ODDS AND ENDS

Southland Times, Issue 24153, 15 June 1940, Page 15

ODDS AND ENDS

Addressing the P. E. N. Club, Hsiao Chien, a distinguished Chinese writer, reports that English literature is more influential in his country than any other European literature, but it is still the Victorians and Georgians who matter most. His people know nothing of contemporary English work. Psychological fiction in China seems to him to be not far from the age of Clarissa Harlowe in theme.

Rupert Hart-Davis quotes Asquith as saying that the two chief drawbacks to autobiography are vanity and lack of memory, and suggests that in feminine reminiscences there is a third and most fatal handicap—lack of selective power. The tea-party among trivial and colourless neighbours seems to assume equal importance in the eyes of the authoress with the dramatic episode, the witty answer, the passionate revolt. Plums are buried in dough.

The Turkish Government, reports The Observer’s Istanbul correspondent, has taken in hand the task of translate ing some of the world’s classics into Turkish. The first list decided upon by the Ministry of Education is composed of Homer, the plays of Sophocles, Erasmus’s “In Praise of Folly,” Boccaccio’s "Decameron,” “Don Quixote,” Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” “Hamlet,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” and “The Tempest,” as well as a few plays by Moliere, Rousseau’s “Emile,” Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister,” Stendhal’s “Red and Black,” and Balzac’s “Lily of the Valley.” Financial assistance is to be granted in the form of prizes for the best translations in another series, which includes Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” Fielding’s “Tom Jones,” and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” Literal translations, if one excludes historical and scientific books and free adaptations from the Arabic and the Persian, used to be rather a rarity in Turkish literature. It is, however, interesting to recall that Mohammed the Conqueror caused European scientific books to be translated for his own personal benefit. It was not before 1859 that a European literary work, Fenelon’s “Voy- I age de Telemaque,” was translated into j Turkish. Among the translations j which followed afterwards, Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” was the only English work.

Reviewing Henry Buckley’s “Lire and Death of the Spanish Republic” (Hamilton), The Times Literary Supplement comments that it is remarkable how newspaper correspondents come to identify themselves with the sides on which they happen to be placed.

There used to be fairly clear lines of distinction, remarks The Times Literary Supplement, between the detective thriller, the secret service novel, the tale of adventure and the autobiographical revelations of former spies, but these are now being blurred out of recognition.

The Manchester Guardian considers that Sinclair Lewis’s writing in “Bethel Merriday” is as slick and smart as ever. But it would be a better novel if he had curbed his tendency to overexpansiveness and exercised a more drastic control of his material. Somehow the whole thing is a little lacking in distinction for a writer of Mr Lewis’s calibre. The Times Literary Supplement describes it as a disappointing novel, as gossipy as a columnist’s exclusive story and blandly eupeptic of sentiment to an almost Panglossian degree. The New Statesman thinks that in this book Mr Lewis has apparently relaxed, and his scourge for folly has completed its transition (slow, but for some time noticeable) into a sympathetic and condescending pat. Maturity has blunted indignation.

Following are the answers to the questions under “Teachers Ten,” elsewhere on this page: 1. Mr Creakle, in “David Copperfield,” by Dickens. 2. Mr Parkhill, in “The Education of Hyman Kaplan,” by Leonard Q. Ross. 3. Ichabod Crane, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” by Washington Irving. 4. Dr Pangloss, in “Candide,” by Voltaire. 5. Mr Chipping, in “Good-bye, Mr Chips,” by James Hilton. 6. Mr Squeers, in “Nicholas Nickleby ,” by Dickens. » 7. M. Hamel, in “The Last Lesson,” by Alphonse Daudet. 8. Mr Dobbin, in “Tom Sawyer,” by Mark Twain. 9. The Old Roman, in “The Varmint,” and other books by Owen Johnson. 10. Barbara Pinkerton, in “Vanity Fair,” by Thackery,