dates at the end of each. The two previously uncollected Orsinian stories, “Two Delays on the Northern Line” and “Unlocking the Air,” are not marked with dates, but the events and references seem to indicate that they take place at more or less the times they were written: 1979 and 1990 respectively.
363.31 “Arianism!”] The teachings of Arius (c. 250–336) were deemed heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325, which established the Nicene Creed, affirming the divinity of Christ, as a standard of Christian orthodoxy. Arianism views Jesus as a separate being, son of God, rather than part of the three-part Godhead that became Christian orthodox belief. Despite official disapproval, Arianism never went away and was revived by Unitarian sects that emerged independently in Transylvania in the sixteenth century and Poland in the seventeenth.
365.26 Odne] The Orsinian equivalent of the Germanic war god Odin.
368.36–38 Ropes and webs of darkness . . . hearth.] The visiting priest is portrayed with the same imagery as the failed wizard Cob in The Farthest Shore. Cob threatens the balance of life and death in Earthsea by claiming individual immortality and drawing others into his belief, a dark echo of Christian resurrection.
369.24–25 the Warrior . . . Odne the Silent.] The local mythologized version of the constellation Orion, the Hunter.
390.37–38 Karantay’s The Young Man Liyve] Lisha is reading from the novel written by one character in Malafrena about another: Liyve is a version of Itale Sorde.
415.27 long ago, early in the last century perhaps] Early in the last century would put Maler into the setting of Malafrena.
420.6 October, 1956] The Hungarian uprising of 1956 began on October 23 and led to the collapse of the Communist regime. Soviet troops invaded Hungary on November 4 and suppressed the uprising in fighting that continued in Budapest until November 10.
424.1 Brothers and Sisters] For the original publication of this story in The Little Magazine, Le Guin’s brother, Karl Kroeber, wrote the following introduction:
SISTERS AND SCIENCE FICTION
When the editors of The Little Magazine asked me for a fraternal comment on “Brothers and Sisters” they couldn’t understand how far beyond mere sibling rivalry they were pressing me to go. Since my father was a distinguished scientist, my first years in academia were dominated by a question to which the answer was, “Yes, he is my father.” Scarcely had he died than my mother became famous as an author, and I found myself saying, “Yes, she is my mother.” About the time mother turned from public acclaim to a new and exciting marriage, my sister won the National Book Award, and I found a third variant for my identifying phrase. I’m convinced that should my sister disappear (squashed by a malfunctioning UFO?) one of my children would instantly win a Nobel Prize, or kidnap F. Lee Bailey. My remarks, therefore, must be taken as those of a familial Birdboot.
I remark first that my sister’s writing has convinced me that (as I had long suspected) literary biography is useless for understanding literature. Boswell on Johnson and Bell on Woolf are delightful, but not helpful. I believe I know where both the general conceptions and many of the details in “Brothers and Sisters” originate. Every story of my sister’s is full of references to things and events and relationships I recognize. But to know these sources is to know nothing of significance about the stories as stories. Bad stories often are raw biography. Literary art consists in transforming one kind of reality, that of physical experience, into another kind of reality, that of literary experience. Imagining, the process of transforming, is illuminated dimly, if at all, only by the magic of criticism. Writers are often complex people and fascinating subjects for psychological analysis, but a writer is a person to whom writing happens. As Winnie the Pooh put it, “Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”
Especially disadvantageous for biographers are people like my sister who never become writers but who always are writers. I can’t remember a time when my sister wasn’t writing. I doubt that she can. For such a person writing is a mode of being, like talking for most of us, and making melodies for Mozart. Interestingly, not all the best writers are born writers—Shakespeare may not have been: he seems to have begun lazily and quit early, though commendably active in his middle years. But for those who lisp in numbers, the lisp is the significant biographical fact pointing to the mysterious truth that writers in writing about nothing but their own experience produce works not much illuminated by their experience. Writing is like alchemy—only the process of transmutation matters.
So little for biography, now less for genre, because my sister is not a “science fiction writer.” She is an imaginative author whose early w
ork has followed the pattern of “science fiction,” the best (perhaps the only) mode open to an honest fantast unperturbed by the whims of the New York Literary Establishment. “Fantasy” derives from the Greek for “boaster,” it in turn deriving from a verb “to make visible.” Forms such as science fiction are a natural outlet for the “ostentatious,” that is, impudent, risk-taking writer. Critics, of course, prefer safe experimentalists. But the critical establishment’s power needn’t be overrated, since it is primarily negative. Occasionally it supports talent, seldom if ever does it permanently prevent a genuine artist from succeeding. When I saw the first advertisement for my sister’s work in the New York Review, I predicted a review of her by my colleague Michael Wood within a year. I underestimated Michael’s sensitivity to popular trends by four months.
The national popularity of science fiction, vampire stories, Gothic romances, and the like is impressive. If Bruno Bettelheim is right, this phenomenon might be called THE REVENGE OF DICK AND JANE. It is at least appropriate that a culture which has exorcized from children’s reading all that is genuinely fearful and romantic should be blessed by the high art and moral profundity of The Exorcist. Surely Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are is charming. “Bluebeard” is distinctly not charming, a sign that Grimm’s monsters are real. So real that thousands of psychiatrists every year make thousands of dollars fighting them. Bettelheim’s suggestion that our culture impoverishes children’s fantasy life deserves practical recognition. His claim that fairy stories enable children to confront, rather than to escape from or be defeated by, fundamental human predicaments—loneliness, jealousy, death—is attractive to anyone who believes that, on a higher level and in a more complex fashion, fine literature is analogously didactic. By imaginatively living through the course of a novel or play one learns useful truths of human existence. The bizarre, absurd, and surreal elements so prevalent in our “serious” fiction too often are but cheap disguises for imaginative poverty of writer and reader. The popularity in our novels of the monologue form seems likewise symptomatic of an enfeeblement of fictionalizing energy, which does not recount but transmutes so that a strong reader (as Bloom would call her) may enjoy re-transforming.
Ursula K. Le Guin Page 65
