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Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw. Readaloud. Another Shaw that I had read when I was 12ish and remembered very little. I mean it's not surprising that I didn't notice how immature Cleopatra is in the play, I mean, I was like, 12. I'm not sure why Shaw chose to make his Cleopatra as immature as he did -- though he does make it clear that it's not just her age (she's 16), it's part of her character -- and I can see how he could come up with that, extrapolating back from the source material to Antony and Cleopatra. I think this suffers from comparison with Saint Joan, or even Pygmalion: Joan and Eliza Doolittle are Great Women of their sorts, if flawed, while Cleopatra is just a girl who has been Born Great. Caesar is interesting, though, as is the choice to make his relationship with Cleopatra not at all sexual. Apollodorus turned out to be the surprise fun swashbuckling character of the show!
Too Like the Lightning/Trop Semblable à l'éclair, Ada Palmer (tr. Michelle Charrier). Enjoying close reading this translation (and reading the original first for reference) -- though doing so means I notice the few things the proofreader missed, which is understandable, this is a hard book to proofread! (To make Eureka's messages look like text-speak, they are missing not only capital letters but also accent marks, except, oddly, that "déjà" is always accented.) Have got pronouns sorted out, though I should pay more attention to when the translator chooses to use "tu" vs "vous". Also I've learned, among other vocabulary, that the verb "irrigue" can refer to blood circulation, which makes the phrase "la manière dont le sang du monde l'irrigue tout entier" less creepy that it came across to me at first.
Too Like the Lightning/Trop Semblable à l'éclair, Ada Palmer (tr. Michelle Charrier). Enjoying close reading this translation (and reading the original first for reference) -- though doing so means I notice the few things the proofreader missed, which is understandable, this is a hard book to proofread! (To make Eureka's messages look like text-speak, they are missing not only capital letters but also accent marks, except, oddly, that "déjà" is always accented.) Have got pronouns sorted out, though I should pay more attention to when the translator chooses to use "tu" vs "vous". Also I've learned, among other vocabulary, that the verb "irrigue" can refer to blood circulation, which makes the phrase "la manière dont le sang du monde l'irrigue tout entier" less creepy that it came across to me at first.