"This is Lorence"

Karen Harvey on a few of Sterne's manuscript jottings. (Via Tom K.; underlying link here.)

Testimonials

From Sterne's Sentimental Journey:

The old officer was reading attentively a small pamphlet, it might be the book of the opera, with a large pair of spectacles. As soon as I sat down, he took his spectacles off, and putting them into a shagreen case, return’d them and the book into his pocket together. I half rose up, and made him a bow.

Translate this into any civilized language in the world--the sense is this:

‘Here’s a poor stranger come in to the box--he seems as if he knew no body; and is never likely, was he to be seven years in Paris, if every man he comes near keeps his spectacles upon his nose—’tis shutting the door of conversation absolutely in his face--and using him worse than a German.’

The French officer might as well have said it all aloud; and if he had, I should in course have put the bow I made him into French too, and told him, ‘I was sensible of his attention, and return’d him a thousand thanks for it.’

There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this short hand, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words. For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically, that when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and sworn to.

The pro-zoo camp

Death by fox: penguin cover-up at the London Zoo.

I write from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Buffalo, New York; I am about to go and register for my conference (I am speaking on Saturday afternoon on Sterne and novelistic conventions for the notation of human gesture) and then investigate the purported rooftop swimming pool...

Light reading catch-up

I seem to be more than usually reading too many different books, out of restlessness and mental dissatisfaction...

The feeling of understimulation drove me to begin (but not [yet] to finish, as neither quite struck my fancy, though the Delany is surprisingly page-turnery and the Home is, bizarrely, a book that seems to have been written exactly for someone with my reading history!) the two novels hanging around that seemed most likely to tickle the brain follicles, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Stewart Home's 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess.

Polished off Lynda LaPlante's Clean Cut, which seemed to me better than the last mystery of hers I read, but had to chunk across the room in disgust the Royal Flush - Sleeping Cruelty omnibus due to utter unreadable trashiness.

Read Robert Harris's Pompeii during a couple hours of downtime on Wednesday afternoon, found it really rather good - it is a simple book, simpler I think than the Cicero series, but Harris really has the gift of storytelling and bestsellery pacing, something I admire and envy.

Finished Ambler and a couple other things that were hanging around, plus the Tristram Shandy reread (it is not truly a funny book, but Sterne is an interesting recapitulator and innovator); also dipping into Temple Grandin's book on animals and Scott McCloud's truly excellent Understanding Comics, about which more anon.

Will shortly head over to the Humane Society Book Loft to offload some of these volumes and see if I can pick out some good new ones.

Monday round-up

Ghosts of the Leningrad siege (via my father).

Bits and pieces of light reading: Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim, a recommendation from Brent that I enjoyed quite a bit (I've read other books rather like it - it is along Dresden Files lines - also we are in the thick of an angel-demon zeitgeist, and I was struck by similarities to the TV series Supernatural - but it is really appealingly well-written, with a fresh and lively and distinctive first-person voice); and Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, which seems to me flawed in various respects but so energetic and interesting and engaging that I was willing to forgive various implausibilities and awkward handlings of narrative point of view.

I got a good haul of books on Saturday at the Hobbies & Books store in Grand Harbour, which is unfortunately closing - but all books were discounted 30%, with an additional free fourth book for every three purchased. A few of the ones I walked away with are true local curiosities, which I will perhaps post about anon...

I'm looking at a funny situation vis-a-vis work. I'm very tempted to plunge straight into drafting the new novel, but have decided it is impractical and that it will be better for me to leave it on the boil for a little while and come back to it later in the fall. I'll be in Ottawa for ten days or so in September, and then I'll be in New York for about four weeks in October, with side trips to Maine (for a friend's wedding) and Buffalo (for a conference).

The talk for NEASECS will be a preview of the ABCs of the novel project in the form of an argument about Laurence Sterne and novelistic conventions for the transcription of human movement and expression, and I'm also giving a talk earlier that month at the Fordham 18th-century seminar on Richardson's Clarissa; so that's two high-quality talks to write.

I also have two tenure letters to write this month, the first ones I have done (I turned down a few before I had tenure and I also turned down one or two in the first year I had tenure, but at this point I really have no good reason to say no, it is an important part of service to the profession); so I think that really my goal for the rest of the month is to write those two letters and get to work on Sterne and Richardson so that when I leave for Ottawa I at least have something down on paper in the way of draft. I may only have a week or so in Cayman between the return from Ottawa and the departure for New York, and it will be foolish to count on getting a lot of work done then; and my notion for the work I'll do during the New York weeks, aside from school catch-up stuff and the seasonal flood of letters of recommendation, is that it will be a good time to give the style book a wholesale going-over...

"Why Stop With a Barnacle?"

At the Believer, Sarah Manguso interviews Lydia Davis (link courtesy of Maud):

BLVR: Is it better to use the word prosaic because it’s the literal translation of prosaique, or to use the word dull because it occupies the same context in contemporary English as prosaique did in Proust’s French? You chose the former, [C. K.] Scott-Moncrieff chose the latter.

LD: I can’t re-create now what led to my choice of prosaic—but as I was translating Swann’s Way I did of course check and double-check every tricky choice to make sure the translation came as close as I could make it to conveying in English in these times what Proust conveyed in French in those times. In your example, I think I liked the closeness in sound of prosaic to the French: it has the same three syllables and the pr opening. It is historically, and rhythmically, entirely different from dull—which is a wonderful word in itself, of course, and one I would be much more likely to use in my own writing than prosaic.

BLVR: In similar situations, would you always choose the cognate?

LD: Whenever I could, I would use the cognate, but often enough that was for reasons of sound, rhythm.

BLVR: In his biography of Beckett, James Knowlson says that Beckett chose to write in French because in French it was easier for him to write “without style.” You’ve said similar things about translating—that it’s an exercise in not imposing one’s own style on the writing. It sounds like the least postmodern position one can possibly take—that there’s some essential truth that style only cloaks.

LD: No, I wouldn’t say there’s some essential truth that is cloaked by style—if I’ve understood your question. I’d say that if I were to translate into my own style rather than preserving, insofar as I could, the style of the original, I would change the nature of the work in an essential way.

I tried, once, for fun, translating Laurence Sterne into more contemporary English. It worked to some extent—some of the narrative content was preserved, some of the humor, quirkiness, etc.—but it was painful. Each time I abandoned some phrasing of his in favor of an “updated” version, an essential, delightful peculiarity of the work was lost.