billybookblog

*contains spoilers* As with an awful lot of Medieval texts, Malory’s incredible collection of tales of knight errantry, Le Morte D’Arthur , is heavily indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (or A History of the Kings of Britain ), which also features, I might add, the Leir which Shakespeare eventually took as his own, troubled, titular King Lear . But more than anything else, Malory’s key inspiration was quite possibly his incarceration in London’s Newgate Prison for some rather violent and lurid crimes, during which time he wrote the tales in light of his own situation as a “knight prisoner” (his own words, there). Well, this is part speculation. There are several Malorys of this period who could also have written this expansive collection, but this incarcerated Malory is the one that seems to hold most water among many historians of British Medieval literature. The version I read is one based on William Caxton’s only-remaining printed edition published in 1484,...

*contains spoilers* In the year 1949, a decade after initially attempting to write in his own, native, Russian language the embittered story of a man besotted with a “nymphet”, Nabokov finally decided to take the tale that was “throbbing” within him in the intervening years and turn it into a full-blown novel written rather astoundingly in sublime English. In his own beautiful explanatory style, Nabokov stated in his afterword to this text, which itself is a sort of zombie-like addition to the twisted narrative preceding it, that his “private tragedy…is that [he] had to abandon [his] natural idiom…for a second-rate brand of English”, though he is terribly unfair to himself in this respect. He writes with an intimidating flourish of confidence in one of the many secondary languages he spoke, and more crucially in which he wrote, exceeding the articulation many other authors would struggle to attain in their first and only language. Even in writing this summary I find myself awkwardly in...