pumpkinstrokemarrow

A not very good shot of what appears to be party gear for hire from a hairdresser in Garratt Lane. From which we deduce that they clearly have more exciting parties than I ever managed to get to.

But appropriate as I have just finished rereading 'Typee' on the kindle, a novel about life on a Marquesan island published in 1846, partly based on the author's own experiences and partly culled from those of others. One thing which I found surprising was his idealisation of life on a Pacific island, a life which appeared to involve neither crime, disease nor hunger. So quite unlike the more recent experiences of Lucy Irvine and Thor Heyerdahl. And quite unlike my recollection of stories about savage warfare between the various tribes of Hawaii. Another was the appearance of sex - to a far greater extent than was the case in the polite literature of this island at that time. Never mind Jane Austen.

The other novel just finished on the kindle is 'Ivanhoe', having been knocking around since around 25th May, and more or less contemporary with said Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice'. As it turned out, once I buckled down to the thing, it was more readable than I was expecting, certainly a lot more readable than when I last tried it, perhaps 50 years ago. And while he does allow some taint of anti-semitism into his prose, overall he is fairly sympathetic, I dare say rather more so than many of his contemporaries.

Scott goes so far as to preface the book with an essay in the form of a spoof letter to one Rev. Dryasdust containing, in addition to the odd bit of untranslated Latin, presumably intelligible to his readers, some interesting reflections on historical novels of this sort. He seems to have some understanding of my dislike of the blending of fact and fiction. He had also given some thought to the business of bringing alive one time for the people of another, which he appears to think needs a sort of compromise. It is no good reproducing things exactly as they were as it would not be understood and a degree of translation is required to make the earlier time intelligible to the later. Which makes me wonder whether, if one was able to exactly reproduce an early 17th century performance of a Shakespeare play, whether anyone around now would be able to understand it? How much of the original do we have to cast away to make what is left of the thing live for today's audience? Has anyone thought to do translations, doing away with the need to swat up on all sorts of obsolete vocabulary, rather as one might translate the 'Iliad'? And presumably losing much of the poetry on the way. With the fact that Scott sees fit to include such a discussion in this preface suggesting a more sophisticated readership than I would otherwise have thought.