A Droll Macaw with a Lyric Tongue.

Isn’t it astonishing how the lyric voice can often spring from a fount of less than heroic proportions.

I’m thinking of Swinburne here.

For Maupassant, his first impressions were of a poet short and thin ‘with a pointed face, a hydrocephalous forehead, pigeon-chested, agitated by a trembling which affected his glass with St Vitus’ dance, and talking incessantly like a madman.’

Swinburne was abnormally short with narrow sloping shoulders and tiny hands and feet. His eyes were green, and his disproportionately large head was topped by a great aureole of bright red hair. His appearance, plus his habit of fluttering his hands and hopping about as he excitedly talked, provoked a contemporary to compare him to ‘a crimson macaw’ who was ‘quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted and convulsingly droll.’

From this droll macaw issued sublime lyrics:
 

Vicisti, Galilaee. 

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;

But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

I think we may assume that in describing laurel as ‘green for a season’ Swinburne did not speak ‘horticulturally’, as Wilde would say, but employs a metonym for the short-lived crown of bay leaves awarded to an energetic young poet whose ‘green fuse’ is destined to fizzle out.

However, considered strictly horticulturally, what can one make of this celebrated quatrain?
 

Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head,

Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,

Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,

But perfect-coloured without white or red.

I think the Linnaean system of classification would be defeated, in this case, by observations more fervid than evidential.

 

A Way of Seeing: Ronald Searle

Having only this evening viewed a truly remarkable (and sobering) documentary on BBC2 TV, The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal, I was reminded of the recent death of that delightful and much admired satirical artist, Ronald Searle.

He was stationed in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese, and he was imprisoned first in Changi Jail and then taken as a slave labourer on the infamous Siam-Burma Death Railway. 

It is not bad taste, I’m convinced, to present this mordant poésie trouvée as a tribute to a great honorary Frenchman, since it is in his own words.

A Way of Seeing.

‘My friends and I,
we all signed up together,’
he recalled. ‘Basically
all the people we loved and knew,
and grew up with, simply
became fertiliser
for the nearest bamboo.’

Ronald Searle*

*Quoted verbatim from the Daily Telegraph obituary column, 3 January 2012.  Ronald Searle, acclaimed as one of the world's greatest satirical artists, died 30 December 2011, aged 91.

Mangled Frankenstein: the Perils of the e-Text.

In four years’ time (2016) I shall be ready to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frankenstein, when I intend to explode the myth of his haunting monster’s origins by publishing my own account of its true inspiration, a source unsuspected by my fellow mythologists. 

See:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.html

 I was reminded of these pending studies when recently encountering any number of misspellings and linguistic errors in a document scanned and converted to digital text by Optical Character Recognition.

The undue reliance placed on OCR and web-based texts is a concern that calls to mind the mangling of Mary Shelley’s classic text six years’ ago in a broadcast production of the drama. 

In that particular dramatization I was appalled to hear an actress seemingly quote Mary’s own exegetical introduction to Frankenstein:

‘Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth.’

Of course, the true text should read (not ‘endured’) ‘... endued with vital warmth.’

(ENDUED = invested with.)

That this error was perpetuated was due, I fear, to the all-too-common failure today to consult the PRINTED TEXT and to placing reliance on the Web or remotely scanned texts.

MORAL: To remind us of the wisdom of scholarly engagement with a palpable text, here is a reference to the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London. 

‘They All Ought to be Hung’: a Minor Spat.

Talking of Roger Casement being ‘hanged on a comma’, I am reminded of my recent spat with an admired American translator from the French of a notable 20th Century authoress.

I had mildly disputed her translation of the French novelist (‘...both of them had been arrested and hung’) when I asked: ‘Did the authoress intend to convey the men were “hung” like game-birds to soften the flesh; or “hanged” until they were dead, in the customary usage of that participle?’

I had also asked (re. ‘... the heat in the church had made me nauseous ...’): ‘Did the authoress intend the narrator to convey that he, himself, caused nausea in others, i.e. a dose of Christianity had caused him to become offensive by his own odour?’

The eminent translator’s reply? ‘The distinctions you questioned are actually a matter of British or US English. Hanged (British) and hung (US) are synonymous. When a person is nauseous, he feels sick; when nauseated, something else makes him feel sick.’

Apparently, this American scholar studied at the Sam Goldwyn School of English.

As Dorothy Parker (a celebrated American, I believe) states in the Paris Review (Summer 1956):

‘Sam Goldwyn said, “How’m I gonna do decent pictures when all my good writers are in jail?” Then he added, the infallible Goldwyn, “Don't misunderstand me, they all ought to be hung.” Mr. Goldwyn didn’t know about “hanged.” ’

 

Oh well. It seems one person in America knows about “hanged”.