Word: wretched
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have any character at all. Matricides may be dealt with kindly in novels, an author may find a spark of good in a drug-addicted card cheat or a grasping banker, and it is an immutable law that prostitutes' hearts are warm. But let a novelist introduce a wretch whose vice is writing novels, and there begins a recital of character faults that would have horrified Caligula: the fellow is meanspirited, lazy, a coward, lustful but inept at sex. soggy with drink, cruel to his children, and two months behind on the phone bill...
Accidental Justice. Two characters are among the best grotesques in Greene's entire waxworks. Conder is the archetype of the author's army of squalid journalists -a wretch so practiced at sleazy sleight-of-mind that, although he is a bachelor, he tells everyone that he has a wife and six sickly children. The other is the unnamed Assistant Commissioner, an old jungle hand stiff with integrity and old wounds and hated by his underlings at Scotland Yard. He is a magnificent Greene hero who pursues criminals with stolid skill, shutting away the unhappy knowledge that his quarries...
...novel, blowing both sequence and motivation into a rubble of farcical shocks and grisly surprises. Catch-22 is held together only by the inescapable fact that Joseph Heller is a superb describer of people and things. Take his portrait of a character called Hungry Joe: "A jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake. Hungry Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips of his fingers, stammered, choked, itched, sweated, salivated and sprang from spot to spot fanatically with...
...conspirators, among them his own British aide. Eventually, the truth came out and the case went to court, where Sir Hari's own counsel, Lord John Simon (later Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer), described his client as "a poor, green, shivering, abject wretch." Sir Hari returned home to face the wrath of his uncle, the then Maharajah, who banished him to a remote jungle estate for six months and made him perform ritual acts of humiliation and penance...
Ultimately, the translation of Greek poetry is a doomed craft, but Torrance succeeds at it remarkably well. His smooth and graceful verse rendering captures Sophocles' sense and most of his imagery. Even the frequent iteration of "wretch that I am" does little to mar the flow of the language. Naturally Torrance loses the melody and complex rhythms of the original; this, of course, was unavoidable in a translation...