The Sanest Man in the World

Christmas came early for me this year.

I was browsing through Google Books (a great resource, if you haven't looked through it already -- I highly recommend it) when I discovered that Penguin Books is publishing a new translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel by M.A. Screech.

Who is Rabelais? Who is M.A. Screech?

For those of you who know me, you know that the French monk and physician Francois Rabelais (1494?-1553) is one of my favorite authors (try to imagine an author who makes James Joyce appear pellucid and the baked beans scene in Blazing Saddles seem refined), and that I have had a webpage devoted to him on the Internet for almost a decade.

If you're interested you can take a look at the webpage here:

http://members.aol.com/Feuillade/TomMoran14.index.html

Sounds intriguing, doesn't he? By the way, if you're wondering about the odd look of the page, it's colored the way it is because red and white are the colors of wine. And Rabelais loves wine.

Anyway, M.A. Screech is one of the world's foremost experts on Rabelais. According to his publisher, he is "a fellow of All Souls College and an honorary fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, as well as a fellow of the British Academy. He is a world-renowned Renaissance scholar who has published widely on Rabelais, Montaigne, and Erasmus." His book Rabelais, published by Cornell University Press in 1979 and long out of print (and almost totally impossible to find -- I won't tell you how many years it took me to get my hands on a copy before I found one in a used bookstore in Toronto), is one of the indispensible guides to a very difficult author.

For years I've been thinking to myself that Screech should translate Rabelais himself -- or at the very least make a revision of Jacques LeClercq's Modern Library translation -- and today I find out totally by accident that not only has he actually done it, Penguin is going to be publishing it next month!

As you can see, this makes me very happy.

So I'm recomending that all the readers of CelticProgressive (however many that is -- I have no idea how many of you are out there) make a New Year's resolution to try reading Rabelais in M.A. Screech's new translation at some point in 2007. As a character in John Fowles's Daniel Martin puts it, Rabelais comes off as one of the sanest men who ever lived, and his gusto for both living and knowledge is something we could all stand to be inspired by.

Tom Moran