Do Not Buy This Book

I'm torn between so many impulses: nausea, of course, and tears are right up there. Laughter, to be sure, but so many kinds of laughter, from the low cynical chuckle accompanied a "what can you do?" shake of the head, to the high-pitched chest-heaving kind that one usually associates with the phrase "neighbors have described the suspect as quiet and well-mannered." But enough coyness; here's why:

http://regent.gospelcom.net/rcp/authors/dennisdanielson/

Let us be clear: someone has "translated" Paradise Lost into "English." And others have looked at this and deemed it appropriate: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/paradise-lost-in-prose/?ref=opinion. The attitude seems to be "Well, if it's something that makes the book easy and thus available to readers, why, more power to it!" And "It's not a 'translation,' per se; it's an interpretation that enables the original!"

With all due respect: Bull. Shit.

Allow me to offer an analogy: A conductor produces a performance of Beethoven's Ninth that eliminates everything but the strings and percussion, claiming that this streamlined version, inasmuch as it is easier for the ear to follow, will open up the work to listeners who aren't quite musically experienced enough to listen to the original. He'd be howled from the podium, pursued by a shower of rotten fruit, and rightly so.

This is the ugly side of a society that believes that "All men are created equal" means "No one is better than me about anything ever"--that thinks that the quick path to stardom created by a few weeks on American Idol is a better, sexier way to greatness than pulling one's tired ass from low-rent venue from year to year until enough character and compexity is created to make the breakthrough legitimate. There is somehow the notion that things that are "hard" are never legitimately so, but are designed to be so in order to exclude you. That works of genius ought not to demand effort from us in order to appreciate them. To repeat: Bull. Shit.

Let me suggest something radical: if you can't read Paradise Lost, then you shouldn't read Paradise Lost. If you have to work at it--if you have to take a college course, or refer to the annotations, or struggle--then good. It should be a struggle. Most things worth doing require effort. This is particularly so of artists, and especially of poets. Shakespeare is hard. Chaucer is hard. Jonson and Spencer and Browning are hard. They're not hard because they "use all that-there fancy-talk"--they're hard because they're hard. Genius is hard--try reading Newton's Principia if you doubt me. Complexity of meaning requires our minds to occupy more than one place at the same time, which they can--but not without effort. So the notion that making Milton 'easier' is a legitimate enterprise is offensive and the kind of thing that makes democracies devolve into dictatorships. (Read Plato's Republic, if you doubt me--oh wait, that's hard, too.)

Look, I'm willing to compromise when it's another language--me, I can't read Greek, and yet Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles have changed my life--I don't have enough Spanish to read Cervantes, and I'd be a poorer soul without Don Quixote. If you need a bridge to cross the gulf between nations, I'll let it go. But English is our language; it's the language that defines how we think, what we feel, who we are. And Milton, with the sole exceptions of Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, has done more to enable the language to achieve heights and nuances of meaning--and has thus enabled us to achieve those qualities in ourselves. To suggest, then, that Milton needs to be dumbed-down--and that is exactly what this 'translation' is, let's not kid ourselves--means that we need to be dumbed-down--that we are too little in our thoughts and feelings to achieve Milton's level. We are not smaller than we were in his time--let's not allow ourselves to be self-crippled by demanding less than an honest effort. To do otherwise is to bitch and moan about how it's not fair that we're fat even though we're not willing to eat less or exercise. Effort is the only means to achievement--anything that life hands you is essentially hollow, which is why the children of the rich either go out and do something with their lives (FDR, JFK, Churchill) or degenerate into self-medicating gargoyles (anyone until 50 with the last name 'Hilton.')

Milton's poem is, among many many other things, about language itself--he tells us that he will attempt to "justify the ways of God to Man," and do so in the language of poetry. But much of the poem is given over to the inadequacy of any language to convey the meaning of the absolute or the divinely obscure--that humanity's frustration is that what we perceive and what it means and how we account for it in speech and action is just own great big godawful mess, and that the only individual who says what he means and means what he says is God, and that's what makes him God.

And yet the poem isn't about despair; it's about struggling against our linguistic inadequacies--about pushing against the limits of words to achieve something approximating the ability to say something--to really say it. For such a poem to be render user-friendly for them what ain't got the book-larnin' is sickening. It's a poem about how hard it is to understand things, and how we have to try all the same--and to corrupt that by making it 'easy' to understand is just...well, words fail me. (Which is kind of the point.) Shame on everyone who touched this slab of pitch and pretended they weren't defiled thereby, and shame on you if you support it.

In in particular, shame on Fish. Goddammit, Stanley, you know better. And if you don't, go back a reread the original, because you've forgotten why you got into this job in the first place.