The Third Man
Initially written as a screenplay Greene later transferred the film treatment to novel form as a novella, published together with The Fallen Idol. Set in post-war Vienna The Third Man concerns the mysterious Harry Lime, a black market trader thought by the authorities to be dead.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
4mentions
4people
2017–2024years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Third Man is another example. Graham Greene wrote a treatment before he wrote the screenplay. The treatment, which wasn't written with publication in mind, was later published as a novella, and it differs from the film in several notable ways, because Greene and the directors changed things during the writing of the screenplay and the principal making of the film.
- They are an odd couple for me in another way. I think their best writing is found outside of their fiction.
For Evelyn Waugh it is his letters. For Greene (with the exception of The Third Man) it is In Search of a Character: Two African Journals.
- Translations are not made every day; one has to pick from what is available (and in the public domain at that, for a website like this), and the translation used here is evidently the one published in 1922 in 21 volumes as being by "Fathers of the English Dominican Province" but actually by one person, Father Laurence Shapcote (1864–1947). (Via the article linked from https://thomistica.net/news/2011/9/13/the-shapcote-translati...)
> In 1910 the Province decided to have the Summa translated. Fr Laurence brought out the first volumes before he left England, but the bulk of the work was done in South Africa. In addition he also translated the Summa Contra Gentes (4 volumes, 1923 –1929), and the Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (3 volumes, 1932–34). This translation of the Summa is ‘literal’. […] In a way, for students who have no Latin, the Shapcote translation gives a better idea, more of the feel, of the original, even though it does not make conversation with St Thomas so easy.
> Laurence Shapcote never wrote anything: there is no way of telling what his own ‘Thomism’ was. It is a century since he started work. He did not respond to suggestions that he should unmask his anonymity. Readers who are thankful for this literal translation would surely be all the more grateful if they knew that it was done by Laurence Shapcote alone, in very austere conditions, on the Rand and in Natal, doggedly translating his way through the major works of St Thomas.
But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s. (For reference, 1950 was the year of publication of Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of stories published earlier, or C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"; Greene's The Third Man and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four were published the previous year.) In what sense is the sentence fragment you quoted not modern English? You gave an example of what you're not looking for; could you also give an example of how you would rewrite it?
And what does this have to do with "thou", which went out of use in the 17th century? (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thou&oldid=102516...) A translation into standard English wouldn't have used "thou" even in 1950 (and this 1922 translation doesn't either, except in literal quotes from the King James Bible).
(Of course, neither of us is using the technical meaning of "modern English" which includes Shakespeare too https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_English&ol... .)
- Dreyfus was my favorite Berkeley professor, and taught my favorite undergrad course, Existentialism in Literature and Film, in which he introduced me to Kierkegaard, Camus, Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour, and Graham Greene's The Third Man. His Heidegger class was also great, and there he also introduced us to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I loved his lectures and he was also a nice guy... a lot nicer and more approachable than his also famous colleague John Searle.
