There’s a very interesting piece on the Guardian website about translators being often overlooked. I’ve often wondered this myself, particularly when reading Tolstoy or Pushkin. Can I say I’ve ever really read Tolstoy? I’ve actually read Louise and Aylmer Maude. As a non-Russian speaker (Okay, I can manage “Hello, my name is Peter, how are you?” but then I get terribly lost and end up at “Goodbye” startlingly quickly.) how am I to know what a person’s writing style is like when it was written in another language with different grammatic conventions, nuances and styles. The work of the translator is to bring all those together in a translation that is both accurate to the original text but also faithful to the spirit of the work. I can’t even begin to imagine how such a feat is achieved. It’s impossible to under estimate how much we owe to good translation.
Literary to a tee?
April 3rd, 2010 by PeterLos Angeles Times | Books | Literary T-shirts
There’s an interesting post on the Los Angeles Times book blog today about literary tee-shirts. My favourites come from Out of Print who do tees of classic book covers. I particularly like Moby Dick and 1984. They’re $28 each and some of the proceeds from each shirt go towards helping literacy in Africa.
Pushkin: With him, we dream.
March 13th, 2010 by Peter
Pushkin. I’d heard of him, of course. You can’t read about Russia without knowing of Pushkin. He seems to bestride their cultural self image like a colossus, the father of Russian literature and their greatest poet. I hadn’t, however, actually read him; it strikes me that in the west he’s somewhat overshadowed by the reputation of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I knew that he had penned that novel in verse that I had always meant to read and yet never quite did. Then it was that tragic time last winter when Borders was closing down. Prices crashing, the forgotten corner of a dusty shelf, the copy of The Complete Prose Tales crying out for a home. I think it is clear where this is going.
I was surprised to find that Pushkin proved to be one of the easiest reads I’ve had in a long time. His prose is lucid and brilliant and his plots keep the pages turning. There is something smooth and seemingly effortless about the way he writes and it just takes you there. There are some words Jacques Chirac said at Alexandre Dumas’ internment; “With you, we were D’Artagnan, Monte Cristo or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles — with you, we dream.” It is the same with Pushkin only with him we are Dubrovsky, Ibrahim, Grinyov, riding through Russia, besieged in fortresses and dining with royalty — with him, we dream.
What adds to the mystery and romance of Pushkin is his own life story. Great-grandson of Peter the Great’s African Major General, Abram Gannibal, Pushkin’s brief life saw him exiled for his political radicalism before later returning to St. Petersburg where he died in a duel at the age of thirty-seven, defending his wife’s honour. When you read of his heroes defending their honour you know that he did so himself to the point of his own life. Upon hearing of his death a friend who was away at that time is said to have written to others asking: “How could you let this happen? If I had been there I would have thrown myself in front of the bullet.” Would that the friend had been there, it’s hard to imagine what Pushkin could have achieved with so much of life still ahead of him. Reading this book you enjoy what is there but are left with a sense of wonderment at the fact that this, while brilliant, is a poet just finding his way with prose. What would he have done with more time?
At times in this collection you come across the sentence “(Pushkin never finished this story.)” Many of these are from several years before his death so it is possible that he had either abandoned them entirely or was going to return to them later. It’s sad that some brilliant stories such as Dubrovsky and The Moor of Peter the Great were unfinished, they give you a taste of brilliance and you want more.
I was left with the paradoxical feeling of wishing that someone would finish them and the feeling that no one else really could. I get to thinking that perhaps they should take Pushkin’s pen and set it in the base of his statue like a latter day excalibur. Whenever a writer was in Saint Petersburg they would pass the statue and try to withdraw the pen. Eventually some young fellow, seemingly too inexperienced, would approach the statue and grasp the quill and out it would slide and to him would fall the task of completing what Pushkin started.
Then I realise that life is not a historical romance. C’est la vie, we shall simply never know.
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The Complete Prose Tales by Alexandr Pushkin is published by Vintage Classics.
The Changeover
March 10th, 2010 by PeterThis blog is now running on the wordpress platform instead of silver stripe which was, if I’m quite honest, becoming more pain than it was worth. Hopefully now it will run better and it allows me easier flexibility with sidebar modules and the like. (Though I can’t help but wonder if I should have went with two sidebars for the layout as I don’t have much in there and the sidebar is already quite long.) Perhaps I will scrap the albums du jour section but I do quite like having what you’re reading and listening to on your blog. I may change the layout of the blog section at some point, it depends on whether I have time and whether it will make much difference. It’s also rather nice to have a blogroll again, which I will populate more when I have a little more time.
If anything isn’t running smoothly please let me know and I’ll fix it and/or stare at the screen and have a voluble tantrum.
Back Jack
February 24th, 2010 by PeterYou may have noticed that I’ve added to the footer of the site a ‘Back Jack 2010′ button. This is in support of Jack Yan for Mayor of Wellington and I thought I’d write something here on the blog to explain why I back his candidacy and why I think it’s important.
This October the people of Wellington, New Zealand, will vote for their new mayor. The election is just another example of a wider trend that I find encouraging in democracy of the race being thrown open by candidates who come from outside of the Political Establishment. In this case the candidate that has emerged from the people is Jack Yan.
It has became obvious over recent years that at all levels of politics that the political establishment has became more and more divorced from the reality of life, they can’t adequately address the problems faced because they’re no more real to them than theories on a piece of paper. What is needed are people who understand how things work in the real world, people who have experience in the real world and people who have been successful at getting results in the real world.
It seems to me that in all elections the candidates who are from the establishment approach the electorate with arrogance; they don’t engage because they don’t feel they need too. They are the politicians, they represent the big parties and they feel that is enough. Talk about the things that matters? No need for that, they feel that name recognition alone is enough to carry the vote. Jack Yan, on the other hand, has approached questions such as job creation and stimulating the economy. Here his knowledge of technology from business is showing as he promotes free-wifi in the city to promote business use and a broader technology platform to provide the economic stimulus for job creation. This is exactly the type of thinking that economies, not just in Wellington but around the world, could really benefit from. The only way to take things forward and grow the economy is to stimulate it, to make it an environment where businesses can flourish and new employment opportunities will be created. So much thinking in the post-recession economy seems to be negative and punitive towards banks and businesses but that is not going to help growth.
Another thing that Jack Yan has made central to his campaign is openness and easy access. Jack sees the city as being made up of all of it’s populace and has started a website called yourwellington.org to allow everyone a chance to contribute to the debate on issues that affect the city. It’s important, in a true democracy, for the electorate to be engaged in the process throughout the years not just at election time. Your Wellington is a way for people to do just that. In the Roman Republic the people had a voice all year round, it’s time our democracies got back to a system where the politicians represent – and indeed, answer to – their electors.
If you’re not a Kiwi you may perhaps be wondering why the election in Wellington is relevant to you. Whatever and wherever the election it’s important to remember that every time someone who cares and who has policies that benefit the people wins, even if not where you live, it is one more voice for change and one less position held by an establishment that serves only itself.
You can visit Jack’s Campaign website by clicking here.
Huntingtower by John Buchan
December 31st, 2009 by Peter
“Civilization is a conspiracy,” said John Buchan. “Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.” This statement could be applied to many of his novels in which characters who are ordinary and human are drawn from their pretences into all kinds of adventure. He gave us characters like Richard Hannay, the Scots mining engineer, and Edward Leithen, the barrister and MP. Less well known, however, is Dickson McCunn, the protagonist from his 1922 novel Huntingtower. Dickson is everything you least expect of a hero in an adventure story: he is fifty-five years old and a recently retired grocer. He is the logical antithesis of the James Bond type of hero and, while successful, is drawn very much from the ranks of the common man. He is dependable, not flashy.
Huntingtower is a rip-roaring adventure story that reads with all the fun and enjoyment that, as a child, could be derived from Enid Blyton. (Actually I saw a lady reading the famous five a little while back in the park – it seems the enjoyment does not diminish with age!) It tells of Dickson McCunn going for a walking holiday and soon finding himself up to his ears in adventure; the story is centred around a Russian Princess who, having escaped the revolution, is being held against her will in the house of the title. As with stories such as The thirty-nine steps there is a back drop of historical relevancy and it very much reflects attitudes and thoughts of the time. What makes Huntingtower different is the light hearted and amusing touches throughout. Helping with this are a group of street urchins from Glasgow called the Gorbals Die-Hards who are camping near-by and turn out to have a spirit at once adventurous and militant. Their exploits are constantly referenced, by the narrator, in comparison to those of great figures from history and the show resourcefulness and hardy courage whenever called upon; while Dickson is the central figure and the narrator is telling his story the Gorbals Die-Hards could arguably be said to steal the show.
I really enjoyed this book and think that it shows Buchan on top-form throughout. It’s not about deep emotional insights, it’s just a good fun read. There were some characters who speak mainly in the Scots’ dialect but it’s usually understandable (just!) and where it isn’t there is a glossary of terms at the back. The story combines light hearted romanticism and adventure with some allusions to the failings and evils of the new social order emerging in Russia at the time. What I find most endearing about Buchan’s work is the way he can write so well – his descriptions of places are particularly excellent – but keep it entertaining and enjoyable throughout and, for me, this is up there with the best of his books.
The Death of Borders
November 29th, 2009 by PeterIt’s a real shame this week to see that the Borders chain in the UK has went into administration. I don’t know any book lovers who don’t also enjoy going to Borders but the problem, I think, was summed up very well in this article on the first post website.
“It might have worked had Borders UK stuck to the high street. Instead they made the fatal decision of settling in edge-of-town shopping malls where mums pushing babies might like to shop for food and clothes but educated singles and young couples don’t want to spend the afternoon flicking through books.
I really enjoy going to Borders for books but how exactly am I to get there when they’re stuck out on retail parks? Even by public transport these places are hard to get too, at least the local ones are, and who wants to pay for a combination of buses, metros and ferries when you can simply get on one metro into the city. You won’t have a borders but you can probably get by with Waterstone’s and in turn you have all the other shops, galleries, coffee shops and everything else the city offers. In general retail parks aren’t really places to hang out, besides borders it’s all big shops to buy fridges or discount clothing outlets.
It’s common sense when a large portion of book buyers are students or young people to have branches easily accessible to universitys and yet neither Newcastle, Sunderland (Okay, that one is understandable, they may be my alma mater but it’s still Sunderland.) or Durham has a branch. When I have been in city branches in places like Glasgow and Leeds they’re usually very busy and students often use the coffee shops to work in so not putting outlets near universities was a major error. I do buy some books online but I also buy a lot in the shops still, Borders always had better choice than any other chain in the UK in that sense. Waterstone’s is a good shop but is increasingly skewed towards best-sellers and celeb biogs, Foyles is great but only in London and WHSmith isn’t really a book shop – it’s bric-a-brac with a few books thrown in for effect.
I really wish that some other chain would see this for what it is – an opportunity – and move in on the market. It would be a perfect opportunity for someone like Barnes & Noble, who are surely long overdue a presence in the UK, to enter the market. Yes, they’d have to be on the ball and move into the big cities instead of staying on the margins but I do think the business model for big book shops can work if done correctly. It seems sad that in most of the areas in the UK you will now be left with the choice of only Waterstone’s or the internet. Borders didn’t just represent a shop, it was a place to socialise that stayed open decent hours. I’m not particularly a drinker so having somewhere you can sit with friends and good books on an evening was a perfect set up.
The Lost Dignity
August 22nd, 2009 by PeterIt was Salman Rushdie who offered the opinion that The Da Vinci Code was ‘a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name’ but it still romped on to sell sixty million copies. Then again, more people than that voted for George W. Bush and look how that worked out.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably noticed that Dan Brown has a sequel coming out. There are subtle hints that have appeared around about that may have indicated this to you; the myriad of posters appearing like a bad dose of the pox around every bookstore, the pre-order offers emblazoned in adverts in the press, the fact that every time you buy something people feel obliged to try and persuade you to pre-order The Lost Symbol at the same time. It is, in short, inescapable.
An industry that should have some degree of self-respect and dignity has flung it all aside in a desperate rush to prostrate itself at the feet of Mammon and sell as many units as possible. It does not matter whether or not The Lost Symbol is good, bad or indifferent; what matters to them is that it will make them all lots of money.
Now, I’m not naive. Businesses have to run and have to try to turn a profit, as such something you know will sell units must be promoted. The promotion for The Lost Symbol, however, is all just too much. It’s everywhere and whether you like it or not if you wish to go to a bookstore you can’t escape it. It’s been this way since April – an unprecedented amount of time to be promotion a forthcoming book for. It’s not based on any merit but solely on the fact that dollar signs have appeared in the eyes of the store owners.
Part of the wonder of bookshops is that there are so many titles, such a great variety that you can go in and look through and choose from. Yes, some titles will be promoted but usually not to the extent that visitors to the store can’t escape them. Most readers don’t read because everyone else is doing it. They read because they choose to for their own enjoyment. Reading is different from other forms of entertainment, in a culture dominated by instant gratification books take a little time, you have to make a concious choice to take time out and read.
There is something wonderfully democratic about the fact that there is such a huge variety of books and most of them get the same amount of space in a bookstore – the width of their spine. Can it really be that we’ve reached the stage where bookshops are now just another place for marketing and promotion – placement over product, style over substance? Perhaps it makes me a hopeless old romantic but I tend to think that bookshops should be different; they should be in some way less commercial than other shops, more about the love of books than shamelessly shifting anything they can on their customers. This September instead of seeing The Lost Symbol I’d really like to see bookshops get back their Lost Dignity.
Currently Reading…
Solar - Ian McEwan
Stendhal - Scarlet and Black
Currently Listening…
Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope
Nicole Atkins - Neptune City
