I first got to know Claudia Franken through academic channels; she is a Europe-based scholar of Gertrude Stein and Arno Schmidt, a less-well-known prose writer who anticipates American postmoderns such as Thomas Pynchon. As his Wikipedia entry states, “Arno Schmidt (1914–79) was a German author and translator. He is little known outside of German-speaking areas, in part because his works present a formidable challenge to translators.” Claudia’s proposal for a session on “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour” took up Schmidt’s early “trilogy” of novellas focusing on cultural displacement after 1945, pursued by analogies to Egyptian and Phoenician antiquity—as if the two time frames were disturbingly (felicitously) co-present (see John E. Woods’s unequaled translation). The conference itself was canceled due to COVID but was revived as a webinar in March 2021, where Claudia presented her work on Schmidt—in a form, on first hearing, that was as allegorically complex as Schmidt’s work itself. I then engaged Claudia’s essay editorially, working toward publication in the Hunan, China-based Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, where it appears (here). All this is complicated, but is what it takes to get the work done in this era of travel restrictions and ideological blockage. What resulted is a fine literary essay that the editors selected to inaugurate their issue. … More
