To start off with: YES, I AM AWARE THERE IS A FILM VERSION OF THIS BOOK! ^^
You wouldn't believe how many people asked me if I knew of the film with Sean Connery while I was reading the novel - either because they loved it that much or because they wanted to spare me the supposed agony of reading the book. It got to be quite funny, actually - and not only because the film was probably a huge part of my motivation for picking up the novel in the first place. Apparently, Eco has quite the reputation for being an unreadable author, especially for his book Foucault's Pendulum.
Luckily, however, I had at least three big motivators for picking up this novel and getting to the end of it: 1) the magnificent film, 2) the lovely teacher-student bond, 3) the truly great lecture on the postmodern elements of the book by Albert Meier.
As a result, I think I got about half-way through the novel, before I began to feel the strain of ploughing through all the descriptions - and then it wasn't too difficult to keep going, since the plot had already begun unravelling. But speaking of plot ...
Since I wanted to broaden my literary horizon a bit, I recently read Things Fall Apart by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. To be honest, I didn't love it from the start, since the narrative style and the literary world was quite unfamiliar - it was very hard to get into at first. However, about a quarter into the book I really fell in love with it, partly because it was so unfamiliar, I think. It was really refreshening to take a break from the issues of European societies in various periods, and instead visit a very different culture in a different country. Before I expand on that, though, I should probably tell you what this book was about in the first place.
Summary
Things Fall Apart is a novel which tells the story of Okonkwo, a very successful inhabitant of Umuofia, a village in the territory which is now known as Nigeria. Despite his success, Okonkwo's life is dominated by his fear of becoming like his father, who was a drunkard badly in debt to all his neighbours. This fear is his ultimate flaw, as it makes him the terror of his own family, particularly when he believes they are showing signs of "weakness". There are countless instances when his fear makes him become violent to the point of beating up his own wife or hitting his children. Violence, it seems, is the only way he knows how to triumph over perceived "weakness".
For the majority of the novel, Achebe describes the way of life in an Igbo village pre-colonialisation. The reader gains insight into Igbo tradition and custom, which are not always painted in a positive light (e.g. the abandonment of twins in the wild). Simultaneously, we also get to know Okonkwo's fatal flaw, namely that he will do anything to avoid being weak and remain respected in his village.
Even thouh things already start falling apart for Okonkwo, things get really critical for him when the white man arrives in the midst of the community and starts trying to convert the Igbo people to the Christian faith. It doesn't happen overnight, but gradually a split develops between those villagers who turn to the new faith and those who decide to stick with their own gods and beliefs. Eventually, both the villagers and Okonkwo realise that the world will never be the same again ...
For those of you who like to watch videos, here's Shmoop's really entertaining summary of the novel. Be careful for major spoiler's though!
Right, now that that's out of the way, let's start talking about some of the fascinating things about this novel!
Language
So, the first thing that was so surprising for me about this book was that it was originally written in English, and not in one of the many languages of Nigeria (more than 500!). The author himself gives a very important reason for this though, namely that precisely because of the multitude of languages spoken by the people of Nigeria, it was necessary to use English, as this was the only way to reach as many Nigerians as possible. Nigeria used to be a colony of the British Empire, that's why English is such a wide-spread language even today (next to the obvious English-as-a-global-language phenomenon, of course).
However, just because he used English does not mean that Achebe did not put his personal touch on the language in order to reflect the culture he aimed to describe. In fact, he apparently once said that writers of African origin "should aim to fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience" (Source). In order to accomplish that in his own novels, he wove together a text which is filled with Igbo words, phrases and proverbs. All throughout the novel, the reader encounters words like harmattan (a dry, sandy wind, typical for the region), chi (a god/karma/fate, personal to every villager), or ogbanje (a special kind of evil spirit), next to the obviously foreign words for plants, food and culture-specific objects.
Harmattan
I also enjoyed the proverbs a lot, such as "A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing", meaning that strange things do not happen for no reason at all, and, most famously, "Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten".
For honesty's sake though, I have to admit that it was exactly these words, phrases and proverbs which made it difficult to get into the novel at first, because sometimes I just had no clue what Achebe was talking about. However, the deeper I got into the story, the more I started appreciating their inclusion, until in the end I couldn't get enough of them. I think that Achebe was a hundred percent right in using these Igbo words and phrases, because next to the obvious advantage of giving you a bit of an insight into the language the protagonists in this book are really speaking, some things just cannot be readily translated into a foreign language. It's the same nowadays, when people choose to use German words instead of English ones, for instance, because they express certain concepts better (e.g. schadenfreude for the kind of malicious glee you feel when something bad happens to another person). At the end of reading this book, I'm very glad for these words and phrases, to the point where I've even taken a look at a website on the Igbo language :). Something interesting I discovered over there: Igbo is actually a tone language like Chinese, which means that, depending on the pitch you use when pronouncing a word, it could mean something totally different!
Impact of the novel
Achebe has been called as the father or patriarch of the modern African literature, partly because his first novel Things Fall Apart had such a world-wide impact. It was published in 1958, at a time when (brace yourselves) only six other novels by African writers had been published in the West. Isn't that amazing? Things Fall Apart stands at the beginning of a huge effort to reinvigorate African literature - an effort that was further supported by Achebe by serving as advisory editor to the African Writers Series published by Heinemann (according to wikipedia there are nearly 300 titles in this series now - I'll have to check that out, it sounds amazing!).
It wasn't only - or even primarily - an attempt to make African literature appear on the literary radar of the West. Things Fall Apart was also an effort at reconnecting with the culture of Nigerian people before they were colonised and became part of the British Empire and all that entailed - British education, British administration, British religion, etc. This was especially important at the time, as Ghana had just become independent, and Nigeria gained independence from the British Empire only two years later in 1960. People obviously felt a need to re-examine their past and find a new identity.
The novel, however, wasn't just about telling a story in which the original customs and tradition are portrayed as good vs. the evilness of the colonisers. Achebe worked really hard at painting an ambiguous picture, where there is good and evil on both sides. For instance, the first converts to Christianity in the story are exactly those people who were disadvantaged by the old customs and traditions or thought there was something wrong with them - those people who were branded as outcasts or those who didn't believe in the practice of abandoning babies in the wild just because they were born as twins. Similarly, the first Christian missionary who arrives in the village of Umuofia is actually accepted by the villagers and is even allowed to eat with the elders. It is only the second missionary, who comes after the first one falls ill, who is the typical bad guy most of us know from films.
It's quite fascinating, really, the way that this story both changed African literature and the way books by African writers are viewed all over the world - and I love it all the more for it.
Finding one's own voice
This sort of ties in with both of the points above: one thing that was particularly important to Achebe was to tell the story of African history and culture in a new way, namely one that would be truer than the sort of stories Europeans wrote about Africa, in which Africans of whichever country where either portrayed as savages or as innocent (but stupid) children. Achebe had a particularly big beef with Joseph Conrad who, in his view, outed himself as a "thoroughgoing racist" (Source) in Heart of Darkness. His main evidence for that accusation was that Africans, in Conrad's novel, are hardly capable of speech. There are only two instances in which they are allowed to pronounce actual words, the rest of the time they babble and grunt, such as in the quotes that Achebe uses:
In place of speech they made "a violent babble of uncouth
sounds." They "exchanged short grunting phrases" even among
themselves. But most of the time they were too busy with their
frenzy. (Source)
Furthermore, he argues that Africa in European literature in general has always been portrayed as more primitive and backwards - "uncivilised" - in order to boost European's self-confidence. A fact which reveals itself to devastating effect in Heart of Darkness.
Thus, Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to tell another kind of story, one in which African people appear as fully-formed human beings, capable of both emotions and language, who encounter other fully-formed human beings, equally, but not more, capable of these things. And it works out brilliantly.
Western ignorance gone mad
Finally, I thought I'd share with you all the things I've found out about Nigeria over the last week, since my curiosity was peaked upon finishing the book. I even made a tiny slide about it to make it look pretty:
So, things I shamefully had no clue about: Nigeria acually has a population of over 182 million people. 182 million. That makes it the most populated country in Africa and the seventh most populated in the world! There are also over 500 different ethnic groups living within the borders of Nigeria - borders which, by the way, were only drawn (somewhat arbitrarily) by the British.
Of course these 500 different ethnic groups also have 500 different languages, which is why Achebe was right, I think, in thinking that it would be best to write in a language which would transcend the various first languages of the Nigerian people.
The Igbo people, by the way, are the third biggest ethnic group in the country. They live in the southwestern region (the light-brownish space on the map), where the vegetation ranges from tall-grass savannas to rain forests.
There was a civil war in Nigeria from 1967-1970. Nigeria had gained independence from the British Empire in 1960, but the post-colonial period was anything but an easy ride. The Igbo people in particular seem to have felt that they needed to establish their own sovereign territory, which is why they tried to establish the Republic of Biafra. Eventually, they were defeated, however, and after much suffering (about which Achebe wrote poetry, by the way) they were reintegrated into Nigeria.
After Goodluck Jonathan, the current president of Nigeria is Muhammadu Buhari. He led a military coup in the eighties, which brought him into office for a couple of years, but in 2014 he was democratically elected. According to wikipedia, he has called himself a "converted democrat" (Source).
And finally, as a chilling example of how western societies used to view Africa: at the time of publication of the novel, in the late 50s to early 60s, people in NYC could go and look at African cultures in general in the Natural History Museum - you know, right next to the polar bears ... O_O.
Final verdict
I really loved the novel. I loved the language, the different customs, the fascinating way of life, the complexity of Okonkwo's character, the ambiguity of good and evil - and if you've been able to plough on through the entirety of this entry, then I'm sure you'll love it, too ;).
Achebe, C. (1977) An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Massachusett's Review [Online] 18. Available from: http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html.
So, I finished reading Huckleberry Finn almost a week ago now, and if I'm totally honest, I still have no clue what I think about it exactly. To be clear: there are a lot of bits which I really loved, and I'm going to show some of them to you later on. Equally though, there was quite a bit of stuff that I did not enjoy at all - first and foremost the glaring use of the n-word throughout the book. So let's get right to that to have it out of the way.
Racism in Huckleberry Finn
So, I get that this book was written at a very specific point in time and that Mark Twain probably chose to include the n-word for authenticity reasons, among others ... but that didn't and doesn't make it any easier for me to read it. And that's on the one hand because I only recently saw Selma, and on the other because of reports by students such as this one:
I can still recall the anger I felt as my white classmates read aloud the word "nigger". In fact, as I write this letter I am getting angry all over again. I wanted to sink into my seat. Some of the whites snickered, others giggled. I can recall nothing of the literary merits of this work that you term "the greatest of all American novels". I only recall the sense of relief I felt when I would flip ahead a few pages and see the word "nigger" would not be read that hour.- Allen B. Ballard (Letter to the Editor, NYT, 1982)
It's just such a painful, nasty term - and encountering it in this novel which is supposed to be one of the greats obviously hurts and makes me feel uncomfortable.
So, I really had no clue how to deal with this until I found this segment of The Daily Show in which Larry Wilmore makes some truly excellent points about the use of the n-word and why it needs to stay in the book, despite attempts to have it removed:
For me, the most important point that Larry Wilmore makes (and it's almost drowned out) is this: the word is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. I think all evidence points to the fact that Mark Twain chose to use the n-word for a reason, which was to contrast the savagery of the white people who would use it with the loyalty, intelligence and good-heartedness of Jim and other black people. This comes through most clearly in the drunken tirade of Huck's father, in which he truly reveals himself to be the mean-spirited, evil person that he is:
There was a free nigger there from Ohio - a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too .... They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin .... And to see the cool way of that nigger - why, he wouldn't a give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out o' the way. I says to the people, why ain't this nigger put up at auction and sold? - that's what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in the State six months.- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 6
It's ironic, isn't it? A drunk failure of a man who has no pleasure in life except to make his own son's existence miserable has the audacity to slur against another, obviously well-educated man, just because of his skin colour. It's the epitome of superficiality and only emphasises the stupidity of Huck's father.
So, even though I still feel hugely uncomfortable reading this word, I've now sort of come to terms with why it's important that it stays in the book. I suppose, in the end, it's like a mirror to the past: it shows us what we once were and what we must never return to. And with that in mind it would be wrong to cleanse the book of it and thereby change history just because it offends our sensibilities now.
With regard to Huck Finn documenting the history of slavery, there are a couple of other interesting things hidden away in the novel, such as this picture by the official illustrator of the novel:
Jim and Huck (E. W. Kemble)
What's interesting about this picture, as the people working on the Mark Twain Project have pointed out, is that it directly quotes another picture, which was used in the campaign to abolish slavery:
(c) New York Public Library
Apparently, in order to raise awareness about the evil of slavery, this image was printed onto pamphlets, stationary and even goods such as pottery. I don't know about you, but I have to admit I find stuff like that fascinating - and I'm glad there are people out there researching this, because I would've had no clue otherwise.
Superstitionin Huckleberry Finn
What's also fascinating, historically speaking, are all the different superstitions that are infused into the novel: like the belief that you can cure a rattle-snake bite by drinking lots of whisky. This happens near the beginning of the book when poor Jim is bitten by one of these snakes (because of Huck's stupidity, frankly) and the first thing he does is grab a jug of whisky. He also asks Huck to cut off the dead snake's rattles and tie them around his wrists, since that is supposed to help too. There are loads of other superstitions in the novel too - about spiders and witches and hairballs, funnily enough. It's a lot of fun, really!
Regarding the thing about the snake, again with the help of the Mark Twain Project I found out that this was in all actuality the sort of advice you would get from doctors at the time:
Internally, give the patient all the Whisky he can drink. From a quart to a gallon should be drunk in six or eight hours. No fears need be entertained of making the patient drunk. You may fill him with Whisky, then let him swim in it, and it will not make him drunk, so long as the poison of the snake remains in the system. - Gunn's New Family Physician (1867).
... Let him swim in it? ... Alright ...
Selling Huckleberry Finn
There's this webpage called Mark Twain in his Times, which I absolutely adore, as it gives profound insight into the way Mark Twain lived, how he published his books, what his contemporaries thought about him, etc. One of the things it necessarily has a lot of interesting information about is the publication and promotion of Huckleberry Finn - I've picked out two interesting details for this post, but you can always go and browse around for yourself at this address.
1) Sales Prospectus Poster of 1884
(c) Clifton Waller Barrett Collection
So this was one of the posters they would use to sell the new book - I find some of the phrasing truly hilarious fascinating:
"Not a sentence of this book has ever before appeared in print in any form."
I suppose they were sad that they couldn't claim the same thing about every word ...
"This book is simply irresistible, and is pronounced by an author OF WORLD-WIDE Reputation and HIGH AUTHORITY, who has read the manuscript: 'The brightest and most humorous book that Mark Twain has ever written.'"
That's lovely but ... who IS this author you speak of? Unless ... is this Hemingway speaking from the future? >___>
2) Defacing the sales prospectus
Apparently, they had a bit of a prankster working at the printers' where the sales prospectus came into being. It was never found out who did it, but it seems that one of the illustrations that were meant to accompany the prospectus was altered in a ... let's say indecent way. It concerns the illustration of Uncle Silas near the end of the book. You can look at it here, but be careful since it's not safe for work!
Jim and Huck's friendship - or "Why I love this book"
Jim and Huck (E. W. Kemble)
And now we finally get to the part in which this post turns into somewhat of a review, at last. If you've made it this far I applaud you.
So, the most interesting part of the book for me was the relationship between Jim and Huck. A) Because it's lovely how Jim treats him almost like a son and B) because Huck's emotional and moral development with regard to Jim is fascinating. I think we all know how hard it is to go against all the rules of the society you've been brought up in, even if your gut is telling you that those rules are wrong. And that's exactly why Huck's actions are so fascinating: even though he is torn between protecting Jim and telling on him numerous times, he always chooses the right course of action in the end, going by his gut feeling instead of what he has been taught all his life - and I admire him so much for that.
Equally though, I admire Jim for his wisdom and his kindness, and the way he manages to set Huck right when he does something stupid or mean. The most memorable moment (to me) in that regard happens after Huck has decided to play a rather cruel trick on Jim, who had believed his young friend to be dead. This is what Jim says:
“[...] When I got all wore
out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart
wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’, en I didn’ k’yer no’ mo’ what
become er me en de raf’. En when I wake up en fine you back agin,
all safe en soun’, de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees
en kiss yo’ foot, I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin’ ‘bout wuz
how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is
trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s
en makes ‘em ashamed.”
Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there
without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me
feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 15
I love this passage so much. I love how confident Jim is, and how honest and straightforward - and I love how much of an effect his words have on Huck. It really shows the budding depth of their friendship - I only wish there could've been more moments like this in the book than there actually were.
So, to sum it up, how much did I enjoy this book? I think I'd give it four rafts out of five - just because I really could not stand the episodes about the two conmen, and the ending of the book was a bit of a letdown (even if it does make perfect sense psychologically speaking, as is explained in detail here). I'm sure as hell going to pick this one up again!
Gunn, JC 1876 Gunn’s New Family Physician: or, Home Book of Health. 100th ed. Cincinnati, New York: Moore, Wilstach and Baldwin. Mark Twain Project Online 2015. Available from: http://www.marktwainproject.org/.
Yesterday I went to see the new Asterix film with my brother. First off, my initial reaction:
(c) onlyknowyouloveherwhenyouletgo (tumblr)
This film was great, honestly! Much, much better than any of the recent Asterix films that have been produced - which especially includes all those live-action ones (I absolutely hated those). First of all, for anyone who would like to have a look at the trailer:
There were so many things that I liked about this film, I don't even know where to begin - so this will be a rather haphazard list, I'm afraid. Sorry!
First of all, they actually had the Romans say Latin phrases from time to time - just like they would in the comics! It's a small point, admittedly, but I really think it's great that they took so much care to try and adhere to the spirit of the comics!
(c) Goscinny & Uderzo: The Laurel Wreath
Second, this film is funny. Not every joke hits its mark, of course, particularly not for me since I'm not likely to laugh just because someone gets hit over the head. BUT there are so many plays on words and funny situations - it's charming really! And since humour is one of the most important features of Asterix, it's important to get this right.
Third, Asterix is so damn cute in this film. Seriously, just look at this picture for instance:
Asterix is not amused.
And that's just the beginning really - there are so many shots in this film, which make him look even more endearing. And don't even get me started on Dogmatix. It's a wonder I got out of that cinema alive.
Fourth, the music is brilliant! The film's got a truly great score, and I really enjoyed the insertion of "Ti amo" by Sara Perchè at some point in the middle of the film, when Asterix felt like his world was going crazy. It really fit the mood of the moment - and, well, I like that song anyway ;)!
Fifth, the opening credits are a true work of art. In style, they are very similar to the opening credits of the recent Tintin film by Spielberg and Jackson:
In the opening credits of the Asterix film, obviously it's Asterix who's running into various, dangerous situations that sort of start blending into each other - not Tintin. Once again it's so well-made, I'd go to the cinema again just to see this sequence a second ... or third ... or even fourth time ;).
Lastly, and most importantly (to me), the film is really about something. It's not just slapstick humour and an arrangement of funny, little moments. There is a real conflict at the heart of the film, one that not only puts Romans against Gauls, but also opens up a rift between the villagers of our favourite Armorican settlement - and that's were things get really interesting. I won't tell you any more in case you still want to see the film, but honestly? It's glorious!
The only negative point that I've got to make is about Caesar. He just wasn't in character for me - and funnily enough, Asterix says something similar at the end of the film, when he accuses Caesar of not keeping to the rules of the game as he usually does. The problem is that he acts too much like a crazy dictator - complete with manic laughter, crazy plans and total disregard for his subordinates. The Caesar from the comic books just isn't like that - he's cold and calculating, yes, and he acutally doesn't care much about his underlings ... but he's not crazy. He's super intelligent and cruel - but not in the mad, shouting way he acts in the film.
Overall though, this does not detract much from the quality of the film, since all of the other characters are so well portrayed and the film in its entirety is just so lovely!
Rating: Where is the TARDIS?! I need to see this film again!
After I started reading Huckleberry Finn last week, I began doing some research on the author, Mark Twain (I do that a lot ... I'm pretty much a research nerd). He was actually a really fascinating guy: he changed jobs a lot, travelled the world, and took a real interest in science - on top of being an excellent writer, of course. But that's just the tip of the iceberg! Here is some of the other stuff that I found out about him (all according to the internet, which as we all know is prone to misinformation - so beware ;)!):
So, what's in a name?
Quite a lot, apparently: his real name was actually Samuel Langhorne Clemens - Mark Twain was the pen name he gave himself which he came up with through the years he spent working on riverboats travelling up and down the Mississippi. "By the mark twain!" would be the call that the leadsmen on these boats would make when they measured the depth of the river and found it to be 2 fathoms deep or more - 2 fathoms being the minimum safe distance to the bottom in order for ships to pass through without sustaining damage. This was a process called "depth sounding", which nowadays is of course done by machines, rather than by using ropes.
Depth sounding in the 19th century (c) Wikimedia
Why "twain" though? Because it's a very old word for "two". Hence, "mark twain" really means "mark two" on the rope, which translates to 2 fathoms (= 12 ft or 3.7 m). And that's how mark twain became Mark Twain ;)!
His Birth and Death
Halley's comet (c) NASA
Both Mark Twain's birth and his death happened shortly after a comet known as Halley's Comet appeared in the sky over Earth. Apparently, this comet flies past our planet every 75 to 76 years, and Mark Twain felt a very special connection to it. He said the following in 1909, just one year before his death:
I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'
And then he really did die one day after the comet returned ... creepy, isn't it?
To give you the exact dates though:
Appearance of Halley’s Comet
Birth of Mark Twain
16/11/1830
30/11/1830
Appearance of Halley’s Comet
Death of Mark Twain
20/04/1910
21/04/1910
Bestselling Author
Since the first volume of his autobiography was only published in 2010 and became an immediate bestseller, he is one of the few authors who have managed to bring out bestsellers in three centuries. That's right. Three centuries. Damn impressive!
Lost in Translation
Of course, Mark Twain's works have been translated into many, many
languages - but did you know that his first successful story was
actually translated into classic Greek? An Oxford professor by the name
of Sidgwick decided that it would make good practice for students
learning to translate English into classic Greek, so he took the tale,
changed the original setting to ancient Greece and translated it so that
he could include it in his new textbook.
The frog that travelled the world (c) Susan Jaffe Tane
The funny thing is that when Twain discovered the translation of his own work, he was not aware that this was his own tale and thought that he had unwittingly adapted a classic Greek tale. He eventually discovered the truth though, when he visited this professor in England at a later date and was much disappointed.
And speaking of translations: when Mark Twain discovered the French translation of the same story, he decided to do a back-translation into English of it, giving it the title: "The Jumping Frog: In English, Then in French, and Then Clawed Back Into A Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil". I think his goal was to poke a bit of fun at the art of translation - which is a difficult job of course, and always destined to fail to some degree, since a translation will never be a 100% the same as the original. That's what he wanted to point out, in my opinion, which become clear in the introduction to the back-translation:
Even a criminal is entitled to fair play; and certainly when a man
who has done no harm has been unjustly treated, he is privileged to do
his best to right himself. My attention has just been called to an
article some three years old in a French Magazine entitled, ‘Revue des
Deux Mondes’ (Review of Some Two Worlds), wherein the writer treats of
“Les Humoristes Americaines” (These Humorist Americans). I am one of
these humorists American dissected by him, and hence the complaint I am
making.
This gentleman’s article is an able one (as articles go, in the
French, where they always tangle up everything to that degree that when
you start into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come
out alive or not). It is a very good article and the writer says all
manner of kind and complimentary things about me—for which I am sure
thank him with all my heart; but then why should he go and spoil all his
praise by one unlucky experiment? What I refer to is this: he says my
jumping Frog is a funny story, but still he can’t see why it should ever
really convulse any one with laughter—and straightway proceeds to
translate it into French in order to prove to his nation that there is
nothing so very extravagantly funny about it. Just there is where my
complaint originates. He has not translated it at all; he has simply
mixed it all up; it is no more like the jumping Frog when he gets
through with it than I am like a meridian of longitude.
And here's an excerpt of the back-translation: Original: There was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the
winter of ’49 or maybe it was the spring of ’50 I don’t recollect
exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is
because I remember the big flume warn’t finished when he first came to
the camp; but anyway, he was the curiosest man about always betting on
any thing that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet
on the other side; and if he couldn’t, he’d change sides.
Back-Translation: It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim
Smiley; it was in the winter ’49, possibly well at the spring of ’50, I
no me recollect not exactly. This which me makes to believe that it was
the one or the other, it is that I shall remember that the grand flume
is not achieved when he arrives at the camp for the first time, but of
all sides he was the man the most fond of to bet which one have seen,
betting upon all that which is presented, when he could find an
adversary; and when he not of it could not, he passed to the side
opposed.
He liked to be funny ;)!
(I'll be honest with you though, I don't quite understand what all the fuss is about - I read the story and didn't like it much at all - the ending was okay, but it just took forever to build up. Maybe I'm missing something though. You can read it yourself here, if you like: http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/price/frog.htm It's very short, only about 4 A4 pages.)
Filmed by Edison
So, A) he was friends with Thomas Edison, which is cool in itself, and B) OMG THERE IS VIDEO FOOTAGE OF MARK TWAIN! Seriously, Thomas Edison came to Mark Twain's house in 1909 and filmed him for a few minutes. The clip is nothing extraoridnary in itself, of course - except for the fact that it's got Mark Twain in it ;)! You can watch it here (via YT):
The Terrors of the German Language
Oh, German - it seems that Mark Twain could not resist pulling you to pieces for your difficult grammar either. In 1897 he actually gave a speech in front of the Viennese print media club about the horrors of German syntax - the funny thing though? He did it in German!
Now, this is something lovely that his daughter did for him, after he had died: she erected a monument above his grave which was exactly two fathoms high (= mark twain).
Monument above Mark Twain's grave (c) Wikimedia
Funny and Meaningful Quotes
Lastly, as a writer and a humorist he obviously said and wrote many meaninguful and funny things. Here's a selection of my favourite quotes (I double checked that it really was Mark Twain who said these things by looking at numerous websites and sources - so these should be alright!):
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
"There are many humorous things in this world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages."
"Lincoln's Proclamation [...] not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also."
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet."
"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
