Even in translation, one of the pleasures of Gogol's prose is the way a genuine emotion, passed through the distortive skaz filter, comes out the other side, still genuine but twisted.
I heard a version of this growing up. Late at some neighborhood party, cornered by some pal of my parents' who'd had too much to drink and longed to convey to someone, anyone, how the world seemed to him (beautiful, unfair, full of hidden messages he'd missed), a sort of Chicago skaz got performed: "You got moxie but, trust me, the fucks are gonna fuck with you, and you gotta give 'em this" - insert raised middle finger - "first time they try that shit!"
Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it's denied an adequate instrument (and we're all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes... poetry, i.e. truth forced out through a restricted opening.
That's all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at hte fence of language and being bound by it.
- George Saunders, from his essay "The Door to the Truth Might be Strangeness" in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
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