The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

"What a godsend this would be for His Majesty, who is seeking everywhere for brave fellows to recruit his Musketeers!"

Who doesn't love the swashbuckling tales of the four legendary friends of the French 16th Century? Funny how most people adopt a puzzled expression when one mentions the four main characters in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers.  Despite our usual familiarity with the novels main character most forget that D'Artagnan was only the younger addition to the already seasoned brotherhood of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis; characters that have seeped out of the national identity of France and managed to make their way, in an odd fashion, into the idealistic anachronism of the U.S.

The book itself was a gift some Christmas long ago from my paternal grandmother. This was a particularly exciting gift since, for the previous eighteen or so years I had always had the impression that Grandma Pauline wasn't exactly sure what to get me for Christmas or Birthdays. Usually it was Grandma Jane that would pore over book after book and Lego set after Lego set to find the perfect gift. I don't hold it against Grandma Pauline, of course. Her number of grandchildren was quickly approaching the double digits even then while Grandma Jane had an even three, my sisters and I, and me the only one old enough to appreciate it. But around the same time that I asked Grandpa Harry for a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy I had asked Grandma Pauline for a copy of Dumas. I had no idea what to expect but I definitely did not expect a volume from the Franklin Collection.

In case you aren't in the know, the Franklin Collection is a hoity toity retailer of expensive collectors items; brass Monopoly sets, useless busts of eagles, and decorative shelf-versions of classic Harley Davidson's. Mostly junk...mostly. To my knowledge I had been completely unaware of a line of books and as a result I was astounded with this volume. You may not be able to tell from the photograph above but it is completely bound in sturdy green leather with gilded letters and finely gilded pages. It even contained a number of full color prints of a watercolor series inspired by the novel. Needless to say I was in awe and profoundly appreciative (I hope). But what was greater was that I feel that there was finally something that Grandma Pauline could be excited about getting me for Christmas. An avid reader herself she began committing quite a lot of time finding nice volumes of books I was interested in and in the few years she had left, managed to find fantastic versions of Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Shelley's Frankenstein (which I will surely blog about someday).

As for the story itself, I feel that my experience with The Three Musketeers may, in fact, have been plagued by uninspired translation. I have always had the impression that Dumas was quite a skilled writer and most readers of The Count of Monte Cristo agree but after reading this novel I felt like I had missed a great deal of the wit and excitement that I'm sure characterizes other translations from the French. That said, there is still a great deal to be said for the sense of heroism and camaraderie that characterizes the Musketeers' books (since the three appear in Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragellone, the inspiration for the 1998 film The Man in the Iron Mask). In the end there is a great deal that the novel establishes that has been a staple of re-imaginings of the tale; aspects such as the villainy of Cardinal Richelieu, the youthful arrogance yet lovable heroism of D'Artagnan, and the Musketeers' unfailing loyalty to the king. Despite the fact that aesthetic turds such as The Musketeer still make it to film, many of these elements remain and somehow keep, even us Americans fascinated with visions (albeit altered ones) of French national identity. In many ways (and I may be overstepping, but so be it) these characters serve a similar function as the Round Table knights do for England.
----
Dumas, Alexandre. The Three Musketeers. Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1978.

Blow Up and other stories - Julio Cortazar

"It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing..."

I was introduced to Julio Cortazar in a class I didn't really want to take entitled "Latin American Literature." It wasn't that I necessarily didn't want to take the class since it contained a number of modern Latin American works of literature that I have come to appreciate and laud, but mostly because a schedule conflict kept me from taking the Medieval Language and Literature class (sometimes I feel like I would have decided to be a medievalist much earlier. Drat). I will fess up to the fact that I have only read one story out of this collection but it leads me to a very interesting issue in teaching literature.

The text assigned for the class was Cortazar's story "Blow Up" which is a postmodern foray into the concept of our perception of time as understood through a photograph (really, that's the best I can do to sum it up). This story was one of those that I'm sure we've all encountered where we read it through a few times yet it still doesn't seem to make sense. The ensuing class discussion subsequently revealed an interpretation that I hadn't even considered and probably wouldn't have if not for the professor's suggestions. After class I went back to read the story again and still found that the consensus at which the class had arrived still presented some problems. It was not until recently, ironically after a great deal of experience with the varied presentations of language in Medieval Literature that I have arrived at some explanation for my confusion.

It is a common oversight in English classrooms to ignore the linguistic heritage of a text. This is not always an intentional oversight and is often simply done as a result of time or contextual constraints. Cortazar, obviously, wrote his original text in Spanish but since Latin American Lit. was essentially an English class we worked exclusively with translations. I find it somewhat interesting that despite our professor being mainly teacher of Spanish classes (she taught this class since she was still connected with the rather broad Department of Literature, Journalism, and Modern Languages) she had a tendency to present the texts read for the class as authoritative and unfortunately ignored the idea that despite the editor's best efforts there is no one-to-one transmission of a text from a different language and the class, especially in light of our postmodern course canon, may have suffered from this oversight.

As a medievalist I must be constantly aware of the effects of translation upon our reading of the text. I've read multiple translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and each offers a very different reading. Thinking in terms of texts which I will be teaching this coming fall I am quite aware of the undergraduate students difference in response to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf (or 'Heaneywulf' as it is known in some medieval circles) and other more academic translations. As an undergraduate I read Heaney's version and must admit that despite its anachronism, Heaney's translation does do significantly more to excite the literary tastes of the medieval novice.

To bring the discussion back to Cortazar I find that, in retrospect, the language and imagery that I may have seen as lofty artistic flourishes or intentional ambiguities may actually be confusions caused by the shift from Spanish to English rather than deficiencies in my own understanding. In either case Cortazar's short fiction is challengingly abstract but I feel that, had my classroom context been cognizant of translation issues I may have felt a bit less belittled by the text. Hopefully such a mindset will help in my own classrooms.
---
Cortazar, Julio. Blow Up and Other Stories. Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: Pantheon, 1967.