The scholarly book Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture includes the fascinating article “Translation and the ‘Surreptitious Classic’: Obscenity and Translatability” by Deborah H. Roberts, Chair of Classics at Haverford College:

Euphemism by generalization seems to be particularly common in translations of Martial, where the frequency of obscenity poses a particular challenge to those who aim at complete editions. So, for Martial’s ‘cunnum Charinus lingit et tamen pallet’ (1.77.6, Charinus licks cunt and is still pale) Bohn’s version has ‘Charinus indulges in infamous debauchery - and yet he is pale’ and the Pott/Wright versified translation has ‘And e’en his vices do not make him blush.’ Similarly, where Martial has ‘Pedicatur Eroc, fellat Linus’ (7.10.1, Eros gets buggered, Linus sucks), we find ‘Eros has one filthy vice, Linus has another’, and ‘Eros and Linus are debauched, you say.’ …

We find similar vagueness in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in the passage in which Lysistrata draws the other women’s attention to the absence of any source of sexual satisfaction (107-110):

[Greek text omitted]

“Not even s spark of a lover is left.
And ever since the Milesians betrayed us,
I haven’t seen a dildo eight fingers long

Which might have been a leather source of help.”

A number of stranslators omit the dildo altogether, but Rogers’s translation offers a kind of place-holder for the unnamed object:

“No husbands now, no sparks, no anything.
For ever since Miletus played us false,
We’ve had no joy, no solace, none at all.”

Lest you think that wimpy translations of Martial are relics of the prudish past, Joseph S. Salemi’s accurate, unblushing translations stirred things up in 1990:

Responses were predictable: after reading some of my Martial translations in public, I was excoriated by the usual contingent of born-again Christians and militant feminists. Some academic careerists quietly urged me to drop the project of translating so repellent an author, lest I offend those inscrutable forces that dole out promotion and tenure. Editors showed even less spine; only six American journals out of fifty-four would publish selections from Martial–and this from a literary establishment that proclaims itself a defender of artistic freedom against Senator Helms. Typical was the comment of one trendy New York editor: “I enjoyed your translations immensely, but I could never print them.”

Audio and photos of Morrissey reading a passage from Within a Budding Grove (aka In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), the second volume of In Search of Lost Time:

Those few steps from the landing to Albertine’s door, those few steps which no one now could prevent my taking, I took with delight, with prudence, as though plunged into a new and strange element, as if in going forward I had been gently displacing the liquid stream of happiness, and at the same time with a strange feeling of absolute power, and of entering at length into an inheritance which had belonged to me from all time.

This was at a show by Howard Devoto’s Luxuria, whose song “Mlle” opens with the original French version of this passage.

{Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog}

I’m starting a new series on Books Are People, Too - FBI files on famous writers. First up is Thomas Mann.

Click here to download the PDF file [100 pages | 4 meg]

The FBI summarized the file when it was posted on its website:

Thomas Mann, German author, Nobel prize winner in literature, and naturalized American citizen, was investigated from 1927 through 1955. The security investigation gathered information showing Mann’s affiliation with communist causes and associates.

For more info on the FBI and Mann, see Communazis: FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers by Alexander Stephan.

Mann’s file is one of several dozen files that used to be available on the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act website but have been quietly removed. I have no idea why the feds yanked these files, but I’ll be posting all the ones I can recover at my other main website, The Memory Hole. Meanwhile, look for more writers’ files to be posted here in the future.

Animation artist Lou Romano (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant, Monsters, Inc., etc.) is creating illustrations and linoleum-block prints for 15 of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. Above are the illos for “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Other images from this exciting work in progress are here.

I feel like a man who has fucked too much (forgive me for the expression) - a kind of rapturous lassitude.

From a letter Flaubert wrote to the poet and novelist Louise Colet, his sometime-lover, on December 23, 1853, at 2 AM:

I must write to you tonight, for I am exhausted. My head feels as though it were being squeezed in an iron vise. Since two o’-clock yesterday afternoon (except for about twenty-five minutes for dinner), I have been writing Bovary. I am in the midst of lovemaking: I am sweating and my throat is tight. This has been one of the rare days of my life passed completely in illusion from beginning to end. At six o’-clock this evening, as I was writing the word “hysterics,” I was so swept away, was bellowing so loudly and feeling so deeply what my little Bovary was going through, that I was afraid of having hysterics myself. I got up from my table and opened the window to calm myself. My head was spinning. Now I have great pains in my knees, in my back, and in my head. I feel like a man who has fucked too much (forgive me for the expression) - a kind of rapturous lassitude. And since I am in the midst of love it is only proper that I should not fall asleep before sending you a caress, a kiss, and whatever thoughts are left in me. …

Source: Madame Bovary: A Norton Critical Edition (second edition), edited by Margaret Cohen, p 307. Letter translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.

In April, HarperStudio will publish Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of 24 previously unpublished humorous pieces by the American master. Right now, an uncorrected galley of the entire book is on the publisher’s website.

When The New Yorker published one of these pieces, “The Privilege of the Grave,” in December, it mentioned the upcoming collection. Googling the title, I was led to HarperStudio’s site for the book, which contains a “PDF e-marketing kit.” Within this PDF file is a link to the entire book online (minus the new introduction and foreword).

The complete table of contents is below, followed by my review.

————————————————————–

Contents

Whenever I Am about to Publish a Book

Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture

Conversations with Satan

Jane Austen

The Force of “Suggestion”

The Privilege of the Grave

A Group of Servants

The Quarrel in the Strong-Box

Happy Memories of the Dental Chair

Dr. Van Dyke as a Man and as a Fisherman

On Postage Rates on Authors’ Manuscript

The Missionary in World-Politics

The Undertaker’s Tale

The Music Box

The Grand Prix

The Devil’s Gate

The Snow-Shovelers

Professor Mahaffy on Equality

Interviewing the Interviewer

An Incident

The Jungle Discusses Man

I Rise to a Question of Privilege

Telegraph Dog

The American Press

—————————————————–

Review

Twenty-four “new” pieces from Mark Twain? Is today my birthday? Let’s open this unexpected present….

“Jane Austen” is an unrelenting takedown of the author of Pride and Prejudice, along the lines of Twain’s infamous “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which is one of the most vitriolic and crushing attacks that one canonical writer has ever launched on another. Of Austen, he writes:

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

All the great critics praise her art generously. To start with, they say she draws her characters with sharp discrimination and a sure touch. I believe that this is true, as long as the characters she is drawing are odious.

He then offers a devastating summary of each character in Sense and Sensibility. The piece ends abruptly and is probably unfinished. If it had been completed, it might have ranked with “Literary Offenses,” but Twain was just warming up.

From its title, “Conversations with Satan” promises to be a Letters From the Earth-style ribbing of religion. It starts out well. Satan - handsome and courtly, “aristocratically calm and self-possessed” - appears dressed as an Anglican Bishop, and tells Twain that he is one of the writer’s “most ardent and grateful admirers.” Of America, he deadpans: “I have not been there lately. I am not needed there.” Twain and Old Scratch are both smoking cigars, and this unfortunately leads Twain off the tracks - the rest of the piece is comprised of his thoughts about stogies (he hates Cuban cigars; most cigar snobs can’t tell the difference between an expensive one and a cheap one without the label; etc.). Satan is not mentioned again in this obviously unfinished piece.

“The Missionary in World-Politics” fulfills its promise of rapping religion on the knuckles. “I do not know why we respect missionaries,” Twain writes to the “Editor of the Times.”

Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors.

He continues: “History teaches us that there is no capable missionary except fire and sword or the command of a king whose subjects have no voice in the government.”

But Twain’s self-effacing humor is present as well. In “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture” he writes: “Yes, and when a man gets old he wants to explain his past. He calls it that; but as a rule what he really wants to do is to whitewash it. I don’t want to whitewash mine, for it doesn’t need it. I have kept it in that kind of repair all the time.”

He says of Oliver Wendell Holmes:

He was a good friend of mine, and wrote me a poem on my 50th birth-day. I plagiarized the dedication of one of his books and used it in the Innocents Abroad. I didn’t know I had plagiarized him, but a friend proved it to me. I told Dr. Holmes about it and it made us good friends. He said we were all plagiarists, consciously or unconsciously, one or the other. It made me feel good to be one or the other - but he didn’t say which.

“Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” recounts Twain’s first visit to a dentist, which happened when he was an adult needing a long, painful operation for Riggs’ disease. Being interested in the history of drugs, I was happy to see Twain perceptively describe his experience with chloroform, which was offered to him only after the operation had been going on for an hour:

The chloroform created a radical change; it made everything comfortable and pleasant. The pains were about as sharp as they had been before, but they rather seemed to be impersonal pains; pains that belonged to the community in general, including me, but not me particularly, not me any more than the others. So I did not care for them any longer; I do not care for a pain unless I can have it all to myself.

“The Undertaker’s Tale” is a short story about an undertaker’s family (named the Cadavers) in a small village. They’re having a tough time financially - no one is dying. The daughter tries to pep up her father: “Do you remember the time that not one person died in this village during twenty-eight days? Were you downcast? Did you show any bitterness? No - not one angry word escaped your lips. You hardly even betrayed annoyance.”

In “Interviewing the Interviewer,” Twain grovels before the “godlike” Charles A. Dana, publisher of the New York Sun, beseeching him to please impart his wisdom regarding journalistic success. Because Twain paid homage, Dana deigns to reveal the secrets of the newspaper trade, starting with:

The first great end and aim of journalism is to make a sensation. Never let your paper go to press without a sensation. If you have none, make one. Seize upon the prominent events of the day, and clamor about them with a maniacal fury that shall compel attention. Vilify everything that is unpopular - harry it, hunt it, abuse it, without rhyme or reasons, so that you get a sensation out of it. Laud that which is popular - unless you feel sure that you can make it unpopular by attacking it. Hit every man that is down - never fail in this, for it is safe. Libel every man that can be ruined by it. Libel every prominent man who dare not soil his hands with touching you in return. But glorify all moneyed scum and give columns of worship unto the monuments they erect in honor of themselves, for moneyed men will not put up with abuse from small newspapers.

Everything we expect from Twain is here - acid satire, down-home charm, self-effacement, attacks on the powerful, gallows humor, political humor, droll travelogues and fables, and even some black dialect (in “The Snow-Shovelers”). It’s fantastic to see this material finally surface 99 years after the great one’s death, but why did it take so long? And when will we get to see the 500 or so other manuscripts that were unpublished when Twain died almost a century ago?

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

All the great critics praise her art generously. To start with, they say she draws her characters with sharp discrimination and a sure touch. I believe that this is true, as long as the characters she is drawing are odious.

From the essay “Jane Austen” by Mark Twain. Previously unpublished, it will be included in Who Is Mark Twain?, coming in April from HarperStudio. (For more information about the book, see “First look at new book of Twain’s unpublished writings.”)

From the Telegraph of London:

Romeo and Juliet production sparks fears over knife crime

But the producers of a new version of the play, specifically designed for a teenage audience, are so concerned that it could be seen to glamorise knife violence and gang violence in an era when fatal stabbings by teenagers have reached record levels that they have met with the Metropolitan police.

Although the Globe was keen to stress the central tenets of the plot - which does include a number of fatal stabbings - would not be altered, a spokesman said the discussion would influence Mr Buckhurst’s approach to the play, with the director anxious to ensure the production dealt sensitively with the issues of teenage gang warfare and knife crime.

“They are not altering it, but the whole way the play is edited is with the audience in mind. What the director learns from that discussion might feed into rehearsals.”

{Image from 1968 film version, from here}

Mark Twain was utterly convinced that the works of Shakespeare were not written by the man named William Shakespeare. In his biography of Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine wrote:

Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening, with Mr. Edward Loomis we attended a fine performance of “Romeo and Juliet” given by Sothern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he said quite earnestly, “That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote.”

Twain’s long essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” doesn’t so much argue for Bacon’s authorship as it blasts the idea that “the Stratford rustic” wrote the works.

In this 45-minute video, playwright and stage actor Keir Cutler, as Mark Twain, performs, interprets, and expands on the essay in this live performance. It really is devastating.

{Via The Scientific Indian}

On Metafilter, shmegegge writes:

Gravity’s Rainbow is a book that I’ve tried to read a couple of times. Every time it goes like this:

Oh hey! Man, I bet I could get through Gravity’s Rainbow this time! I do have a long train ride to work, after all! So what if it takes me a month or longer, I can handle that!

Oh wow! This is awesome! I totally forgot how great these beginning chapters are! I wonder what stopped me from finishing this all those other times?

Fuck, now I remember when my old art teacher told me to keep a little notebook with me so I can note everyone’s name and job and relationships to one another. I forget which scientist this guy is.

Ok, now who the fuck am I reading about? What’s all this with the sibling sex in chains and stuff? Shit, this is the hard part. This is the part that I’ve had trouble getting through in the past. I can do it, though! I can soldier through.

You know what? I don’t think this is my time to finish this book. I’m just way confused right now and I’m not even sure who the hell I’ve been reading about for the past 50 pages. I’m sorry Alan Moore, I know this is one of your favorite books and all, but shit I’m burned out. also, the crying of lot 49 sucked so this’ll probably suck, too. Yeah, I bet this book just sucks, anyway. Yeah, that’s it. This book sucks, that’s why I’m stopping.

A year or so later…

Oh hey! Man, I bet I could get through Gravity’s Rainbow this time!

Bookslut points us to an article by novelist and political commentator James Dellingpole: “Whisper it: you don’t need to have read John Updike.” The main point about not feeling bad because you haven’t read every work, or even every writer, in the canon is a good one, but I really like his final thoughts:

All novels are flawed, that’s the whole point. Dickens goes on a bit as – my, and how! – does George Eliot; War and Peace ends with 100 pages of rambling, esoteric spiritual drivel; Proust badly needs pruning; Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer aren’t great prose stylists.

As a novelist it’s the first – and most depressing – thing you learn about your trade: that between the sweeping ambition of your conception and the reality of your execution there will always be a terrifyingly large gulf. All novels, even the greatest ones, are failures. It’s just that most readers are too polite to notice.

In her introduction to Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble edition, 2003), Jill Muller talks about Charles Dickens’ wild public performances and the toll they took:

During the last decade of his life, Dickens toured England, Ireland, and America, giving public readings of favorite sections from his novels. “Sikes and Nancy,” based on chapter XLVII of Oliver Twist, was a particular favorite of both author and audience. While Dickens’s rendition of Nancy’s brutal murder sent audiences into fits of screaming and fainting, a physician waited back stage to monitor the ailing author’s pulse rate. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster speculated that the energy and fervor with which Dickens threw himself into these performances may have contributed to his early death from heart disease in 1870.

In the endnote for that chapter, Muller writes:

Dickens’s dramatic rendering of this scene became the most celebrated of his public readings, and one in which the author clearly took a ghoulish glee. His son and some of his friends believed that the emotional intensity of Dickens’s frequent performances of “Sikes and Nancy” contributed to his early death.

Yesterday I posted about the copies of 3,000+ previously unseen documents from Hemingway’s estate that are now at the JFK Library. I emailed the library, and they sent me their press release, which doesn’t appear to be online. The crux is this:

Examples of the type of documents that will be available to researchers in Boston include:

Letters to Hemingway from his family including his mother Grace Hall and his sons John and Patrick;
Over a dozen letters from Adriana Ivanich, the possible muse for his novel Across the River and Into the Trees.  Adriana also designed the dust jackets for Across the River and Into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea;
A group of letters to Mary Welsh Hemingway [his fourth wife] written when they first met and were both serving as war correspondents in Europe during World War II;
Letters or cables from such luminaries as Robert Capa, Pablo Casals, Marlene Dietrich, Sinclair Lewis, Lillian Ross and Ingrid Bergman;
Mail from friends and fans particularly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature and published Old Man and the Sea.

The press release also clears up the question of whether the screenplay for The Old Man and the Sea is an unused one written by Hemingway. Nope. Oh well, there’s still that alternate ending to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Here’s the full press release:

Continue Reading »

The National Post has some ideas about who should play the principal figures in the newly announced biopic of Hemingway.

1. Ernest Hemingway. You need some serious chops to take on the late Hemingway. Full of rage, vulnerability, a man at the end of his rope, and still tugging against it. We need an actor with a few tricks to play. Someone like James Gandolfini. But wait! Check out Gandolfini’s IMDB page, and you’ll see that he has signed on for an “untitled Ernest Hemingway Project” due to arrive in 2011. The plot of this one centres  “on the romance between Ernest Hemingway and WWII correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s inspiration for For Whom the Bell Tolls and the only woman who ever asked for a divorce from the writer.” Could this film be one in the same? If not, and Gandolfini is tied up, I’d suggest Robert Downey Jr (aged, of course - but they can do that now!). Or how about William Hurt - he’s got that inner rage thing down pretty good.

Hemingway wrote a second ending to For Whom the Bell Tolls. As it stands, the novel has a beautifully, maddeningly ambiguous “ending.” Does this new version answer any of the questions we’ve been left with for 69 years? It looks like we’ll find out in late spring, when the JFK Library makes available copies of 3,000+ previously unseen documents from Papa’s Cuban estate. The Associated Press reports:

Now, thanks to an agreement between U.S. Rep James McGovern, D-Mass., and the Cuban government, copies of those writings are at the John F. Kennedy Library.

The archival replicas include corrected proofs of “The Old Man and the Sea,” a movie script based on the novel, an alternate ending to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and thousands of letters, with correspondence from authors Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos and actress Ingrid Bergman. The documents were previewed Thursday and will likely be available to researchers in late spring.

That mention of a screenplay for The Old Man and the Sea is also intriguing. Hemingway wasn’t known to have written screenplays for his works. (The screenplay for the 1959 movie, starring Spencer Tracy, was written by Peter Viertel.) Is this a reference to something he wrote, or is it just a copy of Viertel’s screenplay?

When the documents are opened to the public, I’d be glad to hear from anybody who gives them a look.