Does Obama need the Democrats? (part 2)

Last month, on 24 March, I posted an article called Does Obama need the Democrats? Perhaps, after Hillary Clinton's Pennsylvania win, it deserves another airing.

The article proposed that if the Democratic party superdelegates decided in due course to overrule the pledged delegates and prefer Clinton as the presidential candidate, the Democrats might find that Obama responded by declaring himself the moral victor and running for president as an independent. Obama has far fewer ties to the Democrats than the Clintons, and has consistently decried the polarisation into "red" and "blue" states. His reasons for running as an independent would therefore be highly consistent with his previous statements and policies.

In other words the Democrats, by choosing Clinton, might unleash circumstances in which their own candidate faced not one but two formidable opponents. More than this, they might do so under circumstances in which Obama would take from Clinton a considerable proportion of the Democratic vote. If this were so, choosing Clinton over Obama, far from increasing the chances of the Democrats winning the presidency, might be the equivalent of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Meanwhile, Clinton's camp is arguing that the Pennsylvania result demonstrates that Obama cannot win the white working class vote which they believe will be essential to a successful campaign for the presidency. It's an unusually good argument from a candidate who until recently has been mainly clutching at straws. However, perhaps we should hold back our judgement for the time being on whether Hillary Clinton's argument is correct. An alternative explanation of Obama's lack of success in Pennsylvania is that not that the white working class is inherently biased against Obama, but that amongst the various electoral groupings it is simply the most "conservative" with a small "c". This could mean that it is likely to be slower than the other groups, such as middle class and educated whites, blacks and latinos, to arrive in numbers at the Obama banner. It will be interesting to see whether Indiana, which contains another large white working class population, continues to hold out so steadfastly against Obama.

Against this, there is little doubt that Obama created significant difficulties for himself in suggesting that the poorer sections of the working class were often embittered and turned for consolation to guns, religion, and prejudice against others. There is surely an element of truth in assertions from the Clinton camp that he is something of a liberal elitist (even though it applies perhaps more to Clinton). As liberal elitists go, however, he is a very fine one -- preternaturally lucid, graceful in argument, incisive of mind.

This blog is interested in Obama for a number of reasons, not least for what it shows about shifting public opinion in America. Joe Klein, whose novel Primary Colours was a brilliant evocation and satire of a presidential candidate closely resembling Bill Clinton, asks on the cover of Obama's autobiography Dreams from my Father whether it is not the finest ever autobiography from a politician. Taking that as a cue, it this blog's view at any rate that Obama represents the most gifted intellect to approach the presidential elections since the Enlightenment. That does not, of course, mean that he will win, or indeed that these are the same talents that make a fine president. Meanwhile, it is certainly interesting to watch his progress through the minefields of the Democratic nomination, whose startling shifts and transformations surely make it one of the most complex, exasperating and fascinating political contests of all time.

Mugabe and my South African past

As brief personal background, I was born in South Africa in 1948. My father, Robin Collins, wrote a series of novels under his own name and the nom-de-plume of Robin Cranford. One of these novels, My City Fears Tomorrow, set in Johannesburg, was banned by the apartheid regime because it described, with considerable precision, how black Africans had no civil rights and could be arrested and tortured by the police effectively without redress. Not long afterwards my father, who was a liberal, decided he would prefer to take advantage of his dual British citizenship, and the family settled in England in 1960. We greatly preferred Britain's settled tolerance to South Africa's institutionalised racism.

I retain vivid memories of South Africa, and have been haunted by her history and that of her neighbours. I remember as a child that parks had chairs which had blankes (whites in Afrikaans) and nie-blankes (non-whites) written on them. As part of my South African childhood, it was an extraordinary experience to travel north in the late 1950s on holiday to Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe then was ) and go into hotel bars where white barmen were serving prosperous black businessmen. Compared with South Africa, Rhodesia was then a model of racial toleration. To my eyes, it is a special tragedy that subsequently, under the Smith regime, Rhodesia was forced to undergo a brutal civil war between white settlers and African freedom fighters, a war which has had profound consequences in shaping Zimbabwe's subsequent history. Perhaps the most tragic of these is that nearly three decades after achieving independence, Mugabe's administration continues to live in the past, invoking an imaginary threat from Britain to justify its right to rig elections and use violent repression against the democratic majority.

Considering the moral and political support which is currently being given to Robert Mugabe by the South African president Thabo Mbeki, I have written a commentary on the most recent events in Zimbabwe on my Warwick Collins blog.

Replacement of Borges/di Giovanni translations

Is the replacement of the definitive Borges/di Giovanni English translations of Jorge Luis Borges by the grossly inferior translations of Andrew Hurley perhaps the greatest literary crime of the century?

The heart of the case is that the Borges/di Giovanni translations — the product of a four-year personal collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni during 1969-72 — were aimed precisely by Borges to provide definitive translations into English, and to supersede all other translations of his work into English. As each new translation was finished, they were published in the New Yorker, to universal acclaim, and were largely responsible for establishing Borges’ international reputation.

Their subsequent replacement, some twenty years after Borges’ death, by Borges’ eccentric widow Maria Kodama, aided by her agent Andrew Wylie, has been a dereliction of both Borges' work and Borges’ will.

Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine who is widely considered to be the most influential Spanish language writer of the 20th century, was also an Anglophile who felt that the English translations of his work were inconsistent, to say the least. Borges himself admits that he was largely to blame for the circumstances. In the past, when translators had approached him to make translations of his work from Spanish into various languages, Borges tended to say “yes” because he felt that the alternative was no translation at all. The result was a very uneven crop of translations.

Borges found an opportunity to undertake definitive translations after he had effectively retired from creative literary work, when he met the young editor and poet Norman Thomas di Giovanni in 1968. Di Giovanni had already translated a number of Borges’ poems into English. Borges sensed that here was a potential collaborator of sufficient zeal and rigour to create definitive translations of the main body of Borges’ prose work into English. He invited di Giovanni to Buenos Aires. From 1969 to 1972 Borges and di Giovanni worked together daily to create English translations which would do justice to the Spanish originals. Their combined efforts became one of the great collaborations in the history of literature. Borges said that they "thought with one mind". In certain respects their collaboration was so successful that Borges used the opportunity to revise his Spanish originals in the course of creating the new English translations. To a considerable degree, the Borges/di Giovanni translations into English can be considered the most complete and final form of Borges’ work.

What are the motives of Maria Kodama, Borges’ widow, in replacing the Borges di Giovanni translations with laughably inferior versions from Andrew Hurley? They appear to be entirely pecuniary. The underlying facts are that Borges himself insisted that ownership of the copyright of the Borges/di Giovanni translations should be shared equally between the two men. It seems that sharing the income from the English translations was not enough for Borges’ widow, however. Accordingly, she funded for an outright fee a new set of translations by Andrew Hurley - translations which, through the Borges estate, she would own one hundred percent.

In considering the consequence of these actions, one should take into account that Borges’ subtle writings depended greatly on the accuracy and coherence of the translations. Hurley’s truly execrable versions undermine and often destroy Borges’ complex meanings. To anyone who doubts my characterisation, I refer them to the translations themselves. Perhaps I may add one further rhetorical flourish regarding the translations, given that they were conceived by Kodama for pecuniary advantage. What serious academic or translator would have the temerity to concoct English translations of Borges' main works which are aimed to replace those generated by Borges himself in concert with his chosen collaborator di Giovanni? What type of person, in other words, would deliberately flout Borges’ own final will and testament on his English translations?

During the next months I am going to run a campaign under the general heading of The literary crime of the century? The shorter term aim of this campaign will be to direct attention at the current parlous situation. I believe that the effective removal and replacement of the Borges/di Giovanni translations has already denied a new generation of English readers access to the definitive works of one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. In support of this view, I have written a 50-page mini-novel called Icon, which is set out below, and which aims to reconstruct the circumstances and tragedy of this great loss in fictional terms. Although I know di Giovanni well, and regard him as a close friend, I emphasise that Icon is entirely my own work and my own responsibility as a writer. Di Giovanni has remained strictly detached. He neither approves nor disapproves of my efforts, but in characteristically liberal spirit believes I have the right to approach the subject in fictional form should I wish to do so.

To emphasise Icon’s fictive aspects, I have used different names for the leading characters. A great, blind Argentine writer is named Luis Váldez. His young Italian-American translator is called Victor Gambini. I leave it to the reader to decide how close my account comes to the truth.

Icon, printed below, is approximately 10,000 words or about 55 pages. Given that the average rate of reading is approximately a page a minute, a reader who wished to complete the short novel at a sitting should give himself or herself the best part of an hour to do so. Meanwhile, if should you wish to undertake that journey, I hope Icon entertains you.