by Eric Byrd Perhaps unique among France's many colonies, possessions, dependencies and departments outré-mer, Lisle has no foothold on the French Parnassus. Baudelaire's “dame creole” was Mauritian. Leger was born under the palms of Pointe-à-Pitre. And this mulatto isle never produced a polemicist of Négritude – we're obvious bastards, dark enough for chains but not…

by Eric Byrd Have you ever seen Sherman? It is necessary to see him in order to realize the Norse make-up of the man – the hauteur, noble, yet democratic: a hauteur I have always hoped I, too, might possess. (Whitman) Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman are the conspicuous figures in the…

by Eric Byrd “Called the ‘real origin' of Zola's Nana“! What 1950s drugstore customer, twirling the rack of paperbooks, could resist that pitch? I will assume most contemporary readers are like me, and know the Goncourt brothers best by reading or rumor of their incomparable Journal. In the Journal their novels figure as neglected masterworks…

by Eric Byrd [the heroic] outlook which regarded action as the main end of life and attached to it an ideal which demanded that a man must make the utmost of his body and his mind. C.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience Incomplete and unfinished at Fermor's death in 2011, ending mid-sentence hundreds of miles from…

by Eric Byrd Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson. (Specimen Days, “New Themes Entered Upon”) Intensely artful, intensely vernacular – some draughts of the tipsy-making water Emerson…

by Eric Byrd …families like mine which owe everything to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. —Rimbaud, “Bad Blood” Above my cradle loomed the bookcase whereLatin ashes and the dust of GreeceMingled with novels, history, and verse In one dark Babel. I was folio-high When I first heard the voices. —Baudelaire, “The Voice” “The…

by Eric Byrd Actually there was only one, but his lectures contained such echoes – of Khodasevich, Nabokov, Brodsky – that in retrospect he seems the voice of, if not a “culture,” then at least a certain lineage of fierce and fastidious exiles who cut strange figures in the literary communities of Western Europe, and…

by Eric Byrd In an ideal library Mark Twain is the author of Around the World with General Grant (1879; handily abridged in 2002). On earth, however, Ulysses Grant commenced his travels before he and Twain were well acquainted, and even if they had been Twain was a famous writer with a schedule of lucrative…

by Eric Byrd For me the most ominous chapter in Young Pushkin – the first volume of Yury Tynyanov's unfinished “epic on the origins, development and death of our national poet,” serialized in Soviet journals 1937-43 and recently translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, the other Russian-to-English connubial translating team – is the…