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| Main Reading Room of the in the Library of Congress (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
What joy. The Library of Congress has digitised some of its recordings and put them up online – I spent much of this morning listening to Ray Bradbury in 1982, talking about what happens “when the doom doesn’t arrive” in a lecture called Beyond 1984.
There’s also Kurt Vonnegut, reading from Breakfast of Champions, and an interview with an elderly Robert Frost, from 1959, which seems to start in the middle with a discussion of the interviewer’s name (Frost goes off on one, a bit) but continues with the poet reading and chatting for more than an hour (I wouldn’t say his interviewer has the easiest task). Adrienne Rich also appears, as do Anne Sexton and Czeslaw Milosz.
I remember the first time I heard the recorded voice of a dead author – it was TS Eliot reading The Waste Land, and it was extraordinary. I’d spent so much time at school, and then at university, where I first heard Eliot’s recording of “lilacs out of the dead land”, reading and dissecting poems. It was hearing the author himself reciting it that brought home to me with a thud the fact that this stuff had been written by real people – that it didn’t just spring, fully formed, into the literary canon.
How astonishing, since, it has been to hear Virginia Woolf in the only known surviving recording of her voice; or William Carlos Williams, describing those famous plums.
The Library of Congress says its archive dates back to 1943, and contains nearly 2,000 recordings, most of which are on magnetic tape reels, and only accessible at the library itself. The digitisation project is just a sample of the collection, with more items to be added monthly over the next few years.
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