ABSTRACT Clare and Stephen Winsten, artist and writer, were the neighbors of Bernard Shaw during his last decade. They have received cursory, if not denigratory, treatment from Shaw’s biographers for their perceived role in his last years. This article seeks to rescue their reputations and show how their company, after the death of Charlotte Shaw, filled a role in Shaw’s life. By recounting the couple’s earlier lives, it makes clear how much they had in common with Shaw and why he found them satisfying conversationalists. Shaw’s interactions with the Winsten family revived his interest in art patronage and in Pygmalion-style experiments in the development and education of their children. The text identifies the artworks and books, which were created by the couple as a result of their relationship with Shaw, with the aim of rescuing them from later Shavian intellectual snobbery. It was a mutually beneficial friendship.

ABSTRACT Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and Luigi Antonelli’s A Man Confronts Himself both had their origin in 1918, as mass slaughter from the Great War, an assault on traditional values by the Russian Revolution, and the devastation of the flu pandemic created a fascination with the extension of human life. Both dramatists juxtapose immortality with the grotesque business of ordinary life. However, Antonelli sounds a traditionalist warning, while Shaw looks forward to unleashed potential. Though Shaw’s work strives for philosophical purity, it forfeits the powerful tensions of the grotesque, which seeks to live life even in the midst of death.

ABSTRACT We know very little about Bernard Shaw’s sister Elinor Agnes beyond that she died from consumption just shy of twenty-two years of age. Shaw spoke so little of her, revealing so little of his feelings for her, that we might wonder how important Agnes was to him and how her death affected him. Searching for what is known of Agnes led to a number of clues suggesting a close bond existed between Shaw and his sister. Shaw’s silence regarding the dates of the deaths of his sisters Lucy and Agnes speaks of unresolved mourning and complicated grief. What led Shaw to so protect himself from the emotional pain it appears he experienced from death and loss? Importantly, it appears that Shaw’s memories of Agnes and his wishes for her contributed to the creation of his iconic young heroines.

ABSTRACT Unlike many of Bernard Shaw’s more prominent plays, Arms and the Man, his only play with a Bulgarian connection, remained untranslated into Bulgarian for more than a century. In this article, the author highlights his and his co-translator’s experiences in translating the play into Bulgarian. The article focuses on the challenges of translating specific stylistic idiosyncrasies of the play, including cultural referents, unconventional syntax, and punctuation.

ABSTRACT This is a bibliography of Bernard Shaw’s works in Japanese translation. It was originally compiled by Masahiko Masumoto (1934–2006) and has been supplemented and updated by Ryuichi Oura. The list is preceded by an introduction that briefly traces a history of Shaw’s reception in Japan and outlines how Japanese translators have tried to solve some problems in translating Shaw, such as choosing suitable titles and transplanting dialects and swear words.

ABSTRACT Bernard Shaw has been a well-known writer in the Spanish-speaking world since Julio Broutá introduced his works in Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article assesses two of the six translations of his play Pygmalion into Spanish, those of Julio Broutá (1919) and Floreal Mazía (1952), focusing specifically on the rendering of Cockney. Both target authors maintain the dialectal distinction in their works, by translating Cockney as Cheli and Lunfardo, dialects spoken by the lower classes of Madrid and Buenos Aires, respectively.

Stanley Weintraub made a brilliant career chronicling the lives of others, so it's fitting that he himself was not so much born as written into existence by the stroke of a pen. Specifically, a ballpoint pen.In the preface to his biographical memoir, A Writing Life, Weintraub tells the story of his parents' inability to decide on a name for their new son. Since the new mother and her baby couldn't be discharged until the birth certificate was filed, an exasperated nurse legally registered the infant as “Male Baby Weintraub” and sent them home. The couple eventually settled on “Stanley,” and the assumed name readily carried him through kindergarten registration, his bar mitzvah, various jobs, more school registrations and degrees; even his Army enlistment and marriage certificate identified him as “Stanley Weintraub.” It wasn't until he was ready to embark on his writing life that he had to face who he was—or, more accurately, wasn't. His first research trip to the British Library required a passport, and the passport office required his birth certificate—which legally identified him as “Male Baby Weintraub.”While Stanley tried vainly to offer substitute documentation, his mother matter-of-factly closed the gap between fiction and reality by altering his birth certificate, using “a ballpoint pen not yet in use in the year of my arrival, and differing in all particulars from the rest of the words written in April 1929” (xxviii) to write “Stanley” where “Male Baby” had previously stood.Stan knew the importance of writing an opening that uses a critical moment to hook the reader in, and his own story is no exception. It's hard to think of a better anecdote to symbolically capture how his passion for writing the lives of others ultimately made Stanley Weintraub truly himself.In A Writing Life: Revisiting the Past, Stan faced the daunting task of being both the author and the subject of the work. Aided by a vibrantly sharp memory, a lifetime of accumulated diaries and documents, and his well-honed abilities as a storyteller, he becomes the chronicler of his own life, one that rivalled Shaw's in length and breadth. But where Shaw enjoyed talking about himself, Stanley Weintraub almost seems more interested in his books. His life becomes increasingly inseparable from the works he wrote.In good chronological form, Stan begins at the beginning. The early chapters are full of genealogies and childhood memories, histories and reminiscences that range through a vast network of extended family and friends. Many of those earliest recollections clearly foreshadow the direction that his writing career would eventually take him. Stan indulges that plot device while also warning readers not to read too much into it. Drawing connections between theatrical productions he attended as a student and the subjects of later books, Stan observes, “the persistence of memory can be a writer's rainbow bridge, or illustrate only the capriciousness of coincidence” (61). After a lifetime of writing histories, Stan well knew how easily coincidence could look like Destiny in hindsight.Whether it's coincidence or destiny, a remarkably focused narrative trajectory emerges nonetheless. Stan the precocious young reader developed an early preference for nonfiction, being allowed to read newspapers and National Geographics while his second-grade classmates plowed through “classroom twaddle like Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue” (2). Much of his early reading—indeed much of his young world—was dominated by war: first the Spanish Civil War, followed immediately by World War II. Stan's bar mitzvah becomes another symbolic moment for the boy who would grow up to write numerous books about battles and military history: while the ceremony went on against the backdrop of the American bombing raid on Tokyo, he received his first typewriter as a gift from an aunt and uncle. It was a coming of age literally marked by the confluence of war and words.Too young and too geographically distant to experience these early wars firsthand, Stan and his chums followed the conflicts as they were chronicled on the bubble gum cards that they eagerly collected. For young Stan, these colorful and exuberantly patriotic vignettes became important early lessons in narrative bias as he started to recognize the difference between events as portrayed on the bubble gum cards and as they were reported in newspapers or on radio. His own juvenile attempts at writing wartime histories faltered as he grappled with sorting out the truth from the conflicting interpretations around him.Inevitably, war came for Stan. The chapters about his military service as a medical officer in a Korean POW hospital mark a shift in tone and focus from the more carefree exploits of his youth. For security reasons, personnel were not allowed to keep diaries, but Stan was an experienced rule bender and wrote on scraps of paper, recording wartime history as it happened around him. The memories reanimated from his ersatz journal often make for difficult and tense reading, a far cry from the bubble gum cards of his youth. Like the bubble gum wars, though, Stan became profoundly aware of the difference between official reporting on the war and his lived experience. The determination to try to find the truth behind, beneath, or beside the official accounts was a crucial factor in finding his voice as a writer. War became a recurring theme running through his oeuvre, not just in the military histories, but often appearing in the biographies and other works, where he learned to understand it through its impacts on his human subjects. Stan learned one consistent truth about war, an insight that he would have liked to see inscribed on the Korean War Memorial: “War is Not Uplifting” (133).Returning from Korea, Stan literally and figuratively begins a new chapter. He quickly introduces a new character, the “formidable … beautiful, but apparently a bit difficult” (137) Rodelle Horwitz. In another bout of serendipitous symbolism, the couple's first date was to a performance of Shaw's Man and Superman and they engaged in a voluminous correspondence courtship while Stan worked on his PhD at Penn State. Anyone who ever met the Weintraubs will recognize the woman who paused her own wedding ceremony to manage the interruption created by an uninvited crying toddler, or hear Stan's gleeful chuckle as he describes being referred to as “Mr. Rodelle.” While she doesn't always occupy center stage, Rodelle remains a presence throughout the book, managing the house, children, travel arrangements, and family finances; furiously taking notes, tape-recording interviews, and creatively examining documents on research trips; teaching as untenured faculty at Penn State; and tirelessly serving as Stan's “editor of first recourse,” waging her own never-ending battle to relocate the controlling verbs from the ends of the sentences where Stan couldn't seem to help placing them. In the book's dedication, Stan fittingly describes Rodelle as “my Charlotte, who … edited and coauthored my writing life.”The chapters on Stan's early life and career in many ways make the book's most engaging reading, focusing more expansively on the life of the writer. Stan's hallmark wry humor and understatement are on full display as he documents how Penn State schemed to keep him on their faculty when he graduated, intercepting and turning down other job offers on his behalf without telling him. Stan doesn't reveal that plot twist until after he has walked us through the demoralizing experience of watching his classmates move away to academic jobs while he prepared to move Rodelle and their newborn son in with her parents until he could find some way to support them, effectively letting the reader experience the same confusion and indignation that Stan must have felt as the events unfolded. In these chapters, the anecdotes alternate between describing the unglamorous circumstances of an underpaid instructor—taking out mid-month payday loans to make ends meet and setting up his typewriter in a converted coal bin that flooded more than once—and exciting research opportunities and resources that were often less strategically sought than seemingly stumbled on through serendipity, naïveté, or even financial necessity. There's a charming humility to Stan's admission about how guilty he felt leaving the family behind to make that first research trip to the British Library, and how he used the time to research the subjects for three books simultaneously because he wasn't sure when he could afford to return.Despite the incongruous beginning, Stan remained at Penn State for his entire professional career, invariably turning down the offers that eventually started rolling in from more prestigious universities. Sometimes it was personal preference when he and Rodelle couldn't imagine relocating their growing family from Happy Valley to other university cities. But Penn State also offered Stan strategic professional advantages as well. Taking over the editorship of “a minor quarterly on Bernard Shaw, having been discovered by the Shaw Society of America” (161) made Stan the first Penn State faculty member to edit a journal in the Humanities, a distinction favorably noticed by the university president. As a curious and frugal researcher, the habit Stan cultivated of gathering material on several subjects simultaneously allowed him to churn out articles (and later books) in relatively rapid succession. Even if he considered his early works “minor,” they similarly demonstrated a level of scholarly productivity that clearly set him apart from his colleagues at Penn State. The positive attention helped Stan negotiate opportunities conducive to an even more ambitious research agenda. When Penn State's vice president for research offered him the directorship of the newish Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, Stan leveraged the “external visibility and apparent energy” (224) that the administration admired into a research professorship, staff, and several IBM Selectric typewriters that helped to relieve the burden of his arthritic, one-fingered typing.From the perspective of memoir, the increased opportunities for Stan to indulge his passion for the writing life is somewhat of a mixed blessing. Anecdotes about the writer in pursuit of the subject—an afternoon spent with Leonard Woolf at Monk's House, connections with often eccentric private collectors, visits to historic sites and archives—or the writer as publicist—talking with interviewers who mostly hadn't read the book, opining as a media expert, taking an unexpectedly engaging turn in his grandson's kindergarten class—continue to be sprinkled through the work, but they become less and less frequent as the book production gathers momentum. Increasingly, the memoir becomes an opportunity to revisit the subjects and events of the many biographies and histories he wrote, while Stan himself disappears into the background. In a brief interlude chapter between Whistler and Victoria, Stan explicitly rejects the unrealistic expectations of being the hero in his own life story, but he seems to have difficulty in the latter half even seeing himself as the main character. It's as if, right to the end, even in his own biography, he is much more invested in the stories he wrote about other people's lives rather than his own.Ironically, it falls to others to bring the focus back onto the main subject, the life of the writer. The book's editorial team—his son David and Shaw scholar Michel Pharand (a former PhD student of Stan's)—wisely appended an afterword comprising several tributes to Stan that poured in from colleagues and friends at the news of his passing. It's largely through their memories that the sharp, witty, generous gentleman and scholar who is Stanley Weintraub retakes center stage in the story of his own life. I suspect Stan would approve of closing his biographical memoir with anecdotes and memories from those who knew him and his work. He knew better than anyone that ultimately, that is how a life is really written.