Non-fiction, Reviews

‘All Hands On Deck,’ by Will Sofrin

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…being aloft in that storm made me appreciate all I was learning. We were on only day four of our passage, had traveled only one-tenth of the distance to our destination, and I had already seen more than I could have imagined or planned for. There was no off switch, no time-out, no opportunity to stop and take a break. That moment forever changed my understanding of how to handle adversity. The only way out was through.

Like many other people of taste, I have a great fondness for the 2003 move, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe. I find sailing fascinating (though I have almost no experience with it), and have enjoyed reading both the Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey/Matchurin classic novel series. The movie was a box-office disappointment, but has acquired a well-deserved popularity in the ensuing years.

But one thing it never occurred to me to wonder about was where they got the ship that served as the HMS Surprise in the movie. Turns out it was originally called the Rose (after the historical HMS Rose of the British Navy), and had had a lackluster career as a museum ship and tourist attraction on the US East Coast. When the movie studio decided to buy it, it was docked at Newport, Rhode Island. That was where Will Sofrin, a somewhat rudderless young boat bum, joined the crew. He and a motley, coed group of sailors took the ship (which turned out to be poorly built, badly maintained, and leaky) through the Panama Canal to San Diego, surviving a hurricane, a dismasting, and various interpersonal conflicts along the way. The final result is the book, All Hands On Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World.

I always enjoy a good sea story, and Sofrin does an excellent job telling the tale of this voyage. He works in a lot of background about how the British Navy operated in the Age of Sail, as well as more detail than most of us will probably ever need about sailing techniques and technical terms. This information will be of great benefit to fans of Patrick O’Brian’s novels.

The human drama that went on among the crew, particularly when it comes to sexual relations between members of a mixed-sex crew, sometimes offered more information than I wanted. But the story as a whole was human and relatable, and the lessons the author learned were exemplary. He also writes pretty well.

I enjoyed reading All Hands On Deck, and recommend it, especially for O’Brian fans.

Music

Sunday Singing: None Other Lamb

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Today’s hymn begins our approach to Easter, which is the last Sunday of the month. “None Other Lamb” was written by the marvelous English poet Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894). She didn’t write it as a hymn but as a poetic response to Revelation 5.

“And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’” (Revelation 5:2 ESV)

1 None other Lamb, none other name,
none other hope in heav’n or earth or sea,
none other hiding place from guilt and shame,
none beside thee!

2 My faith burns low, my hope burns low;
only my heart’s desire cries out in me
by the deep thunder of its want and woe,
cries out to thee.

3 Lord, thou art Life, though I be dead;
love’s fire thou art, however cold I be:
nor heav’n have I, nor place to lay my head,
nor home, but thee.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry, Publishing, Uncategorized

We Are the Best Obv. and Some Links

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I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and have not finished it, but I wanted to share some thoughts today. Blogging is designed for that, updates along the way.

The point almost from the beginning is that this engineer from 19th century America is an intellectual paragon among sixth century rubes. Their superstition and gullibility make them victims of every charlatan (usually of a religious or magical flavor) who comes into town. Hank the Yankee sees through all of them and will deliver them from all bondage, if he can devise a way to do it. I’m near the end of the book, and though luck has saved his neck many times, his progressive prowess has prepared him for that salvation just as often.

His progressive acumen is as good as magic, because Hank’s been able to create a telephone and telegraph network, school system, railroads, various consumer goods, and many kinds of explosives. He intends to create a thriving democracy in Camelot, if not all of England, and I’m wondering if that’s where Twain will leave it–19th century America triumphing overall. We see a little tension in the story here and there, because Hank is not brilliant and has been successful largely by force of plot and luck. So, I’ve wondered if the satire will turn back on him, and the story will end with everything crashing around him. Will the 19th century man be shown to be the greatest product of society, the pinnacle of the evolutionary process, the smartest and the best of all, or will his Social Darwinian hubris trip him up? I may find out later today.

What can I share with you today?

First, let me apologize for missing the Sunday Singing post last week. Circumstances disrupted by routine and by Sunday afternoon, I decided not to post it. I’ll get one up tomorrow, if I don’t fall a roof in the morning.

Boycotts: The SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, has the U.S. Army and defense contractors as sponsors and participants for years, but this year, helping Israel defend itself against the neighboring monsters is too much for some.

Publishing: A new publishing house formed by three experienced executives intends to forego advances and offer “authors a high percentage of a book’s profits—a model used by some other types of hybrid publishers.”

Food: What is corned beef? It’s an innovation of Irish-Americans who lived near Jewish Americans and took a shine to this kind of meat in Jewish delis.

Poetry: “Trash” by Lowell Jaeger.
“… in the old days there was no such thing as trash”

And slightly related to trash, this post on road kill and opossums.

Photo: Bomber gas station, Milwaukie, Oregon. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Uncategorized

Avalsdnes Viking Farm

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I was looking for another kind of video for tonight. Back when the Kristin Lavransdatter film was shot, I read somewhere that they were preserving the sets they used for Kristin’s father’s farm in the Gudbrandsdal, to have as a tourist attraction. But I can’t seem to find any mention of it, so it must have either never happened, or it failed to thrive.

Instead, I found this relatively new video, about the Viking farm at Avaldsnes. This is the place where I attended the Viking festival 2 years ago. It’s very familiar to me now, and brings back good memories.

Some of you might even be interested in visiting yourselves.

I’m still proud of making that walk twice a day, at my age. Not bad for a fat American. (Confession: I cheated and wore modern shoes.)

Reading, Uncategorized

Kristin Lavransdatter clip

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I think the clip above is not an official trailer for the 1995 Norwegian film, “Kristin Lavransdatter,” directed by Liv Ullman. It’s something somebody put together themselves. But I think it’s nicely done, and it explicates the plot pretty well. I wasn’t over the moon about the film, but this clip pleases me.

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‘Kristin Lavransdatter: The Crown,’ by Sigrid Undset

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And it had been awkward and strange for them to sit together in full view of everyone; they had had little to talk about because they had shared so many secrets. A slight fear began to stir inside her—faint and dim, but always present—that perhaps, in some way, it might be difficult for them when they were finally married, because they had been too close to each other in the beginning and then had been separated for far too long.

I’ve now finished the first book of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, The Crown, in Tina Nunnally’s translation. In spite of some criticisms I’ve expressed about the translation, I have to state for the record that I found the book extremely moving.

The story of Kristin Lavransdatter is pretty well known, and I’ve certainly described it here before. Kristin lives in Norway’s beautiful Gudbrandsdal valley. She is the daughter of a highborn man who, due to political misfortunes, has lost his prospects, and is now a big man in a small community. But he’s highly respected, and deserves it. He adores his daughters, especially his oldest, Kristin, who is very beautiful and whom he tends to spoil. He has betrothed her to a suitable young man, decent but somewhat dull.

Kristin loves her father and means well, but she’s headstrong and doesn’t understand the power she has over men. When she gets in a situation that ends in a young man’s death, her parents send her to spend a year in a nunnery, until the gossip dies down. There she meets the dashing Erlend Nikolausson, who is a bona fide knight, and very handsome. But he has a bad reputation, having had an affair – and fathered two children – with a married woman from whom he is now estranged. The two of them fall passionately in love, and vow to marry. Kristin sets out – through defiance and manipulation – to get her father to break her betrothal and give her to Erlend instead.

Here’s the great conflict of the book. Kristin’s father is a wise and caring man, and he senses immediately that Erlend, for all his glamor, is utterly lacking in character. He knows that if he gives Kristin to this man, her heart will be broken down the line. But Kristin’s willfulness – her fatal flaw – will defeat him in the end, to her own sorrow. That, however, is a tale for the subsequent books.

I have read this book as a young man, as a middle-aged man, and now as an old man. Like all great books, it speaks differently with each reading. This time out, I was impressed by the author’s understanding of character – especially of sin. (Frankly, it stung a bit.) There are people in the book who are known to be sinners and recognize themselves as such, but the “good” people are sinners too. They carry the seeds of their destruction inside them. Kristin means well, but she’s immature and spoiled, and heedless of her power over men. Erlend is gallant in theory – a knight tested in battle – but in his private affairs he’s a sneak and a coward. Even Kristin’s father, though a man of great character, hasn’t the sternness of heart he needs to protect Kristin from herself (though he seems to be in a no-win situation).

Another thing I remarked this time out was the book’s rich descriptions. Sigrid Undset had a lifelong fascination with botany. She names the trees of the forest and the flowers of the field as they come into the picture, and that enriches our imaginations, even if we can’t picture them precisely.

The medieval sexual morality of The Crown must be a puzzle to contemporary readers. No doubt many of them wonder what all the fuss is about. But I suspect that even they can’t help being compelled by the strong characters and their very human conflicts.

The Crown is a tremendous book.

Reviews

Amazon Prime film review: ‘Marlowe’

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I caught the 2022 film, “Marlowe” on Amazon Prime. Anything related to Philip Marlowe always intrigues me, so I watched it in spite of the poor reviews it’s gotten. I liked it in many ways, but somehow it fell apart at the end.

There seem to be two varieties of Philip Marlowe in the cinematic world. Usually he’s portrayed as a strong, tall man, young or no older than middle age. But 1975 brought us “Farewell, My Lovely,” featuring an aging Robert Mitchum, who was so perfect for the role that he made it work (there was even a sequel, “The Big Sleep,” where the whole scenario got bizarrely transplanted to London. But once again, Mitchum pulled it off).

“Old Marlowe” is back, after a fashion, in Marlowe, based not on a Chandler novel, but on a 2014 pastiche called The Black-Eyed Blonde, which I understand to have been based on an outline (or a note or something) from Chandler himself. Liam Neeson dons the trench coat and fedora, playing the role with a world-weary slump. Traces of his Irish accent edge through, and we’re told that he fought in an Irish regiment during World War I. (Which is, I think, new information.) The film is set in 1930, and the costumes and sets are pretty good.

Marlowe, as one expects, gets a visit in his office from a beautiful, wealthy blonde, Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger). She is married, but her concern is with her lover, Nico Peterson (Francois Arnault), who has disappeared. Marlowe learns with little trouble that Nico is officially dead, run over by a car outside the swanky Corbata Club. But Clare insists that she recently saw Nico alive in Tijuana. Complications arise in the form of Clare’s mother, the aging actress Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange. Her character is blatantly based on Gloria Swanson). Drug smuggling and Hollywood studio politics also show up, and civic corruption is revealed.

Liam Neeson is always fun to watch, even when he looks tired. The script was erudite – too erudite, it seemed to me. Raymond Chandler could rock a classical allusion with the best of them, but he knew better than to put quotations in everybody’s mouths.

But my main problem with the film was that the plot kind of went to pieces at the end. A new Maguffin appears out of the blue, and then we get swept up in a lot of references to Nazism that haven’t been set up in the story.

Nevertheless, I can’t deny I enjoyed watching “Marlowe,” most of the way through. Cautions for language, adult themes, and (of course) violence.

Reading

Reading report 2: ‘Kristin Lavransdatter’ (Hubris alert!)

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I proceed with reading Tina Nunnally’s translation of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. It’s a very long work, but I’m not going to read the whole trilogy at once. After I’ve finished the current (first) volume, I’ll turn to other things for a while, getting back into my review schedule.

The thing that’s surprised me most, so far, is a subjective response of my own that will probably make me seem pretty arrogant. I believe I could have done a better job on the translation.

This is ridiculous on the face of it – Nunnally is a successful, established literary translator. I’m a low-paid screenplay translator with one large book under my belt, Viking Legacy. And VL has hardly made many waves in the publishing world.

Nevertheless, the conviction has grown on me as I read. I don’t like Tina Nunnally’s approach.

There’s an old proverb I like to quote, Italian or French in origin, I believe – “A translation is like a wife. If she is faithful, she’s probably not beautiful. And if she’s beautiful, she’s probably not faithful.”

Nunnally is a faithful translator.

She seems to be aiming at precise fidelity to the text, as in these sentences: “There is still so much between us, more than if a naked sword had been laid between you and me. Tell me, will you have affection for me after this night is over?”

That’s precisely faithful. But “laid between us” would sing better, and “feel affection for me” is an awkward construction. “Care for me,” or even “like me” would be more natural. I’d have translated it something like one of those.

A work of literature, especially a masterpiece like KL, is more than a series of bald statements. Considerations of pace and tone need to be taken into account. To borrow a term from biblical translating (without taking sides on the biblical issue), I’m an advocate of dynamic equivalence.

It’s good that an uncut version of KL is now available. But I think a more satisfying job could have been done by a more sensitive translator.

I’m available (cough, cough).

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry

How We Conceive of Conversion and Pushing Against a Classic Separation

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I didn’t make any progress on The Road this week. (Perhaps I should write about it before I finish, make two posts.) I’ve been reading other books too, which is new for me. Last year, I bought a few books to challenge myself and have picked up more since then, so now I’m reading four at once sorta kinda. Saying it that way doesn’t sound right, because I’m not reading four books together. I just have books I intend to but have yet to finish.

One of those books is Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It describes the recent history of several ideas in Christianity, such as spiritual awakening, conversion, sentimentality, and materiality. They may not be ideas emphasized by our church traditions, but I’m sure I’ll find some challenging thoughts as I keep reading.

In talking about the concept of conversion, she notes a reader of Pride and Prejudice who remarked that Mr. Collins doesn’t appear to be a Christian at all. How could he be a minister? He could be a minister, she says, because the state church made political appointments to these positions. This was the context of the Great Awakening. She writes that evangelicals emphasize reaching the lost among those in the world or of other faiths, so there’s a bit of irony in the development of evangelicalism from a society that claimed to be Christian on the whole. How we imagine the conversion experience shapes our faith and influences how we teach others, especially children, to think about their commitment to Christ.

That’s the kind of thing Prior gets into in that book. I’ll write about it again another time.

Christian Nationalism: Hunter Baker reviews a couple books on the Christian Nationalism debate for Modern Age. “For Wolfe, the answer is to become a transgressor against the boundaries of church and state that today appear to be so firmly drawn by the liberal regime. . . . You can’t fight the something of secular progressivism with the nothing of a disarmed faith that lives in the confining pen made for it by modernity, so set forth a vision of the nation as one that is unashamed to call itself and its people Christian.”

Poetry: Five poems from Dorothy Sayers

I sit within My Father’s house, with changeless face to see
The shames and sins that turned away My Father’s face from Me;
Be not amazed for all these things, I bore them long ago
That am from everlasting God, and was and shall be so.

Humanities: The good people at The New Criterion had abandoned the annual Modern Language Association conference, saying, “we felt that, like Macbeth, we had ‘supped full with horrors’ and resolved to leave those annual exhibitions of narcissistic nullity to others.” But this year, they looked back again and found a curiosity or two.

Scripture: Luther on “the chief point of all Scripture” being the certainty of God’s promises.

Photo: Norwest Bank terra cotta detail, Owatonna, Minnesota, 1988. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Reading report: ‘Kristin Lavransdatter,’ by Sigrid Undset

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“It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”

“And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and unimportant. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”

Saint Sunniva won’t be familiar to non-Norwegian readers, and not even to most Norwegians if they’re the American kind. She is a legendary saint supposed to have been martyred by Jarl Haakon (whom you’ll remember from The Year of the Warrior and Death’s Doors). She fled into a cave with her companions to avoid falling into Haakon’s hands, and they all died there. Later King Olaf Trygvesson found their uncorrupted bodies and declared their sainthood. I never used the legend in my own books.

I shared with you a special deal on Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy in the Tina Nunnally translation last month, and now I’ve taken up (re-)reading it myself. I’ve read the trilogy before – twice in the previous English translation and once in the original Norwegian. I should probably read that again, but my second-hand copy’s in very poor condition. And I wanted to try Nunnally – I’ve heard good things about her work.

I admit I approached the book with some degree of reluctance. It’s a fine example of the great Scandinavian tradition of depressing literature (though with the ameliorating influence of Christian faith, which most of the other modern stuff lacks). Kristin is a vivid and fascinating character, mostly respectable by most people’s standards, and always honorable in her own eyes. Yet Undset’s penetrating artistic eye looks deeply into her essential selfishness, which is gradually revealed to Kristin herself through a lifetime of living with consequences.

I’ve often said that Kristin Lavransdatter is an inverted romance novel. The beautiful, willful young girl defies her parents to run off with the dashing knight. But where the romance heroine lives happily ever after, Kristin has to live with her choices. All her chickens come home to roost, one after the other. And yet, the promise of God’s grace never leaves her.

What do I think of Tina Nunnally’s translation? It’s good. I can never read a Norwegian translation (my own included) anymore without quibbling, of course. I sometimes think this one a little too literal, just a little clunky. But I probably need to remove the beam from my own eye before I say that.

The first English translation, done in the 1920s by Charles Archer and J. S. Scott, has been criticized as artificially mannered, featuring deliberate English archaisms that don’t correspond to Undset’s idiomatic Norwegian. I understand the concern, though I can’t help sympathizing a little with Archer and Scott. One of the pleasures, for me, of working with Norwegian is the fact that its diction does have a kind of medieval quality from an English-speaker’s point of view. If I ask, “What means this word?” in English, that’s Renaissance Faire talk, but it’s perfectly grammatical in Norwegian. Getting used to such sentence construction has heavily influenced the way I write my Viking novels. When I think out a sentence in Norwegian, I sound medieval.

But the old translation had other sins, too, I am informed. Certain passages were bowdlerized, and are now restored in this version. (No doubt another, politically correct, bowdlerization is on its way soon, courtesy of Our Betters. So read this one while we enjoy a season of free speech.)

It’s pointless to criticize Kristin Lavransdatter as a work of art. It’s above my pay grade, and I’ve written much about it before. But I recommend it without reservation.