If you use five Modifiers to describe Someone
When people ask me who I think the best writer of all-time was, I usually tell them the same thing. “Ivan Bunin.”
Bunin won the Nobel Prize a million years ago for Literature. I’ve never read anything novel-length by him, but his short stories are the most brilliant and strangely romantic works I’ve ever encountered. Find The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories or Sunstroke and other Stories, to see a representative sample of this guy’s beauty and talent. My personal favorite among his oeuvre is Ballad, a tale about a domestic servant describing some fable to a stolidly middle-class man who is skeptical at first, but grows at least unnerved, if not believing, by the end of the story’s telling.
It’s weird to say that I’ve never read Bunin in his original tongue (and never will; I’m not learning Russian), or to say that the best writing I’ve ever read has been based on translations from different people rather than from the man himself. That Bunin’s tone and force remains consistent regardless of who is translating him is remarkable. That these same attributes remain manifest in his writing even though Russian is drastically different from English is also a bit of a miracle.
I remember reading in the Translator’s Note to one of Bunin’s collections of short stories that if his writing were to be translated literally, without the intervening finesse of an able translator, the result would be ridiculous. The translator claimed that it’s traditional to pile modifier upon modifier in Bunin’s native tongue, and the effect is musical rather than comical, as it would be (and sometimes is) in English.
I was thinking about this in a totally different context the other day when I was reading an article in which some pundit-professor was giving his opinion of some high-level politician. Just to avoid stepping on anyone’s particular toes, we’ll call the professor The Professor, and we’ll call the politician The Politician.
The Professor was giving his opinion of The Politician and he said, “He is a stupid, insane, bigoted, dumb, reckless, uncouth ….”
It took him awhile to get to the noun modified by the mountain of adjectives. I’m not saying The Politician wasn’t all of the things The Professor claimed he was, and worse, but he could have addressed each one of those charges in their turn, or condensed some of the pejoratives that had some overlapping meaning, or, barring that, found some new and more concise words to describe this man’s execrableness.
I think, in English as opposed to Russian, more than two modifiers describing a noun may be too much, in fiction or in any other context. Too many adjectives between the definite or indefinite article and the noun have the effect of making the reader feel lost at sea, a bit adrift, as if the description may never end up linking with the thing it’s supposed to be modifying or describing.
And on a related note, more than two or three insults in tandem, daisy-chained to each other, seem to reveal as much about the person slinging the mud as the person on the receiving end.
The Gentleman From San Francisco
Sunstroke: Selected Stories
Bunin won the Nobel Prize a million years ago for Literature. I’ve never read anything novel-length by him, but his short stories are the most brilliant and strangely romantic works I’ve ever encountered. Find The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories or Sunstroke and other Stories, to see a representative sample of this guy’s beauty and talent. My personal favorite among his oeuvre is Ballad, a tale about a domestic servant describing some fable to a stolidly middle-class man who is skeptical at first, but grows at least unnerved, if not believing, by the end of the story’s telling.
It’s weird to say that I’ve never read Bunin in his original tongue (and never will; I’m not learning Russian), or to say that the best writing I’ve ever read has been based on translations from different people rather than from the man himself. That Bunin’s tone and force remains consistent regardless of who is translating him is remarkable. That these same attributes remain manifest in his writing even though Russian is drastically different from English is also a bit of a miracle.
I remember reading in the Translator’s Note to one of Bunin’s collections of short stories that if his writing were to be translated literally, without the intervening finesse of an able translator, the result would be ridiculous. The translator claimed that it’s traditional to pile modifier upon modifier in Bunin’s native tongue, and the effect is musical rather than comical, as it would be (and sometimes is) in English.
I was thinking about this in a totally different context the other day when I was reading an article in which some pundit-professor was giving his opinion of some high-level politician. Just to avoid stepping on anyone’s particular toes, we’ll call the professor The Professor, and we’ll call the politician The Politician.
The Professor was giving his opinion of The Politician and he said, “He is a stupid, insane, bigoted, dumb, reckless, uncouth ….”
It took him awhile to get to the noun modified by the mountain of adjectives. I’m not saying The Politician wasn’t all of the things The Professor claimed he was, and worse, but he could have addressed each one of those charges in their turn, or condensed some of the pejoratives that had some overlapping meaning, or, barring that, found some new and more concise words to describe this man’s execrableness.
I think, in English as opposed to Russian, more than two modifiers describing a noun may be too much, in fiction or in any other context. Too many adjectives between the definite or indefinite article and the noun have the effect of making the reader feel lost at sea, a bit adrift, as if the description may never end up linking with the thing it’s supposed to be modifying or describing.
And on a related note, more than two or three insults in tandem, daisy-chained to each other, seem to reveal as much about the person slinging the mud as the person on the receiving end.
The Gentleman From San Francisco
Sunstroke: Selected Stories
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