The other day I went to Barnes and Noble looking for a book I had wanted to read called Shopclass as Soul Craft, a book written by your typical philosopher/motorcycle repair shop owner about the dehumanizing aspects of the modern workplace - people don't really make things anymore, a tendency to replace skilled labor with un-skilled labor so that workers lose the benefits and stability of learning a trade, how white-collar jobs are increasingly becoming thoughtless, Office Space-like operations, ect. It has been pretty good so far, much in line with what I've been thinking ever since I read Small is Beautiful this past spring (a superior book to this current one, you should go find it at a library somewhere, good stuff) and contains the somewhat troubling revelation that some new model Mercedes do not have a dipstick (we can't even check our own oil now?).
Anyway, speaking of troubling revelations, while in the store I drifted over to the fiction section for a bit (and ended up picking up Three Men in a Boat, supposedly one of the funniest novels of all time, but have yet to start it) which is near the drama section, which is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare. While looking, I overheard a sales rep talking to a mother, presumably there to buy some play for school for her kid. The sales-lady said something along the lines of, "Here is our updated Shakespeare, it has the original text side by side with the text translated into English so you can understand it." Now, I don't go around saying, "By my troth," or calling people "saucy merchants" or anything like that, but really, a translation? Beyond a few marginal notes for anachronisms, I can't see the text as too terribly difficult if you read it slowly enough and think about what is going on. If I was a English major/teacher I might be marginally depressed by all this.
"No Fear Shakespeare" was recommended to me once... it's basically an 'updated' text removing said anachronisms. I was appalled when I discovered what it was that had been recommended to me.
ReplyDeleteThe most depressing part of that soundbyte to myself, however, is that the sales lady apparently doesn't realize that Shakespeare is written in English. At best that means she doesn't realize the difference between middle English (Chaucer) and modern English (Shakespeare). At worst... well, yes. There it is.