Word: englishings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Translator Sir: Yasunari Kawabata's award of the Nobel Prize for literature [Oct. 25] could not be more deserving. His Snow Country is a book to read, reread and to treasure. But it can be read only in English by most of us, and I strongly suspect that the beautiful translation by Edward G. Seidensticker, which makes this possible, may have played a large part in attracting the attention of the panel. Your excellent article is lacking only in that it does not quote from his introduction to Snow Country: "In Snow Country we come upon the roaring silence...
...odds, George Orwell is the most unlikely culture hero to emerge in the '60s. The ideological passions that rent the Red '30s, strewing literary corpses and real bodies over the Marxist battlefield, leave the current generation cold. Yet this minor English novelist (Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter) is now accepted generally in England and the U.S. as a major prophet for his political journalism, for his anti-Stalinist fable Animal Farm (1945), and for the political-science-fiction shocker...
...conditions in the handkerchief industry." Though Orwell was a socialist, the metaphysical system underlying Marxian socialism meant nothing to him, and he had an empirical Englishman's distrust of other philosophical abstractions; to him, the existentialist Sartre was a windbag. But he also held an immense advantage over English intellectuals in politics who, by comparison, seem like dishonest children...
...clamor for a "strong line" against Hitler (read "war") and demands for peace and disarmament. The British intellectuals, wrote Orwell in August 1941, "for ten dreadful years have kept it up that Hitler is merely a figure out of comic opera. All this reflects is the sheltered condition of English life...
...laws of bloodlines and training, George Orwell should have been a Blimp. Born Eric Blair, into a military-official family, he went on scholarship to a spartan prep school designed to groom likely lads for their destined place in the Establishment. Like any dutiful upper-class English boy, he journeyed East to govern the lesser breeds as an officer in the Burmese police. The experience was decisive. His sketch Shooting an Elephant is a picture in microcosm of two imperial centuries of interracial injustice and violence. Unlike most people, he could take it but he could not dish...