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So, I started to read Isabel Allende's "Zorro" but got derailed by severe translation failure in the English edition, when I hit page 39's sentence (about a painting) "it was one of the horrors commissioned by the square unit in Spain, which had become popular in California."
Er, the what? WTF is the square unit? I suspect, following a moment's Googling, that Allende is referring to the Tercio Espana, a post-Renaissance regiment of pikemen who were sometimes called The Spanish Square - perhaps this military unit commissioned paintings for the HQ and officers' mess?
Fuck knows, cos it's obviously something that would be clear to Spanish readers in the original Spanish, but the translator has neither amended the text to clarify, nor added a footnote to explain. The words square unit aren't even capitalised as the name of a regiment or the like would be, so who knows if that's what's meant. Either way it put me right out of the book - I'll have to find one in Spanish, I suppose.
So I started dipping into Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema, by (usually a music historian) Gary Giddins. This is basically a trawl through Hollywood from the 1900s to the 1960s - plus Blade Runner and Howl's Moving Castle - with about half a page each devoted to his thoughts on 200 or so classic movies.
Overall it's not much of a history or really an analysis - insofar as the word count demands brevity or everything - so it comes over as a collection of blog posts on the classics he's watched each week. Which is fun as far as it goes, but there are some disappointments.
It's very Hollywood-centric, and a lot of my favourites are barely mentioned. Basil Rathbone, for example, is mentioned only twice. There are only a couple of mentions of Conrad Veidt as well (described as "marvellously slimy" in the entry for A Woman's Face - which comes in a chapter on Joan Crawford - and Jaffar referred to as "His sword draped by his cloak suggesting a large tail" in the two pages devoted to Thief Of Bagdad. In fact Werner Krauss gets more wordage than Connie, in the brief spot on German Expressionism.
Still, collections of thoughts on movies watched are always going to be totally subjective, and with so many vintage films mentioned, there's always going to be something that makes you think "oh, I'll have to check that out," even if you're a longtime classics fan.
Er, the what? WTF is the square unit? I suspect, following a moment's Googling, that Allende is referring to the Tercio Espana, a post-Renaissance regiment of pikemen who were sometimes called The Spanish Square - perhaps this military unit commissioned paintings for the HQ and officers' mess?
Fuck knows, cos it's obviously something that would be clear to Spanish readers in the original Spanish, but the translator has neither amended the text to clarify, nor added a footnote to explain. The words square unit aren't even capitalised as the name of a regiment or the like would be, so who knows if that's what's meant. Either way it put me right out of the book - I'll have to find one in Spanish, I suppose.
So I started dipping into Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema, by (usually a music historian) Gary Giddins. This is basically a trawl through Hollywood from the 1900s to the 1960s - plus Blade Runner and Howl's Moving Castle - with about half a page each devoted to his thoughts on 200 or so classic movies.
Overall it's not much of a history or really an analysis - insofar as the word count demands brevity or everything - so it comes over as a collection of blog posts on the classics he's watched each week. Which is fun as far as it goes, but there are some disappointments.
It's very Hollywood-centric, and a lot of my favourites are barely mentioned. Basil Rathbone, for example, is mentioned only twice. There are only a couple of mentions of Conrad Veidt as well (described as "marvellously slimy" in the entry for A Woman's Face - which comes in a chapter on Joan Crawford - and Jaffar referred to as "His sword draped by his cloak suggesting a large tail" in the two pages devoted to Thief Of Bagdad. In fact Werner Krauss gets more wordage than Connie, in the brief spot on German Expressionism.
Still, collections of thoughts on movies watched are always going to be totally subjective, and with so many vintage films mentioned, there's always going to be something that makes you think "oh, I'll have to check that out," even if you're a longtime classics fan.
