It amuses and bemuses me, sometimes, to watch the titles of books and films move from language to language. I imagine most titles get translated pretty closely, but sometimes there is the odd exception.
For example, if I look at the IMDb page for the international titles of the Akira Kurosawa film Tengoku to Jigoku, I see that for most languages where I can readily work out the meaning, the titles have stuck pretty close to the original Heaven and Hell. France seems to have also used Between Heaven and Hell, which is almost the same idea. A common English language title is High and Low: similar, but it loses the feeling of unbearable heat that was so much a motif of the film (down there in the slums of Tokyo was “hell” for a reason).
Girl with A Book, Jose Ferraz de Almeida Junior (1850). Source: WikiArt
Though my translations are amateur attempts, I’m really enjoying the challenge. Other than The Feather Pillow, these are the first literary stories that I’ve attempted without a previous translation to reference. I’ve translated other things without reference, like this and this, but in those cases I was concerned mostly with meaning. With a literary work, one wants to convey not just meaning, but something of the work’s voice and tone.
I watched Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires the other night. I’ve been exploring Bava’s early giallos and proto-giallos, and my husband is an enthusiast of schlock 50’s style sci-fi and horror (“quantity cinema” is what he calls it). Planet of the Vampires was in his collection, but neither of us had noticed it was a Bava. Until now.
It’s not as groundbreaking as Bava’s giallos; it really is a schlock B movie. But it’s a fun movie. Terrible title, though.
The set design was mimimal, and very much of the genre, but it was well done, considering the teeny tiny budget Bava had: something like $200,000. Yes, it showed. My husband pointed out the thermofax machine that was doubling as a piece of instrumentation. The “captain’s log” (some years before Star Trek) also looked to be a copier or blueprint printer or something, and the periscope-style viewer on the bridge looked like it was cobbled together from a salon hairdryer. But it was endearing. And the elevator hatch thing to bring the astronauts down to the planet’s surface was clever.
Considering Bava’s budget, the effects and production values were impressive. Supposedly the set for the planet’s surface was literally two styrofoam rocks, smoke and mirrors, along with some well done in-camera effects. But on screen, it looks pretty good.
Exploring the dark tales of this Uruguayan author.
I recently found Horacio Quiroga’s short story “The Dead Man” in Clifton Fadiman’s 1986 collection The World of the Short Story, and it’s given me a new hobby: tracking down all of his short stories that I can find.
I’ve seen Quiroga’s stories compared variously to Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, and Rudyard Kipling; he himself acknowledged the influences of Poe, Kipling and de Maupassant on his work. Like Poe, he had a theory of the perfect short story (one he often contradicted in his own work). Also like Poe, and he was incredibly obsessed with death, and fascinated with madness as well.
This morbid viewpoint is not surprising, given Quiroga’s own life history. His father accidentally shot himself on a hunting trip and later his stepfather deliberately shot himself (apparently, Quiroga witnessed it). In 1900, when Quiroga would have been about twenty-one, his two brothers died of typhoid fever. The following year, one of Quiroga’s best friends, Federico Ferrando, was challenged to a duel. Since Ferrando knew nothing about guns, Quiroga offered to check Ferrando’s gun for him — and accidentally shot and killed Ferrando in the process. Though Quiroga was found innocent of any crime, his own feelings of guilt led him to leave his native Uruguay for Argentina.
Here’s a clip of Boris Karloff, showing off his vocal chops on the Rosemary Clooney Show in 1957. It’s a duet with Rosemary in the middle of a Little Red Riding Hood skit—Boris is the Big Bad Wolf, disguised as Grandma. (Length: 2:32):
He’s got a great voice, though the song seems slightly creepy by today’s standards…
You can also hear Boris singing a children’s song on the same show, here (from a
video of the entire show; the link should start playing 18:43 in).
It is always hazardous to prophesy the future course of an admirable writer, but it is safe to say that the rich, human embodiment of the stories collected in this volume assure them a permanence in our literature for their imaginative reality, their warm color, and their finality of artistic execution. Almost without exception they represent the best that is being accomplished in America today by a literary artist.
— Edward J. O’Brien, Introduction to Land’s End and Other Stories (1918)
When I first read Wilbur Daniel Steele’s 1919 short story, “Out of Exile,” it struck me right away. The language was beautiful, the imagery evocative. I loved it. I felt immediately drawn into this New England fishing community, on the fictional Urkey Island, as the love triangle at the heart of the story unfolded through the filter of the narrator’s growing up and coming-of-age. And although the story was not in any way supernatural, somehow it felt like a ghost story. And that, of course, is a plus, as far as I’m concerned. I wondered: who is this Wilbur Daniel Steele? Did he write any actual ghost stories? What are they like?
Wilbur Daniel Steele, circa 1918. Source: Wikimedia
He’s quite forgotten today (sorry, Mr. O’Brien!), but Wilbur Daniel Steele was one of the most popular American short story writers of the early twentieth century. He wrote both for prestigious fiction magazines and for women’s magazines. Between 1915 and 1933, at least ten of Steele’s stories appeared in Edward J. O’Brien’s annual Best [American] Short Stories of the Year. Over the same period, eleven of his stories were O. Henry prize selections: one more than John Cheever, one fewer than Alice Munro and William Faulkner.
After about 1933, he seems to have published fewer short stories, and these largely in women’s magazines. He had a revival of sorts around the 1950s, when some of his earlier work was republished in crime fiction magazines like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. After that, he dropped off the radar. Steele passed away in 1970, at the age of 84.
Return to Glennascaul is a lovely short 1953 film written and directed by Hilton Edwards, one of the major figures of Irish theater. Orson Welles appears as himself, narrating this nice variation on the Woman in White urban legend.
On his way to Dublin during a break from filming Othello, Welles picks up a stranded motorist, who in turn tells him this spooky little story. I like the harp that accompanies the main section of the film. It sets the mood nicely.
Here’s Peter Bogdanovich introducing the film (length 4:08):
Near Byland Abbey, Yorkshire, ghosts walked. If only someone would pray for their sins.
I
A traveller, carrying a load of beans, encountered a whirling haystack on the road. Inside the haystack, a strange light glowed. The traveller invoked the haystack; it became a man. This man insisted on carrying the traveller’s beans. When they reached the river, the man disappeared, leaving the traveller with the beans on his own back. The traveller had masses sung for the soul of the revenant, and the ghost was laid.
II
It looked like an injured crow; the tailor tried to help. The crow shot sparks from his sides; in fear, the tailor crossed himself. With a terrible screech, the crow attacked; injured, the tailor prayed for protection. The crow turned into a dog; the tailor invoked the creature to speak. In life, the dog had been a man; he had been excommunicated for a terrible crime (What crime? No one says). Now his ghost wanted absolution, and one hundred and eighty masses to be said for his soul. If the tailor helped him, the ghost would tell him how to heal his wounds; otherwise, the tailor’s flesh would rot, and his skin would waste away.
The tailor went to the priest who had excommunicated the man; the priest refused to give absolution. The tailor begged—who wants their own flesh to rot, or their skin to waste away? Finally the priest agreed. The tailor went to all the monasteries in York, and got one hundred and eighty masses for the man’s soul. The tailor went to meet the ghost; the ghost arrived as a goat, then turned into a flame. Satisfied, the ghost told the tailor to bathe in the river and scrub his body with a certain rock; then the tailor’s wounds would heal. The ghost then left on his journey to heaven; the tailor returned home, and fell ill.
I confess: I picked this up in the bookstore because it had “ghosts” in the title. But I didn’t put it down when I saw that it was a book of essays, and I’m glad I didn’t. I wasn’t familiar with Eliot Weinberger before this, and I’m a better person for having discovered him.
Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, political commentator, editor, and translator of Latin American and Chinese literature. This particular volume has two parts. The first part “continues his linked serial-essay An Elemental Thing” (note to self: pick up the first part of the serial-essay), and the second part collects various book reviews and essays originally written as introductions to other people’s works. The first part is wondrous. The second part is quite enjoyable, too.
Reading “The Story of Adam and Eve” was a revelation for me. In it, Weinberger reconstructs the story of what happened to Adam and Eve (and later, to Cain) after they were expelled from the Garden, based on several extant versions of the story (Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Georgian, Armenian). Not only is in an interesting tale in itself, but I felt like I had just discovered the ideal that I’ve been striving for in the retellings of folktale and myth that I attempt from time to time on this blog. It’s an ideal that I’ll likely never achieve, but now I have a conscious image in my head of what I’m trying to reach.
And then it gets even better; I have more literary goals to strive for.
Thematically related posts series that I’ve done. Now you can find all the hummingbird folktales, or all my Mexican Monstresses posts, or my “Flowers of Dorian Gray” series all in one place, in chronological order.
Tales that I’ve shared. These are (mostly) public domain readings I’ve shared outside of my annual winter tales series (which has its own page): literary fairy tales, ghost stories, and assorted oddities.
I’ll update the page as I share new readings, or write new series.
I’ve also updated the My Favorite Posts page, because I hadn’t done that in ages.
You can find links to these pages on the blog menu; click the “hamburger icon” on the upper right hand corner. Do check them out!
