An Inaugural Address by the Committee

Abstract

An Inaugural Address by the Committee Anthony Madrid (bio) 1 The purpose of this feature will be to present to the public the recent findings of ABR's Society for the Unearthing of Treasurable Literary Relics. We are calling our series "Lost and Found" to get across our feeling of recovery, in the legal sense of the word—the getting back what was always ours, but which had been misplaced. We also wanted to evoke a sense of motley. I, the President of the Society, am delighted to report that our 2022 Expedition into the Interior has been exceptionally successful, so far. We've spared no expense, whether in terms of money, time, or spirit, to read texts that no one has read in thousands of years, and to extract therefrom whatever might compel you to read them. Or at least put 'em on your list. The present "episode" is only an introduction, sketching our methods and aims. Starting with the next issue of ABR, you'll hear from one of our Senior Researchers on a literary artifact that's been lost to view for a long time but which has nonetheless enchained his attention. I'm about to "hand over the mic" to that researcher, but before I do, I wish to take a moment to invite readers of ABR to send the Society suggestions, care of Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Di Leo, for "Lost and Found" reading projects. These suggestions needn't be reasonable. None of this is going to be reasonable. 2 Our President has just mentioned we are open to suggestions. To give you some idea of the parameters involved, let me reveal to you some teaser highlights of materials already in our queue. This will help you identify the kind of thing we have in our sights. [End Page 75] • The special file that James Boswell kept on Samuel Johnson, called the "Tacenda" file, detailing Johnson's frustrated erotic energies when he was first married, as reported by Elizabeth Desmoulins, who had been his (and his wife's) servant. • The Salernitan Questions—a set of unanswerable-at-the-time scientific questions that circulated among medical students in Renaissance Italy. The collection is only a few pages long, and is strikingly poetic. Aristotle and his students produced a vast book of these things, and started a tradition … • The history of translations into English of the pre-Islamic Muʿallaqat, a set of seven "odes" that are among the most famous poems in Arabic. No English translation of any of them is even tolerable. Why. • Medieval Irish Dishonoring Law and its relation to certain satirical Irish-Gaelic quatrains preserved in manuscript. Mockery considered as an aesthetic and moral category. • The particular English version of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (the 1717 edition of the Thomas Creech translation) used by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The special significance of Creech's handling of the material and the prosody. • The American poet Sara Teasdale and her relation to the Italian arts power couple Eleonora Duse and Gabriele D'Annunzio, with special reference to the most narcissistic novel ever written in any language, D'Annunzio's Il Fuoco (1900). • Classic Shakespeare reference books, like Abbott's A Shakespearian Grammar (1870) and Tilley's Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeen Centuries (1950), which, though old, are still cited in every single college edition of the plays, and are themselves literature, if anyone but knew it. • Pearl Buck's translation of the Ming dynasty romance Shui Hu Zhuan (All Men Are Brothers, 1937), compared to various modern treatments. Get the picture? We actually did come on this show to make friends. We're out here, every minute, air tanks strapped to our backs, reading stuff that one [End Page 76] might see casually quoted by somebody like Jorge Luis Borges. We basically want to come off like him. And we want to bring you along, if you're into it. Melville's epic poem Clarel. Nobody, but nobody, has read that. You can be a pretty big Melville fan and not even know what happens in Clarel. It would be cool to be able to weigh in...