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54 great opening lines: 29

When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning or in rain?

Macbeth, Shakespeare

*****

I studied this play twice in high school (two different schools) and never understood the political side.  Only the witch rhymes stayed with me;  my friend and I often cited them at relevant moments, especially when cooking:
Double, double, toil and trouble:  Fire, burn;  and cauldron, bubble.

In recent years I’ve tutored students who were writing about Macbeth, and so… I forced myself to read it to the point of understanding.

Right now I’m translating a French fairy tale in which the words chats and chaudière evoke my Macbeth textbook cover with its etching of three hags on a bleak plain waiting for the cauldron to boil.  But while in Shakespeare’s cauldron there boils the fillet of a fenny snake, in the French fairy tale cauldron there is nought but milk.  For the cats.

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54 great opening lines: 28

Let me lay it out for you:
a rural photography competition in a local town hall
and the woman next to me,
sitting with her husband and two children,
had travelled three hours to be there.

8 x 10 colour enlargements $16.50, Cate Kennedy

*****

I heard this poem read on the radio.  With ‘Let me lay it out for you’, the author had my attention.  It rewards hearing it in full.

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54 great opening lines: 27

One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.

The Paper House, Carlos María Domínguez (Trans. Nick Caistor)

*****

This is a small novel I found on my daughter-in-law’s bookshelf.  I was hooked from the first line, and took it home.

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54 great opening lines: 26

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.

The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells

*****

Yesterday I posted the opening line of Invisible Man (sans article) by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952, a book I confused with The Invisible Man (avec article) from 1897 which I listened to on a long car trip recently.  I found the latter interesting in the first half, but more and more disturbing as the protagonist attempted to violently and invisibly dominate his world.

Wells’s writing is awesome;  look at the words he chose to help us imagine guns and glass:

A resounding smash of glass came from upstairs. Adye had a silvery glimpse of a little revolver half out of Kemp’s pocket. “It’s a window, upstairs!” said Kemp, and led the way up. There came a second smash while they were still on the staircase. When they reached the study they found two of the three windows smashed, half the room littered with splintered glass, and one big flint lying on the writing table. The two men stopped in the doorway, contemplating the wreckage. Kemp swore again, and as he did so the third window went with a snap like a pistol, hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering triangles into the room.

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54 great opening lines: 25

I am an invisible man.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

*****

Last week I pulled this book from a friend’s shelf and began reading.  Great opening line, I thought, but why don’t I remember it?  After I’d read a couple of pages I realised the book was not what I thought it was, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, which I listened to in the car recently.  I’ve now read many more pages and am happy to have accidentally discovered this story.

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54 great opening lines: 24

The verb ‘to read’ does not tolerate the imperative, an aversion it shares with a few others:  ‘to love’ … ‘to dream’ …

Like a Novel (originally Comme un roman), Daniel Pennac (my translation)

*****

I’ve read this book in French.  On the back cover is a list of ten rights of a reader, which I found online in the printable form of an English language poster, and which I duly printed and stuck to the back of a particular door for everyone to read.

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54 great opening lines: 23

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

*****

In my younger and more vulnerable years I went alone to see Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby.  It was slow and misty but dramatic enough.  I’ve never heard the song ‘What’ll I do?’ without returning in my mind to that movie theatre.

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54 great opening lines: 22

There was once a sly old fox with nine tails, who was very curious to know whether his wife was true to him:  so he stretched himself out under a bench, and pretended to be dead as a mouse.

Mrs Fox, Brothers Grimm (Trans. unknown)

*****

I’m presently translating a few fairy tales and for inspiration have been going through a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  When I read this opening line I laughed and read it again.

I’ve found another version of the story entitled How Mrs Fox Married Again, which gives more of a clue about the plot than the simpler Mrs Fox.

MrsFox

Illustration by Walter Crane, found in Project Gutenberg.

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54 great opening lines: 21

When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.

Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (Trans. by Stanley Appelbaum)

*****

Sometimes I have to read a piece of literature in order to teach it.  This one for example.  I’d avoided Metamorphosis all my life until the day a student emailed to ask for help writing an essay on it.  We agreed to meet a week later, to give me time to read it.  Which I did, feeling again the long flying cockroaches of my childhood scratching their way across my bare feet or arms.  At the end of the week I received another email from her, from the other side of the world.  She had left the country, written her essay without my help, then emailed me to say ‘Forget it’.  Too late, I’d read it, I’d squirmed my way to the end.

But one good thing came out of the exercise:  I discovered its great opening line.

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54 great opening lines: 20

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping – rapping at my chamber door.

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

*****

Today I’m working on a translation of a story in which a raven stands guard in a widow’s window, terrifying passers-by.  As I search for the right words to interpret the story, the lines of Poe’s The Raven go round and round in my head.

Gustave Doré created the image in my header.  It’s his interpretation of Poe’s lines.
This and more of Doré’s illustrations for The Raven are available here.