Summer Translations

Madame,

Quite the set of homeless experiences—and reactions—you have chronicled!  I am intrigued by each of them!

That video making the rounds could be the updated and abbreviated equivalent of Steinbeck’s Great Depression tale.

School in August is indeed a travesty, for many reasons.  Ever notice how many decisions we as a society make that are worse than decisions of previous years?  It’s not all rose-colored glasses and the selective memories of the experienced!

My favorite summer memory?  Oh my [why do I hear George Takei every time I see those two words? :)], there are so many, including some of those you had!  If I had to focus on just one favorite, I would say it was riding my bike FAR out on the country road that was close to our city housing edition, enjoying the sun and warmth, and then sitting with my pepsi bottle and comic book under a tree and leisurely reading.  Afterwards, I would sometimes even walk the bike back, because I enjoyed the time to think.

My reading of War and Peace goes at a leisurely pace, and an enjoyable one.  I am not immune to endless distractions and obligations!

The translation I started to read was from 2008 or so, from a husband and wife team—he a American specialist in Russian literature, she a Russian.  They included a great notes section and left a lot of the original French in (with notes at the bottom to translate that).  But it was a borrowed copy from the library, and its edges of the cover started to get very worn, so I knew it wasn’t going to make it.  I therefore bought the latest translation e-version, also by the same couple.  They have removed (well, translated and incorporated) most of the French in this 2014 version.  I do enjoy this translation of the book, as it is much better than the torturous one I read previously many years ago.  To read W&P too early in life, and especially an unrobust translation—folly.

Of course, a Russian friend of mine, with pity, said I would never fully understand Tolstoy or Tolstoy’s works, especially War and Peace, unless I read them in Russian, as some feeling especially is not translatable to English.  Wonder if that is what Isaac Rabel meant when he said “if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

I admire Tolstoy’s independent observance of the world and his saying that “My hero is truth.”

I’m thinking that were he an American today, he would comment on the bitter ironies of Labor Day: 1) That it is a merely a day off for most and they make no connection to its meaning, and 2) that we have a holiday ostensibly to celebrate Labor/The Worker, yet in all the times since Labor Day became a federal holiday, Labor/The Worker have rarely been so little valued.