2024 Week 5: In Which I Waffle On About Books

It's my last full week at work and I am all aflutter over what books to buy with my staff discount card for the last time ever (unless HR forgets to take it back... hahAHAHA). 

So far I have Dante's The Divine Comedy, Tolstoy's A Calendar of Wisdom, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (probably the full set, because what's the point of reading only one third of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu?). I also originally wanted to buy Goethe's Faust, but couldn't find a suitable edition in store, so I got the one I wanted off WOB instead.

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Actually it's very complicated buying translated books, even works as canonical as the above. The Goethe and the Dante gave me the most trouble and I spent several days in that rabbit hole. (Feel free to skip the next few paragraphs if you're not a lit nerd.)

So, let's start with Goethe. The most enjoyable translation of Faust has got to be Walter Kaufmann's. His rhythm and poetry sound like lyrics in a prog-metal concept album:

You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast

Compare that against the more widely available David Luke translation (Oxford University Press).

Only one of our needs is known to you;
You must not learn the other, oh beware!
In me there are two souls, alas, and their 

The David Luke translation is so flat!

However, the problem with the Kaufmann (besides its availability - I believe it's out of print) is that he only translated half of Faust. So the Kaufmann is just Faust Part One plus some bits of Part Two tacked on. 

After comparing a few translations I decided to go for the Philip Wayne one, which was the Penguin  Classics translation up until about 20 years ago. Importantly, Wayne translated both Parts in full, and the books are still available on used book websites.

By this one passion you are quite possessed
You'd best admit no other to a share.
Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast

(In 2005 Penguin replaced the Wayne translation with a more prosaic one by David Constantine:)

You only know the one impulse. Oh may
The other never come into your ken.
Alas, I house two souls in me

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As for Dante! Someone (on 4Chan, no less) compiled an epic translations chart which gives you an idea of how diverse Dante translations can be.

One major issue with the Divine Comedy is that Dante wrote it in "terza rima". Think rhyming couplets, but with 3 lines instead of 2, plus a lot more complexity because, instead of having the 3 lines in each stanza (technical term: "tercet") rhyme, only the 1st and 3rd lines rhyme with the 2nd line of the previous. fucking. stanza. Maybe interlocking rhymes isn't all that hard in Italian, but as you can imagine, much of the musicality is lost when it's translated into English.

So there's poetic structure to think about. Most translators seem to render The Divine Comedy in blank verse (lines in the same meter but not necessarily rhyming), some in free verse (no fixed rhymes or meter, which is less satisfying to read). The popular John Ciardi translation uses tercets, which is pleasant and as a bonus breaks up each canto into easy-to-read chunks.

Then there is the language used. Given the subject matter, the language needs to be suitably dramatic. So there's a trade-off between how modern/comprehensible the translation is versus the mood/feel of the text.

For example, compare this very Old Testament-sounding translation by Henry Francis Cary:

There is no dram of blood
That doth not quiver in me

With the much less archaic, but clinical-sounding John Ciardi:

There is not within me
One drop of blood unstirred

Rather than buy Inferno, Paradiso, and Purgatory are published separately, I wanted a single-volume edition of The Divine Comedy, so my options were really Ciardi (too modern and dry for my liking), Longfellow (a bit painful to read), and the new J.G. Nichols translation published by Alma Books (acceptable, and also the cheapest!).

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I think translations matter less when it comes to prose. I toggled between 2 translations of Anna Karenina and both still sparkled; similarly, I think different translations of Kafka's the Metamorphosis are equally fun to read.

I considered buying the extremely pretty Vintage Classics edition of War and Peace, but felt my old battered Penguin Classics was somehow more pleasant reading. As for Proust, the edition I want is the older Scott Moncrieff translation, mostly because it's both more economical (the full novel is in 3 doorstopper volumes, rather than 6 or 7) and the typeface more legible. 

Anyway, these are material considerations one can only weigh in a physical bookstore.

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Books finished in January 2024!

1. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
2. Walter Benjamin - One-Way Street & Other Writings
3. A Short History of the World in 50 Places
4. A Short History of the World in 50 Books
5. Tom Standage - A History of the World in 6 Glasses
6. Tim Marshall - Prisoners of Geography

Books 3 to 6 were warm-up texts for my year-long attempt to read non-fiction books on world history and politics. Of the 4, I obviously enjoyed A Short History of the World in 50 Books the most, although the 50 Places book in the same series was good for filling up the gaps in my geographical knowledge (which is really one massive lacuna).

I read Prisoners of Geography for largely the same reason, but I kept feeling the writer was trying to sell me a political theory, so the content immediately lost all credibility for me. This is probably going to be an issue in all political science books masquerading as "big history" books, I guess. I am going to be much more careful with the credentials of non-fiction authors.

I didn't enjoy Walter Benjamin all that much - perhaps it's the fault of the translation - but at least now I know who he is. I thought he was awesome for killing himself rather than fall in the hands of the Nazis.

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Next Wednesday is my last day at the bookstore. I have been feeling very bittersweet about moving on, particularly about the people I've worked with. Although I'm not super close to anyone - in the sense that we have heart-to-hearts - we understand one another as only book-obsessed people do. 

If I told Jon or any of my best friends how much time and money I spend on books, they wouldn't get it the way my coworkers do. Some tenets exclusive to Book People include:

• Certain books simply call out to us, and We Must Own Them
• Yes, it's absolutely worth it to spend more on special editions of books
• We think about books even when reading books
• When we take leave, we stay home and read books (reading is superior to travel)
• When we do travel, we go to places with literary or historical significance (in what other workplace would you find coworkers wistfully having a conversation about how much we all want to go to Auschwitz?)
• We would rather read than be social (books are superior to most humans)
• There are books for different occasions, and we have different rituals around different books (there are Toilet Books, Bath/Self-Care Books, Bedtime Books, and Daytime Books)
• We will use any form of Girl Math we can to justify our irrational book purchases
• Good Food + Good Books = Good Life

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OK some pictures.

Hanna!

Jett-o!

Made our first recipe from this cookbook - chicken with peppers and ras el hanout. It turned out delicious.

I saw two Asian Glossy Starlings while out cycling. It's hard to describe these things. They have the most diabolical red eyes and greasy black bodies. They look like Professor Snape in bird form.