translate this to persian:
Be comforted: that sentence did have a main clause and wasn’t simply a
fragment of massive proportion. But we’ll stick to the interesting part. Who is a
“nothusband”? Have you ever thought of children’s feet as possessing
“impotent” or “static” rage? Really? Not even once? Hemingway (don’t worry,
he’s coming) counseled writers to write with nouns and verbs. Sage advice,
mostly. Unless you’re Faulkner, who writes with adjectives and says the most
amazing things. Think about the “biding,” “dreamy,” “victorious” dust. How is
dust ever victorious or biding, to say nothing of dreamy? The answer is, it never
was. Until he made it so. Or “outraged recapitulation.” Just magnificent. And I,
for one, would give up large chunks of my career to have written “that grim
haggard amazed voice,” although I know I would have lacked the courage to
have dropped the commas even had the words occurred to me. The thing is,
Faulkner requires a special kind of labor from readers, and I’m not talking here
about untangling those gargantuan sentences, although that’s labor-intensive as
well. What, for instance, does that voice sound like, all grim and haggard and
amazed? In what way is dust victorious or recapitulation outraged? His out-ofthe-blue adjectives and obscure, slightly archaic nouns make us sit up in
astonishment, but they also remind us of an obligation. We feel the rightness, the
aptness of his descriptors, but then we have to go to work.
Hemingway takes a rather different approach, not how much can I pack in
here, but how little can I say? For him, the real drama of life lies in what goes
unsaid, the meaning behind our conversations. Everyone knows his simple
sentences—a handful of words, subject-verb-object-and-get-out, hardly any
adjectives, fewer adverbs, nouns and verbs. I want to talk about his adjectives.
They’re just as amazing as Faulkner’s: “good,” “fine,” “all right,” “swell,”
“nice.”
Wait a minute. What’s so special about “nice”? It’s not “haggard,” or even
“victorious.”
That, my dear Watson, is what is so remarkable. “Nice” is the dog that didn’t
bark in the night. Consider his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). First of
all, there’s the verisimilitude: Hemingway is capturing the speech of a certain set
of people at a specific moment in history. Those people, expatriates from
America, chiefly, but also England, hanging out in Paris and Spain and trying to
forge new lives amid the personal debris after the Great War, are, like the
speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” shoring their fragments against the
ruins of a crumbling civilization. More often than not, they speak in those same
fragments, little snippets designed to reveal as little as possible. These characters
are all damaged goods, riddled with injuries physical and psychological, stripped
of illusion about the goodness of humanity or the nobility of the cause, too
familiar with emotion and suffering. Jake Barnes’s severed male member is only
the most spectacular—and representative—damage done by the war. Everyone
has suffered and lost, whether friends, sanity, or pieces of bodies or psyches.
Their speech, accordingly, is designed to suppress feeling, to reveal as little as
possible about their inner lives. Robert Cohn, the friend Jake detests, sins against
the tribe in various ways. He’s privileged (a Princeton graduate), successful
among men still struggling to establish themselves, Jewish among Gentiles, left
out of the experience of warfare, excessively earnest, insufficiently guarded.
Perhaps worst of all, he says too much.