“And what does it mean to read? Do I want to read the things other people are reading, so I can talk to them? Which other people? Why do I want to talk to them? So that I can be of my time? Or so that I can know other times and other places? Do I read things to confirm my vision the world or challenge it?”
These are questions I ask but I have no real answers. I cannot tell you precisely why I am writing this blog apart from a general idea that it is important to pay attention and the best way to pay attention to know that when you are finished you will have to recollect enough to be able to write something (no matter how short or trivial). Am I any nearer finding answers to questions about why and how we read after reading the book? Not really. Perhaps they are questions without definitive answers. Nevertheless the questions are worth raising, the style is engaging, and the insights show you things you hadn’t noticed before or help you extend thoughts you might previously have had. (Damn I’ve just broken one of the rules of the blog and made some sort of reviewerly judgement. I will let that pass for the moment but with instructions not to let it happen too often).
The book is a collection of columns written for the New York Review of books and so the essays are discrete, although linked by his concerns as a writer, translator, teacher. They are loosely grouped under four headings: the world around the book,the book in the world,the writer’s world, and writing across worlds but there are a number of common threads and throughout there is an attention to the use of language. How that might resonate differently in different cultures is one of common themes. More works than ever are being translated and literature is increasingly globalised. This might seem to be straightforwardly a good thing to open knowledge of the wider world, but it comes at a cost. Culturally specific, idiosyncratic writing that can only be fully appreciated if you get the references can be marginalised. Writers might go wider rather than deeper and style will suffer in a broader market, where less can be taken for granted and more has to be explained. A flatter world. Rudyard Kipling wrote differently when his audience was confined to English people living in India, who knew the local culture, to when his fame was widespread. Also expectations can be come rigid and works outside the style can be neglected. South America has been strongly associated with magical realism but it is a big continent and others write in a different way and but it is more difficult for them to get a hearing.
These are interesting points about commercial pressures and the business of writing, that have escaped me as an outsider. But what I really like in these essays are the details and the way he looks at the mechanics of a text, for example the weight of particular words and why translation is so difficult.
“Lawrence comments: ‘They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts the were frightened.’ A recent Italian edition the book offers a version that, translated back into English, would give, ‘They both burst out laughing, looking at each other. But deep in their hearts they were afraid’. Experimenting over the years I’ve realised that if I ask a class of student to translate this into Italian about half will introduce that ‘but’. It appears to be received wisdom that pone doesn’t laugh when one is afraid. Lawrence on the other hand suggests that nothing is more common than laughing and being afraid; one laughs because afraid, in order to deny fear.”
I took the point about the ‘but’ but the thing that really interested me was the difference in weight between being frightened and being afraid: the degrees and types of fear and how you can be frightened of or by something but you can only be afraid of. But the bigger thing was the introduction of ‘burst out’ into ‘They both laughed’. If you burst out laughing it tends to be spontaneous and carefree and so that ‘but’ in the passage becomes necessary.
I love chewing on these details when they are pointed out to me but I must admit if I had been reading the text by myself it would have all slipped by. That is the thing: mostly when I read it is like a stream. But sometimes you need a reminder to pause to look more closely at the details and there can be as much pleasure in unravelling a sentence, a word, a tone, as there is in enjoying a well worked plot. This weeks book has been a good reminder.
Date of publication
2014
Randomness factor
None really, except that I only came across it because it was displayed in a bookshop. It is though relevant to the act of reading and hence this blog
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