Apt quotations

I'm always really impressed when authors introduce each chapter with quotations from poems or other writers. I smile to myself and think how clever this author is to have trawled through literature to have found the perfect bit of Shakespeare or Tennyson or some other poet I haven't heard of, or in more recent works, Baudrillaud or Rimbaud or Derrida. This would have been so hard in the days before the Internet.

I quietly resolve that I'll remember the point of the quotation and see how it applies to what lies ahead. Of course I rarely do and I never, ever go back at the end of the chapter and check.

I'm particularly impressed when the quotations are in foreign languages because this shows that the author has not only read lots and lots but that they're multilingual too. How clever!

But now I wonder how much of that is a complete con job. I read a worthy annotated edition of Stendhal's The Red and the Black recently (and despite 150 pages of notes I couldn't work out what the red and black were) which footnoted eveything that was likely to be remotely outside of the everyday life of the average 15 year old American so "francs" were explained every three pages and Napoleon was explained and so forth. This meant that the dozens and dozens of quotations in French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and English were translated and then attributed where possible. Disappointingly, more than half of them turned out to be made up. The old rascal!