Dorothy Sayers. Starkes Gift (tr. 1999)

     Dorothy Sayers. Starkes Gift (tr. 1999) A good translation of the story in which Wimsey first meets and falls in love with Harriet Vane. She stands accused of poisoning Philip Boyes, her erstwhile lover, with whom she broke up when he offered her marriage after having persuaded her, a vicar’s daughter, to live with him for several months. Wimsey finds out that Boyle’s cousin Norman Urquhart had been shortchanged in an aged relative’s will, which provides a motive; and then puzzles out the method, which involves arsenic eating.
     The beginnings of the love affair between Wimsey and Harriet is nicely handled. I don’t think Sayers knew exactly where to go with it, but she did not want Harriet to marry Peter out of gratitude, nor did she want Peter to accept Harriet’s offer of concubinage as any kind of payment for services rendered. By this time Wimsey had already morphed into a much more scholarly gentleman, with a sound grasp of moral philosophy, hence his admiration for Harriet’s refusal to marry the man who had seduced her. Her refusal of his offer of marriage is equally sound, so he does not pressure her, nor does he take up her offer to live with him, a good portent. But it does set Sayers an almost insoluble problem. If these two, destined for each other, are ever to marry, they must do so as equals, which they may be intellectually and before the law, but not morally, since there now exists an obligation between them. It will be Sayers’ task to remove that obligation, which she manages to do in Gaudy Night, but not without a deal more anguish than even fictional characters should have to endure.
Wimsey nags his good friend Insp. Charles Parker into marrying his sister Mary. Parker thinks he isn’t good enough to marry an Hon., an attitude that the Duke and Duchess of Denver approve of, but the Dowager Duchess does not. Sayers doesn’t show us Parker’s and Mary’s courting or married life, even though there is more than a hint that they were intended as a foil to  Pater and Harriet. Authors can be seduced by their creations, too.
     I like Sayers’ books, and have read several of them more than once. This German version is better than Keines Natürlichen Todes, perhaps because the style is less slangy. Slang is always a problem: what one culture finds worthy of slang another either ignores or can speak of only in hushed tones. Slang also dates quickly, so that it is difficult to recapture the intended tone when translating the text a couple of generations later. **½ for the translation. (2007)