Kipling Hedley <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> This may be the debate that never ends, because there is much wisdom
> in what you say. I, for one, would dearly love to rewrite the dialect
> in most of Kipling's early fiction. Philip Mason, in his May 1986
> foreword to the R.S. Surtees Society edition of Soldiers Three,
> writes:
Orwell, famously, agreed:
Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known
better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines of the
first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought to
have overriden his impulse to make fun of a working-man's accent. In
the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same
language. This is impossible to Kipling, who is looking down a
distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic justice one
of his best lines is spoiled -- for "follow me 'ome" is much uglier
than "follow me home". But even where it makes no difference
musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is
irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the
printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary
alterations when they quote him.
Of course, I would argue that the passage of time has been kinder to
Kipling's choice of how to render dialect than it has been to Orwell's
insistence on seeing in this a class slight -- but Orwell's essay, for
all its class-based interpretation, has a several good insights on
Kipling's work, and remains worth reading:
http://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip
--
Jim Wise
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