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Reviews (11)
Jan 15, 2020
Translation of an action classic by a classical man of action.
I'm about a quarter of the way in (100 pages), and can say that this is the most readable translation ( including five or six others over the years) of the Odyssey I have found. i am not speaking to the accuracy of the translation (my undergraduate Greek is so rusty as to be useless), but to the ease with which this version leads me through and the way it holds my interest.
Mr. Shaw's (T.E.Lawrence) explanation of his method in his "Translator's Note": "...I have been free with moods and tenses; allowed myself to interchange adjective and adverb; and dodged our poverty of preposition, limitations of verb and pronominal vagueness by rearrangement. Still, syntax apart, this is a translation."
Personally, I think Mr. Lawrence's "Translator's Note" alone is worth the price of admission.
The book itself is a very nice hardcover rendering with sturdy binding, strong, white paper, and easily readable type (I ran across only two typos in the first hundred pages.).
Would I buy it again? Yes. Would I recommend it to a friend? Yes, again.
Jun 27, 2018
Three dimensional writing.
Nobody writes better than Chandler. Some readers may rate others "as high as" he, but I doubt that any reader will rate anyone else as "better".
Chandler had a traditional liberal arts education so he knew the nuts and bolts of language.
I think that's one reason. Another is that he had lived two lives before he began writing: Front line service in the "Great War" and business experience in a conglomeration of oil companies before the Great Depression.
In my opinion, these gave him the immediate contact with the hard surfaces of life that is palpable in his writing.
Jan 04, 2017
He always leaves me wanting more.
I have read a couple of dozen Maigret mysteries (all in English, I have not studied French), and when I finish one
I always want to read another one, although I'm not sure why. Maigret mysteries are mostly not about finding the clues scattered throughout the text and trying to get to the solution one step ahead of the detective (although I have read a few Maigrets like that).
Most of the blurbs say that Simenon is the master of the psychological solution: The reader is supposed to read the characters of the characters and realize which of them is capable of committing the crime. That may be.
I confess that I have not yet been able to do that. Some blurbs say that the Maigret mysteries are essentially existential, and that Simenon expresses the philosophies of Sartre and Camus. I confess I don't have enough philosophy credits on my transcript to say whether that is true.
I think that the writing is to some extent "hard boiled", in that it is clean, not because it is tough. Simenon does not waste words: He sketches, he doesn't paint. But the stories draw me in and pull me along. I have sometimes "put one down", but not willingly. Usually when I begin a Maigret mystery, I find myself trying to find any way I can to finish it in one sitting.
One last comment: In my opinion, the English in the translations published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich is much
more readable than the current paperback series published by a group named for an Antarctic bird.