The Transparent Style: Or, Is It Time to Translate Shakespeare by Robert I. Katz
Years ago, I read an excellent book by John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist. Gardner was the author of Grendel, Nickel Mountain, Jason and Medea, and many other highly regarded works. He was also a literary critic and a university professor. Gardner advanced the thesis that the purpose of the words is to convey the sights, the sounds, the action and the plot directly into the reader’s awareness…but that the words themselves should be unobtrusive. They should in no way interfere with the immersive, sensory experience of the story. This is generally known as the “transparent” style. This is what Samuel Johnson meant when he said, “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
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