Цитаты из книги Through the Window

" На этой земле есть только два рая - Прованс и читальный зал Британского музея".

"Форд, со свойственной ему безаппелляциозностью, убедил Джеймса Джойса буквально в том, что " главная обязанность вина - быть красеым".

A friend whose long-term lover had died of Aids told me, ‘There’s only one upside to this thing: you can do what you fucking well like.’ The trouble is, that when you are in sorrow, most notions of ‘what you like’ will contain the presence of your lost love and the impossible demand that the laws of the universe be repealed.

Most of the grief-struck suffer – especially in the first months – from a terror of forgetting their lost one. Often the shock of death wipes out the memory of earlier times, and there is a morbid fear that it will never be recovered: that the lost one will now be twice lost, twice killed.

But good jokes are the sign of a certain control over the world, or at least of a settled vision, the sort of vision a writer has. Good jokes are finally just jokes; whereas bad jokes are more revelatory of character and situation.

Novels consist of words, evenly and democratically spaced; though some may acquire higher social rank by italicisation or capitalisation. In most novels, this democracy spreads wider: every word is as important as every other word. In better novels, certain words have higher specific gravity than other words. This is something the better novelist does not draw attention to, but lets the better reader discover.

Even punctuations have different weights: thus the English exclamation mark is shoutier than the French.

The first translation we read of a classic novel, like the first recording we hear of a piece of classical music, ‘is’ and remains that novel, that symphony. Subsequent interpreters may have a better grasp of the language, or play the piece on period instruments, but that initial version always takes some shifting.

But then translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss.

Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to?

Of all the enemies Mérimée faced, bad restoration was the one which obsessed and infuriated him most. ‘I have no hesitation in saying that neither the iconoclastic fury of Protestantism nor the stupid vandalism of the Revolution has left such deplorable marks on our monuments as the bad taste of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The barbarians at least used to leave ruins; the so-called repairers have left us only their own sorry work.’

Романы состоят из слов, равномерно и демократично распределенных; впрочем, некоторые слова могут подниматься на более высокий социальный уровень за счет курсива и прописных букв. В большинстве романов эта демократия распространяется шире: каждое слово столь же важно, как и все остальные. В лучших романах определенные слова получают больший удельный вес по сравнению с другими словами.

«Риф» Эдит Уортон

стиль «Романов в три строки»

Профиль Феликса Фенеона

в «итальянском» романе Пенелопы Фицджеральд «Наивность»:

в «итальянском» романе Пенелопы Фицджеральд «Наивность»: «В человеческих отношениях есть такие же дилетанты, как, скажем, в политике».

из Обманчивость Пенелопы Фицджеральд