Offensive Language

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Offensive

28 Pounds doesn't sound very modest to me!

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.
Eriq La Salle 

I came across a stumbling block recently when I realised that no one had ever told me they had been offended by my writing. I felt like I hadn't pushed nearly enough boundaries if this was the case. But then I asked myself, does writing have to offend? Am I crap because I'm not Salman Rushdie? Some of my favourite works offended the hell out of me when I first read them. I hated Gregor Samsa's family when I read Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'. Why? Well, I guess it's because he was so devoted to the family that banished him as a freak and then rejoiced in his death. Am I being unfair? I'm really not sure how I'd react to a family member turning into a giant cockroach but I'd like to think that I'd still hang out with them. Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' was another one that offended me - I hated the colonial aspects of the text: the descriptions of the natives as being sub-human. Then I realised that both of these causes of offense are products of their time. Kafka wrote 'Metamorphosis' at a time when people were beginning to turn against Jews in Europe just before World War II. Kafka was merely relating this to us in an uncanny little package. Conrad was in the middle of the colonial era where it was common to see people as being sub-human because of their different culture. Perhaps his point was to make others aware of the folly of this - I really can't remember. In any case, there's no offense in either of these stories when they are taken contextually. It'd be like being offended by Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' because you don't get the satire. When I think about my favourite authors now, I'm not offended by anything they've written but that makes sense - many of them are my contemporaries and write within my time. Of course, I love classics, offensive books such as 'Metamorphosis', 'Frankenstein' (if you don't find Frankenstein offensive re-read it with a modern view) and 'The Count of Monte Cristo' among them. They are of their time, though, and that's not offensive — that's context. So, I'm cool with not being offensive. I'm still going to aim for challenging, though.

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A less glassy Integral than I expected

 I'm sure I've bemoaned this before but I really don't have time to do as regular updates to my blog as I once did due to studying honours this year. One of the texts that I'm working on is Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We'. I adored this book when I first read it - it's the predecessor of another favourite, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell. I did, however, receive a sharp wake-up call when I downloaded it to my Kindle last week. I do own the paper copy but for researching the Kindle's search function cuts out heaps of time. So I started searching. I tried 'One State', the name of the Earth in Zamyatin's united nation. No results. That's weird. So, I started flicking through my paper copy to find a reference that I could cross with my Kindle version. It turns out that I have two different translations which are not just slightly off but have very different words for core themes. My Kindle calls the 'One State' the 'United State', a term that I'm not overly pleased with as it seems to refer to America in a book which was written in the USSR. As I flicked further I realised that it was not only key terms but the flavour of the book had changed. The Kindle version was clumsy. Perhaps this is a sign that it's a more correct translation but I liked the flow of the paper version. The case being that I don't speak Russian I can't tell what the difference really is. It would take me a long time to learn Russian to a standard where I could understand Zamyatin's original words for what they were. So, I'm choosing enjoyment of reading over clumsy. If anyone knows what the better translation is, though, I'd be very interested in learning this.