Word: high-flown
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This week, when she publishes Black Is My Truelove's Hair, it is plain that Author Roberts has escaped from her blind alley in brilliant fashion. Her new novel reads like a folk tale of the Kentucky countryside, depends on no archaic trappings or high-flown language for its effect, takes place in a recognizable world of village gossip, youthful lovemaking, Kentucky feuds, with characters who are farmers, truck drivers, wise widows and runaway girls. The telephone and radio have reached Miss Roberts' countryside but the people have not changed much: they are superstitious, religious, poetic, great musicians...
...principal obstacles to presenting opera successfully in English has always been the high-flown, stilted character of the translations. Most pretentious operatic theeing and thouing can be blamed not on opera's original librettists but on their 19th-Century English translators. For many years Cambridge Professor Edward J. Dent; one of England's most eminent critics and musical biographers, has brooded over the problem of translating operatic texts into sensible, singable English. Published recently were his translations of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and Beethoven's Fidelio. Where a hitherto much...
...startled to hear a mountain peasant exclaim, "America is the world of the future." In Arabia a native told him owlishly that the English "were united and used their guns only to shoot strangers, while the Arabs were always squabbling among themselves and were very nice to strangers." Hating high-flown sentiments in all forms (he read Juvenal on the way to Damascus, did not like it because "I smell rhetoric"), he grows eloquent only about the Spanish civil war. After seeing Madrid under siege, feeling uncomfortable talking to soldiers because he could remember how he felt when journalists visited...
...sees how blindly they grope through life, comes back to the cemetery eager to forget. Living people, Wilder seems to say, miss most of experience; only the dead get down to essences. But this moral needs no such circuitous statement, should not be interwoven with all the mysticism and high-flown speculation that Wilder insists on adding. A good playwright when he deals with living people, he is only a bad philosopher when he deals with dead ones...
...first novel, The Gray Notebook, begins when pious, portly Widower Oscar-Marie Thibault discovers that his 14-year-old son Jacques has run away from home after getting mixed up in a scandal at school. Guiltless of anything worse than writing high-flown, affectionate, freethinking notes to a young Protestant, young Jacques flees to Marseille with his easy-going friend Daniel, paces the streets and broods about right and wrong while Daniel is befriended by a warm-hearted girl who solves some moral problems for him without a moment's thought...