Ask, and ye shall recieve! (Punctuation and paragraphs are of my own devising, since the original is in audio.)
And you know from Famous Romans [an earlier lecture series] how much I admire Julius Caesar. In my mind, he is the greatest statesman ever to live: A man of enormous vision and courage, a man of genius who amidst a busy life composed works of history--his commentaries to describe the victories in Gaul--that are the finest examples of Latin prose ever written. A military genius who didn't begin to command until he was thirty-nine years of age, and then never lost a battle; conquering the whole of Gaul. And a statesman, who envisioned Rome not as a narrow republic, ruling an empire for its own gratification, but as a world state--ruling from Britain all the way out to Iraq, and from the sands of the Sahara to the North Sea, in which every inhabitant of that empire enjoyed personal liberty, the freedom to live as they chose, the freedom to follow their own occupation, to make money and to be prosperous, all equal under the magisterial rule of great Caesar.
And Caesar is a world historical force. And like a world historical force, we cannot judge him by the values of ordinary life. Many a beautiful little flower must be trampled underfoot before a great figure like Caesar. War? Why, the conquest of Gaul! Plutarch tells us that Caesar killed a million Gauls, sold a million into slavery, and left one million free to become good Roman citizens. You might ask, what had the Gauls done to be invaded? Well, they had to be invaded because the demands of empire justified it. And history would justify it. And the French today are deeply proud of Caesar and the great conquest that created the nation of France.
-From Lecture 18 (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) of Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life, by J. Rufus Fears
Yeah, typing all that out gave me even bigger creeps than when I was paraphrasing from memory. Gotta love the dehumanization of the Gauls Caesar killed and enslaved ("beautiful little flower" barf). not to mention the blithe justification for Caesar's atrocities. Besides, the statement that Caesar created a Rome where everyone had rights and everyone was equal is just contradicted on its face by what he did. I'm not unaware of the complexities of history, and I certainly recognize that great crimes can pave the way for greater prosperity and peace. I do, however, draw a line at dismissing the very real damage done in the name of getting hard-ons for the criminals.
did they keep the puns in?
Not so much in direct translation, but they were careful to add footnotes to explain the puns in the original. It was like the translators wanted to make really, really sure the readers know how funny the original is. I appreciated the effort even if there were more footnotes than I was used to reading in a comic book, and the comics were funny even without the puns. I did hear that Asterix is huge in France, and I certainly enjoyed the translated books I read.
there's a reason the stereotypical bit of dialogue to indicate 'history class' is "nos ancêtres les Gaulois..."
Wooden condoms? That sounds... painful, lol. So much for J. Rufus Fears' speaking for the French. I can imagine, say, Renaissance French intellectuals shoving their Roman past in everyone's faces because ancient Rome and Greece were da shit back then, but then came the Enlightenment and everyone moved on to nationalism AFAIK.
(Speaking of French nationalism, La Marseillaise has been playing nonstop in my head this past week or so. I'll be blogging about it one of these days.)
no subject
Yeah, typing all that out gave me even bigger creeps than when I was paraphrasing from memory. Gotta love the dehumanization of the Gauls Caesar killed and enslaved ("beautiful little flower" barf). not to mention the blithe justification for Caesar's atrocities. Besides, the statement that Caesar created a Rome where everyone had rights and everyone was equal is just contradicted on its face by what he did. I'm not unaware of the complexities of history, and I certainly recognize that great crimes can pave the way for greater prosperity and peace. I do, however, draw a line at dismissing the very real damage done in the name of getting hard-ons for the criminals.
Not so much in direct translation, but they were careful to add footnotes to explain the puns in the original. It was like the translators wanted to make really, really sure the readers know how funny the original is. I appreciated the effort even if there were more footnotes than I was used to reading in a comic book, and the comics were funny even without the puns. I did hear that Asterix is huge in France, and I certainly enjoyed the translated books I read.
Wooden condoms? That sounds... painful, lol. So much for J. Rufus Fears' speaking for the French. I can imagine, say, Renaissance French intellectuals shoving their Roman past in everyone's faces because ancient Rome and Greece were da shit back then, but then came the Enlightenment and everyone moved on to nationalism AFAIK.
(Speaking of French nationalism, La Marseillaise has been playing nonstop in my head this past week or so. I'll be blogging about it one of these days.)