"Solzhenitsyn...is DEAD," Elegant Choice announced dramatically when he came home from work on Sunday. "Solzhenitsyn? But I thought he was from the eighteenth century," I responded wonderingly.
Napoleon was French. Jules Verne was French. Gertrude Stein lived in Paris. Plato ate french fries with his gyros, and Gilgamesh invented French toast. There are other people, you know--people who aren't French. Zachary Taylor. Samuel Gompers. Sun Yat-Sen. Edward Elgar.
I only recognize your subject line from The Great Gilly Hopkins. Did everyone read that, or just my school? She reads that poem out loud and then steals a fistful of money from a blind man who keeps it behind some other poetry books.
Oh no, Richard! Take away my dollars and replace them with...French dollars.
Stranger, I DID read that book in school. The main thing I remember is that Gilly gives her teacher a racist card, and I could not figure out for the longest time why the card was racist, because I was only eight years old and blissfully unencumbered by any knowledge of racist vocabulary. "What cuss," I wondered, totally bewildered, "rhymes with figure"?
Napoleon was French. Jules Verne was French. Gertrude Stein lived in Paris. Plato ate french fries with his gyros, and Gilgamesh invented French toast. There are other people, you know--people who aren't French. Zachary Taylor. Samuel Gompers. Sun Yat-Sen. Edward Elgar.
ReplyDeleteI think that's everyone.
I only recognize your subject line from The Great Gilly Hopkins. Did everyone read that, or just my school? She reads that poem out loud and then steals a fistful of money from a blind man who keeps it behind some other poetry books.
ReplyDeletexo internet stranger
Oh no, Richard! Take away my dollars and replace them with...French dollars.
ReplyDeleteStranger, I DID read that book in school. The main thing I remember is that Gilly gives her teacher a racist card, and I could not figure out for the longest time why the card was racist, because I was only eight years old and blissfully unencumbered by any knowledge of racist vocabulary. "What cuss," I wondered, totally bewildered, "rhymes with figure"?
I was born in the year pig-hundred-fourteen, alas. I think RHE was, too.
ReplyDeletexxoo
All the best people were!
ReplyDeleteI thought the Bible was a French translation, at least the new testament.
ReplyDeleteSadly, my sense of the timeline of literature has no idea that translations even exist.
ReplyDelete