#isaac babel

[traumaticemphaticfantastic]

You've met me at a very Isaac Babel time in my life.

[chantssecrets]

Isaac Babel, writer

[madonnamadeofasphalt]

The most parasocial I allow myself to be is getting particularly offended at historical regimes having murdered writers I happen to really like. Like, you know, Nazis murdered a lot of people, including some members of my own family, but it's kind of especially personally enraging that they murdered Bruno Schulz. Fucking Bruno Schulz, can you imagine? Shot him dead right in the middle of the ghetto street while he was on his way home with a loaf of bread. Probably the greatest artist in the history of Polish prose, bleeding to death in the street aged 50, just like that, because he was walking too slow to make the curfew. The dipshit who did it probably never even found out who he killed, and even if he did, he wouldn't be able to comprehend it. And not just him! Fucking cunts killed Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński! What kind of asshole do you have to be to murder Boy? One hour of Boy's time on this Earth was worth more than the entire lifetime of any Wehrmacht motherfucker. And Korczak! My God, Korczak! How do you send Janusz Korczak to a gas chamber and not kill yourself immediately out of sheer shame? And the thing is that this post was triggered by stumbling upon the final mugshot of Isaac Babel again, all bruised-up, shortly before the NKVD shot him. That's not even the right regime, but I got so distracted by being mad at Nazis that I've almost forgotten to mention it. Fucking Isaac Babel, can you imagine?

[jawbonejoe]

Was flipping through Odessa Stories last night and I’m struck by how well the old joke of a man kvetching to a stranger going:

“But that’s how it is in my family. My father was childless, and so was my grandfather before him.”

“Then where did you come from?” The stranger asks.

And the man answers:

“From Odessa.”

This joke translates perfectly if you sub in Baltimore. Sister cities for a fucking reason man

[jawbonejoe]

Need my wire family mutuals to read Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel so we can all convene on archetypes of gangsters across world lit and media

[sherbertilluminated]

I'm an influencer (telling my friends to read Isaac Babel)

[sherbertilluminated]

I love the Babel short story where the title is "[firstname + patronymic] and [firstname + patronymic]" but his narrator calls the main character "[lastname]" the whole time.

[sherbertilluminated]

We're reading Marina Tsvetaeva's "Girlfriend" cycle for class and while I think both the poetry and its translation are awesome, I'm a little startled by one of the ways Tsvetaeva's narrator describes her lover:

(Trans. Veronika Sizova)

I'm willing to believe that this is an impressive and attractive feature. Unfortunately I have a very small frame of reference for such an invocation:

(From the short story "The Rabbi" by Isaac Babel, in the collection Red Cavalry.)

I don't have the official translation on me right now but it's something like:

And suddenly I spotted a youth behind Gedali, a youth with the face of Spinoza, the magnificent forehead of Spinoza and the sallow face of a votary.