Rewriting(s)
Lucy Russell, Eleanor Dobson
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‘Cualquier hombre es todos los hombres’ (‘any man is all men’): Jorge Luis Borges, W. B. Yeats and Eternal Return
Grace Gaynor
doi:10.59860/wph.a588a4a

This paper considers the presence of W. B. Yeats in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. It focuses particularly on Borges’s use of Yeats’s poetry as epigraphs to two of his short stories, ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’ (‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’) and ‘Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)’ (‘A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)’). An epigraph presents a unique way of one writer making reference to another, particularly within the broader context of Borges’s propensity to saturate his work with allusions and references to other writers. A consideration of these epigraphs as rewritings of Yeats by Borges is supported by paratextual theory, and further explores ideas of recontextualisation, appropriation, and attributing authorship. Finally, this paper also discusses Borges’s references to Yeats in the context of eternal return, examining the ways in which Borges employs a selective principle in his choice of Yeats.

Rewriting Othello for the Stalinist Stage: The Case of Sergei and Anna Radlov
Jill Warren
doi:10.59860/wph.a697e91

Anna Radlova was one of the first to undertake the translation of Shakespeare into Russian in the Stalinist period, whilst Othello was the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays in the Soviet Union in the 1930s–40s. Radlova’s translation of Othello was used by her director husband, Sergei Radlov in two highly successful productions in 1935, at his studio-theatre in Leningrad, and the Malyi Theatre in Moscow. For Radlova, the translator was first and foremost a communicator, a mouthpiece through which the greats of foreign literature and drama could speak to the Soviet people. She argued the need for new Russian-language versions of Shakespeare, which could be truly understood and appreciated by Soviet audiences. Radlov, meanwhile, contended that as a soldier embodying all the best qualities of the Renaissance period, Othello was the ideal hero for the Soviet stage. This article uses translation theory in order to investigate the ways in which the play was shaped by the boundaries of socialist realism, and explores the tactics adopted by a translator and director in order to ensure that Shakespeare’s play remained on stage under the increasingly repressive political regime.

‘The Truth Only Partially Perceived’: (Mis)Reading/Writing, Rewriting, and Artistic Development in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet
Rachel Darling
doi:10.59860/wph.a6b3098

Through the role of the Alexandria Quartet’s writer-narrator, L. G. Darley, Lawrence Durrell interrogates the writing process by dem­onstrating the co-existence of multiple interpretations of place and time. Both Durrell and Darley build an evocation of Alexandria and its inhabitants using myriad textual sources, including fictional writer-characters as well as well-known authors such as E. M. Forster and Cavafy. This article examines the use of this palimpsest as a device through which Darley learns to become a novelist, by reading, rereading, and rewriting his impressions of the city. The multi-vocal nature of the Quartet — in which each of the four books effectively retells the same story — demonstrates not only the inherently intertextual and self-reflexive nature of the novel form, but also the way in which stories take shape. Darley frames and structures the narrative, propelling it forward by demonstrating his evolution as a writer throughout the four books. Durrell illustrates this both structurally and thematically, presenting Darley’s growth as a novelist through the layering of different versions of the truth, whilst suggesting that only together do these disparate readings of ‘truth’ constitute something approaching reality.

Spectres of Balzac: Stefan Zweig’s Collection of Manuscripts and his Rewriting of the Unfinished Balzac
Pardaad Chamsaz
doi:10.59860/wph.a7c247b

This article ties together two of Stefan Zweig’s (1881–1942) principal creative enterprises — the collection of autograph manu­scripts and the writing of biographies — and positions him as a significant figure in the developing appreciation of ‘rewriting’. Zweig’s collection included working drafts and corrected proofs from many great writers, but central among these was Honoré de Balzac, who is pivotal to both the nineteenth century’s turn towards authors’ compositional traces and the more modern practice of genetic criticism. Focusing partly on Balzac’s bound proofs of the novel Une ténébreuse affaire, an early part of Zweig’s collection, a conflicting, or perhaps hybrid, conception of creativity can be drawn out. On the cusp of material and textual criticism, yet fixed to a Romantic admiration of the author figure, Zweig’s thought represents an interesting negotiation of authorship. His process of writing biography sheds further light on his conception of a creator. Zweig revises his early drafts of Balzac to maximise the personal struggle of the protagonist at the expense of contingent factors to creativity. Simultaneously reductive and personal, Zweig’s empathetic mode of biography, so often condemned, might also be seen to have a moral foundation in its focus on human exceptionality.