Showing posts with label russian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label russian. Show all posts
Friday, 27 June 2014
Across Europe and Asia, by John Milne, Esq.
Thursday, 27 December 2012
The Last Ringbearer
Another recommendation from over-Christmas reading: the 1999 fantasy novel The Last Ringbearer. I mentioned it in February 2011, and liked the concept a lot, but for whatever reason only just got around to reading it, after recent reacquaintance with Tolkien's world led me to a handy ePUB version that worked on the Kobo.
The Last Ringbearer, written by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov as Последний кольценосец and translated by Yisroel Markov, is a revisionist account of the events depicted in The Lord of The Rings. It works on a number of premises, one being a geologist's take on necessary consequences of Tolkien's geography of Middle Earth (the world has to be bigger than the part he shows) - but the most significant is the idea that The Lord of the Rings is a mythologised 'history written by the victors'.
The trio of chief characters of The Last Ringbearer are two from Mordor - Haladdin, an Umbarian academic turned field medic, and Tzerlag, an Orocuen sergeant (an orc, in fact, in this book a human ethnicity) - and Baron Tangorn, a disaffected Gondorian soldier-aristocrat. The three are thrown together in the deserts of Mordor after its fall: Haladdin and Tzerlag save Tangorn, who has been left for dead after he tried to stop an elf-led civilian massacre by mercenaries on his own side.
After this brief framing, we get a flashback of The War of the Ring told with a very different slant from Tolkien's. Mordor is an enlightened technological civilisation ruled by the unremarkable Sauron VIII against a general backdrop of barbarian feudal rival kingdoms such as Gondor and Rohan. It has, however, damaged its self-sufficiency by disastrous land irrigation mistakes, and this weakness is taken as cue for the warmongering Gandalf to advise a Western attack on it.
This attack succeeds through various factors. The "vast Mordor hordes" are a propaganda exaggeration. The Western forces have magic: they can create undead armies, have palantir communication, and got the Elves on their side by the loan of a powerful clairvoyant and magic-enhancing device, The Mirror. They indulge in various breaches of rules of engagement, such as failing to honour conventions on single combat. In the aftermath of the main battles, Aragorn seizes the throne of Gondor by engineering the murder of the de facto king, Denethor (with the unlikely cover story that the latter just happened to set fire to himself), and assures the compliance of allies by hostage-taking (he keeps Éowyn, sister of the Rohan heir Éomer, along with the genuine Gondor heir Faramir, under guarded exile). However, it's not all roses for Aragorn: Arwen will not consummate their alliance, as from her immortal Elvish viewpoint, he's little more than a primitive baby. The Elves also, naturally, won't give back The Mirror.
Haladdin, Tzerlag and Tangorn form an alliance, initially for mutual protection from Gondorian mop-up operations, and kill Eloar, the elf who was behind the massacre. Then, while on watch, Haladdin gets a visit from a Nazgûl, Sharya-Rana (the benign and rational spirit of a dead mathematician) who tells him what's at stake for the future. The world ("Arda") is at the interface of physical and magical worlds, and the Elves have plans to exploit this and lead Middle Earth into an Elf-dominated stasis. The only way to stop this is to disconnect the worlds by destroying The Mirror in the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom within 100 days: a daunting task since The Mirror weighs 1000 pounds and is installed in the totalitarian Elf stronghold of Lórien. Haladdin has been selected to do it because he has no magical abilities, and so is impervious to magical attacks. Sharya-Rana dies - or rather discorporates, having used all his energies - and Haladdin is left to contemplate how he can achieve this quest (of which more in a moment).
I was reading this book well into the small hours - I finished at nearly 5am - and was gripped. Eskov has thoroughly worked out the whole revisionist scenario, and it fits the Lord of the Rings timeline beautifully. The overall stance is humane and rationalist, fiercely polemical in its stance of outrage at misrepresented history. And, as Eskov has stated, it avoids alignment of good/evil with ethnicity or military side. It's thoroughly realistic in its portrayal of brutal Realpolitik and the double-edged aspect of espionage: for example, Baron Tangorn's personal shame is that he compiled for Gondor the open source intelligence report on food imports showing that Mordor was no threat, not realising that this very report would be used as the rationale for Gondor's unprovoked attack on it.
Eskov takes a real joy in his world, too, showing vividly the multifarious cultures that thrive in a geographical area stretching across the equivalent of, say, NW Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. He delights in food and wine and how they're prepared, in total contrast to Tolkien's descriptions that really seem to stem from the latter's dull and abstemious tastes. However, this joy does have a slight downside: Eskov occasionally digresses into cultural back-story that holds up the plot. There's a huge and not very relevant chunk about the history of Middle Earth's Africa analogue, and an interminable section (which really belongs in a separate novel) about Baron Tangorn's adventures as a spy in the port city-state of Umbar, playing off the various security services against each other.
That aside, The Last Ringbearer made very satisfying reading, rich in allusion to similar scenarios in real-world history (if you don't spot them, there's an appendix) and more than a few neat references - when the characters discuss the "World as Text theory" - to the whole issue of the fictionality of both The Last Ringbearer and The Lord of the Rings. Despite it being let down in places by longueurs, it's a superb book: a commenter to my earlier post called it "This is a true book of ideas in the Russian tradition". And it's freely available, now in a 2nd Edition.
The copyright is undoubtedly still very 'grey': free or not, this is still an unauthorized derivative work. The Tolkien estate is not known for its liking of derivative works, but there doesn't seem to have been any move from it lately on the matter. Here's the official page, and here is where I found the ePUB version.
(Check out also this striking Flickr image of Dubai by Rick's Images. A detail of this, which shows towers including the Burj Khalifa under construction in March 2008, was used as the cover image for the Tenseg Press edition I read).
- Ray
Spoiler warning: I've completed the plot summary below, in white text. Mouse over if you want to read it.
So ... Haladdin works out a solution to the problem of getting The Mirror to the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom: do the opposite, and use a pair of palantíri to transmit the Eternal Fire to The Mirror. They obtain the palantíri (one of them by aiding a coup to free Faramir) and set up the second half of the plan. Baron Tangorn goes alone to Umbar, where he conducts months of espionage in order to contact the Elven underground with a forged letter and the fiction that Eloar is still alive but imprisoned. The Elves don't initially buy this idea, and Tangorn thinks he has failed; he plans to leave Umbar with his courtesan lover Alviss, but is tragically murdered by his pursuers when he steps out to buy her a gift. Ironically, the Elves take this as evidence of the truth of his carrying dangerous information; unknown to him, he has succeeded.
Haladdin's plan goes ahead: to subvert Eloar's mother, the high-ranking Elf Eornis, into setting up a palantír connection, thinking she can talk with her son. The Mirror, she is told, must be in sight at her end as a bona fide of her location. The palantír is dropped into Lórien from a glider piloted by the troll Kumai - trolls are another human ethnicity - and the Elves fail to find it (Eornis has glued it underneath The Mirror). Even though The Mirror is giving distinct warnings of impending doom, the Elves fail to act decisely because of their one weakness: a paranoid demarcation of decision-making among their politely bickering Politburo-like leaders.
However, as the moment approaches when Haladdin will drop his palantír into the Fire, Gandalf spots the danger and casts a spell on Haladdin's palantír to turn him to stone; it doesn't work, because of the latter's lack of magical nature. Saruman takes over, attempting to reason with Haladdin via the palantír, and tells him what's probably the truth: that Sharya-Rana's scenario is just one theory, and that destroying The Mirror may in fact destroy the world. However, fate intervenes when Tzerlag accidentally touches the palantír and begins to turn to stone. Haladdin takes the chance and destroys it to save his friend, who lives with just the loss of a couple of fingers.
There are massive detonations - and the magic simply goes away. Elves become just beautiful people without power or charisma. Magical items, such as Elven medical kits, cease to work. Arwen loses her power over Aragorn, and he goes on to a career as an enlightened king who brings in a long era of democracy in Gondor, and is ultimately succeeded by Faramir.
The book ends with a future perspective - a future in which history has gone more or less like ours, with another continent called Amengo discovered - discussing the historicity and modern media treatment of the characters in the narrative. A "Western literary adaptation" called The Lord of the Rings is one of them.
- Ray
The Last Ringbearer, written by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov as Последний кольценосец and translated by Yisroel Markov, is a revisionist account of the events depicted in The Lord of The Rings. It works on a number of premises, one being a geologist's take on necessary consequences of Tolkien's geography of Middle Earth (the world has to be bigger than the part he shows) - but the most significant is the idea that The Lord of the Rings is a mythologised 'history written by the victors'.
The trio of chief characters of The Last Ringbearer are two from Mordor - Haladdin, an Umbarian academic turned field medic, and Tzerlag, an Orocuen sergeant (an orc, in fact, in this book a human ethnicity) - and Baron Tangorn, a disaffected Gondorian soldier-aristocrat. The three are thrown together in the deserts of Mordor after its fall: Haladdin and Tzerlag save Tangorn, who has been left for dead after he tried to stop an elf-led civilian massacre by mercenaries on his own side.
After this brief framing, we get a flashback of The War of the Ring told with a very different slant from Tolkien's. Mordor is an enlightened technological civilisation ruled by the unremarkable Sauron VIII against a general backdrop of barbarian feudal rival kingdoms such as Gondor and Rohan. It has, however, damaged its self-sufficiency by disastrous land irrigation mistakes, and this weakness is taken as cue for the warmongering Gandalf to advise a Western attack on it.
This attack succeeds through various factors. The "vast Mordor hordes" are a propaganda exaggeration. The Western forces have magic: they can create undead armies, have palantir communication, and got the Elves on their side by the loan of a powerful clairvoyant and magic-enhancing device, The Mirror. They indulge in various breaches of rules of engagement, such as failing to honour conventions on single combat. In the aftermath of the main battles, Aragorn seizes the throne of Gondor by engineering the murder of the de facto king, Denethor (with the unlikely cover story that the latter just happened to set fire to himself), and assures the compliance of allies by hostage-taking (he keeps Éowyn, sister of the Rohan heir Éomer, along with the genuine Gondor heir Faramir, under guarded exile). However, it's not all roses for Aragorn: Arwen will not consummate their alliance, as from her immortal Elvish viewpoint, he's little more than a primitive baby. The Elves also, naturally, won't give back The Mirror.
Haladdin, Tzerlag and Tangorn form an alliance, initially for mutual protection from Gondorian mop-up operations, and kill Eloar, the elf who was behind the massacre. Then, while on watch, Haladdin gets a visit from a Nazgûl, Sharya-Rana (the benign and rational spirit of a dead mathematician) who tells him what's at stake for the future. The world ("Arda") is at the interface of physical and magical worlds, and the Elves have plans to exploit this and lead Middle Earth into an Elf-dominated stasis. The only way to stop this is to disconnect the worlds by destroying The Mirror in the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom within 100 days: a daunting task since The Mirror weighs 1000 pounds and is installed in the totalitarian Elf stronghold of Lórien. Haladdin has been selected to do it because he has no magical abilities, and so is impervious to magical attacks. Sharya-Rana dies - or rather discorporates, having used all his energies - and Haladdin is left to contemplate how he can achieve this quest (of which more in a moment).
I was reading this book well into the small hours - I finished at nearly 5am - and was gripped. Eskov has thoroughly worked out the whole revisionist scenario, and it fits the Lord of the Rings timeline beautifully. The overall stance is humane and rationalist, fiercely polemical in its stance of outrage at misrepresented history. And, as Eskov has stated, it avoids alignment of good/evil with ethnicity or military side. It's thoroughly realistic in its portrayal of brutal Realpolitik and the double-edged aspect of espionage: for example, Baron Tangorn's personal shame is that he compiled for Gondor the open source intelligence report on food imports showing that Mordor was no threat, not realising that this very report would be used as the rationale for Gondor's unprovoked attack on it.
Eskov takes a real joy in his world, too, showing vividly the multifarious cultures that thrive in a geographical area stretching across the equivalent of, say, NW Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. He delights in food and wine and how they're prepared, in total contrast to Tolkien's descriptions that really seem to stem from the latter's dull and abstemious tastes. However, this joy does have a slight downside: Eskov occasionally digresses into cultural back-story that holds up the plot. There's a huge and not very relevant chunk about the history of Middle Earth's Africa analogue, and an interminable section (which really belongs in a separate novel) about Baron Tangorn's adventures as a spy in the port city-state of Umbar, playing off the various security services against each other.
That aside, The Last Ringbearer made very satisfying reading, rich in allusion to similar scenarios in real-world history (if you don't spot them, there's an appendix) and more than a few neat references - when the characters discuss the "World as Text theory" - to the whole issue of the fictionality of both The Last Ringbearer and The Lord of the Rings. Despite it being let down in places by longueurs, it's a superb book: a commenter to my earlier post called it "This is a true book of ideas in the Russian tradition". And it's freely available, now in a 2nd Edition.
The copyright is undoubtedly still very 'grey': free or not, this is still an unauthorized derivative work. The Tolkien estate is not known for its liking of derivative works, but there doesn't seem to have been any move from it lately on the matter. Here's the official page, and here is where I found the ePUB version.
(Check out also this striking Flickr image of Dubai by Rick's Images. A detail of this, which shows towers including the Burj Khalifa under construction in March 2008, was used as the cover image for the Tenseg Press edition I read).
- Ray
Spoiler warning: I've completed the plot summary below, in white text. Mouse over if you want to read it.
So ... Haladdin works out a solution to the problem of getting The Mirror to the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom: do the opposite, and use a pair of palantíri to transmit the Eternal Fire to The Mirror. They obtain the palantíri (one of them by aiding a coup to free Faramir) and set up the second half of the plan. Baron Tangorn goes alone to Umbar, where he conducts months of espionage in order to contact the Elven underground with a forged letter and the fiction that Eloar is still alive but imprisoned. The Elves don't initially buy this idea, and Tangorn thinks he has failed; he plans to leave Umbar with his courtesan lover Alviss, but is tragically murdered by his pursuers when he steps out to buy her a gift. Ironically, the Elves take this as evidence of the truth of his carrying dangerous information; unknown to him, he has succeeded.
Haladdin's plan goes ahead: to subvert Eloar's mother, the high-ranking Elf Eornis, into setting up a palantír connection, thinking she can talk with her son. The Mirror, she is told, must be in sight at her end as a bona fide of her location. The palantír is dropped into Lórien from a glider piloted by the troll Kumai - trolls are another human ethnicity - and the Elves fail to find it (Eornis has glued it underneath The Mirror). Even though The Mirror is giving distinct warnings of impending doom, the Elves fail to act decisely because of their one weakness: a paranoid demarcation of decision-making among their politely bickering Politburo-like leaders.
However, as the moment approaches when Haladdin will drop his palantír into the Fire, Gandalf spots the danger and casts a spell on Haladdin's palantír to turn him to stone; it doesn't work, because of the latter's lack of magical nature. Saruman takes over, attempting to reason with Haladdin via the palantír, and tells him what's probably the truth: that Sharya-Rana's scenario is just one theory, and that destroying The Mirror may in fact destroy the world. However, fate intervenes when Tzerlag accidentally touches the palantír and begins to turn to stone. Haladdin takes the chance and destroys it to save his friend, who lives with just the loss of a couple of fingers.
There are massive detonations - and the magic simply goes away. Elves become just beautiful people without power or charisma. Magical items, such as Elven medical kits, cease to work. Arwen loses her power over Aragorn, and he goes on to a career as an enlightened king who brings in a long era of democracy in Gondor, and is ultimately succeeded by Faramir.
The book ends with a future perspective - a future in which history has gone more or less like ours, with another continent called Amengo discovered - discussing the historicity and modern media treatment of the characters in the narrative. A "Western literary adaptation" called The Lord of the Rings is one of them.
- Ray
Monday, 19 November 2012
Alexander Herzen in Ventnor
I apologise for this being a thoroughly second-hand post, but following blog references led in a pleasant direction.
Sydney Padua's always excellent 2D Googles just cited an 1840 letter by Thomas Carlyle to his younger brother John Aitken Carlyle, containing a complimentary description of the Isle of Wight as place to spend the winter months.
One shows St Augustine Villa, where Herzen stayed (my photo for comparison) ...
... and the other shows the coastline looking eastward toward Ventnor (again, I found a photo of my own, this one from May 2012):
- Ray
Sydney Padua's always excellent 2D Googles just cited an 1840 letter by Thomas Carlyle to his younger brother John Aitken Carlyle, containing a complimentary description of the Isle of Wight as place to spend the winter months.
Your Weymouth Letter reached me yesterday. If you accomplished your purpose for Sunday, getting to Lymington as you proposed, you must have ample means to be in Ryde at your journey's end before this reach you. I fancy you to be there perhaps even now. It gives me no little satisfaction to consider that your wandering is now over, and has settled you for a space of rest in a corner so near me. I imagine Wight to be the elegiblest of all places for passing these dim months;—not enveloped in fog, drizzle, and glar [mud], as we here; but with a fresh sea round you, with glimpses of blue sky, and some constant evidence that this Earth and her Seasons still exist.Googling around this took me serendipitously to a blog post In Herzen’s footsteps: a visit to Ventnor by Sarah J Young, a lecturer in Russian at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. It concerns the author's visit to Ventnor in the process of researching the mid-1850s stay in Ventnor of Alexander Ivanovich Herzen ("a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the father of Russian socialism and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism" - Wikipedia). The whole account is rather cool, not least for the inclusion of sketches of Ventnor by one of the Herzen entourage, Malwida von Meysenbug.
- TC TO JOHN A. CARLYLE, Chelsea, Tuesday, 24 Novr / 1840— The Carlyle Letters Online
One shows St Augustine Villa, where Herzen stayed (my photo for comparison) ...
 |
| St Augustine Villa, Ventnor, 1855, Malwida von Meysenbug Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative works 2.0 England and Wales License |
 |
| Ventnor, October 2010, Ray Girvan, public domain image |
 |
| Ventnor, Chalet Hotel, 1954 - scan of postcard: click to enlarge |
... and the other shows the coastline looking eastward toward Ventnor (again, I found a photo of my own, this one from May 2012):
 |
| Coast near Ventnor, by Malwida von Meysenbug, 1855 Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative works 2.0 England and Wales License |
 |
| Coast near Ventnor, Ray Girvan, May 2012, public domain image |
Saturday, 17 March 2012
Garmoshka meets Schwyzerörgeli
Some subjects, even when you think you know them well, keep throwing surprises at you; and this surprise was two accordion variants I'd never heard of.
At the beginning of December, the Guardian's Eyewitness series carried an excellent photo of electoral officials visiting villagers - Eyewitness: Gryaz, Russia (5 December 2011, Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters - see zoom) - with a gentleman playing accordion in the foreground.
Angela Williams of Literary Places sent me a link to the Reuters Photographers Blog, An accordion for Ablogin, which tells of an unexpected spinoff to the photo. Maddalena Bucher, in Britain, noticed the shabby state of the accordion (the player's name is Vladimir Ablogin) and contacted Reuters to arrange to send him her late husband's accordion, a "Schwyzerörgeli" button accordion. It's an immensely kind gesture, and a good story.
However, there is a telling line in the Reuters account ...
... and the pictures reveal the likely reason. Although both the garmoshka and Schwyzerörgeli are superficially similar button-key accordions, they have a very different configuration: Mr Ablogin's garmoshka has a two-row diatonic system right-hand keyboard, and the Schwyzerörgeli is three-row, with a fingering like the "club system". The order of the bass buttons of the Schwyzerörgeli is also the reverse of the usual Stradella setup on accordions.
It sounds a monstrous learning curve to switch between the two. I found switching from piano accordion to chromatic button-key accordion bad enough, but at least it had the advantages that the bass configuration was the same, and the right hand work was a clean break: the new keyboard bore little relation to the old. Then again, I do know musicians who seem capable of switching between different configurations of instrument (for instance, between bisonic and unisonic accordions). I really do hope Mr Ablogin gets on with the Schwyzerörgeli, because it does look (and sound) a very nice instrument.
"Garmoshka", by the way, is a diminutive of гармон ("garmon") / гармоника ("garmonika"); as with the Finnish "harmonikka", the Russian "garmonika" means accordion, not harmonica (an example of a linguistic false friend). "Schwyzerörgeli" means "Swiss accordion" ("örgeli" - accordion - is the diminutive of "örgel" - organ).
Addendum: This is a very difficult situation to analyse. Is this a very imperfect outcome being spun by Reuters as a feelgood story? Is it so good-intentioned a gesture that I should ignore the very real practical problems? (I do feel very churlish pointing them out). Is Mr Ablogin so poor that the generosity of the gift blows him away despite the downside that he most likely can't play the thing? I don't know.
- Ray
At the beginning of December, the Guardian's Eyewitness series carried an excellent photo of electoral officials visiting villagers - Eyewitness: Gryaz, Russia (5 December 2011, Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters - see zoom) - with a gentleman playing accordion in the foreground.
Angela Williams of Literary Places sent me a link to the Reuters Photographers Blog, An accordion for Ablogin, which tells of an unexpected spinoff to the photo. Maddalena Bucher, in Britain, noticed the shabby state of the accordion (the player's name is Vladimir Ablogin) and contacted Reuters to arrange to send him her late husband's accordion, a "Schwyzerörgeli" button accordion. It's an immensely kind gesture, and a good story.
However, there is a telling line in the Reuters account ...
the new instrument which he has yet to learn to play with the same virtuosity as his old Russian garmoshka
... and the pictures reveal the likely reason. Although both the garmoshka and Schwyzerörgeli are superficially similar button-key accordions, they have a very different configuration: Mr Ablogin's garmoshka has a two-row diatonic system right-hand keyboard, and the Schwyzerörgeli is three-row, with a fingering like the "club system". The order of the bass buttons of the Schwyzerörgeli is also the reverse of the usual Stradella setup on accordions.
It sounds a monstrous learning curve to switch between the two. I found switching from piano accordion to chromatic button-key accordion bad enough, but at least it had the advantages that the bass configuration was the same, and the right hand work was a clean break: the new keyboard bore little relation to the old. Then again, I do know musicians who seem capable of switching between different configurations of instrument (for instance, between bisonic and unisonic accordions). I really do hope Mr Ablogin gets on with the Schwyzerörgeli, because it does look (and sound) a very nice instrument.
"Garmoshka", by the way, is a diminutive of гармон ("garmon") / гармоника ("garmonika"); as with the Finnish "harmonikka", the Russian "garmonika" means accordion, not harmonica (an example of a linguistic false friend). "Schwyzerörgeli" means "Swiss accordion" ("örgeli" - accordion - is the diminutive of "örgel" - organ).
Addendum: This is a very difficult situation to analyse. Is this a very imperfect outcome being spun by Reuters as a feelgood story? Is it so good-intentioned a gesture that I should ignore the very real practical problems? (I do feel very churlish pointing them out). Is Mr Ablogin so poor that the generosity of the gift blows him away despite the downside that he most likely can't play the thing? I don't know.
- Ray
Thursday, 5 January 2012
Faux Cyrillic sighting
Even though I didn't know the setting until Googling it - the lower picture featuring the Kremlin wasn't discernible from the upper deck of the bus - the general location was evident from the typography, which uses Faux Cyrillic letters.
There's the classic use of Я ("Ya") for one occurrence of "R" (as seen last year at this mesto in Salisbury), along with Д ("De") for "A" (as used on the poster for Borat!), and Ц ("Tse") for "U".
- Яду
Addendum. See Felix Grant's The Growlery - Double delight - for further nice examples.
Monday, 10 October 2011
Bayan time (10): Ochi Chyornye
Another work-in-progress from Saturday: Ochi Chyornye (Очи чёрные = Black Eyes). Sorry about the general murkiness of sound; the laptop microphone isn't so good. It's a nice tune with such a huge history of variant covers that it allows plenty of scope for improvisation, whatever your skill level. It shows a couple of the many nice features of the bayan: the compactness of the layout, allowing a 'three-handed' effect (left-hand bass and, with unexceptional stretch, melody on right thumb and a third part over an octave above that using the other fingers of the right hand); and the ease of playing chromatic runs.
As the Wikipedia entry mentions, despite its reputation being stereotypically Russian, the lyrics to Очи чёрные are a Ukrainian romantic poem by Yevhen Hrebinka, and the music probably German. The poem is very Swinburne:
Очи чёрные, очи страстные
Очи жгучие и прекрасные
Как люблю я вас, как боюсь я вас
Знать, увидел вас я в недобрый час
Ох, недаром вы глубины темней!
Вижу траур в вас по душе моей,
Вижу пламя в вас я победное:
Сожжено на нём сердце бедное.
Но не грустен я, не печален я,
Утешительна мне судьба моя:
Всё, что лучшего в жизни Бог дал нам,
В жертву отдал я огневым глазам!
Dark eyes, passionate eyes
Burning and splendid eyes
How I love you, how I fear you
Verily, I espied you in an ill-starred moment
Oh, not for nothing are you darker than the deep!
I see mourning for my soul in you,
I see a triumphant flame in you:
A poor heart immolated in it.
But I am not sad, I am not sorrowful,
My fate is soothing to me:
All that is best in life, God gave us.
In sacrifice I returned to the fiery eyes!
Its tune is an 1884 arrangement of an originally piano piece called Hommage-Valse by a German composer, Florian Hermann. There's a deal of garbling of the composer name and title, but the most reliable sources I can find are in the Library of Congress Records of its Nicolas Slonimsky Collection ...
BOX 285 Gerdal, Sofus (arranger)
BOX 285 Ochi chernyia, ochi strastnyia (na motiv val'sa "Hammage" Germana)
[voice and piano]. Moscow: A. Gutkheĭl', 1884.
Photocopy and negative photocopy.
Based on "Hommage-valse" by Florian Hermann, quod vide.
...
BOX 287-A Hermann, Florian
Hommage-valse [piano]. [S.l.]: [s.n.], n.d.
Negative photocopy of original edition [?].
... and the entry in James J Fuld's The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (pp 417-418), which notes further that it appeared in collection billed as "favourite songs of the Moscow gypsies".
- Ray
Friday, 19 August 2011
This mesto in Salisbury
On a flying visit to Salisbury for my brother-in-law's birthday party, I spotted this interesting typography for a vodka bar name (clearly alluding to the Korova bar in A Clockwork Orange) on the way into the city. I like the way the first character of the first word throws you into thinking it's a sigma, even if the second one, "БАЯ", slightly loses subtlety points by falling into the cliche of using a "Я" ("Ya") to represent "R" in pseudo-Cyrillic.
- Ray
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
The scent of plagiarism
I'm not sure how to categorise this: strange cultural/musical crossover, I suppose. I admit to liking a lot of Europop, and just ran into the above: "Я люблю тебя" ("Ya lyublyu tebya" = "I love you") by ГиллерА (GillerA, who I think is/are Ukrainian; the song is all over the Russian/Ukrainian videoclip circuit, but with no sign of creator details). It's a very nice track: upbeat and bright, yet rather wistful. It's accompanied, however, by a majorly incongruous SF video, about an evidently alien/superpowered woman (vital stats including ferrum, helium, uranium, hydrargyrum, cuprum and copernicium ain't normal) who gets loose in a laboratory and zaps the staff with mindcontrolling/aphrodisiac fluence from her hands.
Whatever its intrinsic merits, however, it's causing considerable annoyance to fans of the French singer Mylène Farmer. As reported in the online magazine .evous - Mylène Farmer: Le clip de ’Dégénération’ plagié par une chanteuse ukrainienne! - the video for "Я люблю тебя" is heavily derivative - shot for shot in places - of that for Farmer's "Dégénération" ("Degeneration") in which an evidently alien/superpowered woman gets loose in a laboratory and etc etc. Here's the video - it's NSFW, but far less explicit than it looks.
It's hard to take sides on this. While the video for "Я люблю тебя" is clearly based on that for "Dégénération", the song should be judged on its own merits: it's pleasant light listening, as good in its own way as "Dégénération", a far darker techno/electro piece that reached No. 1 in the French charts. I very much like both tracks. The "Dégénération" video, in addition, itself contains in one section a close visual similarity to a previous work: the scene in Luc Besson's film The Fifth Element in which Leeloo escapes after her regeneration, so its makers aren't entirely on the moral high ground about borrowing.
There is a possible book connection; at least one commentator - Erwan Chuberre, in the book Mylène Farmer: Des mots sur nos désirs - thought the "Dégénération" video also drew inspiration from Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, in which the perfumier Grenouille escapes execution by releasing an aphrodisiac scent, sparking a whole-town orgy.
- Ray
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
The Last Ringbearer
MetaFilter currently has an excellent thread worth visiting - The Last Ringbearer - which has a wealth of links concerning 'parallel novels': works that retell others from the viewpoint of a different character or perspective.
The particular focus of the thread, however, is Middle-earth according to Mordor ("A newly translated Russian novel retells Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' from the perspective of the bad guys") - this Salon article by Laura Miller discusses Последний кольценосец (The Last Ringbearer) by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov. Working by the aphorism that "history is written by the victors", this is a counter-text to The Lord of the Rings that tells of the last days and aftermath of the War of the Ring from the viewpoint of the forces of Sauron. As Miller describes it:
If you know Russian, an article by Kirill Eskov, How and why I wrote the apocryphal "Lord of the Rings", looks worth reading. Skimming via Google Translate: Eskov explains that he's not formally a writer, but a "graphomaniac" who writes for his own pleasure and that of friends. He mentions the long history of works that dissect and overturn fictional worlds, right back to Dio Chrysostom, whose rhetorical "Trojan speech" argued the Iliad to be pure PR, the siege of Troy a failure. He mentions the power to expose interesting facets of a work through the device of approaching a work from an ethical or aesthetic position radically different from that of its creator, citing examples including Andrzej Sapkowski (whose Złote popołudnie - Golden Afternoon - retells the story of Alice from the viewpoint of the Cheshire Cat), "Gloria Howard's take on Moby Dick from Ahab's wife's viewpoint" (I can find no reference to Gloria Howard - but the book has to be Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel), and Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
However, a further aspect of Eskov's motivation was to examine Tolkien's Middle Earth as a real world, and as a geologist he spotted problems. Plate tectonics requires that Middle Earth, as a supercontinent, would have central highlands, which Tolkien doesn't describe. Evidently there must be more to Middle Earth, so Eskov posits other continents and archipelagoes. He asks about practicalities of Middle Earth that have to exist. What's the monetary system? How can Rohan sustain itself solely by breeding horses? What do the inhabitants of Mordor eat, and why is their capital city in the middle of a desert? And if Middle Earth is treated as a real world, then characters such as Aragorn and Faramir are historical personages whose actions, just as with historical figures in our world, are open to very differing interpretations Finally, he tackles the tropes of fantasy itself. Fantasy has very strict canonical rules: no moral relativism, but a black-and-white morality. He accepted this groundrule, but attempted to arrange good and evil more realistically, by individual person rather than by race (his elves are "not evil and not good - they are simply alien").
For the moment anyway, The Last Ringbearer is available in the English translation by Yisroel Markov, authorised by the author, as a free download. To circumvent the undoubtedly grey copyright situation - see the Guardian's Lord of the Rings reworking a hit with fans, but not Tolkien estate - it's being released on a non-commercial basis. I won't link to it, but you'll find links via Eskov's Wikipedia entry and the Salon article.
Eskov has, by the way, written another novel called The Gospel of Aphranius, which attempts to construct a demythologised account of the events of the Gospels (rather like Frank Yerby's Judas, My Brother).
Update: see The Last Ringbearer, posted in December 2012 after I read the ePUB version of the 2nd Edition.
- Ray
The particular focus of the thread, however, is Middle-earth according to Mordor ("A newly translated Russian novel retells Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' from the perspective of the bad guys") - this Salon article by Laura Miller discusses Последний кольценосец (The Last Ringbearer) by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov. Working by the aphorism that "history is written by the victors", this is a counter-text to The Lord of the Rings that tells of the last days and aftermath of the War of the Ring from the viewpoint of the forces of Sauron. As Miller describes it:
... a well-written, energetic adventure yarn that offers an intriguing gloss on what some critics have described as the overly simplistic morality of Tolkien's masterpiece.The Last Ringbearer is in tune with a number of criticisms of Tolkien's mythos mentioned in the MetaFilter thread that, much as I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings films, I don't find hard to disagree with. There's Michael Moorcock's 1989 essay Epic Pooh. And David Brin's J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress (Salon again, Dec 17th 2002), that attacks its pro-aristocratic Romanticism. And Fantasy and revolution, an interview in International Socialism in which fantasy author China Miéville says: "Tolkien's worldview was resolutely rural, petty bourgeois, conservative, anti-modernist, misanthropically Christian and anti-intellectual".
In Yeskov's retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science "destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!"
...
The protagonist of "The Last Ringbearer" is a field medic from Umbar (a southern land), who is ably assisted by an Orocuen -- that is, orc -- scout, who is not a demonic creature like the orcs in "The Lord of the Rings," but an ordinary man.
...
In Yeskov's scenario, "The Lord of the Rings" is a highly romanticized and mythologized version of the fall of Mordor, perhaps even outright propaganda; "The Last Ringbearer" is supposed to be the more complicated and less sentimental true story.
If you know Russian, an article by Kirill Eskov, How and why I wrote the apocryphal "Lord of the Rings", looks worth reading. Skimming via Google Translate: Eskov explains that he's not formally a writer, but a "graphomaniac" who writes for his own pleasure and that of friends. He mentions the long history of works that dissect and overturn fictional worlds, right back to Dio Chrysostom, whose rhetorical "Trojan speech" argued the Iliad to be pure PR, the siege of Troy a failure. He mentions the power to expose interesting facets of a work through the device of approaching a work from an ethical or aesthetic position radically different from that of its creator, citing examples including Andrzej Sapkowski (whose Złote popołudnie - Golden Afternoon - retells the story of Alice from the viewpoint of the Cheshire Cat), "Gloria Howard's take on Moby Dick from Ahab's wife's viewpoint" (I can find no reference to Gloria Howard - but the book has to be Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel), and Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
However, a further aspect of Eskov's motivation was to examine Tolkien's Middle Earth as a real world, and as a geologist he spotted problems. Plate tectonics requires that Middle Earth, as a supercontinent, would have central highlands, which Tolkien doesn't describe. Evidently there must be more to Middle Earth, so Eskov posits other continents and archipelagoes. He asks about practicalities of Middle Earth that have to exist. What's the monetary system? How can Rohan sustain itself solely by breeding horses? What do the inhabitants of Mordor eat, and why is their capital city in the middle of a desert? And if Middle Earth is treated as a real world, then characters such as Aragorn and Faramir are historical personages whose actions, just as with historical figures in our world, are open to very differing interpretations Finally, he tackles the tropes of fantasy itself. Fantasy has very strict canonical rules: no moral relativism, but a black-and-white morality. He accepted this groundrule, but attempted to arrange good and evil more realistically, by individual person rather than by race (his elves are "not evil and not good - they are simply alien").
For the moment anyway, The Last Ringbearer is available in the English translation by Yisroel Markov, authorised by the author, as a free download. To circumvent the undoubtedly grey copyright situation - see the Guardian's Lord of the Rings reworking a hit with fans, but not Tolkien estate - it's being released on a non-commercial basis. I won't link to it, but you'll find links via Eskov's Wikipedia entry and the Salon article.
Eskov has, by the way, written another novel called The Gospel of Aphranius, which attempts to construct a demythologised account of the events of the Gospels (rather like Frank Yerby's Judas, My Brother).
Update: see The Last Ringbearer, posted in December 2012 after I read the ePUB version of the 2nd Edition.
- Ray
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Bayan time
Further to "You'll like this, it has buttons": the bayan arrived several days back. Being very busy (tax deadline again, and lots of web work to do ... sorry, guys) I swore I wouldn't spend time trying it out until I'd cleared my desk adequately, but once I'd opened the huge padded package from Ukraine with "НЕ бросать" (Russian: "DO NOT drop/throw") all over it, it was inevitable I'd get sidetracked. So, brief impressions.
It's a secondhand Орфей (Orfei = Orpheus) bayan - the Russian flavour of chromatic button accordion - with 120-button stradella left-hand keyboard and a five-row 85-button right-hand keyboard. It's a chunky 10kg (nearly 2 stone) instrument as used by professional bands such as the Ukrainian folk rock band Тік (above), with a very solid clarinet-like tone, with lots of bass (it makes my small piano accordion sound positively shrill and tinny). Oh, and it has a nice green casing.
Although I'd read around the topic as much as possible, moving to button-key was still very much a leap of faith after decades of playing a piano accordion - and even more so to go for a B-system bayan, where I'm likely to be on my own over learning (the reasons were partly affordability, partly liking the overall tone, and partly feeling indefinably simpatico with the instrument). But after a week, I can safely say I'm sorry I didn't make the change years ago. The left-hand needs only minor acclimatisation, since I'm used to the stradella layout. As to the right-hand: I find the keyboard layout - shown here at Blumberg's Music Theory Cipher - both conceptually elegant and practical. As Blumberg puts it, it's an "isomorphic instrument" - every note has the same relationship to those adjacent (see basics), meaning playing scales in all keys uses the same fingering, as does chords. Any scale is playable on three rows, but the five rows offer duplicate buttons playing the same note, which often offer easier alternate fingerings (for instance, a move to an adjacent key rather than a jump). The keyboard is also highly compressed compared to piano format: you can easily play two-octave chords. A downside, however, is that the non-linear layout makes long glissandos rather more difficult (Nydana's Accordion Resources has a good analysis comparing the B and C systems).
All of that is readable anywhere; but an aspect I haven't seen mentioned is that I'm finding it vastly easier to learn tunes on the Orfei than on a piano keyboard. I tend to think visually, and find the 2D button layout gives tunes a "shape" - they become a path following locations on a surface - that's rapidly memorable. Another neat, and encouraging, observation is that there seems to be a kind of synergy: after a week exploring the bayan, I've noticed an improvement in my piano accordion technique. So far, it looks altogether an interesting project for 2011.
(There are some scary examples on YouTube of what can be done on the five-row bayan: see Lidia Kaminska and Alexander Dmitriev. Ouch).
- Ray
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Artzybasheff and Artsybashev
Artzybasheff: Life panorama of fictional lunar inhabitants and visitors, 15th December 1958: click for full spread and associated article identifying them.
Further still relating to the link Bill Higgins sent, it's worth checking out the work of the Ukrainian-born artist Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965). For some reason I'd never encountered his work before, and I'm sorry it took so long to make the acquaintance. It ranges from the near-photorealistic straight portraiture (though, more often than not, with surreal background elements) of his cover art for Time magazine to the highly surreal, such as the anthropomorphised machines of his Machinalia and Diablerie; his depictions of pathological mental states, Neurotica; and the nightmarish swastika-based fantasias of his anti-Nazi art for Time.
Life magazine also featured his artwork. See this Speaking of Pictures feature for 3rd November 1941; his explanation of flying saucers for 21st July 1947 (its biomorphic alien gun is remarkably reminiscent of the artwork of HR Giger, particularly the 'space-jockey' of Alien; the designs for improving the human form for 12th March 1951 (see man and woman); the previously-mentioned panorama of fictional Martians for 24th September 1956; and this similar panorama of fictional lunar creatures for 15th December 1958. See the Google Books magazine search option for many more.
Artzybasheff is further known for his book illustrations, such as those for Charles G Finney's forgotten classic The Circus of Dr Lao. His work is collected in a standalone book, As I See.
A striking collection of extraordinary images from one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed and unique American artists. This fantastical collection teems with ironic imagery which documents our culture’s vanity, aggression, dreams, and neuroses with biting wit and wisdom. Boris Artzybasheff’s striking graphic style, which includes everything from grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, to the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion, is displayed to full effect in this seminal collection of his work. A stunning collection from an artist with a strong sense of design and humour!
- As I See blurb, Titan Books edition
Artzybasheff was the son of Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927, same surname - just different conventional transliteration). Artistic ability clearly ran in the family, as the latter went to art school. , However, Artsybashev instead turned a similar thematic interest in the outré to writing, producing short stories and novels - by turns amusing, subversive and horrific with their themes of sex, suicide and murder - that scandalised Russian society in the closing years of the Tsarist regime and were banned by the subsequent Soviet regime. His most popular novel was the 1907 Санин (transliterated as Sanin or Sanine) whose Wikipedia description deserves some kind of prize for the most misleadingly coy description of a novel:
Its hero, twentysomething Sanin, after a long absence from home, comes back to visit his mother and sister. During his stay he meets varied people, some of whom are neutral, amazed, threatened or excited by his way of thinking about the world and human existence. Sanin remains confident and self-assured and at the end of the book leaves town.
The Cornell Press blurb is more informative. The title character Sanin is an intellectual antihero who quietly goes around behaving with complete disregard for conventional morality:
The hero of Artsybashev's novel exhibits a set of new values to be contrasted with the morality of the older Russian intelligentsia. Sanin is an attractive, clever, powerful, life-loving man who is, at the same time, an amoral and carnal animal, bored both by politics and by religion. During the novel he lusts after his own sister, but defends her when she is betrayed by an arrogant officer; he deflowers an innocent-but-willing virgin; and encourages a Jewish friend to end his self-doubts by committing suicide.
At the time, the novel was denounced as pornographic, but it isn't remotely by modern standards; you can read it in translation at Project Gutenberg (EText-No. 9051). The cause for offence was that it appealed to, and appeared to encourage, the attitude of a disaffected generation in Russia who were cheesed off both with traditionalism and with the failure of political action to alter things. Sanin came out at the beginning of the "Period of Reaction" when pro-Tsarist factions were increasingly undermining progressive changes introduced after the 1905 Russian Revolution (though it wasn't written in response to this; it had been rejected by publishers in 1903).
Sanin appeared at the psychological moment, late in the year 1907. The Revolution was a failure, and it being impossible to fight the government or to obtain political liberty, people in Russia of all classes were ready for a revolt against moral law, the religion of self-denial, and all the conventions established by society, education, and the church. At this moment of general desperation and smouldering rage, appeared a work written with great power and great art, deifying the natural instincts of man, incarnating the spirit of liberty in a hero who despises all so-called morality as absurd tyranny. It was a bold attempt to marshal the animal instincts of humanity, terrifically strong as they are even in the best citizens, against every moral and prudential restraint. The effect of the book will probably not last very long, — already it has been called an ephemeral sensation, — but it was immediate and tremendous. It was especially powerful among university students and high school boys and girls — the "Sanin-morals" of undergraduates were alluded to in a speech in the Duma.
- Essays on Russian Novelists (William Lyon Phelps, 1911 - p 248 onwards).
A number of other Mikhail Artsybashev works are online at the Internet Archive: search on creator:"Artsybashev, M. (Mikhail), 1878-1927". His first anthology, Tales of the Revolution, is characteristic of his style and themes.
- Ray
Thursday, 23 April 2009
Breaking out of the game
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A recommendation: Ian Watson's Queenmagic, Kingmagic (Grafton, 1988, ISBN-10: 0586074147), which Felix just lent me (I re-used the Flammarion woodcut as this is another conceptual breakthrough novel).
An expanded version of Watson's novella Queenmagic, Pawnmagic, it tells the story of Pedino, a "pawn-squire" in a world modelled on chess. Two kingdoms, Bellogard and Chorny, are locked in a centuries-long battle fought by assassination and counter-assassination among the few important individuals (kings, queens, knights, and so on) who have powers of magical teleportation and attack. The story initially follows Pedino's schooling in Bellogard, his elevation to a role in the battle, and his liaison with Sara, a young prostitute who is a spy for Chorny, but it then takes a more cosmic turn. Both sides know that the end of the war is the end of their world, and both have vague awareness of previous cycles of existence; this is leading a few mystics and academics to look for ways to break out of that cycle.
Eventually Pedino finds a way to jump with Sara into other realities based on other games: one world where snakes and ladders provide portals to enclaves of higher and lower standards of living; another based on Monopoly, where society is based on a lethal property ladder run by lottery; and a third, in which soldiers and civilians are muddling through during confused movements of military encampments, based on the scoring stage of Go. Finally he finds himself in a new cycle of existence of the Bellogard-Chorny war, his options cramped by elevation to ineffectual kingship, but with sufficient acquired knowledge to guide more focused efforts to break through the "bubbles" into other planes of existence.
I enjoyed Queenmagic, Kingmagic a lot, with some reservations; it does go on fast-forward toward the end, and some parts I suspect wouldn't be widely understood. Recognising the Russian in-jokes in proper names is a bonus - for instance, Bishop Slon = Bishop Elephant, referring to the piece's form prior to Westernisation. That's not crucial (though I'd like to know what exactly Watson meant by the repeated incantation "Opasnost po Zhivot!" which transliterates as "Опасность по живот" - "Peril to stomach". Maybe flank attack?). However, while most readers know chess at least theoretically, fewer will know Go, much less recognise the troop movements in that section of the book as a description of the rearrangement of stones during the scoring phase). But overall it's great fun, and manages to stay fresh and witty despite the fairly dark scenario of characters fighting the dissolution of their universe.
Queenmagic, Kingmagic obviously isn't the first fiction to be set inside a chess game; the best-known prototype is Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Gutenberg EText-No. 12). 1 whose story is integrated with a real chess problem (see Gardner's classic concordance The Annotated Alice) though one that contains illegal moves. There's a detailed analysis in Glen Robert Downey's PhD dissertation The Truth about Pawn Promotion: the Development of the Chess Motif in Victorian Fiction which is very worth reading for its exploration of the long history, pre-Carroll, of allegorical chess motifs in Western fiction. In mediaeval times, a succession of authors wrote "chess moralities" that mapped the roles of pieces map on to the real-world hierarchy to morally instructive intent: for instance, John of Wales' Quaedam moralitas de scaccario per Innocentium papum (The Innocent Morality) and Jacobus de Cessolis' Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium (see Power play: the literature and politics of chess in the Late Middle Ages, Jenny Adams, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, ISBN 081223944X). The drift of such works was generally to reinforce conventional moralities, often via edifying pseudo-origins to the game, but later, Middleton's play A Game at Chess took a more subversive stance and used the chess format for political satire.
Post-Carroll, chess continued to be a popular theme for fiction, particularly science fiction; Poul Anderson's The Immortal Game (F&SF, 1954) is also worth finding for its vivid insider view of a chess game:
The first trumpet sounded far and clear and brazen cold, and Rogard the Bishop stirred to wakefulness with it. Lifting his eyes, he looked through the suddenly rustling, murmuring line of soldiers, out across the broad plain of Cinnabar and the frontier, and over to the realm of LEUKAS. Away there, across the somehow unreal red-and-black distances of the steppe, he saw sunlight flash on armor and caught the remote wild flutter of lifted banners. So it is war, he thought. So we must fight again.
Again? He pulled his mind from the frightening dimness of that word. Had they ever fought before?
(The title and plot refer to the classic "Immortal Game" played between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in 1851, famous for Anderssen's win by audacious sacrifice of major pieces. The final moves of the same game are quoted in the game between Sebastian and Tyrell in Blade Runner).
The Greenwood encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy: themes, works, and wonders has more examples of this theme.
Ongoing: I recommend A haphazard way to move through life and treasure... at The Growlery, which has further recommendations (that I second) for the works of Ian Watson. Felix mentions that he "personally liked the Go section, finding it the most evocative of the whole book", and I can see why: it is the most realistic depiction of the human condition, akin to the age-old situation of refugees, airdropped supplies haphazardly, being shuffled around between temporary encampments in furtherance of a war whose tactics are indiscernable. I just didn't think it a wise choice of game given - at the time - its relative obscurity (outside cognoscenti) to a Western readership. Now, Internet accessibility, through IGS Pandanet for instance, has greatly increased its player base.
Go itself does have a considerable role in literature and art. Although the absence of identifiable special pieces doesn't lend it to personification in the style of chess, it has attracted a large body of philosophy in relation to war, business, and life in general (the two stone colours map readily on to the yin and yang of Taoism). I'll leave that aside mostly - except to recommend Japanese Prints and the World of Go, by William Pinckard, for its nice overview of its omnipresence in Edo period depictions of legend and everyday life - and move to the narrower field of its manifestation in Western fiction. Go in Western literature, by Brian ‘Chiwito’ McDonald, is a slightly out-of-date but still pertinent commentary on the relatively few Western works to feature Go in a major role. Iain Banks is mentioned (I'd forgotten that his Walking on Glass contained a number of variants on board games) along with Ian Watson, as well as a number of other familiar faces: some members of the aforementioned Oulipo were into Go. McDonald also debunks the common belief that Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is about - or even inspired by - Go, explaining how Hesse's game isn't physical, and even in its historical form within the book's mythos, used a wire-and-bead system unlike Go.
Oh, I've just recalled too that Katin in Nova knows about Go, but then he would.
And lights dimmed.
The captain hooked in. The grafitti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.
"A shook up go game," Katin said, "with iridescent stones."
Addendum, Friday 28th August The Guardian Books Blog has a piece by Stuart Evers, Why chess is a perfect game for fiction, which recommends the anthology of chess stories, The 64-Square Looking Glass: Great Games of Chess in World Literature (Burt Hochberg, Times Books, 1993, ISBN-10: 0812919297).
- Ray
1. Alice Through the Looking-Glass is a common misnomer.
2. Also worth looking at for Go and the 'Three Games', which explores the idea of three region-related philosophical subtexts to historically classic games: the Middle Eastern backgammon as Fate-dominated; chess playing out the "great myths of the West ... the overthrow of a hero and the crowning of a new hero ... a hierarchical and pyramidal society with powers strictly defined and limited", and the Eastern Go representing processes of pure mentation. Maybe - but this reeks of national stereotype, and ignores that chess - as shogi - is also highly traditional and highly popular in Japan, and that backgammon has been extremely popular in England and Europe: Chambers's Information for the People: A Popular Encyclopaedia, 1854, said of it:
the game has been long established in the country; and, as a fireside amusement of a decorous and exciting nature, is a favourite among clergymen, squires, farmers, and retired professional persons.
Saturday, 8 September 2007
More Russification / Wind Done Gone
I recently mentioned Tanya Grotter, Dmitri Yemets' Russian "cultural reply" to Harry Potter. I've been reading Wikipedia on the subject, and was interested to find behind this a long-running story of Russian adaptations of classic Western literature - not mere translations but Russification to adapt to local cultural flavour. We have Tolstoy's Buratino (based on Pinocchio); The Wizard of Emerald City, Alexander Volkov's adaptation of L. Frank Baum's Oz mythos; Nabokov's Anya in Wonderland (see Nabokov as Translator for background); and Boriz Zahoder's adaptation of Winnie the Pooh (see the Zahoder page at the Russian State Children's Library). These works have acquired classic status within their genre: the Volkov adaptations have even come back into English and inspired the works of March Laumer (brother of SF author Keith Laumer - more about him soon). I find it hard to conclude JK Rowling's successful litigation to prevent Western publication of Tanya Grotter to be of long-term benefit to literature; Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass looks an interesting book that could enlighten Western readers about Russian mythology and life in modern Russia.
You can, incidentally, with a little Google-Fu, find a detailed English-language analysis of the the first three Grotter books in Tanya Grotter: a Russian Harry Potter Knock-Off or Parody?, Mark Hooker's conference address reprinted in Selected Papers from Nimbus-2003 Compendium. If you go to the link above and search the book internally for "Tanya Grotter" (use the Google Books "search in this book", in the right-hand sidebar) you can track through the article page by page (ie pp75-104).
Hooker ultimately concludes that the relationship between Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter is akin to that of Gone with the Wind and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a retelling from a slave perspective (marketed and legally defended as a parody, though it obviously isn't one in the usual comic sense of the word). A legal dispute on very similar grounds to that of Emets vs Rowling concluded as an out-of-court settlement - Settlement reached over 'Wind Done Gone' - enabling the book to be published. The US climate and scenario is, however, rather different, in that The Wind Done Gone was "home-grown" and had strong expert support for its cultural perspective; also, a block on publication raised First Amendment issues of "unlawful prior restraint".
Addendum, 12 Oct 2008: I just ran into another example of a retelling of a novel still in copyright, Pia Pera's Lo's Diary 2001 , Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita retold from the point of Lolita herself, portraying her as a sadistic monster: see Salon Books' The Nymphet Strikes Back and Nerve.com's On a Book Entitled Lo's Diary (Dmitri Nabokov's commentary). Despite considerable legal wrangling, a settlement was reached between Pera and Nabokov's estate - Pact Reached on U.S. Edition of 'Lolita' Retelling (Peter Applebone, New York Times, June 17, 1999). It shows that such accommodations are perfectly feasible.
- Ray
You can, incidentally, with a little Google-Fu, find a detailed English-language analysis of the the first three Grotter books in Tanya Grotter: a Russian Harry Potter Knock-Off or Parody?, Mark Hooker's conference address reprinted in Selected Papers from Nimbus-2003 Compendium. If you go to the link above and search the book internally for "Tanya Grotter" (use the Google Books "search in this book", in the right-hand sidebar) you can track through the article page by page (ie pp75-104).
Hooker ultimately concludes that the relationship between Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter is akin to that of Gone with the Wind and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a retelling from a slave perspective (marketed and legally defended as a parody, though it obviously isn't one in the usual comic sense of the word). A legal dispute on very similar grounds to that of Emets vs Rowling concluded as an out-of-court settlement - Settlement reached over 'Wind Done Gone' - enabling the book to be published. The US climate and scenario is, however, rather different, in that The Wind Done Gone was "home-grown" and had strong expert support for its cultural perspective; also, a block on publication raised First Amendment issues of "unlawful prior restraint".
Addendum, 12 Oct 2008: I just ran into another example of a retelling of a novel still in copyright, Pia Pera's Lo's Diary 2001 , Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita retold from the point of Lolita herself, portraying her as a sadistic monster: see Salon Books' The Nymphet Strikes Back and Nerve.com's On a Book Entitled Lo's Diary (Dmitri Nabokov's commentary). Despite considerable legal wrangling, a settlement was reached between Pera and Nabokov's estate - Pact Reached on U.S. Edition of 'Lolita' Retelling (Peter Applebone, New York Times, June 17, 1999). It shows that such accommodations are perfectly feasible.
- Ray
Saturday, 21 July 2007
Tanya Grotter
Rather than make the obligatory comment about the release of the last Harry Potter novel, I thought I'd mention a more interesting bibliographic story: the case of Tanya Grotter.
The Tanya Grotter series is a very popular Russian clone of Harry Potter by the best-selling author Dmitri Yemets. There is no doubting the origin, and Yemets is open about it: introduced in Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, Tanya is an orphan with magical powers, brought up by an abusive foster-family, who gets to go to a wizarding school, etc etc. You won't currently get to read it in translation because in 2003 lawyers for JK Rowling and Time Warner successfully brought a cease-and-desist action to prevent the release of a Dutch translation, and this is likely to be the fate of translation into other languages (see Pravda's J.K. Rowling law firm sued Russian publishing house Eksmo on plagiarism allegation and the BBC's Rowling blocks Grotter release). Rowling's lawyers argued that the Grotter books violated copyright, and Yemets and his Moscow-based publishers, Eksmo, were unsuccessful in defending it as a parody. The latter is permitted under copyright, which is why Michael Gerber's Barry Trotter series is allowed.
On the face of it, this sounds like a cut-and-dried copyright case. But Maureen O'Brien, a blogger in the USA, wrote a deal at the time about the Tanya Grotter series, suggesting that it has been misrepresented. According to Defending Tanya Grotter, the case failed to address the point that the Grotter series is not a parody (in the sense of an extended joke) but a contrafakt: a form of literature that retells a story in a different genre. Compare "contrafactum", the same concept applied to music. Maureen gives the particular examples of Sharon Shinn's Jenna Starborn and Pat Murphy's There and back again, respectively SF retellings of Jane Eyre and The Hobbit. The latter is a particularly significant precedent, as The Hobbit is still in copyright.
As described in Maureen's review , Tanya Grotter has structural similarities to Harry Potter, but is so deeply adapted to a Russian setting that, Maureen argues, it amounts to a different work (or, as Yemets put it, a "cultural reply" to the Potter series). For instance, Tanya doesn't sleep in a broom cupboard but a loggia, a glazed balcony (freezing in winter, sweltering in summer) characteristic of Russian apartments. The magical elements are rooted in Russian folklore, such as Baba Yaga and Rusalki, and general Russian culture such as the works of Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov's Night on Bald Mountain. You can read about some of the characters at another of Maureen O'Brien's postings, A little more measured response.....
None of these subtleties came out at the Dutch court sessions, and few commentators outside Russia bothered to investigate (news items just reported the similarities and assumed the copyright breach to be clear-cut). One exception was Tim Wu at Slate.com - Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright - who argued that the freedom to create derivative works is actually beneficial to the literary market. There have been no attempts to market a translation since then.
- Ray
Addendum: I've commented on this further in a later post, More Russification / Wind Done Gone. - Ray
The Tanya Grotter series is a very popular Russian clone of Harry Potter by the best-selling author Dmitri Yemets. There is no doubting the origin, and Yemets is open about it: introduced in Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, Tanya is an orphan with magical powers, brought up by an abusive foster-family, who gets to go to a wizarding school, etc etc. You won't currently get to read it in translation because in 2003 lawyers for JK Rowling and Time Warner successfully brought a cease-and-desist action to prevent the release of a Dutch translation, and this is likely to be the fate of translation into other languages (see Pravda's J.K. Rowling law firm sued Russian publishing house Eksmo on plagiarism allegation and the BBC's Rowling blocks Grotter release). Rowling's lawyers argued that the Grotter books violated copyright, and Yemets and his Moscow-based publishers, Eksmo, were unsuccessful in defending it as a parody. The latter is permitted under copyright, which is why Michael Gerber's Barry Trotter series is allowed.
On the face of it, this sounds like a cut-and-dried copyright case. But Maureen O'Brien, a blogger in the USA, wrote a deal at the time about the Tanya Grotter series, suggesting that it has been misrepresented. According to Defending Tanya Grotter, the case failed to address the point that the Grotter series is not a parody (in the sense of an extended joke) but a contrafakt: a form of literature that retells a story in a different genre. Compare "contrafactum", the same concept applied to music. Maureen gives the particular examples of Sharon Shinn's Jenna Starborn and Pat Murphy's There and back again, respectively SF retellings of Jane Eyre and The Hobbit. The latter is a particularly significant precedent, as The Hobbit is still in copyright.
As described in Maureen's review , Tanya Grotter has structural similarities to Harry Potter, but is so deeply adapted to a Russian setting that, Maureen argues, it amounts to a different work (or, as Yemets put it, a "cultural reply" to the Potter series). For instance, Tanya doesn't sleep in a broom cupboard but a loggia, a glazed balcony (freezing in winter, sweltering in summer) characteristic of Russian apartments. The magical elements are rooted in Russian folklore, such as Baba Yaga and Rusalki, and general Russian culture such as the works of Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov's Night on Bald Mountain. You can read about some of the characters at another of Maureen O'Brien's postings, A little more measured response.....
None of these subtleties came out at the Dutch court sessions, and few commentators outside Russia bothered to investigate (news items just reported the similarities and assumed the copyright breach to be clear-cut). One exception was Tim Wu at Slate.com - Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright - who argued that the freedom to create derivative works is actually beneficial to the literary market. There have been no attempts to market a translation since then.
- Ray
Addendum: I've commented on this further in a later post, More Russification / Wind Done Gone. - Ray
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