Ever since reading T. S. Eliot’s snooty line in college making fun of people who read foreign literature in a “good translation,” I’ve made an effort to read books in the original language whenever possible. That’s a tough row to hoe, since my interests are pretty random and I may end up reading a novel in a language I haven’t got a clue about.
Take Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go (1951), please. I’m not about to study Japanese only to struggle for years and ruin the experience. Same thing with Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013), which I’m reading now. I can handle perestroika and glasnost, especially since I remember them, but that’s about it. Actually, what I remember most is Mikhail Gorbachev and his granddaughter doing a Pizza Hut commercial, but that’s another story.
I can report some success. I’ve read Cervantes, Dante, and Martin Buber in the original. I’ve read the Bible not in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic but in Spanish, and the psalms in Italian. I like a challenge but not a blowout. Right now, I’m reading Madame Bovary in French. I had to slog through nearly sixty pages of literary critique to get to page one. It took forever, but now I am stepped in it so deep that “returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Something like that.
But this is a post about synchronicity as much as literature (cf. Synchronicity). The link is Flaubert’s impetuous, self‑absorbed, but sympathetic diva, Emma Bovary. She responds eagerly when offered access to a personal library of “the best authors” like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Walter Scott. As in Eliot’s critique, she has no intention of reading any of them — not even in a good translation — but she likes the idea of being cultured. That’s the key to her character: the idea of culture, not the reality.
Flaubert lists another author, Jacques Delille, described in a footnote as a lyric poet and translator of Virgil’s Georgics. Ever the footnote sleuth, I went on a hunt for his translation. That brought me back to Latin, which I had taken in college along with a semester of Greek. The Latin lasted; the Greek didn’t. That was mainly because Greek class was at 8:00 a.m., and it was my senior year. You get the picture.
Here’s the first synchronicity shoe to drop. Just as I was digging into the dirt of the vineyard in Book Two (I skipped Book One on plowing), my brother sent me a PDF image of the Georgics on his WhatsApp account. “WhatsApp with that?” I wondered. He has never done anything like that before, never studied Latin, and — as far as I can tell — has no interest in Emma. I was flabbergasted. I have decided to drink wine every day until I figure out what this means. There must be a Riesling.
The second shoe to fall also involves our ill‑fated protagonist. The small, local stagecoach — une petite voiture publique — that Emma takes to and from her trysts in Rouen is called the Hirondelle. Hirondelle in French means “swallow.” The hotel I stayed at in La Falda, Argentina was also named the Hirondelle. It had storyboards in the lobby recounting its history, which is connected to the resort up the hill named Hotel Eden (see Lost in Argentina). The displays included pictures of swallows.
I understand that swallows symbolize speed, grace, and freedom, and thus have definite meaning for Emma as she tries to escape what she perceives as the drudgery of her life in the sticks. Drudgery for her means dealing with the reality that life is not a romantic novel. In modern parlance, we would say that life isn’t Hollywood. Far from it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out for madame as she pursues her double life, going from a shabby public coach to a rented room with grimy sheets.
I’m not sure what the swallows mean for me, except maybe as an encouragement to keep doing what I am doing. I spend a lot of time writing, but writing is a byproduct of something deeper. That something deeper could be the challenge of aging gracefully. The kicker is that aging gracefully includes aging clumsily; that is, tripping through life but learning to integrate all of that into your soul.
This is where the hirondelle makes the most sense. It’s about flying ever higher and freer. It should be recognized, though, that Virgil was all about the sweat and toil of the soil. That is, you can’t reach a swallow’s heights without first digging in the vineyard. That’s a lesson Emma never learned.
Of course, I could be talking through my hat. Some would say through something else. Time will tell. But for right now, I’ve got Georgics on my mind.
Images: Spiros Kariofillis, Hannah Wernecke, Roberta Sant’Anna, Getty Images. For T.S. Eliot, see “The Sacred Wood” (1920): “Tacuit et fecit.” For more, click on Amazon top right or go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below or the Contact tab above.
