JULY 17, 2014
POSTED BY BRAD LEITHAUSER
You pick up a novel. If it’s any good, before long it has you trying to get into its characters’ heads. What are they feeling? What will they do? Can they be trusted? But, behind such thoughts, broader and subtler questions arise: What is the author aiming at? What was he or she feeling when these paragraphs were written? As for the book’s perceived inconsistencies: Was the author being inattentive, or were you? Literary reading soon grades into complex efforts at mind reading.
But more complicated still—and, in some ways, more rewarding still—is the attempt to read a book through someone else’s eyes. Your thoughts triangulate. You wonder, What did person X feel when he read Y’s book?
It needn’t be a novel. Maybe it’s a collection of stories, poems, even essays. Somebody you’re interested in—your person X—found this book entrancing. It’s no longer sufficient to know what the author was thinking. Now you want to know what person X thought the author was thinking.
Perhaps you read a book that you don’t much care for. Then you discover that some writer you adore, and with whom you feel psychologically aligned, loved it. So you open it once more, this time attempting to apprehend it through his eyes. “What did he see in it?” you ask yourself. The question provides a rhythmic march through its pages: What did he see? What did he see?
Some books are read chiefly in a triangular fashion. I was surprised recently to discover that Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, first published in 1567, remains in print. Likely, this is not purely a result of its literary merits—Golding’s translation was the one from which Shakespeare absorbed the transformations of the Roman poet who was, arguably, his greatest influence. Needless to say, Shakespearean scholars have sifted through Golding’s soil with a fine-toothed rake, seeking to turn up a familiar glint—a borrowed phrase, a recycled simile.