Summer Reading

My dear food-writer and foodie friend has said several things to me that have changed my life. My favorite is, "Whenever I don't know what to read, I read Pride and Prejudice. That way, I'm never disappointed."

When my daughter had cancer and our family went through two years of hell trying to save her life (and succeeding), I read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (London: T. Egerton, 1813). When my husband was ill with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis--also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), I read Pride and Prejudice. I read it after I was widowed, and look forward to starting it again this hot summer evening.

I confess that, until lately, I have been thrown by Elizabeth's answer to her sister's question, "How long have you loved him?" It sounds so flip.

Elizabeth says, " . . . I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." (Notice that in most of the recent mini-series and movie adaptations, script writers rarely change Austen's dialogue, because each bit of dialogue is so perfect for the person who says it. And this is so perfect for Elizabeth.)

She makes a sly allusion to the theme of the novel, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Our Elizabeth cannot resist a little humor, even though she takes the joke seriously. But, without pride or prejudice, and now having seen Darcy's estate, she knows what kind of man he truly is. The fields and forests and lakes are well-managed and productive, the people who serve him admire their master for his kindness and fairness, and the house itself, without being showy, shows off his handsome demeanor and his well-ordered and cultivated mind.

Elizabeth sees a union for herself not with a self-important nitwit like Mr. Collins, not with a thoughtless wastrel like Wickham, not with a man who long ago lost his common sense to beauty alone, like her father, but a marriage that truly contributes to the society in which it flourishes.

War and Peace

Anyone who has tried to read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Moscow: The Russian Messenger, 1869) or any other great novel in translation knows that translation is a creative process and requires the translator to reenter the work. Understand the author's design. Choose words that support that design. Give characters the lifelikeness the author gives them. And so on.

In trying to read War and Peace, for instance, I have given up because the translator had not solved the problem of Russian naming conventions. Each character in a Russian novel has a given name, a patronymic, and a family name. The practical translator picks one version of the person's name and pretty much sticks with it (if he or she expect me to keep reading, anyway).

Then, to make things worse, it's always somebody or other's name day.

Maybe you can tell by now that my irritation got the better of me, and more than once, at the two Natalyas' name day in Chapter 1.

I have also given up reading a translation because the writing sounded stilted, as if the translator just plodded along word by word, instead of choosing the best word for the job, and the publisher didn't know the difference.

Just go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble, search on "leo tolstoy war and peace," and take a peek inside different editions, and you will see what I mean. With War and Peace, the translator has a particularly difficult problem: the first sentence is in French and, to be true to the novel, must stay in French or somehow retain its French "flavor."

A word to the wise. If you are translating a work of fiction, be prepared truly to become the author's voice. If you are reading a work of fiction in translation, be picky and look for the integrity the work of art deserves.

Words Take Flite

Miss Flite is a secondary character in Dickens's great novel, Bleak House, first published in serial form between March 1852 and September 1853. Her first appearance is in Chapter 3, when, as Esther writes, "a curious little old woman in a squeezed bonnet, and carrying a reticule, came curtsying and smiling up to us, with an air of great ceremony." She wants to meet Ada and Richard, wards in the Chancery case Jarndyce and Jarndyce, as she once was, and their companion, Esther.

She has a bird-like quality about her, evident in her name, in her person (we get to see her in Phiz's wonderful etching), in the birds she keeps caged in her garret, and in her role as messenger of doom. Richard, despite the softening influence of Esther and Ada, becomes obsessed with the case and finally dies after it is settled--or rather just plain old terminated, because the entire estate has been "absorbed in costs."

Dickens never says, Miss Flite is like a bird (in which case, in every passage she appears in, she would provide an excellent example of a simile). This not dramatic enough for Dickens's purposes.  Instead, she is a wonderful example of metaphor.  Figuratively, she is a bird.

Miss Flite with the wards of Jarndyce & Jarndyce.

The Little Old Lady, by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), 1853.
Scanned image and text by George P. Landow.