Posts featuring Isaiah Berlin

Elementalia: Chapter III Earth

April 3, 2025 | in Essays | by Kanya Kanchana

What does Earth know that Word does not?

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.

Earth is cracking along her fault lines. And most of these fault lines are now human.

[William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar-turned-detective:] “This is what we need: a way to get into the library at night, and a lamp. You get the lamp. Linger in the kitchen after dinner, and take one…”

[Adso of Melk, his protégé, a Benedictine novice:] “A theft?”

[William:] “A loan, in the name of the greater glory of the Lord.”

[Adso:] “If that is so, then count on me.”

– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

The Simultaneous Precision of Each Person’s Storytelling and Unknowability of the Truth: On Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls

October 4, 2023 | in Reviews | by Rachel Landau

Kadare suggests that memory itself can build discourse, poetic and otherwise, with those who are no longer living.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Counterpoint Press, 2023

In A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare creates an interwoven narrative of historic suspense, gently challenging the line between personal storytelling and an encyclopedic index of information. John Hodgson’s eloquent translation from Albanian is densely packed with perspectives, anecdotes, and curiosity surrounding a significant moment in Soviet literary history. How a legendary conversation transpired and what impact it had on all involved is the question that Kadare seeks to answer in A Dictator Calls; he approaches the question from all angles, and in the process investigates his own complex relationships to historical and literary legacies, afterlives, and the very act of storytelling.

Kadare’s novel is grounded in a story from 1934: Osip Mandelstam, a legendary Russophone poet, had been arrested after writing a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, a text known in English as “The Stalin Epigram” or “The Kremlin Mountaineer.” According to the general narrative, Stalin himself decided to call Boris Pasternak, a contemporary of Mandelstam’s, to ask whether or not Mandelstam was a great poet. Stories diverge, and contemporaries of both poets, from Viktor Shkhlovsky to Isaiah Berlin to Anna Akhmatova, claim different conclusions to that conversation.