Karoline > Recent Status Updates

Somewhat accidentally reading five first-person spiritual narratives at the same time, written across a millennium and a half

Which is just fascinating. Augustine to Julian to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson and the Psalms behind them all . . . watching the baton pass from hand to hand, altering and transforming and turning corners and picking up new passengers is amazing.

Immensely enjoying this translation and the spacious, poetic formatting! For readers whose primary interest is spiritual and literary, I don't think there's a better choice to start with!

Just wish books 10-12 had been included. Even though I get the reasoning for omitting them.

A verse novel is a hard sell but oh my word I LOVED this. A Charlotte Bronte plot with Elizabeth Gaskell interests told as a prolonged, interior, confessional reflection reminiscent of Augustine, wrestling with modernity, social reform, vocation, men and women's work, and love and ending - with a nod to Dante - at daybreak in Italy before a vision of the New Jerusalem. Love my girl EBB.

Chapter 4. ❤️ Beautiful in English but I can never pass it without the Latin too. All the superlatives . . . summe, optime, potentissime, omnipotentissime, misericordissime et iustissime, secretissime et praesentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime, stabilis et incomprehensibilis, immutabilis mutans omnia . . .

Decided to try this translation of the first nine books with its intentionally poetic layout - which certainly honors the prominence of the Psalms in Augustine's prayer-narrative. I think I'm going to like this . . . .

somehow this poem manages to be intensely interior and very wide-ranging at the same time!

Why hello St. John Rivers - I mean Romney Leigh! Remarkably strong Jane Eyre parallels here in Book II. Now I'm trying to think of other Victorian heroines who make a conscious choice AGAINST the zealous social reformer and commit to less tangible service - love or poetry. Gaskell's North and South presents an interesting variation on this pattern.

The Victorian novel nobody ever thinks about because it's written in verse!

Sentences, my friends, sentences. If you're writing a book, please know your way around sentences. Mystified by the clumsiness here. Surely an attentive editor should have addressed this??

The music of it, and the shock of it, and the rigorous rightness all at the same time. . . nobody is quite like Hopkins. Once the lines and the images get into your ear, they stay. I don't think I've walked outside once in 25 years without "seeing in Hopkins."

HERE for arcane arguments about whether or not the word "protagonist" can be appropriately used in the plural. #teamdryden

"They are afraid of nothing. Together, they would brave Satan and all his legions."

Quite the final judgment! It's the altogether more ordinary and conventional second generation that actually stands up to the powers of hell.

Hard to imagine anybody has ever turned Heathcliff into a romantic hero. Emily Bronte makes him as savage, repellent, malignant and generally depraved as possible.

Emily Bronte: I'm going to write a book that says - Don't sentimentalize the rural country. Don't sentimentalize soul consuming passion. Don't sentimentalize mysterious brooding heroes. And don't sentimentalize impulsive marriages. Questions?

Um, so a mysterious stranger has shown up amidst a riot of portents and I'm worried. Don't succumb to dark, mysterious, seaborne strangers with a limp Emma!!!! More than one god was tossed out of heaven and at least one of them limps!

Also, I see you Henry V.

Also, this book is thoroughly charming and a very short, quick read.

It's played for laughs but surely it CAN'T BE GOOD that Our Heroine is rudely deprived of her copy of Paradise Lost before she's out of hell and the company of Satan's infernal council!

feeding my fascination with the Drake Passage

Ok how many mythologies can an author summon in 30 pages? because we've already met Milton's Satan, a Roman ghost, a Greek goddess, a Wodehousian aunt, a church built on a Celtic burial mound, a not-quite-unmagical neighborhood named after St. Crispian ("we band of brothers?") and a magician-vicar who commands the powers of Prospero's Ariel and reads aloud the Romantic poets. Waiting to see where all of this goes....

I've been doing that thing where I refuse to read a popular book because Kindle keeps shoving it in my face. But Cindy Rollins said it's good fun, and that's my cue. I concede.

And I'm already feeling reassured because it's page 3 and the heroine is in the attic and finds a copy of Milton and HELLO PARADISE LOST.

Any contemporary author who will invoke Milton almost on page one has my immediate attention.

Tolkien:

"The knights of renown and noble ladies all for the love of that lord had longing at heart, but nevertheless, the more lightly of laughter they spoke. Many were joyless who jested for his gentle sake."

Raffel:

"Gracious knights and lovely women grieving for love of Gawain, but laughing and drinking his name, smiling and joking while their hearts sank gray and cold." (lol)

BUT IS IT FUNNY?

I don't know if it's Tolkien's reading of this poem, or his translation choice, but it all sounds so serious. Except - is it really supposed to be serious when the nights are kicking around the Green Knight's head under the table???

Burton Raffel's translation leans into the comedy, and it makes more sense to me this way.

"Never read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so is not to eat up your interior silence."

Honestly, the older I get, the more wisdom I see in this.

Reading this with my girls for our first term's Shakespeare play and they LOVE it. My 4th grader still isn't a fluent reader of chapter books, but she reads Shakespeare aloud like it's easy. This phenomenon baffles me. 😂🤷‍♀️

I did it.

Now I have to take it all in. This book was an EXPERIENCE. The kind that hovers over your entire summer and colors all your memories.

Marius: Cosette's dad was at the barricade, so weird. In other news, some unknown man saved my life. Who could it possibly be??? And why on earth is Cosette's dad acting so weird about this mystery man???

For a lawyer, Marius has a lot of trouble getting logically from point A to point B. Where's Javert when you need him?

SO MUCH DANTE