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King of Shadows, Susan Cooper. This book is still good! Timeslip fantasy of the most self-indulgent kind: teenage boy performing at the reconstructed Globe Theatre is sent 400 years back in time to play Puck to Shakespeare's Oberon. There is a darker edge, though; Nat is processing grief and trauma, which is compounded by the experience of being jerked around in time. This book was so obviously written for 13-year-old me, it's ridiculous (well, maybe not the trauma aspects) -- I assumed it must have been an influence on the classical music time travel story that I wrote when I was 13, but the timing doesn't work out.
I spent a while leafing through old journals looking for my review of it, but it seems that all I wrote was "I absolutely [hart]ed it." I feel like younger Alison could have had more consideration for her older self when writing down reactions to books, but no -- she wrote multiple pages ranting about a bad book that wasn't even interestingly bad, and just this sentence. Hopefully older Alison is doing better? Maybe?
Jonathan Strange et Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke, translated into French by Isabelle Delord-Philippe. This is a curiosity -- a French translation of a very English novel. I bought it in 2017 when Schoenhof's Foreign Books was closing its brick-and-mortar location, and tried reading it then, but only made it through about the first third. I'm trying again, and have just gotten to "Illusions-Perdues" ("Lost-Hope"). Susanna Clarke is still funny when translated into French, even if it's not quite the same voice, and I'm learning dubiously useful vocabulary like "guéridon" and "occire". The poetry doesn't really hold up, but that's hard to do.
The translator occasionally makes her presence known by footnotes -- not as good as Clarke's -- mostlyfilling in English history or references that the French reader won't get -- though there are a couple places where she makes her love of Victor Hugo clear -- *obviously* if you're going to translate this book you should choose someone who loves Victor Hugo. (If I lose patience I might just skip to the Waterloo section and see what the translator has to say.) It's interesting to see which things *don't* get translated: most of the time "gentleman" is left in English to make it clear this is the ineffably English notion of gentlemanhood, but sometimes it's translated as "gentilhomme". On the other hand, anytime anyone is dropping French words or sentences into the conversation, those are not only italicized but marked with an asterisk to make this clear.
I spent a while leafing through old journals looking for my review of it, but it seems that all I wrote was "I absolutely [hart]ed it." I feel like younger Alison could have had more consideration for her older self when writing down reactions to books, but no -- she wrote multiple pages ranting about a bad book that wasn't even interestingly bad, and just this sentence. Hopefully older Alison is doing better? Maybe?
Jonathan Strange et Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke, translated into French by Isabelle Delord-Philippe. This is a curiosity -- a French translation of a very English novel. I bought it in 2017 when Schoenhof's Foreign Books was closing its brick-and-mortar location, and tried reading it then, but only made it through about the first third. I'm trying again, and have just gotten to "Illusions-Perdues" ("Lost-Hope"). Susanna Clarke is still funny when translated into French, even if it's not quite the same voice, and I'm learning dubiously useful vocabulary like "guéridon" and "occire". The poetry doesn't really hold up, but that's hard to do.
The translator occasionally makes her presence known by footnotes -- not as good as Clarke's -- mostlyfilling in English history or references that the French reader won't get -- though there are a couple places where she makes her love of Victor Hugo clear -- *obviously* if you're going to translate this book you should choose someone who loves Victor Hugo. (If I lose patience I might just skip to the Waterloo section and see what the translator has to say.) It's interesting to see which things *don't* get translated: most of the time "gentleman" is left in English to make it clear this is the ineffably English notion of gentlemanhood, but sometimes it's translated as "gentilhomme". On the other hand, anytime anyone is dropping French words or sentences into the conversation, those are not only italicized but marked with an asterisk to make this clear.