....after checking a few editions of The Scarlet Pimpernel and thinking "Hmm, these translations all seem the same," I realized Baroness Orczy wrote IN ENGLISH, because she was not the author of La Princesse de Clèves, which I have always been vaguely meaning to read ever since just-missing it at St John's*: there are two campuses which, despite the much-touted "Great Books" simultaneous reading Program, have two different syllabi; the juniors of my era in Santa Fe read about Mademoiselle de Chartres, but the juniors in Annapolis read about Phèdre. By which I mean, we read ALL of Phèdre. Every goddamned perfectly balanced matched-up alexandrine syllable. Other classes read one or two acts, or the Greatest Speeches From, and went on to other, pleasanter, things. Not us. Lines from that play are burned on my brain, which I suppose is one of the purposes of a liberal education, but we spent so much time on the technical aspects I got the confused impression of a scaldingly freezing passion, like dry ice. But I can still rap out "la fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé," just as, our tutor earnestly assured us, every educated Frenchman (yes, he said "Frenchman") could. He also told us all French people, taxidrivers included, divided themselves into Cartesians and....aww hell, I forget what the devotees of Pascal were called. Pascalites? Pascalettes? Triangles?
(With dreadful symmetry, years earlier, I had also been in the only freshman language class to translate the ENTIRE Meno. Every fucking particle. It was like diacritical ((or dialectical?)) boot camp.)
-- ANYWAY. Probably they'll never read The Scarlet Pimpernel at SJC (when I was there, Jane Austen was barely allowed one book, and O'Connor and Woolf were both highly spoken of but dropped quietly) (I remember suggesting both Wuthering Heights and Beloved to my freshman seminar tutor as possible readings, which was met with a polite sneer) which is a damn shame, as it's really fun. Does anyone really read this anymore, except curious bookworms? If not that's also a damn shame, for as the editor of the 100th anniversary edition points out, the author's influence can be felt in modern pop cultural icons from Batman to James Bond to John Carter. (He also classes the book with both Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche, which makes up for his dwelling on Orczy's supposed plainness in contrast to her wishfully beautiful heroine.)
And I am about to have period brain, so I need something light, fun, fluffy, and utterly compelling, and as far as I'm concerned right now this is perfect.
*Whoah, they redesigned their website. Again. It just gets uglier every time.
descensus Averno facilis est