I want all your secrets beamed right to my eyes

[sovay]

I have a migraine. I'm trying to post about non-depressing things.

1. Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling has a new music video: their cover of Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan." There is a monkey. Also a plywood violin.

2. Via fleurdelis28: Cops go undercover to bust Roman gladiators. I'm just waiting for the inevitable update about the pitched battles being fought in the streets between gangs of retiarii and secutores, secretly and unknown to one another almost all plain-sandals policemen.

3. I really like Jonathan Franzen's version of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen, 1891) except for one line, which is unfortunately the one he uses in his introduction to illustrate his attempts toward a performable as well as readable translation of the play: "Dieses Glückskind, dieses Sonnenkind—dieses Freudenmädchen auf meinem Jammerweg!" Franzen translates this (capitalization his) as "THIS SUNNY CHILD, THIS LUCKY THING—THIS FLOOZY ON MY TRAIL OF TEARS!—" The line is being yelled in totally earnest, hopelessly comic adolescent despair by a fourteen-year-old whose dramatic suicide monologue has just been accidentally interrupted by a former schoolmate who doesn't understand a single reason he wants to shoot himself: Moritz has been tying himself in knots over his failing grades and his unmanageable hormones and Ilse dropped out of school a year ago to model for all the artists at the Priapus Club. She's as unconcernedly Bohemian as he's nervously Werther-ish; she invites him back to her place, he begs off on a confused excuse of homework, and then has about three different directions of second thought and temporarily blows a fuse. Freudenmädchen means joy-girl; a prostitute. The problem with "floozy" is that while it's a suitably funny and frustrated word choice for a character who even after death is chastised as immer noch derselbe Angstmeier!, it doesn't really carry over the original German and so loses all the follow-through from "luck-child," "sun-child," and the contrast with Jammerweg, "misery-road." I don't disagree with Franzen's rejection of previous translations, that "daughter of joy" is too technical, "little whore" overstates the case, and "blissful temptress" is just off. I just looked at the sentence and couldn't figure out why he didn't use "good-time girl."

(Oh, my God. At the Volksbühne am Bülowplatz in 1929, in a production directed by Karl Heinz Martin, this scene was played by Peter Lorre and Lotte Lenya. Will somebody get me a fucking time machine already?)

4. I have just been hit by l'esprit de l'escalier nearly two months late. On the Kipling panel I moderated at Readercon, one of the panelists insisted on reading from a letter written by Kipling in 1919:

Do you notice how their insane psychology attempts to infect the Universe? There is one Einstein, nominally a Swiss, certainly a Hebrew, who (the thing is so inevitable that it makes one laugh) comes forward, scientifically to show that, under certain conditions Space itself is warped and the instruments that measure it are warped also . . . When you come to reflect on a race that made the world Hell, you see how just and right it is that they should decide that space is warped, and should make their own souls the measure of all Infinity. The more I see of the Boche's mental workings the more sure I am that he is Evil Incarnate, and, like all evil, a pathetic Beast. Einstein's pronouncement is only another little contribution to assisting the world towards flux and disintegration.

Which was interesting, but slightly derailing, in that it dropped the conversation back to well-was-Kipling-a-racist-or-wasn't-he? as opposed to exploring how the generation of writers who grew up on him might have absorbed or refuted or engaged with whatever complicated attitudes in their own fiction. This afternoon, it finally struck me that the real interest of that passage is not the degree to which Kipling's anti-Semitism was derived from or merely coexisted with his hatred of Germans, but what it meant that we were holding an entire panel about the influence on speculative literature of a man who freaked out at the thought of relativity.

5. Conversation with rushthatspeaks indicates that the film of Out of Africa (1985, which they have not seen) is a very faithful version of the book of Out of Africa (1937, which I have not read) and additionally incorporates material from the author's life that was left out of the novel. I guess I should read some Dinesen.

And now we are at the point where I need to lie down or scream or something, so I will leave you with the revamped website for Caitlín R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest and her Kickstarter project with Kyle Cassidy, The Drowning Girl: Stills from a Movie That Never Existed. Because they are neat.

Comments

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

Why not "pleasure girl" for Freudenmädchen? Simplest, closest to the original and with the right era aura.

There was one huge miscalculation in Out of Africa that threw the entire film off: casting Robert Redford as Denys Finch-Hatton. Hatton was the quintessential dilettante British upperclass gent, with the emotional opacity to match. Redford as a persona was as American as they come -- plus there was no chemistry between Meryl Streep and him.

Dinesen is a consummate storyteller, I'm frankly surprised you haven't read them, given your predilections. My favorite is Winter's Tales. I also highly recommend Judith Thurman's biography.

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Redford as a persona was as American as they come -- plus there was no chemistry between Meryl Streep and him.

I guessed that the character was not originally meant to have been American, but I thought that the two of them worked very well together; I never had any difficulty believing their conversations about self and belonging and the promises people can and cannot make to one another, which seemed the heart of their relationship.

My favorite is Winter's Tales.

It's on the list, then.

I also highly recommend Judith Thurman's biography.

Thanks!

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

These were not conversations that they held (Finch-Hatton was not the type to allow them... I'm tempted to conclude that they only occur in American fiction, but that's another conversation). They were conversations that Dinesen had with herself, so to speak: mental bargains she made while she was trying to reconcile herself to his physical absence and emotional withholding, which carried over to her writing -- the concept of a rooted female versus a roving male, the idea of deprivation and abnegation as springboards for creativity.

Klaus-Maria Brandauer as Bror Blixen was far closer to his real-life counterpart. And in many ways the formative presence during those years was Farah Aden, Dinesen's haughty Somali majordomo.

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They were conversations that Dinesen had with herself, so to speak: mental bargains she made while she was trying to reconcile herself to his physical absence and emotional withholding, which carried over to her writing -- the concept of a rooted female versus a roving male, the idea of deprivation and abnegation as springboards for creativity.

But even if their conversations are herself externalized and projected out onto someone who has become, for the purposes of fiction, some other self: they still need to work as characters for a viewer who knows nothing of Dinesen's life; and I found that they do.

Klaus-Maria Brandauer as Bror Blixen was far closer to his real-life counterpart.

I'd seen the actor before, but not to know his name; I'd watch him again.

And in many ways the formative presence during those years was Farah Aden, Dinesen's haughty Somali majordomo.

rushthatspeaks spoke of him.

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

The film was biographical and purported to be as accurate as possible. I saw it after I had read Dinesen's stories and Thurman's biography. So I had a very clear sense about Finch-Hatton. Redford is enormously personable. But to me it was like seeing Greer Garson in the role of Elizabeth Bennett.

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But to me it was like seeing Greer Garson in the role of Elizabeth Bennett.

No longer about Robert Redford—I haven't seen the 1940 Pride and Prejudice. How so?

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

Very much a parallel: Garson was as convincing as Redford. That is, not at all. Neither can submerge themselves into a role. They are always, more or less, themselves. So if the role fits them, well and good; if not...