Yesterday my dad suggested I translate The Picture of Dorian Gray into Latin, instead of the Silmarillion. I've no idea what inspired that, because the great genius of translating Tolkien is that it's exactly the same vocabulary as Latin epic - Nautae incolas pugnant, soliders and islands and battles.



But it stuck in my head, and a few minutes later I came up with this epigram:

"in sole te sedento sedebo in tenebris - sic vitae nostrae"

Which isn't even in the finished book, it's a deleted line. "You will sit in the sunlight, and I will sit in the shade - it is like our lives". Dorian to Basil. Or possibly, it's Dorian in the sun and Basil in the shade. Both make a sort of sense. I tried to look up the correct version on google, but the only other occurance of it on the entire web is on my Deviantart account...

As Latin, I am very satisfied with it. I can translate stuff into a sort of pigin Latin, the words and cases are all right but I doubt it'd convince a Roman. For the same indefinable reasons my Latin usually sounds wrong, that sounds completely correct. I'm convinced it's 100% correct.

I've never understood why it was cut - I mean, it's very artificial dialogue, but it's not like Oscar Wilde ever had a problem with that! It'd be my favourite line, were it still in the book. As it stands, I can't just call one great line to mind: my favourite scenes tend to fluctuate. Once, it was the descriptions of the jewels in epic chapter 12, then the end of that chapter; then it was the scene when Dorian wakes up, then his blackmailing Alan a few pages later. It will change again, and my bets are it will change for Basil. I've been going through this period of Basil love for more than two years now, and I can barely bear to read the second half.

Even if to fufil my dream of translating The Silmarillion, I should really be working on it without distraction, I would love to translate maybe one of his poisonous little fairy tales into Latin. The challenge, however, would be this: I love the story of TS, but the style I can take or leave. There are some great bits, but I worship Oscar Wilde's style, so translating it is instantly more daunting.

Time for a digression on Oscar Wilde's short stories. Oscar Wilde is most famous as a creator of witty epigrams, and author of Importance of Being Earnest. Is that his greatest work? Quite possibly. His other plays are more serious, certainly melodramatic, but I'm fiercely fond of them all. It's a pity they're forgotten. His poems, I've talked about before, and I feel they're rightly not talked about. Cruel, but true.

For me he is a storyteller, of which The Picture of Dorian Gray is naturally the finest, but his hordes of short stories are well worth reading if you're a fan of sticky Gothic prose and a fine turn of phrase.

The first was The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and the only one you'd remotely consider handing to a child. Broadly speaking, all these have a solid moral to them and have fairly realistic settings - and endings which satisfy, even if sad. Pomegranates endings are just as good, just as suitable - but they remind one of snatching you in an alleyway and beating you to a grubby pulp. Pomegranates takes no prisoners. It contains:

The Happy Prince - the famous one, and oh is it lovely. I have a friend who, I'm told, cries when attempting to synopsise it.

The Nightingale and the Rose - this is my favourite from the collection. It has the ability to go from "happy" to "bawling eyes out" within 6 pages.

The Selfish Giant - one of the more child-friendly, you might have heard this one repeated by your local church. Like the rest, the imagery is gorgeous.

The Devoted Friend - my least favourite of this set. Like many Wilde works, the irony is in the title - substitute "devoted" for "doormat". As a Doormat Friend myself, I can't really find it all that amusing, as I'm just as much of a sap as Hans.

The Remarkable Rocket - the other one you'd give to children, if only for the charming personifications of animals and fireworks. I love the herald, whose pay keeps being doubled by the greatful king - even though his pay was nothing to begin with.

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories was the second set, firmly based in contemporary reality and evidently for an adult audience. They don't hang together so well, and all are sort-of forgettable. They certainly have less of the OTT Gothic orientalism and fantasy which makes me love the other two. This collection reminds me strongly of Friend 5, I've always thought some of these would really amuse her.

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - the most "Dorian Gray"ly of any of the short stories, this is fairly long. It is a wonderful black comedy about a man who is told he is fated to murder one of his relations by a palmist, so sets out to satisfy destiny before he gets married to his beloved. Hilarity ensues in the shape of a gunpowder packed clock, poisons and other wonderfully hammy murder methods. There's a nice twist too.

The Canterville Ghost - the second one reminding me of Friend 4, especially now she is in America. This is a delightful comedy relying on Victorian stereotypes of Americans, of being all new and efficient and not understanding tradition, as an American family inherit a haunted English home and drive the poor Ghost half mad by their practical refusal to be spooked. The American aspect doesn't work quite as well today, but there are still plenty of people who would take no-nonsense cleaning precautions to spirits!

The Sphinx Without a Secret - very short, and to say any more than that is to spoil the twist.

The Model Millionaire - like Sphynx, too short to discuss, but it's a really sweet story.

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. - half tale, half essay, it's vital you read this with a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Mr Exposition explains to Mr Audience Identification Figure why the aforementioned poems were actually written for a Mr W.H., the picture of which has been found. There's a great story lurking under the surface here, but as it stands the evidence overwhelms the plot. Still, like the final character, I can't help but wonder...

The year after all this, out comes The House of Pomegranites - and you can tell from the title you're in a different realm altogether. Oscar Wilde claims it was "intended neither for the British child nor the British public", and you can see why. As promised above, by now he'd perfected the gut-punching twist (although arguably, he never produced anything as shocking as Nightingale again), and the following just drown in superfluous description.

The Young King - This is another story where you can smell Dorian Gray down the corridor. It always amuses me that though the moral is about rejecting luxury, how much darn fun he has describing it all anyway. You also get an interesting depiction of faith, that fine line between uber-Catholicism and outright paganism all his books tread. I find the end of this story hugely powerful.

The Birthday of the Infanta - Another story you might know, this is a giddy romp around the splendour of the Spanish court, with a cruel ending typical of this collection. It's also very, very beautiful. Cruelty-Beauty would be one way to sum up the whole Wilde thing anyway, it'd be an interesting line of investigation. Like The Young King, the covert moral seems to be "Morally, these beautiful things are evil. But they are still beautiful". Same goes for Dorian Gray, with evil hidden behind beauty - but the beauty is still well worth celebrating.

The Fisherman and his Soul - if you only read one Oscar Wilde short story after this, make it this one. The end is very moving, and the intervening story has all the elements of a fairy tale, but distorted. The individual passages are gorgeous, and it takes time to detour through Witches dances, distant gods and all is wonderful. If you're not a fan, then maybe this'll be the very antithesis of what you can stand - but from my perspective, it is the ultimate.

The Star-Child - similar to The Young King, and possibly the most overt fairy tale ever written by him, complete with talking animals, kind shephards, beggars and magical transformations. Not to be mistaken as one for the kids. Yeh, kinda hackneyed - but pulled off with Wilde style, and it's worth reading the lot if only for the final line.

And that's without discussing his "Poems in prose", or his dinnertime stories which were preserved by the listeners, some of which you may have heard me repeating. I'll talk about them when I don't have coursework. So I leave you with my current favourite lines from Dorian Gray:

"There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either
after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death,
or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the
chambers of the brain sweep phantoms moreterrible than reality itself, and
instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends
to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy,
especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady
of revery.Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they
appear to tremble. Black fantastic shadows crawl into the corners of the
room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the
leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, orthe sigh and sob of
the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house,
as though it feared to wake the sleepers. Veil after veil of thin dusky
gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored
to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand
wherewe have left them, and beside them lies the half-read book that we had
been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at theball, or the
letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.
Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes
back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left
off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the
continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or
a wild longing, it maybe, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a
world that had been re-fashioned anew for our pleasure in the darkness, a
world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or
have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place,
or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the
remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain."