Your Purpleness, we know you did not want your work uploaded on YouTube, but we need it.
See how the weather provides the production design for Purple Rain.
Chris Evans, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Nate Parker interpret Diamonds and Pearls.
Count Leo Tolstoy playing tennis.
Janet Malcolm writes that the revered Tolstoy translations by Constance Garnett—”her fine English, her urgent forward-moving sentences, her feeling for words—all this was gone, replaced by writing that is like singing or piano playing by someone who is not musical.”
Morson wrote these words in 1997, and would recall them bitterly. Since that time a sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations. When you go to a bookstore to buy a work by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Chekhov, most of what you find is in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
In an article in the July/August 2010 issue of Commentary entitled “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature,” Morson used the word “tragedy” to express his sense of the disaster that has befallen Russian literature in English translation since the P&V translations began to appear. To Morson “these are Potemkin translations—apparently definitive but actually flat and fake on closer inspection.” Morson fears that “if students and more-general readers choose P&V…[they] are likely to presume that whatever made so many regard Russian literature with awe has gone stale with time or is lost to them.”
Read the essay by Janet Malcolm.
Aaargh, and since critics have been raving about the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of the Russian greats, I’ve replaced nearly all my Garnett and Aylmer translations with the new ones by P/V. Dammit, who is right?
Malcolm provides samples for comparison.
Garnett: After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and honorable man. She liked him very much, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him.
P&V: After seeing her guests off, Anna began pacing up and down the room without sitting down. Though for the whole evening (lately she had acted the same way towards all young men) she had unconsciously done everything she could to arouse a feeling of love for her in Levin, and though she knew that she had succeeded in it, as far as one could with regard to an honest, married man in one evening, and though she liked him very much (despite the sharp contrast, from a man’s point of view, between Levin and Vronsky, as a woman she saw what they had in common, for which, too, Kitty had loved them both), as soon as he left the room, she stopped thinking about him.
Benedict Cumberbatch as the villainous Richard
If it’s propaganda you want, hire a great playwright. Seize the narrative. Shakespeare wrote Richard III under the auspices of the Tudors who overthrew Richard, the last of the Plantagenets. It’s been a lasting investment in public relations. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” Richard cries in the fatal battle, and that at least may have been true. His bones were discovered a few years ago, under a carpark where the battlefield used to be. Examination showed that one of his shoulders was higher than the other because he had scoliosis. Spin that detail and you have the villainous Crookback.
At Richard’s reinterment, a poem was read by one of his relatives, the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. The star of Sherlock and the forthcoming Doctor Strange is Plantagenet’s second cousin 16 times removed, but before his ardent fans get any ideas about putting him on the throne, there are several thousand Plantagenet descendants walking the earth. Now Cumberbatch plays Richard III in the season finale of BBC’s The Hollow Crown. His late cousin still doesn’t get a fair shake, but as supervillains go, he’s awesome.
In this TV film adapted for the screen by Ben Power and directed by Dominic Cooke, Richard isn’t just bad. He glories in malevolence. The first image we see is that of a chessboard, a hand moving the pieces, and then the huge lump and distorted spine. It looks like some alien experiment. Cumberbatch himself has always struck me as odd-looking: beautiful from some angles, extraterrestrial from others. As he struggles to put on his shirt he announces his intention of screwing over his brothers, the king and the duke, and details his nefarious plan. Since he looks like a monster anyway, he’s going to be a monster.
Quickly he demonstrates his talent at deception, confiding his schemes to the viewer one second, and in mid-speech appearing concerned as his brother George is led away to the Tower. Just as he had planned. Later he invites us to watch as he convinces his cousin Anne (Phoebe Fox), whose husband and father-in-law he had killed, to marry him. After all the horrible things I’ve done to her, she still says yes, he gloats. Richard is intent on seeing how low he can go. It’s not merely ambition or resentment that drives him, but bottomless self-loathing. Cumberbatch shows us a man who wants the world to revile him as much as he reviles himself. He’s evil, but recognizably human.
Ben Whishaw as the whispery Richard.
In the first season the fey Richard II (Ben Whishaw), makes arbitrary decisions that lead to his being deposed by his cousin Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear), who becomes Henry IV. Whishaw is a marvelous Richard II—he never raises his voice because everyone must hang on his every word. When the crown is taken from him, he sees himself as a Jesus figure carrying the sins of the world. Where Whishaw is wispy and otherworldly, Kinnear is stocky and grounded—his Henry reveres his king and is consumed by guilt. His actions reverberate through The Hollow Crown, setting in motion a series of power plays ending with the death of his dynasty. As Henry’s father John of Gaunt, Patrick Stewart doesn’t get much screen time, but his rendition of “This sceptred isle” reminds us why men would follow him anywhere, be he the Duke of Lancaster, Captain Picard, or Professor Xavier.
Kate Beckinsale stars in Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship
Whit Stillman makes literary movies, specifically Jane Austenesque movies, so no one is surprised that his new movie Love and Friendship is an adaptation of a Jane Austen novella, Lady Susan. If there is anything Whit Stillman fans are used to, it is waiting. Since his first movie Metropolitan came in 1990, he’s made a total of five (and one TV pilot, The Cosmopolitans on Amazon–are they doing a full season?), for a five-year wait between productions. This is why we have memorized his movies.
On the other hand his last movie Damsels in Distress came out in 2012, so maybe he’s picking up the pace. In Unserious Austen, Adam Thirlwell nails what we love about Whit Stillman movies:
Sure, the surface may be all frivolity and flippancy, a high bourgeois/aristocratic setting. Such archness and such a setting can make it easy to see these films as exercises in the unserious unserious. But Stillman’s gravity comes from the way he both understands the terrors of social relations—the pursuit of love and friendship—and also admires all strategies in artifice that might soften these terrors, subvert the tyranny of misinterpretation, and restore a version of utopia. Against the malice of the social, he places a range of tactics: optimism, elegance, tradition, invented selves and accents, the desperate maintenance of outmoded or contradictory ideals. So what if an ideal is absurd! And his highest ideal is eloquence.
While waiting to see Love and Friendship, I read Lady Susan, which Auntie Jane wrote when she was 18 (but wasn’t published till after her death). It’s a 64-page novella in the form of letters between the widowed Lady Susan Vernon, her friend Alicia Johnson, her disapproving sister-in-law, the mother of the sister-in-law, the brother of the sister-in-law who becomes smitten with Lady Susan, and other characters whom we could consider Lady Susan’s patsies. There are wonderful moments of bitchiness and hilarity in Auntie Jane’s novels; in this shorter work the bitchery is more concentrated and less subtle. You end up rooting for Lady Susan—”the most accomplished coquette in England”—despite her conniving, manipulative ways because she’s leveraging her limited power in a society where she’s supposed to shut up until her husband lets her speak.
I wanted to write out all the letters, but I have work to do. Maybe table it for a future project.
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