Franz Rosenzweig

Sir, – I often heard the story of Franz Rosenzweig’s near-conversion to Christianity from my teacher, the late Nahum Glatzer, who was a friend of Rosenzweig’s and editor of many of his writings. I would like to add an additional dimension that David J. Wasserstein omitted from his account (Commentary, June 20): the synagogue that Rosenzweig attended in Berlin on that fateful Yom Kippur of 1913, inspiring him to withdraw from conversion to Christianity and devote himself to Judaism, was (according to Professor Glatzer) a small, devoutly Orthodox, East European-style “shtiebl”, quite different from his parents’ grand, modern, Reform temple in Kassel that he had just attended on Rosh Hashanah.

Thus, a crucial element in the mythology about Rosenzweig’s last-minute “rescue” from conversion to Christianity was the pious Judaism of Eastern Europe that assimilating German Jews had long held in contempt. Repudiating the assimilation that many German Jews underwent, Rosenzweig’s story is not only a rejection of conversion, but instructs all Jews about the dangers of Reform Judaism and insists that a rebirth of Jewish commitment can only occur through exposure to the religiosity of East European Jews that had been lost in the West. Indeed, their sense of pride in Jewish identity as well as their piety continued to fascinate Rosenzweig when he visited small Jewish communities in the East during his military service in the First World War, at the same time that he was writing The Star of Redemption, his magnum opus.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL
Department of Religion, Dartmouth College, HB 6036, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755.

Lemon or melon

Sir, – Some Durrellian gremlin evidently got at Jonathan Mirsky’s review of Burton Watson’s translation of The Analects of Confucius (July 4), turning Watson’s “bitter melon” into three “bitter lemon”s. But even Watson’s rendering of the vegetable that Confucius protested at being taken for – used to decorate a room but not, when mature, eaten – is questionable, since a bottle gourd, or calabash, is one thing and a bitter melon another (as adventurous Chinese-food mavens know). Nor was James Legge’s sturdy Analects of Confucius (1861) the book’s first Englishing; his bibliography lists versions published in 1809 and 1828.

MARTIN LEVINE
7401 Eastmoreland Road, Apartment 916, Annandale, Virginia 22003.

Chandler’s output

Sir, – Lidija Haas, in an otherwise informed and perceptive essay on the New Romantic Novel (June 20), seems to think that Raymond Chandler “churned out” his “sweaty, mass-market paperback[s] . . . swiftly and regularly”, like other assembly-line producers of genre fiction “repeating their familiar structures with the details changed for novelty’s sake”. In fact, over a span of nearly two decades, from 1939 to 1958 (the year before he died), Chandler “churned out” only seven novels. True, their frequency declined as his drinking got worse, but the more fundamental reason for his slackening pace is to be found in his relentless self-criticism. I will leave it to other readers to defend his originality against imputations of “familiarity” and “novelty”.

CHARLES J. RZEPKA
Department of English, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.

India made him

Sir, – In his review of Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib (July 4), Navtej Sarna writes that “most of what will be remembered of Kipling was finished with the writing of Kim at the age of thirty-five; thereafter, with his stock of Indian memories exhausted, it was all downhill”. It is not clear from the context whether this limiting and, I had thought, old-fashioned judgement of Kipling’s literary career is expressed in the book under review or simply added by Mr Sarna, but it seems a little like saying, for instance, that Beethoven’s music falls off after his Op 100. What about the extraordinary further development of Kipling’s art in his later, twentieth-century short stories, from the volume Traffics and Discoveries (1904) onwards? While it is certainly true that “India made him” (Charles Allen’s words) in the sense that India and the Raj provided such rich material for his work of the late Victorian period, culminating in Kim, Kipling’s achievement is far from circumscribed by his Indian experience and memories, as Sarna suggests. While his political outlook may have become anachronistic in his own lifetime, his fiction continued to break fascinating new ground: a combination of conservatism and modernism which, of course, is not altogether unique to Kipling.

TIMOTHY STRAUSS
51 Clyde Road, Brighton.

Craftsmanship

Sir, – The debate about craftsmanship has dimensions beyond what one might expect. It raises notions of perfectibility and imperfection which seem to me to have been more often a matter of myth and of speculation than of fact. Is there hard evidence of the requirement for the insertion of a deliberate flaw into, say, Islamic carpets or Chinese paintings or Friesian dykes? Thus I am not sure I quite buy Matt Chappel’s kindly exculpation in these terms (Letters, June 20) of the typographical disasters reviewers have found in Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman. Irony as a cultural pretence can go too far. For instance, I have heard it argued that in Georges Perec’s crafty “e”-less La Disparition, there is in fact a single deliberate instance of the missing letter; but I now slightly regret the hours I have wasted trying to find it. Should this indeed be the case, however, it would be entirely in accord with the precepts of the Oulipo, to which Perec belonged along with Raymond Queneau, and which dresses up the whole idea of the grit in the oyster as the theory of the “clinamen”. They would surely approve of such deliberate flaws as those apparently inserted in computer security systems to deter hackers.

PIERS BURTON-PAGE
1 Binden Cottages, North Lane, Buriton, Hampshire.

Richard Burton

Sir, – In his review of Iliya Troyanov’s The Collector of Worlds (June 13), Robert Irwin repeats the old myth that Richard Burton translated the Kama Sutra as well as the Arabian Nights. Burton may have been able to pass himself off as a native in Arabic, Hindustani and any number of Indian dialects, but his Sanskrit wasn’t up to much. As I reveal in The Book of Love: In search of the Kamasutra (2007), the pioneering 1883 translation of the Kama Sutra was in fact one of the oddest of literary confections. The chief work was done by the high-minded Bombay archaeologist, Bhagvanlal Indraji. (His name still adorns the pedestal of the Lion Capital of Mathura, one of many treasures he bequeathed to the British Museum.) Burton’s oldest friend, the Indian civil servant Foster Fitzgerald “Bunny” Arbuthnot, provided the precise and very unBurton-like English prose. Burton himself added a few salacious footnotes and acted as publisher, promoting the book enthusiastically to the pornophiles and aristocrats he counted among his friends and sponsors.

JAMES McCONNACHIE
25 Egbert Road, Winchester.

Carradines

Sir, – In her review of some recent ballet performances (Arts, June 27), Judith Flanders was presumably “reminded of” his brother David, rather than Keith, Carradine, and one might also take issue with the misleading syntax that identifies the David Carradine vehicle Kung Fu as “the American television 1970s programme”; “the 1970s American television programme” would be better, lest anyone think that the show took place in the 1970s rather than in its actual setting, the 1870s American West.

PAUL STUEWE
Department of English, Philosophy and Communications, Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vermont 05764.

Et nutat

Sir, – J. C.’s adjudication of the opening lines of various Latin versions of Gray’s Elegy (NB, June 20) will have mystified some readers and misled others. First, why is “triste dat occidui” (John Wright) declared “tongue-twisting” when the chosen favourite (Robert Langrishe) has “vespertina notat”, with its awkward clatter of “t”s and “n”s? In addition, “notat” is unduly prosaic for “tolls the knell”; “canit” (sings) would have been a more Virgilian choice with its palindromic form (-tina canit) and suggestion of a figura etymologica on “campana”. Secondly, and more critically, there is no “daring caesura” in “aut qua / Languescente procul tinnit ovile sono”. The suggestion is in fact incomprehensible unless one assumes that J. C. has mistaken this whole line for a hexameter, notwithstanding the typographic indications that “Languescente” begins a fine pentameter line from a version evidently composed in elegiac distichs. The horribly false quantities of “tinnit ovile sono” when read as if they were intended to constitute a hexameter ending (o, o!) are misleading, but would explain the judgement that this version “misses the soporific substance” of Gray’s “And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds”. In fact, the somnolent spondee of the opening word “Languescente”, followed by the lightly varied consonants and vowels of the following words and the humming “n”s of “tinnit”, beautifully capture both the sense of somnolence and the distant tinkling of bells. Et nutat, J. C.

ARMAND D’ANGOUR
Jesus College, Oxford.

Coke with you

Sir, – Your reviewer William Wootten (June 27) connects a poem in Stephen Romer’s Yellow Studio to a mannerism he has observed in Hugo Williams’s work: “conjur\[ing\] a particular time and milieu \[through a\] proper name. Romer has picked up the habit”. The poem in question begins:

Having a Coke with you
in the Coffee Parisien
has got to be more fun
than trailing to an exhibition

Perhaps Wootten might have recalled instead a poem by Frank O’Hara, whose first line is its title:

Having a Coke With You
is even more fun than going to San
Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye . . .

O’Hara, like Romer, goes on to compare favourably his social escapade to the joys of encountering various twentieth-century paintings. The New York poet, of course, “picked up the habit” of using proper nouns in this way over half a century ago, drawing on the example of Apollinaire, whose significance to Romer’s volume Wootten mentions only in passing.

Might your readers not reasonably expect such explicit allusions and connections to be picked up by your reviewer?

PETER BRENNAN
16b St Andrews Road, Enfield, Middlesex.