The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

Author:Helen DeWitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811230087
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2022-08-16T00:00:01+00:00

18.

Mais, quoique je veuille vous parler de la province pendant deux cents pages, je n’aurai pas la barbarie de vous faire subir la longueur et les ménagement savants d’un dialogue de province.

Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir*

I am guilty of this barbarity. To recount what followed is precisely to inflict on the reader the tedious machinations of a dialogue de province. A hotshot publisher or agent in New York does not feel like a provincial; the tedium gives the game away. But one must be rational. If the object is not merely to entertain, but to instruct, those in need of instruction will feel the benefit. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

* I will not say that this is untranslatable; perhaps my English is at fault. It easily escapes four professional translators, whose attempts I offer below. The English reader is too often allowed to believe that little is lost if French is left behind at school, or, indeed, never studied at all.

But though I want to talk to you about the provinces for two hundred pages, I lack the requisite barbarity to make you undergo the long-windedness and circumlocutions of a provincial dialogue. Horace B. Samuel, Heraklion Press, 1913

But albeit I mean to talk to you of provincial life for two hundred pages, I shall not be so barbarous as to inflict upon you the tedium and all the clever turns of a provincial dialogue. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Century Edition, 1926

However, though I fully intend to talk to you about the provinces for a couple of hundred pages, I haven’t the heart to subject you to the tedium and astute manoeuvring of a provincial conversation. Roger Gard, Penguin Classics, 2002

But though I propose to tell you about provincial life for some hundreds of pages, I will not barbarously submit you to the prolixity, the wise heavy-footedness of country conversation. Burton Raffel, Modern Library, 2003

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