I have to read Notes From Underground today for my World Literary Masterpieces class. I have given up on the translation in our Norton Anthology text for one by Pevear and Volokhonsky in the hope that they will be able to come closer to making me like it.
Last night, at the grocery store, the Frosted Mini Wheats that I wanted were five dollars a box, so instead, I went with Raisin Bran, since it was nutritionally close to the Mini Wheats but half the price.
I am sitting here, therefore, staring at two things that I am doing because they are good for me, hoping that, before I touch either, I can muster into action some adult portion of my brain that will make me able to like them enough not to resent their foul healthiness. The child in me is holding her breath and throwing a wicked tantrum.
Was I supposed to like the Russian authors? Shit!
I will say that, as I yelled at them from the safe perch of distant eras, I came to dread them. Then, I began to respect and dread them. Then, to realize their greatness and dread them. And now I dread them, for the dread of the thickness of their prose, and for the dread of their clarity in the vastness of the humanity of their work. So, I Don’t dread them at all, but I lack dread as I dread.
As for cereal, pay the fiver. How can one not eat sugary food resembling haystacks in winter snow?
By the way, Pevear is considered by many to be THE translator of Russian literature. He also works on the French, and has out a new translation of “The Three Musketeers.”
And it is after hearing of such a thing that a mouse of heightened consciousness will, heaping reason upon reason and desire upon desire, stay in its squalid corner, gnashing its teeth, knowing all the while that its wanting will bring exquisite pain … yes, gentlemen, I say “exquisite”! But to those of you who have never felt the lust to expand one’s library, one’s fortress of fictions, of lies — how can you understand? Indeed, some of you gentlemen, while not knowing the agony, know of the agony, and fling these crumbs of literary cheese through the crack in the floor simply to watch the mouse squeak and scamper after them. I will tell you hommes de la nature et de la verite that the cruelty of your entertainment goes deeper than you can conceive, for no mouse can live on such crumbs but the hunger grows worse and worse.