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Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
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----- Forwarded message from Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com -----
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 18:23:51 -0500
From: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Reply-To: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Subject: RE: Spam: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Huckleberry Finn was the first unedited, unrevised American classic that I read
in my life. I was eight years old, and what puzzled me more than anything about
the book was how the characters spoke. I can't imagine what a translation of the
book into any other language must be like.
I lived in an integrated neighborhood in Detroit and knew and spoke with many
black people, and had never heard anyone, ever, speak like Jim. For me, the
word which some may use who are accustomed to speaking in cultured, educated
environments was and is by no means a word that a white person can use without
expecting consequences. In my childhood, the consequences would have been
physical, and immediate. They would be today, as well. I don't use the word.
Aside from that, dialogue which consisted of "marse" "I'se" "de blamedest ting"
and countless more on Jim's part, and Huck's own mispronunciations such as
"yellocution" for elocution, along with many other phrases an educated reader
can recognize as comic, were beyond me at the age of eight. I'm curious as to
how Jim's speech was rendered in Hungarian.
None of Mark Twain's work was taught in the public school I attended. English
grammar was taught in a phonetic system which allowed one to get consistently
good grades if you had been brought up hearing English spoken properly in your
home, as I was.
The moral complexities of Huck Finn were only vaguely available to me until I
was about 12. Literature was simply not taught until junior high school where I
remember reading Byron's "The Assyrian Came Down Like the Wolf on The Fold," and
Sir Patrick Spens, and a few other works that the teachers seemed to regard with
annoyance. I can remember that on at least two occasions, I was sent to sit in
the receiving room, or to see my guidance counselor, because I was caught
reading books in class.
> ----------
> From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum on behalf of Donald B. Johnson
> Reply To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> Sent: Tuesday, March 8, 2005 5:56 PM
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Subject: Spam: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
>
> <<File: ATT1947340.htm>>
>
>
> ----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
> Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 15:45:32 EST
> From: STADLEN@aol.com
> Reply-To: STADLEN@aol.com
> Subject: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
> To:
>
> In a message dated 08/03/2005 20:27:16 GMT Standard Time,
> chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu (i.e. Andrew Brown) writes:
>
> > Huck Finn may well be a difficult book for non-American readers to cope
> > with
> >
>
> "Huckleberry Finn" is surely a morally complex work. It seems fatuously
> anachronistic to object to it because it accurately reproduces the word
> "nigger".
> Also, there is surely an ironic distancing between author and narrator in
> relation to many of the less than socially approved activities of the latter
and
> his friend Tom Sawyer. But my friend Thomas Szasz has told me how moved he was
> as a boy reading the book in Budapest in Hungarian translation, and again as a
> man in the United States in English, by its showing how an "ignorant child"
> can see through the evil of slavery when none of the adults around him can.
>
> The occasion when Huck Finn risks, as he supposes, going to hell for not
> turning his friend, the escaped slave Jim, in to the authorities is one of the
> great existential moments in literature.
>
> If the Nabokovs disapproved of the book for DN, it would seem that they were
> underestimating his sensibility.
>
> Anthony Stadlen
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
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