Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...canaux, canards, canaille!") may be accurately rendered in English as "Farewell, canals, ducks, rabble!" The only thing missing is everything that made Voltaire's remark so witty and memorably alliterative in French. If a four-word mot successfully thwarts attempts to export it, the problems posed by an epic poem more than 10,000 lines long, written two millenniums ago in a language now deceased, are likely to be proportionately more impossible...
This English version of a cool but fascinating epic seems flawless. (Fitzgerald, 72, has already done superb modern translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey.) But such judgments are ephemeral...
...struggle for that scoop is only a minor episode in a far more epic battle: the one between Millstein and the national editor for the job of editor in chief. Indeed, to the Newspaper's scribblers, nearly every event in the newsroom, and in the world at large, is important only in terms of office intrigue. "When the copy editors crossed your commas out, people made an interpretation of your standing vis-a-vis Ron and of Ron's standing vis-a-vis [the national editor] and of both their standings in the eyes of [the editor...
...spiritual contemporary Céline, Döblin saw Germany as a huge human slaughterhouse and Franz as "a big, good-natured sheep.' Mixing statistics of death and disease with the story of some petty, brutal people living in East Berlin, Döblin created a 600-page epic that was part newsreel, part nightmare-a documentary melodrama written in blood and neon. Through his art he exercised the control that Franz and his friends could never exert on their lives...
...Vacation is not a rambunctious "laff riot" on the order of Animal House--not withstanding newspaper ads depicting Chase in a mock epic pose with Beverly D'Angelo and Christie Brinkley each gripping a leg. It is, rather, a fairly subtle and biting parody of upper-middle class middle America...