Fly Melon

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/paradise-lost-in-prose/

Yes, a good idea but certainly studying the “translation” shouldn’t be a substitute for studying the original.  I like the bit about Leavis and Davie, pasted at length below, because it highlights the trend  toward ”good story-telling” and away from a multi-faceted text that’s meant to be lingered over and relished for its multiplicities of meaning.  If we try to preserve the long-form written narrative by proving to readers that this form, like film or youtube, can also entertain them with a rollicking good story, then we’re going to fall short and, worse, miss the point entirely.  Reading a text always requires some degree of translation and awareness of ambiguity, variability in meaning, intentionality, etc., and that participatory aspect is part of what makes the medium unique.  Ah, the vagaries of anti-intellectualism……..

“The experience of reading poetry like this was well described by the great critic F.R. Leavis, who said of Milton (he did not mean this as a compliment) that his verse “calls pervasively for a kind of attention … toward itself.” That is, when reading the poetry one is not encouraged to see it as a window on some other, more real, world; it is its own world, and when it refers it refers to other parts of itself. Milton, Leavis said, displays “a capacity for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words.” The poetry is not mimetic in the usual sense of representing something prior to it; it creates the facts and significances to which you are continually asked to attend.

It is from this strenuous and often frustrating labor that Danielson wants to free the reader, who, once liberated, will be able to go with the flow and enjoy the pleasures of a powerful narrative. But that is not what Milton had in mind, as Donald Davie, another prominent critic, saw when he observed (again in complaint) that, rather than facilitating forward movement, Milton’s verse tends to “check narrative impetus” and to “provoke interesting and important speculative questions,” the consideration of which interrupts our progress”