"I read The Open Air this summer in a 1907 fine-paper Everyman edition bought for a fiver, which enhanced the magical experience of following Jefferies as he walks and explores and effectively chats to himself."
Adam Thorpe
Adam Thorpe's first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992, and he has written five other novels, two collections of stories and five books of poetry. His translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is destined to become the definitive English translation of our time.
William Faulkner: Wild Palms
I found this neglected masterwork in an early Penguin edition. This enhanced the sensual pleasure of reading Faulkner's prose with its long, coiling sentences, descriptive punch - and occasional grammatical incoherence (he often wrote when drunk, admitting to keeping his whiskey "always... within reach"). The novel is constructed from two unconnected stories (separated as novellas in some editions) told in alternate chapters: a passionate yet destructive love affair between a quiet married doctor and a reckless artist in the Deep South of the 1930s, and the picaresque rescue of a woman by a convict during the Mississippi flood of 1927. It is technically bold in form and breathtaking in its lyrical power: "a volume of moving water toppling forward, its crest frothed and shredded like fangs." I scribbled down quotes in my notebook, but they fail to add up to much out of context, only gathering their charge in the current of the whole. The reader's expectation that the two stories will eventually meet up, plot-wise, is never fulfilled, leaving you space to link them thematically and poetically - extremely satisfying.
Giovanni Verga (Translated by D.H. Lawrence): Little Novels of Sicily
I thought about including these tough, country stories in my top ten English translations for the Guardian, but they would have undermined my point that 'accuracy is the gold standard' even more than the eventual inclusion of Ezra Pound. Lawrence's Italian was not wonderful, he relied too much on the dictionary, and he worked very fast, but his fascination for the great Sicilian's work produced a small masterpiece. Lawrence's Verga could be nobody else's, filled with a fluent energy as it evokes (not without humour) a pre-modern society trapped not only by its own unflinching traditions in the age of the railway, but by the harsh cruelties of the landscape: 'And the woman looked at the work in hand, at the little stony desolate field, where the earth was white and cracked, because there had been no rain for so long, the water coming all in mist, the mist that rots the seed; so that when the time came to hoe the young corn it was like the devil's beard...' This is a scrabble for survival, in which the donkeys do the work and only the greediest and most ruthless win - until they in turn fall to penury on a whim of chance or weather.
Richard Jefferies: The Open Air
Jefferies is my favourite naturalist. An eccentric contemporary of Thomas Hardy, he was born on a farm in the hamlet of Coate, in what is now the Swindon edgelands. As it happens, the very fields and ancient woods he so cherished are about to vanish under a vast housing development that no one wants except the developers - unless their imminent appeal fails. I read The Open Air this summer in a 1907 fine-paper Everyman edition bought for a fiver, which enhanced the magical experience of following Jefferies as he walks and explores and effectively chats to himself. At moments anticipating Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique, he discusses topics ranging from rooftops and their niche wildlife (starlings, swallows, lichen) to the broad sweeps of his native downland: 'The furze-bushes are lined with thistledown, blown there by a breeze now still; it is glossy in the sunbeams, and the yellow hawkweeds cluster beneath.' His descriptions have the beady-eyed singularity of a pre-Raphaelite painting, but without the Victorian romance: just a passionate love for the natural world and its obscurest corners that remains as fresh as this morning, if accompanied more and more by sorrow for what is already disfigured or lost.
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Adam Thorpe's new translation of Madame Bovary is published by Vintage Classics.
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Monday, 7 November, 2011
In What I'm reading
- Dag Solstad
- Adam Thorpe
- Sarah Hall
- Yvvette Edwards
- Marika Cobbold
- Aatish Taseer
- Julie Myerson
- Annalena McAfee
- Meaghan Delahunt
- Colin Thubron
- Sunjeev Sahota
- Polly Samson
- Lydia Davis
- Rebecca Hunt
- Emma Donoghue
- Adam O'Riordan
- Robert McCrum
- John Simpson
- D. J. Taylor
- Thomas Trofimuk
- Robin Robertson
- The Editors
- Mary-Kay Wilmers
- Robert Service
- Penelope Lively
- Daniel Metcalfe
- Anna Richards
- Ross Raisin
- Charles Elton
- Melvyn Bragg
- Anita Shreve
- Steven Galloway
- Tom Hodgkinson
- Damon Galgut
- James Meek
- David Leavitt
- Diana Athill
- Gerald Martin
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