And somehow yet one more thing about Orestes Fasting And Pylades Drunk has popped into my head:
I suspect this is only relevant to a particular translation, as I don’t know how it goes in French, but over in Grantaire’s introduction we have (so help me, I know it by heart)-
The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras
And then in OFPD we have-
“Might as well kill two birds with one stone, he said; and then, turning to Enjolras, he added gently, “If you don’t mind.”
So s’like…in his last moments of life, Grantaire gets to be a bird too, Enjolras’s equal. And even though the whole thing is probably just a accident of translations and colloquialisms, I like it…
I don’t think this was completely an accident
The majority of the lexis associated with Grantaire is pretty damn negative. Not only the whole “inordinately homely… impossible… dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas” [There is a whole slew more, and the spleen thing, there is even a chapter titled ‘Night Begins to Fall on Grantaire’, oh Hugo]. A lot of this description also contains many plosive phonemes; “dead drunk… tender… deafening… troubled”. Yet in O&P we get “risen… live… clear and clean… immense blazing light…”. Positive lexis. The predominantly plosive phonemes are replaced with clear sonorants. This is a translator thing, but it’s still pretty damn important. On a phonological level alone, this could be read as an indicator of intense happiness, but
the words
and they’re Hugo’s
this is some of the most positive lexis ever associated with Grantaire in the novel.
d’you know what you could read this as?
The happiest he ever was is just before his death.
Oh, the words used in Grantaire’s last scene break my heart. In this translation you get ‘strong voice’ ‘risen’ ‘immense gleam’ ‘brilliant glance’ ‘firm stride’, and my favourite, ‘transfigured’…it’s all the exact opposite of what we got when we first met him.
I always wondered if you could read Grantaire being ‘dead drunk’ for the whole battle as being like a symbolic death? And that when he wakes (and instantly decides to die with Enjolras, probably without even thinking about it) it’s like he’s shed all the bad parts of himself?