Some observations of a literary bent. Deconstruction and finding politics not pleasure. George Eliot. The importance of translation. The Psalms. Defending capitalism. Andrew Carnegie.
Critical mass . . . There’s a literary theory, cynical and full of "Gotcha!" stuff, that says if you read for the pleasure of it, you're missing the point. All this Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson is political tract material, you see. Take it apart and what do you find? Dictation from the ruling class.
So take it apart, the theory says. The story or poem was constructed; deconstruct it. Dissect it, you find nothing but worms and ants. If you defend its beauty, as whether the work can stand apart for a reader to love, you are a cultural conservative, fellow traveler with robber barons.
For some dissection of the dissectors, consider a review some years back in the Times Literary Supplement, which likened Literary Theory (reviewer's capitals) to "uplifting tracts" as read by Janet in the George Eliot short story, "Janet's Repentance."
In this story Janet would hurry past references she could not imagine and get pleasure out of - "Zion," "River of Life," and the like — not in favor of "the minister's pony," "boots and shoes" and the like, images of everyday reality.
The Literary Theory folks want us to stop and savor such uplifting references. The reviewer likened these theory-lovers to 19th-century tract writers.
Let us now praise translation. It is not hack work but is crucial to transporting culture age to age, says Martin Greenberg in an essay, "A Defense of Translation," in Against the Grain (Ivan Dee, 1995), collection from a New York-based monthly, "The New Criterion." Almost as much genius is required of good translation as in doing the original, says Greenberg.
Where would we be if there had been no English version of Plutarch's Lives such as Shakespeare read to learn about Julius Caesar?
Some translations live on their own. Don Quixote is one, Englished by the 18th-century novelist Tobias Smollett, author of Humphry Clinker and other rollicking chronicles. Smollett's Quixote lives today, same as his Clinker.
Same with Pope's Iliad. Greenberg writes of "laughing out loud" as a teenager reading another 18th-century translation of Quixote, by Peter Motteux, whom he ranks with Smollett. On the other side are "pedants," who revel in exactitude and end up writing stuff you can't read.
The good translator dips into the sensibilities of another age or at least another language and passes sense and tone and manner of expression on to his own age in his own language.
That said, consider the 1996 Penguin paperback, The Psalms in English, edited by Donald Davie, who presents the Psalms in order of composition but also provides an index that allows you to read them in numerical order, first to 150th.
Fidelity to the original is crucial for him. He calls "most horrible" the translation that most went off on its own, a self-described "paraphrase" of the 137th Psalm by John Oldham in the 17th century. Davie admittedly prefered versions that reflect the Christian view. Such translations work for Christians, who appropriated them centuries ago.
The Psalms in English popped out at me from the neatly ordered, modest-sized new-book shelves of the River Forest public library, which reflect the relative orderliness (and affluence) of the town itself. My Oak Park library is bigger and bigger-budgeted, and ever there when I need it. It says a lot about where the two communities choose to put their tax money. This is the point of affluence, it seems to me, not that it's there but what's done with it.
From that RF library shelf also popped out at me a defense of capitalism by the philosopher Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life (Free Press). And from this book's pages popped out a defense of the supreme capitalist Andrew Carnegie, who sold off U.S. Steel in 1901 at age 66 and spent his last 18 years giving away the proceeds.
Carnegie is defended by Novak as a creator of wealth. Born poor in Scotland, in Pittsburgh he worked from the age of 12 to help support his family. With just four years of formal education, he eventually devised a way of making steel and running a business that changed how people live.
He is also blamed for hypocrisy and dishonesty in absolving himself of a role in precipitating and suppressing the Homestead Steel strike in 1892 -- an action he spent much time and money atoning for. Novak in effect puts the question: are we better or worse off because of Andrew Carnegie?