Well, the finale to my little reverie on Elif Batuman’s LRB arti­cle is now fully two weeks in arrears, and I regret to inform anyone who cares that it will remain so for a bit longer. I sup­pose I should take all the blame upon myself, but I’d like to think that part of the fault is John Latta’s.

He opened his post last Friday with the ques­tion “So who is Roberto Bazlen?” inspired it seems by a ref­er­ence to Enrique Vila-​Matas in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that lead him to a book by Vila-​Matas (this one) that spoke of Bazlen thusly:

Bobi Bazlen was a Jew from Tri­este who had read every book in every lan­guage and who, while pos­sess­ing a very demand­ing lit­er­ary con­science (or per­haps pre­cisely because of this), instead of writ­ing pre­ferred to inter­vene directly in people’s lives. The fact that he never wrote a book forms part of his work. Bazlen, a kind of black sun of the crisis in the West, is an extremely curi­ous case; his very exis­tence seems to signal the true end of lit­er­a­ture, of the absence of output, the death of the author: a writer with­out books and there­fore books with­out a writer.

Latta learned more (and also about Félix Fénéon, who has been reborn on the inter­net as an anony­mous col­lec­tive here*):

Roberto Bazlen, b. 1902-d. 1965. There seems to exist a Scritti, publish’d in Milano by Adel­phi in 1984, edited by the ines­timable poly­math Roberto Calasso. It includes “Il cap­i­tano di lungo corso” (1973), the “Note senza testo,” some “Let­tere edi­to­ri­ali,” and “Let­tere a Mon­tale.” Bazlen brought both Italo Svevo and Ernesto Saba to the atten­tion of the Ital­ian (and inter­na­tional) public.

Intrigued, I did a bit of min­i­mal inter­net snoop­ing of my own, and quickly came across one of the edi­to­r­ial let­ters that Latta men­tioned in his brief. (It is included in the afore­men­tioned Scritti.) The letter was one that Bazlen sent to Luciano Foà, the direc­tor of the Ein­audi pub­lish­ing house, rec­om­mend­ing (sort of) the pub­li­ca­tion of Robert Musil’s Man With­out Qual­i­ties, which just hap­pens to be the novel I’m cur­rently read­ing. And so, always heed­ful of the demands of coin­ci­dence, I spent my allot­ment of week­end blog­ging time trans­lat­ing the Bazlen letter for your enjoy­ment instead of writ­ing about hero­ism and phi­los­o­phy. It’s long, but hope­fully some­one will find it inter­est­ing. Here goes:

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12 June 1951

I’m sorry that there’s such a rush. It is a com­pli­cated busi­ness, and to help you under­stand what it’s about, I wanted to write you at great length, and trans­late some pas­sages. But given that there is a rush, I’m send­ing you three vol­umes today and I’m throw­ing down some words that will, I hope, help you to decide:

At a cer­tain level, there’s noth­ing to dis­cuss, and (in spite of the reser­va­tions that I’ll make to you and infi­nite others that could be made) it ought to be pub­lished with­out another look. In terms of its symp­to­matic value on every single page, in terms of its absolute value in a great number of parts, it remains one of the great­est among all the great exper­i­ments of non-​conformist nar­ra­tive writ­ten after the first world war, nearly all of which were based on the pre­dom­i­nance of a single func­tion that is employed even beyond the per­mis­si­ble limits of pedantry (in Joyce, for exam­ple, the sonic asso­ci­a­tion; in Musil, the pre­ci­sion of thought).