In an era of computer animation wizardry it's nice to see older technologies like stop-motion animation being reinvigorated and put to use for intelligent visual storytelling. A few months ago we were pleasantly surprised by Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and just last night we stumbled upon this little gem. Written by Enda Walsh, The House is made up of three narratives supervised by three different directors, with the common thread being the title building and how it embodies both the nightmarish aspects of home ownership and our insistent need for a place to hang our hats. (For reasons I won't go into, we found it uncannily appropriate to our circumstances.)
The first segment begins in folktale fashion with a poor couple who, after an encounter with a mysterious stranger, find themselves in free possession of a rambling mansion in the British countryside, the only requirement being that they surrender the smaller house that is their own. The focus of the segment is on the older of the couple's two young daughters, who, like Chihiro in Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, is more alert to the dangers of temptation then her parents are. Increasingly creepy as it progresses, it is the only part of the film that features human subjects, here represented by doll-like and delicate figures whose faces convey boundless melancholy.
By the second segment, the rural landscape has become urbanized and contemporary, and the house is in the possession of an ambitious developer (literally, a rat) who has furnished it with the latest mod cons in the hopes of making a killing in the real estate market. When the house is ready for showing everything possible goes wrong, and, what's worse, two sinister creatures — are they rodents, or something unimaginably worse? — take up residence uninvited and show no sign of leaving.
In the final segment, the house has become isolated by rising seas and is now owned by a long-suffering cat named Rosa, who struggles to maintain it and run it as an apartment building with little help from her two tenants, neither of whom pays cash rent. Gentler and more wistful than the other two parts, it ends in a way that is ultimately liberating.
Here and there I sensed affinities with, but rarely overt allusions to, everything from Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle to the scratchboard artist Thomas Ott and Terhi Ekebom's lovely graphic story Logbook.
The trailer below gives a good idea of the film's visual styles, but, inevitably, exaggerates its pace. The film largely avoids the lamentable tendency of contemporary animation to fill every possible second of running time with frenetic activity. When the story is sound to begin with there's little need for all of that.
"Sometime in March last, a gentleman who lives in Portsmouth N. H., being on a visit to Boston, was induced by a friend of this city, to visit, out of curiosity, the third row, in the Tremont Theatre. In all cities, this part of the theatre is well understood to be the resort of the very dregs of society. Here the vile of both sexes meet together, and arrange their dark deeds of licentiousness and vice. Soon after entering the common hall, this Portsmouth gentleman was struck with the very youthful and innocent countenance of one of the girls in the crowd. He sought an opportunity to speak to her. After some light observations to engage her attention, and not excite any suspicions, but that he was one among the rest, he asked her to walk a little aside, when he inquired how she came to her present condition, &c. He learned that she was from L_______, Vt., that she was very unhappy in her situation, but did not know how to get out of it...
"We warn parents in the country, to be careful about permitting their daughters to go to factories, and especially about coming to Boston. There are men here who have the appearance of gentlemen, who, by the most seductive pretensions, and consummate artifice, seek every opportunity to ruin the innocent and unwary. They do this too, without the least remorse; they even make a boast of their ruined victims. Trust not, then, your daughters here, unless you can secure the watchful care of some well known friend. O how many who have come to this city, innocent and unsuspecting, have been soon snared in the trap of the deceiver, and here found an early, and a dishonorable grave!"
The writer and publisher Alastair Brotchie has died, according to social media announcements by the Atlas Press, of which he was the proprietor, and the London Institute of Pataphysics, of which he was a guiding spirit and "Secretary of Issuance." The date of his "disappearance" is given, according to the Pataphysical calendar, in the title of this post; according to the Gregorian calendar it was on January 27th of this year.
Brotchie's biography of Alfred Jarry has been near the top of my list of books to read for several years, but I've never quite gotten around to it, in part because our local library system doesn't own a copy. I do have a copy of the Oulipo Compendium he edited with Harry Mathews.
Pataphysics, founded by Jarry, has been defined as "the science of imaginary solutions," and you may make of that what you will. Shortly before the pandemic broke out I took a trip into Manhattan, in part to see the outstanding exhibition at the Morgan Library devoted to Jarry. One can only wonder what he would have made of such a venue for his work, but I like to think he would have been amused. I haven't been back to the city since.
One summer evening about twenty years ago I left work at rush hour and joined a line of backed-up traffic using the on-ramp to merge onto the parkway I took to get home. Several minutes went by before I made it to the head of the line. The compact car immediately in front of me, driven by a woman who looked to be in her thirties, had no choice but to come to a complete stop and wait for an opening, to the considerable frustration of the drivers behind us, some of whom had started leaning on their horns. I could see the woman leaning anxiously out her open side window, intently watching the cars to her left until, finally, a car moved into the center lane and let her out. The gap was small, however, and so she immediately floored it to get up to speed with the flow of the oncoming cars. What she didn't see, and had no reason to expect, was that two bicyclists, who weren't supposed to be on the parkway at all, had crept up on her right and pulled into the highway lane just in front of her.
As soon as she realized what had happened she slammed on her brakes, but the bicycles were moving too slowly and her momentum was already too great. Boxed in to her left, with only a fraction of a second to react, she had nowhere to go but over the curb to her right. Her car lurched onto the grass border, flattened a small bush, and came to rest at the base of an overpass some ten yards from the pavement.
I had kept my foot on the brake pedal while I watched all this happen, but when the lane opened up I crept out, then carefully pulled off the road onto the grass. So did the car immediately behind me, which was a tan Ford station wagon that looked like it had seen better days. The bicyclists, in the meantime, had heard tires squeal and stopped along the curb to look back. I turned off the engine, walked over to the woman's car, and asked her if she was okay. She said she was but she seemed dazed, distraught. I stepped back a bit, uncertain, half-expecting a cop to come along and sort it all out. After a moment, when nothing seemed to be happening, a heavy-set Black man in his fifties got out of the station wagon and walked, with a barely perceptible limp that suggested a painful hip, over to the woman's car. Even before I noticed the instrument case in the back of the station wagon, I had no trouble recognizing the bass player and composer Clifford Margen. I had seen pictures of him in jazz periodicals and even in a spread in Life magazine. I had a few of his records, one of which some record company marketing whiz had unimaginatively entitled Margenalia. I also knew that he had a reputation for what one writer, with no particular axe to grind, had called "truculence and unpredictability."
The woman tensed visibly as the man approached, but as soon as he spoke to her she relaxed, again said that she was okay, and leaned back against the headrest. He walked around the car once to make sure there was no damage, but by the time he got back to the driver's window he could see that she was sobbing. I couldn't make out his words, but whatever they were they seemed to help and soon she was more composed. He had her take some deep breaths and eventually she managed an embarrassed smile. When it was clear that she was all right he glared briefly at the bicyclists, who were quietly slipping off, and also at me, then got in his car, started the ignition, flipped on his four-way flashers, and crept back to the curb. He waited until the woman had started her car, then put his arm out the window to hold back traffic and let her pull out ahead of him. When they were gone I got into my car and drove off as well.
There was an office party at work the next day, and while chatting with my colleagues I told several of them about the incident. They were about evenly divided between those who shook their heads over the woman's bad driving and those who deplored the presence of bicyclists on a road where they had no business to be. Just one of them recognized the name of Clifford Margen, and he wasn't sure what instrument he played: tenor sax, maybe? Only on the way home that night did I remember what I had, in truth, known perfectly well all along, namely that Clifford Margen had been dead for twenty years, the victim of a landslide on a deserted mountain road somewhere northwest of Mexico City. Even so, I had no doubt about my identification, just as I have no doubt, even now, that there's a tan Ford station wagon somewhere out there driven by a heavy-set Black man who's heading for his next gig and rescuing travelers along the way.
The Memphis Jug Band was a shifting collection of African-American musicians that recorded some 70 or 80 sides of music between 1927 and 1934. Its guiding force was a singer, guitarist, and harmonica player named Will Shade. Other members tended to come and go, although kazoo player Ben Ramey and the guitarist (and ebullient vocalist) Charlie Burse were mainstays. Their music represented a strain of Black entertainment that was popular in its heyday in the 1920s and '30s but which is often forgotten or dismissed today, although a loyal corps of fans, collectors, and musicians have succeeded in keeping much of it in print for those who seek it out. Compared to saxes, electric guitars, and keyboards, kazoos and jugs just aren't generally regarded as being "serious" musical instruments, setting aside the fact that the band also employed acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and Will Shade's brilliant harmonica.
The first Memphis Jug Band compilation I owned was a two-LP album issued by Yazoo Records, which I must have bought not long after it was released in 1979. It had 28 tracks, good remastering, liner notes by the respected blues scholar Bengt Olsson, and some colorful front and back cover art by R. Crumb (who also created the trading card shown at the top of this post).
I got a lot of spins out of the Yazoo set but once CDs came along I started looking around for something I could play in the car, which is where I do most of my listening. (I can't comfortably read, converse, or even think with music in the background, but I can drive.) The Yazoo albums were eventually transferred to CD, minus five tracks, but I opted instead for a 36-track set from a label called Blues Classics. That label, which I think is now defunct, apparently had some sort of arrangement with Document Records, the big daddy in prewar American music re-issues, which originally was based in Austria. The Blues Classic set had perfunctory liner notes, but the tracks were well-chosen and it was cheap. I got twenty years out of it. Still, there were a few songs I remembered from the Yazoo set that I missed hearing.
This year I bought myself the 72-track collection on the Acrobat label shown below. Its liner notes, while extensive, lean a bit too much on Wikipedia and other online sources, and it includes some tracks of minor interest, but it's inexpensive and seems to be more or less as comprehensive as the alternatives. (What to include can be a matter for debate, as the band had various aliases and offshoots.) For the completist, Document Records probably has more thorough coverage, but their compilations aren't as conveniently packaged and several now seem to be only available as downloads. Seventy-two tracks should hold me for a while.
There are reasons why jug band music went out of favor — advances in musicianship, shifts in popular taste, complicated issues of racial and sexual politics, cultural embarrassment at anything that was perceived as "primitive" — but the best of it still has much to offer. It's lively and inventive, it's historically important to the development of American popular music, but most of all it's just plain exuberant fun. We should avoid nostalgia for the grim conditions of the segregated society in which it was made, but at the same time we shouldn't turn our backs on the vitality of its creators.
The first representative track, below, is from the band's initial session, in 1927. According to Samuel Charters, the vocalist is Will Weldon, but the song is really a showcase for the harmonica and kazoo. "Sun Brimmer" or "Son Brimmer" was a nickname of Will Shade's.
"Cocaine Habit" (1930) finds the band backing Hattie Hart, one of several female vocalists they worked with at various times, the most notable being Memphis Minnie. Shade's harmonica is again featured, and the guitar part is played by Tee Wee Blackman, who is said to have taught Shade the rudiments of the guitar.
"Everybody's Talking About Sadie Green" also from 1930, displays the band's vaudeville side; the lively vocalist is Charlie Nickerson.
Finally, here's one of my favorite tracks, one that's not included in the Acrobat set, probably because it was credited at the time to "the Carolina Peanut Boys." It's also from 1930 and Charlie Nickerson is again the lead vocalist, but it's the infectious instrumental section after the first couple of verses that really makes it sing. Vol Stevens plays the hybrid banjo-mandolin, and Shade once again is on harp. It's hard to resist.
The standard print sources on the Memphis Jug Band are the pioneering writings of Samuel Charters (The Country Blues, Sweet As the Showers of Rain) and Bengt Olsson (Memphis Blues); the latter is hard to find. There is an exhaustive, if somewhat outdated, online discography at Wirz' American Music.
Phoebe Hearst didn't care for her son's taste in women. Throughout his adult life, the media magnate William Randolph Hearst had a taste for showgirls and lived more or less openly with mistresses even while raising a family of five sons with his legal wife, Millicent (another showgirl). While still in his twenties, he had come close to marrying an aspiring actress named Eleanor Calhoun. Though Phoebe had actually introduced the two, she regarded Calhoun as a golddigger and firmly opposed their union. Young "Will" Hearst, at that point, had ambition but little money of his own. His father was a wealthy mining entrepreneur who eventually became a US senator, but he was absent much of the time, marginally literate, and averse to correspondence; it was Phoebe, originally a Missouri schoolteacher, who kept tabs on things. In 1887 she wrote to a friend:
I am so distressed about Will that I don't really know how I can live if he marries Eleanor Calhoun. She is determined to marry him and it seems as if he must be in the toils of the Devil fish.
The last phrase is odd. What was a Devil fish, and what labors did it undertake? Why would it be an apt metaphor for a woman who, in Phoebe's view, was out to ensnare her son?
It turns out that the term "devil-fish" or "devilfish" has been applied to a bewildering range of creatures, from gray whales to manta rays, but the animal Phoebe had in mind was neither fish nor cetacean but a cephalopod. Had she been inclined, she could have read an 1875 book by Henry Lee, the keeper of the Brighton Aquarium, entitled The Octopus, Or, The "Devil-fish" of Fiction and of Fact. One chapter of Lee's book retells a portion of Victor Hugo's novel Les Travailleurs de la mer, which describes a life-and-death struggle between a Guernsey fisherman and a giant octopus. Phoebe, who was well-travelled and who is known to have studied French as an adult, may well have been familiar with Hugo's account, in translation or in the original, and if not no doubt she had heard similar stories.
Once the "Devil fish" has been identified, the metaphor starts to make sense. Phoebe saw Eleanor Calhoun as a sinister monster threatening to enfold Will in her lethal embrace. But what about the "toils"?
My first thought was that Hearst's biographer, David Nasaw, had mistranscribed Phoebe's letter, and that what she really wrote was "coils of the Devil fish," referring to its tentacles. But Nasaw is a careful researcher and his book is well-edited; surely the error, if it were such, would have been spotted early on. I then supposed that Phoebe meant to write "coils" but had slipped and written "toils," perhaps with Hugo's "toilers" in the back of her mind. As it turns out, however, there's no need for creative speculations. Phoebe wrote "toils" because she meant "toils"; the word "toil" has an archaic meaning of "net, snare," related to the French toile. In a 19th-century translation of Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame a fly is said to be "caught in the toils of the spider." The octopus idiom seems to have been in the air; in 1897 a writer named Owen Hall, who certainly hadn't read Phoebe's letter, used the identical words in a short story entitled "In a Treasure Ship."
A similar molluscan metaphor would inspire Frank Norris's 1901 novel about the California railway industry, The Octopus.
First Second Books in the US has released the first authorized English-language translation of Hayao Miyazaki's 1983 full-color manga Shuna no tabi (Shuna's Journey). I've written about the original Japanese version at length before (link); I speak no Japanese but was able to follow the story with the help of earlier fan translations. The readable new translation, by Alex Dudok de Wit, clears up a few points in the narrative here and there. The New York Times has a review. I'll confine myself below to a few technical points about the reproduction.
The American edition, printed in Singapore, respects the layout and orientation of the Japanese edition, that is, printing it back-to-front from a US perspective. The trim size has been increased by about 50% with a noticeable but not glaring decrease in sharpness, and unlike the original, which was a paperback, the book has a hardcover binding, which makes it easier to see into the gutter. The paper stock isn't coated, however, and the color palette, particularly the lovely rich blues of Miyazaki's original, is a bit washed out. Whatever image processing magic was required to replace the Japanese text with English seems to have gone smoothly. Devotees may want to seek out the Japanese edition (ISBN 9784196695103), which should be obtainable for under $20, so that they can appreciate the full beauty of the original in tandem with this welcome and overdue translation.
My favorite Booth cartoon, this one didn't appear in the New Yorker but in the business section of the New York Times, accompanying an article about corporate downsizing. I scanned it years ago but missed a sliver at the bottom.
I'm standing on a great plain with no trees or buildings in sight, and I notice a faint hum of engine noise. I look up. Airplanes or airships that must be of enormous size, though they are barely dots because they are so high, are flying in formation across a crystalline, cloudless sky, leaving tiny, precise contrails miles above me. They seem not to have come from any of the cardinal points but simply to have descended from the stratosphere. As I watch I see white parachutes emerging, opening and hanging in the air like dandelion seeds, but the skydivers don't descend; they simply hover in space, dancing and parading together, held aloft no doubt by powerful high-altitude winds.
A crowd has gathered. I hear the cough of a police radio at my back and air-raid sirens somewhere in the distance. Strobe lights flicker. Military vehicles appear, steered by grim-faced men in helmets and dark glasses.
The aircraft are moving over our heads at what must be terrific speed, though from the ground they barely seem to creep. The parachutists, too, are drifting away, still whirling in tight patterns and showing no sign of coming to earth. The crowd thins and the vehicles race off and disappear from sight. The plain darkens as the sun falls behind distant mountains. All is quiet.
This was not a dream, although it seemed a bit like one at the time. On a beautiful fall afternoon I drove a few miles to one of my favorite haunts, a preserve of some 600 or so acres of woodland dotted with rocks and a couple of little ponds and streams. I brought my camera along as I usually do on my hikes, but there wasn't much to see except fallen leaves. I walked a couple of miles without meeting anyone else, then, having climbed a hill to the highest point in the preserve and briefly rested on a bench, I got set to head back.
I came to a place where the trail bends to the left and descends to what on the map is called a lake but is really just a modest pond. Just at the bend, though, I saw something that had never been there on my previous visits: a trail off to the right, clearly marked with red blazes on trees and carefully bordered with lengths of pruned branches. Intrigued, I started down the trail and followed it up to the top of a ridge, figuring that it couldn't take me very far out of my way. I continued along as it wound through the woods, crossed old stone walls, and wove around ancient outcroppings of rock. At one point I passed the remains of some kind of structure, though it would be hard to say just what it had been.
And the trail went on and on. I kept expecting it to loop back to the main trail, or if not, just to come to a dead end. But I started to think: What if it doesn't? What if it never comes back? What if it just keeps going?
I lost the trail once or twice because I was paying attention to the contours of the terrain instead of the blazes, but quickly found the right course again. Eventually I got a bead on where I was in relation to the rest of the preserve, and descended a series of what looked like old stone steps at the top of a long slope that, sure enough, met up with the main trail at an intersection that, like the first, had never been there before. I had detoured about a mile. An improvised sign posted at the intersection noted the opening of the trail, and the recent purchase of a new parcel of land that made it possible, but when I got back to the main kiosk at the parking lot the map there hadn't been updated and there was no notice posted about any extension of the trail system. I almost wonder whether that trail will be there the next time I visit.
About twenty years ago or maybe a little more, my wife and I went to a small music club called the Towne Crier, which at that time was located in Pawling, New York, to hear a Scottish traditional music group called the Tannahill Weavers. According to a rumor I heard later, the Tannies had just come off a gig in a different venue at which some ignorant louts of the kind who think that anything connected with Scotland is fair game for mockery had made it an utterly miserable night for the group, so they may have come onstage with just a wee bit of trepidation. The Towne Crier, however, was a club for people who are knowledgeable about and serious about their music. As soon the Tannies finished the first song (or maybe set of tunes), the audience of some 150 or 200 people went absolutely wild in the best way, cheering and applauding and maybe even leaping to their feet, and I'll never forget the looks the band members exchanged in that moment, looks of mingled delight, relief, and stupefaction at their reception. Needless to say they were energized for the rest of the evening and put on a great show. As of 2022 they're still regular vistors to the Crier, which has since moved a bit west to Beacon.
The Tannahill lineup that night (it has changed often over the years) was presumably Roy Gullane on lead vocals and guitar, Phil Smillie on whistle, flute, and vocals, Leslie Wilson on guitar, bouzouki, and vocals, John Martin on fiddle and vocals, and I think Duncan Nicholson on bagpipes. The inclusion of the pipes was an innovation introduced by the group, and takes a bit of careful arranging, since bagpipes are just naturally louder than the stringed instruments and aren't traditionally played in a combo setting. (The Irish group Planxty, which had an approach somewhat akin to that of the Tannies, made similar creative use of Liam O'Flynn's uilleann pipes.)
The Tannies play a mixture of instrumentals, old ballads, and original songs, driven by Gullane's vocals and energetic rhythm guitar work, which really has to be seen live to be appreciated in full. Gullane has just put out a memoir entitled Goulash Soup and Chips, in which he tells stories from tours past, some painful (miserable road trips, gigs that weren't paid for, baggage handling disasters, etc.) and others absolutely hilarious. It's available from Amazon or at Tannahill Weavers gigs, and is essential for fans of the group and recommended for anyone interested in traditional music. Long may they wave.
Below is a clip of an expanded line-up of the Tannies performing "The Geese in the Bog" a few years back during a 40th-anniversary celebration.
I enjoyed this seasonally appropriate 1960 Mexican film directed by Roberto Gavaldón, with cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. Macario is based on a short story by B. Traven, which is in turn based on a folktale called (in one of its many versions) "Godfather Death." It tells of a poor woodcutter (Ignacio López Tarso) who can barely feed his family enough tortillas and beans to fill their stomachs. Since his one wish in life is to have an entire roast turkey for himself, his devoted wife (Pina Pellicer) finally steals one and cooks it for him. As he sits down to eat it he receives in succession three visitors, whom we realize are in turn the Devil, God (or Jesus), and Death. Each asks to share his meal, but on the basis of some quite logical reasoning he agrees to invite only the third, who, in return, gives Macario a magic liquid that will enable him to cure the dying. There is a catch, however; if Macario sees Death standing at the feet of the patient, he may perform his cure; if Death stands at the head of the bed, the patient is his and Macario must not intervene. Macario makes use of the potion and becomes, in time, a rich man, until the Inquisition gets wind of his activities.
One of the things I liked about the film is that it plays down the potentially garish visual aspect of the story. (That aspect is, in part, reserved for the opening credits, which feature a troupe of folkloric skeleton marionettes.) The Devil, for instance, is a bit of a snazzy dresser, but he doesn't have horns and a goatee, nor is Death a skeletal figure with a flail. Macario, in his unassuming way, recognizes them for who they are nevertheless, and he isn't excessively impressed with either, or with the Señor. López Tarso is particularly good at giving Death skeptical looks at the bedside of patients who are obvious goners but whom Death assures him can still be saved. Really, this one?(Shrug.)
Gavaldón made at least two other films based on Traven novels or stories, Rosa Blanca and Días de otoño. I haven't seen either one, although I've read the story the latter is based on and it could be interesting. Ignacio López Tarso, at this writing, is still alive at the age of 97, which suggests that he set aside a bit of that potion for himself. Sadly, Pina Pellicer, who starred in Días de otoño, died at age 30 of an overdose of sleeping pills.
I'm not sure about the current availability of Macario on DVD or from streaming services; I watched an older DVD release that has subtitle options in both English and Spanish. A version of the folktale can be found in the Lore Segal / Maurice Sendak edition of The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, one of those perfect books that belong in every household.
The grass may not always be greener, but with mushrooms it seems to be a different story. It's been a dreadful year for fungi-spotting where I live (too dry), but whenever I go away they seem to be abundant everywhere else. These specimens, from a brief field trip to New Hampshire, were found in an area of scrubby woodland along a rarely-used trail.
Amanita is an interesting and often photogenic genus, with the classic "toadstool" appearance. Some species are regarded as choice edibles (by braver souls than I), others are deadly, and one, the "fly agaric," is a notorious hallucinogen with an alleged role in shamanism and religion. They can be hard to tell apart and I'm not quite sure which Amanita these are, but it was a pleasant surprise to come across them.
The narrator of this novel by the elusive writer who called himself B. Traven is one Gerard Gales, an American seaman who oversleeps while in port and loses his identification papers when his ship sails without him. Unable to prove his identity, his nationality, or even his legal existence, he is deported from one European country to another until he finds a freighter whose captain has reason not to be fussy about documents. As it turns out, the aptly-named Yorikke, on which Gales becomes a stoker's assistant, is a dilapidated ship of fools, doomed to be scuttled for its insurance payoff. If the first part of the book is bureaucratic satire, lighter but also sharper than Kafka's in The Trial, the rest is largely taken up with harrowing descriptions of the working conditions of those who tend the boilers. Unlike the Kafka of Amerika, who never crossed the Atlantic at all, Traven clearly knew from first-hand experience what a stoker's existence was really like. But even at its grimmest the book never loses its dark sense of humor. The Yorikke, Gales assures us, is actually thousands of years old. Its apparent timelessness gives the tale yet another dimension.
Who was B. Traven? He usually claimed that, like Gerard Gales, he was an American whose documents had gotten lost. Sometimes he blamed the destruction of his birth record on the fires caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He may have even believed it, and it may even have been true, although few scholars now give the idea much credence. That he was the same person as one Ret Marut, a German actor and radical writer whose paper trail went cold in the 1920s, is no longer seriously questioned, but then who was Ret Marut? We may never know with absolute certainty.
The Death Ship was originally published in German as Das Totenschiff. The earliest English-language edition, issued in 1934 by Chatto & Windus, was translated by Eric Sutton. It was followed almost immediately by an American edition brought out by Alfred A. Knopf, of which my Collier Books edition above is a reprint. No translator is indicated inside the book. Traven, who reportedly didn't like the Sutton version, chose to translate the novel himself for Knopf, expanding it as he did so. His command of English was faulty, however. The German scholar Karl S. Guthke explains what happened:
The manuscript of The Death Ship that arrived in New York in 1933 was couched in an English that would have raised the eyebrows of most readers. As Knopf editor Bernard Smith reported, the text was so Germanic in vocabulary and syntax that it could never have made it in to print. And for good reason: Traven himself had translated the novel (as he was to translate the other novels Knopf would bring out), at the same time giving free rein to his lifelong passion for rewriting, cutting, and inserting new material. Knopf asked Traven to agree to a revision by Smith. Traven asked for sample pages and was favorably impressed. After instructing Knopf that only grammatical, syntactic, and orthographic changes were to be made, he authorized Smith to rework the entire manuscript. "This entailed treating about 25% of the text," Smith recalled. "In any given paragraph there was sure to be at least one impossibly Germanic sentence, and sometimes an entire paragraph had to be reconstructed." Smith stressed that his contribution in no way involved what could be considered literary or creative work on the three novels he revised. He had merely turned Traven's translations into acceptable English. It was clear to Smith from the beginning that English was not the translator's mother tongue; the syntactic thread was German, and even in Smith's reworked version the German original rears its head from time to time.
B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends
The treatment of American place-names in the Traven-Smith version is a bit off. Referring to Wisconsin familiarly as "Sconsin" might just slip by unnoticed, but Chicago is casually referred to as "Chic," Cincinnati as "Cincin," and, least likely of all, Los Angeles as "Los." Other than that and a few eccentric colloquialisms the novel doesn't particularly "read like a translation" at all. Weirdly, it winds up being a work of American literature.
Traven, who would stubbornly maintain the fiction that his novels were originally written in English, allowed his German-language publisher, Büchergilde Gutenberg, to issue a new German "translation" in 1937 based on the Knopf version.
I've been assigned to escort a famous poet to a public reading in Princeton, New Jersey. We are to meet in Grand Central Station before transferring across town to catch a southbound train, but I've neglected to arrange an exact rendezvous with Famous Poet, whose number isn't in my phone. I wander about looking for him, but the terminal is an enormous bazaar covering acres and acres, and it's hopeless to try to locate one person in such an intricate and crowded space. Parts of the bulding have been torn down or have fallen into ruins; on the levelled ground earth-moving machines are preparing the foundation for new structures to come. I select a name from my list of contacts, a colleague who would be likely to have Famous Poet's number, but the person who answers is a stranger who knows nothing about it. I call my boss but he can't help; he is alarmed that we aren't already on the way.
Finally I spy Famous Poet near the ticket booth. He is distraught and tears of rage are streaming down his face. There's no question of continuing; the reading will have to be rescheduled.
It's been another unpredictable year in the squash patch. The acorn squash that I planted in the wake of last year's profusion of volunteers didn't come up at all, perhaps because the seed I saved just wasn't viable. It looks like I may have some Black Futsus coming (seed from Baker Creek), and I have some vines that are just starting to run but that I suspect may turn out to be butternuts. In general things are late, perhaps because the spring was a bit cool here and the summer has been hot and dry. I did get some nice gray zucchini before the vine borers wiped them out.
The big surprise (literally big) is this 15-lb. pumpkin, which I didn't consciously plant and which I suspect grew out of last fall's Jack O'Lantern. I've named it Rusty Staub, in homage to le grand orange.
Before the former child star Olivia Rorschach sets off on one of her frequent trips, she leaves instructions for her au pair, Jane Sutton, one sentence of which reads "Buy cooked Edam for Polonius and don’t forget to take him once a week to Monsieur Lefèvre for his domino lesson." Perec appends an explanatory footnote:
Polonius is the 43rd descendant of a pair of tame hamsters which Rémi Rorschach gave Olivia as a present shortly after he met her: the two of them had seen an animal-trainer at a Stuttgart music hall and were so impressed by the athletic exploits of the hamster Ludovic – disporting himself with equal ease on the rings, the bar, the trapeze, and the parallel bars – that they asked if they could buy him. The trainer, Lefèvre, refused, but sold them instead a pair – Gertrude and Sigismond – which he had trained to play dominoes. The tradition was maintained from generation to generation, with each set of parents spontaneously teaching their offspring to play. Unfortunately, the previous winter an epidemic had almost wiped out the little colony: the sole survivor, Polonius, could not play solo, and, worse, was condemned to waste away if he was prevented from indulging in his favourite pastime. Thus he had to be taken once a week to Meudon to his trainer, who, though now retired, continued to raise little circus animals for his own amusement.
Life A User's Manual (translation by David Bellos)
When I first read this 1978 novel by Georges Perec in David Bellos's translation years ago I recall being entertained but also perhaps a bit underwhelmed. This summer I'm reading it in the original (with the translation on hand as a crib) as a way to keep up my French. In some ways it's ideal for the purpose. It's made up of fairly short, self-contained chapters that I can read at a relaxed pace of one or two a day, and it's not particularly slangy or conversational (street French not being something I'm up on). The grammar I can handle; the hard part is the vocabulary for material objects (clothes, home furnishings, tools) which Perec delights in ennumerating. (In fact the cataloguing of objects was part of his compositional method.) These are, as it turns out, the very things where my English vocabulary is weakest; thus when Perec refers to an aumônière, I am little wiser when I turn to Bellos and find that this is "a Dorothy bag." My eyes begin to glaze over when Perec, at his most maniacal, devotes several pages to the contents of a catalog from a hardware manufacturer. Fortunately, such extreme moments are rare.
For those unfamiliar with the book, La vie mode d'emploi captures a snapshot of the inhabitants and furnishings of a Paris apartment building at one instant in June 1975. In addition to describing them synchronically, he also moves back in time liberally in order to narrate the stories of the present and former denizens of the building. There's also a frame tale involving an expatriate Englishman named Bartlebooth who wanders the world for twenty years painting harbor scenes, which he sends home and has made into jigsaw puzzles. Puzzles and games fascinated Perec, and the writing of the novel was itself structured by the use of various constraints and procedures, such as a "knight's tour" in chess, in which the knight visits every space on the chessboard exactly once. But arguably the parts are more interesting than the whole.
Comparing the two versions raises new puzzles. Why, for instance, in the list of paintings created by a tenant named Franz Hutting, did Bellos translate
14 Maximilien, débarquant à Mexico, s'enfourne élégamment onze tortillas
as
14 Maximilian lands in Mexico and daintily scoffs four nelumbia and eleven tortillas
and for that matter what on earth are "nelumbia"? Why does
21 Le docteur Lajoie est radié de l'ordre des médecins pour avoir déclaré en public que William Randolph Hearst,
sortant d'une projection de Citizen Kane, aurait monnayé l'assasinat d'Orson Welles
become
21 Dr LaJoie is struck off the medical register for having stated, in front of Ray Monk, Ken O'Leary, and others that, after seeing Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst had put a price on Orson Welles's head
with the parts in bold (my emphasis) being apparently gratuitous additions by the translator?
As it turns out, there is method to Bellos's changes. According to a table available here, each painting description in the original conceals the name of one of Perec's friends and associates. Thus "s'enfourne élégamment" hides (Paul) Fournel, which Bellos has reproduced with the mysterious "four nelumbia." Similarly, "Kane, aurait" reveals (Raymond) Queneau, prompting Bellos''s "Ray Monk, Ken O." (Harry Mathews, by the way, is tucked into "Joseph d'Arimathie ou Zarathoustra.")
These diabolical devices, of which there must be many examples throughout the novel, add to the book's fascination, but also provoke some frustration. What else, one wonders, is one overlooking as one reads innocently along?
Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más; Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace el camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino sino estelas en la mar.
