Salon: Books That should be Banned from Schools.

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by ekster

A lot.

I'm lucky as I can read in both Russian and French. I've read some of Dostoevsky's works in Russian, and I looked over at the translations, and there's a world of difference. A lot of things simply cannot be translated and completely lose their meaning when they're written in English. A lot of people are also not used to the way the names get shortened or use, or the way people talk/write in Russian (especially novels from the 19th/early 20th century, when language was one of the most (if not the most) important things in the Russian culture and the criteria for a good work was extremely strict, anything containing more than 2-3 mistakes, having the slightest unprofessional tone, etc. was considered trash and thrown out on the spot.)

Same thing with French. Les Misérables really takes someone understanding French to really read the novel. No matter how hard someone tries to translate it, the language just cannot translate well.

Another perfect example for me is The Three Musketeers. It's (now) my favourite book ever. It's also my first book I've ever read. And while it was my favourite story ever, I really struggled with the book at first because I read it in Russian (it also didn't help that it was written for adults and I read it when I was 6 years old... but that's another story.) I re-read it again in Russian when I was older (10-12?) and I enjoyed it more, but it was still not an easy read. I then read it in English in my teenage years, and that made me question why I even liked it in the first place. And sometime later, I actually got the French version and finally read the original. What a difference! It actually became my favourite book ever at that point.

So yeah, translation is another thing to keep in mind. I'm not saying people shouldn't read translated work, but I don't think kids in highschool/college are ready to appreciate a translated book at that age and understand the differences compared to the language they're currently used to.

I really envy your ability to read in Russian and French, as well as in English. If I could read Russian, I might have another go at "Crime and Punishment" to see how I found it! Unfortunately I can't - but I have read a number of Russian authors in translation and find the Slavic culture and mind-set fascinating. In the same way, I love Russian music also.

In many ways, I think reading translations of literature might work better for high school/university students in conjunction with studying the history of the particular country or area, rather than studying it in an English class. It seems to me that literature, art and history are so inextricably entwined that for the outsider to the culture, each helps with the understanding of the others.

Sorry, this is going away from the original topic, but it's a really interesting discussion!

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I still occasionally wake up in a cold sweat thinking I have a test covering Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables that morning.

Uh... I just picked up the audiobook of that at the library and was going to start it on Thursday. That bad?

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by twowheels

Uh... I just picked up the audiobook of that at the library and was going to start it on Thursday. That bad?

Best way to ruin any enjoyable book, regardless of what it's about: Tell students they have to read it before a certain date, and there'll be a test on it.

I like Bram Stoker's Dracula. Hated it when I had wrote write an essay on the thing.

[allinhi/]

I only remember one book I really disliked, 1919, John Dos Passos, I believe. Before college teachers rarely choose the books assigned. They pick from an approved list. One of the issues is schools in many areas, due to lawsuits students cannot be ability grouped. I remember my mother demanding the library issue me an adult card in second grade because I had read the allowed 6-8 childrens books in the car on the way home. The library had refused to let me check out Lord of the Rings and Waystation. Fortunately I was OK at sports so I wasn't picked on to much.

[DMB]

Originally Posted by allinhi/

I only remember one book I really disliked, 1919, John Dos Passos, I believe. Before college teachers rarely choose the books assigned. They pick from an approved list. One of the issues is schools in many areas, due to lawsuits students cannot be ability grouped. I remember my mother demanding the library issue me an adult card in second grade because I had read the allowed 6-8 childrens books in the car on the way home. The library had refused to let me check out Lord of the Rings and Waystation. Fortunately I was OK at sports so I wasn't picked on to much.

That is appalling! I have never understood the sausage-machine approach to child development. Children are as individual as the adults they will become. They can vary enormously in abilities and interests.

[stormdream]

HA! I love that Ethan Frome was mentioned. I'd barely gotten through the first paragraph when I thought of all the ways I wanted to destroy that book. My English teacher fawning all over it didn't help. "It's boring," I said.

She looked at me in horror. "This is fine literature."

No wonder I ended up reading zombie novels...

[ilovepurple2234]

Originally Posted by Keryl Raist

What I have noticed is my take on popular works has changed quite a bit. Some of the fantasy novels I adored as a kid read like cardboard cut outs of themselves. And my take on 'good' tv has changed radically.

This is absolutely true for me. A lot of the popular stuff I read as a kid are so insubstantial now. I kinda feel betrayed by them now because I loved them back then and those memories are totally spoilt now with the knowledge that I don't like them now.

My school started us on Shakespeare with The Midsummer's Night Dream in 6th grade (we were all about 11 ish ) and most of us loved it and for most of us, that experience cemented the Shakespeare-is-awesome idea in us pretty young (as a show of hands, about 75% of the class professed to like Shakespeare's writings even after we finished King Lear in 11th grade, even though most of us hated King Lear itself.) We also got started on George Bernard Shaw with Pygmalion which had a similar effect. Of course, there was a lot of stuff about it we didn't understand as kids, but it felt so good that I've always carried the idea that I love Shaw which makes me read more of the stuff he wrote.
Where I come from, they ease us into reading. And we never start with classics. Like by 2rd grade, we were reading Enid Blyton (it was a ex-British colony country) and collections of popular local fables and then we did some popular stuff like Agatha Christie and commercial fiction before we started Dickens in like 4th grade or something. We need to teach kids to read first before we teach them to handle the heavy stuff.
This theory has worked with a friend who didn't know any english too. She never read much in her original language, but then when she learnt english, I suggested she read popular fiction until she was hooked onto reading and then I rolled in the heavy guns. She even made it through Vanity Fair! (Vanity Fair is probably my --our-- least favourite book in the universe...but we never give up reading a book midway even if we hate it)

[Keryl Raist]

Originally Posted by DMB

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 can read about six words of French, so it was the English version. The unabridged English version. I was in this I'm going to get serious and read a whole lot of the classics phase, and that one just killed me.

Purple prose is a good way of putting it. Serialized novel that was paid for by the word is another. It's a whole lot longer than anything written by a modern author would be.

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by twowheels

Uh... I just picked up the audiobook of that at the library and was going to start it on Thursday. That bad?

You had me worried, but I'm 2 disks into the audiobook, and so far I'm really enjoying it! Have to say, I chuckled more than once...

This paragraph in particular made me laugh:

The maiden lady's devotions are concluded. Will she now issue forth over the threshold of our story? Not yet, by many moments. First, every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened, with difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then, all must close again, with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a rustling of stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking a step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, dingy-framed toilet-glass, that hangs above her table. Truly! well, indeed! who would have thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on the matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who never goes abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one's eyes another way?

I've been enjoying the way in which the author describes everything...

[Keryl Raist]

Originally Posted by ilovepurple2234

This is absolutely true for me. A lot of the popular stuff I read as a kid are so insubstantial now. I kinda feel betrayed by them now because I loved them back then and those memories are totally spoilt now with the knowledge that I don't like them now.

That's the reason why I won't re-read, re-watch certain things now. I know it would kill the memories.

[temetka]

No book should be banned.

Closed minds should be banned.

I happened to really books like "The Grapes of Wrath", "Catcher in the Rye", "The Great Gatsby" and of course "Lord of the Flies".

Then again I am one of those people who like to read books and articles that are more than 1 page long.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by temetka

No book should be banned.

Closed minds should be banned.

I happened to really books like "The Grapes of Wrath", "Catcher in the Rye", "The Great Gatsby" and of course "Lord of the Flies".

Then again I am one of those people who like to read books and articles that are more than 1 page long.

...and that's more than 140 characters!

[bevdeforges]

Originally Posted by stormdream

HA! I love that Ethan Frome was mentioned. I'd barely gotten through the first paragraph when I thought of all the ways I wanted to destroy that book. My English teacher fawning all over it didn't help. "It's boring," I said.

She looked at me in horror. "This is fine literature."

No wonder I ended up reading zombie novels...

Ah, a kindred spirit. I remember almost nothing about Ethan Frome except how much I hated reading it. Oh, and isn't there something about a sled at the end and everyone dies - or somebody dies - or something like that?

I've gone back and re-read a few of the books we were required to read in high school, and have been pleasantly surprised to find I liked them much more as an adult. (And how much I missed in the first reading!): Of Human Bondage, Moll Flanders, and the Mayor of Casterbridge. But I swear I will never touch Ethan Frome - not with a barge pole. My memories of it are just too negative.

[DMB]

Originally Posted by bevdeforges

Ah, a kindred spirit. I remember almost nothing about Ethan Frome except how much I hated reading it. Oh, and isn't there something about a sled at the end and everyone dies - or somebody dies - or something like that?

I've gone back and re-read a few of the books we were required to read in high school, and have been pleasantly surprised to find I liked them much more as an adult. (And how much I missed in the first reading!): Of Human Bondage, Moll Flanders, and the Mayor of Casterbridge. But I swear I will never touch Ethan Frome - not with a barge pole. My memories of it are just too negative.

You were lucky to get Moll Flanders. It was much too risqué for school children when I was at school. I read it on my own, of course, as well as Roxana, Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year. I rather liked Defoe at that time. I tried Moll Flanders again more recently and found it much less appealing than I did the first time.

[Andrew H.]

I read extensively in German, but I don't think that translations are inherently bad or *necessarily* significantly worse than the original (although, obviously, there is some loss). But, for reasons I don't really understand, translations don't seem to age well. I can read a 19th century work in the original and it never strikes me as being particularly archaic or stilted - but if I read a 19th C translation of the same work, it often strikes me as being stilted and murky, in a way the original isn't. But newer translations - say, Kaufmann's excellent translation of "Faust" - don't seem to have this problem.

Relatedly, there are translations of Shakespeare into modern English available, mostly as study aids. And while I really don't like the idea for various reasons, I have to admit that I usually pick up something I didn't catch in the original - and I've read a lot of Shakespeare. Here's an example of a translation from Macbeth:

As whence the sun 'gins his reflection
Shipwracking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring whence comfort seemed to come
Discomfort swells. Mark, King of Scotland, mark:
No sooner justice had, with valor armed,
Compelled these skipping kerns to trust their heels,
But the Norweyan lord, surveying vantage,
With furbished arms and new supplies of men,
Began a fresh assault.

Becomes

But in the same way that violent storms always come just as spring appears, our success against Macdonwald created new problems for us. Listen to this, King: as soon as we sent those Irish soldiers running for cover, the Norwegian king saw his chance to attack us with fresh troops and shiny weapons.