I can go anywhere I want just not home: Ahsoka and Anakin
So my favourite part of the chapter was the way the actual ages of Ahsoka and Anakin played a part in their interaction, Ahsoka tells Anakin that he looks the same and Anakin answered that she looks old, which is true, Ahsoka is close to aging beyond Anakin´s age of death at 46 and while Anakin "looks" like clone wars Anakin, he isn´t just Anakin, this is post ROTJ Anakin, someone who already lived 23 years in the light and 23 years in the darkness, he is Vader, he is Anakin, he isn´t young at all and he is living in a whole other level in the force compared to the one Ahsoka lives, because she is still alive.
In fact the first question Anakin ask Ahsoka is if she still remembers Baylan Skoll, because that means she is still alive, she can still come back, "That´s good" he says.
I love how adult Ahsoka automatically reverts to her teenager personality when she noticed Anakin, she smiles, her eyes bright up, she makes jokes and teases Anakin just like in the good old times, because she missed him so much, in many ways he is her home and if he wasn´t there anymore she could not return home, as simple as that, she could not act as if Vader was Anakin, he was a broken version of her master, consumed by darkness, she probably was happy to hear from Luke Anakin died in the light but he was dead and she didn´t get the chance to say goobye but THIS, this is her brother/father, he is back, he looks the same, she can lower her guard, smile and tease because he is here to take care of things like he used to do when she was a child.
She only gets serious when Anakin isn´t automatically teasing her as well, when he says he needs to teach her one more thing, when he gets serious, then Ahsoka remembers Anakin isn´t just Anakin anymore, she knows him but he´s grown into someone she doesn´t know anymore either.
So Anakin begins by teasing her back, putting her at ease and then, he sends her to the heart of what´s bothering her, the clone wars. In many ways, she is still that child fighting over and over again, she no longer has a particular reason to keep fighting and she is tired. It´s such a good contrarts how while adult Ahsoka is teasing with Anakin, child Ahsoka is grumpy, she complains, she questions, she asks, just like she did in the past, this child is adult Ahsoka allowing herself to be a child again, to not have all the anwers and to complain to Anakin to give her a reason to keep fighting and explain why does it matter anymore. She could not do this with Hera and Sabine because Hera is her friend but they are not that close and she is also her superior in the alliance and Sabine depends on her to make the decisions and guide her but Anakin? He is family, she can complain all day long knowing he will try at least to listen to her and try to guide her to the best of his hability and this isn´t teenager Anakin either, this is post Vader Anakin so she knows she can get snippy, angry, mad and hostile with him all she wants, she has all the right to be and he will take it.
Anakin doesn´t just listens anymore, he counsels but he also pushes her into talking about what she doesnt want to talk about
"Do you really want a padawan?" "Being a teacher isn´t all that"
Low key Anakin is giving her the freedom of not being a teacher if she doesn´t want to be, Ahsoka looks at him affronted but it´s true, she accepted Sabine because Hera wanted her to and Sabine wanted her to but she herself isn´t sure she wants a padawan, in fact she already abandoned Sabine once, what is keeping her from doing the same again? and part of the reason she doesn´t know the answer is that she wants to be able to give Sabine or any other padawan something more than war, death and the training to be a warrior as a legacy but she is convinced there isn´t anything else she can give, because emotionally she is still that little girl forced to fight in a war, mourning for each death, mourning for her master fall and she believes that´s all she is ever going to be in the future. She fears her master fate because she believes that is going to be her fate too.
So Anakin, Vaderkin, tries to explain she has to adapt to the times, his master teached him to be a guardian of peace because that´s what he was, Anakin teached her how to be a soldier because they were fighting in a war and she would have died if he didn´t teach her how to survive war but this doesn´t mean she can´t adapt to the times she and her padawan are living and this is precisely what Ahsoka is refusing to do, she is stil in mourning so she can´t enjoy her present.
Anakin tells her she is more and even if she believes she can´t because she has his teachings in her, she is more because he also is way more than Vader.
So when Ahsoka answers him "you are more but more dangerous and powerful than anybody thoguht" and if that´s what he is, then what hope is there for her if she has inside herself his legacy, his teachings?
Is this what this is about? I gave you a choice live or die
Here Anakin gets mad because she isn´t understanding, she has his legacy but she isn´t him, his fall, his redemption, his good and his bad side are his own, not hers and in time she will have to make her own decisions, adapt, grow and teach her padawan what she had learned, they are the legacy of previous masters but they are also MORE, they are also what each one of them adds to that legacy.
So Anakin brings his other half, Vader, to teach her and test her with the same lesson Anakin learned along with Luke, his Son, you are more, you make your own choices and you can choose again and again and that´s what defines you, only you can define yourself, not others. He pushes Ahsoka with Vader´s persona to defy her to live once again but he also pushes her by showing her , her deepest fear, her falling, her becoming a darksider and he gives her an ultimatum, kill him and die herself, not just physically but the light inside of her, or live and stay in the light.
Ahsoka chooses the light and lets her lightsabers fall, just like Luke did, her lightsabers are no longer her life, she is more than war, she is more than just a warrior fighting in an eternal war but more than that, she is still herself and it´s her choice if she wants to stay being herself or die and fall.
Anakin reverts back from Vader to himself again, proud of her, happy with her choice, he reverts to show her how if he, who was in darkness for so many years, buried and dead inside could still come back, then there´s so much hope for her to make her life anew by not letting her past or her lightsabers define her anymore and this is symbolized with her being taken away from the water towards safety.
In the end, he didn´t just wanted to teach her how to live physically again or how to leave behind her past, enjoy her present and enjoy life, he also wanted her to learn she must live by not falling to the darkness and even if she falls, there´s "Hope for her still" because there was also hope for him as well and now Ahsoka can remember him without mourning, without regret.
Just so many great interactions between them. Loved this chapter. Hope we see what other scenes Anakin is going to have because this story isn´t done yet.
PD: Post ROTJ dead Anakin is so relaxed, happy and vibing, love it, honestly, good for him.
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So yesterday I read "Slimed with Gravy, Ringed by Drink" by Camille Ralphs, an article from the Poetry Foundation on the publication of the First Folio in 1623, a major work without which most of Shakespeare's plays might very well have been lost today, possibly the most influential secular work of literature in the world, you know.
It's a good article overall on the history and mysteries of the Folio. Lots of interesting stuff in there including how Shakespeare has been adapted, the state of many surviving Folios, theories of its accuracy to the text, a really interesting identification of John Milton's own copy currently in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the fascinating annotations that may have influenced Milton's own poetry!!! Do read it. It's not an atrociously long article but there's a lot of thought-provoking information in there.
There's one paragraph in particular I keep coming back to though, so I'm just gonna quote it down here:
...[T]he Play on Shakespeare series, published by ACMRS Press, the publications division of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University... grew out of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s plan to “translate” Shakespeare for the current century, bills itself “a new First Folio for a new era.” The 39 newly-commissioned versions of Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily by contemporary dramatists, who were asked to follow the reasonable principle laid out by series editor Lue Douthit: tamper in the name of clarification but submit to “do no harm.” The project was inspired by something the linguist John McWhorter wrote in 1998: “[the] irony today is that the Russians, the French, and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do … [because] they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak.”
Mainly it's the John McWhorter thing I keep coming back to. Side note: any of my non-native-English-speaking mutuals who have read Shakespeare, I would love to know your experiences. If you have read him in translation, or in the original English, or a mix of both. It's something I do wonder about! Even as an Anglophone reader, I find my experience varies so much just based on which edition of the text I'm reading and how it's presented. There's just so much variety in how to read literature and I would love to know what forces have shaped your own relationships to the stories. But anyway...
The article then goes on to talk about how the anachronistic language in Shakespeare will only fall more and more out of intelligibility for everyone because of how language evolves and yadda yadda yadda. I'm not going to say that that's wrong but I think it massively overlooks the history of the English language and how modern standard English became modern standard English.
First of all, is Shakespeare's language completely unintelligible to native English speakers today? No. Certain words and grammatical tenses have fallen out of use. Many words have shifted in meaning. But with context aiding a contemporary reader, there are very few lines in Shakespeare where the meaning can be said to be "unknown," and abundant lines that are perfectly comprehensible today. On the other hand, it's worth mentioning how many double entendres are well preserved in modern understanding. And additionally, things like archaic grammar and vocabulary are simply hurdles to get over. Once you get familiarized with your thees and thous, they're no longer likely to trip you up so much.
But it's also doubtful that 400 years from now, as the article suggests, our everyday language will be as hard to understand for twenty-fifth century English speakers to comprehend. The English language has significantly stabilized due to colonialism and the international adoption of English as a lingua franca. There are countless dialects within English, but what we consider to be standard international "correct" English will probably not change so radically, since it is so well and far established. The development and proliferation of modern English took a lot of blood and money from the rest of the world, the legacy of which can never be fully restored.
And this was just barely in sight by the time that Shakespeare died. This is why the language of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is early-modern English. It forms the foundations of modern English, hence why it's mostly intelligible to speakers today, but there are still many antiquated figures within it. Early-modern English was more fluid and liberal. Spelling had not been standardized. Many regions of England still had slight variations in preferences for things like pronouns and verb conjugation. We see this even in works Shakespeare cowrote with the likes of Fletcher and Middleton, as the article points out. Shakespeare's vocabulary may not just reflect style and sentiment, but his Stratford background. His preferences could be deemed more "rustic" than many of his peers reared in London.
Features that make English more consistent now were not formalized yet. That's why Shakespeare sounds so "old." It's not just him being fancy. And there's also the fact that blank verse plays are an entirely neglected art nowadays. Regardless of the comprehensibility of the English, it's still strange for modern audiences uninitiated to Elizabethan literature to sit there and watch a King drop mad poetry about his feelings on stage by himself. The form and style of the entire genre is off.
But that, to me, is why we should read Shakespeare. We SHOULD be challenged. It very much IS within the grasp of a literate adult fluent in English to read one of his plays, in a modern edition with proper assistance and context. It is GOOD to be acquainted with something unfamiliar to us, but within our reach. I'm serious. I do not think I'm so much smarter than everyone else because I read Shakespeare. I don't just read the plain text as it was printed in the First Folio! The scholarship exists which has made Shakespeare accessible to me, and I take advantage of that access for my own pleasure.
This is to say that I disagree with the notion that Shakespeare is better suited to be enjoyed in foreign tongues. I think that's quite a complacent, modern American take. Not to say that the sentiment of McWhorter is wrong; I get what he's saying. And it's quite a beautiful thing that Shakespeare's plays are still so commonly staged, although arguably that comes from a false notion in our culture that Shakespeare is high literature worth preserving, at the expense of the rest of time and history. It is true that his body of work has such a high level of privilege in the so-called Western literary canon that either numerous other writers equally deserve, or no writer ever could possibly deserve.
The effort that goes into making Shakespeare's twenty-first century legacy, though, is a half-assed one. So much illustrious praise and deification of the individual and his works, and yet not as much to understanding the context of his time and place, of his influences, forms, and impacts on the eras which proceeded him. Shakespeare seems to exist in a vacuum with his archaic language, and we read it once or twice in high school when we're forced to, with prosaic translations on the adjoining page. This does not inspire a true appreciation in a culture for Shakespeare but it does reinforce a stereotype that he must be somehow important. It's this shallow stereotype that makes it seem in many minds today that it would be worth it to rip the precise language out of the text of a poet, and spit back out an equivalent "modern translation."
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