MAREK NOWAKOWSKI, the Polish writer, was arrested on 7 March shortly after Polish publishers were instructed by the government to strengthen their ideological role. Public letters from British and other writers imploring the Polish authorities to release him have gone unheeded. His arrest is part of a wider move to silence the still active opposition within Poland. The deputy head of the Polish Communist Party's Cultural Department told officially recognized publishers in February that publishing was 'the chief sector of the front of ideological struggle': books must espouse 'socialist values' and have a socialist 'literary shape'.
Index

Index has received the February/March 1984 issue of the Hungarian samizdat publication A Hirmondo (The Courier), devoted mainly to an appeal to Amnesty for a general amnesty for all political prisoners of conscience. Especially interesting is the response of the Hungarian opposition to the joint statement of 12 February 1984 by Charter 77 of Czechoslovakia and Polish Solidarity-KOR. Co-operation between dissident groups in Central and East European countries is regarded by the authorities as dangerous and has in the past been dealt with harshly.

On 2 February the Welsh Arts Council announced that its International Writers' Prize, awarded every two years, will go this year to the Polish poet and essayist whose work will be familiar to PNR readers, ZBIGNIEW HERBERT. Previous recipients of the award include Ionesco, Dürrenmatt, Astrid Lindgren and Derek Walcott. Herbert, who is sixty this year, can look forward to British editions of two books of his poems and to a newly-translated volume of his essays which are scheduled for publication in the next twelve months.

The Sudanese poet and journalist SIRR ANAI KELUELJANG was arrested in February near Rumbek, in the Southern Region, and is detained in Rumbek prison. He was said to have been arrested for carrying literature hostile to the state, but has neither been charged nor tried. He is denied access to lawyers and friends. The conditions he is held in are poor. This is not his first brush with the authorities. In 1979, his collection of poems The Myth of Freedom was destroyed by the authorities. He writes in English and in Dinka, one of the main indigenous languages of Southern Sudan.

LEOPOLD SEDAR SENGHOR is the first Black writer to be admitted to the Académie Française, whose forty members are the Immortals entrusted with overseeing the French language. M Senghor was formerly a French government minister and President of Senegal. His work has been widely translated. M Mitterand, as 'protector' of the Academy, attended the investiture.

In March the Swiss dramatist FRIEDRICH DURRENMATT received the Austrian National Prize for European Literature. His best-known works remain Der Besuch der alten Dame and Die Physiker. He follows Ionesco, Pinter and Vaclav Havel in receiving this honour. His most recent play, Achterloo, was first performed in Zürich in October 1983.
MH

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE planned something rather special for the month of August 1914-a book of 'idéogrammes lyriques et coloriés' called Et moi aussi je suis peintre (I, too, am a painter). He reckoned, of course, without the gods of war and the project had to be postponed. After lying dormant for seventy years, the famous maquette was discovered in the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques-Doucet by a Paris publisher, Sébastien Gryphe, who intends to realize Apollinaire's plan. The work will be printed by Michel Décaudin and Daniel Grojnowski, with artwork by Manuel Viusà and printing by Jean Paul Vibert. Anyone interested should apply for a subscription from to Editions Sébastien Gryphe, 1 rue Milton, 75009-Paris. There are 200 copies (at 800F each) of the edition proper, with a further 1800 available at 300F.
DA

The February issue of The New Criterion, published in New York, contains an enjoyable account, by its editor Hilton Kramer, of the centennial conference of the Modern Language Association, held in that city last December: a babel of Marxists, feminists, post-structuralists and deconstructionists, offering sessions on, for example, 'Sluts, Slatterns, Soubrettes, and Seductresses', and 'Female Heterosexual Sublimation and Resolutions of Mother-Son Incest Bonding in Certain Brecht Plays'. Kramer remarks on the lack of truly distinguished senior scholars among the speakers on traditional literary subjects, and on the dominance of ideologies that were 'largely Marxist or feminist or some radical combination of both. No other social or sexual views-except, of course, those deriving from the doctrinaire programs of male homosexuality- found their way into the convention's program'. It looks as though the politicization of literary studies is well-advanced in the United States, for Kramer goes on to comment: 'In American academic life, this development now seems pretty much taken for granted'. In this respect, however, Britain can be proud of one notable export to the conference: Terry Eagleton, who, in a session on Raymond Williams, was, according to Kramer, 'greeted by many of those present as little less than the risen messiah'.
NT

No professors attended the first Durham English Studies Conference on 28-30 March, and only one or two participants held University posts or regular paid employment. It was organized by and for students in English and related disciplines to enable people from different universities to get together and exchange ideas, at the lowest possible cost. Some thirty students took part, and some twenty papers were read and discussed. Although that old chestnut, the Crisis in English Studies, had to be chewed over, the enthusiasm and intelligence revealed in the papers suggested not so much a crisis as a vigorous life. Here was some evidence that the nation is 'not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy in discourse, not beneath the reach of any point, the highest that human capacity can soar to'. Or if not the nation, a bit of it. A similar conference is possible next year; anyone interested should get in touch with Alison Girdwood, Colling-wood College, Durham.

To mark DIDEROT YEAR, Langres, the philosopher's native town, has organized a number of events-exhibitions, theatrical occasions and lectures. Information is available from the Office du tourisme de plateau de Langres, place Bel'Air, 52200 Langres, France. Another celebration is the tercentenary of the death of CORNEILLE, to be marked 'avec éclat' from 4 May to 13 October in Rouen, where the dramatist was born. Here, too, there will be exhibitions, lectures, conferences, and in the chapel of the lycée Corneille there will be performances of his early comedies. In September there will be a popular festival and on 13 October the Comédie-Française will perform Cinna at the Théâtre des Arts.

ELITROPIA, the little Italian publishing house which we have had occasion to mention in these pages in the past, is publishing a 'manual' (in the etymological sense, a book to be kept to hand) under the title In Forma di Parole. It will be very elegantly produced, run to 346 pages and cost 15,000 lire. The first issue (there will be others) includes texts, many of them previously unpublished, by Char, Cocteau, Kafka, Lessing, Brod, Sartre and others.

The following 'Note' concerning the present situation in the Little Spartan War has reached us from Dunsyre: 'Strathclyde Region has been granted-a euphemism, since no rational process is involved-a new summary warrant against the Garden Temple, Little Sparta. In time, sooner or later (who can guess at the intentions of the Region's "socialist" councillors and bureaucrats?), this will inevitably produce a further assault on the Temple, or possibly the imprisonment of those at Little Sparta. Meanwhile, the Region illegally holds artworks stolen in the last assault, their value amounting to twice the total of the alleged rates debt; only the American-owned artworks have been returned, after the intervention of the American State Department last year. The Scottish Office is aware of these (multiple) illegalities but has stated that it 'is unable to get the ear of the Lord Advocate' and evidently intends to go on seeing the law broken by its own procedures (in respect of rates exemption applications) flouted by the Region. Though the Regional Assessor has unequivocally (and unashamedly) stated that he "does not know what a garden temple is ', the Scottish Arts Council still refuses to uphold that part of its Charter which speaks of its "advising our Government at all levels". Associates who once protested to the Region, or the Scottish Office, or the Arts Minister, have long lapsed into the cynical pact of silence which concludes almost all "democratic" communication between ruler and ruled. One is astonished to recall that culture was once an area not of acquiescence but of intelligent aspiration. "Let him" (the modern artist) "despise the unworthy escape route which consists of demeaning the value of the ideal in order to fit in with human neediness and of excluding the intellect in order to have an easier time with the heart. Let him not lead us back into our childhood in order to purchase peace and quiet with the most precious attainments of the intellect, a peace and quiet which can last no longer than the slumber of our intellectual powers, but lead us on to adulthood in order to let us feel the higher harmony which rewards the fighter, which blesses the conqueror." Schiller.'

La Maison de la Poésie in Paris celebrated the work of FRANCIS PONGE in April with readings, lectures and exhibitions.

MENARD PRESS, London, Anthony Rudolf's enterprising poetry and anti-nuclear publishing house, celebrated its fifteenth birthday in March and marked the occasion with 'Keepsake Number Three', a poem-folder by Michael Hamburger, Menard's first author, who turned 60 this year. The first issue of the Journals of Pierre Menard appeared in 1969 and was devoted largely to Hamburger's work as translator. The title of Rudolf's enterprise is an oblique tribute to Borges. Menard Press, in its poetry activities, is primarily a celebratory press, directing our attention to neglected writers and insisting that to understand the centre we must attend, too, to the margins where-who knows-the real centre might in fact be.

The ORIEL BOOKSHOP and Gallery, established by the Welsh Arts Council at 53 Charles Street, Cardiff, is also marking an anniversary, its tenth. Oriel is the best bookshop for poetry in Wales, an attractive place in which many literary events occur. The decade is being marked with a series of readings featuring Welsh and Anglo-Welsh writers, among them Harri Webb, Jean Earle, Tom Leonard, John Tripp, Steve Griffiths, Meredydd Evans and Dic Jones. Joseph Clancy has read his well-known translations of Welsh poetry and the Welsh Arts Council New Poets Competition prizegiving took place.

The Council of Europe has published another report on Cultural Policy which begins with an item headed 'Priority for grassroots culture-A Council of Europe Conference in Bremen': 'Gathered in the free Hanseatic City of Bremen,' it tells us, 'some two hundred mayors, local councillors and cultural officials made an appeal to governments to pursue a systematic policy of decentralisation and to give municipalities and regions the adequate resources and facilities they need to conduct their own innovative cultural policy. These were the final notes of the three-day Conference on Town and Culture-New responses to cultural problems organised jointly by the Standing Conference of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe and the Council of Europe's Council for Cultural Cooperation.' There follow a number of conclusions of such generality as to be meaningless. Quite apart from the cost to the Council of a three-day conference on this scale, it is worth noting that cultural policy was discussed in the absence of artists (mayors, local councillors and cultural officials only); that what was under discussion was money ('resources and facilities') and that administrators, elected and otherwise, believe they have a remit and a vision to conduct 'innovative cultural policies'. The conference reports conclusions not unlike those reached at national level by our own Arts Council and by the French and German authorities: decentralisation and a potential weakening of major national 'cultural amenities'. The conference based its lucubrations on the experiments conducted in select cultural 'backwaters' throughout Europe, from Vantaa, Krems and Ghent to Eindhoven, Charleroi and Rochdale. Some of the conclusions are valid as far as they go, especially in relation to 'Cultural contribution of populations of foreign origin'. Others merely re-state policies which have been proven unworkable over the last ten years and further confuse the provision for education with the provision for the arts.

The 1985 CAMBRIDGE POETRY FESTIVAL, scheduled for June, is beginning to take shape. The following poets have agreed to attend: John Ashbery, Thom Gunn, Adrienne Rich, Charles Tomlinson, Norman Nicholson, Carol Rumens, Jeffrey Wainwright and Douglas Dunn. The Festival runs from 14 to 16 June.

The record for the world's slowest-selling book is held by Oxford University Press for their New Testament in Coptic, printed in the late eighteenth century. The modest print-run of 505 copies did not sell out until 1953.
RM