http://www.nytimes.com/2016/
michael roloff
Seattle 13 hours ago
I agree with Ms. Prose and friend
Ben Moser. As the child reader of a yuppie father’s uncut treasury of the
world’s fairy tales and living in a rural fairy-tale world I turned – e.g.- the
B-17 that nearly crashed into our house, as it approached screeching, into the
fairy tale bird Griffen. By age 11 I was writing fairy tales of my own, they
grew inside me like dreams, and so no wonder that I so much love the early
Guenter Grass fairy tale novels & Walter Benjamin’s essay on fairy tale
writing. I did not anticipate that emigrating into a different language and
culture would deprive me of the soil out of which I wrote, or that something
wrote me. I wrote a lot of stories in college, only one of which approached the
quality, and then concluded that I needed a lot of experience to write again.
25 years as editor in New York provided that experience in spades, and then
some. Like Benjamin I have written a biography, of Peter Handke whose work I introduced into this country and
translated and of course I continue to read his work. Ah, what would I have
done the past thirty years without Handke and Freud! But I lack the time –
while writing – and ability or willingness
to read much else. I had hoped to be done with my work a decade ago and
get on a tramp steamer as I had once before, with steamer trunks full of books,
so as to become well- read again. I started to read at age four, my mother gave
me a magic writing tablet of wax, and if you rubbed it, magically letters
turned into words.
