Sellic Spell

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I have just received, thanks to Big Blue Marble in Chestnut Hill, my copy of J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf.

For those who are looking for consumer advice on whether to buy it or not, I will posit a single simple question:  How many translations do you already have?  If the answer is fewer than two, you can probably wait until you run across a copy in somebody's yard sale.

But Beowulf lay at the heart of Tolkien's vision and The Lord of the Rings lies at the heart of modern fantasy, so this is important to those of us who geek out on such things.

I've been waiting for this book for decades, and so I'm not going to rush through it.  But already I've read Sellic Spell ("Strange Tale"), which is the great fantasist's attempt to recreate the story he imagined may well have preceded the poem.   And it was a surprise and a delight.

The prose, to begin with, is bright and crisp, much better than such imaginings usually produce.  (Apparently, he wrote it first in old English and then translated it into modern English.)  But mostly it's full of surprises.  Did you know that Beowulf was raised by a bear?  Or that that he got his name because of how bearish he was?

Here's the description of the hero as a boy:

. . . the child grew to a surly, lumpish boy, and was slow to learn the speech of the land.  He would not work, nor learn the use of tools or weapons.  He had great liking for honey, and often sought for it in the woods, or plundered the hives of the farmers; and as he had no name of his own, people called him Bee-wolf, and that was his name ever after.

This is terrific stuff.  I'm going to enjoy this boy tremendously.

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Writing In My Sleep: "Thursday"

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Occasionally, I write in my sleep.  Which is not the same as dreaming, really, but a specialized kind of dream in which I put words together to form a work of fiction.  The resulting piece is quickly forgotten upon waking up, as are most dreams.  But occasionally I bestir myself to write them down immediately.

Here is last night's contribution to world literature:

"Thursday"

Today is Thursday, named after Thurs Fiordwal, the Swedish calendar maker. Until 1857, there were only six days in the week, and the year consisted of twelve five-week months with five days left over as holidays, six on leap years. Since these days were taken by individual workers operating on the honor system, this proved incompatible with new standards of industrialization and so in 1857 the calendar was reformed. Historians tell us that this was the beginning of the modern era and the first step toward a future which none of us is going to enjoy.

This has been a Bicentennial minute.  Tomorrow:  the history of Cleveland.

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Ruthless Self Promotion Du Jour

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Several of my friends over at Facebook have informed me that my collection of short fiction, The Dog Said Bow-Wow,  is a one-day Kindle special today.  Apparently this is a regular thing that Kindle does.

The deal is that you can buy an e-copy for $1.99 -- but only today.

I think it's a terrific deal because I think it's a terrific book. But, then again, I would.

You can find the offer here.


And in unrelated news . . .

You've probably heard this already, but Maya Angelou has died at age 86.  This is longer than most of us get.  But it still seems unfair.  There are some people whom one expects to simply go on forever and Maya Angelou was one of them.

Marianne's father was one of the deacons of Washington Baptist Churh in Washington, PA.  When he died, the minister compared him to one of the cedars of Lebanon.  "Now he's gone," he said.  "How different the horizon looks!"

Goodbye, Ms. Angelou.  How different the horizon looks without you.

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This Glitterati Life, Part 5,438 . . .

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Above:  The legendary Andy Duncan tries to sell me some absolutely spurious line of reasoning at a reception in his honor at Gregory Frost's house, last Saturday.  I, of course, am not buying it.


Photograph copyright 2014 by Gregory Frost.

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The Single Best Story You Won't Read This Year

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This is the last of four reviews which appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction.  I don't do many short fiction reviews these days because I have so many other things I have to write.  So when I actually do write such a review it's because I was particularly moved by the story.

If you’ve never been stranded in Beijing Capitol International Airport and tried in vain to derive some aid from the signage, you can’t have a proper appreciation for how hard it must be to translate Chinese into English.  So major props are due to Nicky Harman and Pang Zhaoxia for rendering Zhao Haihong’s “1923 – a fantasy” into a prose so lithe and graceful that it reads as if it had been written in our own language.  This task was made all the more difficult by the fact that Ms. Zhao’s story is a wonderful construct, vivid and nuanced, that shifts effortlessly between modes of storytelling.

Here’s a sample of the mingled art of the writer and her translators.  A Kuomintang operative, a woman with her hair cut mannishly short, enters a nightclub:

. . . Bubbles was greeted by the hostess, who patted her coquettishly on the chest, pushing a white rose into the breast-pocket of her Sun Yat-sen jacket as she did so.  “Good evening, Sir...”

        The Hostess’s words were no sooner out of her mouth than she flinched, her fingers fluttering from Bubbles’ chest like a startled bird.  The corners of Bubbles’ mouth twitched in a smile, which allayed the hostess’s surprise.

        “I’m looking for someone,” Bubbles announced calmly, and slipped into the brightly-coloured world of the club’s interior, crowded with customers cruising in the glittering, night-time waves of light like brilliant tropical fish.  Bubbles melted into the pool of colours, with a flick of her tail as it were, almost giving my imagination the slip.

There are four main characters in this story:  Bubbles, the revolutionary; Jia Su, who is trying to invent a machine that will store memories – or possibly dreams – in water; Meiying, forced by poverty to work as a dance hostess at the nightclub; and the narrator whom Bubbles almost evades.  This last, unnamed person is Zhao’s best invention, the consciousness in which the story is created and yet one who performs a few crucial actions while revealing nothing about the person making them – not even the gender.

The plot is relatively simple.  The narrator finds a box that belonged to his or her great-grandmother (Meiying), containing biographical information about her husband (Jia Su), and two bottles of an unknown liquid.  The written material includes the enigmatic datum that in 1925, the “aqua-dream machine” that Jia Su was working on failed.  What interests the narrator most, however, is family lore that the great-grandfather had once provided shelter to a revolutionary.  The opening of the story, and subsequent segments set in 1923, are the narrator’s imaginative re-creations of the past.

The past, however, is not only a foreign country but one in which we have little influence.  After evoking the nightclub scene (and admitting that the re-creation may be too heavily influenced by classic movie star Brigitte Lin), the narrator is unable to create a romance between Jia Su and Bubbles.  The past is as it was.  The characters go off to their varied fates.  The narrator is left to make sense of it all.

Structurally, the story is a marvel of deftness.  It darts back and forth in time and ends more or less where it begins, with a deepened understanding and a clearer picture of what the imagination can and cannot impose upon what has been.  The narrative is vividly real and yet floats weightlessly in the mind.  “1923 – a fantasy” is every bit as marvelous a machine as the device Jia Su dedicated years of his life to.

It is worth noting that for several decades science fiction was effectively banned in China as a distraction from the serious business of nation-building.  More recently, officialdom has recognized the value of SF as a means of encouraging creative thinking in generation that will need it in the coming years, if their nation is to thrive.  “China in the twenties did not need an aqua-dream machine,” the narrator observes near the end of this tale.  But perhaps now its time has come.           

“1923 – a fantasy” appeared in the Spring & Autumn 2012 special issue (“Chinese Science Fiction: Late Qing and the Contemporary”) of Renditions, a magazine of translations from Chinese to English published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  Which means that, unless you chance upon the Columbia University Press reissue of the magazine as a stand-alone book which is rumored to be forthcoming, you’re unlikely to have the opportunity to read it.  I have told you of its existence simply so that you may know that such marvels exist in the world.




Above:  I couldn't find a copy of the photo of Brigitte Lin looking exactly like Bubbles which appeared in Renditions, so you get the cover of the magazine itself instead.
 

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Clothesline Night

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For all its virtues, the Internet has a heavy bias for information created after it came into existence.  Some of this is slowly correcting itself.  When I first came online, I discovered that it contained more references to me than to Konrad Lorenz.  This deplorable situation is, I believe, no more.

Other distortions remain.  If you search online for Clothesline Night -- much less Bean Day -- you'll find next to nothing.  But in the Winooski, Vermont, of my youth it was a very big deal indeed, the opening of the season of vandalism centered on Halloween.

And what was Clothesline Night, you ask?  It was the night when boys ran through the neighborhood with knives (all boys had pocketknives then), cutting every clothesline they found in pieces.  It was definitely a Vermont thing.  My family came to Winooski from Schenectady, New York, and found out about this quaint custom their first year there.  Old-timers all knew to take their clotheslines in the night.

I am the most honest of men.  But it appears that I do not have a trustworthy aspect.  Long ago I learned that if I told somebody it was a beautiful day out, they'd grab their umbrella.  This is a cross I've learned to live with.  Occasionally, I make money by betting that I'm telling the truth.

So it was a particular pleasure to discover the following paired items from the Moberly (Missour) Monitor Index of November 19, 1934, in a column titled AROUND TOWN WITH GOETZE JETER:

HERE'S one for you! It was that always-anticipated "Clothesline Night" before Halloween and the (what scientists term “identical”) twin sons of a certain w. k. local family were out for a lark.

Armed with a pocketknife – surreptitiously sneaked out of t h e house – and accompanied by other youngsters of their neighborhood they set off on a snipping expedition. They had grand sport until they reached one south-side residence.

There they encountered a clothesline that defied the pocketknife, It was made of wire.

Temporarily stumped, one of the twins solved the problem. Knocking at the front door he asked if he could borrow a pair of pliers. They were given to him. He retired to the rear of the house, put them into action, returned to the door with them, extended his thanks for their loan very solemnly and disappeared.

And with him – so the dismayed householders discovered the next morning – had gone their coil of clothesline!

EVERY story has a sequel – and this is this one's.

            Knowing the twins well, the householders still can't place the blame for the trick. The appearance of the twins is so similar they haven't yet remembered which one came to their door that night.

            And the twins haven't confessed. As yet!

I share this with you in the hope that somebody else might step forward to share memories of this revered old holiday which, inexplicably, seems to have faded into obscurity.

The explication of Bean Day I shall leave for another time.

Incidentally, I rather like ol' Goetze.  He seems to have been a man with a sense of humor.

 

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Mummers' Song

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You may not know it, but I'm an honorary Newfoundlander.  I've kissed the cod at the screech and I have the certificate to prove it.  Even though I do live in Philadelphia.

One thing the citizens of both places have in common is mummers.  Newfoundland's mummers are very much like what our mummers used to be two hundred years ago (except that ours shot off guns in the air) and ours are very much like what theirs might mutate into a couple of hundred years after the Apocalypse.

I wouldn't give up the Philadelphia Mummers for anything.  But how heartwarming and fun Newfoundland mumming looks to be!

The song is by Simani (pronounced Sim 'n' I),  a music duet from you'll never guess where.  Enjoy.

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