Two marriage episodes from The Saga of Thidrek of Bern, translated by Edward R. Haymes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988; out of print)

THE BRIDE-WINNING OF SIGURD AND GUNNAR

225. Thidrek’s champions return to their lands

Now that King Thidrek and all of his men had proven themselves so that no man in the world would dare to bear a shield against them in battle, they wished to set their lands in order and put great chieftains over castles to rule them. Earl Hornbogi went home to Vindland along with his son Amlung and his wife Fallborg, and they ruled over their land for a long time with honor and respect. Sistram went east to Fenidi and became duke there and the most famous of men, just as his kinsmen had been before. Herbrand went home to his country where he was the most powerful duke.

226. Sigurd takes Grimhild

Then Thidrek rode home with King Gunnar to Niflungaland along with all those who were later to be his knights, and they made the plan that later became very famous, namely that Young Sigurd should marry Grimhild, the sister of King Gunnar and of Hogni, and that he should take half of King Gunnar’s kingdom. This was now celebrated with a great feast and all the best men of the realm were invited and this feast lasted five days and was exceedingly grand in all ways.

And now when they were all sitting together, King Thidrek, King Gunnar and Young Sigurd, Sigurd spoke to Gunnar, his brother-in-law: “I know of a woman who is outstanding above all the women in the world in fame and in all courtesy. She is also superior to all other women in wisdom, courtliness, and all knowledge, nobility, and ambition and she is called Brynhild. She rules over the castle that is called Saegard. You should take this woman as your wife, and I shall help you because I know all the ways that lead there.’

Then King Gunnar answered and eagerly accepted this advice.

227. King Gunnar asks for Brynhild

Then King Thidrek, King Gunnar, Hogni, Young Sigurd and all of their fellows left the feast and traveled a long way without stopping until they reached the castle of Brynhild. And when they arrived, she welcomed warmly King Thidrek and King Gunnar, but she was cool toward Sigurd, because she knew that he had his own wife. The first time they had met he had promised her with oaths that he would take no other woman but her, and she had sworn that she would take no other man.

Then Sigurd went and spoke with Brynhild and told her their purpose and asked that she accompany King Gunnar.

And she answered in this way: “I have found out in truth how badly you keep your word to me, the oaths we swore. In spite of that, if I had all the men in the world to choose from, I would still choose you as a husband.”

Then Young Sigurd answered: “It must take place as has been planned, for you are the most worthy woman and the noblest I know, and things cannot be between us as was intended earlier. I have urged King Gunnar to do this for he is the greatest man. He is an excellent knight and a powerful king, and you and he seem to me a good match. I took his sister rather than you because you do not have any brothers. And he and I have sworn that he shall be my brother and I his.”

Then Brynhild answered: “I see now that I cannot have you and for that reason I will take good advice from you and from King Thidrek.”

Then King Thidrek and King Gunnar came to where they were speaking and they did not end their discussion before it was decided that Gunnar would wed Brynhild.

228. Gunnar does not get his will with Brynhild

And now a great feast was prepared. When it was ready and many worthy men had come together, King Gunnar was supposed to go to wed Brynhild. The first night Gunnar wished to stay beside Brynhild in her bed, and no third person was allowed to sleep in the chamber, because the watchmen kept their watch outside the hall.

When the two were together, the king wished to lie with his wife, but she certainly did not want it. And they strove so much between them that she took his belt and bound his feet and his hands and hung him on a nail by his hands and feet, and there he remained almost until daybreak. When day began she freed him, and he went to his bed and lay there until he was supposed to get up and his men came in to him. Then the men went to drink and he told no one what had happened, nor did she. The second night the same thing happened and also on the third. King Gunnar was completely dejected and did not know what to do about it.

And then he remembered that Sigurd, his brother-in-law, had sworn an oath to be as a brother to him in all things, and he was the wisest of men, so Gunnar decided to trust him in this case, to let him know, and to take his advice about what was to be done. He spoke privately to Sigurd and told him the truth.

And Sigurd answered: “I shall tell you what it is that causes this. She has a supernatural power as long as she retains her virginity so that there is scarcely a man who has her strength, but when it is lost she will be no stronger than other women.”

Then Gunnar answered: “For the sake of our friendship and family ties I trust you more than any other man in those cases where much is at stake and things must be kept secret. I also know that you are such a strong man that you could take her virginity if any man in the world can, and I would most like to trust you that it will never become known to any man if it is done this way.”

Then Sigurd answered and said that he would do what Gunnar wanted. And thus it was decided.

229. Sigurd sleeps with Brynhild

Evening came and Gunnar set out to go to his bedchamber, and at the first opportunity, he arranged for Young Sigurd to go into his bed. He put on Sigurd’s clothes and went away, and everyone believed that he was Young Sigurd. Sigurd cast clothes over his head and appeared completely weak and thus lay there until everyone had gone away and was asleep. And then he went to Brynhild and quickly took her virginity. In the morning he took from her hand a gold ring and put another in its place. And now a hundred men came to meet him and the first was King Gunnar. He went to the bed, and Sigurd went to meet them after he and Gunnar had changed their clothes. They managed for no one to know that it had happened thus.

230. The knights go home after Gunnar’s wedding

When the feast had lasted seven days and nights, they prepared to ride home. King Gunnar set chieftains in charge of the castle to rule it and he rode home to Niflungaland with his wife Brynhild. When he had come home, he sat in his kingdom and ruled it now in peace together with his brother-in-law Young Sigurd and his brothers Högni and Gernoz. But King Thidrek and all of his men rode home to Bern and they parted in the best friendship.

THE STORY OF HERBURT AND HILD

231. Tristram kills his brother Herthegn

Count Herthegn was married to Isolde, the sister of King Thidrek. They had three sons. The oldest was named Herburt, the second Herthegn, and the third Tristram. The champion Vigbald was also with the count. The count wished to have him teach his sons to fence, since they were now old enough to learn all kinds of skills and courtesy. Herburt and Herthegn learned well, but Tristram, the youngest, was slow and learned worst of all.

One day, when Vigbald was sitting at table with his apprentices, the two older brothers were talking between themselves, saying that their brother Tristram was not learning to fence. They said that he should learn another occupation, since he could not understand any of this. Tristram answered and said that they should test him at fencing with either one of them and they would find out whether he could do anything or whether it was as they said that he could not learn anything. They consented to do as he wished and Tristram wished to fight immediately. The brothers and their master Vigbald went out and they took the swords they expected to fence with.

Young Tristram said that it would be of no importance to fight with blunted swords. He said he wanted to fight with sharp swords: “and then we will know,” he said, “if you or I can do something with our weapons if our swords cut. We shall not get angry over this, though.”

His brother Herthegn was going to fight and he thought it good that they were fighting with sharp weapons, because he was already better at fencing. But Master Vigbald wanted to see if they had learned anything while they were learning from him, and he bade them not get angry because they had sharp swords. Herthegn said that he would certainly not get angry, but young Tristram lifted up his sword and went against his brother rather angrily and then he took up his shield. His master went to him and said that he should not take up the shield in this way and that he had not taught him to pick up his shield this way, but rather in this fashion and he told him how. Tristram answered him angrily and said that he would not learn anything now if he had not learned anything before and that there was no use for him to teach him.

They now went together and fenced and it seemed to Herthegn that he could land a blow on his brother any way he wanted to and he did not defend himself. Young Tristram raised his sword and aimed a blow at his brother Herthegn, but Herthegn raised up his shield before the blow. When Tristram saw that, he ran his sword under the shield and into the body above the belt, so that the sword ran through him and Herthegn fell dead to the ground.

Tristram threw down his shield and went away with drawn sword to where his horse was. He leapt onto the horse and rode away out of the country to Brandinaborg to Duke Irons, and stayed there a long time. He told the duke all about his trip and what had happened when he had left his country and what he had done. The duke welcomed him warmly and made him his servant and gave him into the care of Nordian, his hunter. He now took care of the duke’s hunting dogs and rode in the hunt. He pleased the duke well.

232. Herburt comes to Bern

Count Herthegn was informed that his son had been killed and that young Tristram had gone away. He called his son Herburt to him and asked where his brother was, and whether it was true what had been told him that his son Herthegn had been killed and that Tristram had ridden away. Herburt said that it was true.

The count now said: “I have now lost two sons, and you alone are responsible, because you are the oldest and you should have advised them and prevented them from doing something that would turn out ill. But you have urged them together and advised them to the course that things have taken. It is fitting that you alone pay and you will never be a respected man again.”

Herburt thought it bad that his father was angry at him, and he became anxious about this, and he went away and thought it over a short while. Then he got his horse and his weapons and rode away from Ivern.’ He took the roads that led to Bern to meet King Thidrek, his uncle, and he told him everything that had happened: that his brother had been killed and that their youngest brother Tristram had done it and that his old father had blamed him for it. That was why he had gone away. King Thidrek welcomed his kinsman warmly. He remained with him in great honor.

Herburt became a man of great accomplishments in all things, so that his equal could scarcely be found in any sport or in knightly prowess.

233. Thidrek hears about Hild, the daughter of King Artus

King Thidrek did not have a wife at this time because he had neither seen nor heard of a woman as beautiful as he wanted. He was told about a woman named Hild, the daughter of King Artus of Bertanga [Bretagne].She was said to be the most beautiful of all women. King Thidrek sent his men out into all the world to find him the most courteous of ladies. These men came to Bertanga and to King Artus and were told that his daughter was the most beautiful woman in the world. She was protected so carefully that the messengers could never see her as long as they stayed there. Everyone who had seen her said that no man had seen as beautiful or as fair a woman. After this they returned to Bern and told King Thidrek how much they were told about this woman: that she was more courteous and fairer than others might find if they sought through all the world. They also told him that she was so carefully guarded that no foreigner could see her, nor could any of her countrymen except the closest friends of the king.

When the king had heard this news, he began to think much about how be could win this woman. He called his kinsman Herburt to him and said that he should bring his message to Bertanga and ask for the hand of Hild, the daughter of King Aflus. Herburt said that he would go wherever he wished to send him.

King Thidrek had him prepared for the trip and gave him twenty-four knights and gave them good armor and good horses and good clothing.

234. Herburt brings King Thidrek’s proposal

Herburt now rode all the way to Bertanga where he was well received by King Artus. When Herburt had been there a short time, he went before the king and told him that King Thidrek of Bern, his uncle, had sent him thence to ask for his daughter Hild on behalf of of King Thidrek.

King Artus asked why King Thidrek did not come there himself to ask for his daughter if he wished to gain her.

Herburt answered that there had been other men of King Thidrek’s there for some time and that they had not gotten to see her. “And now he sends his nephew, whom he trusts well, to see the woman himself.”

The king answered that he would also not be able to see her, because it was not their custom to let foreigners see her except on the one day when she was in the habit of going to church.

235. Herburt serves King Artus

Herburt remained a long time with King Artus and the king made him his man and he was supposed to serve the king at table. When he had been there a while, Herburt was such a courteous knight that the king and his men thought that they had scarcely seen his equal. When the king had seen how well he served, the king increased his honor, made him his steward. He was put in charge of the mead, of waiting on guests, and of serving those who required the greatest care. He served him in this office with such skill that no one had ever seen anyone like him before. The king increased his honor even more and made him his personal steward, and he had to serve the king himself. He carried out this task so well that the king himself and all his men thought that no man who had come there was his equal in courtesy and in all the tasks he was to perform, neither foreigner nor countryman. One time when he had been serving at the king’s table and had washed his hands, he did not take a towel, but held his hands up in the sun and dried them in this fashion.

236. Herburt hears about the princess

Herburt was with the king when an important holiday arrived. There was a great festival in the king’s hall and on the same day Hild was due to go to church. Herburt went to the road ahead of her and planned to see her. When Hild went out from her hail, twelve counts went with her, six on each side, holding up her gown, and then came twelve monks, six on each side, who held up her mantle. After that came twelve earls with byrnies, helmets, shields and swords and they were to see that no one would be so bold as to speak with her. Over her head there was a structure like two peacocks, and this was held up with all of the framework that went with it to shield her so that the sun could not burn her fair face. Around her head were silken veils, so that no one could see her face, and so she went to the church, sat on her seat, took her book, and sang and never looked up from it.

Herburt now went into the church, so that he came as close to the princess as possible, but he did not see her face because the men who were supposed to guard her stood in front of her. These were the men who had come with her, the twelve counts and the twelve monks. The twelve earls who were supposed to defend her with weapons stood before the church.

Herburt had taken two mice and had one decorated with gold and the other with silver. He turned the mouse that was decorated with gold loose and the mouse ran toward the stone wall near where the princess was sitting. When the mouse ran toward her, she looked around quickly to see where the mouse was running, and Herburt was able to see a little of her face. A little while later he turned the other mouse loose, the one decorated with silver, and this mouse ran the same way as the first one had toward the wall where the princess was, and for the second time the princess looked up from her book to see where the mouse was running. Now she saw a distinguished and courteous man and smiled at him, and he smiled in return. A short time later she sent her lady in waiting to ask who he was, where he came from, and what he was doing there.

He answered: “My name is Herburt. I am a kinsman of King Thidrek of Bern and he sent me here. I cannot tell you my errand, but if your lady wishes to know it, then I will tell it only to her alone.”

The girl returned and told the princess everything she had been told and how this man wished to meet with her. She answered and said that she dared not speak one word with a foreigner while her mother and father were present and she asked him to wait until they had left and told him to stand behind the church door. The girl went back again and told him what the princess had said. He did as he had been told and waited at the door, as she had said, until the king and queen had left. The princess now went out to the door after the king. She turned behind the door and Herburt greeted her. She bade him welcome and asked what mission he had with her.

He answered: “That will take a long time to say. I have been in this place a half year, and I have not been able to come near you nor to hear you speak. But my mission has to do with you and I would like it if you can arrange for us to talk for a longer time so that you can know my errand.”

She answered and said that she would arrange it.

A monk, who was a watchman for her, went between them, pushed him aside and asked how he could be so bold, as a foreigner, “that he speak with you, lady, and he shall pay for it quickly.”

But Herburt took the monk’s beard in his right hand and shook him so hard that the beard came away with the skin. He said that he would teach him not to push foreigners. The princess went away along with her attendants and ladies-in-waiting, and Herburt went back to the king’s board and served. And the princess was drinking there with her father in the hall because it was a great feast.

237. Herburt serves the princess

Herburt stood before the king’s table and served. The princess spoke to her father: “Sir, will you give me a gift if I request it of you?”

The king asked: “What are you going to request? Everything is at your disposal that you wish to own in my kingdom.”

She answered: “I wish you to give me this courteous table servant as my servant.”

The king answered: “You shall have the servant, but I promised you the fulfillment before I knew what you would ask.”

When the feast was over, the princess returned to her castle and young Herburt traveled with her and was supposed to serve her now.

Herburt now sent twelve knights back to Bern to tell King Thidrek that it had come about that he would now be able to speak with her. He added that he had seen her and that she was the most beautiful of all women as had been said. The other twelve knights remained there and were supposed to wait on how his mission turned out. Now the messengers traveled back to Bern and told King Thidrek all of this news, and he was pleased about their journey.

238. Herburt woos the princess and flees with her

Herburt spoke often with Hild, the daughter of King Artus, and he told her that King Thidrek, his uncle, had sent him to her with the mission of asking for her hand.

She asked: “What kind of man is Thidrek of Bern and what does he look like?”

Herburt answered: “King Thidrek is the greatest of warriors in the world and the most generous person, and if you will become his wife, you shall lack neither gold, nor silver, nor treasure.”

She answered: “Can you draw his face on this wall?”

He answered: “Lady, I can draw with my hands so that a man would recognize King Thidrek who had seen him before.”

He drew a large and frightening face on the stone wall and he said: “Lady, look here at the face of Thidrek of Bern, and may God help me, if his face is not really much more frightening.”

She replied: “May God not be so angered with me that this frightening devil would take me.”

And she continued: “Sir, why are you wooing me for the hand of King Thidrek of Bern instead of for your own hand?”

Herburt spoke: “I shall carry out the mission for King Thidrek as he commanded. But if you do not want to have him, then I will gladly ask for you myself, if you wish to have me. Even though I am not a king, all of my family is high-born, and I have enough gold and silver to give you, and I fear no man, neither King Artus, nor his men, nor Thidrek of Bern, nor any man in the world, and I shall do any sort of thing you wish.”

She answered then: “Sir, of all men I have seen, I would choose you first. I do not know anything about King Thidrek, except that he is more powerful than you are, but I wish to have you and not him.”

Before they ended their discussion, they put their hands together and gave each other oaths that they would not part until death.

Herburt now remained in her hall for some time before he spoke one day in the morning to the princess: “Lady, I would advise that we ride out of the city before the king becomes suspicious of us.”

She said that he should decide everything about her and that she would follow him all her life. He took two horses and saddled them, one for himself and one for her. They rode from the castle quickly to the forest. When the guardsmen who were guarding the city walls saw them riding, they suspected who might be accompanying Herburt and they went quickly to the king and told them what they had seen. When the king heard that, he sent men to the princess’s castle. When the messengers became aware that the princess had ridden away and that Herburt had gone with her, they quickly went back to the king’s hall and told the king what they had found out.

239. Herburt escapes with the princess

The king called for his knight Hermann and bade him ride after Herburt and not to return home until he had the head of Herburt to give the king.

Hermann quickly took his weapons and his horse and he had thirty knights riding with him, along with thirty squires carrying weapons and byrnies, and they all rode the road that Herburt had taken earlier. They came so near that Herburt could see them and he spoke to his lady: “The king’s knights are riding after us. The king will think that you have gone away without much honor. Because of this he will have sent his knights so that they should serve you and both of us.”

She answered in this fashion: “Sir, they will have a different mission than you said, because they will be wanting to have your life.”

He answered: “Lady, why should they seek the life of an innocent man? And if that is their mission, as you say it is, then may God help me that I shall not die before these men for no reason. But I shall not run away any longer.”

He now dismounted and took her down and bound the horses to a tree. He lay down beside the princess and took her maidenhood. A short time later, Hermann, the kinsman of King Artus, and his men arrived, and Herburt said that they should be welcome.

But Hermann answered that he would never receive a truce, and he continued: “Tell me, you evil dog, before you die, and may God help you that you do not lie, has Hild retained her maidenhood?”

Herburt answered: “When the sun went up this morning, she was a maiden. Now she is my wife.”

Hermann rode at him and aimed his spear at his chest, but at the same moment Herburt drew his sword and cut the spearshaft in two. The second blow struck Hermann and split his helmet, his byrnie and his neck asunder, and he fell dead to the ground. He immediately dealt another knight a blow in the thigh that cut off his leg and he fell off the other side of the horse. He struck at the third one. A very hard battle ensued for a long time until twelve knights and fourteen squires were killed. The ones who remained all fled back to the city. But Herburt had eleven great wounds and his shield and byrnie were cut apart and made useless. Hild now took her cloth and wiped off his wounds. After that he got on his horse and they rode for a long way until they found a king. Herburt remained with him a long time and was made a duke in his army and he had great honor there and there are many great stories to be told of him.

240. The marriage of Thidrek, Fasold, and Thetleif the Dane

It happened one time that King Thidrek made a journey north through the mountains and he was accompanied by Fasold and Thetleif the Dane. They had sixty knights with them. They traveled until they came to a castle called Drekanflis, where he was well received, along with his men. The castle was ruled by King Drusian’s nine daughters, whose mother had died of the grief she had received when Ekka was killed.

Thidrek told them that he wished to ask for the hand of the eldest daughter of King Drusian, who was called Gudilinda. The second sister should go to Fasold and the third to Thetleif the Dane. The daughters of King Drusian did not wish to refuse this honor and so they accepted. A great and rich feast was prepared, and at this feast King Thidrek and Fasold and Thetleif the Dane all married. This broke the promise that had been made to the daughter of Sigurd the Greek. This feast lasted nine days and it increased every day so that more was offered each day than had been offered on the previous one.

Fasold and Thetleif were now placed over the kingdom that had belonged to King Drusian, and King Thidrek made them both dukes, and he himself rode home to Bern along with his wife Gudilinda. When he came home he ruled over his kingdom.

Belknap Crater in Mt Washington Wilderness

Picked up by James G. at about 8:30 AM; the drive through Springfield, out McKenzie River highway, off the old McKenzie Pass road, 270° curves as the road winds up to 5000’. It’s cold, it’s in the high thirties as we get out of the car. I’m putting on almost all my extra clothes: a wool shirt, raincoat, wool muffler, gloves, wrap-around winter hat, everything except rain pants. Fortunately it’s a bright sunny day, the sun starting to warm the black rocks and my back.

The Dee Wright Observatory, a stone castle in the lava barrens, and the nearby Three Sisters gleaming snowy to the south, bare Mount Washington further to the north, but no Pacific Crest trailhead here, just the Lava River Trail, a half-mile paved loop east of the observatory through interesting lava features. Back west on the highway a half mile to the trailhead, brown forest floor of sand and dead conifer needles, a few trees. Soon we’re taking off our outer garments as the exercise of hauling a daypack full of lunch and water (and a thermos of tea in my case) uphill begins to warm us. Now I’m down to my teeshirt. Up the trail – not much greenery except the trees, the ferns also turning brown, along the ecotone next to the black lava barrens and then out into them, the trail dusty or stones larger than an egg, hard on the foot, a trough between piled sharp black rocks as far as you can see, edging upwards. No views, just upwards through a maze of small lava formations, little tables troughs piles jumbles until Belknap Crater tan and sandy looking with a few trees near the top, or nearer lower Little Belknap Crater red like new blood dripping on sinister black battlements hovering over the lava barrens.

There is no life here, a little lichen maybe on some rocks, but then there’s a fir tree down in a trough in the rocks, another trough has a willow-like shrub, narrow pointed green leaves. Couldn’t be a water-loving willow – it’s a mystery plant, here in the lava. An hour or more on the trail and we’re at the first junction, a trail off to the right heading over towards Little Belknap, to the left towards Belknap Crater now looming in the near west, a giant tan ridge with a few trees at the start of the summit ridge, three diagonal lines marking it. We’re waiting for the elderly gent with walking stick in each hand coming down the trail from Little Belknap, “Those are the trails up it,” he says, “see, a man and a woman have just broken out of the trees and are going up them.” We see them, and not three minutes later I notice that they’ve gotten about 10% of the way up. “We can do that,” I tell James, and talk him into going there rather than heading over to Little Belknap. “Climbing that’s an accomplishment,” says the old man, who got up there once in recent years. He advises us: “Just put one foot in front of the other and don’t look up the trail. On the way down, you can slide-step down the scree – it’s better for the path not to go down it.”

So passing up the spur trail to Little Belknap, we continue gently uphill on the Pacific Crest Trail through the lava a few hundred feet until we reach the edge of the sparse grove, again the tan soil, this time with an unsigned track, a climber’s trail, straight towards Belknap Crater. A lovely spot for a campsite if only there were water. We reach the well-demarcated beginning of the slope only ten minutes after leaving our loquacious temporary guide, and start up the trail. It is quite steep and very narrow, and I’m stepping into the more or less horizontal footprints ahead of me, because the ground is so soft, almost like climbing a dune, that I fear it will just crumble underneath if I walk on the otherwise doubly-tilted trail: sloping steeply up directly ahead and even more steeply off to my left where the exposure, a height of steep sandy soil, increases by the step.

As we rise out of the lava the nearby volcanoes are swimming into view: North and Middle Sister (parenthesized on maps as Faith and Hope), with slightly higher South Sister (Charity) obscured behind: all snowy with their first dusting of the late summer.

It’s becoming quite a ways down the bare slope to the grove of confers below (eventually 570’, from the summit). Violating received wisdom I look ahead up the narrow trail and immediately understand that it is so steep that I’m dizzy trying to walk and look craning my neck at the same time – I stop and recover myself, look up again, then down at the immediate footprints ahead of me as I continue to fill them. One step at a time indeed is best. We’re curious about our pulses, mine is 150/minute and strong – went right down at the top, a good sign.

We’re coming up below the ridgeline now, and a small long-dead tree trunk has fallen across the trail where a little improvised detour arcs around underneath it. The trail is even narrower here and a bit alarming, it’s only the width of the footprints, so I pause momentarily daunted before taking it on. Down a few feet, back up, and returning to our now luxurious-seeming width of climber’s trail. This is how it is on the mountain slopes, we’re lucky if the climber’s route is so beaten down that it’s a real trail but we’re going up no matter how bad it is. Up and up. A few more trees now, live with many long dead branches almost white, or completely dead, but all stunted in the wind, limited in both height and width by the severity of exposure. And finally breasting the ridge, a small but luxuriant growth of these little trees as the ridgetop grants a view not only to the jumble of lower hills in the west, with the more distant ones showing their clearcuts marked as patches of lighter blue, but Belknap’s crater directly below, a waste of vertical rock over tumbling rockfall down to the waste ground at bottom, all black and gray, red and dark brown. A startling view of geologically recent violence.

And now the trail turns up the ridge, the best part really, an easy solid trail on the ridgeline with views on both sides, steep but not difficult, the ridge wide enough to provide a sense of comfort, as we pick our way up and find the barren summit. Here we are! There’s a light breeze, the accumulated heat of the lava fields reflecting back into the air. It’s very pleasant. I immediately change my shirt, exchanging my sweat-soaked tee shirt for my dry wool shirt and putting my rain jacket over that as a windbreak. Nice to be warm, comfortable, sitting and enjoying my lunch with my companion on the otherwise empty summit, staring down into the frozen sea of black lava with the great peaks of the Three Sisters nearby, the top of South Sister in view between the other two and the summit of Broken Top east of South Sister peeking over a dip in the shoulder of North Sister, its arm spreading out visible to the east behind North Sister’s arm. To the north, bare and lower Mt Washington obscuring all but the snowy shoulder of Mt. Jefferson on its right, and only this fragment representing the highest peak in view, with yet lower Three Finger Jack, jagged Jack with its imposing gendarmes, entirely visible beyond Washington’s left side.

We’re drinking tea from my thermos. Then it’s after lunch and as all my friends and relations would know, I’m brushing my teeth… while James has gone to sleep, he’s actually snoring faintly for a moment, than awake again. We look around a little more, including a look at the slightly lower peak nearby with its wind shelter of hand-piled rock. On the barren summit I can’t quite figure out where to start the descent but eventually we figure it out. Where the bottom of the ridge meets the edge of the crater rim, a small flat area covered in vegetation, the combination of lush habitat and austere black volcanic panorama of crater gives a reminiscence of Hawaii, a picture of islands where I’ve never been. But it is only this one microhabitat, all else is pretty bare. We quickly abandon any notion of scree-sliding and stay on the trail, but it forks and we avoid the fork on which we’d ascended, thereby shortening the traverse and heading down sooner. Coming down the sandy slope, through a range of sparse dune grass, a single starveling half-green set of leaf blades every foot or so, the ground seems too hard for sliding, but by about halfway down we’re taking giant sinking fast steps, what fun! and then into the grove of conifers at Belknap’s base.

Then parallel to the base to find our climbers’ track so to work back to the Crest Trail, back in the lava. In the black rock, bright red leaves of – not willow, but what? Later I was told that this would be fireweed, Epilobium angustifolium, the genus with the common name Willow-herb, and also growing as it likes to with the low tiny-leafed huckleberry bushes, all along the ecotone at the boundary between the black lava barren and the sandy-soiled sparse conifer forest.

Hard walking on the rocky trail. Oversize gravel, from small as an egg to big as a baseball. A maze through the black rocks, the mountain views sinking under the encroaching walls with their multitude of formations, suggestive shapes, sharp corners. Finally back into the forest and to the car, down the twisty Pass highway to the straight River highway, listening to the music as it eases us on our way through all the little towns and groceries, McKenzie Bridge, Rainbow, Finn Rock, Blue River, Vida, Leaburg, Walterville, Cedar Flat and then into Springfield, Glenwood, finally Eugene. Bringing air from the mountain with us.

Book notes

I was fortunate to grow up in a household with lots of books, and in a high school crowd with quite a few aspiring writers, some of whom have realized those aspirations. Besides that, literary criticism has sometimes been a useful source for me, e.g. Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin, Erich Auerbach, all of whom are entertaining to read just as writers -- more on them later. H. Stuart Hughes' Prisoners of Hope introduced me to modern Italian Jewish writers such as Carlo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Italo Svevo.

When I was a boy I decided that certain publishing houses were worth checking out: New Directions and to a lesser extent, Grove Press. More recently I've sometimes been partial to MIT Press and Penguin Books, the latter often having the best translations.

I read The NY Review of Books which includes good reporting as well as splendid essays masquerading as reviews, and which has introduced me to numerous fascinating books. More recently I’ve been reading the London Review of Books which has the advantage of being shorter and livelier.

I tend to distrust most bookstores since they're so small compared to the quantity of available work. I rarely will enter one without knowing what I already want. There are some exceptions, notably Powell's in Portland Oregon, which is enormous, and has both new and used. I generally prefer used bookstores anyway, and mostly buy through the on-line used book consortium abe.com.

American History --

At one time I read a quantity of African-American and Native American history, believing that treatment of the oppressed told a lot about my culture. Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore introduced me to a prime ante-bellum source, Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect of Central Park in NYC, Volunteer Park in Seattle, Golden Gate Park in SF, and other parks and campuses far too numerous to mention. In the 1850's he was a traveling correspondent for the NY Times and wrote three volumes which are noteworthy for their unadorned language, concrete observation of people and landscape -- he was a trained naturalist -- and humor.

A diarist from the period is Fanny Kemble of the British theatrical family, whose Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, a bit more flowery, has many interesting observations.

A popular genre of the period was the slave narrative. Some of these are quite striking. I recall particularly the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, written by himself, and Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave, included in an old anthology Puttin' On Ole Massa.

For straight history within the period, Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll: the world the slaves made and Willie Lee Rose's Rehearsal for Reconstruction stand out in my memory. A practitioner of micro-history, Herbert Gutman, has an extraordinary study, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. (Gutman's collected articles are primarily concerned with labor history and include an evocative study of the textile factory women of early 19th century New England and the cultural milieu they created.)

Garry Wills’ “Negro President” is a startling treatment of Jefferson and the very effective support of the slave system through political means.

Journal of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname by Captain John Stedman was recently issued in an edition based on the original manuscript (ed. Richard Price). Stedman, a humane and enlightened man, in some ways typifies the naturalist-explorers of the colonial period: early editions as well as this one include engravings of his paintings of some of the flora and fauna as well as of the horrific treatment of slaves (some of the latter engraved by William Blake). He had an unusual access to and sympathy with all levels of society and provides a complete picture from the most wretched to the most exalted.

More recently, the Autobiography of Malcom X and Richard Wright's Black Boy and the posthumous American Hunger (collected in the Library of America edition) are American classics. For history, Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, Howell Raines' oral history My Soul is Rested, and a narrative-with-photos titled Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, by Danny Lyons, a former U of Chicago student who became SNCC's photographer, are all quite moving. Parting the Waters also is unusual historical writing because of its extensive use of direct quotation, derived from government wiretaps, bugging and police spy reports. Simple Justice is a somewhat more popular treatment of the legal struggle leading to Brown vs. Board of Ed.

For Native American history, I recall being most fascinated by Eve Ball's oral histories of 19th century Apache life, Edmund Wilson's Apologies to the Iroquois, Anthony Wallace's The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, and various volumes in the University of Oklahoma's Studies in the Civilization of the American Indian series – notably Dan Thrapp’s books about Apache/white conflicts, Jack Forbe’s Apache, Navaho and Spaniard, and The Indian and the Horse. Jaime de Angulo's Indian Tales, a book that poets William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder favor, gives another perspective, as does Theodora Kroeber's Ishi (standard college fare). Edward S. Curtis' marvelous photographs, which have been widely reprinted in relatively tiny selections, are available complete at the Multnomah County Library (Portland), where they once let me inspect the thirty-odd oversize volumes in a staff office. Frank Hamilton Cushing's Zuni Breadstuff, illustrated, is an exhaustive and fascinating treatment of maize culture at Zuni pueblo by a late 19th century anthropological prodigy who writes with an obvious enjoyment in the doings of his subjects.

William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain crosses the boundary between history and literature, with a multitude of voices, arguments, styles.

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is charming and pithy.

Susan Delano McKelvey's Botanical Explorations In The Trans-Mississippi West 1790 - 1850 provides many vistas of the pristine West for the botanically literate.

European History --

Georges Duby's William Marshal is a micro-historical look at the actual life behind all those medieval romances I grew up on, e.g. how marriage, infrequently permitted a knight, was a ticket to prosperity, since a married man was permitted to settle.

Norman Davies' God's Playground, a two-volume history of Poland, was a NY Review find. Poland interested me as a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious state (e.g. the Jews had their own estate, with courts and legislature: a status comparable to nobility, clergy, royalty and municipalities) with an elected monarch and a rich intellectual tradition, including Copernicus, for example. Barbara Lifton's moving The King of Children, about the Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, writer and radio personality Janusz Korczak includes some of the same preoccupations in a twentieth century setting. (Korczak’s own writings present a distinctly idiosyncratic view of the lives of children and, in his Ghetto Diary, of life in Nazi hell.) Shielding the Flame is a discussion between a Solidarity journalist, Hanna Krall, and Marek Edelman, a Solidarity figure and the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

E. P. Thompson's well-known The Making of the English Working Class is fascinating and detailed. Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels by another leftist British historian, E. J. Hobsbawn, includes many peculiar stories and introduced me to the great Turkish novelist Yassir Kemal, whose first novel Memed My Hawk describes the type in an Anatolian setting. Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 also interested me.

I found Herodotus' Histories most entertaining, Xenophon's Anabasis a good adventure story, and Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon sufficiently lurid, as was Tacitus' Annals, which is also written in magisterial style. Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of which I've only read the first third, matches these last two in heights of style, depths of intrigue and anecdotal detail.

Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean, a long work that I’ve not yet completed, is an astonishing survey of sixteenth century life in the environs of the great inland sea.

The Italian Carlo Ginzburg, best known as the greatest living authority on witchcraft, has a couple of investigations of unusual world views of ordinary people during Renaissance, The Cheese and the Worms and The Night Battles, based on old Inquisition records.

The diaries of Victor Klemperer, published as I Will Bear Witness, detail everyday life in Nazi Germany from the sophisticated if heartsick point of view of a secular Jewish intellectual.

Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Natalie Zemon Davis' The Return of Martin Guerre both open peculiar doors into pre-revolutionary France.

The Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, sociology rather than history, has many charming fragments of life in virtually another country.

After the introductory section regarding putative history behind the formative myths of Norse culture, Heimskringla by the medieval Icelandic historian Snorre Sturlason paints a gripping picture of adventure and political intrigue. It includes many references to the origins of our own democratic politics. I like the Dover-published translation best.

Russian history --

I've explored this mainly through biographies. Joseph Frank, a Princeton professor of Slavic languages, has published a five volume biography, Dostoevski, which combines biography, social and intellectual history and literary criticism. Alexander Herzen, perhaps the leading liberal of the previous generation, wrote a four volume autobiography, My Life and Thoughts, of which I found the first volume, dealing with his youth in Russia, prior to his life-long exile, to be the most interesting: high spirited, vividly written.

Early Memoirs by the dancer / choreographer Bronislava Nijinska casts a brilliant light on the cultural life of the late Russian empire and western Europe through the 1920's, by focusing on the period of activity of her brother, the great dancer / choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky.

For the Soviet period, Nadhezda Mandelstam's memoir Hope Against Hope and Solzhenitzn's trilogy The Gulag Archipelago are strong stuff. Varlam Shalamov’s stories of Gulag life, acclaimed by Solzhenitzn, translated as Kolyma Tales and Graphite, are extraordinary.

Islamic history –

Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam takes a very large view of its subject, including theological, social, political, artistic, intellectual, and (for context) world history, with the ecological and archaic background also providing the setting for an enlightening treatment of a multi-dimensional civilization.

Louis Massignon’s The Passion of Al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, is a moving four-volume account of the first Sufi to bring his awareness out of the small circle of devotees and into the marketplace, this in the empire’s capital at a time of great corruption; and the survival of his memory after his martyrdom. The first volume was reprinted as a paperback under a similar title.

SUNY under UNESCO’s auspices has published translations in thirty-nine volumes of the great chronology by the medieval Baghdad historian al-Tabari, as The History of al-Tabari. I’ve read several vivid volumes, The Victory of Islam, The Foundation of the Community, The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, The Community Divided, Revolt of the Zanj and The Abbasid Recovery. The last two concern a black slave insurrection and its surpression, and include the author’s own observations of a few of the events described.

The Baburnama in Thackston’s new translation is alternately tedious and fascinating – characterized as the first Islamic memoir, by the humane and gifted founder of the Moghul Empire in India, always nostalgic for the lost mountains of Afghanistan, with many observations of the people and places of his time.

Other history --

Jonathan Schell's The Gate of Heavenly Peace is an interesting treatment of Chinese intellectuals' response to the oppressive situation of their people from the nineteenth century to the present, and introduced me to a few writers.

S. D. Goitein's five volume treatment of the social history of the Jews based in Cairo during the Islamic high middle ages, A Mediterranean Society, based on some 12,000 secular documents surviving from the time, gives an extraordinarily rich and detailed view of life in a completely different environment with some curious echoes and reflections of our own in its entrepreneurial mobility.

For additional Jewish social history, Salo Baron's magisterial treatment in A Social and Religious History of the Jews in eighteen volumes (I've read the first six, so far) similarly recreates lost worlds from the tiniest fragments; as the sources become richer he benefits by the added detail. Arthur Koestler's since discredited The Thirteenth Tribe expands on an area that Baron's third volume outlines, the Khazar Empire (500 - 1000 AD) and State ( - 1200 AD) which converted to Judaism around 750 and which appears to be the source of the later large population of Eastern European Jews. The Jews Of Khazaria, with an unbelievable wealth of obscure citations in many languages, as in Baron, presents a surprisingly closeup look at its subject in less polished a style than Koestler’s.

Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, although initially heavy going when tracing the Kabbalah background, is a fascinating treatment of an astonishing mass movement, with Jews all over Europe and the Ottoman Empire selling up their homes and businesses to go to Jerusalem for the coming of the Messiah.

The Changing Faces of Jesus, by Geza Vermes, an academic expert on the languages and sources of the period, peels away revered layers of theological dogma and tendentious description to provide a closeup of the historical Jesus.

I recently finished The Fatal Shore which describes the Australian penal colony and thus the underside of the British class system and its more oppressed members.



Imaginative literature:

I recently acquired The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry which includes various poets whose work I already knew and others whom I'd only heard of and was glad to discover, such as the recent Nobelist, the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.

Russian literature --

Anton Chekhov's stories, well translated and introduced, are arranged more or less chronologically in the Oxford Chekhov -- I prefer to avoid the earlier ones. The Garnett translations are serviceable but not ordered or well edited. The stories themselves are poignant snapshots. He is almost never medical. I don't enjoy his plays except performed. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have published a range of superior translations from Russian which seem closer to the ideal, in a volume of stories and another volume of novellas. I also enjoyed their translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls, of which only Book One seems worth reading.

Isaac Babel is a Soviet master of the short story, by turns comic, violent, always vivid and original. Reading his stories, variously collected, gave me a new set of eyes.

Pushkin is as great a master of romantic irony as Byron (and reportedly the superior craftsman) but unlike Byron, whose essential subject was himself, Pushkin's eyes were on his society. I especially liked Babette Deutch's translation of the "poem in the form of a novel" Eugene Oneigen and D. M. Thomas' translations of Narrative And Dramatic Poems, both for Penguin. A good translation (in Stanford and Everyman editions) of his prose includes a few marvelous stories and one lively novella. (Stories: Tales of Belkin & The Queen Of Spades; novella: The Captain's Daughter.)

Also translated by D. M. Thomas, Akmatova's “Requiem” describes the tragedy of the Stalinist period.

Turgenev’s Sketches From A Hunter’s Album combines aristocratic privilege and detachment with a very observant eye, observing with equal clarity and rendering with equal vividness the hunstman’s pleasures and their rural social matrix.

Tatyana Tolstaya is a contemporary stylistic cousin to the magic realists of Latin America; I especially like her essays in NY Review but her stories, which have been published in books, are good as well.

Bulgakov’s novel The Master And Margarita is an astonishing performance, an amalgam of peerless satire and tragedy by an author whom Tolstaya cites as a predecessor.

I started reading Tolstoy in my 30's: read War and Peace, read some of the novellas, read Hadji Murad, read Martin Green's Tolstoy and Gandhi: Men of Peace (they corresponded). I starting reading Dostoevski in my teens: read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazof, The Possessed. I don't know what to say of these masters who are so well known as to be above my comment. The extraordinary five volume biography Dostoevski by the Princeton historian Joseph Frank combines biography, literary criticism and social and intellectual history.


Central European literature --

I love a sophisticated and gentle irony which seems to abound in Czech writers. Hasek's The Good Soldier Schwiek And His Adventures In The Great War -- find Cecil Parrott's complete, unexpurgated translation (about 600 pages) -- and Karol Capek epitomize this for me. I particularly like Capek's The Gardener's Year and How a Play is Produced. I don't find Kafka nearly as cheerful although the story is that his friends would roll to the floor in paroxysms of laughter as he read aloud to them.

Is a Bulgarian Jew who lives in England and writes in German within German literature? The first two memoirs of Elias Canetti (1981 Nobelist), The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear are exotic and fascinating; the third, a depiction of Wiemar literary life, less so for me.

The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski specialized in reporting from third world countries in revolution. I was especially fascinated by The Emperor, about Ethiopia, which is a mordantly funny picture of autocracy, and Another Day of Life, about Angola at the end of the Portuguese period. His more recent Imperium about post-Soviet Russia has a little more of the wide-eyed tourist's view, but still many valuable insights e.g. that dictators think themselves experts in everything. Perhaps "mordantly funny" is a Polish ideal, as in Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse which describes the encounters with officialdom of a dissenting writer on the day his friends have persuaded him to set himself on fire in protest outside a party conference.

The Polish poet and Nobel Laureate of 1996, Wislawa Szymborska, writes marvelous lyrics which translate well into English. I sometimes read her aloud to friends who are then smitten with love for this writer’s irony and compassion.

I love Brecht's plays and poetry, which have now been collected in excellent translations by Methuen (ed. Ralph Mannheim) and good ones by Grove Press (I prefer Grove's translation of Galileo, by Charles Laughton, included as an appendix in one of the Methuens). Especially: Galileo, Caucasian Chalk Circle, Good Woman of Setzuan, Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Puntila and His Man Matti, A Man's A Man.

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin adapts Joycean methods to a Weimar workman’s experience. A rich and sometimes difficult work (also Joycean categories).

Goethe’s Faust (I’ve read only Part 1, in a very fluid translation published by New Directions), in which Faust challenges Mephistopheles to restore his faded interest in life’s experiences, combines an elevated moral tone, magnificent language and characterization, and a moving story.

French literature --

The Red And The Black by Stendhal is wonderful, and his Charterhouse Of Parma has many brilliant and evocative scenes. Of Balzac I particularly enjoyed Eugenie Grandet and The Black Sheep, as well as A Harlot High and Low (all in Penguin translations). Of Flaubert, Three Tales and Bouvard And Pecuchet are my favorites; Sentimental Education and Madame Bovary less so. Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle is a great introduction to symbolist literature. New Directions publishes a good translation of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (2nd edition), which suits my taste for the twisted. The Journal of the Gouncourt Brothers is an invitation to intimate observation of French society and literary life 1850 - 1890 by the founder of France's premier literary award and his brother. Maupassant's stories are entrancing.

In the 20th century, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's novels (trans. Ralph Mannheim) are explosive, funny and cynical, written in a unique and vital style. I especially enjoyed Guignol's Band and Castle To Castle, which is the first of a trilogy of his adventures as a refugee from the French Resistance in Nazi Germany during the closing years of the war. Simenon is the compelling and unbelievably prolific author of both gloomy psychological novels and a mystery series with a similar atmosphere relieved by the imperturbable presence of Chief Inspector Maigret. I’ve read only the first two books of Proust’s enormous architectonic recreation of upper-class French life and enjoyed him as a satirist and as a most idiosyncratic and baroque prose stylist.

Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (notorious for his mystery novel omitting all e’s, translated as A Void; followed by a short story in which all vowels were e’s) is a very peculiar and funny novel which purports to describe a Paris apartment and all its inhabitants at one particular moment of one day. The ancillary stories that get worked in have extraordinary variety and richness.


English literature --

Just a smattering of some favorites here -- I liked the claustrophobic atmosphere of Conrad's The Secret Agent and Victory. Boswell's journals are like the life itself, from the time he meets Johnson a third of the way through the first one (London Journal). Byron's Don Juan and multi-volume Letters And Journals introduce a sophisticated, ironic and genial companion. Don Juan takes a lot of skimming, though. Lawrence's Women In Love is as intense as Dostoevski. Henry Green's Loving is an amazing below-stairs novel; Living, a great workplace novel influenced in its occasionally fractured syntax by the work of Virginia Woolf, who was his first publisher. His Party-Going is a dizzying look at the lives of the wealthy. I also enjoyed his Caught and Back, although these later novels are not quite at the same level. Auden's poems, in their original versions before his conversion to Catholicism, are sometimes worthy of Byron in their irony and compassion. Heaney’s translation of Beowulf brings it to life.

Irish literature --

I read Ulysses a few years ago, without a trot, and was entranced; I'd been similarly recently fascinated by Dubliners but haven't reread Portrait Of The Artist as a Young Man since youth. Shaw's plays before 1920 are scintillating. Playboy of the Western World is also as good on the page as in the theater, as is Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. Everybody loves James Stephens' The Crock of Gold. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds is a hilarious travesty of Irish literary life in a language as honed as Beckett’s.

Italian literature --

I liked Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped At Eboli and Primo Levi's memoir of his return from Auschwitz, The Reawakening. I liked the autobiographical sketches in Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. Silone's Bread and Wine is a great novel of the anti-fascist resistance. I have recently been fascinated with the work of Natalia Ginzburg, especially Voices In The Evening and All Our Yesterdays (also published as A Light For Fools), which present themselves as the random happenings of life itself. I’ve enjoyed three Sicilian writers: Giovanni Verga, whose Little Novels of Sicily is translated by DH Lawrence, and whose two late novels Mastro-Don Gesualdo (not in Lawrence’s inferior translation) and The House by the Medlar Tree are gripping tragedies of ordinary life; Lampedusa’s The Leopard; and the novels and stories of Leonardo Sciascia, whose unsettling mysteries bring the underside of Sicilian life to light.

Classical literature --

I love Catullus' poems in suitably frank translation. I read Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Iliad a few years ago and it knocked me out.

Scandinavian literature --

Strindberg's A Witch in a new edition is an astonishing portrait of adolescence. His genial novel about islanders off the Swedish coast, People of Hemso, is unambitious and occasionally comic. Hamsun's The Growth of the Soil is a novel of Norwegian pioneers in the north. My wife loved Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy with which I'm unacquainted. Independent People by the 1950’s Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness, reprinted in paperback, is a marvelous pastoral combining comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy, in astonishing proportions.

The Complete Sagas Of Iceland have recently been published complete in excellent translations in five volumes by an Icelandic publisher, with selections appearing in various Viking/Penguin volumes. Well worth finding are these translations of Njal’s Saga (by Robert Cook), Saga of Grettir the Strong, Egil’s Saga, and many others. A fine selection The Sagas of Icelanders was remaindered in hardcover and may still be available, also published in paperback.

Oriental literature --

I greatly enjoyed two lengthy medieval Chinese novels, Outlaws of the Marsh (trans. Sidney Shapiro) with its enormous cast of roughnecks, and The Journey to the West (which I read abridged as Monkey) with its broad comedy and heaven-resident Buddhist parodies of the Chinese civil service. I'm currently in the second volume of the great salacious (and banned) medieval Chinese novel Chin Ping Mei in a recent translation (The Plum in the Golden Vase, earlier abridged as The Golden Lotus), with its sexually ravenous anti-hero, detailed picture of society, and textural complexity. The somewhat later The Story of the Stone, better known in abridged versions as The Dream of the Red Chamber, combines a very detailed look at later Chinese manners with an endless round of parties, poetry contests, and many portraits of young women both wealthy and in service.

I read a great medieval Japanese novel for school many years ago, Tale of Genji by Murasaki by Lady Murasaki Shikibu.

My favorite books by the contemporary Turkish novelist Yassir Kemal are The Sea-Crossed Fisherman and The Birds Are Also Gone. The better-known Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red combines a post-modern sensibility with a murder mystery and encyclopaedic assessment of the art of the miniature set in 16th century Istanbul.

For Egyptian Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz, I especially enjoyed Midaq Alley, Fountain and Tomb, Adrift on the Nile, all very different: respectively a novel of variously sordid and elevated Cairo life, a reminiscence of his Cairo youth, and a tale of marijuana smokers. The American Paul Bowles has translated several weird novels or collections of stories by a Moroccan hustler and compulsive story-teller named Mohammed Mrabet. Bowles’ translation of Charhadi’s A Life Full Of Holes gives an indelible impression of Moroccan life, as does his translation of Choukri’s straight autobiography For Bread Alone.

Vikram Seth’s very lengthy A Suitable Boy combines the readability of a popular generational novel with a Tolstoyan sweep over Indian society and politics in the early independence period. From Australia, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey adapts some of the feeling of an actual surviving Ned Kelly document into a more extensive and moving treatment.

Latin-American literature --

Mario Vargas-Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is funny, poignant, and contains quite a few great stories interspersed with the main narrative. I especially enjoyed Garcia-Marquez' 100 Years of Solitude and The General in his Labyrinth. His Love In The Time Of Cholera seemed a little frothy for me. Guillermo Cabrera-Infante's Infante's Inferno, which takes quite a while to stop introducing new characters, is as funny as Henry Miller.

I enjoyed The Chase (1956) by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, which seems to have poured out of the writer in a baroque excess of sometimes incomprehensible language. An extraordinarily evocative work. (His more conventional earlier work The Steps was less interesting to me.) On the jacket Carlos Fuentes credits Carpentier with inventing magical realism.

The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra has everything in his poems, which are written in an unadorned vernacular and thus are quite susceptible to translation. Jorge Luis Borge's stories (I like the collection Labyrinths the best) are unique and almost monastic in their tone.

The late 19th century Brazilian novelist Joaquin Machado de Assis’ novels combine wit, occasional surrealism and a detailed view of contemporary life, presented in post-modern fashion in many miniature chapters. His Dom Casmurro, often considered his masterpiece, is ultimately pretty gloomy. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas can be pretty funny. Quincas Borba (older translation: Philosopher or Dog?) sits between these extremes.

Spanish literature --

Camilo Jose Cela's The Hive is like some of Mahfouz in its wealth of characters, with an even richer depiction of society and greater irony, as well as a more sordid imagination, which if you've read Mahfouz may be hard to conceive.

Portuguese literature –

Jose Saramago’s All The Names is a bureaucratic comedy, a bit repetitious perhaps but with a grasp of the comedy of institutional life approaching Kafka’s and Mahfouz’.

American literature --

The New American Poetry 1945 - 1960 has a lot by my favorite American poets. I especially like the last two-thirds of Frank O'Hara's writings, the first third of Gary Snyder's (especially Myths and Texts and Mountains and Rivers Without End, collected I believe in The Back Country), "Marriage" and a few other things by Gregory Corso. Recently I’ve again come to appreciate Allen Ginsberg, whose last book, Death And Fame, contains much wisdom and humor. William Carlos Williams is too old for this anthology; his Paterson and Selected Poems are wonderful. I also love his doctor stories The Farmer's Daughters and In The American Grain as noted above. I’ve come to great appreciation of Emily Dickenson and always have enjoyed the earliest Walt Whitman.

William Kennedy's Albany Trilogy Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Ironweed is wonderful. Dreiser's Sister Carrie is compelling reading. I'm a big fan of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch which is written with an axe-edge of satire; Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Quiet Days in Clichy and "On Turning 80" which was collected with some other late writings as Sextet; Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm; Kerouac's Dr. Sax which is by turns a charming reminiscence and a vivid recreation of little Jackie's comic-book fantasies, as well as his more conventional portrait of Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bums.

A comment by Allen Ginsberg -- he prefers the later Melville -- put me onto The Confidence Man which is written in a prose that challenges the reader to unravel it, as twisted as the Confidence Man himself.

Peter Mathiessen's Far Tortuga uses dialect for dialogue to catch the speech rhythms of seamen of the Cayman Islands. I like the stories of Paul Bowles, variously collected, as well as his Points in Time, sketches of Moroccan history, and his novel The Spider's House which describes the forced French exit from Fez from a variety of viewpoints, including (most remarkably) that of a teenage Moroccan. Sam Shepard's plays are fun to read, e.g. Curse of the Starving Class.

In the mystery category, the earlier novels of Raymond Chandler are wonderfully evocative of late '30's and early '40's LA. I'm a fan of stories and novels by Dashiell Hammett, however they mostly read almost more like untutored memoirs than literature, and are thus not perhaps to everyone's taste. Chester Himes’ novels of black police detectives are wonderful escapes. I especially liked the first, printed as A Rage in Harlem or For Love of Imabelle and destroyed on film.

Popular science --

Richard Feynman's two books of lectures, QED The Theory Of Quantum Electrodynamics and especially The Character Of Physical Law are very well done and enlightening. I've enjoyed several books by Jeremy Bernstein, the New Yorker's physics writer..

For essays on the arctic, Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams emphasizes the natural and historical worlds; John McPhee's Coming into the Country the recent social environment. Almost everything by McPhee is entertaining although I find his geological writings of lesser interest.

I want to mention a couple of books by Helmut Tributsch from MIT Press: How Life Learned to Live and When the Snakes Awake. The former discusses the biophysical adaptations of various life forms, e.g. how porpoises and barracudas cope with large Reynolds numbers (representing potential for turbulence) resulting from their combined speed and size. The latter describes animal precursors to earthquakes, widely known from anecdote, and proposes a mechanism accounting for this behavior.

Self help --

Chogyam Trungpa's The Myth of Freedom first proposed the virtues of boredom to me -- to help me lessen my addiction to fascination. Skillful Means by Tarthang Tulku, another Tibetan, is less tuned into specific Buddhist doctrine and describes how to improve the work experience.

Jazz --

I've read lots of books about jazz, one of my amateur specialties -- you can find a number of my reviews at allaboutjazz.com. I especially enjoyed autobiographies by Art Pepper (Straight Life) and Miles Davis (Miles: The Autobiography), as well as Bird Lives by Ross Russell, To Bird With Love which is an enormous Charlie Parker photograph album, and Too Marvelous For Words about Art Tatum. Carl Woideck's Charlie Parker: His Life and Music is a reliable and readable treatment.

I also enjoyed four books of interviews: Jazz Talk by Robert Rusch (whose great periodical Cadence Review: Jazz & Blues Creative Improvised Music has a pair of striking interviews every month), Jazz Spoken Here, Notes and Tones in which the great jazz drummer Art Taylor evoked some frank talk from his contemporaries, and Robert Reisner's Bird: The Man and the Legend, with many reminiscences of Charlie Parker. To some degree this stuff is for fans only. None of these are hagiographic, the weakness of the genre.