Grand tour

Tobias Smollett's novels have been on my list of things to get around to reading, so when I found this edition of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker in a local used bookstore I took the plunge. An epistolary novel told "in different voices," it was Smollett's last novel, and the editor of this volume, Howard Mumford Jones, considers it his masterpiece. It concerns a middle-aged Welsh landowner, Matthew Bramble, who makes a slow circuit of England and Scotland leading in tow his disagreeable, husband-hunting sister Tabitha, their wide-eyed niece and nephew, and a few servants. Bramble is a hypochondriac bachelor who hates crowds and finds much to grumble about in English social life, architecture, and hygiene, but he's ultimately soft-hearted and unpretentious. As he and the other members of the party send their individual accounts back home, we're treated to contrasting views of the delights or inconveniences of Bath, London, and other parts, until they all cross the border into Scotland, where Bramble's health miraculously takes a turn for the better. There are mishaps and romantic entanglements along the way, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a serious of improbable revelations and three weddings. Oh, and a character named Humphry Clinker does in fact appear, eventually.

There's a good deal of genial low comedy throughout the book, including some fairly vicious pranks and at least four separate incidents of accidental indecent exposure. (This was, after all, the period that produced Rowlandson's Exhibition Stare Case.) Much verbal fun is had with the inability of Tabitha to spell English correctly ("Don't forget to have the gate shit every evening before dark") and with the lack of sophistication of her maid Winifred Jenkins (who twists "metamorphos'd" into "matthewmurphy'd" and says of the Highlanders, observantly, that "they speak Velch, but the vords are different"). It's not all drollery, however; Smollett has interesting things to say about husbandry and political economy, and his affection for his native Scotland is evident.

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The original Everyman's Library was founded in 1906 by J. M. Dent with a declared goal (which it eventually surpassed) of publishing affordable editions of more than 1,000 titles in various fields, though English literature would predominate. The Arts & Crafts-influenced design of the earliest volumes, featuring ornate floral decorations on the spine and endpapers, is too busy for my taste (and the books have tended to fall apart over time); the modernist redesign in 1935, featuring the dust-jacket emblem by Eric Ravillious shown above, is more to my liking. By the 1970s additional redesigns had bled out the visual appeal of the books, and the advent of Penguin Classics and other paperback lines made them obsolete. The rights to the hardcover series were ultimately acquired by Random House, which relaunched it in a completely different format and with a narrower range of titles. The current Everyman's Library is a commendable undertaking, but one can't magine it publishing, as J. M. Dent did, eight separate volumes of Hakluyt. There is a comprehensive history of the Dent Everyman's Library (including a link to a list of titles) at Collecting Everyman's Library: 1906-1982.

Reading Spanish: By Way of an Essay

I first studied Spanish in junior high school. There were, as I remember, four languages you could select: French, Spanish, German, and Latin, the last of which was chosen by only a few top students. Spanish was assumed to be the easiest, and I had some slight connection to the language because my father had been stationed in Panama during the Second World War, but I don't think I could do more than count from one to ten when I began. (I was green enough that when I first came to class I thought there was someone there with a last name that sounded like "Hustead," that is, usted.) I learned the lessons along with the other students — I still remember bits and pieces of those first-year dialogues — and I got good grades, but as soon as I had fulfilled the requirements for a diploma I gave it up, not anticipating that it would be of any use in my future — which at that point was basically what I thought about all of my subjects, other than perhaps biology. I remember memorizing the names and most famous works of a few Spanish authors, but I don't remember reading anything literary except for bits of Pío Baroja's Las inquietudes de Shanti Andía and an anecdote by Ciro Alegría called "Hueso y pellejo" (Skin and Bones).

When I got to college I took French for a while, since that corresponded more to the writers I was reading then, then I dropped out for a couple of years and went to live in Manhattan, reading and book-buying on my own. Though the Latin American literary "boom" was already old news at the time, the major writers were still around and American publishers had discovered that their work was marketable. I don't remember exactly what got me started on contemporary Latin American literature. It may have been a friend's copy of an anthology entitled Doors and Mirrors: Fiction and Poetry from Spanish America, or it may have been hearing good things about One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was already interested by late 1976, which is when I bought a copy of García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch when it appeared in translation in the US. At some point I started, very haltingly, trying to work through some of the literature in the original. I think I began with a volume of stories that had an English version on the facing page, and in spite of my previous exposure it took me a while to develop a useful reading knowledge of Spanish. Eventually I went back to college and focused on the language and its contemporary literature, and wrote a bachelor's thesis on Cortázar that I would probably wince to read now.

I've used the language in various ways since then, but above all for the simple joy of reading it. My understanding of the grammar is solid, but there remain persistent gaps in my vocabulary depending on the author and the subject matter. If I want to read something badly enough I will read it without a crib, but I don't object to having a translation at hand for occasional reference (and out of curiosity — i.e., How would you translate that phrase?)

Unless the material is more didactic than literary, my usual practice involves reading books in Spanish twice. The first reading allows me to decode anything I can't immediately understand, to look up unfamiliar words, etc., as well as to rush to the end to find out how the story comes out. The second reading, begun as soon as I finish the first, is entirely different in character. Having deciphered the author's words and gotten a sense of the structure of the book, I can simply indulge in the pleasure of understanding the text and appreciating the author's style and inventiveness — all of the things, in effect, that can't be readily summarized or transferred to another form.

Which leads, of course, to the question of whether those things can be translated. To that, I'd have to say that the answer is yes and no. There are very good translators around; people like Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman have done wonders with twentieth-century Hispanic literature, and glancing back and forth between versions I'm impressed by how well most things do in fact carry over. There will always be some issues; in García Márquez's brilliant short novel Del amor y otros demonios, for example, the same word — rabia — means both "rabies" and "fury," and there is no easy way in English to convey that potentially significant point. (In the novel, an adolescent girl is bitten by a rabid dog, but the nature of her real affliction is very much for the reader to determine.)

But to me one of the advantages of reading a book in another language is that it forces me to work harder. I can't let my concentration wander and skip a few pages. I have to read, page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word, and engage in the miraculous process of moving meaning from mind to mind by way of text.