Notes on quotes

There are sentences we read that immediately become a part of us forever. They strike a deep chord and stay there. Taken out of context, they evolve inside us, and polished by our needs, turn into something slightly different. One of mine comes from Proust. The context is a shared student flat in Dowanside road, just off Byres Road (what a name! they tried to change it to Victoria but the residents refused. It is a rather good antidote to the pretension that can grow up around Universities, especially ones as old and beautiful (if you like old things) as Glasgow.).

I remember Cath MacClean from Prestwick reading a passage to us that she found too beautiful to keep to herself – from the untranslatable “à l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” (Within a Budding Grove or In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower...). It was breathtakingly beautiful, I think we all understood how beautiful the writing was without understanding really what he was getting at, which is as good a way as any of discovering aesthetics. My memory is of Cath enthusiastically reading a very beautiful passage from Proust which came to a satisfactory end with the words “les après-midis bleus de ses fenêtres” (“the blue afternoons of its windows”). In my mind’s eye, I can see the full-stop on the page, Cath’s finger on it, her eyes looking up at us in wonder, and then the book slowly closing with a sigh.

As the University was not in session in the summer, all my memories of it are in the other three seasons, and very dull, almost damp. So I suppose those few words encapsulated everything I imagined about France, a place where there was warmth, lots of bright sunshine, blue sky visible through the windows, and people who could live in cork-lined rooms and write for the pleasure of the words, write as a way of worshipping language, live completely for the activity of the mind, totally unconnected to anything involving physical work. If human experience was a spectrum then this was the opposite end from soul-destroying manual labour.

Today I looked up that quote and was horrified to find it ended with a semi-colon; “un tout petit (salon), vide, que commençait déjà à faire rêver l’après-midi bleu de ses fenêtres;”. It was unlikely that Cath would have stopped reading with such an emphatic feeling of satisfactory completion at a semi-colon; I was also horrified to realise that I had no recollection whatsoever of the preceding passage. And so my memory was part fiction.
Another Proust quote I live with is “J’avais un rendez-vous urgent avec moi-même” – ‘I had an urgent appointment with myself’.

Apron strings. The idea of a “mummy’s boy” has always annoyed me, as a jealous female sibling, d’abord, then as a girlfriend - they say that mother-in-law/daughter-in-law animosity is genetically programmed, for the survival of the species, which does not make it any easier to bear. I hate the idea of a man being “attached” to his mother. There is something unpleasant about the very words sycophantic infantilism. Maybe this is because one of my biggest worries, as the mother of a male teeneager, is “will he be able to stand on his own two feet?”. So imagine my horror as a translator when I read that Proust wanted to translate Ruskin, but his English wasn’t up to it, so his mother translated the text literally for him so that he could “write Ruskin in excellent French”. Yikes! Talk about silver spoon feeding!!

Tipping point.

Looking for info on Byres road I came across a passage from Alasdair Gray

Who did the council fight?"

"It split in two and fought itself."

"That's suicide!"

"No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."

"I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich."

"How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?"

"My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly.

"You have a son?"

"Not yet."

Lanark, p.411

One of my Shakespeare ones is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

Nancy Huston did not win the Orange prize for fiction, but was shortlisted. As a translator, I feel compelled to react to the following delicious comment:

"First published as Lignes de Faille, the novel sold over 400,000 copies in France, was then translated by the Canadian-born author herself with a level of creativity and confidence simply not achievable by the average translator."

Well, I wanted to react, but words fail me...