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Wuthering Heights
When Dante Gabriel Rossetti read the novel Wuthering Heights, he wrote to a friend: "The action takes place in Hell, but the places, I don't know why, have English names.
That is from Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 16, 2008 at 05:06 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
In context here: Posted by: Kat at May 16, 2008 6:09:37 PM
In context here (perhaps correctly posted this time):
Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854-1870, at the Internet Archive
(The book doesn't quote it exactly: "The action is laid in hell, only it seems places and people have English names there." The translator being more faithful to Borges than to Rossetti? :-))
Posted by: Kat at May 16, 2008 6:11:09 PM
Borges liked to put real quotes on fictional people and false quotes on real people.
And perhaps he quoted it by memory so the translator is being faithfull to Borges who wrote it that way or translated it that way. The Borges translator need not to be faitfull to Rossetti
Posted by: karl at May 16, 2008 9:35:59 PM
If you haven't heard it, one of my favorite choral pieces is "Sudden Light," which is based on a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. God bless the PRB!
Posted by: JH at May 16, 2008 11:44:46 PM
