I appreciated your discussion of translation, and the uncertainty of what is truly faithful to the original text or not. One of my favorite books (sadly out of print) is from someone who thought a lot about issues of translation, George Steiner, who compiled "Homer In English" gathering excerpts of hundreds of translations of Homer over the centuries. I don't read ancient Greek, but do think I've gotten a deeper sense of some of the passages from seeing them rendered in so many different ways.
"Ultimately, what underlies the Great Books is their undeniable power to affect contemporary human beings. These are books that only exist because they have been reaffirmed continuously"
This resonates with me. But, I also think there's a historical value to these in the way they offer a window into what people thought/felt at different times. The book may be only a single window, but you can still look through it, and often what you see isn't that different from what you see today (which is why they're still relevant). I recently finished reading "Don Quixote," and I kept being struck by how similar the characters (including Cervantes' narrative voice) were to people today.
Of course, that may be partly attributable to Grossman's translation, which supports your point about how hard it is to really get close to the original intent. But I find that when I go too far down that particular epistemological road, it gets a bit into "how do we really know anything" territory and I have to stop. I probably don't have time in my life for anything Don Quixote-related that doesn't involve trusting that Grossman did her job well enough, just like I can't interrogate the research methods of every social scientist or chemist out there.
Woolf always struck me as pretty serious, at times maybe even humorless, except in her essays where you’d see the gleam of wit and humor that must have been there all the time (the way she says of Defoe, “He is said to have been a hosier; but what, after all, was a hosier in the seventeenth century?”).
And Faulkner, despite the seriousness of theme and subject, sometimes winks at the reader. (In Sanctuary we get a latter-day Snopes, one Clarence, a successful local politician. The reader of the stories thinks, ah, the barnburners have now inherited the earth. We also learn how he pronounces his first name and can almost hear his voice: “I’m Senator Snopes, Cla’ence Snopes.”)
And Faulkner’s descendants are often pretty flip and funny (Welty). Is even Charles Portis a relative? Well, at least an in-law.
I guess I’d just disagree that American literature seems more serious than English literature. In any case, I don’t think of Waugh as a contemporary of Fitzgerald. His greatest work, the WWII trilogy, was written in the 50s and early 60s, and published as a single volume, Sword of Honour, in 1966, which makes him almost a contemporary of William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut and even Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel was published in 1963.
A commonality of these writers (besides WWII) might be evident in their characters’ practically Dickensian names and (pre)occupations: Waugh (Guy Crouchback, lonely, cuckolded Catholic enlistee), Gaddis (Wyatt Gwyon, art forger), Vonnegut (Diana Moon Glampers, Handicapper General of the U.S.), Pynchon (Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, sexual homing beacon in London for German V-2 rockets).
I appreciated your discussion of translation, and the uncertainty of what is truly faithful to the original text or not. One of my favorite books (sadly out of print) is from someone who thought a lot about issues of translation, George Steiner, who compiled "Homer In English" gathering excerpts of hundreds of translations of Homer over the centuries. I don't read ancient Greek, but do think I've gotten a deeper sense of some of the passages from seeing them rendered in so many different ways.
"Ultimately, what underlies the Great Books is their undeniable power to affect contemporary human beings. These are books that only exist because they have been reaffirmed continuously"
This resonates with me. But, I also think there's a historical value to these in the way they offer a window into what people thought/felt at different times. The book may be only a single window, but you can still look through it, and often what you see isn't that different from what you see today (which is why they're still relevant). I recently finished reading "Don Quixote," and I kept being struck by how similar the characters (including Cervantes' narrative voice) were to people today.
Of course, that may be partly attributable to Grossman's translation, which supports your point about how hard it is to really get close to the original intent. But I find that when I go too far down that particular epistemological road, it gets a bit into "how do we really know anything" territory and I have to stop. I probably don't have time in my life for anything Don Quixote-related that doesn't involve trusting that Grossman did her job well enough, just like I can't interrogate the research methods of every social scientist or chemist out there.
Woolf always struck me as pretty serious, at times maybe even humorless, except in her essays where you’d see the gleam of wit and humor that must have been there all the time (the way she says of Defoe, “He is said to have been a hosier; but what, after all, was a hosier in the seventeenth century?”).
And Faulkner, despite the seriousness of theme and subject, sometimes winks at the reader. (In Sanctuary we get a latter-day Snopes, one Clarence, a successful local politician. The reader of the stories thinks, ah, the barnburners have now inherited the earth. We also learn how he pronounces his first name and can almost hear his voice: “I’m Senator Snopes, Cla’ence Snopes.”)
And Faulkner’s descendants are often pretty flip and funny (Welty). Is even Charles Portis a relative? Well, at least an in-law.
I guess I’d just disagree that American literature seems more serious than English literature. In any case, I don’t think of Waugh as a contemporary of Fitzgerald. His greatest work, the WWII trilogy, was written in the 50s and early 60s, and published as a single volume, Sword of Honour, in 1966, which makes him almost a contemporary of William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut and even Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel was published in 1963.
A commonality of these writers (besides WWII) might be evident in their characters’ practically Dickensian names and (pre)occupations: Waugh (Guy Crouchback, lonely, cuckolded Catholic enlistee), Gaddis (Wyatt Gwyon, art forger), Vonnegut (Diana Moon Glampers, Handicapper General of the U.S.), Pynchon (Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, sexual homing beacon in London for German V-2 rockets).