One of the most popular and presumably accessible, as well as one of the greatest of the medieval Provencal romances, this is sometimes referred to as the French "Romeo and Juliet". It is also one of the shortest works on the entire list, so I wonder if I should not try reading it in (old) French sometime. Of course it is on the internet. Here are the first four lines:
"Qui vauroit bons vers oir
del deport du viel antif
de deus biax enfans petis,
Nicholete et Aucassins..."
I can probably make out enough of it to follow the story. Whether I would get it enough to get a much better sense of it as a work of literature, I don't know.
I read the relatively celebrated Andrew Lang translation in the 1957 Modern Library edition of Medieval Romances, which surprisingly does not include anything else that made the IWE list, though it does contain classics like Tristan and Iseult and Sir Gawain and the Green Night. Medieval Romances are evidently underrepresented on the program. I like romances and the ideals of the Middle Ages and old French literature enough that I enjoyed the tale and the nicely translated poetic parts well enough, though I was still more distracted than I would like to be and could not achieve the level of absorption in the book that I like to. Aucassin and Nicolette are, to my perception, a strange pair of lovers. Aucassin comes off as rather whiny and petulant, as opposed to say, angry and fierce, during the parts where his love is denied, refusing even to defend his father's castle from attack, though at other times he demonstrates bravery and martial skill more appropriate to his station. Nicolette, a Saracen who was captured as an infant and sold to a viscount is plucky and keeps her eye on the prize of marrying Aucassin, though I did not get a sense of her having a great romantic passion in the Shakepearean or Villonian sense. Apparently some experts have considered that Aucassin and Nicolette might be a parody of the romantic genre, and there are some decidedly odd episodes in it such as the king being in childbed and the battle fought with hunks of cheese for weapons.
I wish that perhaps I had read this when I was younger and more passionate and more innocent of the world of literature. It probably would have made a stronger impression on me.
I noted on the threadbare Wikipedia page for this book that Walter Pater in the Renaissance and Mortimer Adler somewhere in his writings took up this story. Since I have both of these at home I meant to take them up today and see what they had to say, but of course it slipped my mind because there were multiple things going on at my house today, and now I am not there. I am so scatterbrained nowadays it is comical. I need to try to finish this tonight or who knows how long it will take me.
It is now the next day, as I did not finish the report last night. And I forgot to look at the books again! My excuse is that I am I in the 2-week dog days period where my wife, who is a teacher, has gone back to work but the children haven't gone back to school yet so I have all of them all day. Also there were carpenters in the house today framing walls, so there were a lot of impingements on my intellectual life.
This is the (a?) week where everyone has been riled up politically and morally over Nazis, or wannabe Nazis and the "alt-right", which terms some have declared interchangeable. Of course I have a lot of thoughts about this, which seem to be more coherent when I am not trying to write them down, or maybe I am less tired earlier in the day. These kinds of topics are endlessly fascinating, I suspect because most people, apart from Donald Trump and a small number of others like him, are very attuned to the appearance in the world of people who may hate them, and there has been a considerable amount of hatred expressed in one form or another over our wonderful internet during the past week. Much commentary and denunciation have been passed on the Nazis/alt-righters themselves which I don't have much to add to. I don't deny that they are an embarrassment. I am not convinced how much of a threat they are. Supposedly they constitute a main leg of Trump's support, though there is some dispute about how much of a force they really are. From such footage as I saw there looked to me to be two distinct groups: the tattooed musclebound biker crowd who at least in my lifetime have always been pretty openly racist and offensive and don't really care if everybody knows it. I don't think there is much danger of these guys overthrowing the establishment; and then there were the second, even weaker-looking group, the uncertain, even dorky-looking guys in the torch parade, who it is pretty evident are the products of a socialization and education gone badly wrong and are grasping at any kind of identity that feels vaguely masculine. My guess is that to some extent they perceive that their minority enemies are considered adequately masculine, and that they derive some portion of this strength from it being more socially acceptable, if not encouraged, for them to be aggressively antagonistic towards whites. Whether there are more people turning out like this than people realize, or previously cared about, I don't know, but I suspect that the answer is yes. I also have to wonder if the people who hate them with the most vehemence are subconsciously delighted that the cretins have come out in the open so that they can stomp on them and destroy them in the epic good vs evil confrontation that they have long craved. But now I am going off on a tangent. I had jotted down a few short thoughts this afternoon when I wasn't tired that I thought were reasonable and pertinent. I am going to write those here, hopefully without embellishment:
There are a lot of people of the internet eager to direct my thinking on this issue. Evidently there is only one way to think about it, and perhaps there is, but unfortunately my school training such as it was placed a very heavy emphasis on the idea that it is unlikely there is only one way to think about anything, so these uniform exhortations are not as effective with me as I might like them to be for my own sake.
I saw dozens of reminders that being silent in the face of such evil is basically akin to being complicit in it, that if we ever wondered what we would have done during the Nazi occupation, etc, that what we are doing now corresponds, and so on. Even if we do nothing else about it, I suppose we must at least have it on the record that we have denounced it though since in this instance about 50-100 million people are shouting denunciations in full-throated fury, if Nazis do somehow manage to take over the country, I am assured it will not be because too many people were silent. Also while it may be necessary to suggest that we are currently reliving the Nazi era in real time in order to prevent it from actually happening (though I am skeptical), we in fact are not, not yet. If anything, there are as many calls from the left for stripping people of rights, employment, money that are actually coming from seats of actual power as there are from the right.
Kim Jong Un. Worse or better person than Thomas Jefferson? Robert E Lee? Trump? He certainly doesn't elicit as much passionate fury from the left as any of these guys. I get that he is foreign and not white and most people agree that he is generally bad, while the wickedness of these other guys needs to be taught, perhaps forcefully, to half the U.S. population. Still, if we are to have no tolerance for slavery, murder, homophobia, etc...
I have to admit I increasingly find the left to be unbearably sanctimonious on their pet issues. As much of a debacle as Trump is, I really dread the left getting back into power anytime soon after this, since now there is undoubtedly going to be extra pressure and motivation to "punish" people perceived as being likely Trump supporters, which would be ugly. I don't see a Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman type figure on the horizon.
So far the places that have notably taken down confederate statues or have had mobs take them down that I have seen are two big cities with mostly black populations (Baltimore and New Orleans), three cities that are the home of major (i.e. wealthy, largely upper middle class, global-minded) universities (Gainesville, Charlottesville, and Durham, and in the two latter of these the statues did not come down without conflict). In my old haunt of Annapolis they are apparently finally going to remove the statue of Roger B Taney from the state house grounds--there were people talking about doing this when I lived there 25 years ago--but this is in the capital of what is now one of the most reliable Democrat states in the country and one that was not actually part of the Confederacy. In short, places whose spiritual connection to the Old South has grown more tenuous with the passage of time than other old southern towns.
I am planning to do a post on Robert E Lee on the other blog one of these days. I am going to get a computer when school starts so I can write at home. I'm going to put it on a credit card, which I hate doing, but what has it been, two or three years. I still think of myself as a writer in my approach to everything, and I feel left out of everything when I am not trying to do something in that line.
Challenge
1 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (movie)...............................................9,740
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban (movie)............................................2,636
3. Imitation of Life (movie-1959).................................................................................664
4. The Train (movie-1965)...........................................................................................485
5. Chip & Dan Heath--Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.......422
6. Charles Frazier--Nightwoods....................................................................................340
7. Marjorie Bowen--Mary Queen of Scots....................................................................139
8. Theodor Fontane--Effi Briest......................................................................................43
9. Threepenny Opera (movie-1931)...............................................................................32
10. Wilderness (movie--2008)........................................................................................27
11. Andrew Lang--Tales of Troy......................................................................................9
12. Lynne Tillman--Someday This Will be Funny............................................................6
13. Bloom's Critical Modern Views: Tennessee Williams................................................1
14. David Ruffin--"I'm So Glad I Fell For You/I Pray Everyday You Won't Regret Loving Me (record)..............................................................................................................................0
15. E. Jane Burns--Courtly Love Undressed.....................................................................0
16. Jay Ruud--Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature.........................................................0
17. The Violin: A Research and Information Guide..........................................................0
18. Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore (ed. Sherman)..................0
Qualifying Round
#18 Storytelling over #15 Burns
#17 The Violin over #16 Ruud
Incredibly, all of these books except for Courtly Love Undressed have made it into a library somewhere in my state.
Round of 16
#18 Storytelling over #1 Fantastic Beasts
This is at least the 2nd appearance of Fantastic Beasts in the tournament.
#17 The Violin over #2 Harry Potter
#3 Imitation of Life over #14 Ruffin
#13 Bloom over #4 The Train
#12 Tillman over #5 Heath
#11 Lang over #6 Frazier
Lang's book is rarer, and I am intrigued by Frazier a little, but another effort by the once-appreciated translator of Aucassin and Nicolette gets the nod here.
#7 Bowen over #10 Wilderness
#8 Fontane over #9 Threepenny Opera
Theodor Fontane, apparently a quite celebrated author of whom I had never heard, wins the battle of the German productions.
Final 8
#18 Storytelling over #3 Imitation of Life
What a draw for Storytelling.
#17 The Violin over #7 Bowen
The same for The Violin, which beats Bowen because no libraries saw fit to pick up her book.
#8 Fontane over #13 Bloom
Effi Briest is not found outside of academic libraries, though it has been published in English as part of the Penguin classic series.
#12 Tillman over #11 Lang
Final 4
#8 Fontane over #18 Storytelling
#12 Tillman over #17 The Violin
Championship
#8 Fontane over #12 Tillman
"Theodor Fontane (1819-1898)...regarded by many as the most important 19th century German-language realist writer." Given the comparatively paltry extent of my reading in, and even basic knowledge of, German literature, this was a pretty easy choice, though I'll have to scare up a copy of the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment