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Old 10-25-2011, 06:28 AM   #55
DMB
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum View Post
Back in the mists of time when I was at school, it seemed the teachers did everything they could to make Shakespeare as dreary as possible. But I had been lucky enough to go to a good production of "Twelfth Night" the year before I went to high school. So I KNEW Shakespeare was wonderful, however dreary the teachers made him.

And "Twelfth Night" is still my favourite Shakespeare play - I haven't seen all of them (or read all of them) but I have seen and/or read quite a number.

It seems to me that the way to introduce high school children to Shakespeare is to take them to see a professional performance of one or more of the plays - that's what grabs you and that's how they were meant to be experienced. Preferably ones with plenty of action, like "Macbeth".

And to add to the list of loathed books: "Crime and Punishment" which I had to read at University, where I was a mature age (well, in my twenties) student. I remember saying something about it to a friend who was herself a high school teacher of English, and she said "Just be glad you don't have to read "The Idiot"!" So Dostoievsky is definitely not on my reading list.
I do wonder how much of the problem with Dostoevsky is due to the fact that most of us read them in translation. I find nearly all the Russian classics I have tried hardgoing and I think a lot of it is down to the inevitable loss in translation. It's not the fault of the translators; the languages and related modes of thought are so different. I even get confused with the names of the characters in huge works like War and Peace.

Keryl Raist mentions Les Misérables. I wonder if that was in French or English. It was just about the first full-scale novel I ever read in French, and I found it gripping. But I was aware that the language would not translate well. Nineteenth-century French is a language that goes in for purple passages that seem fine in context but would look awkward to eyes used to modern English writing styles.

I wish I could read at a decent length in more languages. I wonder how much we lose through having access only to translations.

When my daughter was in 12th and 13th grades she was doing Higher English as her language A for the Internationale Baccalaureate. Although the subject was called "English" the material they were studying was "world literature in translation". She did a section on the position of women in the 19th century and had to study Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Middlemarch. I thought it was a great pity that Madame Bovary came up on her English syllabus, and therefore translated, rather than in her French syllabus.

Does anyone else think that translations are a barrier? Or should I start a thread on reading translations?

I can see there are good arguments for exposing children to writings from other cultures, but I'm not at all sure that this ought to be in "English Literature".
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