Gained in Translation

[lapsedmodernist]

I should probably writing about the debates or fact that I am leaving the country in, like, 36 hours but fuck that shit, it's stressing me out. You know what I am going to write about? The Wizard of Oz. You probably know that after writing his metaphor-for-American-politics-circa-the-Great-Depression book, Frank Baum wrote a bunch of sequels. What you may not know is the fact that after a man named Alexander Volkov translated the original Wizard of Oz into Russian, he continued, in a glorious and classic Soviet disregard for international copyright laws, to write his own sequels. Not translate the later sequels. But, like, write his own. He wrote like five of them: Urfin Juice (or Jews?) and his Wooden Soldiers (which I thought was a sequel for a long time, b/c Urfin Juice sounds English), The Seven Underground Kings, The Fiery God of the Marrans, The Yellow Fog (where an epidemic strikes Oz and it's Dorothy and Toto to the rescue, young-pioneer-style), The Mystery of the Deserted Castle (at some point, possibly in this book, Dorothy is replaced by her niece? And her niece's little dog named Arto). Anyway, it's a completely alternative trajectory of the Oz narrative. And then another Russian dude wrote two sequels to the Soviet bootleg sequels.

Whenever I try to explain this to my American friends I am reminded of the following experience: my sophomore year at Oberlin I had a misguided impulse to summarize Mimsy Were The Borogroves, a short sci-fi story by Henry Kuttner...wait, let me explain. The premise of the story is that the Jabberwocky is a space-time equation that can be solved by children who are conditioned into thinking within a radically different logical system by educational toys from another dimension that they find. The adults socialized into "standard" logic cannot learn the other system. The children keep bringing weird crap home, like branches and vaseline and stones, and arranging them in weird ways, and when the parents (and later a psychologist) ask them about it they can only refer to the poem; the parents think it's odd but harmless, but in the end the children solve the equation and vanish into thin air. The second narrative within the story is about Alice and Lewis Carroll; in the story she also finds the educational toys, but she is too old to find a way to cross over to the other world, but she gleans enough to relate the Jabberwocky to Lewis Carroll, who thinks she is making up cute nonsensical rhymes and writes down all of her stories. Anyway, so I told the plot of this story to a friend who was tripping on acid. After which he stared at me in horror and said "that's not how Alice in Wonderland goes at all!"

Anyway, I should go to bed, because tomorrow is going to be a very long day.

I'd like to give a shout-out to boss #1 for giving me her beachtech box, to the awesome boys at Democracy Now! for fixing it, to boss #2 for giving me a tax-exemption letter for my camera-related purchases and a boo on B&H for being closed, which means I have to go on a wild microphone chase tomorrow morning.

Comments

Re: Hee! Oberlin!

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Erm ... '85. Very old, me.

Re: Hee! Oberlin!

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yes. I was still in the Soviet Union then. There still WAS a Soviet Union then! Was this back [in the mythological times] when Harkness was punk?

Re: Hee! Oberlin!

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

o god, I am not merely old but mythological.

Harkness was never punk. There were 3.153 punks at Oberlin who never deigned to go anywhere near the co-ops. And the co-op they didn't deign to join was Tank. However, there were experimental-music geeks at Harkness who bordered on/had fights with the punk crowd. They used to play dadaist pranks on the earnest co-opers -- I fondly recall the Holidays In Cambodia brunch -- but that was different. And I was in Tank, myself.

When were you there?

Re: Hee! Oberlin!

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

class of '99. And Harkness was full-on hippie by then without any irony or Dadaism. We are talking Naked Special Meal Crews and such. No experimental music to speak of, either. Just Phish. And I suppose there was some musical crossover with the high-strung girls in Fairchild who listened to Little Earthquakes.

the ancient crone waves her cane in the air and speaks:

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Oh, naked special meal crews, that was just par for the course, back in the day.

My favorite thing at Tank was Thanksgiving when there would always be the one table with the very clearly marked Sober Turkey, meaning substance-free stuffing.

Well, you know, we had to do something to counteract the effects of the 3.2 beer.