Jane Austen in Deadwood: A Translation
By Devon Freeny

"There was a kind of cold-hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them; and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanour, and a general want of understanding."
—Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

"Gentlemen, we are men of experience. Self-interest is immutable, but its dictates vary daily."
"You talk like you take it up the ass."
—Commissioner Hugo Jarry and Silas Adams, Deadwood

——

"One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty."

My daddy used to say the secret was, you smile real big and they'll buy anything you're sellin'. But there weren't no secret my daddy knowed worth anything at all.

Whenever it is a girl sets out to circulate some pussy—and they all of them do, one way or the fuckin' other . . . not one ever had to be schooled in the way they should smile, or to make some trick feel lofty. The game is learnin' the proper way to hate him. My whole life, I never fucked a man but that I thought of some reason I ought not to, and I'd be sportin' with the worms in the earth by now if I'd've done just like my daddy taught instead.

I ain't sayin' I think it's a blessing, Jane. I wouldn't know one if it come down in a herald o' trumpets. But ever' so often you hate 'em enough, you find a reason that's better'n you thought it'd be. And you never tell no one—'cause that's yours, and no one else's. And then you fuck him just the same.

——

"Every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies."

Living as I must in such incessant society, I begin to fear that I have . . . misapprehended the source of my talents. And that what I took for favors from a generous and faithful earth are instead the cunt-borne diseases of an unchaste and undiscriminating paramour.

Forgive me. I have no habit for such indelicate analogizing. Yet the plain and decent idiom in which I speak, and which the earth speaks to me, suffices no apt description of the unwholesome commerce my work demands. For although I would pursue the color discreetly and without interference, in this very desire for solitude I am not alone.

Perhaps you, madam, are charmed by this, uh . . . local intercourse. But I do not relish playing rival to every fool. I find if I but move my bowels, men gather to set jealous eyes upon me, as if from my posture above the hole they might learn how and why the earth rewards me. More galling, I look to them for signs that they have swayed the hand of fortune, prospered in my stead. This fucking place makes cuckolds of us all.

——

Devon Freeny offers his apologies to Deadwood creator David Milch—so maligned, but such is the price of genius. Which is to say:

Were I to confirm, for fuckin' argument's sake, that no cocksucker ever lived but that cursed with his last dyin' breath the shit rained down upon him by enemies and fuckin' friends alike, I would nonetheless hold that it is the genii, Chief, that wail the fuckin' loudest. For them that see the world more as it is than as they'd like it be—that fuckin' dope fiend Milch not last among them—there's more shit rained upon and more perceived, and still more rained by hooples envyin' the perception.

As for me, I forbear my fuckin' envy. But if in so doing I should waft the scent of pity for the cunts I do not count myself among, I will trust you, Chief, to hold your fuckin' nose.

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