Magic Prague

by Eric Byrd Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923 – 1978) was a poet, Slavicist, translator of the great Russian Symbolists and Silver Agers (Bely's Petersburg into Italian, a transmutation as arduous and heroic as any of Ulysses, from what I've heard Nabokov say), and, most memorably, a servant of Czech letters whose devotion extended, in one…

Ségur

by Eric Byrd Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign is the graspable handle New York Review of Books Classics has given David Townsend’s translation-abridgement of General Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande-Armée pendant l’année 1812, published in 1824. In his original two volumes, Ségur interleaved tedious statistics and technical disquisitions in archaic military…

Orlando

by Eric Byrd Orlando's biography spans five centuries but I think Woolf endows but two, the sixteenth and the nineteenth, with a full measure of her erudite brio and critical fantasy. Nothing in the novel surpasses the Renaissance fantasia of the first chapter – sixty pages of enchanting, festive, parti-colored prose. Orlando opens his/her eyes…

Housekeeping, Houseburning: Terrence Malick and Marilynne Robinson

by Eric Byrd A few years ago Slate's culture editor David Haglund posted a piece called “Marilynne Robinson, the Terrence Malick of the Literary World.” Malick and Robinson, he said, are kindred artists. They share a pattern of striking debuts, mid-career hiatus, and late fertility; also, an unfashionable theological seriousness, and a deep attention to…

On Alvin Kernan

by Eric Byrd There's a subgenre of military memoirs produced by elderly emeriti, the crew-cut close readers of postwar English departments, who in late career published personal recollections of they and the other terrified teenagers who mostly fought World War Two. Alvin Kernan (Shakespeare editor, torpedo bomber crewman) is like Paul Fussell (Johnsonian, infantry officer)…