Re: XyWrite For OS/2

[Robert Holmgren]

Steve, couldn' t agree with you more. Unfortunately, I made something like the
very same argument two years ago, and it fell on deaf ears. TTG's position is
that they have to apply their limited resources where the market is, and that's
M$Win, howsoever ghastly it may be. I think it's a stupid position. At this
moment there are more than 4 million copies of OS/2 in use. Many of us would
like a native WP application. The M$Windows marketplace is saturated with WP
apps. If M$Win users are already using WordPerfect or Word or whatever, why
would they switch to XyWrite? It doesn't make sense. Whereas, there is
literally no competition in OS/2 apart from DeScribe, which puts people off
simply because they never heard of it. People would love a fast WP. But they
gotta fix up the problem with the keyboard first, it's simply unuseable in
present form (the GUI Win version, I mean).

 The real problem that OS/2 keeps hitting is that its greatest strength, its
cross-platform compatibility and high optimization, is also a weakness from a
developer's standpoint -- because a company like TTG figures that if they
develop for M$Win, they're also running under OS/2 (i.e. Win-OS/2).

 I think we should also keep another likelihood in mind also, namely that the
port that TTG probably made to OS/2 is probably just a Mirrors-style port ala
the WordPerfect 5.2 port. I mean, it just doesn't seem likely that TTG wrote a
real native OS/2 version. More likely they just ran Windows code through a
software translator. That would not make anyone happy.


To: CARL DISTEFANO
Subject: RUSSIAN POETRY
Carl: A funny article I found in The Guardian -- thought you'd enjoy it (plus
a chance to try out the OCR of Caere's "OmniPage Pro" -- it does a _great_ job)

 ---------------------

 [Manchester Guardian Weekly 28 Nov 93 p.28]

 BOOKS

 Sales pitch for the nation's soul

 Andrei Navrozov

 Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry
 selected by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
 Fourth Estate 1075pp ?30

 Like freedom, justice and other vital abstractions (including--dare I say
it?--the soul), poetry is indivisible. As an intellectual is either the master
of his thought or a slave to platitude, as a jury is either tampered with or
free to make its decision, so poetry is either the apogee of a nation's culture
or nothing. The politician who believes that some of what he says is true
deludes himself. The society which accepts the result of an almost democratic
election is a police state. And the anthology of Russian poetry compiled with
the partial aim of pleasing the "American Businessperson" is a travesty.
 To appreciate that I am not playing at maximalism, turn to the compiler's
introduction. "There is an enormous potential market in your country, a giant
space for joint ventures," a smarmy Ivy League youth tells Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
"I will never understand my partners if I will not understand your poetry."
 Of course Yevtushenko--Yevtukh in familiar Muscovite parlance--is only partly
serious when he quotes with approval the optimistic inanities which express the
wisdom of the new world order. In Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, he has
collected 830 poems by 253 poets from Konstantin Sluchevsky (b.1837) to Nina
Grachova (b.1971), and as far as the eclecticism of his choices, the book is
certain to bamboozle the most tenacious "American Businessperson".
 I can almost see him, or her, terminating the process of cultural exchange
with Wassily Kandinsky's poem 'Why?" ("No one ever came out of there."/ "No
one?"/ "No one."/ "Not one?") and scampering off to rent the video of that
novel you know, the one with Julie Christie. Deep down, I suspect that wily
Yevtukh sees this too, and that the whole "American Businessperson" globaloney
is an attempt to hard-sell a product that people never want at ?30, unless they
want it at any price because it is their only drug, their only antidote and
salvation. But is this book such a product?
 The commercial rot, admittedly, could hardly have affected the selection of
names represented in the first of the book's slickly-named sections, "Children
of the Golden Age" (poets born before 1900). These names are an unchanging
canon, to which a few curios, like Kandinsky, have been added. Where the
corrosive spirit is felt is in the haphazardly mass-market selection of the
poems, and the door-to-door approach to their translation. Nikolai Klyuev
(1884-1937)--perhaps Russia's only purely "native" voice in poetry (in the
sense that Mussorgsky's, according to Constant Lambert, is in music)--is
represented by a single excerpt from Lenin. By contrast, Sergei Yesenin
 (1895-1925), the epigone and populariser of Klyuev's nativism, is represented
by 15 poems. Although, as a poet, he traces his own spiritual genealogy from
Yesenin, wily Yevtukh ought to know better.
 Thus while, on the face of it, the catholic proprieties are observed, in
actual fact the magical properties are enfeebled. The translators, in their
turn, fob off the disillusioned with pabulum. This is what Bernard Mears heard
Mayakovsky telling the angels:
 You winged scoundrels!
 Get back to heaven where you belong!
 Ruffle your feathers in a frightened rage!
 Or I'll open you up,
 for all your stink of frankincense,
 from here to Alaska.
 Here is the same howl overhead by Dorian Rottenberg (from his Mayakovsky
published in Moscow in 1986):
 Let your feathers shiver in St Vitus' dance,
 crouch in heaven,
 lip-serving,
 wing-flapping rascals!
 I'll rip you all up, stinking with incense,
 from here right down to Alaska!
 As the "American Businessperson" would say, shop and compare.
 The later generations--from the pre-war "Children of the Steel Age" to the
post-war "Omega and Alpha" (whatever this means)--are my own purlieus, in the
sense that their members were either family friends or samizdat fodder in
childhood, or quasi-official functionaries and poseurs of the 1960s and 1970s.
What of them?
 Take my late uncle, Yevgeny Vinokurov (1925-1993). He is in, with a whopping
14 poems, just one short of Yesenin. Yet Vinokurov's genius found its finest
expression in the man's stoic apophthegms, recorded privately and transmitted
orally. The talent he put into his poems was strictly a chamber-music affair.
Hence to open the book to:
 My beloved was laundering
 Her shoulders pounding away. . .
 is like opening a volume of Marcus Aurelius to find something by Kingsley
Amis.
 If the new world order, global totalitarianism with a capitalist face, is
really upon us, I see no reason why Western publishers cannot pick up where the
Soviet Writers' Union left off. This way Yevtukh can keep both his
quasi-official role and his promise to the "American Businessperson" that "this
anthology is the key to the soul of Russia". Otherwise the discerning reader
will continue to rummage through second-hand book stalls, remembering that
poetry, like the soul, is indivisible.