Lost domains
May. 10th, 2007 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIt seems that The Guardian has only to run a piece about a book for me to discover that I can't find my copy.
It began a couple of weeks ago, with an entertaining essay about Le Grand Meaulnes, comparing it to The Catcher in the Rye for its cult status and to... Well, here's the text:
Today I was reading another Guardian article, about a forthcoming collection of children's playground songs and rhymes. Painter and writer Dan Jones has been talking to - and recording - children in London's schools, and has gathered together the material for a book, The Singing Playground, to be published (complete with a CD of recordings) later this year. The Guardian commented that "at a time of unprecedented panic over the decline of make believe and outdoor play in favour of the sedentary and solitary entertainment of television and the games console, Jones believes playground culture is alive and kicking as feistily as ever." This sounds familiar: "We were told that the young had lost the power of entertaining themselves; that the cinema, the wireless, and television had become the focus of their attention; and that we had started our investigation fifty years too late," write Iona and Peter Opie in the preface to their The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, fifty years ago.
One of the fascinations of the Opie's book is the survival of regional variations: they map, for examples, the different "truce terms" used by children to claim immunity, to call for a break in a game. At school in east London, we said "fainites" and displayed "crossed fingers", the middle finger crossed over the index finger. The Opies recorded this, and recorded the equivalent in the north east in the 1950s: "skinch", which my father recalled using in the 20s.
Dan Jones's investigations in contemporary London illustrate an opposing truth: the children's games of all the world have arrived, Russian games, songs from Mongolia. But what goes around, comes around.
It began a couple of weeks ago, with an entertaining essay about Le Grand Meaulnes, comparing it to The Catcher in the Rye for its cult status and to... Well, here's the text:
Which is neat, and sent me to the shelf where I was sure I would find my copy (Livre de Poche editions, alphabetical, nothing tricky about that...)
Some of the trouble has been put down to its supposedly untranslatable title: Le Grand Meaulnes has appeared over the years in English as The Wanderer, The Lost Domain, and even Big Meaulnes. "No English adjective will convey all the shades of meaning that can be read into the simple word 'grand' which takes on overtones as the story progresses," one translator has written - but in fact its title is exactly equivalent, in its combination of sardonic irony and appreciative applause, to that of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby a decade later, one more brief classic of the same resonant kind (and yet one more Anglo-American novel which The Great Meaulnes resembles and must have influenced).
Today I was reading another Guardian article, about a forthcoming collection of children's playground songs and rhymes. Painter and writer Dan Jones has been talking to - and recording - children in London's schools, and has gathered together the material for a book, The Singing Playground, to be published (complete with a CD of recordings) later this year. The Guardian commented that "at a time of unprecedented panic over the decline of make believe and outdoor play in favour of the sedentary and solitary entertainment of television and the games console, Jones believes playground culture is alive and kicking as feistily as ever." This sounds familiar: "We were told that the young had lost the power of entertaining themselves; that the cinema, the wireless, and television had become the focus of their attention; and that we had started our investigation fifty years too late," write Iona and Peter Opie in the preface to their The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, fifty years ago.
One of the fascinations of the Opie's book is the survival of regional variations: they map, for examples, the different "truce terms" used by children to claim immunity, to call for a break in a game. At school in east London, we said "fainites" and displayed "crossed fingers", the middle finger crossed over the index finger. The Opies recorded this, and recorded the equivalent in the north east in the 1950s: "skinch", which my father recalled using in the 20s.
Dan Jones's investigations in contemporary London illustrate an opposing truth: the children's games of all the world have arrived, Russian games, songs from Mongolia. But what goes around, comes around.
One Tibetan refugee told him movingly of his country's ancient traditions, including a distinctive tea ritual involving a special pot that had been immortalised in rhyme. I said, "sing it to me". He sang I'm a Little Teapot in Tibetan.And if I could find my copy of Language Hunting in the Karakorum I could quote Mrs Lorimer's confession of being a bad anthropologist, forgetting herself far enough to play "This little piggy went to market" with one of the local babies ("This little lamb...", I think it was). As I can't, this paraphrase will have to do.
