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February 04, 2009

THE WEDNESDAY READ: TOM STOPPARD AT B&N REVIEW

Tom Stoppard is interviewed at the Barnes & Noble Review, where he discusses - among other things - his adaptations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard.

JM: You've said about your own plays that the motivating impulse in composition is the next line -- to find out what it is, to be surprised by it, to take what you've done to the next step. In a translation, you know what the next line is. So while there's the consolation of Chekhov having done the heavy lifting, so to speak, is there a fundamental difference for you in the experience of writing when you're working on an adaptation?

TS: That's a good point. You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration then is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character -- and economical as well, actually. And in that task perhaps it's actually quite helpful to know what the comeback is going to be, what the next line is going to be. Because you're dealing in rhythms, really. When I'm looking at a speech, parts of it I find immediately -- I think half the time I get there in one. But as to the rest, it seems as if you don't get it in one, you feel you never get it -- you're into your seventh or eighth try, and then you're into your ninth, which you discover to your surprise is the same as your first. It's a strangely maddening process, but essentially an enjoyable one for me, because it's a pleasant challenge each time. It goes wrong if you work too many hours at a stretch. What happens is that some kind of reverb sets in between your natural sense of the language and your translator's brain-load, and you lose touch with some fundamental level of English discourse. Quite often, one might go to bed thinking, "That bit's OK, probably," and the next day it reads much more stilted in some way, because you'd been made un-grounded by the loop between the literal and your own sense of the language.

Posted at 10:34 AM in Interviews |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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