joan wyndham
So Joan Wyndham has died: "aspiring actress, heroic drinker, jitterbugger and Benzedrine-fuelled bohemian," and teenaged keeper of a wonderful wartime diary, which I loved loved loved when it was published in the mid-eighties. (There were two books: Love Lessons and Love is Blue.) Here's a taste (though there is more, more - I remember the bit where the maid left, because of the bombs, and her mother had no idea how to make hot chocolate, so Joan just melted a bar - but couldn't add anything to it because there was nothing - and it made them sick when they tried to drink it):
"Went to Confession at the Servite - Father Carato, again, three Hail Marys. While I was kneeling in front of the altar saying my penance, I suddenly thought of G kissing me and a kind of delicious stabbing pain ran through my stomach, so sharp and strong that I winced."
7 comments:
Hi Ms B. I don't know her work but I like the sound of her.
Actually I wanted to comment on your previous post 'Lost in the Original' but you don't have comments enabled - That's so not like you. Have you been hanging out with that reprobate Periodic Englishman (the periodic being operative)?
(*** I think this phrase is really worth remembering: "a kind of hovering over magnetic territory, always seeking the centre of meaning.")
I enjoyed this post very much. It never occurred to me before that words themselves could be obfuscation. If, as Szirtes found, the translator must identify meaning (often without being privy to authorial intent) and reconstruct a poem from the available lexicon - this combination potentially produces a brand new piece of work. If there is no equivalent metaphor in the new language and the translator inserts an appropriate substitute, then he/she might well claim creative input. Does it really mean that integrity is the only indicator of whether work is a 'translation' or 'version'?
It seems important that the translator maintains clarity on what he/she set out to do in the first place (as Szirtes clearly has). The reader has a right to expect a sincere effort on the part of the translator to be faithful to the original work. I know translation is largely a labour of love but you'd think there'd be some incentive to be considered reliable.
TSP, thanks for the heads-up, I've enabled comments - don't know what happened there!
See the original post for my reply.
I think you'd love Joan Wyndham, but she's a bit posh.
What is an "heroic drinker"? I've never understood this particular literary device.
Joan Wyndham sounds fabulous, most intriguing and although her name/work was new to me,I shall delve further..
What a glossy life.
Thankyou for your posting.
I knew Joan Wyndham and thought she was one of the great women of my generation, always funny, wry, loving wife but you just knew she'd get her kit off for a handsome geezer, fitted into the swingin 60's perfectly, we all fancied her husband, and loved her daughter Camilla, great family
poetry in translation, as a translator of poems life goes in very slow motion, one has to be faikful to the original, but then it loses its fluency, try that from the German! If I could take my translations and re-do them without the original work alongside, I would get a better poem, I think, but I am not allowed to do that, and so one gets a stilted correct version. And then I hate it when people try to rhyme the thing, try doing that with Finnish into English, or Arabic. But, we must have translations. Read 'I saw Ramallah' by Bhargouti, and weep for Palestine, in this fine translation.
Miss Pamela, hi there and thanks for commenting! I think that's charming and am envious. She sounds such fun. I reread "Love Lessons" after writing this post and liked it tremendously. I hadn't read it since I was not much older than the age Joan was in the book, so I read it differently - and not without a trace of nostalgia - but really, it is a very delightful book.
Please do stop by again!
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