how many fucks?

3 - i think
how many goddamns? not sure... anyone?
how many for chrissakes? not sure.. anyone?
how many if you want to know the truths? not sure... anyone?

"Kozusko, Matthew" <mkozusko@ursinus.edu> wrote:

Jim: "I think we need to speak of what about Holden is being communicated by
_Catcher_, then talk about what can be communicated via translation and
what's lost."

The translation debate always manages to bustle with smart thinking and keen
observation, but it usually manages also to forget that there are cultural
obstacles involved as well as language-specific ones. While many relatively
affluent Americans and western Europeans today have a cultural background
that enables them to connect with Holden's emotional odyssey, a reader's
general familiarty with "American culture" doesn't mean Holden's attitude
toward and view of the world is accesible in translation.

The story Salinger tells may address more wide-reaching cultural
issues--things perhaps more worthy of that ridiculous lable,
"universal"--but that's not what makes the book so lovely. It's his
attitude toward *his* world that sets the story apart, and *his* world is a
very small one indeed. No matter how adept the translation, you can't
translate late 1930s-Manhattan, for instance, or cantankerous ideologues at
prep schools, or piano bars, or hunting caps, or David Copperfield-style
"crap." How many angry young readers today really know what David
Copperfield crap is? I sure don't.

Fantastic Onion recommendation. And a pretty sound "deconstruction," for
all its tongue-filled cheekiness!

Matt

--
mkozusko@ursinus.edu
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