Zina Rohan's Blog, page 10
February 15, 2011
Clearly Not a Patriot
Our local news (UK) keeps banging on about the forthcoming royal wedding and then the Olympics. I am a Londoner. I am already making plans to be elsewhere on both occasions. Sensible or a dereliction of patriotic duty?
February 7, 2011
So Much I've Missed
An interesting BBC4 TV programme this evening reminded me of so much of English literature that I haven't read - and now will: book:Evelina|8048731] and Caleb Williams. Yes, but when?
February 4, 2011
Reading Takes a Break
No time to read anything at all at the moment. Too busy co-ordinating the campaign to Save BBC World Service Radio from the cuts imposed by the government.
January 28, 2011
Holiday reading
I've had a kindle for something over a year - ostensibly for traveling. But actually the object itself appeals to me because it's light, it doesn't curl up at the edges and it remembers where I left off. Not good for non-fiction, though. Flipping back to that map, that picture, that footnote - nah!
Stone's Fallwas disappointing. I enjoyed it for the story but the writing was not what he achieved in his earlier books. Somehow every character sounded the same, both form within and without. Then I readHeartstone, and again...fun for the long journeys, but a little to much to-ing and fro-ing in the plot. Still, Shardlake is always an appealing persona. Then I moved onto Sacred Hearts and was truly fed up. I'm not sure what I expected - more church politics and history interwoven into the story would have helped. I shall try another Dunant - but only one more...unless the next one has more meat. Now that I'm home, I am reading By Nightfall: A Novel. Book, not kindle. In comparison with The Hours it seems somehow inconsequential, and linguistically duller. Ah me...
Stone's Fallwas disappointing. I enjoyed it for the story but the writing was not what he achieved in his earlier books. Somehow every character sounded the same, both form within and without. Then I readHeartstone, and again...fun for the long journeys, but a little to much to-ing and fro-ing in the plot. Still, Shardlake is always an appealing persona. Then I moved onto Sacred Hearts and was truly fed up. I'm not sure what I expected - more church politics and history interwoven into the story would have helped. I shall try another Dunant - but only one more...unless the next one has more meat. Now that I'm home, I am reading By Nightfall: A Novel. Book, not kindle. In comparison with The Hours it seems somehow inconsequential, and linguistically duller. Ah me...
December 28, 2010
I Wish it had been longer
The Memory Chalet Every page of this wonderful man's lucid, sane writing had me nodding - in recognition, in admiration, in affection, although of course I never met him. How I wish I had. We have lost so much. How much more he might have written had it not been for his terrible death.
Tony Judt's voice has offered the most quietly devastating critique of our times, and for our times. There is not a word of jargon, no polysyllabic cant, and even no hypocrisy. Very occasionally I found myself disagreeing, perhaps because I am a little more cynical than he was - but always I wished he was right.
His memories of his London childhood, sketched with such a light brush, reminded me of all the details of my own that I had forgotten. His analysis of the world as he grew, his youthful and fervent Zionism - and what caused him to jettison it; his cool head during the 60s student revolutions and his wry acknowledgment of what we westerners had failed to understand then...all, all so clear, so inescapable. Read Tony Judt. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land and anything else you can lay hands on.
Tony Judt's voice has offered the most quietly devastating critique of our times, and for our times. There is not a word of jargon, no polysyllabic cant, and even no hypocrisy. Very occasionally I found myself disagreeing, perhaps because I am a little more cynical than he was - but always I wished he was right.
His memories of his London childhood, sketched with such a light brush, reminded me of all the details of my own that I had forgotten. His analysis of the world as he grew, his youthful and fervent Zionism - and what caused him to jettison it; his cool head during the 60s student revolutions and his wry acknowledgment of what we westerners had failed to understand then...all, all so clear, so inescapable. Read Tony Judt. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land and anything else you can lay hands on.
December 25, 2010
Thought I Understood
I've done a lot of work with people who are refugees. I have a number of refugees in my family. I have had refugees living in my house, and yet I learned more about war and what it does from reading S. than I thought possible. Terse, flat in tone - it's what trauma does, brilliantly translated (I think). Go for it!
Thought I Understood
I've done a lot of work with people who are refugees. I have a number of refugees in my family. I have had refugees living in my house, and yet I learned more about war and what it does from reading S. than I thought possible. Terse, flat in tone - it's what trauma does, brilliantly translated (I think). Go for it!
December 21, 2010
Don Quixote
My hat off to Edith Grossman. This was a feat of translation, easy on the mind's tongue, funny, moving. And by the by we learn so much about 16th century Spain...
This is a novel in two parts. 1. The novel itself - perhaps the world's first - although I'd have to look up the dates for the Tale of Genji.
2. The novel about an imposter who tried to steal Cervantes's thunder.
After all this time we read in such a different way from the way Cervantes's public read it, of course.
There's been a lot written about translations recently, sparked off by the new version of Madam Bovary. In the UK, Julian Barnes wrote an engrossing essay in The London Review of Books on the impossibility of ever making a definitive translation of anything, which is why a new one must be done for each generation.
Now I'm reading S by Slavenka Drakulic - in translation. As short and terse as Quixote is baggy, because novel writing by now is a historically practised skill. Read them both!
This is a novel in two parts. 1. The novel itself - perhaps the world's first - although I'd have to look up the dates for the Tale of Genji.
2. The novel about an imposter who tried to steal Cervantes's thunder.
After all this time we read in such a different way from the way Cervantes's public read it, of course.
There's been a lot written about translations recently, sparked off by the new version of Madam Bovary. In the UK, Julian Barnes wrote an engrossing essay in The London Review of Books on the impossibility of ever making a definitive translation of anything, which is why a new one must be done for each generation.
Now I'm reading S by Slavenka Drakulic - in translation. As short and terse as Quixote is baggy, because novel writing by now is a historically practised skill. Read them both!
Don Quixote
My hat off to Edith Grossman. This was a feat of translation, easy on the mind's tongue, funny, moving. And by the by we learn so much about 16th century Spain...
This is a novel in two parts. 1. THe novel itself - perhaps the world's first - although I'd have to look up the dates for the Tale of Genji.
2. The novel about an imposter who tried to steal Cervantes's thunder.
After all this time we read in such a different way from the way Cervanters public read it, of course.
There's been a lot written about translations recently, sparked off by the new version of Madam Bovary. In the UK, Julian Barnes wrote an engrossing essay on the impossibility of ever making a definitive translation of anything, which is why they must be re-done for each generation.
Now I'm reading S by Slavenka Drakulic - in translation. As short and terse as Quixote is baggy, because novel writing by now is a historically practised skill. Read them both!
This is a novel in two parts. 1. THe novel itself - perhaps the world's first - although I'd have to look up the dates for the Tale of Genji.
2. The novel about an imposter who tried to steal Cervantes's thunder.
After all this time we read in such a different way from the way Cervanters public read it, of course.
There's been a lot written about translations recently, sparked off by the new version of Madam Bovary. In the UK, Julian Barnes wrote an engrossing essay on the impossibility of ever making a definitive translation of anything, which is why they must be re-done for each generation.
Now I'm reading S by Slavenka Drakulic - in translation. As short and terse as Quixote is baggy, because novel writing by now is a historically practised skill. Read them both!
October 24, 2010
Still Nabokov
It's very clever what he does. Yes, he's recalling, in the sense of calling back, with effort, his Russian childhood and the many forays abroad with his family, in all the sensual detail he can muster: he pursues a figure, a passion (butterflies and moths) out of chronology, then returns to it. He remembers and remembers remembering, and remembering inventing, and inventing memory. There is much he cannot bring to mind, but in the writing of it then somehow does. All his senses are engaged. I wish I could do that - and with his acerbic (yet not cold) humour.
