A note on some prose styles

I must add here that Clive’s prose feels deathly leaden to my ears, pedestrian in the extreme, the very definition not of prose of but of prosaicness. I have these few days been washing these poor ears of mine with Ghalib (in Russell’s translation) wherein I find sentences like this:

“While I dwelt in this same seclusion and distress, a cruel, ruthless man who knew not the fear of God – may he dwell in eternal torment – in the blackness of the night killed with a musket shot William Fraser Sahib Bahadur, the Resident of Delhi and unhappy Ghalib’s benefactor. My heart felt afresh the grief of a father’s death. My soul was shaken within me.”

Etc.

For about a year now I have been trying to emulate the manly style of Joseph de Maistre: short sentences shorn of adjectives and subordinate clauses. Now, for a change, I think I should try to emulate Ghalib’s flowery Persian. I shall make a study of Russell’s book. Is it not odd that I should feel such affinity to a Mughal writer, dead these two hundred years, who wrote in a tongue I do not read and, at the same time, such profound indifference to my own contemporary writing in a language in which I write myself?