Bottom's Dream discussion
Pointless and Without Porpoise this thread
On page 10 of 2666 we read "...a lecture given by an old professor from Berlin on the works of Arno Schmidt..." And if I find it again (I'll post it) -- but I think somewhere is evidence that Julián Ríos was also familiar with Schmidt.
Can we talk about the apostrophe? Is it just the proper translation from German to English to include the ' where there is none in Zettels (I think this is the case)? But would AS have left out the ' even if the German language had told him to include it (a) because he didn't care and would leave out the ' when he saw fit, and/or (b) Because of Finnegans Wake?
Joshua wrote: "Can we talk about the apostrophe? Is it just the proper translation from German to English to include the ' where there is none in Zettels (I think this is the case)? But would AS have left out the..."Very clearly we are faced with some inconsistencies. I notice that the major editions (their respective covers) in German do not agree :: The facsimile edition without, the typeset edition with. I usually write it with just to spite Finnegan ; but I'm not consistent. All I know is that the apostrophe is the crux of the biscuit.
Also, need to recognize Arno's wife Alice, she being The Without Whom Nicht. She pretty much worked the same 100 hour weeks he did. I don't think this is she, but, well, you might get the idea .....https://www.google.com/search?q=alice...
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "The facsimile edition without"This edition is missing the ' on the slipcase (top left) and the book cover (top right). But the ' is there on the first page (bottom['s dream]):
As to Nathan's first comment, the finding of Schmidt in the one-off referencer of Bolano was for me a joy in reading 2666
Putting these here, not to gloat, but to share the joy-of-finding: "Item Status: Confirmed
Title: The School for Atheists: a Novella = Comedy in 6 Acts[ & Radio Dialogs I [2 volumes]
Author: Schmidt, Arno and Woods, John E. [translator]
Quantity: 1
Book Description: , 2 volumes, 301 & 379 pages, both translated from the German, other ISBN:1892295016 First English Edition and Reprint , books in very good condition Paperback ISBN: 1892295962
ISBN: 9781892295965
Binding: Soft cover
Book Price: £ 20.00
Postage Price: £ 3.35"
Jonathan wrote: "Item Status: Confirmed"Congrats, Jonathan :)
Jonathan wrote: "& Radio Dialogs I."You've got a Wake=essay in that one there.
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "& Radio Dialogs I."You've got a Wake=essay in that one there."
yeah - I could not believe that, not only was the School so cheap but I was essentially getting the Radio thrown in for free...
And let's pretend that this Group was born two days earlier than the db says it was ;; then it will be coincident with Arno's own birth on January 18. We'll have to do something special for his Death=Day on June 3rd.
Here in our backwater I once saw a teetering tower of School For Atheists for three dollars each. I bought ONE. I regret that now, if only, I could've mailed such to-and-fro like the Great Khan's spunk across our mitochondrial heritage.
I should say, the amount of critical German stuff on Schmidt [see our "It's About Schmidt" folder] is analogous to that of our (English) literature on The Wake. And vise=versa, except there's probably a lot more in German about the Wake than there is in English on Schmidt. So, at the moment, I feel we're skewing toward trying to identify those few works of Schmidt=criticism in English. Not to dissuade the add'ing of German critical works. For a quick gander at what's available in German, just look in on Friend/Moderator Michael's AR=NO shelf :: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Schmidt is to early for the apostrophe, it irritated me too. In German there are no apostrophes. They are even far away on the keyboard, try a german keyboard layout. Nice ös, äs, üs, even äus. pronounce it right: oeouies.A journalist called it Deppenapostroph, idiots apostrophe as any pub puts one here. Schmidt's Eck should write Schmidts Eck, drinking Schultheiss with Fouqué in Berlin Kreuzberg.
What kind of an american bias is this? Coopers?
You should write it Bottoms Dream. And every diner or what its called too, even Sothebies.
I miss J. F. Cooper.The translations here are out of print. Is Cooper comfortable to read to you? Schmidts translation seem sometimes not.
Even Franz Schubert liked Cooper for his sanguinariness. No english word for blutrünstig. Bloodthirstiness. Heavy like the Erlkönig without blood.
But in this word thirsty does not occur at all. It is supposed to be in there. Wanting to get even more.
runs, rünst is stream, run, to trickle but sounds better. Old word, same language.
Trickling is not enough it should sputter.
Week 23 Reading ZT over at The Untranslated.https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/
Mushrooms (“Basis schicklich behaart […] enorm dikk!”) and dick jokes. Something about dogs in Poe.
If there's any group of nuts who might know this, it's y'all...What was the name of Arno Schmidt's cat? The missus asked me the other day and I could not remember. I'm certain I encountered it years ago in reading stuff about him, but I can't recall where, either, whether it was a book intro or online or in the Review of Contemporary Fiction... Heck, it may have been from his fiction (sometimes hard to separate the Schmidt from the narrator)...
I wanna say it was a devilish name, like Beelzebub, Behemoth, something like that...
Between Coasts wrote: "If there's any group of nuts who might know this, it's y'all...What was the name of Arno Schmidt's cat? The missus asked me the other day and I could not remember. I'm certain I encountered it ye..."
Not sure if it's Schmidt's own cat's name, but in School for Atheists the infernal kitten is none other than Bafomet.
OK, that's most likely what I'm thinking of. Devilish name starting with a "B"... Thank you kindly, Jason!
Hintzewhite grey male cat: Conte Fosco
https://katerpaul.wordpress.com/2011/...
BAFOMET
https://katerpaul.wordpress.com/2011/...
Purzel
https://katerpaul.wordpress.com/2011/...
Hintze has assoziation with Hintz und Kuntz which means common ordinary people. Conte Fosco is italian, I do not know.
Purzel reminds me a somersault, Purzelbaum.
Klaus wrote: "Hintzewhite grey male cat: Conte Fosco
https://katerpaul.wordpress.com/2011/...."
Danke, Klaus! Priceless!
Conte Fosco is actually the name of the villain in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (which Schmidt translated into German and wrote an essay or radio piece about).
That is interesting. We discussed here, that the Frau in Weiß is a bestseller of Schmidt. Perhaps the coincidence of his feel for language and the victorian atmosphere.
Who is BURIED in Karl May's grave? Apparently it really is May ::http://www.complete-review.com/saloon...
And poisoned to boot!
This kind of thing can only come from a true Schmidtianer like Orthofer (get his new book today!)
Joshua wrote: "No foul play? Drat!"Yeah, one might have suspected and prepared for it? Like with Pullman::
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...
I named my cat "persnickety"...it was too perfect.
I kid you knot. Here I am reading BD and suddenly gr gives me one of those gr=notifications and here I see that a certain "dp" is Following me. (!) Is there no escaping the Dichter Priester?
Why Arno Schmidt is One of the Best Readers of All Time | Michael Orthofer | CWT Shortshttps://youtu.be/FfE-RtG6TEI
Spell < tear=dropps > with a dubble < p > at the end, and use a < = > to join the words -- I find it looks much more melancholy; ergo, more correct -:Arno Schmidt, KAFF auch Mare Crisium
Still (almost) no mane=st(r)eam press notice of BD ; but it takes an alt=weekly ::NEWS OF THE WEIRD
[what's weird about a book? ...--;?..--; but I'll take it.]
"Great Art!
The 1,496-page German novel “Bottom’s Dream,” translated into (broken) [that's a big "sic!"] English, more than twice as long as “War and Peace,” recently reached U.S. bookstores as a 13-pound behemoth, bound with a 14-inch spine that*, based on a September Wall Street Journal description, will almost surely go unread. The story follows two translators and their teenage daughter over a single day as they try to interpret the works of Edgar Allen Poe, making for slow going for anyone not already conversant with Poe."
http://www.encorepub.com/news-of-the-...
* back in the day, the only book (or one of very few) in the house was a book of about this size (and of comparable difficulty) ; but no one's making that comparison just yet.
And in New Zealand we get this insight from one of their hipster blurbers ::"Once upon a day ...
The German novel Bottom's Dream, is more than twice as long as War and Peace, (nearly 1500 pages) and weighs nearly twice as much as the All Black captain coffee-table breaker Richie McCaw 148 [no clue]. If that's not enough to ensure it remains unsold and unread, the subject matter surely will. The story follows two translators and their teenage daughter, over a single day, as they try to interpret the works of Edgar Allen Poe.
YAWN."
John E. Woods is amazing! I'm reading and enjoying all the word play and thinking it is as if this was never a translation. It reads as if it were written in English!
Still missing X=Mess presents? How about the Arno=Schmidt=Dress=Up=Doll (including ZETTEL'S TRAUM)
Click here for template and instructions (PDF)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1...
Matt wrote: "Still missing X=Mess presents? How about the Arno=Schmidt=Dress=Up=Doll (including ZETTEL'S TRAUM)Click here for template and instructions (PDF)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1......"
Yep. I think the people will want that!
Now that the year is 2018, almost 2 years after BD was published: is it more impenetrable than the Wake ? The Wake looks like a model of simplicity compared to BD.
James wrote: "Now that the year is 2018, almost 2 years after BD was published: is it more impenetrable than the Wake ? The Wake looks like a model of simplicity compared to BD."Knot at awl!!! BD/ZT is just a pile of dirty=puns (fun-on-a-bun!) next to The Wake! The Wake is of course moist Joy(c)ous!
The Wake is almost a living thing, it is so full of energy. It is an Ouroboros of a book. If its interpreters had lived 150 years ago, they would have been commenting on the Bible. What immediately impresses me about BD is its sheer length, Michael Chabon wrote this of the Wake:
“Now, I know (along with everything else) that I am a know-it-all. I avoid contests of knowledge—word games, Trivial Pursuit, Celebrities—because they bring out an omnisapient swagger in me that I despise. I also try to steer clear of puzzles, because I have a tendency, in the solving of them, to lose perspective. There was a broken combination padlock lying on a coffee table at a party I attended not long ago; though my hosts knew the correct combination, the lock refused to open. At this party—or so I was afterward informed—one might have enjoyed excellent hors d’oeuvres, premium alcoholic beverages, the company of witty and attractive human beings. I spent the whole time wedged into a corner of the couch, fiddling with that lock.2 That morning in the Burger Chef, I could hear the book calling to me, whispering like the sword Stormbringer seducing Elric, promising that if I were to lose myself in it I would become—in the phrase leveled at Joyce by his ever-skeptical brother, Stanislaus—“a super-clever superman.””
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/...
If the Wake is like Stormbringer, BD sounds more like Arioch the demon-god of Chaos, or maybe like one of Clark Ashton Smith’s wizards. The entire review is very, very funny.
James wrote: "Michael Chabon wrote this of the Wake: ....The entire review is very, very funny."I don't understand how famous writers can let such embarrassingly dumb pieces get published.
I have just bought a copy of the new Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake, and it is much stranger than the original. The translator decided to use two sizes of characters to suggest alternative readings, and every right-hand page is footnotes. Words from the original are printed in small text. Joyce would have adored it.
Jim wrote: "I have just bought a copy of the new Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake, and it is much stranger than the original. The translator decided to use two sizes of characters to suggest alternative r..."Would it be possible to post a link to an attachment/screenshot ? If it’s stranger than the Wake, it must be quite something.
I will post to my Facebook page when I get back home. (Can't get Facebook without a VPN in China.)
ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Check out @Manuelpavonb’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/Manuelpavonb/stat..."Most impressive. Thank you :)
ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "In pictures!https://www.theguardian.com/books/gal..."
This looks as though it belongs on Deviant Art. There are some beautiful illustrations to Tolkien that take the form of a single page containing many images. Like this:
https://www.deviantart.com/art/Gondol...
Jim wrote: "I have just bought a copy of the new Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake, and it is much stranger than the original. The translator decided to use two sizes of characters to suggest alternative r..."Did they get the whole thing trans'd? iirc, they'd only busted out about a hundred pages.
You're right Nathan!"After spending eight years translating the first third of James Joyce's famously opaque novel Finnegans Wake into Chinese, Dai Congrong assumed it was a labour of love rather than money."
Many people are eager to know when Dai Congrong, the Chinese translator of Finnegans Wake, is going to produce the rest of the book. To date she has only published one third of her version and dropped no hints about when we might see the rest. A while back, quizzed by a reporter, she said: ‘May God give me the courage to finish it’ – which is surely a good call, even if you’re not a believerThe first third of Finnegans Wake took her eight years, and now she is vice dean of the Chinese Literature Department of Fudan, a post which carries many administrative and social obligations, leaving even less time for her magnum opus.
London Review of Books
If there's a topical reason right now to be reading Schmidt, especially as a USofA citizen, it is his anti-militarism.