Re: Universitatlity

I think some of this is a bit exaggerated -- you're right, Cecilia,
about Penn Station and the Carosel music. But how important are those
specific details to the book? Aren't those specifics that, even the day
Catcher was published, only New Yorkers would be able to understand?
Someone living in Albany who'd never visited NYC, for example, wouldn't
have any more idea about these referents than someone living in India
and reading it in Hindi -- now or 50 years ago. How much of the book's
meaning is really dependent upon the specifics of these details? I
think the cliche NYC (and honestly, the city is a cliche of itself half
the time) that most people around the world know from film and lit is
probably good enough to give them a picture of Holden's environment.

For that matter, how important is the David Copperfield reference? How
many US readers have slogged through David Copperfield, or had the day
Catcher was published. The reference to Dickens (a Brit author, by the
way, from a previous century -- so could Holden have understood him?)
just tells us that Holden isn't going to give us a highly detailed
biography beginning at or near his birth and leading up to the present.
He's just going to tell us about the events that led up to his being
where he was (which I suspect was some kind of sanitorium or hospital in
CA somewhere).

And for his voice -- Holden's voice is conveyed more by the way he puts
words together than by his vocabulary. I just randomly opened the book
and saw a sentence using the word "rat" to describe a person, and "crap"
to describe a game using dice. That's the closest I could find to
jargon just randomly flipping around the book, and both those terms are
still current in modern English. I'm sure there are others...but I
suspect they're few and far between.

I appreciate the Rilke example, but it seems to me that translating
-from- German -to- English has to be more difficult than translating
-from- English to German or Spanish or French or pretty much any other
western language. English is pretty straightforward subject/verb/object
in most of our sentences, and Catcher is especially so. There aren't
too many constructions in English that aren't really translatable in
these other languages, while there are quite a few constructions in
German (and some in Spanish) that aren't really translatable in
English. The problem just isn't reciprocal.

While I disagree with Marcus that "existentialism" is "universal" --
it's largely a western disease -- I think he's more to the point. Yeah,
that one class of NYC kids didn't get into Holden. But quite a few all
across the world still do. I think they're connecting with Holden, on
some level, the same way many US readers do. And, of course, probably
in some ways we don't too. They can't picture the Museum of Natural
History the way you can, but they can appreciate a teenage Holden
wandering through a big city with a wad of cash and picking up hookers,
drinking in bars, and maybe even asking a cab driver where the ducks go
in the winter...

Jim
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Received on Sat Dec 6 18:56:58 2003