Cudgelling an author: Roloff responds

It is but the latest, albeit crudest and most ignorant and distorted, baffled as much as baffling self-righteous libel to appear in the United States on the same subject; and if it had not appeared in the medium that bears the title scholar and is sponsored by the crossword puzzle champs I can't imagine anyone paying it the least heed. McDonald's piece is but the latest installment of the forever same caricature of Handke's political position on Yugoslavia which is then employed to cudgel the work of an author that one misreads just as badly. It's the old two sucker punches in a row.

Peter Handke's first English translator Michael Roloff responds to Michael Macdonald's attack in The American Scholar on Europe's greatest living author. This, the first part, deals with the political aspect and MacDonald's niche in what others have called the Worthy-Genocide Establishment. The second part, on MacDonald's bizarre literary misreading of Handke (he has "a postmodernist aesthetic" apparently!), is to follow.