2014 — 10 August: Sunday
The arrival of the much-heralded vile weather1 this morning gives me no incentive to rush outside and do anything mad like splashing around in the Hampshire mud I would now be sure of finding there. Besides, I've got a new colour printer to play with.
Time...
... for my second cuppa, already. It's 09:59 or so, and thus also nearly time for the divine Cerys.
I'm not proud...
... of having read so little Russian literature — with the (I contend) honourable exception of "The Master and Margarita", of course — but I generally prefer to leave my many prejudices undisturbed at this point in my life. Besides, I still have "Game of Thrones" to finish.
Clara Bell, who worked in London, was a talented linguist but the English War and Peace she published in 1886 was translated from the first French edition of 1879 rather than the Russian original, which it little resembled. The American Nathan Haskell Dole, who published the first translation of Anna Karenina, also in 1886, did work with the Russian text but this was not always apparent. To the critic of the New York Times, his version suggested "the geological subsidence of a layer of Russian into a substratum of English, leaving a number of words to linger fossil-like amid the latter in untranslatable durability".
I didn't even learn the meaning of "prolix" until my first encounter with ex-PFC Wintergreen in "Catch-22". Now consider this merest trifle from W&P Book Fourteen: 1812 - Chapter XVIII (which may, it occurs to me, contain a hidden clue or two as to any infelicity of that first French translation):
And lastly, the final departure of the great Emperor from his heroic army is presented to us by the historians as something great and characteristic of genius. Even that final running away, described in ordinary language
as the lowest depth of baseness which every child is taught to be ashamed of — even that act finds justification in the historians' language.
When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception
of "greatness." "Greatness," it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the "great" man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a "great" man can be blamed.
"C'est grand!" say the historians, and there no longer exists either good or evil but only "grand" and "not grand." Grand is good, not grand is bad. Grand is the characteristic, in their conception, of some special animals
called "heroes." And Napoleon, escaping home in a warm fur coat and leaving to perish those who were not merely his comrades but were (in his opinion) men he had brought there, feels que c'est grand, and his soul is tranquil.
Remind you of any more recent "great" leaders bestriding the Western world? Just askin'.
Last year...
... I failed the UK citizenship practice test with a dismal score of 50%. I've just scored 79.17% on a new test, taking (I estimate) 3 minutes of the 45 allowed. The questions are still fatuous and pathetic.
I guessed "Dedham Vale" (which I'd never heard of) correctly. I have no idea why a citizen needs to know "which district" (actually county) Maiden Castle is in, and guessed wrong. I also wrongly assumed that the Queen ultimately "delegates" (sic) — surely that should be "designates"? — the members of the Cabinet, since I thought they all swore mighty oaths on bended knee to serve their beloved monarch loyally. Wrong. I further assumed (unwisely, it seems) that driving licences were re-established every 5 years after age 70. They damn' well should be. How can anyone claim to know precisely where Mo Farah (whoever or whatever a Mo Farah is) was conceived? I guessed correctly from the choices, but quite where the sperm entered the egg is, I would still contend, anybody's guess.
I couldn't care less how many jurors serve on a Scottish jury. And why the identity of their "Patron Saint" matters, I have no idea. Since those two questions both concern a country that may yet become independent I can't see their relevance in any case. And I actually managed to overlook a question about resistance to slavery without even noticing it.
(Link.)
Having admired...
... the helicopter drones on display in the BBC's "Click" — and having been unable to find any good reason for the file (when played from my NAS to the Oppo Blu-ray device) to end so abruptly about 8 minutes into a 23 minute programme, I'm now about to change gear, and OCR almost the last of the ancient, yellowing, newspaper clippings that have been hanging behind glass frames — for (in most cases) over two decades — from various book shelves in what was my study...
... but has since metamorphosed into my Books Warehouse upstairs. Now that I have a colour printer, I'm considering some newer forms of visual decoration for the next two decades.
And if you can't quite make out what it says in these two Posy Simmonds frames in the top corner of the nearest clipping, try this.
:-)