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Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865




The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to
resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which was the first
ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance,
Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks
has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable
vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might
have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of
dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the
elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs,
a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and
prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the
order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this
always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt
Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his
style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where
the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the
German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment
will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad,
disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's
translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of
the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as
they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of
affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor
and abandonment.

There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble
swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth
Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe groeszere Wellen auf mich
zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves!
Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and
bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams,
and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying
flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the
sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down to the
flowers," etc. But this may appear finical to Mr. Brooks. We certainly
do not press it critically against his great and general success. Such a
paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is
very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has
sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses
and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the
sentiment, and is within the translator's liberty.

It always seemed to us that the finest part of "Hesperus," and one of
the finest passages of German literature, is contained in the Ninth
Dog-Post-Day and some pages of the Tenth. The Ninth, in particular,
which is a perfect idyl, describes Victor's walk to Kussewitz: all the
landscape is made to share and symbolize his rapture: the people in the
fields, the framework of an unfinished house, the two-wheeled hut of the
shepherd, are not only well painted, but turned most naturally to the
help of interpreting his feeling. The chapter has also a direct and
unembarrassed movement, which is rare in this romance. And it is
beautifully translated.

The reader must understand that Victor is called by various names; so
that, if he merely dips into the book, as we suspect he will until his
sympathy is enlisted by some fine thought, his ignorance will increase
the frantic and dishevelled state of the story. Victor is Horion,
Sebastian, and Bastian; a susceptible youth, profoundly affected by the
presence of noble or handsome women, and brought into situations that
test his delicacy. He smuggles a declaration of love into a watch which
he sells, in the disguise of an Italian merchant, to the Princess
Agnola, on occasion of her first reception at the court of her husband.
He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of
Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread
lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique
at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he
has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather
florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man
interrupts. But all this time, the inflammable Victor was indulging a
kind of tenderness for Joachime, maid-of-honor and attractive female. As
the love for Clotilde deepens, he must destroy these partialities for
Agnola and Joachime. This is no easy matter; what with the watch-paper
and various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the
true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the
partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible
and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into
Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to
herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with
sudden coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the
story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a
honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage
and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own
father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the
genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is
visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of
Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.

However, the characters are all respectably connected at last, and the
reader does not care to understand how they were ever disconnected: for
Lord Horion's motive in putting the children of the old Prince out of
the way, and keeping up such an expensive mystification, can be
justified only by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned
by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the
sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English
school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as
improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it.
"Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of
female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul
sometimes affects to say cynical things of women, he cannot veil his
passionate regard for them, nor his profound appreciation of the
elements of their influence in forming true society and refining the
hearts of men. Notice the delicacy of the "Extra Leaf on Houses full of
Daughters." It is chiefly with the women of his romances that Jean Paul
succeeds in depicting individuals. And when we recollect the corrupt and
decaying generation out of which his genius sprang, like a newly created
species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy
country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his
incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners,
his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics
are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the
narrative does not hide them.

In view of a second edition, we refer to Mr. Brooks's consideration a
few places, with wonder at his general accuracy in the translation of
obscure passages and the explanation of allusions.

Vol. I. page 22. _Sakeph-Katon_ (Zaqueph Qaton) is an occasional
pause-accent of the Hebrew, having the sense of "elevator minor," and is
peculiar to prose.

Page 68. The famous African Prince Le Boo deserves a note.

Page 111. _Ripieno_ is an Italian musical term, meaning that which
accompanies and strengthens.

Page 114. _Graenswildpret_ does not mean "frontier wild-game," but game
that, straying out of one precinct into another, gets captured: stray
game, or impounded waif.

Page 139. The note gives the sense, but the corresponding passage in the
text would stand clearer thus: "not a noble heart, by any means; for
such things Le Baut's golden key, though bored like a cannon, could
fasten rather."

Page 179. A note required: the passage of Shakspeare is, "Antony and
Cleopatra," Act V., Scene 2:--

"His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck
A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, the earth."

_Territory of an old lady_ should be "prayer of an old lady." _Gebet_,
not _Gebiet_.

Page 209. _Eirunde Loch_ would be better represented by its anatomical
equivalent, _foramen ovale_. It should be closed before birth; in the
rare cases where it is left open after birth, the child lives half
asphyxiated.

Page 224, note. _Semperfreie_ is not from the Latin, but comes from
_sendbarfreie_, that is, eligible, free to be sent or elected to
offices, and consequently, immediately subject to the _Reich_, or Holy
Roman Empire.

Page 235. An _Odometer_ is an apparatus for measuring distances
travelled by whatsoever vehicle.

Page 275. _Incunabula_ means specimens of the first printed edition of a
work; also the first impressions of the first edition, the firstlings of
old editions.

Page 317. _Wackelfiguren_ means figures made of _Wacke_, a greenish-gray
mineral, soft and easily broken.

Page 322. The note is equivocal, since the phrase is used by fast women
who keep some one in their pay.

Vol. II., page 122. _Columbine_ is not equivalent to ballet-dancer; it
is the old historical personage of the pantomime, confederate and lover
of Harlequin, who protects her from false love.

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