The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
160The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
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Overview
An NYRB Classics Original
Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist.
This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781681371962 |
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Publisher: | New York Review Books |
Publication date: | 03/20/2018 |
Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 160 |
File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Adriana Calinescu is the Thomas T. Solley curator emerita of ancient art at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art. She has written widely on the subject of ancient art and is the editor of the scholarly work Ancient Jewelry and Archaeology. She has translated works from English into Romanian, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is the standard text in Romania.
Breon Mitchell is a professor emeritus of Germanic studies and comparative literature at Indiana University. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, he has received numerous national awards for literary translations, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize from the British Society of Authors. His translations from the German include Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, as well as works by Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lenz, Uwe Timm, and Marcel Beyer.
Norman Manea has written numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The Hooligan’s Return and the novel The Lair. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guadalajara International Book Fair’s (FIL) 2016 Literature in Romance Languages Award, and the Prix Médicis étranger. He is a professor emeritus and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
Portrait 3
On God's Flame 6
On the Stages of the Spiritual 8
From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter 12
On the Book of Job 14
On Courage 17
On the Realm of Stupidity 20
Begging 22
Existence and Possession 24
Regarding the Devil 30
De Amicitia 32
From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter 36
On Women 37
The Revelations of Begging 39
On Children 44
On Poetry 47
Responsibility and Freedom 49
On One Form of Divine Wrath 51
On Travel 54
From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter 56
The Crime of "Analysis" 57
On Suicide 60
On Comfort 64
On Mathematical Language 69
A Poem Tossed into the Trash Bin of a Public Garden by Zacharias Lichter and Retrieved by His Biographer 73
On Old People 74
On Saying and Writing 79
On the Meaning of Love 85
The Wandering Jew 87
The Metaphysics of Laughter 89
Legends 91
On Reticence 97
Again on "Analysis" 102
The Significance of the Mask 107
On Haste 109
From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter 111
On Illness 112
On Mirrors 118
Innocence and Guilt 120
On Self-Indulgence 123
On Lying 126
Eulogy of the Question 128
On Imagination 131
The Moral Law 139
From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter 141
Epilogue: Zacharias Lichter and His Biographer 143