Italy's Great Historical Novel
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Loading... - Nessa Smith
- 11 Oct 2022
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Afew years ago, reading the introduction to an English-language version of Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” I found the translator, Norman Denny, confessing that he had made a number of cuts in the French text. Certain of them, he said, were for sense. But others, he was not ashamed to say, were due to his feeling that the book was just too long-winded. The great Frenchman couldn’t shut up. He told us things twice, three times. Or he said them too many times the first time. “It is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun,” Denny noted, with wonder. Even after the trims, his version is still more than twelve hundred pages long.
This fullness, overfullness, was endemic to the genre to which “Les Misérables” belonged, the nineteenth-century historical novel, a form that was immensely popular in its day. It recorded sweeping changes: kingdoms rose and fell, peoples were enslaved or freed. For great events, great language was needed. But, from what I can tell, even readers of that time occasionally grew tired of the grandiloquence, and when they did they were not afraid to skip. Likewise their children and grandchildren. A friend of mine told me that once, when he was talking to a group of Russian-literature professors, he confided to them that he and his American colleagues often had difficulty with the many highly detailed accounts of battles in “War and Peace.” Oh, the Russians answered, we skip those parts! So boring! You should skip them, too, they said.
Americans are unlikely to take that advice. Modernism taught us not to. A work of literature was what it was. You didn’t toss out the parts you didn’t like. The assumption was that the author had already pared his novel or poem down to its bare bones, every word of which was essential to the true picture. Ironically, this way of thinking may have emboldened some people to avoid the big books altogether. In recent years, some celebrated writers have come clean about which fat masterpieces they have never read. Jonathan Franzen told a journalist that he had never got past page 50 of “Moby-Dick.” Others have said that they have not read “Vanity Fair,” or “David Copperfield,” and didn’t intend to. I have never heard a modern novelist say that he has not read Joyce’s “Ulysses”—there are limits—but I’ll bet that such a one is lurking out there, waiting to strike. Read More...
