MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Una de las anécdotas más famosas de la literatura norteamericana es aquella que cuenta que Raymond Carver no era minimalista, que sus párrafos estaban llenos de sentimentalismos y refelexiones, pero que su editor Gordon Lish, también escritor, corrigió aquellos "excesos", contra la voluntad del autor incluso, y convirtió a Carver en el maestro del minimalismo. Luego hubo una disputa por saber si Carver le debía su fama a Lish que concluyó con un argumento genial: si Lish pudo hacer eso por Carver, ¿por qué no pudo hacerlo por sí mismo? Ahora, con afán de "reescirbir la historia" la viuda de Carver, Tess Gallagher, pretende publicar los cuentos antes de la tijera de Lish. ¿Valdrá la pena? ¿No es un riesgo demasiado grande publicar versiones que el autor deshechó en vida? Ya se anuncian líos judiciales de parte del editor de Carver que piensa que la edición de Tess sería ilegal. La noticia está muy bien detallada en The New York Times, que incluye el ejemplo de un cuento sin correcciones, y también aparece en The Guardian bajo el estupendo título "Less said the better"

Dice la nota en NYT: "Tess Gallagher, the widow of Raymond Carver, one of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century, is spearheading an effort to publish a volume of 17 original Carver stories whose highly edited versions were published in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” his breakout 1981 book. Largely as a result of that collection, which became a literary sensation, Carver was credited with popularizing a minimalist style. But many of his fans have been aware of reports that Gordon Lish, Carver’s first editor at Alfred A. Knopf, had heavily edited, and in many cases radically cut, the stories before publication to hone the author’s voice. At the time, Carver begged Mr. Lish to stop production of the book. But Knopf went ahead and published it, to much critical acclaim. Ms. Gallagher, who is also a novelist and poet, wants to see the original stories published as a volume called “Beginners,” the title that Carver gave to the story that became the title story in “What We Talk About.” “I just think it’s so important for Ray’s book, which has been a kind of secret, to appear,” Ms. Gallagher said by telephone from her home in Port Angeles, Wash. But, she added, “I would never want to take ‘What We Talk About’ out of publication.” Those versions of the stories, she said, “are now part of the history.” Ms. Gallagher’s plan has created controversy. Carver’s later editor, Gary Fisketjon of Knopf, which holds the copyright to “What We Talk About,” is deeply opposed to the idea. “I would rather dig my friend Ray Carver out of the ground,” he said. “I don’t understand what Tess’s interest in doing this is except to rewrite history. I am appalled by it.”

También se lee: "Carver acknowledged in the letter that Mr. Lish had “made so many of the stories in this collection better, far better than they were before.” But because several people — including Ms. Gallagher and the writers Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff and Donald Hall — had already seen some of the stories in their earlier versions, Carver wondered, “How can I explain to these fellows when I see them, as I will see them, what happened to the story in the meantime, after its book publication?” Carver, who had recently met Ms. Gallagher (he later divorced his first wife, Maryann Burk) and stopped drinking, wrote: “If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.” He then detailed what he wanted restored. Mr. Lish disregarded Carver’s plea and published the edited stories. Writing in The Washington Post, Doris Betts praised Carver’s “verbal skill, the distilled pungency, the laser focus of his implacable vision.” Michael Wood, writing in The Times Book Review, said “his writing is full of edges and silences, haunted by things not said, not even to be guessed at.” Ms. Gallagher said the critics hadn’t read the real Carver. “Ray really resisted this whole thing of being dubbed a minimalist,” she said. She added that those who viewed Carver’s later stories as more expansive than his early work, simply never knew that he had always been expansive. Reached by telephone, Mr. Lish said he was “very skeptical about anyone having what you describe as the original manuscripts,” he said, adding “The Carver matter is a dead letter with me.”

Etiquetas: eeuu, gordon lish, NOTICIA, raymond carver, tess gallagher

This entry was posted on 10.23.2007 at 3:57 p. m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.