Monday, February 18, 2013

Des soldats qui jouent comme des enfants


One of Karl Kraus' dicta appears in a different guise in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion. Here is Kraus:

"Kinder spielen Soldaten. Das ist sinnvoll. Warum aber spielen Soldaten Kinder?"

Children play soldiers. That is sensible. But why do soldiers play children?

And here is what Captain de Boeldieu remarks to his fellow prisoners:   

«D’un côté, des enfants qui jouent aux soldats ; de l’autre, des soldats qui jouent comme des enfants.»

Once again, you can see how the subtitles distort things a little; changing the more aphoristic balanced sentence into a more specific observation with it's "in here" & "out there".

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Simsion Simplicissimus

Graeme Simsion's recently published first novel, The Rosie Project, is an entertaining first person narrative written from the point of view of a genetics researcher, Don Tillman, who displays several Asperger's-like characteristics. The story gets under way describing his lack of success in finding a partner, which leads him to the idea of the Wife Project, which involves a sixteen-page questionnaire to be completed to filter out unsuitable respondents. Don is an unreliable narrator and this is a source of comedy. Take this small episode of burlesque: Don arrives to give a lecture on Asperger's Syndrome, the convenor has previously been described to him as "blonde with big tits" ... when a woman greets him the internal monologue goes like this "in fact, her breasts were probably no more than one and a half standard deviations from the mean for her body weight ..." and the paragraph is followed by the sentence "I may have spent too long verifying her identity, as she looked at me strangely".

The technique of the defective narrator who doesn't "get it", has a long lineage, and one of the more notable examples has to be in Grimmelshausen's  Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus) from 1668.  For example, in chapter 4, when the soldiers start ransacking and wrecking the boy's home he observes: "Andere schlugen Ofen und Fenster ein, gleichsam als hätten sie einen ewigen Sommer zu verkündigen" ("others broke the stove and windows, as if proclaiming an everlasting summer", or in Mike Mitchell's translation "some smashed the stove and windows, as if they were sure the summer would go on forever").

The story is thought to be in part autobiographical, Grimmelshausen having been abducted by soldiers at the age of 10, and witnessing at first hand many horrors in the Thirty Years War.

In the next chapter the defective narrator manages to convey a striking piece of psychological insight, when he describes how he - as a boy - escaped from the soldiers while they were still torturing the "peasants" which included his father and mother.  "verbarg ich mich in ein dickes Gesträuch, da ich sowohl das Geschrei der getrillten Bauren als das Gesang der Nachtigallen hören konnte, welche Vögelein sie, die Bauren, von welchen man teils auch Vögel zu nennen pflegt, nicht angesehen hatten, mit ihnen Mitleiden zu tragen oder ihres Unglücks halber das liebliche Gesang einzustellen; darumb legte ich mich auch ohn alle Sorg auf ein Ohr und entschlief." (which is rendered helpfully with a little elucidation by Mitchell as "I hid in a thick bush. There I could hear both the cries of the tortured peasants and the song of the nightingales. The birds ignored the peasants and continued their sweet singing, showing no compassion for them or their misfortunes, and therefore neither did I, but curled up in my bush and fell asleep as if I hadn't a care in the world")