Orson Scott Card

I heard Orson Scott card speak at a luncheon banquet I attended today. I' know he's a big name in SciFi and fantasy, but all I've read of his would be most of the Alvin Maker series. I enjoyed those books quite a bit, but lost interest after the third because it took so long for him to write the 4th one. I think I read that two, but I got the feeling that he had lost interest.

I also read an editorial from the New York Times from awhile back in which Card celebrated the end of the Star Trek Franchise. The last series had been cancelled and there were no new films in the works. He prefers scifi as literature as opposed to TV or film.

He surprised me in that he was quite scholarly. He also pissed me off a little with two comments he made.

First, he suggested that Shakespeare be translated into our vernacular, remarking that we are the only country that can't read Shakespeare in our own language. I would argue that, no matter what language, no matter how skilled the translator, if it ain't in the Queen's Renaissance English it ain't Shakespeare. You'd just be reading a translation of Shakespeare. The poetry of Shakespeare word would be lost in translation.

He might have been kidding, but no one laughed.

The problem with Shakespeare is that most of us have had the same exposure, usually from High school, that does Shakespeare a great injustice. We read one Shakespeare play a year. That's it. We probably skip this in our junior year, because that's when we get American Lit. Then we get another dose in our senior year, and then, if we don't go to college, we're done.

I learned in grad school that, if you're going to learn much about Shakespeare, you need him in large doses. If high school teachers are going to teach him, they should have their students read at least three plays in a year, preferably back-to-back. That way, the students get used to the quirks of Shakespearean English and learn that, at his best, Shakespeare is pretty simple.

The other comment Card made, the more I think about it, contradicts his opinion about Shakespeare. He regaled the teaching of haiku because it comes from an "unstressed" language and can't be adequately adapted into English. So, Shakespeare can be translated, but haiku can't.

I honestly think that he, and many others, don't get haiku. Haiku is as much about sharing an image of a moment without commentary as it is about from. The 5/7/5 format does probably work better in Japanese that it does in English, but many writers of haiku in languages other than Japanese abandon that strict form anyway. They emphasize brevity over syllable counts.

Not that I write the best haiku. But, apparently, neither does Card.

He was a fine speaker though, otherwise. He had a lot to say about poetry. And he had a lot to say about how we teach it and how perhaps we would do better to not overly praise every poem a student might write, but save the praise for student poetry that was really high-quality.