Caught in a blizzard

Iceland is a small country that has produced some remarkable writers of thrillers and mysteries. One of these is Ragnar Jonasson, whose Outside (2021) makes compulsive reading.

The plot seems simple enough. Four friends go on a mid-winter hunting trip when an unexpected storm sweeps in. Yet the blizzard is just the first, and perhaps the least, of many surprises.

They seek shelter in a cabin, where they find a still, silent man holding a gun. Gunnslaugur may be a respected lawyer but he is also an alcoholic who, this being a hunting trip, has his own gun. In a panic, he shoots the silent man. Now what do they do?

It turns out that the four friends are not as friendly as we were first led to believe. In fact, one of the novel's big mysteries is why these four people would ever go hunting together in the first place. Nobody really likes Gunnslaugur. Daniel left Iceland to become an actor in London. He doesn't like guns and isn't that fond of any of his "friends." Armann is an outdoorsman and a professional guide, and it is he who organized the trip, but he has a violent past. Helena, we learn, is Armann's twin sister, and she carries grudges against both Gunnslaugur and Daniel.

One disaster leads to another in Jonasson's story. The brief chapters, each told from the point of view of one of the four main characters, will keep every reader turning the pages as quickly as possible.

Whose rules?

The English language has always been tolerant of contributions from elsewhere. So many of the words we use, other than the basic Anglo-Saxon ones, come from other languages. English speakers may change them and pronounce them differently, but we keep them and make them our own.

Yet trouble seems to follow whenever other languages become too highly regarded by English speakers, often supposed language experts. Many of the silly language rules we older folks learned in school were imported from Latin as late as the 19th century. These include not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with a preposition. Yet English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language. Latin rules do not apply to English.

After the Normans conquered England in 1066, numerous French words entered the English language — at least the English spoken by aristocrats. Thus, chickens became poultry and pigs became pork, among many others. Again, English welcomes words from anywhere.

But there are many words and phrases that English speakers have adopted simply because they sound French, yet they are not French at all. We just like to pretend they are French because they make us sound more sophisticated. These include such expressions as piece de resistance, nom de plume, affair d'amour and even negligee. These are unknown in France. The British simply made them up.

Over the years the British were quick to accept French spellings of English words. In fact, Americans spell many English words in a more traditional English way than the British do. The British now use the word honour because of French influence. Americans spell it as honor, the way the English used to. Similarly, Americans use theater, center and fiber, while the British, under French influence, now spell these theatre, centre and fibre.

But the English language isn't French, any more than it's Latin. We English speakers can take their words, but we should follow our own rules.

Picking up the pieces

So many brave young men died in World War I, yet yet the trials for those who survived, both men and women, continued even after the war was over. Somehow Helen Simonson produced a light-hearted novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club (2024, out of this serious situation.

During the war, young British women had to step up and do many of the jobs young men had done before the war. Some of them discovered they liked doing these jobs, but when the war was over they were expected to quit and get married, never mind that there were fewer men available to marry. Meanwhile, wounded veterans found themselves unwanted for the many jobs newly available. Soldiers from India who had contributed to the war effort were less welcome in England once the war was over.

Set in the summer of 1919, Simonson's novel centers on Constance Haverhill, who did her part during the war, but now her bookeepping skills are unwanted. She is employed as an aide to a wealthy elderly woman who will soon need her no longer. Mrs. Fog is set to marry a sweetheart from long ago.

Constance doesn't know what she will do with herself, but then she befriends Poppy, an outgoing young woman who rode motorcycles during the war and wants to continue doing the same. She has several friends, female riders or mechanics, with similar frustrated ambitions. Poppy's brother, Harris, was a pilot in the war, but now he has a wounded leg, and the bank job promised to him before the war is no longer available. And although he is a gifted pilot despite his bad leg, nobody wants him flying their planes.

A badly damaged Sopwith Camel, purchased by Poppy, gives Harris incentive to live again, and with Constance as his unexpected flying partner, he begins to see a brighter future for himself. Will that future include Constance?

There are complications, of course, all of which result in an absorbing novel with just the ending readers want.

The right word

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg more for her legal commentary than her literary commentary, yet she once wrote something that must ring true to writers everywhere: "Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the readers."

Words matter to a writer, as well as to a discerning reader. Why one word and not another? Why one descriptive phrase and not another? Why set a story in one location and not another? Such choices matter, and often they matter a great deal.

In Muse of Fire, Michael Korda's book about World War I poets, he tells in detail how Siegfried Sassoon influenced changes in one of Wilfred Owen's most famous poems. Even the title was changed dramatically with one word choice. "Anthem for Dead Youth" became "Anthem for Doomed Youth." That single word change made the title more powerful, more mysterious, more memorable.

Sassoon suggested the poem be written in third person, rather than second person, as Owen originally wanted. The poem's first line changed from "What passing bells for you who die in herds?" to "What passing bells for those who die as cattle?" You became those; in herds became as cattle. These changes widened the scope of the poem somehow.

And so on.

The poem remained Owen's, yet Sassoon's editing made it immortal. All this demonstrates the importance of good editing, but it also illustrates Bader's point that a particular word choice can make a world of difference.

The poets' war

World War II produced several novelists of note, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. World War I, however, was the poets' war. It produced one of the greatest war novels of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, yet poetry still ruled the literary world, even though it was all but dead just a few years later when the second big war erupted.

Michael Korda, the author of a number of wartime histories, including With Wings Like Eagles, has written a fine book about World War I seen through the eyes of its poets, Muse of Fire (2024).

He focuses on six poets who fought in the war and wrote verse about their experiences: Rupert Brook, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Only Graves and Sassoon survived the war.

Their poetry changed as the war went on and on. To Brook and Seeger, the only American in the group, the war was a great adventure. "What bloody fun!" Brook wrote in a letter. In one of his best-known poems, he said: "If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England."

Seeger, related to folk singer Pete Seeger, was even more romantic about combat. "I have a rendezvous with death ...," he wrote. And "that rare privilege of dying well."

The others viewed the war more realistically. No less patriotic that the other two, they nevertheless saw the war as pointless and a terrible waste of human life.

They were also shockingly blunt about what soldiers did in war. Writing about killing an enemy soldier with a bayonet, Sassoon wrote: "Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;/That in good fury he may feel/The body where he sets his heel/Quail from your downward darting kiss." In another poem he wrote the phrase, "The place was rotten with dead."

Authorities strictly censored letters, books and anything else written about what was actually going on in the trenches. Yet for whatever reason — perhaps because the censors had little patience for poetry — the poems of these men somehow got through.

Translater, traitor?

There is an Italian adage that goes, "Traduttore, traditore." It means "Translator, traitor," but of course, that is a translation.

It means simply that something is always lost in translation. Of course, if you are someone who needs the translation because you can't read the original language, then you will never know if the translator is really a traitor or not.

I have read many books that have been translated into English. I am presently in the middle of one that has been translated from Icelandic. I think it's a terrific novel, but am I missing something? I will never know if the translation has betrayed the original or not.

I have mentioned in this blog that I sometimes write and even preach sermons, and a few months ago I preached one that relates to this topic. (Actually all sermons relate to the subject because all sermons are based on translations of either Hebrew or Greek texts. We can always wonder, what has been lost in translation?)

I found that Job 35:10 has been translated very differently in different Bible translations. For example, the New International Version translates it as "But no one says, 'Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night ...'"

The Complete Jewish Bible says that God "causes glad songs to ring out at night.," which is more specific than simply "songs." The Good News Bible puts it this way: "God their Creator gives them hope in their darkest hours."

The New Catholic Bible makes it more personal: God "protects me during the night." In the New Revised Standard Version, God "gives strength in the night."

Then there is The Message, which says, "God puts spontaneous songs in their hearts."

That's the same Hebrew text translated six very different ways. Some mention songs; others do not. Some mention the night; others do not. Some simply translate the metaphor; others attempt to interpret the metaphor. I liked all six translations, and I preached six mini sermons, one on each of them.

Are all six translators traitors to the original? Or does each bring out something different that was there all along?

A place to tarry

When dining in a restaurant, the server will often place the check on your table and say something like, "There's no hurry." We already know this, of course, and when I have had a good conversation partner, I have sometimes sat at the table for two hours or more. During busy times, however, when people are lined up waiting for a table, the management probably wants desperately for you to move on, whatever the servers might say.

Speed is a priority at a number of business, such as the one that promises a "10 minute oil change." Nobody likes standing in a long line at the grocery store or sitting in a crowded waiting room at a doctor's office.

So I am impressed by the slogan of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry, Here our greatest good is pleasure." The line comes from Epicurus in reference to his school, but it seems ideal for a bookstore. The more time people spend in a bookstore, the more books they are likely to find that they cannot resist.

And while books are often about instruction and reference and guidance, they are mostly about pleasure. We usually read what we enjoy reading.

The best bookstores encourage customers to stick around. They have chairs, for example. They serve coffee. Some have cats or even dogs. Some have authors signing books or giving talks. Children's departments have story times, giving parents a chance to browse. The more books a store has, the more time book lovers are likely to spend there, and of course the more money they are likely to spend.

One does wonder, however, whether the "here you will do well to tarry" motto still applies as closing time approaches.