Center Michaelondaatje Mexico Modern Knopfin Translation MAGAZINE
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FALL 2017 FALL center MAGAZINE Mexico Modern Michael Ondaatje Knopf in Translation “ Years ago, while traveling with the architect Anjalendran in the southern provinces of Sri Lanka—he was looking for some pillars and window 4 frames and other odds and ends—he paused, bending over to look at some medieval rain spouts that are still used in Sri Lanka, and he remarked, “In Sri Lanka 90 percent of architecture is loitering.” And I thought to myself, of course this is true of literature too. In fact in any art you spend your time searching or waiting for some small anecdote or the remarkable accidental discovery. How an architect gathers and how a writer gathers, how they assemble and collect it all into some organic shape and try and unite them, is not that different. And what is unearthed will influence not just the content of the story, but its style, its very language.” –Michael Ondaatje, Traveling with Anjalendran Laura Wilson, Michael Ondaatje, Petaluma, California 3/25/10 ContentsFALL 2017 24 Deadline 2028 By 2028, we may lose many analog audiovisual recordings as formats go out of use and materials degrade. 12 Orchestrating the Mexican Moment in New York Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins on il on canvas mounted to board, 62.5 x 48.0 cm. © 2017 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums the city’s outsized influence on Mexico’s mid-century arts scene. 18 The Attempt to Keep Day and Night Together Dean Echenberg on the origins of his war poetry collection, a recent acquisition and one of the largest of its kind in the world. A Glutton for Books 20 Researcher Victoria Livingstone on the influential Knopf translator at the heart of the Latin American literary boom. A Family Affair 23 Kate O’Toole on choosing the right “family” for her father’s legacy. What did 1920s & 1930s Texas DEPARTMENTS moviegoers hear when they went Around the Plaza. 2 Membership . .8 to “the pictures”? Artifact . .10 Lone Star Melody Makers | pg. 27 Ask a Book Conservator . 11 The Archivist’s Archive. 29 Cover and page 6: Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954), Untitled [Self-portrait with thorn necklace hummingbird], 1940. O / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Mexico, D.F. Trust, AROUND THE PLAZA Director’s note Community THE ARCHIVE WILL SEE YOU NOW This spring, we welcomed the Dell Medical School’s first-year cohort of medical students and Dr. Steve Steffensen. Steffensen collaborated with Ransom Center Head of Instructional Services Andi Gustavson and Graduate Research Associate Reid Echols to teach a session. This issue of the Ransom Center Magazine The class covered Duchenne de Boulogne’s (1806–1875) use of early contains a wealth of stories about the photography, the beginnings of the field of neurology, and the use creative figures represented in the of applied electricity to study human facial expressions. Discussion Center’s collections, and it is also the centered on medical ethics, Duchenne’s adoption of new technologies, debut of an appealing redesign of the and modern concerns of privacy, consent, and the doctor-patient Center’s newsletter—the first redesign relationship. in 11 years. You’ll notice a new name, an acknowledgement of the expanded page count and in-depth features. You’ll find GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ here stories about how the Center’s ONLINE ARCHIVE collections continue to grow—whether it be the arrival of early printed books of Launching this November: the sixteenth century, a generous gift by a dedicated collector, or the acquisition 25,000+ pages of the literary archive of one of our finest contemporary writers. The cover 219 photographs story presents the informing narrative of our current exhibition Mexico Modern: 22 scrapbooks Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1945, and I hope it will prompt you to visit. The Ransom Center Magazine is also 1,110 your guide to how to be a part of this local K-12 students toured our exhibitions last year. Wow! creative community whether through research and study, through rich program offerings, through membership, or via CONNECT WITH US @ransomcenter social media. UT Austin APSI Whatever form your participation takes, @UTAPSI @sunflowergala Taking advantage of I invite you to be a part of this creative Pre-AP High School the world class library community. English’s trip to that houses our @ransomcenter this cultures‘ creativity summer was such and genius. an enriching addition I love to visit here. #parallelperspectives STEPHEN ENNISS to the training week! #harryransomcenter Director, Harry Ransom Center #TBT #UTAPSI 2 | Ransom Center MAGAZINE Scholarship & Research CURRENT GRANT-FUNDED PROJECTS Recent grants are helping us to preserve, catalog, and share the archives The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $195,000 for “Writers Without Borders: Creating Global Access to the PEN International and English PEN Records.” The archive spans 1912–2008 and contains more than 100,000 letters. It documents the formation, history, and activities of PEN and its global centers. We will digitize 4,400+ images for the web. The Council on Library and Information Resources awarded $24,000 for “Preserving the Interview Recordings of Mel Gussow, American and British Theater Critic.” Gussow was the lead cultural critic for the New York Times and recorded interviews with stars and lesser-known figures of the American and Mexico Modern: Art, British theatre. We will digitize 75 rare cassette audiotape interviews with actors, Commerce, and Cultural playwrights, writers, and directors for the web. Exchange, 1920–1945 APPLY FOR RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS Through January 1, 2018 The Ransom Center awards fellowships to postdoctoral, dissertation, and Widely acknowledged independent scholars to support research in our collections. Applications are due by 5 p.m. CST on November 15, 2017. as a critical chapter in Details on our website. the history of twentieth- century art, the rise of RECENTLY CATALOGED modernism in Mexico COLLECTIONS was activated by artists, • Iain Sinclair Papers museum curators, gallery • House of Bonaparte Collection owners, journalists, and • Pierre Cordier Photography Collection publishers. This exhibition • Hillyer Family Photography Collection explores two decades of See more of what’s been newly cataloged, updated, dynamic cultural exchange and brought online at http://budurl.com/cataloged. between Mexico and the United States. FALL 2017 To change your contact information, please notify: The publishers have made Suzanne Krause, Editor | [email protected] every effort to contact Volume 1 | Issue 1 all copyright holders for permissions. Those we Suzanne Krause Editor have been unable to reach Ransom Center Magazine is published Anne-Charlotte Patterson Designer are invited to contact us so biannually for members and friends that a full acknowledgment Leslie Ernst Art Director of the Harry Ransom Center at may be given. Daniel Zmud The University of Texas at Austin. Webmaster Unless otherwise noted, photography by Pete Smith. © 2017 Harry Ransom Center. All rights reserved. Phone: 512-471-8944 | www.hrc.utexas.edu hrc.utexas.edu | 3 RECENT ACQUISITIONS A Nomad’s Writing Finds a Home RANSOM CENTER DIRECTOR STEPHEN ENNISS INTERVIEWS POET AND NOVELIST MICHAEL ONDAATJE The Ransom Center has acquired the archive of Michael Ondaatje, widely regarded as one of the finest English language novelists writing today. Michael Ondaatje began his career as a poet but is best known as the author of the 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, which was made into a critically-acclaimed motion picture. He was born in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1943; he moved to Canada at age 18. The archive documents in great detail Ondaatje’s working methods and demonstrates his centrality to the literary and cultural communities of Canada and the broader world over more than 50 years. SE: Your archive contains a number of notebooks which you have made into scrapbooks and interspersed with found images of different kinds. What is the relationship of your novels to this visual imagery? MO: Well these so called “notebooks” are what I actually write the novels in. I usually write about four drafts of a book by hand before it moves to a typewriter or computer. After that I keep reworking it, printing it Ondaatje’s first draft of The English Patient 4 | Ransom Center MAGAZINE out, rewriting it by hand. So during those early limit you. But I need stages of handwriting the novels, I sometimes to ground myself in need a few visual breaks along the way; I a precise location might stick in someone’s poem fragment, just or time period—a a few lines, or perhaps a stray visual image of farm in California, a party at Oxford where quite a few are drunk Louisiana in 1912— that I came across in a magazine. There might in order to let the be perhaps some subliminal influence. That book evolve without party scene got totally recast into a scene where drifting off into Almasy imagines meeting Katharine when she something surreal was young, long before he actually met her. or unstructured. I When I came upon that long ago notebook need the historical years later—that was the first time I realized moment, a time and recognized its influence on a scene in The period. So in that limited setting the English Patient. Often I glue in an image on top characters who emerge and act are freer, are able of a section of prose that had been re-copied to discover themselves and others. They might into the next notebook, so the notebooks are not come together from different countries perhaps, quite chronological. Anyway, they are not just but the story takes place then, there… it could be scrapbooks. This is where the novel gets writ- a convent where strangers meet and are altered.