Downloads and bookstores
I about half way through Anna Karenina. When I finish, I will make a post of quotes excerpted from the book. This post is a follow-up to that post, even though this post comes first chronologically.
My reading has been seriously slowed by moving. Tomorrow (Tuesday the 28th), my cat and I get on a train to the big city; I will put him on an airplane to a cousin’s house, and the next day I will get on a train to set off on my rumschpringe. Yesterday, I turned 24 years old.
The post of Anna Karenina excerpts will begin with a comment on the translation I used. The simplest explaination is that I am using the translation that they had at the local bookstore; while that is accurate in essence, it is actually a suturing over of the truth. In fact, I am reading Tolstoy’s book, as I read most books nowadays, on an electronic device. I downloaded the copy of the book from a so-called “online library”, but this is also a suture over the truth.
What do I mean by “suture”? I mean that, were I to explain how I actually got the book, it would interrupt the continuity of my writing with the writing that came before. To say “I am using this translation because it was the best electronic version available at the book sharing site I download electronic texts from”, though it would be strictly speaking accurate, has a completely different connotation than “this was the translation that my bookstore had available”. The latter sentence could appear in a text (at least, some semantically equivalent sentence could appear) from the 19th or 20th centuries. The more accurate sentence, however, is more puzzling. It could easily be a true sentence spoken in the late 20th or early 21st century, but it could also be appear in science fiction.
To say “I got the book in a bookstore” instead of “I got the book off of the internet” is to suture, which is to say, paper or plaster over the disjunction between my world and Tolstoy’s: Tolstoy could very well say something like “the bookstore had thus and such translation”, but it would be impossible for him to say “the internet had thus and such version” (though Anna Karenina’s focus on trains, which were first introduced in Russia just after Tolstoy’s birth, is also an example of this kind of change). To maintain the illusion of continuity with 20th and 19th century authors, whose work I read and whose dialect I (mostly) share, I must suture over the breaks between my world and theirs. Is this dishonesty? Disavowal? Denial?
