Tea at Trianon: On the Birthday of Sigrid Undset

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 23, 2025

On the Birthday of Sigrid Undset

From The Catholic Thing:

Fran Maier recently expressed concern about Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey, which jettisons the familiar grand summoning of the muse to “sing” for something more casual: “Tell me about a complicated man.” This attempt to translate in our own image is nothing new, and not always bad. Seamus Heaney chose to translate hwaet, the opening word of Beowulf (essentially a call to attention, formerly rendered as something like “listen,” “lo,” or the admittedly antiquated “hark”) as “So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by. . . .” Indeed, where the reader once may have heard an Anglo-Saxon scop calling across the centuries, he now hears the Dublin or Boston Irishman at the bar in mid-story: “So, there was this guy by my cah. . . .”

Past generations seemed not to need such condescension. A 1937 Book-of-the-Month Club promotional for Kristin Lavransdatter claims that, in the ten years since the club’s founding, Undset’s story has remained the enduring favorite: “This remarkable trilogy has been more deeply enjoyed by the real booklovers of the nation than any novel published in the past decade.” Calling the story “as modern and as ancient as the passions of humankind,” the ad echoes what the Archer translation was able to communicate to hundreds of thousands of average readers: “Years pass, long years, and do their work. This is a book, in short, that leaves you rich in memories, as Time does itself.”
Kristin Lavransdatter is, in the Archer translation, quite simply a book that sings. It sang out to Dorothy Day and her friend Frieda, whose “beach house remained unswept, her husband and son unfed” while she devoured it. It sang out to Catholic converts like Deal Hudson, whose lives it transformed. It sang out to Southern Agrarian Andrew Lytle, who, in his nineties, wrote one final work, an homage to the novel simply entitled Kristin. And so it sings to me of a life spent striving. (Read more.)