~ gained in the translation?

I just reread Erich Maria Remarque’s great novel ‘Im Westen nichts Neues’

the vigilant observer will catch the anachronistic and east-for-west image, but, you get the idea...

couple of thoughts—I can never read it without being moved—

but I consider how many individuals hate this book because they were made to read it in school.

another thought is, though the title translates as ‘in the west, nothing new’—

I find the English paraphrase ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ to be much more evocative.

the very best example of ‘gained in the translation’ has to be Marc Blitzstein’s rewriting of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Die Moritat von Mackie Messer’ into the American hit ‘Mack the Knife’...

among classics of WW1 literature, Remarque’s novel is first fiddle of the quartet that includes Ernest Hemmingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ e.e. cummings’s ‘The Enormous Room,’ and John Dos Passos’s ‘Three Soldiers.’

the imagery and content guaranteed this work its pride of place among the very first books that the Nazis burned when they took power in 1933.

and along with this reading comes the occasional cynical thought—what do you do, if your first novel is one of the monuments of Western literature, and then you’ve got to live forty years longer...? certainly EMR produced a couple other fine novels, and many decent ones during the composition of which it must have become clear to him that he was neither Thomas Mann nor Herman Hesse, but this début was rather an impossible act to follow ~

off the top of my little pointed head ~

in an email exchange with a good friend:

the most difficult task that desire must perform is betimes to submit itself to the discipline of patience.

~ You've had Pig ~ !

So here is an excellent example of my occasional failure to pay attention.

I took this photo of myself some sixteen months ago, in the Hauptbahnhof in Düsseldorf. I was waiting to board the Super Chief to Berlin, and was taken with my reflection in the windowglass of a train which came in on the track before mine was due.

...caught up in this auto-erotic reverie, I neglected to notice that my train for Berlin had snuck in to the station on the track behind me, until I heard the last call announcement over the loudspeaker. Whereupon I lept aboard.

and as I collected myself pulling out of the station, I had stuffed the Motorola Razor used to take the pic in my pocket, had my twosuiter and my shopping bag—

but my shoulderbag was nowhere to be seen.

I had left it on the platform. Swore. German or English? don't remember. Yes I do. "Fuck!"

Took stock quickly, acted immediately—

got off the Super Chief at Düsseldorf International Airport, five minutes down the track.

changed platforms, got on the Regionalbahn headed back into Düsseldorf.

didn't even bother to revisit my previous platform, just swept down stairs in a flurry—

marched up to Lost and Found

asked for a black Tumi shoulder bag.

gratefully received same from the attendant on duty, who said

"Sie haben Schwein gehabt!!" (you've had pig!)

which means, yabastid you been lucky this time...

cost me 2€ for a windowseat reservation on the subsequent train...

good Viertel of Künstler Riesling, as the clouds and the landscape rollled by.

quick transplant from Facebook...

German Spätburgunder is fascinating, in that, at its best, it is simultaneously unburgundian while remaining solidly Olde Worlde.

try Künstler, Münzberg, Lingenfelder, Meyer-Näkel, Fürst Löwenstein, Bernhard Huber, August Kessler—these should get you started...

—here, shown riding NJ Transit, is Rainer Lingenfelder, looking even more like Thomas Mann than he did this time last year... ~

...what in a name is ~

this entirely superb 1955 recording has been pretty well stuck in my CD player most of the summer—

Dexter Gordon is most dextrously accompanied by Kenny Drew on piano, Leroy Vinnegar playing double-bass, with Larry Marable on drums.

Vinnegar figured among the prominent bassists on the west-coast scene in his day, developed his own distinct style of slapping the doghouse—

but the kicker is, this Bethlehem Archives CD release was remastered by a chap named Rick Essig.

Essig is the German word for vinegar.

ach du lieber ~

¡!¡ lost and found in the translation ~

... this handsome image was newly captured by my friend and foreign correspondent Aaron Sing Fox, who covers Brooklyn, Italia, and The Mysterious East, during his recent visit to Tibet.

no further explanation necessary ~

...but it starts me musing about other instances in my own experience where the language shows itself off in fine form:

once upon a time in a retail wine shop, I was stacking boxes of Cava, that Spanish sparkling stuff which provides good and inexpensive bubbles to the Thirsty.

on the box was printed in Spanish something like ‘Vidrio Con Cuidado’

in English, directly translated as ‘Glass, With Care’

in French, ‘Manutentioner Avec Soin ’ which means “handle with care—”

but then, in German, ‘Bitte Nicht Werfen’ = “please don't throw...” (!)

but das allerbeste example of an observation gaining in the translation had to be printed in the introduction of a Zen-on edition from Japan of Georg Phillip Telemann’s sonatas for the recorder, or Blockflöte, which I encountered in a music-shop in Boston back in the 1970s...

and I quote:

“...a recorder is like unto a flute, except that it has no tampons.”