Musings of a Literate Engineer

Literature in Transmutation ... can be... okay. I should certainly start with a definition of "transmutation":  the action of changing into another form .  This could be changing literature into a song, a play, a dance; but generally what I'm talking about is a film. My first real experience of Cinema started with a college class I took called, "Film and Literature".  In it, we read a book, saw the movie, and discussed.  In order to have the vocabulary with which to discuss, we also learned something of Cinema:  Genre, mise en scène , stuff like that.  (Of course  we studied Citizen Kane , it was a class on film , frchrissake!)  I don't know how much I learned about Literature , but I did learn something about Film. One of my favorite passages from a favorite book is in Stave III of Dickens'  A Christmas Carol .  The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge out into the town on Christmas Eve and Dickens describes the scene: (If I quoted everything I like

Literature in translation  ... is a consummation devoutly to be un -wished. I once picked up a copy of War and Peace  at the Christmas Bazaar Book Sale.  It was incredibly inexpensive (a dollar? two?), in good condition, and I had never read it.  Of course, it has a reputation of being Great Literature and REALLY LONG. I got the book home and read a few pages before I had to take a trip.  Rather than bring the book with me, I thought I might download a digital copy onto my phone.  I was a little surprised at the number of different available copies there were and their prices were non-zero.  But what really struck me was their lengths.  None of the copies were the same number of pages.  This difference was not due to typesetting, as the app would apply its own font size, chosen by the user.  So I did a little research into why these versions were different and I found... translation. (Boo! Hiss!) War and Peace  was written in Russian (primarily) and French.  There have been a dozen tra