Wednesday, January 20: Tune It Or Die!
UFF, UFF
by Rob Lopresti
Here’s a pop quiz. Don’t bother to get out a number 2 pencil. There’s only one question.
Who is the most popular author of fiction in Germany? I mean someone at a near-J.K. Rowling level of fame. An author whose ouevre is celebrated every year in festivals held near Bavarian castles where fans dressed as the author’s characters and rewatch movies based on the author’s works. That sort of popular.
Give up?
I make reference to the late, legendary Karl May. Yup, Karl May (1842-1912, pronounced My.) Most of his books were set in the wild West, and I am not referring to the Rhineland. His most famous character is Winnetou, a Mescalero Apache. Not bad for a guy who never hit the U.S. until late in his career, and then never made it west of Buffalo, New York.
The narrator of Winnetou is Old Shatterhand (not to be confused with Old Firehand or Old Surehand… when May found a formula that worked, he stuck with it). Old Shatterhand is a young (surprise!) German immigrant who speaks perfect English and turns out to be better than the cowboys and the Indians at riding, shooting, tracking, and bear-killing. And I almost forgot, in his spare time he composes religious chorale music. Science fiction fans would immediately recognize Old Shatterhand as a Mary Sue; that is, the author’s alter ego or wish-fulfillment character. Fan fic used to be drowning in them.
Words of wisdom
So how does the writing hold up? Here is a passage from Winnetou, translated by Michael Shaw and published in 1977. The speaker is the title character describing his blood brother, Old Shatterhand.
“My brother is cautious like someone about to step in a river full of crocodiles.”
The chief is both eloquent and erudite, considering how far it is from New Mexico to the nearest crocodile. Of course, it is cheap and easy to make fun of a translated text more than a century old. So let’s do it some more!
“Uff, uff,” the Indians exclaimed. They seemed both inquisitive and regretful…
“What a greenhorn. He really could make me furious with his impudence.”
“Uff! At this moment, my soul is as calm as the grave into which I shall place these dead.”
That last was Winnetou speaking again. You may recognize his style.
Another country
I do have a point to make, somewhat more serious than mocking my deceased betters. Years ago I read an article about art fraud. The article featured some genuine examples and forgeries of the same artists which had fooled experts years ago. Well, I am not quite an art expert in the sense that the Pacific Ocean is not quite a desert, but I looked at some of those forgeries and instantly knew that they just weren’t right. The expert was asked the same question I was thinking: how could these phonies have fooled scholars?
His answer, as I recall, went something like this. Art works are products of their time. A Rembrandt, lets say, is a product of the seventeenth century. A forged Rembrandt painted in 1903 is a product of 1903 and the farther you get from the year it was painted, the more it looks like a product of 1903, rather than of the time it is meant to represent. A matter of perspective, I guess.
You see where I am going here? A piece of literature about written in time/place X about time/place Y may look very believeable. But the further we move away from X the less the book looks like Y. And remember, your home town thirty years ago is a different culture. As L.P. Hartley famously said “The past is a foregin country; they do things differently there.”
It’s a sobering lesson for those of us who write historicals. Until next time, watch out for rivers full of crocodiles.
Ah, Karl May! I read about fifty of his novels growing up. It was wonderful. And not just the Wild West stories (for which he is indeed best known), but also his tales of Kara Ben Nemsi (you guessed it, a young German explorer) and his faithful servant Hadschi Halef Omar (Ben Hadschi Abul Abbas Ibn Hadschi Dawud al Gossarah), set in the Ottoman Empire. True, the writing was wooden, indigenous peoples are described in terms about as politically incorrect as one could imagine, and the Christian preaching became rather obnoxious over time, but the stories! The stories! I could never bring myself to read “Winnetou 3” a second time; it was just too sad to see this proud Indian warrior die because he’d shielded his white friend from enemy gunfire…
Thanks for bringing back these wonderful childhood memories.
When I was shopping my (still unsold) Treviscoe novel, which takes place in 1768 and 1772, one editor passed on it with the remark that it was “too authentic.” Go figure.
In the afterword to his 2000 Edgar-winning novel, A Conspiracy of Paper, which takes place in 1719, David Liss wrote that he had modernized the dialogue “in the interest of readability” while trying to maintain something of its period flavor. I think his decision to update the dialogue was flat out wrong. It’s a major flaw in the novel, and the excuse that he wanted to ease things for the reader is simply ridiculous: people still read Defoe, Addison, and Steele for pleasure and enjoy them largely because of the period language.
I assumed I knew what fanfic was until I found myself following the Mary Sue threads. It’s like an alternative universe existing along side literary and commercial fiction.
I keep thinking of the Island of Ufffa. (I think that’s what it’s called…) Doyle may have been thinking of May. Or maybe not.