Are we ready to let this quote:...
Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined....loose on these threads?
I must read this, from the description. I used her book about Andalusia when visiting there, and was very impressed with her then.
Macaulay understands the value of lists:
"Wolves", Father Chantry-Pigg, who knew about hunting, corrected him, "when they hunt men. Wolf when men hunt them."
Being both old-fashioned and very class, Father Chantry-Pigg called these animals wooves and woof, for he was apt to omit the l before consonants, and would no more have uttered in it wolf than he would in half, calf, golf, salve, alms, Ralph, Malver, talk, walk, stalk, fault, elm, calm, resolve, absolve, soldier, or pulverise.
Is she kidding? American speech has always pronounced significantly more of those ells than the British class referred to, although obviously not all of them. Never heard of not saying it in "golf," "Ralph" is a classic Atlantic split.
Hey would this be a reasonable place to threadjack and ask if any of you have yet seen "Little Miss Sunshine" and experienced what an awesome, beautiful movie it is?
man, for such an awesome title, this post really didn't deliver the goods. I was hoping for sartorial tips from the Pope, or something.
All I can see in this post is "The Towers of Tr&ecute;z&ecute;guet"; otherwise, I'm sure I would have a more substantive comment to make.
Oh, . Make that "Trézéguet," and I curse the people who mocked me for not putting diacritical marks in my online French.
w-lfs-n, maybe you can help me out with a point of grammar. I spent about an hour arguing about the first two lines in "Requieum d'un twisteur" from Du Jazz dans le ravin:
Dites-moi que vous avez connu Charley?So. I had always believed that this was a literary past subjunctive tense, but when we finally found and consulted the Bescherelle, that tense form corresponded to a) the pluperfect subjunctive tense, or b) "the second form of the past conditional tense."
Le contraire m'eût étonné...
Now, I dispute, first, that the cited line isn't a plausible, if truncated, pluperfect subjunctive, and second, that the the modern hard distinction between the subjunctive tense and the subjunctive mode really applies in these rarified, outmoded usages. Your thoughts?
What did you find unsatisfactory about the conditional tense? It seems to me to fit perfectly. (I don't think w-lfs-n knows French.)
7 -- I'm sure that anyone who would mock someone for so cheap a laugh would have come quickly to regret having done so.
Kudos to w-lfs-n for having so terrorized the populace that they ask him for help with a language he doesn't speak, even when Kotsko, who's actually had a translation from the French published, is around.
8. It's mostly that this "second form conditional" tense tracks perfectly, across all of the irregular verbs indexed in the Bescherelle, with the pluperfect subjunctive. To the extent that one might feel justified in wondering what agenda is served in separating the two.
In this case, the English translation is obvious: "The contrary [if you said otherwise about your previous experience], would have surprised me."
We're clearly within the mode of the subjunctive. We're only lacking a "que," if I'm to believe the hard-liners, for the sentence magically into this vaguely defined "second form past conditional"? Why not a truncated pluperfect subjunctive conjugation, reordered as "It would have surprised me, had you not known Charley"?
Also, I have an agenda regarding the subjunctive, and I'll be the first to admit that this agenda obscures my grammatical reason.
10.--No, but I'm working on it.
11.--w-lfs-n serves as the pretext for grammar, really.
Has Kotsko's translation actually been published? I thought it was in limbo.
I am unfamiliar with this so-called subjunctive "tense". It's not a tense in Latin, not (so far as I can tell) in German, and the less said about English the better.
I read the Towers of Trebizond and I think I found it utterly annoying. The first half is like light-comedy / travelogue, then the latter half is Spiritual Journey via Orientialist Revelation.
Isn't it? or maybe I'm misremembering.
I'm still in the first half but I'm down with light comedy.
Also, since w-lfs-n has already nit-picked, it's the subjunctive mood.
In Latin, the subjunctive can appear in an independent clause in the past tense, being translated with "would," just like in our example. Since French has a separate conditional tense, I'm sure that usages like this that are identical in form to the pluperfect subjunctive are nonetheless classed with the conditional because of their function.
If you'll note, the indicative past historic (or preterit) is sometimes indistinguishable from the imperfect subjunctive (or is distinguishable only by the circumflex accent, as in avoir), yet the two tenses are still distinguished.
W/r/t my translation, I ended up getting screwed over on the publication thing. You can, however, read my translation here.
I'm down with light comedy
Okay, but be prepared for a mood shift.
Mostly I think I just like the breezy style.