Macaronic Frühneuhochdeutsch, anyone?

One passage of many such, from the 1883 Weimar Luther, volume 34 of 127; in this instance, from the 'text' of a sermon delivered on the evening of 11 April, Easter Tuesday 1531.

Audivimus de poenitencia et remissione peccatorum. Das hab ich umb der kurtz wyllen uberlauffen et tamen clare, expresse. Das wyr aber das fest bschlissen, wollen wyr ein stuck odder ii vor uns nhemen. Der Her hat uns vorgemalet, was er vor eyn geberde furet unter seynen jungern, quod in medio illorum progrediatur et salutet illos ita, ut terreantur discipuli. Die selbige erschreckung wyl er nicht leyden, quia non vult estimari spiritus, qui non habet carnem et ossa. Er bekennet, das die geyster alßo erscheinen, tum non habentes carnem et ossa. Diß ist eyn sonderlich bylde pro impiis conscienciis. Der teuffel hat auch die arth, das er offentlich zw uns durchs worth odder heymlich durch gedancken zw uns kumme, uff das er hoc malum, das man heist ein falschen Christum. Satan hat auch die art, quod venit ad nos offentlich und heimlich, 1. per praedicationem, 2. per cogitationes potest etiam dicere: 'bonus dies' et 2. conscientiam terrere et sic hominem irr machen, ut nesciat homo, Christus sit necne, semper vult simia esse dei.

A translation of which would look something like this:

We have heard about repentance and the remission of sins. I wanted to run over that briefly and yet clearly, expressly. To conclude the feast, let's have a look at one or two passages. The Lord has shown us what gesture he makes among his disciples, for he goes among them and greets them thus, as the disciples are frightened. He does not want to suffer the same fearfulness, for he would not be thought a spirit without flesh and bones. He acknowledges that the spirits appear thus, not having flesh and bones. This is a peculiar image for impious consciences. The Devil is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly through words, or secretly through thoughts, such that, on account of this evil, one calls him a false Christ. Satan is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly and familiarly, 1. by spoken words (or, more specifically, 'by preaching, prophesying'), and 2. can also say 'good day' by thoughts alone, and 2. can frighten the conscience and thus make a man mad, so as not to know if Christ exists or not; always would he be the ape of God.

Luther is alluding to the narrative in Luke 24.36-39, where Christ appears to his disciples after the resurrection. In the Vulgate: 'Iesus stetit in medio eorum et dicit eis pax vobis ego sum nolite timere / conturbati vero et conterriti existimabant se spiritum videre / et dixit eis quid turbati estis et cogitationes ascendunt in corda vestra / videte manus meas et pedes quia ipse ego sum palpate et videte quia spiritus carnem et ossa non habet sicut me videtis habere.' And in the KJV: 'Jesus himself stood in the midst of [the disciples], and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. / But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. / And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? / Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.'

The function of Satan is always to burlesque God, that is, to imitate him in reverse; he is found as the 'ape of God' (simia dei, Gottes Affe) throughout Luther's sermons and commentaries. (Alfred Adam traces the motif to the Cistercian hagiographer Caesar of Heisterbach.) Like Christ, Satan strikes awe into the soul, but where Christ makes his presence manifest, Satan makes a man forget whether Christ exists.

So that's the theology taken care of. But what's going on with the languages? It seems highly unlikely that Luther should have delivered a sermon in hybrid German-Latin, even to a small circle of intellectuals. Some of the Latin fragments play on the Vulgate, but they are not direct quotations, and others have no obvious provenance. Malcolm Parkes writes:

The evidence indicates that the scribes [in Luther's circle] translated the essentials of what they had heard in German immediately into Latin, and then set down the discourse in Latin in order to use the customary methods of abbreviation in that language, which enabled them to record spoken discourse more quickly. Only when the process of instantaneous translation was too difficult, or when the German phrases were particularly striking, did the scribes write down Luther's own words. Subsequently the "reportator" translated the text back into the original language, expanding both the simplified forms and abbreviated thought in such a way as to make the record more readable.

Did the scribes omit to re-translate, in this instance? Or was the Weimar editor using an odd source-text? In any event, the German and Latin seem to play against each other, the one sometimes half-repeating the other, or elaborating upon it, like the interaction between a God and his Ape.

Two Plays in One Fitts

In 1955, Dudley Fitts published a translation of Aristophanes' Frogs for Harcourt & Brace; in 1957, of the Birds. The two versions were issued separately by Faber in London, and, in 1959, paired in a new edition for the Heritage Press; the matching pale red and pale blue original Faber octavos have graced my shelf for years now. I bought the one on the basis of the other, and the other—the Frogs—on the basis of a single verse:

Ah the logotomy! Verb breasting adverb, the cristate nouns
plunging 'gainst pavid pronouns. Let the bull stylistic
(husband of cows) rise up and whirl his whiskers!
Ah the lambent raiding of verse, the (my God!) tripsis
of boant anapests leaping in lucent line
against the skiaphagous luculent ululant
phalanges of the foe!

At the time I had been sipping Nashe and books on Joyce; you will readily understand the flash of recognition here. (Fitts himself compares Frogs to Joyce: it 'is almost as rich as Finnegans Wake in literary allusion and rhetorical parody—indeed, it is a haunted text'.) Fitts' passage bears little resemblance to the original:

estai d'ippolophōn te logōn koruthaiola neikē
skhindalamōn te paraxonia smileumata t' ergōn,
phōtos amunomenou phrenotektonos andros
rhēmath' ippobamona.
phrixas d' autokomou lophias lasiauxena khaitan,
deinon episkunion xunagōn brukhōmenos hēsei
rhemata gomphopagē pinakēdon apospōngēgenei phusēmati.

The mock-Homeric grandeur of which, in some dull sense, is better captured by the clunking hyphenese of Matthew Dillon's translation at Perseus:

There will be the helmet-blazing strife of horse-crested phrases;
Axle-splinterings as the chisel-working fellow defends himself
against the horse-galloping utterances of the mind-building man.
Bristling the shaggy-necked mane of his natural-hair crest,
Knitting his terrible brow, bellowing, he will launch
bolt-fastened utterances, ripping them apart board by board
with gigantic blast of breath.

To depart so radically from the original takes balls. But Fitts knew what he was doing. This was a gold still moment in the self-realisation of late (American) modernism, a full ripening on the tree, before the pecking sparrows and necrosis of postmodernism. Nothing new arrived between 1955 and 1960; but the dust settled. When Fitts and his friends turned to criticism, they could write with an air of authority, of a Matthew Arnold, only their accepted truths were now those of formalism and the New Critics. The mood was erudite, philological, good-humoured, word-oriented, and concerned, most of all, with the nature of poetic authenticity. In his little bookling, The Poetic Nuance (1958), Fitts dismisses Nabokov's violently-annotated prose translation of Eugene Onegin—a popular bugbear of the time, at least among poets:

A tireless writer of footnotes, I find this concept endearing; but I am not sure that it is anything more. The trouble is that such a translation, though it might give the prose "sense" of the original together with an explanation of whatever goes to lift the prose sense above itself and transmute it into a form of art, might also provide no evidence beyond the saying so that the art was art in the first place. . . We need something at once less ambitious and more audacious: another poem. Not a representation, in any formal sense, but a comparable experience.

How Nabokov would have sneered at such cant! Fitts is merely reproducing Cleanth Brooks on the 'heresy of paraphrase' [NB: please to observe the Wikipediast's literalistic wit, bottom]. Like a good on-message poet (or critic) of his age, Fitts assumes that poetry is irreducible, that a poem without the Poem is nothing, or, worse, a betrayal. Like so much modern dogma, this is essentially a romantic absolutism. The same thinking leads him to equally conventional remarks on the translation of jokes, conceived as the most difficult of idioms:

A joke can be a nuisance. Nothing is more inert than a witticism that has to be explained. Topicality, the recondite allusion, special jargon—these are matters that can not be handled even in Nabokovian footnote without inviting the embrace of death.

To illustrate this point, Fitts discusses one of his own choices, from his Frogs of three years past. The cowardly Dionysus is being taunted by his servant Xanthias, on the existence of the hellish monster Empusa, before the latter winds down his prank, assuring his master that the beast is gone: 'As Hegelochos would say, ek kumaōn gar authis au galēn horō.' The Greek means, literally, 'After the storm I see again the polecat.' Here comes the Nabokovian death-embrace: Aristophanes is alluding to a line of Orestes, mispronounced by the actor Hegelochos: the word galēn, depending on stress, can mean either 'calm at sea' (from galēnē) or 'polecat' (from galeē). The translator is therefore faced with a classic untranslateable pun: what to do?

The dread hand of Nabokov would translate, 'After the storm I see again the polecat', and spend half a page in 9-point explaining the allusion. Such, precisely, was the pre-Romantic approach. Thus a 1785 version by the cleric Charles Dunster offers: 'I see a weasel rising from the storm', and, true to form, clarifies the joke in a footnote. By the time we reach Benjamin Rogers' 1914 Frogs, Romanticism has already set in, and the pun is not preserved but re-imagined: 'Out of the storm there comes a new fine wether.' The only problem is that 'wether' cannot be a mis-pronunciation of 'weather': as a satire on Hegelochos' delivery, it fails. Fitts, at any rate, offers a similar solution: 'After the storm I see the clam again'. (Dillon, straining, has 'calm-ari'.) He justifies his decision thus:

It is a hoary one, certainly, but only a cad would object to it. . . there are still customers who will suspect the whole thing of being an enigma or a typographical error, and these people must be led through some such process as the one we have just traversed.

And so we get, if we look in the back, unprompted by any little digits, an explanatory note. A Fittsian modernism is therefore a softened and saleable doctrine. He would preserve the art qua art, and gloss it still, so as to reassure the sceptic that it is, after all, art. Proust had written 'une oeuvre où il y a des theories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix', a literary work with theories is like an object with the price-tag still attached. He had written this, a bit of theory, in his great literary work, the Recherche, thus contradicting himself even as he wrote. But this dictum remained the essence of High Modernism, whether or not it reflected practice. A poem should not mean, but be. By the time of Fitts there is some forgiveness.

*

Fitts dedicates his Frogs to his younger friend John Ciardi, the great translator of Dante. Ciardi was a card-carrying New Critic, editing an annotated anthology of verse in 1959 with the almost cartoon-formalist title, How Does a Poem Mean? In the introduction he insists, smelling of Empson, against a 'high-minded appreciator', that poetry is to be understood as a feat of engineering and formal invention. The ultimate modernist-romantic, he asserts, 'The pretty, by a first law of art, is never the beautiful. The two cannot coexist. . . all greeting cards are pretty and therefore no greeting card is beautiful.' For his dedication, appositely, Fitts chooses a sliver of Dante, the conclusion of Inferno VI:

Ed egli a me: 'Ritorna a tua scienza,
Che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta,
Più senta il bene, e così la doglienza,

Tuttochè questa gente maledetta
In vera perfezion giammai non vada,
Di là, più che di qua, essere aspetta.'

Noi aggirammo a tondo quella strada,
Parlando più assai ch'io non ridico:
Venimmo al punto dove si digrada:
Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran nimico.

Ciardi himself has this, in his 1954 Inferno, on which Fitts remarked, 'This is our Dante. . . a shining event in a bad age':

And he to me: "Look to your science again
where it is written: the more a thing is perfect
the more it feels of pleasure and of pain.

As for these souls, though they can never soar
to true perfection, still in the new time
they will be nearer it than they were before."

And so we walked the rim of the great ledge
speaking of pain and joy, and of much more
that I will not repeat, and reached the edge

where the descend begins. There, suddenly,
we came on Plutus, the great enemy.

The context is this: Dante and Vergil are discussing the judgement of the damned at the Second Coming. Dante wonders if those in Hell be better or worse off after this point: 'When the great clarion fades / into the voice of thundering Omniscience, / what of these agonies?' His master replies that since they will recover their flesh and bodies, they will, secundum Aristotelem, be more perfect, and so they will feel more pain.

For the dedication of his Birds to his disciple and collaborator, Robert Fitzgerald, more famous for his Aeneid, Fitts chooses a morsel not of Vergil, but of Erasmus, from the Lucianic colloquy 'Charon':

Alastor. Sed quid opus est triremi? Charon. Nihil, si velim in media palude rursus naufragium facere. Al. Ob multitudinem? Ch. Scilicet. Al. Atqui umbras vehis, non corpora. Quantulum autem ponderis habent umbrae? Ch. Sint tipulae, tamen tipularum tanta vis esse potest, ut onerent cymbam. Tum scis, et cymbam umbratilem esse.

To translate:

Al. But what use is the trireme? Ch. Nothing, if I want to wind up shipwrecked in the middle of the swamp again. Al. On account of the throng? Ch. Naturally. Al. But you transport shades, not bodies. And how little must the shades weigh? Ch. They are only crane-flies (tipulae), but crane-flies can have enough weight to sink a skiff. You know, too, that the skiff itself is shadowy.

In neither instance is explanation given: the reference is hermetic, like in the good old days of Pound and Stevens. One might reasonably suspect, given the chthonic setting of both passages, that Ciardi and Fitzgerald were dead. But both were in the prime of health, dying within a year of each other, just under thirty years later. In each case we have a dialogue, a guide and a pilgrim. Surely Fitts claimed for himself the role of the cicerone in hell, a role at the core of the modernist worldview. Pound had begun his masterpiece by translating a translation of Odysseus's katabasis; Williams booted his own career with a work entitled Kora in Hell; Eliot guided his reader not through hell but through the Wasteland, its fertility latent but real; Leo Bloom is given a whole chapter for his own nekuia, and H. C. E. an entire book; and before them all, the forefather of modernism, James Frazer, had turned his own opus on a symbol representing safe passage through the underworld. The poet is the acknowledged legislator: the trireme weighed with the tipulary souls of men, not only the true dead, but those still feeling of pleasure and pain. Fitts, conservative 'in a bad age', explicitly shares the pain of a conservative Aristophanes, who, in the Frogs, 'now regards the War, desperate as it is, as only another symptom of the disease of his time'. This from a man who, according to David Slavitt, rated student papers 'PB (pretty bad), NTB (not too bad), NB (not bad), and NAAB (not at all bad)'. Only a very few, the last generation of American modernist-humanists, were eligible to walk with Fitts himself.

[Update: Dave Haan, on a forum thread on translation, links. A respondent calls my post, bizarrely, a 'paean to etymology': no wonder he finds it unpersuasive! Said respondent also seems to believe that I argue that 'one person or group has a monopoly' on knowledge, and that I have something against Nabokov's Onegin, or even Nabokov in general. I do not, I do not, I do not.]

Kitap Mitap: a shaggy dog story

For the last month, I've set up camp in the Rare Books room of the British Library, where between reams of Sotheby's catalogues I entertain myself with the perusal of unusual volumes—Maupertuis's 1745 Vénus Physique, for instance, or Cato's De Re Rustica (aka. 101 Uses For Amurca), which, in the 1934 Loeb edition bound with Varro, reveals behind its spine a column of paper pasted in from another little Loeb, so tantalising in its final words:

in other languag
ly. The variety

Sotheby's turns up a Vulgate on uterine (foetal) vellum; a manuscript ascribed to 'Anicius, Manlius, Severinus et Boethius'; Abu Ishak's Pole Star of Pleasure from Wines; and Rules for Roman Catholic Criminals, whose contents are described by the auctioneer as 'ludicrous and amusing'. It also turns up a Wycliffe Bible from the 15th century, sold on July 28, 1863, for the sum of 850 350 pounds—an enormous amount of money. To put this in perspective, your average Vulgate manuscript was going for around 6-20 quid. Update: Arnold Hunt, Curator of Historical Manuscripts at the BL, has been so kind as to send me (unsolicited) the July 28 entry from the diary of Sir Frederic Madden (1801-73, palaeographer and BL keeper of manuscripts). Madden notes the £350 sale of the Wycliffe with three exclamation marks, and comments:

The first three lots were purchased by Parker & Stevens for America! It is remarkable, what madness exists at present in regard to the MSS of the Wycliffite Versions of the Bible. Yet the man who would give the absurd price of £350 for a MS of the New Testament, of no particular value in regard to the text, would grudge £4 to buy a copy of my edition of both Wycliffite versions of the entire Bible with the various readings of all the best MSS extant!

Many thanks to Dr. Hunt for this additional contemporary insight into the sale. Perhaps Mr. Stevens had been swayed by the rhetoric of the catalogue note:

The extraordinary rarity of Manuscripts containing Translations of any portion of the Holy Scriptures into English is too well known to require comment, but is not to be wondered at when we consider that the mere possession of such an article, if it became known to the Priests, would have probably brought its owner to the stake. The followers of Wyclif were persecuted to the utmost as heretics, and the Transcripts of his Version seized and rigidly destroyed. Hence the difficulty to Bible-Collectors of finding any specimen to enrich their collections.

The persecution of Wycliffe is still a totem of mediaeval Church evil. But as David Daniell remarks, in his already-classic 2003 The Bible in English, nobody had ever been persecuted for reading a vernacular Bible before 1401. That year was when Henry IV passed his law De haeretico comburendo. And in 1408 Thomas Arundel, recently voted 'Worst Briton of the 15th Century', established his quasi-legal Constitutions of Oxford, the 6th and 7th items of which attacked Wycliffe and his vernacular Bible:

VII. CONSTITUTION. That the text of the Holy Scriptures must not be translated into the English language.

It is a dangerous thing, as Saint Jerome attests [Letter 57 to Pammachius, written in 395], to translate the text of the Holy Scriptures from one idiom into another, for in translation it is not easy to retain the original in all its senses, just as Saint Jerome, even though he had been inspired, still acknowledges frequent error; therefore we state and ordain that henceforth, nobody may by his own authority translate the text of the Holy Scriptures into the English language or any other, whether into a book, a booklet or a treatise, nor may anyone read any book, booklet or treatise recently written by John Wycliff or his associates, or any about to be written, either in part or whole, in public or in secret, under threat of major excommunication, until the translation has been approved by the local bishop, or if necessary the provincial council; whoso acts against this will be punished as a promoter of heresy and like errors.

Strange, then, that according to Daniell, and contrary to the Sotheby's writer, 'About twenty surviving [Wycliffe] manuscripts of the 1380s are of the whole Bible, almost ninety of the whole New Testament. Over 250 manuscripts survive, a larger number of copies than for any other medieval English text.' The Canterbury Tales, by comparison, exists in 64 copies. I can only imagine that by 1863 the majority of Wycliffe texts were already in official collections—there are dozens in the British Library, and in the Bodleian. The next part of the Sotheby's description allowed me to trace the manuscript:

The present copy, written in the old orthography, appears to have been purchased in May, 1576, by "Robert Ardern of Barwicke" from "Mr. Englatt the Mr of the singyng chyldren in Chryste Churche in Norwich" for "twentye shillings."

Robert Ardern here should not be confused with Shakespeare's grandfather, Robert Ardern (or Arden) of Park Hall, who died in 1556. Englatt of Norwich, however, is the lead we want, and points us to this manuscript in the New York Public Library. Among the ownership notes are some verses:

By chaunce this Holy Booke came to my view,
It's worth the keeping, for it's very true.
I haue not seene it's fellow, and believe
Nor any man, that is this day aliue.
Giue God the praise for this his auncient Work
Who hath preseru'd it both from Pope & Turk
Both wch if they might haue had their desire
Would haue exposed it vnto the fire.
But God will alwaies keep from such bad men
His holy Writt: Giue glory to him then.

12 Nouembris 1661.

The aforesaid Mr John Booker casually seeing this booke as it came from the binding forthwith composed & writ the above verses being affected with this Antient Manuscript.

Sotheby's, in fact, quotes these last lines, but not the verses, and finally remarks that 'John Booker was one of the antagonists of Taylor the Water-Poet'. We can do better than that. Booker (1601-67) was a professional astrologer, and a successful one. In the mid-century, English astrologers were divided into Royalist and Parliamentarian factions; Booker, and the more famous William Lilly, were on the latter side. (Booker's anti-Royalism was also an anti-Catholicism, as he accuses Charles of popery—associated in the above verses with the suppression of Wycliffe.) Principal on the Royalist side was George Wharton, who published almanacs and prognostications from 1641 under the anagram 'Naworth'. Booker attacked Wharton—'No worth'—in his 1644 Mercurius Coelius (The Heavenly Herald), and Wharton immediately replied with Mercurio-Coelico-Mastix (Scourge of the Heavenly Herald). Booker's next salvo was A Rope for a Parret, published on March 6th, two days after the appearance of Mercurius Vapulans, also against Wharton, by the pseudonymous 'Timotheus Philo-Bookerus'.

It was at this point that the aforementioned John Taylor, the 'Water Poet', famous Royalist satirist and pamphleteer, stepped in on Wharton's behalf. Taylor's No Mercurius Aulicus, subtitled 'the breaking of BOOKER, the Asse-tronomical London Figure-flinger, his perfidious Prediction failing, and his great Conjunction of Saturne and Iupiter dislocated', was published on July 10th. (Mercurius Aulicus, incidentally, being an important proto-newspaper produced by the Royalist John Birkenhead.) Taylor accuses Booker of slander and disloyalty to the King, and concludes:

Thus (Master Bookerus) I have anatomized and skellitonized your railing Pamphlet and ridiculous Prediction: it is known too well, that the expectation of some mischievous events was the ladder on which your meditations mounted. You were believed amonst a company of catacoxcombrian Plebeians, as amongst the Heathen the Delphian Oracle;

Readily apparent is the stylistic imprint of that great pamphleteer Thomas Nashe, whose work Taylor so admired ('Tom Nash a witty pamphlet did endite / In praise of Herrings, both the red and write', from In Praise of Hempseed). The same fantastical coinages—especially 'catacoxcombrian'—are fully in evidence in Taylor's pamphlet.

But what of Booker? The astrologer ups the ante in his own reply, published on July 19th—No Mercurius Aquaticus, 'but a CABLE-ROPE Double-twisted for IOHN TAYLER, the Water-Poet, who escaping drowning in a Paper-Wherry-Voyage, is reserved for another day, as followeth'. (The reference is to Taylor's penchant for taking wacky trips on the Thames in a paper boat.)

And now thou Thames Otter, thou Malignant Dive-dapper, thou Jack Tayler, thou Motley, Sea-green, Ditch-water villain, that hast more Malignant flowings and ebbings in thy Waterish Brains, then the Thames hath Tides. . . I perceive that your language is as foggy and fulsome as your Ale, your conceits smell too much of the Malignant Onions and Garlick of Egypt, you have so much Irish and Spanish, that I cannot understand you with my Wits.

It gets even better!

I shall goe no father than Mahomet and his Alcoran, and there I finde the word, Thorny Ailo, the wise Anagram of thy Name, to be thus Anatomized and Skellumatized. Thorny in the Arabicke, signifies a villaine, and Ailo in the Syriack a Rook, otherwise called in the Greek Abaddon, which being Englished, is a destructive Villaine; or an Antichristian Prick louse, which tacks together all sorts of Fustian, as impudent lies, Slanders, and far-fetch'd Bumbast, in the behalfe of Popery. . .

Notice that 'skellitonized' has become 'Skellumatized', after 'skellum', meaning a villain or scoundrel (compare Pepys). Booker goes on to suggest another anagram for Taylor—'Joyn Halter is a most compleat Anagram, than which none could ever have framed a better to speak thy deservings'. Also of interest to language geeks is Booker's mockery of Taylor's spelling of his own name (with 'or' rather than 'er')—a very unusual sort of criticism at the time:

What is the reason Sir, that you spell false? Is it because your Skellumship would not have the world to thinke, that your Pedegree was derived from such a Lowsy, Snip snap Originall, as to have thy Ancestors thought to be Taylers?

True enough, John Taylor did not stay silent. His reply, still in 1644 but undated, was Iohn Taylor being yet unhanged sends greeting. It is more of the same relentless raillery and invective, and seems to have been the last of the exhange. Taylor scoffs at Booker's silly wordplay, while suggesting his own anagram ('O Harty Lion'), and insists that his rival has only the wits to go where he leads:

As when Christopher Columbus (an Italian) first discovered some small part of the (then unknown) America, Vespusius (a Spaniard) sailing the year after, with the Chart or Card, Compasse, Mappes, and Mariners, that formerly Columbus had used, the said Vespusius discovered more Land, as the golden Peru, and other vast Continents, and at his returne (being at dinner with Columbus and others) Vespusius bragged that he had onely found that new and rich World, at which words the Italian took an Egge in his hand, asking Vespusius, if he could make the Egge stand on one end upon the Table, to which he answered, he could not do it, then the other said that he could do it, and presently he put the Egges end into the Salt, and it stood upright; then the Spaniard said, that he could do that tricke as well as he, to which the Italian replied, so you could finde America when I have shewn you the way.

It is a much-repeated story, known as Columbus' Egg, and has its own Wiki page. Taylor's telling is unusual on two accounts—first, it involves Vespucci by name, and secondly, Columbus stands up the egg by putting it in salt, rather than by breaking the bottom on the table, as is commonly recounted. The story comes from Girolamo Benzoni's 1565 History of the New World, and was itself lifted from a tale told by Vasari of Brunelleschi; it was probably known to Taylor via the 1613 Pilgrimes of Samuel Purchas—

Euen the Spaniards themselues, not only by the tale of the Pilot before mentioned [ie. Columbus], but by light esteeme of his worth haue shewed a contemptible contempt of him: some of whom obiecting to himselfe the easinesse of this Discouerie, as he sate at Table, he prayed to make an Egge, which then he gaue them, to stand on end; which when they could not, hee bruising the shell, and making the end flat, made it to stand thereon: thereby insinuating, how easie it was for them to doe that which they had seene and learned of him.

Why the addition of Vespucci to Taylor's telling? Men in the 1640s—Peter Heylin, for instance—were still suggesting that America had been misnamed, and should rather be Columba, or Cabotia. Thus the name of Vespucci gave the anecdote a particular sapor, although I do not know why Taylor thought him Spanish. The sand, again, I cannot account for. Perhaps Taylor wanted to show that, unlike Vespucci, he did not need to follow others; his solution is, if anything, more elegant than that of his predecessors.

An innocent stratagem

But were all the particular miracles, actions, and discourses of Jesus to be minutely and circumstantially recorded, for there were a great many more than those that have been published, the consequence would be, I am persuaded, that the world would never receive and embrace a religion, whose history was contained in such a vast number of large volumes as the life of Christ would then necessarily compose.

— John 21:25, in Edward Harwood's translation.

The last verse of the Gospels is essentially a statement of human finitude in the face of the divine infinite. The text cannot be a mystical microcosm of God, as the Tanakh would become for the Jews—it can only be an epitome or a crude likeness composed for the sake of persuasive evangelism. This passage is in the tradition of Greek practical rationalism. It is also, more broadly, an expression of the limits of translation, for it makes clear that the Biblical text is merely a 'translation' into words of the divinity of Christ, or if you prefer, of the Word:

Before the origin of this world existed the LOGOS—who was then with the Supreme God—and was himself a divine person.

The New Testament is a translation in more ways than one. On a literal level, it is likely to be a translation of Aramaic documents, and Semitic idioms can be detected in the Greek. It is a translation of Jewish messianism into the urbane philosophical culture of the Hellenic Mediterranean. And as John 21:25 shows, it is a translation of the infinite into a finite medium.

*

A translation, like the conversion of energy, can never be ideal: something is always lost in the process. Most translations choose to gloss over this energy differential, by pretending that they are not translations. Thus an English renderer of Tolstoy, say, will traditionally attempt to make Tolstoy sound as if he wrote in English. But for a contrary fellow like myself—as I have indicated here and there with my own efforts on this site—a translation is more interesting and appealing if it exploits that differential as an opportunity for a new language. This sort of rendering will draw attention to its translated status: it will retain elements of the original, as difficulties not swept aside. It will be, in other words, consciously problematic. This aesthetic stems from the belief that translation is not a necessary evil, but rather a primary basis of language and literature. It is a Romantic outlook—compare Schlegel's notion of the Mischung, which I discussed here, and more specifically Schleiermacher on translation:

Consider, for example, a translator facing the challenge of translating Homer's word aretê into English. The translator will recognize that nothing in existing English exactly expresses this concept. He will therefore judge that the best way to convey it in English is to modify existing English usage in a systematic way for the course of the translation in order thereby to mimic Greek usage and hence meaning. He will begin by taking the word from existing English which comes closest to aretê in meaning, say the word virtue. . . for the duration of his translation he will modify the rule which governs the word virtue in order to make this rule conform (or at least more closely conform) to that which governs Homer's word aretê. . . He will thereby succeed in expressing—or at least come close to expressing—in English the meaning of Homer's word aretê.

Here, the word virtue will not be used as the English virtue, but as the Greek aretê—it could be applied to a habitual liar, but not to a weak saint. It will stand out for its discrepancy, as a mark of the alterity of the original concept. The reader of this translation will suspend his normal understanding of the English language, and instead come to inhabit the semantics of Homeric Greek. A similar reasoning lay behind Burgess' futile stipulation that A Clockwork Orange should lack a glossary.

The earliest instance of this logic, as far as I know, is found in the Celestial Hierarchy of the Pseudo-Dionysius, early 6th century:

Thus all those who are wise in divine matters, and are interpreters of the mystical revelations, set apart in purity the Holy of Holies from the uninitiated and unpurified, and prefer incongruous symbols for holy things, so that divine things may not be easily accessible to the unworthy, nor may those who earnestly contemplate the divine symbols dwell upon the forms themselves as the final truth.

It is better to represent the 'Deific Principles' by such lowly images as the worm or the corner-stone, than by lofty images like 'Light shining forth unclouded and intelligibly' (John 1:5)—because the latter are more likely to be mistaken for the truth than the former. It is essential for the religious man to understand that the textual and pictorial symbols of the divine are merely symbolic, just as it is important for any reader to remember that a translation is a translation. The sign must not dissimulate its nature. Furthermore, for the Pseudo-Dionysius, it is the ugliness of angelic symbols that prompts us to make the Platonic ascent towards God, just as for Schleiermacher it is the incongruity of semantic usage that prompts us to appreciate the alterity of the original language.

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John 21:25 tells us that our understanding of Christ must necessarily be imperfect. This verse turns out to be a culmination of the themes running through the final chapter, usually referred to as the 'appendix', and considered to be later than the rest of the book. In 21:11 the gathered disciples, under Christ's governance, catch 153 fish—the number is incongruous, and has been subjected to the most fantastical reaches of exegesis. It seems to betoken the ineffable mystery of the Word. 21:22-23 succinctly shows us a failure of communication:

Jesus said to him [Peter]—Suppose it is my desire he [the 'beloved disciple'] should continue in life 'till the time of my coming, how doth it concern you?—Do you follow me. The words which Jesus now spoke relative to this disciple, gave rise to an opinion, which the other apostles maintained—That this disciple would never die—Tho' Jesus never asserted any such thing—He only said, "If it was his desire that this apostle should continue in being 'till the time of his coming, what concern was it to Peter."

Even Christ's apostles do not understand his words, and the transmission of his original statement through the group brings inevitable confusion. We are witnessing a translation of the infinite into the finite medium of man. And immediately before this passage come three famous verses (21:15-17), an exchange between Peter and Christ:

After they had finished their repast, Jesus turned to Peter and said to him—Simon! do you love me with a more strong and intense affection than any of this company?—Peter replied—You are conscious, Sir! of the sincerity of my love to you—Jesus said to him, Feed my lambs.

Jesus said to him a second time—Simon! do you love me with an affection superiour to any of these?—You know, Sir! he answered, the fervency of my love for you—Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep.

Jesus said to him a third time—Simon! is your love for me more fervent than theirs?—Peter by his repeating the same question three times, thinking he questioned the sincerity of his regards for him, was greatly affected and said—I can appeal, Sir! to your consciousness of the human heart for the ardour of my love—Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep.

Here, the English translation—I quote Harwood, but the same is true of the KJV—loses an important semantic difference in the Greek. Christ's first and second questions to Peter are, agapas me? Each time, Peter replies, philo se. Finally, Christ asks, phileis me?, and Peter again replies, philo se. Christ's initial verb, agapein, does not have the same connotations as philein, although both are translated as 'to love'. Agapein is the verb Christ uses (Matt. 22:37, 39) for the two Christian commandments, 'Love the Lord thy God', and 'Love thy neighbour'. The implication is that Christ wants Peter to show agape, but instead Peter shows only philia. The problem of translation is not merely Greek to English, but within the Greek itself—Peter cannot even comprehend the simple language of his divine interlocutor. Again and again in Chapter 21, John demonstrates the difficulties of communication: the error inherent in translation becomes a model for all linguistic interaction.

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So who is this Harwood fellow I've been quoting, and why have I been quoting him? David Norton, in his classic History of the English Bible As Literature, refers to him as a 'much-mocked dissenting minister, classicist and biblical critic'. He was born in 1729, and died in 1794. His Liberal Translation of the New Testament was published by subscription in 1768 (having been advertised since 1765), and in the same year the poet William Julius Mickle published his critique, A letter to Mr. Harwood, wherein some of his evasive glosses, false translations, and blundering criticism, in support of the Arian heresy, contained in his Liberal Translation of the New Testament, are pointed out and confuted. Ever since, Harwood's translation has been a laughing-stock, not for its theological heterodoxy but for its ludicrous prose style.

By 1768 the KJV was almost sacrosanct, and the Geneva Bible, which had remained popular throughout the preceding century, was forgotten. In 1769 the KJV would be re-edited by Benjamin Blayney at Oxford, putting the text into the form we read today. Its strength was the poetic economy of its prose, an accurate reflection of the original, but not of standard 1611 English. Stephen Prickett, in the early chapters of Origins of Narrative, defends the KJV's heavy use of calqued idioms against the criticisms of Eugene Nida, whose line on Biblical translation has become standard in the missionary community. By using words and phrases according to the Hebrew and Greek, the KJV created a new English—see for example its uses of 'host' and 'word'—thus putting into practice the Romantic theory of translation avant la lettre.

Harwood found this style unacceptable: 'the bald and barbarous language of the old vulgar version hath acquired a venerable sacredness from the length of time and custom'. It is barbarous because 'the idioms and structure of the antient are so essentially different from the modern languages, that a literal and servile version of any Greek and Latin author must necessarily be barbarous and unintelligible'. What Harwood wanted, rather, was the old ideal of translation: 'to cloathe the genuine ideas and doctrines of the Apostles with that propriety and perspecuity, in which they themselves, I apprehend, would have exhibited them had they now lived and written in our language'. Propriety and perspecuity, incidentally, are two of the three classical principles of translation according to Frederick Rener, the third being purity.

The result clashed badly with prevailing conceptions of what the Bible should sound like, which by 1768 was equivalent to the KJV. Harwood's prose was elegant in a manner befitting his models—including Hume and Johnson—but hardly suited to the abbreviated beauty of the New Testament. One could hardly attribute poetic economy to the Liberal Translation. Take, for instance, John 21:15-17, quoted above—in the original it is 88 words long, in the KJV it is 124 words, and in Harwood it is 156. Christ's second question in the Greek is simply, Do you love [agapas] me? Harwood renders it as 'Do you love me with an affection superiour to any of these?' The added words serve as a gloss on agapein, and serve also to 'diffuse over the sacred page the elegance of modern English'. Harwood's ultimate reason for his new translation should now be familiar—

[The author] flattered himself that such a Translation of the New Testament might induce persons of a liberal education and polite taste to peruse the sacred volume, and that such a version might prove of signal service to the cause of truth, liberty, and Christianity, if men of cultivated and improved minds, especially YOUTH, could be allured by the innocent stratagem of a modern style, to read a book, which is now, alas! too generally neglected and disregarded by the young and gay, as a volume containing little to amuse and delight, and furnishing a study congenial only to the gloom of old age, or to the melancholy mind of a desponding visionary.

Which innocent stratagem reads a little like John 21:25, circa 1768.

Foos won't moos

In his 1943 book Intertraffic, E. S. Bates argues that translation 'is still in its infancy. Most of it is subject to taste and temperament rather than to knowledge. Nobody is entitled to be authoritative or final about it.' What he wanted, like his friend and reviewer, the classicist C. M. Bowra, was a science of translation, one that took into account all the relevant difficulties and grappled with them in a systematic manner, one with an intuitive grasp of the music of words in both languages. Not that he thought the practice technical:

In practice, typographers' and haberdashers' definitions of verse-forms, and a public which lingers alongside them, handicap the translator. The technically-minded man is evil in all his ways. Unemployment amongst grammarians needs to be raised to 101 per cent: what they prescribe matters no more to the translator than the anatomy of a dog to a dog-lover. Grammarians and Academics, in fact, know no more about language than economists about economics. All three get busy in vacuums; and the truth-proof lining of each vacuum is its vocabulary.

This condemnation of the technical and the pedantic has very strong roots—it is an expression of an aristocratic humanism centuries old, almost utterly lost in the English departments of today. In many respects, the 1940s marked the height of this attitude among British intellectuals—in the coming decades, literature and language would be under increasing siege from the sciences. But of course, humanism did not vanish, and the field of translation remained an old fortress for decades; only in the 1980s did it come under serious attack from the avant-garde. In June 1957, the prelate and critic Ronald Knox gave a public address on 'The Demands of a Good Translation'. This was two months before his death, and so he 'was obliged for reasons of health to deliver his lecture sitting down'. As the Times reported:

The ideal approach, he considered, was to represent the original in a graceful, genuine, solid form; the rendering, like the original, needed to be a literary production. . . The translator must in fact get inside somebody else's skin before he undertook the rendering of a single sentence.

'Graceful, genuine, solid form'—this is the voice of tradition speaking. As Frederick Rener observes, the classical criteria for good language-use, cited by translators of all ages, are proprietas (aptness) and puritas (elegance). As for 'get inside somebody else's skin', this is nothing but the standard Romantic line since Schleiermacher, who wrote that 'in interpretation it is essential that one be able to step out of one's own frame of mind into that of the author'. Knox wished for a 'timeless English', fearing that his choice of words would become dated—'no one could possibly tell what [English] would be like in the year 2007'.

This Times article, and Bowra's review of Intertraffic, were two of several cuttings (all on translation) generously inserted into my copy of Bates' book, which I acquired in a small bookshop off Edgware Road for a mere 3 quid. On the inside rear-flap of this wartime volume I find propaganda for British radio: 'FROM LONDON COMES THE VOICE OF BRITAIN. . . THE VOICE OF FREEDOM'. On the back of another cutting, 'MR. ATKINS said that if the overcrowding on parts of the southern section of the Northern Line underground had been imposed on British prisoners of war they would have aroused howls of protest.' Plus ça change, eh?

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The most curious of all the cuttings, however, was this, again from the Times, over a decade later, 28 December, 1957:

TRANSLATOR'S BOLD EFFORT
from our Paris correspondent

This month's issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française contains an attempt at a translation into French of some passages from Finnegans Wake by M. André du Bouchet, together with an essay on Joyce's language by M. Butor. . .

The article goes on to quote a few bits of the translation; I find it difficult to imagine today's broadsheets being so bold. It so happens that I own a lovely 1962 copy of Bouchet's translation, bound with fragments of Anna Livia Plurabelle translated by 'Samuel Beckett, Alfred Perron, Ivan Goll, Eugène Jolas, Paul-L. Léon, Adrienne Monnier, Philippe Soupault, with the author'. It's a rare volume now, and I snapped it up at a PBFA fair a few years ago, an early jewel in my collection. If the Wake is a limiting case of literature, then it must also be a limiting case of difficulties in translation. Can the translator get inside Joyce's skin? Can he fall back on aptness and elegance, on graceful, genuine and solid form, or is something else required?

Let's have a look at what is perhaps the most famous passage of the book—with the exception of its Ovidian opening—namely, the conclusion of ALP, in which two washerwomen airing dirty laundry at the Liffey slowly metamorphosise into a tree and a rock in the gathering dusk.

Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, field-mice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can't hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughter-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

This is language aspiring to the condition of music—Joyce has played the words as a fugue of themes, as he did in the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses, only now with a much greater assurance. Shem and Shaun, the two boys of the book, are melded in the rush of the waters with the stem (elm) and the stone—and this pair stands for a whole series of dichotomies: time / space, music / painting, good / bad, and so on. Here's how Joyce and his friends render it:

N'entends pas cause les ondes de. Le bébé babil des ondes de. Souris chauve, trottinette cause pause. Hein! Tu n'es pas rentré? Quel père André? N'entends pas cause les fuisouris, les liffeyantes ondes de. Eh! Bruit nous aide! Mon pied à pied se lie lierré. Je me sens vieille comme mon orme même. Un conte conté de Shaun ou Shem? De Livie tous les fillefils. Sombres faucons écoutent l'ombre. Nuit. Nuit. Ma taute tête tombe. Je me sens lourde comme ma pierrestone. Conte moi de John ou Shaun. Qui furent Shem et Shaun en vie les fils ou filles de. Là-dessus nuit. Dis-mor, dis-mor, dis-mor, orme. Nuit, nuit! Contemoiconte soit tronc ou pierre. Tant rivièrantes ondes de, couretcourantes ondes de. Nuit.

In a concerted effort to retain the musical impetus, the collaborators have managed to avoid too many changes to the semantics, but there are a few; 'yonder elm' and 'yonder stone' become 'my elm' ('mon orme') and 'my stone' ('ma pierrestone'). On the other hand, 'dark hawks hear us' becomes 'dark hawks hear the shade' ('écoutent l'ombre'). Thus in the French the narrators have become recentred; but there is a remarkable fidelity to the rhythm. Marked for ictus:

Besíde the rívering wáters of / hítherandthíthering wáters of.
Tánt rivierántes óndes de / courétcourántes óndes de.

The leading syllable in the English is a short i, in the French, a nasal a [ã]—the latter sound better suited, I think, to the elegiac pace at which Joyce read the passage in English aloud.

As if to prove his polyglot genius, in 1938, with the help of Nino Frank, Joyce translated ALP into Italian; the text is online here.

Non odo più per le acqui di. Le chiacchiericcianti acque di. Nottole qua, topi là fan pian. Oh! Non sei andata a casa? Che Renata la Masa? Non odo più il nottolio, le liffeyanti acque di. Rio ci scampi! Al mio piè ledra v'è. Mi sento vecchia come l'elmo tasso. Fiaba detta di Gionni e Giace? D'Anna Livia i figlifiglie. Corvo scuro ode. Notte! Notte! Il mio cupo capo cade. Mi sento pesa come quel sasso. Dimmi di Giaco e Giaso! Chi fur Giac e Gion i vivi figli e figlie di? Notte addenso! Dimmi, dimmi, dimmi, olm! Nottenot! Dimmifiaba d'alberoccia. Presso le frusciacque di, le quinciequindi acque di. Not!

We can contrast this to another Italian translation published recently by Luigi Schenoni, a copy of which I bought in Siena three years ago:

Non riesco a sentire con l'acque bisbiglie di. Le mormoricchianti acque di. Pipistrelli volicchianti, il parlottare dei topi campagnoli. Ho! Non sei tonnat'a pedone? Chi è Thom Malone? Non riesco a sentire con il parlottare dei pipistrelli, con tutte le liffeggianti acque di. Ho, parla salvaci! I miei oossuti piedi non si mooseòvono. Mi sento vecchia come quel'elmlontano olmo. Una storia spifferata di Shaun o di Shem? Tutt'i figliefigli di Livia. Scuri sparvieri ci sentono. Notte! Notte! La mia tozza testa tentenna. Mi sento greve come quel sasso laggiù. Mi dici di John o di Shaun? Chi erano Shem e Shaun i vivi figli o figlie di? Notte nera! Dimmel, dimmel, dimmel olmo! Notte notte! Dimmi il ditto stelo e sasso. Accanto alle fiumeggianti acque di, alle quaelavaganti acque di. Notte!

The difference is worth noting. Joyce has allowed himself a greater creativity, not as afraid of his original as Schenoni is. Hence, Joyce alters the name 'Thom Malone' so as better to fit the previous sentence, whereas Schenoni alters the sense of going home to fit the English name. Schenoni, in other words, treats the name as a sort of token of the original, something that must be preserved in the transition to show the true nature of the text. The same goes for the names Shem and Shaun, which Schenoni, unlike Joyce, keeps English.

But Schenoni is insensitive to Joyce's music, and is unwilling to compress the syntax for sonic effects. Notice, for instance, how the rhyming spondee 'bawk talk' has been preserved in 'cause pause' and 'fan pian', whereas Schenoni offers the grossly flaccid 'il parlottare dei topi campagnoli'. Similarly, his rendition of the penultimate line has no feeling for the rhythm, the syllables tripping over each other in their haste:

Joyce: Présso le frusciácque di / le quínciequínde ácque di.
Schenoni: Accánto alle fiumeggiánti ácque di / alle quaelavagánti ácque di.

If Joyce could bend the shape of his English for musical and other effects, it seems churlish to refuse the same to a target language; 'olm' for elm is therefore better than 'olmo', as it contains more.

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But the oddest translation of all is not into French or Italian—nor into German, or Japanese or Russian, or Swahili, or Tagalog or Etruscan. It is into English, or rather, I should say, Basic English. This was the simplified grammar and vocabulary devised by C. K. Ogden around 1930, allegedly learnable in 7 weeks, to be used in international communications. It was savaged by B. L. Whorf as misguided, and would later be the satirical target of Orwell's Newspeak.

Now, you might wonder why on earth anyone would want to translate Finnegans Wake—the most complicated book in the language—into Basic English, with its 850-word lexicon. Well, you and me, buddy, as M would say. When I mentioned it to Steve Languagehat he admitted that his 'mind is now officially blown'. Still, it was published with Joyce's blessing in the March 1932 issue of transition, the very magazine that serialised the early Wake. The piece can now be found in Noel Riley Fitch, ed. In Transition: A Paris Anthology:

No sound but the waters of. The dancing waters of. Winged things in flight, field-rats louder than talk. Ho! Are you not gone, ho! What Tom Malone? No sound but the noise of these things, the Liffey and all its waters of. Ho, talk safe keep us! There's no moving this my foot. I seem as old as that tree over there. A story of Shaun or Shem but where? All Livia's daughters and sons. Dark birds and hearing. Night! Night! My old head's bent. My weight is like that stone you see. What may the John Shaun story be? Or who were Shem and Shaun the living sons and daughters of? Night now! Say it, say it, tree! Night night! The story say of stem or stone. By the side of the river waters of, this way and that way waters of. Night!

Winged things in flight? The noise of these things? Dark birds and hearing? This is a piece that passeth all understanding! Of course the music is shot, but you could hardly expect different. When the original gets more twisted, Ogden's rendering is even more helpless:

Joyce: And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we're all their gangsters.

Ogden: And Dear Dirty Dublin, he, on my word, was a strange fat old father to his Danes light and dark, the female and male. Old girl and old boy, their servants are we.

Joyce: He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves.

Ogden: His markets were married, the cheap with the bad, like Etrurian Catholics of hated religion in their light reds, light oranges, light yellows, light greens, and the rest of the seven the rain gives.

Joyce: He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord!

Ogden: He was kind as a she-goat, to young without mothers. O, Laws!

And so on. It's a good folly-project; rather reminiscent of Mary Godolphin's 1867 Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable:

But I had worse luck this time than the last, for when we were far out at sea, some Turks in a small ship came on our track in full chase. We set as much sail as our yards would bear, so as to get clear from them. But in spite of this, we saw our foes gain on us, and we felt sure that they would come up with our ship in a few hours' time.

(The full text is available on Gutenberg if you're interested.) These works remain a monument to their authors' literary ingenuity, some more fun than others. Thus, the prehistory of the OuLiPo. Ogden seemed pretty happy with his results, even though they read more like a curiosity than as a serious product of translating expertise. Others had related ideas with the Wake—abridgments (Anthony Burgess, A Shorter FW), epic poems (Norman O. Brown, Closing Time), and dramas (er, some bird whose name I forget Mary Manning, Passages from FW: a Free Adaptation for the Theater—this, and several other adaptations, I owe to the comments of that inimitable internet savant, MMcM).

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What are we to learn from this—is the only person capable of getting under Joyce's skin Joyce himself? The translators never seemed to have a chance with this one, and the further away we get from 1939, the less modernism we have in our hearts and pens. Hence, Schenoni has nothing on Joyce's own efforts. Perhaps for translators other than Joyce, the technical and pedantic might have some merit. Aptness and elegance, in this instance, do not seem so far apart as goals. But then, nobody is entitled to be authoritative or final about it.

Update: the auxiliary section of RobotWisdom, which is among other things the great Joyce website and run by the man who coined the term 'weblog', kindly links. An honour!

The Bat

I have said already that there is no member of the animal series with worse luck in its designation than the flying mammal; that people first gave it the generic name of Bald-Mouse [Fr. chauve-souris], an absurd name, seeing that the fabled animal that it apparently designates is neither a mouse nor bald; —and that science has succeeded no better with its latest label of chiroptera (winged hands), as the locomotive organs of the beast in question are neither hands nor wings. Vespertiliones and Anthropomorphs communicate no more or less about them.

I have said that although science wants at all costs to honour this anomaly with a Greek or a Latin name, she should create for it a composite substantive that corresponds to its natural qualities, something like bird-breast, for instance, or hairy bird, flying quadruped, mammiptera.

Choose, if you will, mammiptera, and let us agree, moreover, that of all the bizarreries of the last creation, the. . . bat. . . was without contradiction the most difficult to name; and that I would have feared to affright my young readerettes by restoring to him his true name.

For the bat is an emblem of death.

And a single name suits him, that of Bugbear or Satanist, which some passional¹ zoologists have given to the Storm-Petrel.

Those little skilled in the art of divining nature's rebuses, those who know how difficult it is to make mutes speak, will take my word for it when I assert that I was forced to spend ten years in close contact with the Bat, with a great effort of insistence and perseverance, before I was able loosen its teeth and acquire a full confession of its turpitude. It spoke to me for a long time on this matter. And truly I do not know, given the nature of its confidences, if I would not do better to keep them to myself than to make them public. It is enough to give one gooseflesh, the very idea of the ill-fated consequences of indiscretion among the weak.

The question of the Bat is a question of the afterlife, a question that smacks of heresy [Fr. qui sent la fagot]. . .

All is mystery, darkness, and imposture in this transitional series, in all these moulds² of the ambiguous, branded at the edge of the abnormal, the hideous and the fantastic.

Is it the black spirit of the abyss? Satan's ensign? The gaunt and livid phantom born of hell-terrors at the bedside of the moribund? The spectre with the frightful laugh, raised from tombs at dusk to return at dawn? The false skeletons, soaring in silent flight in the regions of Erebus? It is all these at once, and still another thing.

It is the image of death in limbic societies, the image of the dolorous transition, the nightmare of terrified imaginations.

The Bat, like the spectre, inhabits sombre caves, sombre caves and the trunks of dead trees, black caverns and the cracks in old walls, from which it departs at that hazy hour preceding night. Suspended from the vaults of sepulchral grottoes during the day, it imitates the utter immobility of the deceased in his coffin. The hairy membranes that sustain it in the air serve as a model for all the mortuary hangings that decorate the chambers of tombs.

Half bird, half quadruped, it is the transition from an inferior life to a superior life. But what sort of superior life? That is the question.³ Listen patiently as I explain all.

The Bat is one of those rare species to enjoy the privilege of inspiring mortal antipathies at first sight, and to effect swoons among those of a nervous disposition. It shares this sad ability with the Toad, emblem of the beggar; with the spider, emblem of the shopkeeper; and with the viper, emblem of perfidy. Now, remark well this observation: the Bat is an innocent beast!!! That is the word of the enigma.

The Bat is an innocent beast, and more than innocent, useful; it continues the service of the Swallow, whose work is interrupted by nightfall. The Bat wages war on all the insects and nocturnal vermins that afflict man and his fruit trees.

— But surely, although this hideous creature, which enjoys a supreme ugliness, and indeed a supreme faculty of repulsion, is but an innocent animal, and even a useful one—surely our fear of death, of that too too disquieting transition, is not merely an atrocious sort of joke?

— An atrocious joke, if you would call it that; a mystification prolonged infinitely too long, —by the aid of which miserable impostors have odiously exploited credulous men, profiting from their ignorance to frighten them, to affect their minds with the idea of a wicked God, to propagate the dogma of eternal pain, to practise the flight to Purgatory. Fortunately, all this is revealed in daylight (analogy). The Bat, with which the phoney obscurantists had collaborated in their tenebrous conspiracies, might not have betrayed them, but then another of their accomplices would have spilled the beans.

The Bat is a chimera, a monstrous being, impossible, symbolising only the chimera, a nocturnal sprite [Fr. farfadet] representing exclusively the phantoms of sick imaginations, the progeny of brains calcined by asceticism, by fasting and by solitary meditations. The Bat is imposture made beast, just as M. de Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, was imposture made man.

The character of universal anomaly⁴ and of monstrosity which is observed in the Bat's structure, in those bizarre sensory inversions by which the villainous beast listens with its nose and sees with its ears, can be explained as a corruption of ideas, and as the intellectual irregularities that this fantastic form is designed to symbolise. Moreover, it can be proven that the Bat has only ever represented a false death, by the fact that the true Death is noseless [Fr. camarde], whereas the Bat has an exaggerated nose that sometimes descends down to its breast, like an elephant's trunk.

The Bat openly admits its complicity in the work of Obscurantism; for sixty centuries it has been the devoutest auxiliary of Superstition, for the simple reason that its natural sympathies are for the friends of darkness, and that light offends it, and that it cannot see a lit candle without feeling the need to blow it out. In turn, I admit that I could not make a crime of the poor beast's sympathies. He who resembles himself, comes together. The Bat only lets itself crawl during the day; it neither flies nor walks; soldiers of this kind cannot serve in the regiment of progress.

But then, veritably, there is for the systematic obscurantism of the Bats, as for that of the Bear, no longer such an ardent friend of the light—there is an attenuating circumstance of extreme gravity.

To the ignorant I must explain that the childhood of the worlds was a good time for Bats, just as the childhood of a man is a good time for Werewolves and Boogiemen. The closer one is to the birth of the animal world, the higher the Bat's place on the scale of the world's animality.

It ruled the world that preceded ours; antediluvian history tells us that it was once one of the highest moulds of animality. From its high position in those distant times, the Bat has yet retained a glorious sign. It has its breast in the same place as the Sphinx; it is this that gives it an anthropomorphic quality, that is to say the build of a human figure. An anthropomorphic religion is one constructed by human hands, whose God naturally resembles he that made him: To objectivize the I and raise it to the absolute is the eternal marotte of human folly, red-white-hot with pride. As for the atheist, the atheist above all adores an anthropomorphic God in a single person, who has the name of Holback [sic], or Henri Heine.

It is proven, therefore, that in the fine days of the Creation before last, the domain of the air belonged in all sovereignty to two or three gigantic Bats, types of aerial ships whose membraneous sails measured ten or twelve metres across; and that these powerfully-built Bats—which today's savants call pterodactyls so as not to repeat the word chiroptera, which means exactly the same thing—shared with the Bear the benefits of an unchallenged tyranny. I let myself say that there were, among these hairy birds, these hideous vampires, those who hesitated not to draw from a poor Megatherium, or a poor sleepy Dinotherium, half a hectolitre of blood. If one would believe our explorers' tales, this habit of sucking a man's blood during his sleep has been carefully transmitted from the pterodactyls of yore to the chiroptera of today.

I am not an apologist for tyrants, nor for vampires; but I do have some sympathy for deposed powers; from those who have lost everything in a revolution, I do not require any affection for the new order of things. In all times and on all worlds, the pretenders, that is to say the deposed (the Bear and the Bat), have lent a hand to the obscurantists, or to put it bluntly, the Jesuits; in all times, pretenders and priests have banded together to halt progress. The pretenders' interest in this coalition is very clear; before moving a chariot retrograde, one must bring it to a halt. The tactics of the priest and royalist parties in our revolutions.

The question that smacks of heresy. . . ⁵

It is certain that it is the Bat who has helped most to ingrain, in the imagination of credulous mortals, the more or less fabulous myths of the Hippogriff, the Griffon, the Dragon, the Chimera; that it is the Bat who, in a word, has served as a model for all those birds of four feet and jaws, to whom the ancient world was accustomed to entrust its treasures. The Roc of Arabic legend is not an Eagle, but in fact a Bat. A bird which is only a bird, no matter how great, and which has only two feet and feathers, could never inspire the same terror as the most innocent Bat. The bugbear's physique demands imperiously the union of claws, wings and jaws. The Devil of Catholic legend, both apostolic and Roman, the Christian Devil, who has tampered so much with souls, and caused so much good land to be given by testament to the priests, the Christian Devil is himself only a very happy counterfeit of the Bat, and on his forehead can be seen the two horns of the ancient satyr, there only to disguise the plagiary. The Devil who crosses the backdrop of the Opéra during the third act of Robert has membraneous wings and toes adorned with claws like a Bat. All the invocations of the sorcerors of infernal dramas have as their first results the appearance upon the stage of frightful pterodactyls, who open their wings in time to the music. All the principal figures in that great epic of Callot, the Temptation of Saint Anthony, were copied from an original that one can admire in any cabinet of natural history, in the gallery of pictures of the Bat family. Show a painter the hairstyles of his most outlandish demons, their most eccentric ears and their most expansive noses, and I assert that the Rhinolophus, the Long-Eared Bat and the Flying Rat will still make him denounce the copyist's timidity. The tradition of the Vampire, who leaves his tomb during the night in order to suck the blood of young girls, is the tradition of the Bat. The Jesuit's tricorne, the Monk's cowl, these are the pieces of the Bat's uniform.

I know all the crimes of the Bat, and I forgive it them, because a fault confessed is a fault half-forgiven.

I forgive the Bat its crimes, by dint of this religious motive, that the fear of death is one of the fatal conditions of existence in limbic societies, and that God has had to square the terrors of death with the miseries of life. Superstition, which will soon cease altogether, has had its necessity, just like evil. If we had no fear of death, we should all desire to go down into the earth, when life pleased us no longer.

But just as the first rays of the Sun, hearth of light and love, chase the spirits of darkness, the Owl and the Bat, from the reawakened atmosphere. . . so False Morals and Superstition, the idea of a wicked God, and Fear and Imposture, will flee a man's brain with the first flickers of the dawn of Harmony⁶, and the fearful nightmare of Hell will cease to weigh upon our dreams!

Insensible are those who complain that God has refused to our age a revelation of the things of another life. . . clearly, they know not that it pains those who are aware of the delights of the aromal⁷ life to remain here below!

The Bat, who lost so much in the last creation, is destined to disappear entirely at the beginning of the next.

*

Notes.

(A thank-you to the polytropic Siganus Sutor for helping me with a few difficult points in the French.)

1. This chapter makes more explicit references to the theories and jargon of Charles Fourier; these need a little explaining. For instance, passionelle is a key term, referring to Fourier's idea of natural attraction in the animal world, a version of Aristotle's final cause. The Trésor provides this definition: "Attraction passionnelle. Penchant par lequel chaque être est attiré vers les autres et vers le but de sa passion dominante, antérieurement à la réflexion. Charles Fourier se considérait comme un nouveau Newton, pour avoir conçu l'attraction passionnelle comme le ressort fondamental de la vie sociale." Ceri Crossley ('Anglophobia and anti-Semitism: the case of Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885)', online here) writes that Toussenel "rejected conventional forms of taxonomy and employed Fourier’s theory of the passions as his principle of classification. He argued that the science of analogy revealed that the cosmos was a meaningful unity bound together by a network of correspondences. Plants, animals and humans were all secretly linked. Everything was symbolic." The neo-mediaevalism of this attitude, reflected in Toussenel's revival of the bestiary genre, is clear.

2. The word 'mould' [moule] is also technical; as Toussenel writes in his volume on birds, "Les animaux de tous les règnes sont, à l’instar des minéraux et des plantes, des moules particuliers de la passion humaine"—in other words, animals are 'particular forms or moulds' of human passion.

3. In English in the original text; the reference is obvious.

4. 'Anomaly' being the classical antithesis of 'analogy', the key structure in the Fourierian universe.

5. A particularly intricate design; viewing the larger image is highly recommended. The object clutched in the demon's right hand is a rosary; in its left hand is, I believe, an aspergill.

6. As Crossley puts it, Toussenel "looked forward to the future age of Harmony, to a time when humans would collaborate peacefully and work productively in a society that allowed for the full expression of the passions. In Harmony, humankind would at last be reconciled with nature. The creatures that embodied human vices would disappear and new harmonious animals would be born." Compare Fourier's infamous doctrine, half ironic, that in the next age the seas would turn to a bituminous substance tasting like lemonade.

7. Fr. aromale: the Trésor gives this definition—"Mot forgé par Charles Fourier (1772-1837), fondateur de l'école phalanstérienne, et appliqué au système de distribution des aromes qui régissent les relations des astres."

For more: Toussenel on the Mole-Rat, and on the Ermine.

The Ermine

The Ermine and Erminette, who only attack children and who wear the white robe, symbolise the hypocritical professors of false morals named M. Rodin, M. Tartufe [sic], Dom Basile [an early Carthusian, fl. 1170], who assume robes of chastity and innocence so as to weasel their way into families and pervert youth. The blackness of the ermine's schemes is betrayed by the colour of the brush of hair worn at the end of its tail. We note, finally, that law professors and most doctors of the civilised sciences, who are good only for the corruption of youth, show themselves to be very fond of ermine finery.

*

Stoat is generally preferred to ermine for the English name of the creature, but the latter is perfectly acceptable, and better matches the French. From the OED's extensive discussion of the word's etymology:

A different hypothesis (favoured by Littré, Paul Meyer, and others) is that the Romanic words represent L. Armenius Armenian. The mus Ponticus, 'Pontic rat', mentioned by Pliny as a fur-bearing animal, is commonly supposed, though without actual proof, to be the ermine; and as Pontus and Armenia were conterminous, it has been suggested that an alternative name for the animal may have been mus Armenius. That some animal was known by this designation in the second century is rendered probable by a passage in Julius Pollux (c A.D. 180), who (Onomast. VII. 60) gives μυωτός as the name of an Armenian garment, and, amongst other conjectures as to the origin of the word, suggests that this article of dress may have been so named because made of the skins of 'the mice (or rats) of that country'.

For more: Toussenel on the Mole-Rat, and on the Bat.

The Mole-Rat

Virgil has unwittingly defined the mole, thus:

Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, CUI LUMEN ADEMPTUM!

A hideous, shapeless, colossal monster, who cannot see at all.

A famished mole leapt one day to a young girl's throat.

The Mole is, in effect, the most monstrous of all created beings. It has the greatest muscular power of any quadruped; it is the most bloodthirsty of carnivores. It is the most complete of all of the mammals, not excepting man; it is the champion best armed for war, for labour, and for love.

I've heard a great deal of talk about the strength of the Elephant, who carries towers loaded with combatants upon his back. I myself have said much on the locomotive power of the Whale, who can encircle the globe in no more than fifteen days. The Bengal Tiger, finally, has been cited as a drinker of blood impossible to sate. But the prowess of the Elephant and the Whale are but trifles compared to the tours de force of the Mole—and the Creator has expent more mechanical ingenuity in the construction of the Mole's hand than in building all the skeletons of the giants of the earth and of the waters. Compared to the Mole, the Bengal Tiger is but a lizard in his sobriety, and but a lamb in his sweetness—for the Tiger has never turned his canines upon his own kind. Send two tigers in a box to a friend, and they will reach their destination without problem; put two moles in the same position, and they will have swallowed each other before the first stop.

The fine difficulty of moving along the surface of the ground like the Elephant or, like the Whale, in a fluid medium, which pushes one up and down by the degree of compression or dilatation in one's lungs! But put an Elephant or a Whale fifty feet under ground, in the same circumstances as the unfortunate Dufavel, and observe what the most desperate efforts of the cetacean or the proboscidian will achieve. Alas! Without picks to pierce the earth, and vigorous muscles to move themselves, even the gods would soon perish with the effort. Give the mole the tail of a Whale, or even that of an Elephant, and it will overturn the world!

It is obvious, moreover, that an animal destined to live in a medium like tufa should be armed with a means of locomotion more powerful than those creatures inhabiting an atmospheric or aquatic medium, the molecules of which can be displaced with the least opposition. The muscular superiority of the Mole over the Elephant is self-evident and cannot be disputed.

The Mole's jaw is armed with FORTY-FOUR redoubtable teeth. Its snout, the index of a stormy sensuality, has acquired such enormous proportions that it almost completely obstructs its sight (its sense of charity).

The Mole stirs its head, and the powdered soil spurts suddenly into the air, like the bitter wave from a Cachalot's spiracles.

Its stomach is an ever-burning furnace in which the most indigestible aliments instantly break apart, dissolve and disappear.

Its hunger is rabid, its love epileptic….

The existence of the Mole is a continual orgy of blood. Its stomach is seized by fits of rage three or four times a day. It will perish of starvation after ten hours of abstinence.

The Mole leaps upon its prey with a prodigious bound, seizes it under the belly, and plunges its long muzzle into the entrails, tearing open the wound with its hands so as to drown entirely in the blood of its victim, so as to delight through every pore. Every murder occasions a voluptuous ecstasy. A famished mole leapt one day to a young girl's throat and pierced her breast, before anybody had the chance to come to her aid.

Now, M. de Buffon has painted an edifying picture of the pastoral mores and virtues of the mole! And this virtuous beast has numerous friends in the agricultural press, for the current fashion is for the rehabilitation of ugliness. The canonisation of Saint Fabian has thrown all imaginations into delirium. Nothing is more beautiful than the ugly.

If the ancients had known of the Mole, it is more than likely that they would have consecrated it to Priapus…. god of the gardens. The Mole does not contradict that well-known dictum that love is blind.

With regards to blind love, there is something very painful to say to man, and above all excessively delicate to write in French. Today, for the first time, I admit my error in cursing the tenderness of my teachers, who condemned my childhood to a forced labour in Latin, instead of allowing it to develop freely in the great outdoors of vagabondage and of those perfumed hayricks so favourable to gymnastic exercise. I sincerely regret no longer possessing, as I once did, my Cornelius Nepos, so as to muddle through my explanation, in the manner of M. Dupin the spiritualist. I mean that if it is true, as science supposes, that an animal's place in the natural hierarchy is determined by the degree to which its organs each possess a unique function, then man must place himself upon a lower rung than that occupied by the Mole; in man there remain organs serving two functions, but in the Mole there are none. I shall not explain myself more clearly on this point, nor shall I examine the reasons for the desperate resistance offered by the virtue of the young moless to the brutal solicitations of her lovers.

M. Flourens the immortal, whose interesting studies of the colorisation of the duck's bones have opened to him the gates of the Academie Française, has made some curious observations on the history of the Mole. It turns out from the immortal's experiments that the Mole professes so sovereign a contempt for the vegetable diet that it prefers to let itself die than touch even the tastiest legumes with its teeth. I will boldly contradict this result, and, in the name of all-powerful analogy, I demand that the academician renew his experiment, taking care to substitute for the carrot a TRUFFLE, and I'd wager anything that the mole allows itself to be seduced by the truffle; for if this were not the case, the analogy of the snout would be faulty, and then what principle could we follow?

We understand, moreover, that a beast like the Mole cannot be the emblem of any individual human type. The Mole is not, in effect, the emblem of a single character, it is the emblem of an entire social period—the period of the birth of industry, the cyclopaean period, the darkest and most dolorous of all of those of the limbic phase. The Mole does not symbolise a single vice, it symbolises them all; it is the most complete allegorical expression of the absolute predominance of brute force over the intellect. It carries its dominant characteristical written in its snout—and see here the extent of the influence of the exaggerated development of a beast's olfactory apparatus. The Elephant, whom I naturally placed at the head of the proboscidians, is exclusively herbivorous, and with his frugality and reserve he willingly symbolises the innocent and chaste mores of the paradisiacal period. Meanwhile, because he carries a trunk, and is thus the parent of the Tapir and of the Mole, the Elephant is subject to the mood-swings which, on occasion, make his company so insufferable that you'll use a cannon to be rid of him. He is equally known to indulge in booze without trouble or remorse, and we know how far the unfortunate can be degraded by their passion for drunkenness.

The Mole is the receptacle of impurity mentioned in the Holy Scripture. If you take equal parts Bluebeard and Louis XV, Messalina and the Marquis de Sade, grind them all up in a mortar, heat, and distill, you will obtain the mole.

The Titan who heaps Pelion upon Ossa, the Enceladus whose convulsions give Etna such terrible nauseas, and who causes it to vomit torrents of fiery lava—that is the Mole, who also heaps mountain upon mountain, who stirs the entrails of the soil, and who multiplies eruptions of earth all over the prairies!

The Mole is the one-eyed Cyclops who labours the entrails of the earth, who digs subterranean tunnels, who feeds on human flesh, who crushes Galatea's lovers with fragments of rock; who thinks orgies without copious bloodflow quite bland. Where, except in the hideous cyclops, can we find the image of the Mole…. of the male Mole who possesses his female only after executing all his rivals…. who having killed them devours them, and, all soiled with blood, reeking of carnage, reclaims his beauty as the prize of his exploits?

For the long subterranean tunnels that your eyes follow along the prairie are not always those famous drainage-tunnels hollowed out by the mole to find the larvae and earthworms upon which it feasts. Just as often it will be an exit carved out by the female in retreat from the redoubtable obsessions of her persecutors. Love speaks loud to the sensuality of this species—and every female is subject to the claims of a crowd of suitors. The unlucky girl has only a brief respite, during the fierce duels in which her torturers indulge; she tries to profit from the conflict with an escape attempt. This might work for a day, or for however long the killing lasts; but barely is the struggle over when the victor, his vengeance satisfied, devotes himself to recapturing the fugitive. It is a siege, with all its rules—all the strategies of the miner are deployed—mines and counter-mines, boyaux circular at both ends, diagonal trenches, Cormontaigne and other stratagems. The resistance must nonetheless come to an end when the male succeeds in trapping his victim at an impasse. In effect, there remains no way for her to delay defeat, other than quickly to reach the surface; but daylight dazzles her, and her modesty is betrayed by spent efforts—the dolorous sacrifice is accomplit. To ensure her family's future, the mother henceforth uses all the talent used formerly by the virgin to defend her virtue.

We have seen examples of these tunnels of love as long as one kilometre; the hunting tunnels are no shorter. The hunting-tunnel is the route by which the Mole moves from his domicile to the feeding billet. The moler's art, invented in this century by the celebrated Henry Lecourt, tiller of Seine-et-Oise, is based almost entirely on knowledge of this passage. As the Mole is obliged by its voracity to make this journey many times a day, and especially in the morning and evening, it is very easy to trap him when one knows his route. The moler's art has made great progress for some years—but the extermination of the mole, like that of the cockchafers and of the caterpillars, can only be achieved by means of unified measures, based on the principles of association and solidarity, and practised on an immense scale. Some day, agriculture will gratefully erect statues to Henry Lecourt, having been delivered by him from the scourge of the Mole.

However, let us not forget to mention, before this event, one interesting particular of the mole's story. All creatures have their reasons for being here below, the Mole just as the cyclops. The Cyclopes forged ploughshares at the same time as swords. The Mole served agriculture as an instrument for drainage before that marvelous procedure was discovered. It cleans the prairie subsoil with salutary grooves, although it disfigures the surface with the deposits that it ceaselessly accumulates. But let us say no more on the subject; it would be wise to pray that the wicked beasts may exist no longer, to concede them the benefit of mitigating circumstances.

It was Henry Lecourt who measured the speed with which the mole moves through its subterranean tunnels. He planted along the entire length of one inhabited tunnel a certain quantity of haystraws ornamented with floating banderoles, and hermetically stopped up the mouth of the passage with a cornet pavilion. Then, when he saw by the agitation of the molehill that the enemy was close, he drew from the instrument an appalling note, which produced in the animal such an impression of terror that all the little flags along the line could suddenly be seen to turn over, like a batallion of misplaced dominos. By this curious experiment, repeated many times, he ascertained that the greatest speed of the Mole in its tunnel equalled that of the horse at great trot.

Let those who desire to know more about the mole investigate the writings of M. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the greatest scientific and zoological genius of this century, and the only savant who has understood the series, understanding thereby the principle of material analogy.

Many esteemed analogists, to whose opinion I would happily concede, do not entirely share my point of view on the mole. They are not at all convinced that Virgil had intended an allusion to this animal in the verse cited above. They say that this odious quadruped, prosperous, pot-bellied and greedy, is an emblem of the landlord. They find quite a marked resemblance between the mole, who turns the soil and drills subterranean communication-routes so as to pursue and capture everywhere the insects upon which it feeds—and the monopolists of the railroads and courier-services, who devour each other, who overturn all the commercial links of a country, and absorb all the transport-routes, so as to ransom travellers, their victims—who use their chemins de fers as electric telegraphs, and who ruin both the true traveller and the State by their agiotage [stock-jobbing]. These analogists add that the extreme nervous sensitivity of the Mole, which dreads the light and dies from the least scratch, admirably characterises the obstinate obscurantism of those monopolists of the bank and transport-systems, who dread the light likewise, because they know perfectly well that the first industrial reform, by killing the anarchic régime in which industry struggles, would kill them also. I have never denied the great truth in these similarities—nor that there is a little of the Mole in the railroad concessionaire, who makes a little good out of a great evil—but I believe the analogy of the Cyclops to be preferable.

*

The above is a chapter, 'La Taupe' or 'The Mole-Rat', translated from Alphonse Toussenel's 1847 L'Esprit des Bêtes. Toussenel is an incredibly obscure figure; until recently his Wikipedia article looked hilariously like this—

Alphonse Toussenel is a French writer born in Montreuil-Bellay, small meadows commune of Angers , in 1803 , and died in Paris in 1885 . Phalansterian eminent, it belongs more to the policy than with the pure literature. Its anticonformist imagination, not to say unslung, its surprising images, its unexpected bringings together, its excesses, its Utopias, its exaltations proc餥nt as much literary creation however very that political vision. Intransigent feminist, but also anti-English and notorious anti-semite - so much so that the editors, in their Foreword, disunite its opinions enemy of the Capital, misanthropist (" what there is best in the man, it is the dog ", quotes it forward), abolitionist, nourished Toussenel soil belongs to the species of the political and mystical literary men, pessimistic physiognomists and " 魡ncipateurs of the poor

Now it's been cleaned up a little. The only scholarly discussion of Toussenel concerns his rabid anti-semitism, except for Walter Benjamin's indomitable Arcades Project, wherein I first learnt of him. The two volumes of L'Esprit des Bêtes consist of descriptions of all types of creatures with a moral slant, in the tradition of Physiologus and the mediaeval bestiaries. The naturalist Louis-Pierre Gratiolet wrote that 'Nous connaissons mieux que Toussenel l'animal mort, mais aucun de nous ne connait comme lui l'animal vivant'. But although the genre is mediaeval, the aesthetic is very much of its time: Toussenel, like that other great fantasist Grandville, was an admirer of Charles Fourier, everyone's favourite socialist nutnut-genius. The subtitle of this work, Zoologie Passionelle, is in fact an explicit reference to Fourier's bizarre theories of natural attraction, and the repeated theme of 'analogy' in the text translated here derives from Fourier's obsessive delight in analogies between human and animal life. The emphasis on analogy as a guiding method—and indeed as a predictive one, as in the detail about the truffle—is typical of the whimsical but deadpan irony found in Toussenel's work, as in Fourier's. I find it hilariously funny! The chapter as a whole, however, stands out for its rather Poeian macabrism, which is why I chose it.

I own a copy of Toussenel's second volume, on birds, which Benjamin quotes liberally—there are marvelous passages on the symbolism of curves and arcs, among other delights. But the present translation is from the first volume, on land and sea creatures; this edition, printed by J. Hetzel in 1890 (I think), contains wonderful illustrations by Emile Bayard, best known for creating the poster-child of the musical Les Miserables. Bayard's designs for Toussenel are quite fascinating and unpredictable: alas, there is only one image for the chapter on the mole, but in another post I shall offer his fantastic designs for the whale.

*

I have endeavoured to reproduce Toussenel's orthographic eccentricities in my translation; he is inconsistent, for instance, in his capitalisation of animal-names. It has been frustrating that I could not track down all the references. I do not know who 'Dupin le spirituel' is—not, I think, Poe's famous detective, though it is historically possible—nor do I understand the reference to the military historian Cornelius Nepos. I do not grasp the significance of Saint Fabian—is Toussenel referring to the Saint Fabian, or satirising a contemporary? I can find no online reference to Henry Lecourt. I am not sure that 'M. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire' is Etienne, as I have linked above, as opposed to his son Isidore.

A couple of small notes: the Vergil quoted at the outset is Aeneid 3.658 on Polyphemus. The line was bawdily reused by Ausonius, see here. See also Baudelaire's Hymne à la Beauté, line 22, 'O Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu.' In the last paragraph I have used the French 'chemins de fers' [sic] to translate Toussenel's 'rails-ways' [sic]. Other words I have left in the French, where appropriate, such as 'boyaux', which survives as an obsolete technical term in English; from the OED—'A branch of a trench; a zig-zag; a trench in rear of a battery, forming a communication with the magazine; a small gallery of a mine'. The archaic 'characteristical' translates the archaic French 'caractérielle', not an exact match, but what the hell.

For more: Toussenel on the Ermine, and on the Bat.