Helen DeWitt Is A Wit

Filming of “The Seven Samurai” from Eiga no Tomo – Eiga no Tomo (映画の友) – Public Domain

I started reading Helen DeWitt’s woefully under-appreciated contemporary classic The Last Samurai this week. It’s mind-blowing, tender, playful, brilliant. It’s more than I’d hoped for. If you’ve never had the pleasure, do yourself a favor and read it ASAP.

The story begins proper when, after spending nearly 50 hours translating a dry German text, Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik, the protagonist Sibylla realizes that the author is at best illogical, certainly deluded, and perhaps insane. Mostly she regrets wasting so much time and effort working through the translation in her head. The experience leads to her leaving academia and eventually to the birth of her über-precocious son. The following is from her reflections on it all:

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. (19)

Whatever you think of the accuracy of the initial metaphor, hopefully that passage conveys a bit of her humor, wit, and intelligence.