Reviews for Interstices of night

The average rating for Interstices of night based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-30 00:00:00 Martin Ashton William Henry Drummond was born in Ireland in 1854 (and in 1864, the family immigrated to Canada, settling in Montreal). Best known for his so-called "habitant poetry" (humorous, often parodistic narrative verses about French Canada and French Canadians that were composed in a kind of artificially constructed "dialect" or rather perceived French Canadian tone of voice), during his lifetime William Henry Drummond was actually and indeed one of the most widely read and beloved (admired) poets in Canada. But personally, and in fact ever since I first had to read these poems in high school, I have been very much of two conflicting minds with regard to William Henry Drummond's habitant poetry. Now in and of themselves, the presented and featured poems are generally fun, engaging, satirical, and there most definitely are a number of deliciously sly and successful parodies presented (The Wreck of the Julie Plante for example, is in many ways a wonderful, marvellous parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Wreck of the Hesperus, full of humour, pathos and both an appreciation of the original and showing parodistic criticism thereof). However, William Henry Drummond's superimposed, pseudo French Canadian "lingo" while definitely somewhat humorous and with considerable charm, has also always made me cringe more than a bit, as it does tend to somewhat read like a deliberate berating of French Canadians, making them appear as sweet tempered but generally rather uneducated country bumpkin types of persons (almost like loveable buffoons). Perhaps (and even more than likely) William Henry Drummond was not ever trying to depict French Canadians as peasants, almost as Canadian hillbilly like, but in much of his poetry, this unfortunately tends to at least partially be the case, tends to end up being the end result (or at least, that kind of an aura does strongly exist and permeate throughout). And thus, while I would still and definitely somewhat recommend William Henry Drummond's habitant poetry, I also leave the more than necessary caveat that personally, I do not consider the constructed "typical" habitant (French Canadian) dialect (patois) of these pieces as being entirely politically correct (and indeed, that is actually rather an understatement on my part). Oh and by the way, for fans of L.M. Montgomery, in her (and one of my personal favourites) 1937 novel Jane of Lantern Hill, I am pretty well sure that the habitant poetry Jane recites and which so infuriates her grandmother (as it turns out that Jane's absent father, whom the grandmother has always despised, used to be very much into reciting said habitant poetry) is more than likely understood to have been by William Henry Drummond (and indeed, in the late 1930s, readers would more than probably have well realised that connection without Montgomery even having to name names, which she in fact does not do in Jane of Lantern Hill, as Willian Henry Drummond's name is certainly not ever mentioned)

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-27 00:00:00 Robert Sheriff Doesn't quite work with the translation