There should be a campaign to bring Enid Bagnold’s novel, THE LOVED AND ENVIED, back into print. First published in 1951, it focuses on a group of friends who confront the difficulties of aging through work, art, outings to the theater, improbable marriages, and mutual support.
Ruby, who has retained her beauty into her fifties, is loved, criticized, and envied by her friends. At the debut of her friend Rudi’s play, she mourns the news that a 70-year-old friend has married his fiftysomething housekeeper. It leads her to consider male aging in general.
“Alberti’s news, the light on his lonely condition, had so shaken her that when she caught sight of Edouard in the stalls and saw him bend his head to talk to his crumpled companion she felt for him too a tender and speculative compassion. All her men friends were getting older. The whole band, like a wagonette of picnickers, was driving towards the edge of the world. It was not so much the extreme edge, however, that gave her apprehension, as the pity she felt for hearts inwardly taken aback by the arrival of age. Contrary to what was supposed, it was easier for women.”
Is the arrival of age easier for women? Not all characters in the novel agree. Bagnold describes their rage against the absence or loss of beauty and attributes some of Ruby’s generosity to her lucky appearance. Rose, Eduard’s mistress, mourns the loss of her hair: “Her turbans were to Rose what false teeth might be to another woman.” Cora, a gifted painter, tells Ruby bluntly: “It puts me in a rage to think you aren’t grateful to God! If I could have one day of beauty, if the dear God in his kindness would let me change for one day the impedimenta I’ve had to put up with for fifty conscious years!” A character who attempted suicide because of her deformed face ironically profits from running an exclusive beauty salon.
Yes, the men suffer. They seek female companionship in old age as they become lonely and regret lost opportunities to connect. On the other hand, some of the women grow more independent.
A fascinating, witty novel about upper-class friendship, aging, and gender.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Amitav Ghosh
A political novelist reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh describes in THE HUNGRY TIDE the struggles of the people of the Sundarbans, a group of islands off the eastern coast of India. Nature is their biggest foe: tigers attack men in the mangrove forests; storms and tidal waves destroy villages; women expect to be widowed at a young age. But government policy has also been their enemy.
Ghosh interweaves the stories of Kanai Dutt, an interpreter, Piya, a marine biologist, Fokir, a poor fisherman, and Kanai’s uncle, illuminating the political policies that have conspired to destroy lives and the environment. Ghosh’s description of the massacre of Bengali refugees in Morichjhapi in the 1970s gives us a terrifying glimpse of an incident virtually unknown outside of India, according to Ghosh, who says the only published historical treatment in English is an article in the 1999 JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES.
The following two passages are not about the massacre of the Bengali refugees, however. One is about passion for work, the other about ecology.
In the passage below, Kanai, an interpreter and businessman, makes a fascinating connection between marine biology and translation while observing Piya, a marine biologist, at work.
“...she was back in position with her binoculars fixed to her eyes, watching the water with a closeness of attention that reminded Kanai of a textual scholar poring over a yet undeciphered manuscript: it was as though she were puzzling over a codex that had been authored by the earth itself. He had almost forgotten what it meant to look at something so ardently--an immaterial thing, not a commodity nor a convenience nor an object of erotic interest. He remembered that he too had once concentrated his mind in this way; he too had peered into the unknown as if through an eyeglass--but the vistas he had been looking at lay deep in the interior of other languages. Those horizons had filled him with the desire to learn of the ways in which other realities were conjugated.”
The next passage describes the dwindling Orcaella (river dolphin) population in the Mekong, where Piya had worked before journeying to India.
“The Orcaella population of the Mekong was known to be declining rapidly and was expected soon to fall below sustainable levels. The Mekong Orcaella had shared Cambodia’s misfortunes: in the 1970s they had suffered the ravages of indiscriminate American carpet bombing. Later they too had been massacred by Khmer Rouge cadres, who had hit upon the idea of using dolphin oil to supplement their dwindling supplies of petroleum. The once abundant population of Orcaella in the Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s great fresh-water lake, had been reduced almost to extinction. These dolphins were hunted with rifles and explosives and their carcasses were hung up in the sun so their fat would drip into buckets. This oil was used to run boats and motorcycles.”
The horror of the massacre of the dolphins, in a spooky way, parallels the massacre of the Bengali. Ghosh also captures the commitment and frustration of the activists as they attempt to rescue people and the environment.
Ghosh interweaves the stories of Kanai Dutt, an interpreter, Piya, a marine biologist, Fokir, a poor fisherman, and Kanai’s uncle, illuminating the political policies that have conspired to destroy lives and the environment. Ghosh’s description of the massacre of Bengali refugees in Morichjhapi in the 1970s gives us a terrifying glimpse of an incident virtually unknown outside of India, according to Ghosh, who says the only published historical treatment in English is an article in the 1999 JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES.
The following two passages are not about the massacre of the Bengali refugees, however. One is about passion for work, the other about ecology.
In the passage below, Kanai, an interpreter and businessman, makes a fascinating connection between marine biology and translation while observing Piya, a marine biologist, at work.
“...she was back in position with her binoculars fixed to her eyes, watching the water with a closeness of attention that reminded Kanai of a textual scholar poring over a yet undeciphered manuscript: it was as though she were puzzling over a codex that had been authored by the earth itself. He had almost forgotten what it meant to look at something so ardently--an immaterial thing, not a commodity nor a convenience nor an object of erotic interest. He remembered that he too had once concentrated his mind in this way; he too had peered into the unknown as if through an eyeglass--but the vistas he had been looking at lay deep in the interior of other languages. Those horizons had filled him with the desire to learn of the ways in which other realities were conjugated.”
The next passage describes the dwindling Orcaella (river dolphin) population in the Mekong, where Piya had worked before journeying to India.
“The Orcaella population of the Mekong was known to be declining rapidly and was expected soon to fall below sustainable levels. The Mekong Orcaella had shared Cambodia’s misfortunes: in the 1970s they had suffered the ravages of indiscriminate American carpet bombing. Later they too had been massacred by Khmer Rouge cadres, who had hit upon the idea of using dolphin oil to supplement their dwindling supplies of petroleum. The once abundant population of Orcaella in the Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s great fresh-water lake, had been reduced almost to extinction. These dolphins were hunted with rifles and explosives and their carcasses were hung up in the sun so their fat would drip into buckets. This oil was used to run boats and motorcycles.”
The horror of the massacre of the dolphins, in a spooky way, parallels the massacre of the Bengali. Ghosh also captures the commitment and frustration of the activists as they attempt to rescue people and the environment.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Envy
"And in my heart such envy used to burn,
If I’d caught some one looking pleased with life,
Thou wouldst have seen how livid I could turn."--Canto XIV, vv. 82-84, Dante’s PURGATORY, tr. by Dorothy Sayers, Penguin
The envious dwell in Purgatory. Oddly envy isn’t discussed anymore. (Sexual jealousy, yes. Sexual jealousy is a popular theme in films and novels. But other forms of envy seem to be considered acceptable in contemporary society.) Dante’s hard-edged description of this sin makes it evident why the envious spend time in Purgatory. Guido del Duca, a 13th-century political and legal administrator in Ravenna, speaks the words above to Dante. Although Guido repents, he admits the ugliness of his past emotions. One envisions envy surging up like bile inside him.
One can imagine envy leading to crime: political character assassination; the falsification of information that led to the war in Iraq. Of course, the sowers of scandal end up in Dante's hell. But doesn’t it begin with envy?
Perhaps I don't think about envy because I'm not a careerist. I opted out of the traditional workplace years ago. Envy flourishes when people jockey for position and power. People in competitive professions talk about “having to watch their backs.”
The poor envy the prosperous. That's expected. Yet I’d never thought about the unhappy envying the happy, which shows a failure of imagination on my part. Dante reveals the hideous nature of sin.
Reading PURGATORY is an astonishing experience. Dante is not only a brilliant poet but understands the gamut of human emotions.
The Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of THE DIVINE COMEDY: “It seems to me that if Dante is a universal patrimony (beyond a certain level of necessary study)--and such he has become, even if he remarked more than once that he was speaking to few who were worthy of hearing him--then his voice can be heard today by everyone as it never was in other ages and as may never again be possible in the future, so that his message can reach the layman no less than the initiate, and in a way that is probably entirely new.”
If I’d caught some one looking pleased with life,
Thou wouldst have seen how livid I could turn."--Canto XIV, vv. 82-84, Dante’s PURGATORY, tr. by Dorothy Sayers, Penguin
The envious dwell in Purgatory. Oddly envy isn’t discussed anymore. (Sexual jealousy, yes. Sexual jealousy is a popular theme in films and novels. But other forms of envy seem to be considered acceptable in contemporary society.) Dante’s hard-edged description of this sin makes it evident why the envious spend time in Purgatory. Guido del Duca, a 13th-century political and legal administrator in Ravenna, speaks the words above to Dante. Although Guido repents, he admits the ugliness of his past emotions. One envisions envy surging up like bile inside him.
One can imagine envy leading to crime: political character assassination; the falsification of information that led to the war in Iraq. Of course, the sowers of scandal end up in Dante's hell. But doesn’t it begin with envy?
Perhaps I don't think about envy because I'm not a careerist. I opted out of the traditional workplace years ago. Envy flourishes when people jockey for position and power. People in competitive professions talk about “having to watch their backs.”
The poor envy the prosperous. That's expected. Yet I’d never thought about the unhappy envying the happy, which shows a failure of imagination on my part. Dante reveals the hideous nature of sin.
Reading PURGATORY is an astonishing experience. Dante is not only a brilliant poet but understands the gamut of human emotions.
The Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of THE DIVINE COMEDY: “It seems to me that if Dante is a universal patrimony (beyond a certain level of necessary study)--and such he has become, even if he remarked more than once that he was speaking to few who were worthy of hearing him--then his voice can be heard today by everyone as it never was in other ages and as may never again be possible in the future, so that his message can reach the layman no less than the initiate, and in a way that is probably entirely new.”
Saturday, March 11, 2006
THE HUNGRY TIDE
The cover of THE HUNGRY TIDE reminds my spouse of LIFE OF PI. “Do you think they did it deliberately?”
I laughed at his acuity. “There are actual tigers in the book, though.”
Honestly, the two novels couldn’t be more different. I'm very much enjoying Amitav Ghosh’s THE HUNGRY TIDE, set in the Sundarbans, a group of islands off the eastern coast of India. Ghosh’s political novel is beautifully written. The complex narrative alternates the stories of Kanai, a translator from Delhi, with that of Piya, an American marine biologist of Indian descent who is studying dolphins. Kanai is on his way to a remote village to visit his aunt, the organizer of a women's union and a hospital. She wishes him to read the papers of his late uncle. At the railway station, Kanai spots an unusual young woman.
The novel opens: “Kanai spotted her the moment he stepped onto the crowded platform: he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair nor by her clothes, which were those of a teenage boy--loose cotton pants and an oversized ite shirt....
“Why would a foreigner, a young woman, be standing in a south Kolkata commuter station, waiting for the train to Canning? It was true, of course, that this line was the only rail connection to the Sundarbans. But so far as he knew it was never used by tourists...”
At the end of their casual meeting on the train, he invites Piya to visit him. And after she tussles with two thuggish men on a boat and is rescued by a poor fisherman, she is glad to have the name of his aunt’s village.
Ghosh gracefully interweaves an exposition of Indian history and politics with Kanai’s memories of his last visit to his aunt and uncle and Piya’s involvement with a fisherman and his son.
I laughed at his acuity. “There are actual tigers in the book, though.”
Honestly, the two novels couldn’t be more different. I'm very much enjoying Amitav Ghosh’s THE HUNGRY TIDE, set in the Sundarbans, a group of islands off the eastern coast of India. Ghosh’s political novel is beautifully written. The complex narrative alternates the stories of Kanai, a translator from Delhi, with that of Piya, an American marine biologist of Indian descent who is studying dolphins. Kanai is on his way to a remote village to visit his aunt, the organizer of a women's union and a hospital. She wishes him to read the papers of his late uncle. At the railway station, Kanai spots an unusual young woman.
The novel opens: “Kanai spotted her the moment he stepped onto the crowded platform: he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair nor by her clothes, which were those of a teenage boy--loose cotton pants and an oversized ite shirt....
“Why would a foreigner, a young woman, be standing in a south Kolkata commuter station, waiting for the train to Canning? It was true, of course, that this line was the only rail connection to the Sundarbans. But so far as he knew it was never used by tourists...”
At the end of their casual meeting on the train, he invites Piya to visit him. And after she tussles with two thuggish men on a boat and is rescued by a poor fisherman, she is glad to have the name of his aunt’s village.
Ghosh gracefully interweaves an exposition of Indian history and politics with Kanai’s memories of his last visit to his aunt and uncle and Piya’s involvement with a fisherman and his son.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Remembrance or Search?
The following passage from Part Two of WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE is a typical Proustian meditation on memory,both poetic and philosophical. It also provides a strong argument for translating A LA RECHERCHÉ DU TEMPS PERDU as REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST rather than IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.
Proust writes: “That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture it. Or rather we should never recapture it had not a few words (such as this ‘head of the Ministry of Posts’) been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable.”
Reading Proust is by turns ecstatic, intellectual, humorous, philosophical, and boring. In the above exquisite passage he analyzes memory, its relationship to concrete imagery and abstract emotions. Then he returns to the story, to M.’s train journey from Paris, away from his habits and pain over Gilberte, to his stay in Balbec, where new scenery and characters distract him from his neuroses.
Sometimes I tire of M.’s stream-of-consciousness. I admit I’m occasionally as bored by M. as Gilberte must have been. At other times I’m immensely amused, as when he describes the snobbish clientele at the hotel and the deterioration of the service after maid Francoise makes friends with some of the hotel employees (she refuses to disturb them on behalf of her employers).
It’s a long, brilliant, beautiful novel by a neurotically attentive writer who can turn a piece of furniture or a train journey into poetic prose.
M is such a sexist, though. Only his grandmother and the women of her generation are portrayed as well-educated and sympathetic. M. sees most women only as sexual beings or, in the case of Odette, as a kind of ideal fashion plate.
Five and a half more volumes to go...
Proust writes: “That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture it. Or rather we should never recapture it had not a few words (such as this ‘head of the Ministry of Posts’) been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable.”
Reading Proust is by turns ecstatic, intellectual, humorous, philosophical, and boring. In the above exquisite passage he analyzes memory, its relationship to concrete imagery and abstract emotions. Then he returns to the story, to M.’s train journey from Paris, away from his habits and pain over Gilberte, to his stay in Balbec, where new scenery and characters distract him from his neuroses.
Sometimes I tire of M.’s stream-of-consciousness. I admit I’m occasionally as bored by M. as Gilberte must have been. At other times I’m immensely amused, as when he describes the snobbish clientele at the hotel and the deterioration of the service after maid Francoise makes friends with some of the hotel employees (she refuses to disturb them on behalf of her employers).
It’s a long, brilliant, beautiful novel by a neurotically attentive writer who can turn a piece of furniture or a train journey into poetic prose.
M is such a sexist, though. Only his grandmother and the women of her generation are portrayed as well-educated and sympathetic. M. sees most women only as sexual beings or, in the case of Odette, as a kind of ideal fashion plate.
Five and a half more volumes to go...
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Sayers or Mandelbaum?
Sayers or Mandelbaum? Their styles are so different that their translations read like different poems.
Here are their two versions of vv. 1-9 of Canto IV of PURGATORIO.
Sayers’s translation:
When some one faculty, by its apprehension
Of pain or pleasure, grows so clamorous
That it commands the soul’s entire attention,
Of all powers else the soul’s oblivious--
Which goes to show how false is the surmise
That soul is kindled above soul in us.
Thus, when such things engage our ears or eyes
As bend the soul towards them totally,
Time passes, and we mark not how it flies;
Mandelbaum’s version of the same lines:
When any of our faculties retains
a strong impression of delight or pain,
the soul will wholly concentrate on that,
neglecting any other power it has
(and this refutes the error that maintains
that--one above the other--several souls
can flame in us); and thus, when something seen
or heard secures the soul in stringent grip,
time moves and yet we do not notice it.
My old Bantam paperback of the INFERNO had the Italian text side-by-side with the translation. My newer editions of PURGATORIO and PARADISO have only the English. I suppose the publishers are saving money.
I’ll return to Mandelbaum for PARADISO, as Sayers died before she finished her translation. A friend of Sayers finished the PARADISO and I don’t know her work.
It’s very, very wearisome having to depend on translations of poetry. Maybe I could teach myself Italian.
Yeah. But will I?
Doubtful.
N.B. The line indentations of Sayers's and Mandelbaum's translations don't come out right on Blogger. Apologies. I can't fix it.
Here are their two versions of vv. 1-9 of Canto IV of PURGATORIO.
Sayers’s translation:
When some one faculty, by its apprehension
Of pain or pleasure, grows so clamorous
That it commands the soul’s entire attention,
Of all powers else the soul’s oblivious--
Which goes to show how false is the surmise
That soul is kindled above soul in us.
Thus, when such things engage our ears or eyes
As bend the soul towards them totally,
Time passes, and we mark not how it flies;
Mandelbaum’s version of the same lines:
When any of our faculties retains
a strong impression of delight or pain,
the soul will wholly concentrate on that,
neglecting any other power it has
(and this refutes the error that maintains
that--one above the other--several souls
can flame in us); and thus, when something seen
or heard secures the soul in stringent grip,
time moves and yet we do not notice it.
My old Bantam paperback of the INFERNO had the Italian text side-by-side with the translation. My newer editions of PURGATORIO and PARADISO have only the English. I suppose the publishers are saving money.
I’ll return to Mandelbaum for PARADISO, as Sayers died before she finished her translation. A friend of Sayers finished the PARADISO and I don’t know her work.
It’s very, very wearisome having to depend on translations of poetry. Maybe I could teach myself Italian.
Yeah. But will I?
Doubtful.
N.B. The line indentations of Sayers's and Mandelbaum's translations don't come out right on Blogger. Apologies. I can't fix it.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
"Twilight of the Superheroes"
There are no dull moments in “Twilight of the Superheroes,” the title story of Deborah Eisenberg’s new story collection.
The italicized surreal prologue reads like science fiction. On New Year’s Eve in 1999, people all over the planet anticipate Y2K, the widely predicted computer breakdown that fails to happen. Nathaniel, the author of a comic strip, PASSIVITYMAN, tells his grandchildren about the millennium.
“It must be hard for you to imagine--it’s even hard for me to remember--but people hadn’t been using computers for very long. As far as I know, my mother (your great-grandmother) never even touched one! And no one had thought to inform the computers that one day the universe would pass from the years of the one thousands into the years of the two thousands. So the machines, as these experts suddenly realized, were not equipped to understand that at the conclusion of 1999 time would not start over from 1900, time would keep going.”
Nothing came of Y2K. No disaster happened. Nathaniel, who had spent the evening partying with friends, awoke with a hangover.
But in 2001 Nathaniel, his friends, and his uncle Lucien, an art gallery manager who had found him a loft apartment sublet, witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Lucien, mourning not only his dead wife but the death of history as he understood it, tries to analyze the meaning of events and to brace himself for the future.
“But the future actually ahead of them, it’s now obvious, had itself been implied by a past; and the terrible day that pointed them toward that future had been prepared for a long, long time, though it had been prepared behind a curtain.
“It was as if there had been a curtain, a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents, with Lucien’s delightful city. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.”
The curtain imagery is reminiscent of the Iron Curtain imagery that dominated the ‘50s and “60s. It seems appropriate.
While Lucien tries to make sense of current events, his nephew Nathaniel, a newcomer to New York City, becomes depressed and loses his sense of creativity. Instead of concentrating on his career, he dreams about Delphine, a cosmopolitan woman who had tolerated him and allowed him to sleep in her apartment while the debris from the Twin Towers was cleaned from his loft. He must also leave the loft that has been his home, because the owner is returning.
A sad, moving, brilliant story, characterized by arresting imagery and insights.
The italicized surreal prologue reads like science fiction. On New Year’s Eve in 1999, people all over the planet anticipate Y2K, the widely predicted computer breakdown that fails to happen. Nathaniel, the author of a comic strip, PASSIVITYMAN, tells his grandchildren about the millennium.
“It must be hard for you to imagine--it’s even hard for me to remember--but people hadn’t been using computers for very long. As far as I know, my mother (your great-grandmother) never even touched one! And no one had thought to inform the computers that one day the universe would pass from the years of the one thousands into the years of the two thousands. So the machines, as these experts suddenly realized, were not equipped to understand that at the conclusion of 1999 time would not start over from 1900, time would keep going.”
Nothing came of Y2K. No disaster happened. Nathaniel, who had spent the evening partying with friends, awoke with a hangover.
But in 2001 Nathaniel, his friends, and his uncle Lucien, an art gallery manager who had found him a loft apartment sublet, witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Lucien, mourning not only his dead wife but the death of history as he understood it, tries to analyze the meaning of events and to brace himself for the future.
“But the future actually ahead of them, it’s now obvious, had itself been implied by a past; and the terrible day that pointed them toward that future had been prepared for a long, long time, though it had been prepared behind a curtain.
“It was as if there had been a curtain, a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents, with Lucien’s delightful city. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.”
The curtain imagery is reminiscent of the Iron Curtain imagery that dominated the ‘50s and “60s. It seems appropriate.
While Lucien tries to make sense of current events, his nephew Nathaniel, a newcomer to New York City, becomes depressed and loses his sense of creativity. Instead of concentrating on his career, he dreams about Delphine, a cosmopolitan woman who had tolerated him and allowed him to sleep in her apartment while the debris from the Twin Towers was cleaned from his loft. He must also leave the loft that has been his home, because the owner is returning.
A sad, moving, brilliant story, characterized by arresting imagery and insights.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Furniture
“All the ideas that I had formed of the hours, different from those that exist for other men, passed by the Swanns in the house which was to their everyday life what the body is to the soul, and whose singularity it must have expressed, all those ideas were distributed, amalgamated--equally disturbing and indefinable throughout--in the arrangement of the furniture, the thickness of the carpets, the positions of the windows, the ministrations of the servants.”--Proust’s WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE
I’ve been slowly reading IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. I’m reading the second volume, WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE.
Proust evokes the slow passage of time and the changes wrought, and the slight plot revolves around the love life of Swann and the narrator M.’s budding passion for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, then for Albertine. Proust ‘s ornate sentences and elaborate descriptions of upper-class life have an opiate effect on me.
I’m occasionally bemused by Proust’s meditations. Much as I love the elegance of this translation (by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright), the experiences of the narrator, M., differ from my own.
In short, I’m not rich.
Life in IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME consists of lunch, tea, salons, reading, walks to the Champs-Elysées, going to the theater, and, apparently, worshipping furniture. Proust describes the architecture of churches and interiors of houses in loving detail, often matching them to his psychological and emotional states.
As a middle-class person, my pleasures are simpler.
What’s this about furniture? The exquisite passage describing the possessions of Swann, which goes on and on, slightly exasperated me.
“...and there was nothing, not even the painting by Rubens that hung above the chimney-piece, that was not endowed with the same quality and almost the same intensity of charm as the laced boots of M. Swann and the hooded cape the like of which I had so dearly longed to wear...”
I have known a Swann or two in my time and have admired their luxurious houses. But their Oriental carpets, windows, comfortable sofas, and paintings have never stimulated me to M’s pitch of ecstasy.
Furniture means nothing. A Barcalounger chair is more comfortable than an antique wingback.
Proust’s reveries on nature, madeleines, and reading move me. His passion for furniture does not.
I’ve been slowly reading IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. I’m reading the second volume, WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE.
Proust evokes the slow passage of time and the changes wrought, and the slight plot revolves around the love life of Swann and the narrator M.’s budding passion for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, then for Albertine. Proust ‘s ornate sentences and elaborate descriptions of upper-class life have an opiate effect on me.
I’m occasionally bemused by Proust’s meditations. Much as I love the elegance of this translation (by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright), the experiences of the narrator, M., differ from my own.
In short, I’m not rich.
Life in IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME consists of lunch, tea, salons, reading, walks to the Champs-Elysées, going to the theater, and, apparently, worshipping furniture. Proust describes the architecture of churches and interiors of houses in loving detail, often matching them to his psychological and emotional states.
As a middle-class person, my pleasures are simpler.
What’s this about furniture? The exquisite passage describing the possessions of Swann, which goes on and on, slightly exasperated me.
“...and there was nothing, not even the painting by Rubens that hung above the chimney-piece, that was not endowed with the same quality and almost the same intensity of charm as the laced boots of M. Swann and the hooded cape the like of which I had so dearly longed to wear...”
I have known a Swann or two in my time and have admired their luxurious houses. But their Oriental carpets, windows, comfortable sofas, and paintings have never stimulated me to M’s pitch of ecstasy.
Furniture means nothing. A Barcalounger chair is more comfortable than an antique wingback.
Proust’s reveries on nature, madeleines, and reading move me. His passion for furniture does not.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Dante Translations
The most daunting task for the Dante reader is selecting a good translation.
I used to despair of translations. For years I read English poetry or poetry in the original of the few languages I’d studied, because I saw no point in reading unreliable translations. Stripped of its language, poetry is often reduced to a crude outline. And translators play fast and loose with the texts. Not that I blame them: turning an inflected language into syntactically rigid English is nearly impossible.
But I left school long ago, and at last it dawned on me I didn’t need to play by scholarly rules. I was unlikely to read THE DIVINE COMEDY if not in translation.
So I’m bending the rules, and it’s a pleasure.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I admire Mandelbaum’s translation of the INFERNO. Now I’ve begun Dorothy Sayers’s introduction to her 1955 translation of PURGATORY. She writes so beautifully and is so brilliant that I wish I had a copy of her INFERNO as well.
Although I read and admired Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries years ago, I’d been led to understand that her Dante translation and scholarship were out of date. The best writers never go out of date, though.
Her translations have been reissued in attractive new Penguins, and if they live up to her introductions, they’re well worth the price.
Here’s part of her fascinating opening paragraph:
“Of the three books of the COMMEDIA, the PURGATORIO is, for English readers, the least known, the least quoted--and the most beloved. It forms, as it were, a test case. Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at. Let no one, therefore, get away with a condemnation--or for that matter a eulogy--of Dante on the mere strength of broiled Popes, disembowelled Schismatics, grotesque Demons, Count Ugolino, Francesca da Rimini, and the Voyage of Ulysses, even if backed up by an erotic mysticism borrowed from the Pre-Raphaelites, and the line ‘His will is our peace,’ recollected from somebody’s sermon. Press him, rather, for an intelligent opinion on the Ship of Souls and Peter’s Gate; on Buonconte, Sapia, and Arnaut Daniel, on the Prayer of the Proud, the theology of Free Judgement, Dante’s three Dreams, the Sacred Forest, and the symbolism of the Beatrician Pageant. If he cannot satisfy the examiners on these points, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican....”
I used to despair of translations. For years I read English poetry or poetry in the original of the few languages I’d studied, because I saw no point in reading unreliable translations. Stripped of its language, poetry is often reduced to a crude outline. And translators play fast and loose with the texts. Not that I blame them: turning an inflected language into syntactically rigid English is nearly impossible.
But I left school long ago, and at last it dawned on me I didn’t need to play by scholarly rules. I was unlikely to read THE DIVINE COMEDY if not in translation.
So I’m bending the rules, and it’s a pleasure.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I admire Mandelbaum’s translation of the INFERNO. Now I’ve begun Dorothy Sayers’s introduction to her 1955 translation of PURGATORY. She writes so beautifully and is so brilliant that I wish I had a copy of her INFERNO as well.
Although I read and admired Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries years ago, I’d been led to understand that her Dante translation and scholarship were out of date. The best writers never go out of date, though.
Her translations have been reissued in attractive new Penguins, and if they live up to her introductions, they’re well worth the price.
Here’s part of her fascinating opening paragraph:
“Of the three books of the COMMEDIA, the PURGATORIO is, for English readers, the least known, the least quoted--and the most beloved. It forms, as it were, a test case. Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at. Let no one, therefore, get away with a condemnation--or for that matter a eulogy--of Dante on the mere strength of broiled Popes, disembowelled Schismatics, grotesque Demons, Count Ugolino, Francesca da Rimini, and the Voyage of Ulysses, even if backed up by an erotic mysticism borrowed from the Pre-Raphaelites, and the line ‘His will is our peace,’ recollected from somebody’s sermon. Press him, rather, for an intelligent opinion on the Ship of Souls and Peter’s Gate; on Buonconte, Sapia, and Arnaut Daniel, on the Prayer of the Proud, the theology of Free Judgement, Dante’s three Dreams, the Sacred Forest, and the symbolism of the Beatrician Pageant. If he cannot satisfy the examiners on these points, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican....”
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Dante's INFERNO
I'm a fan of epic poetry: the grand themes, the complicated narratives, the struggles of the heroes, and the imaginative descriptions of gods and mythic monsters. Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES, Virgil’s AENEID, and Milton’s PARADISE LOST are three of my favorite poems.
Yet no one writes epic in the 21st century. It’s a dead form. Poets presumably study epic, but compose lyric and narrative poetry instead. The epic form doesn’t suit the casual mores of modern times, I suppose.
This is my year of reading THE DIVINE COMEDY, a long allegorical narrative poem. I found three translations of the INFERNO on our shelves: Robert Pinsky’s, Alan Mandelbaum’s, and John Ciardi’s. My original plan was to read Pinsky’s, the most contemporary, but after inspecting all three, I chose Alan Mandelbaum’s translation. The language is lucid and passionate, the images vivid and horrific. And the lines correspond exactly to the Italian.
Much as I admired the INFERNO, I can’t say I enjoyed my tour of hell. Dante had a grisly imagination, influenced by his knowledge of the works of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The deeds of the sinners are often sinister, but the punishments are disproportionate. This is a 14th-century person’s vision of hell. In Canto 28, the Sowers of Scandal are perpetually wounded by a demon with a sword, and after healing, wounded again. Mohammed, the founder of Islam, walks maimed, split open, with his bowels hanging between his legs. His sin? Dante considered him a “sower of dissension.”
The last canto in Dante’s INFERNO describes Dis, or Lucifer, emperor of the king of hell, a three-faced monster with wings beneath each face, whose wings agitate cold winds that freeze Lake Cocytus. Dante is horrified.
O reader, do not ask of me how I
grew faint and frozen then--I cannot write it:
all words would fall far short of what it was.
I did not die, and I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
what I became, deprived of life and death.
--vv. 22-27 of Canto 34, Alan Mandelbaum’s translation of INFERNO
I couldn’t wait to get out of hell. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Virgil grabbed Dante and clambered over Lucifer’s body and got out of there.
I’m looking forward to PURGATORIO, in Dorothy Sayers’s translation.
Yet no one writes epic in the 21st century. It’s a dead form. Poets presumably study epic, but compose lyric and narrative poetry instead. The epic form doesn’t suit the casual mores of modern times, I suppose.
This is my year of reading THE DIVINE COMEDY, a long allegorical narrative poem. I found three translations of the INFERNO on our shelves: Robert Pinsky’s, Alan Mandelbaum’s, and John Ciardi’s. My original plan was to read Pinsky’s, the most contemporary, but after inspecting all three, I chose Alan Mandelbaum’s translation. The language is lucid and passionate, the images vivid and horrific. And the lines correspond exactly to the Italian.
Much as I admired the INFERNO, I can’t say I enjoyed my tour of hell. Dante had a grisly imagination, influenced by his knowledge of the works of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The deeds of the sinners are often sinister, but the punishments are disproportionate. This is a 14th-century person’s vision of hell. In Canto 28, the Sowers of Scandal are perpetually wounded by a demon with a sword, and after healing, wounded again. Mohammed, the founder of Islam, walks maimed, split open, with his bowels hanging between his legs. His sin? Dante considered him a “sower of dissension.”
The last canto in Dante’s INFERNO describes Dis, or Lucifer, emperor of the king of hell, a three-faced monster with wings beneath each face, whose wings agitate cold winds that freeze Lake Cocytus. Dante is horrified.
O reader, do not ask of me how I
grew faint and frozen then--I cannot write it:
all words would fall far short of what it was.
I did not die, and I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
what I became, deprived of life and death.
--vv. 22-27 of Canto 34, Alan Mandelbaum’s translation of INFERNO
I couldn’t wait to get out of hell. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Virgil grabbed Dante and clambered over Lucifer’s body and got out of there.
I’m looking forward to PURGATORIO, in Dorothy Sayers’s translation.
Friday, February 24, 2006
Gaylord No. 10
Few of the books I read are library books. This winter I've read SWANN'S WAY and Dante's INFERNO, books I've had in my collection for years. I buy books at library sales and used bookstores, shopping for books the way other women shop for clothes. I have so many books that, when I vacuum or dust, I get distracted by the fascinating titles on my own shelves.
Let’s see. Would I like to read Rebecca West’s THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER or Colette’s THE CAT next?
My local librarian doesn’t have a clue what I read. Since I own most of my books, Big Librarian, ha ha, can't turn over accurate records to Big Brother. Although I support my local library, I'm not a regular patron. I impulsively check out new novels, mysteries, and DVDs on my bimonthly visits. The librarian must think I’m addicted to the works of Anita Desai and Ngaio Marsh, though as often as not these books sit on the table undisturbed until I return them unread.
I love the smell of libraries, though--old paper?--and approve the mix of great literature, genre books, biographies, and reference books.
I recently checked out a 1960s mystery from the library. It had a shiny cellophane cover, the kind which crackles when you open the book.
It made me nostalgic. These days my branch library applies practically invisible, noiseless book covers instead of the old-fashioned kind I prefer.
I opened the ‘60s book and read the underside of the book jacket. It reads like a poem:
Gaylord No. 10
For Books 91/2 Inches to 10 Inches
Gaylord
The Trusted Source
Gaylord Bros.
Syracuse, NY
13221.4901
Los Angeles, CA
90060.0659
USA
ADJUSTABLE
BOOK JACKET COVER
Instructions:
Insert dust jacket between the liner and the plastic cover.
Slide book jacket to top edge of cover, fold bottom of cover to the height of this jacket and
crease.
Replace protected dust jacket on book and attach flaps with tape or adhesive.
Call 1.800.448.6160 to Re-order.
Gaylord is still in business, by the way, 109 years old. Check out their website: http://www.gaylord.com/
Let’s see. Would I like to read Rebecca West’s THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER or Colette’s THE CAT next?
My local librarian doesn’t have a clue what I read. Since I own most of my books, Big Librarian, ha ha, can't turn over accurate records to Big Brother. Although I support my local library, I'm not a regular patron. I impulsively check out new novels, mysteries, and DVDs on my bimonthly visits. The librarian must think I’m addicted to the works of Anita Desai and Ngaio Marsh, though as often as not these books sit on the table undisturbed until I return them unread.
I love the smell of libraries, though--old paper?--and approve the mix of great literature, genre books, biographies, and reference books.
I recently checked out a 1960s mystery from the library. It had a shiny cellophane cover, the kind which crackles when you open the book.
It made me nostalgic. These days my branch library applies practically invisible, noiseless book covers instead of the old-fashioned kind I prefer.
I opened the ‘60s book and read the underside of the book jacket. It reads like a poem:
Gaylord No. 10
For Books 91/2 Inches to 10 Inches
Gaylord
The Trusted Source
Gaylord Bros.
Syracuse, NY
13221.4901
Los Angeles, CA
90060.0659
USA
ADJUSTABLE
BOOK JACKET COVER
Instructions:
Insert dust jacket between the liner and the plastic cover.
Slide book jacket to top edge of cover, fold bottom of cover to the height of this jacket and
crease.
Replace protected dust jacket on book and attach flaps with tape or adhesive.
Call 1.800.448.6160 to Re-order.
Gaylord is still in business, by the way, 109 years old. Check out their website: http://www.gaylord.com/
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS
It didn’t make the Best of the 20th Century List. Yet John Wyndham’s THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a great example of apocalyptic literature.
This 1951 science fiction classic, reminiscent of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, is creepier and more entertaining than Wells’s more famous masterpiece. Wyndham isn’t a greater stylist than Wells: his prose is workmanlike--no flourishes. The plot, however, is riveting. My spouse advised me not to read THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS at night, claiming it was too damned scary. But I was glued to it for a couple of evenings, notwithstanding my fears.
Wyndham begins the third paragraph: “The way I came to miss the end of the world--well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years--was sheer acccident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.”
The narrator’s philosophical observations enhance this end-of-the-world narrative. While mysterious green lights flash and blind the majority of the world’s people one night, the narrator is hospitalized for an eye ailment. He awakens to a strange silence and leaves his room to find the remaining patients blind. He takes to the streets, one of the few sighted people left in London, and saves a sighted woman, Josella, who has been enslaved by a blind man to help him forage for food. The narrator and Josella, horrified by the chaos and riots, form a relationship and quickly fall in love.
Gangs and looters are not the only danger. Walking plants called triffids, once farmed for oil, have escaped and are killing people. Yes, it sounds far-fetched, but Wyndham’s long pseudo-scientific chapter persuaded me.
An organized gang separates the narrator from Josella. After a plague decimates London, he escapes to the country in search of her and other survivors. He observes:
“The sight of the open country gave one hope of a sort. It was true that the young green crops would never be harvested when they had ripened, nor the fruit from the trees gathered; that the countryside might never look as trim and neat as it did that day, but for all that it would go on, after its own fashion. It was not, like the towns, sterile, stopped forever. It was a place one could work and tend, and still find a future. It made my existence of the previous week seem like that of a rat living on crumbs and ferreting in garbage heaps. As I looked out over the fields I felt my spirits expanding.”
Wyndham is brilliantly imaginative. The atmosphere is definitely ‘50s--there’s a glum post-atom-bomb certainty of the inevitablility of man’s destruction, combined with a lack of hipness --but the story still speaks to us. Are we more or less optimistic about the future than Wyndham was? Possibly more, possibly less: I’m out of touch. Wyndham’s dystopian tale is also a thrilling adventure of survival.
And, I must add, it has been richly plagiarized by the writer of the film 28 DAYS LATER. No infected monkeys in THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, but both heroes survive because they are in the hosptial when other human beings are stricken.
The photo of John Wyndham was found at: http://www.billsparks.com/assets/images/Sci-Fi/wyndham.j
Monday, February 20, 2006
Madeleines
I ordered a madeleines pan from Williams-Sonoma. This sounds extravagant, but I couldn’t find one at Target or K-Mart. I was reading IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME and wanted a Proustian experience. But madeleines aren't a popular cookie.
Everyone knows the scene in SWANN’S WAY in which M., the narrator, describes the exquisite experience of eating a madeleine. He equates the taste of madeleines with joy and sensuality. If madeleines were the source of joy, I would bake them.
Proust wrote: “...one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petite madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence, or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. When could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?” (p. 62, C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation, Modern Library edition)
Making the madeleines was fun. I combined two recipes from THE GOOD HOUSEKEEPING COOKBOOK and THE NEW YORK TIMES COOKBOOK. First you melt one-fourth cup butter or margarine and let it cool. Then you whip two eggs with a pinch of salt until it peaks. Then add one-third cup of sugar, two tablespoons at a time, beating the mixture until the froth becomes a stiff peak. Then add a half teaspoon vanilla. Then fold in two-thirds cup flour and the margarine (or butter).
Fill the seashell molds of your French nonstick madeleines pan three-fourths full and bake for 8 minutes in a 375-degree oven.
My oven must have been too hot, because the fluted bottoms of the cookies were too brown (I turned them over when they’d cooled so I could admire the shell pattern). I also had trouble figuring out how to remove them from the pan. The spatula was too big, so I used a knife to scrape them out.
The overall taste was disappointing. I had wanted homemade Pepperidge Farm cookies. Instead, I had shell-shaped sponge cakes (which I later learned they were supposed to be anyway).
Next time I’ll try a different recipe and perhaps I’ll use butter instead of margarine.
Everyone knows the scene in SWANN’S WAY in which M., the narrator, describes the exquisite experience of eating a madeleine. He equates the taste of madeleines with joy and sensuality. If madeleines were the source of joy, I would bake them.
Proust wrote: “...one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petite madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence, or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. When could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?” (p. 62, C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation, Modern Library edition)
Making the madeleines was fun. I combined two recipes from THE GOOD HOUSEKEEPING COOKBOOK and THE NEW YORK TIMES COOKBOOK. First you melt one-fourth cup butter or margarine and let it cool. Then you whip two eggs with a pinch of salt until it peaks. Then add one-third cup of sugar, two tablespoons at a time, beating the mixture until the froth becomes a stiff peak. Then add a half teaspoon vanilla. Then fold in two-thirds cup flour and the margarine (or butter).
Fill the seashell molds of your French nonstick madeleines pan three-fourths full and bake for 8 minutes in a 375-degree oven.
My oven must have been too hot, because the fluted bottoms of the cookies were too brown (I turned them over when they’d cooled so I could admire the shell pattern). I also had trouble figuring out how to remove them from the pan. The spatula was too big, so I used a knife to scrape them out.
The overall taste was disappointing. I had wanted homemade Pepperidge Farm cookies. Instead, I had shell-shaped sponge cakes (which I later learned they were supposed to be anyway).
Next time I’ll try a different recipe and perhaps I’ll use butter instead of margarine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)