My Years With Proust - Day 386

But, after casting her eye over the two translations, my mother would have preferred that I should stick to Gallard's, albeit hesitating to influence me because of her respect for intellectual liberty, her dread of interfering with my intellectual life and the feeling that, being a woman, on the one hand she lacked, or so she thought, the necessary literary equipment, and on the other hand ought not to judge a young man's reading by what she herself found shocking.  Happening up certain of the tales, she had been revolted by the immorality of the subject and the coarseness of the expression.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 865

Proust continues to riff upon upon the thought of re-reading the Thousand and One Nights, either the Gallard or the Mardrus translations, both of which his mother had ordered.  It's interesting that his mother had been "revolted by the immorality of the subject and the coarseness of the expression."  I'm guessing the Burton translation was then clearly out of the question.  In my doubtless never to be completed manuscript of my never to be finished book on the epics I've considered whether or not I want to include a chapter on the Thousand and One Nights; at least in this first version I'm not, although I would hope to include it in the second volume, written in demand to the wild popularity of the first (he wrote, knowingly).  I mentioned yesterday that my proposed student trip to Jordan next year will be centered around the Arabian Nights, dealing with the question of how a work that is so synonymous, at least in the western mind, with the Arabic world can be, in so many ways, so utterly unrepresentative of that world and so unread in that world.  As we all know, the tales are mainly of Persian or Indian origin and it's considered pretty scandalous.  The default answer from many Muslims is that the reason that the Arabic world doesn't have an "epic," as much as we from the outside want to attribute the Arabian Nights to this region, is because the Quran stands as their epic.  It's an interesting proposition, and something I want to explore in my never to be finished manuscript to my never to be published book, or at least in my class, if Champlain doesn't cancel it.

Now, having said all that, this is the observation I find most fascinating/insightful: " . . . my mother would have preferred that I should stick to Gallard's, albeit hesitating to influence me because of her respect for intellectual liberty, her dread of interfering with my intellectual life and the feeling that, being a woman, on the one hand she lacked, or so she thought, the necessary literary equipment, and on the other hand ought not to judge a young man's reading by what she herself found shocking."  His mother is interested in his intellectual development, but is also respectful of its independence.  She also feels, and here Proust throws in the disclaimer "or so she thought," that she lacked the "necessary literary equipment" to comment on his readings.  I've been thinking a lot about my grandmother Maude, my father's mother, and how intensely intelligent she was, and how she was blocked by economic and societal limitations from pursuing her education after high school.  This is one, of many, reasons why she was so interested in my path towards my Ph.D.  Both Marcel's mother and grandmother come across as intelligent women who love culture, but obviously there is still an intellectual glass ceiling in place.