SES wrote: Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, the first woman to serve as a judge on the U.S. Supreme
Court, recently explained in an interview with Legal Times that she took a class
at Cornell with VN and that his teaching has influenced her writing of legal
opinions. Attached, R.B. Ginsburg on VN: "She remembers his
advice on good writing: "'Have the reader ready for what you're going to
say.' He gave an example of why he liked the English language. He said, think of
French
(which was his first language): If you say 'white horse' in French,
it's 'cheval blanc.' And you immediately hear 'horse' and you're thinking
'brown.' But in English it's 'white horse,' so you don't see a brown horse and
have to displace it. He was big on the written word and on making word
pictures."
JM: What an interesting example
about VN's teaching influences and on how attributes in English and
French may open to us different word pictures about white or
brown horses.
My first question was: "how would this
sentence come out in VN's native Russian?" and how would a Russian
reader be advised about what to expect or what will be
refused.
Next I remembered the wonderful allusive power of the
English " a flowerless garden" ( you get the flowers first, then they
are denied to you in your garden) and tried to figure it in French ( would
they say "un jardin sans fleurs"? ) and wondered about how this would be
translated in Russian, preferrably in a sentence written by
VN.