Anodyne
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
 

Copied-down bits from Maillard's Running:

"My feelings were powerful and my thoughts were vague, so trying now to guess what it is that I wanted from her is a work of pure archeology from a site almost devoid of clues -- not much more than a broken pot here, a few flints there, and a ruined hearth stone. This is the best I can do."

[And I note, in typing up the above, that the last sentence in my version ends with a colon in Maillard's text, and another hundred-odd words of explanation. All his hedging aside, Maillard's narrator actually has a pretty good idea of 'what it is that [he] wanted from her.' Whereas my version ('mistranslation'?) throws the reader back on memory's sketchy evidence: those ceramic shards, that blackened stone.]

"In the car Cassandra said, 'You know, John, you can't win. If you're different, they pick you to pieces, but if you try to be like them, that doesn't work either because they know you don't mean it.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:39 AM


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