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ALL ANGLES

rasterize, rock, Rothko, rhyme, Rohmer

I have four hours left of reading to finally finish Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" when I unsettled myself over the possibility that the years—yes, two years!—I spent trying to place the novel on my "done" list were wasted over a poorer translation of it.


Aaron Taylor Johnson as Vronsky and Alicia Vikander as Kitty in "Anna Karenina" (2012) by Joe Wright.

So I quickly scoured forums where readers asked each other what the best English version of Tolstoy's masterpiece is. The preferences were mixed.

Oprah Winfrey apparently played a role in the revived popular interest in the book when she featured it on her book club, choosing Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation because of its accessibility. It does not mean theirs were of higher quality. Janet Malcolm on the New York Review of Books wrote that Pevear and Volokhonsky built an industry of taking any Russian material and "putting it into flat, awkward English."

An earlier work by Maude and Maude had the next best rep, as many older readers found their translation more readable. The "Anna Karenina" they had in high school was usually Maude's, released in 1912. Other runners-up were those of Marian Schwartz and Rosamund Bartlett.

Now what Malcolm hails as the finest of the lot also happens to be the earliest: Constance Garnett's 1901 release.
"[Garnett] has a fine sense of English, and, especially, the sort of English that appears in British fiction of the realist period, which makes her ideal for translating the Russian masterpieces. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were constantly reading and learning from Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and others."
This put me at peace. I've been reading Garnett's all along, thank God.

Maybe next time, when I've finally put down "Anna Karenina," we'll talk about the best film version.


A quaint new set of videos on YouTube channel Hildegard von Blingin'—a play on the name of German saint, abbess and musician Hildegard von Bingen or Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century—is just the type of spark to rouse this blog from a five-year hibernation.
 

Von Blingin's the most laugh-out-loud hilarious and most literate channel I've seen in a while. A medieval style cover of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" with a video of rewritten lyrics and static marginalia illustrations popped up on my feed enlivened my soul.

Let it do nice things to yours:





YouTube's algorithms threw it my way most likely after relating stuff I've been watching recently on ancient Rome and explainers on monk's tonsures and homonculus or the phenomenon of portraying the supposedly cute Baby Jesus as an old man in medieval paintings.

And the comments on the videos are similarly winners. Here's one on the switched line from "Pumped Up Kicks" from

He's got a rolled cigarette, hanging out his mouth he's a cowboy kid.
to 
He hath a jaunty cap, perched upon his head, he is a longbowman.



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About Me

ART AS A PEDESTRIAN

Hi, I'm Camille, and I'm a real journalist from Manila. Without claiming expertise on the subjects, I try to write about my artistic and cultural encounters on this 17-year-old spot.

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      • Medieval-style covers of pop songs
      • Best English translation of Anna Karenina?

Whut!

We will have but one option: We will have to adapt. The future will present itself with a ruthlessness yet unknown.
~Michelangelo Antonioni, filmmaker

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ...
~first lines of Charles Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
~Matthew Arnold, cultural critic

The only way to really change society is through culture ... it's not through force, it's not through armies, it's not through politics (but) through freedom.
~Dony McManus, artist

You are a fine person, Mr. Baggins ... but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!
~Gandalf in The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

"I find television very educating. Every time someone turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
~Groucho Marx, actor

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.
~Logan P. Smith, essayist

God is in the details.
~Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect

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