 a ship of the line
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May. 6th, 2008 @ 06:07 am 
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This description in Les Mis was beautiful, and as I read it, I thought about ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sovay's recent entries, and also about teenybuffalo, who's helping to organize "Sail into the Sunset 2008" (more information in her entry here) and who loves the sea.
"A vessel of the line is composed at once of the heaviest and lightest materials, because it has to contend simultaneously with the three forms of matter, the solid, the liquid, and the fluid. She has eleven iron claws to grasp the rock at the bottom of the sea, and more wings and feelers than a butterfly to catch the breezes in the sky. Her breath is expelled through her hundred and twenty guns as through enormous trumpets, and proudly answers the thunderbolt. The ocean strives to lead it astray in the frightful similarity of its billows, but the ship has a compass, its soul, always counseling it and always pointing toward the north. On dark nights, the lantern takes the place of the stars. So, to oppose the wind, it has ropes and canvas; against the water its timbers; against the rock its iron, copper, and lead; against the darkness, light; against immensity, a needle."
That's from the Signet Classics edition of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo ("new unabridged translation by Lee Fabnestock and Norman MacAfee, based on the classic C. E. Wilbour translation," so they say, and Signet is an imprint of the American Library which is somehow part of Penguin, and this edition was published in 1987), pp 369-70.I feel...:  cheerful I hear...: birdsong |
I've never seen it or read it... But my friend, Lily has an uncle who played
Jean Val John (sp?) on Broadway for years.Dave and my brother went to go see it in high school and apparently he was in that show! Pretty amusing.
Wow, how cool about Lily's uncle! Yes, Jean Valjean (as it happens to be spelled) is a great protagonist. I have never seen the movie or the musical or anything, so it's all completely new to me. I love it.
Oooh.... I like this translation a lot, especially as someone with a sailboat/water fixation. It runs in the family, I swear! Both my father and my uncle love sailboats. My father had my brother and I out on my family's tiny sunfish from about the age of 4. There's even a family story that says that his great grandparents sailed themselves over to Canada on their fishing boat when they decided to immigrate.
Anyway, somewhere in the basement I have my unabridged translation of Les Mis, which I love greatly, but was unfinished when I last moved away from college, and I am unsure in which box it ended up. I really must find it, as my love for Victor Hugo knows no bounds. It's incredibly long, yes, but his descriptions have a way of pulling you into the time period like few other authors can.
That's an excellent story about your father's great-grandparents. Wouldn't it be fun to chase that up (if there were worlds enough and time) and find out how it all happened? I bet there'd be some great songs associated with that journey and their adventures.
Triton clarinet :-) Music and the sea!
And I agree with you about the way the descriptions pull you in--it's like stepping into a time machine and actually being there.
I just finished his chapters on the Battle of Waterloo--now I feel like I've lived through it!
I like this a lot. The description is beautiful.
Hey, it's me Sarah/myhappythoughts. This is my other journal, I just started using it again for other stuff besides happy list updates. I hadn't used it in years!
Hee, glad to see you under any name. If you're posting as ismellu, I'll friend you there, too :-)
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| From: | wicapis |
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May 6th, 2008 01:49 pm (UTC) |
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a great morning read
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but the ship has a compass
until the ship sailed into The Bermuda Triangle! heehee. Pandemonium struck all aboard!
making you laugh--thats all.
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| From: | asakiyume |
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May 6th, 2008 04:30 pm (UTC) |
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Re: a great morning read
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:D
and then... the ship appears later... totally empty!!
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| From: | duccio |
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May 6th, 2008 02:55 pm (UTC) |
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Les Miserables was, when I read it in the late 70's, my favorite book of all time (except the ending I found depressing). I still have my Penguin copy. I read it just after War and Peace, and Brothers Karamazov (which is something incredible). Sometime before that I had read Notre Dame de Paris (the Hunchback), and sometime earlier, and interspersed between all of these, maybe half of of Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series, of which Nana was my favorite. (I never read L'OEuvre, or La Débâcle of the series though, which I suspect I would also have liked very much.) I seem to have delighted mostly in the French. Another favorite is Guy de Maupassant, whose huge number of short stories have come to me in collections of ten here, fifteen there... I'm still looking for ones I have never read. I'm widely read in "classics", but hardly ever read new fiction. For a while I was in a reading group, and we read all of James Joyce except for Finnegans Wake, out loud to each other, passing the book around in our circle, taking short stretches of reading, each of us, and over several months. That was really fun.
I'm reading it in remembrance of my friend who died last year--he loved it, and I'm really, really loving it. And you've mentioned two of my other favorites--War and Peace and the Brothers K (I can't choose between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; I love them both).
I don't know why I never tried Victor Hugo before, but he's truly amazing. The story is great, yes, but beyond that, every single sentence , every thought, is so engaging; I feel like I'm sitting with VH himself. On the same page as the quote I put up was this statement about the nature of war, that I also found very moving:
...aside from wars of liberation, all that armies do they do by compulsion. The words "passive obedience" tell the tale. An army is a strange composite masterpiece, in which strength results from an enormous sum total of utter weaknesses. Thus only can we explain a war waged by humanity against humanity in spite of humanity,
I agree with you about the classics v. modern literary fiction. There's just no comparison at all.
Edited at 2008-05-06 05:35 pm (UTC)
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| From: | sovay |
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May 6th, 2008 05:27 pm (UTC) |
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So, to oppose the wind, it has ropes and canvas; against the water its timbers; against the rock its iron, copper, and lead; against the darkness, light; against immensity, a needle.
Okay, that's lovely.
Especially that last clause:
against immensity, a needle.
I just loved that.
It's like he could write or something ;-)
That really resonated. I'm in the middle reading all O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels right now, and this hit the spot.
I need to read those one day--are you enjoying them?
Most definitely! For most of them it's my second time reading them. They are literate, witty, historically sound, and the Aubrey-Maturin friendship is right up there with Holmes & Watson, or Kirk & Spock, on the list of great friendships. Bart used a quote from them in the dedication to his dissertation. We find ourselves referencing them in conversation fairly regularly.
The movie, while not quite based in any one book, took elements and dialogue from several of them, and is an excellent snapshot of the characters. One of the best adaptations I've ever seen :-)
That's "Master and Commander"? I remember really liking that.
I've been recently re-reading Les Mis (working on my screenplay again) but you know what? I've never read that part. I have the same translation and everything.
It's right after the Battle of Waterloo part and right before Jean rescues a sailor.
Aha! I always skip that part.
Now you know a little of what you've been missing :-D
It's like most of the parts of Les Mis I skip. Sure it's pretty, but what does it have to do with the plot?
I thought it was fantastic--I felt like I had actually lived through Waterloo. Plus, I learned a bunch about strategy... plus at the very end of that section, you see evil Thénardier stealing gold off dead soldiers, and one guy he steals something from turns out not to be dead and thinks that Thénardier has *saved* him, and you know (you probably especially know; I'm just guessing) that this will be significant later on.
The way he described Napoleon and Wellington! It was amazing. And this sunken road (just like the lanes in Dorset) that all the French troops fell into--too horrible.
Yeah, that part about Thenardier does become important later. It's weird, though, I've never read it. Like how I've never read the end of Beowulf. I didn't get good grades in English because I can't make myself read something I'm not interested in.
Ha! With things like Les Mis or Beowulf, being unable to make yourself read certain bits is no excuse--you can find out about those parts from Spark Notes or whatever.
What happens at the end of Beowulf that you didn't want to read? (I never read it. I took Anglo Saxon in college for a term, but the term I took was the "Everything but Beowulf" term, so we read other things.)
You amaze me with what you haven't read. I thought there was some law that said "All English-speaking persons must read Beowulf."
Actually, the animated movie is pretty good, though it differs in a few places. You should see it.
Is this your way of avoiding telling me what you didn't want to see at the end of Beowulf? Look, I know the plot. He's a warrior, there's a monster named Grendel, he kills it, and then he has to face Grendel's mother. Oh, and Wikipedia tells me later he gets killed by a dragon. Meh. I prefer the other stuff. We read the Battle of Maldon in Anglo-Saxon; that was cool. And the Seafarer and the Wanderer were beautiful, and I liked the Dream of the Rood and Deor (I liked Deor a lot...)
So, do tell about Beowulf.
It's not that I'm avoiding spoilers, I just don't know how to explain it if you've never read it.
It's the dragon part I've never read. In my opinion the story ends when he defeats Grendel's mother and the Danes or whoever rejoice. The dragon thing is very WTF.
The movie was the same way. The first 40 minutes are like the best thing I've seen all year. Then I turned it off. Not sure what happens in the end. He fights a dragon, I think.
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