Links for August 28th
Afghanistan interpreters, the wildest story I've read in a while, William Faulkner, an early paperback of 1984
Hello, hope you’ve had a smooth week aside from all the bleak news. Little lighter on the links this week because of work (finishing a piece).
Links
This story about an interpreter in Afghanistan is simultaneously deeply upsetting and very moving, and provides depth and scale to what’s happening overall in its specificity.
For as much as you heard everyone unhappy about Moulton and Meijer going to Afghanistan, this interview with the two of them has some interesting insights.
This story is MADNESS. And if you’re looking for like an “escapist psychological read,” this is it.
Assume you saw this thread, but just in case you did not see the Dell Curry thread…
A ranking of this season’s MLB City Connect jerseys here, if you haven’t seen them all (Miami should be first). And lastly,
Light book commentary
So as I mentioned, I finished Louis Menand’s The Free World, and here are two great little bits.
First, the early days of paperback books:
…spicing up the covers put paperback lines in competition with one another and it quickly became a race to the bottom. Scantily clothed women and sexually suggestive poses, whether the author was Mary Shelley or John D. MacDonald, became almost a requirement of the format. If it was a hard-boiled detective novel or a mystery, the woman was a state of undress, or wearing a peignoir and holding a gun.
The paperback reprint was therefore not only different physically from a hardcover; it had a different aura. The dust jacket for the American hardcover of Nineteen Eighty-Four, published by Harcourt, Brace in 1949, has a tasteful, all-text design. The cover of the 1950 Signet reprint (the artist was Alan Harmon) features a sleeveless, and surprisingly toned, Winston Smith next to Julia, who wears an Anti-Sex League button pinned to a blouse whose neckline plunges to her hourglass midriff. O’Brien is figured in a black skullcap and bodice outfit, clutching what appears to be a whip. ‘Forbidden Love… Fear… Betrayal,’ says the cover line. ‘Complete and unabridged.’
And secondly, this book partially explained something I had always wondered about, which is why William Faulkner’s books (and others in the American canon) are deemed to be “Greek.”
I’m aware that As I Lay Dying is an Odyssey reference and possibly the structure…? I don’t know: I’m not a big classics person, so I’ve always assumed the Greek determination was exclusively me being out of my depth on canonical plot structures that aren’t, like, King Lear. But I learned I can also partly pin this on the original French translations, which massively increased Faulkner’s profile internationally, and ultimately, in the United States. The translations also sound absurd:
[Maurice-Edgar Coindreau] advised French readers that the Grand-Guignol plots in Faulkner’s novels — along with the idiocy, murder, rape, incest, racism, and general depravity — could be ignored. ‘In the works of William Faulkner, the subject is only a pretext for a display of technique,’ he wrote in his NRF article. ‘…To be fair to Faulkner, one must forget his themes and consider only the way he deals with them.’
[Publisher Gaston] Gallimard’s translators therefore regarded dialect as something they were not obliged to reproduce…This meant that French translations of American novels largely bleached out markers of race, region, and class. The effect was to classicize. Malraux described Sanctuary as ‘the eruptions of Greek tragedy into a detective story’; Larbaud called As I Lay Dying ‘Homeric.’ These phrases from the prefaces were parroted in the reviews, and they became the basis for the French reception of contemporary American fiction. Discounting the plot and universalizing the themes threw the focus onto the technique, which is exactly where Coindreau wanted it to be thrown.
The other interesting part and the reason Menand writes about this: Along with Hollywood movies, these weird translations — including the same group’s version of Hemingway — had a big effect on Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, etc.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.