01-23-2014, 08:22 AM
This seems to have gone a little hay-wire! Revenons a nos moutons!
I should have been more lucid. It is true that there was a time when the well-educated did have a good grasp of several languages, living and dead. But there were always dunces...like Winston Churchill, marked out as a failure at school. I was, however, alluding to translations as well. A good translation is worth any amount of partially understood bits and bobs from school, although if one has been exposed to the pronunciation of a language, a dual-text can work wonders. Language pre-forms the way we think, and so if we do manage to get a little peek at how it goes, we also get a better idea of how the writer is thinking, when his or her words come across in English.
One of my dreams is for our lending libraries to have a couple of cases, with the best work from around the world -not just your Zola (a hero of mine) and other French big-hitters, but examples of all countries Golden Age, or best shot, even if just one book. How else is Joe Soap going to stumble across?
I should have been more lucid. It is true that there was a time when the well-educated did have a good grasp of several languages, living and dead. But there were always dunces...like Winston Churchill, marked out as a failure at school. I was, however, alluding to translations as well. A good translation is worth any amount of partially understood bits and bobs from school, although if one has been exposed to the pronunciation of a language, a dual-text can work wonders. Language pre-forms the way we think, and so if we do manage to get a little peek at how it goes, we also get a better idea of how the writer is thinking, when his or her words come across in English.
One of my dreams is for our lending libraries to have a couple of cases, with the best work from around the world -not just your Zola (a hero of mine) and other French big-hitters, but examples of all countries Golden Age, or best shot, even if just one book. How else is Joe Soap going to stumble across?