A Pilgrim’s Digression

I posted the first part of another story to my Fictions blog. I call it my World War II story and have tentatively titled it “Your Self, or Something Like It.”

The problem of this story as you will see is how to handle dialogue in a foreign language. I confess I am uncertain how to resolve that issue so that the story retains a sense of verisimilitude but is not completely incomprehensible to an English-speaking reader. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Following is a passage from Philip Larkin’s essay “The Pleasure Principle” I find interesting:

[The process of poetry] consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.

from Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993. 214.

It srikes me that on one level, Larkin has here reformulated Wordsworth’s dictum that good poetry is strong emotion recollected in tranquility. Larkin extracts it to its farther point, that good poetry allows someone in another time and place to recollect (”re-create,” Larkin says) that emotion in tranquility.

Larkin may have owed an unacknowledged debt to the Romantics. If I were a scholar, I might write a paper on that. Since I am not a scholar, I won’t. I will just throw the idea out there for someone else, if they want to pick it up.