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.
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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?
----- 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
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