Three great releases of lost concerts by Duke Ellington Orchestra, John Taylor & Stan Sulzman, and Joe Henderson
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‘Maybe there is no such thing as a fatherland’
LEIGH WILSON applauds the new translation of a novel from 1932 that is a hymn to values inimical to the forces that were growing in Germany in the early 1930s
LOVE IN SWASTIKA’S SHADOW: Summer 1932 in Mecklenburg; Propaganda image showing the Nazi SA canvassing votes in ‘even the smallest farm’
[Pic: Bundesarchiv Bild/CC]
To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Background for Love
Helen Wolff, Pushkin Press, £16.99
ALL publishing can be seen as a kind of translation. Sometimes from one language to another but also from one place to another, one time to another, one reader to another.
The writer and publisher Helen Wolff knew this. It shaped her life as one of the 20th century’s most important publishers, and it has shaped too the life of her novella, Background For Love, which has just been translated into English from German for the first time by her grandson, Tristram Wolff.
It is a startling work following a young woman as she escapes the rising fascism of 1930s Berlin with her older lover for the south of France. It shimmers with summer sun, with a young woman’s desire for her lover but also with her stronger desire to create her life as her own. And among the shimmering, the novella asserts too those human values, evident in the best kinds of translation, which are our defence against the narrow and the limited.
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