{"id":6891,"date":"2015-04-03T01:27:44","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T01:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=6891"},"modified":"2018-01-08T15:55:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T04:55:59","slug":"spiridion-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=6891","title":{"rendered":"Spiridion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four years ago I began translating one of George Sand’s novels:\u00a0 Spiridion<\/em>.\u00a0 She was, some say, the first French feminist.\u00a0 I wrote a post about her here<\/a>, not because she was a feminist but because she did what people said she couldn’t do:\u00a0 George Sand was a female who earned her living from writing, which, if it’s difficult in the 21st century, was next to impossible in the 19th.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Two years ago I finished the translation, and SUNY Press agreed to publish it.<\/p>\n

Today, sitting in an airport in a foreign land – an unusual experience no matter how many times I do it – I’ve received an email from them to say\u00a0Spiridion<\/em> is now available as an ebook from their website<\/a>.\u00a0 I’ve had a few short translated pieces published in literary journals, but this is the first novel.\u00a0 It’s a morning of unusual things.<\/p>\n

In May it will be available as a real hold-in-your-hand book.\u00a0 Fantastic!<\/p>\n

Here’s the book cover and summary of the story, with a little bit about me as the translator, copied from the web page.\u00a0 Hope it tickles your 19th-century-French literary fancies!<\/p>\n

\"\"
‘Spiridion’, cover<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An abbot\u2019s ghost searches for an intelligent monk to exhume his manuscript from a hellish crypt and learn the truth that monks lack two things: freedom of inquiry and benevolence.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Both Gothic and philosophical, Spiridion<\/i> tells the story of a young novice, Angel, who finds himself cruelly ostracized by his monastic superiors and terrified by the ghostly visits of his monastery\u2019s founder, the abbot Spiridion. Though he founded the monastery on the search for truth, Spiridion watched his once intelligent and virtuous monks degenerate into a cruel, mindless community. Turning away from the Church and withdrawing into his cell, he poured his energy into a manuscript that tells the \u201ctruth\u201d about Roman Catholic doctrine and monastic life and provides a vision of a new and eternal gospel. The manuscript was buried with him, and his spirit now searches for a monk who is intelligent enough to exhume it from his crypt, which is guarded by hellish spirits, and share its vision with the world.<\/p>\n

Translated into English for the first time in more than 160 years, Spiridion<\/i> offers a fierce critique of Catholic doctrine as well as solutions for living with the Church\u2019s teachings. Although Sand had broken with the Church several years earlier, she nevertheless continued to believe in an omnipotent God, and her novel makes the distinction, as Angel\u2019s protector, Father Alexis, puts it, \u201cbetween the authority of faith and the application of this authority in the hands of men.\u201d As translator Patricia J. F. Worth argues in her introduction, the novel\u2019s emphasis on freedom of inquiry, benevolence, and moral reform inspired other nineteenth-century writers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Matthew Arnold, and Henry James, and the novel is also relevant to twenty-first-century discussions of religious authority and rigid adherence to doctrine.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an excellent translation of a tale of the supernatural by a major French author. With her searing critique of Catholicism and its labyrinthine structures, Sand in Spiridion <\/i>deconstructs her culture in a way similar to what Mary Shelley has done in Frankenstein<\/i>. Both works are effective as horror stories, but both can also sustain serious academic inquiry, yielding still deeper rewards. Beyond academe, serious students of religion will also find that Spiridion<\/i>\u2019s subject matter raises provocative theological questions.\u201d \u2014 Lynn Hoggard, translator of Nelida<\/i> by Marie d\u2019Agoult<\/p>\n

Patricia J. F. Worth<\/b> is a French-English translator and private tutor of English and French. She received her master of translation studies from the Australian National University, Canberra, where she focused on nineteenth-century French literature and recent New Caledonian literature.<\/p>\n

\u00a0*****<\/p>\n

On the SUNY Press web page for\u00a0Spiridion<\/em> there’s a link to what is called the ‘first chapter’, but it will in fact take you to the introductory material.\u00a0 So, to read the first chapter you will have to get the book…<\/p>\n

Happy Reading!<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four years ago I began translating one of George Sand’s novels:\u00a0 Spiridion.\u00a0 She was, some say, the first French feminist.\u00a0 I wrote a post about her here, not because she was a feminist but because she did what people said she couldn’t do:\u00a0 George Sand was a female who earned her living from writing, which, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Spiridion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[157],"tags":[241,713,358,714,156,715,69,716,2,21,646,648,3,717,270],"class_list":["post-6891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-french-literature-and-translation","tag-19th-century-literature","tag-books","tag-france","tag-french-feminist","tag-french-literature","tag-fyodor-dostoyevsky","tag-george-sand","tag-literary-translation","tag-literature","tag-postaday","tag-spiridion","tag-suny-press","tag-translation","tag-translator","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6891"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10227,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6891\/revisions\/10227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}