I'm going to be rereading "Supernatural Horror In Literature" and posting the occasional thought here. If anyone would care to join me, the essay can be found at http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/works/super.htm

Sounds like an interesting topic, Francis. This essay, the Wise & Fraser collection from Modern Library, and the volumes E. F. Bleiler edited for Dover in the 60s and 70s were the base from which I built my weird literature collection.

Jim

I had the Bleiler books from Dover. I live in the tropics, however, and books don't last long here. I'm unfamiliar with the Modern Library collection you mentioned.

What a pity about the effects a tropical climate has had on your books!

The Modern Library anthology is still in print after almost 60 years:

Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Fraser (eds.) GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL. Modern Library, 1944.

It is not perfect--its selection of work by foreign, female and (for that time period) contemporary authors is poor--but it is a good selection of "canonical" authors in weird fiction. It could be argued that David Hartwell's excellent anthology, THE DARK DESCENT (Tor, 1987), has superseded it, but both books offer gems the other ignores, there is very little duplication, and Hartwell's representation of foreign and women authors is only a little better than Wise & Fraser's had been. At least Hartwell partially redressed this deficiency in his later anthology, THE FOUNDATIONS OF FEAR (Tor, 1992), though I still ask myself, "How could he possibly omit Vernon Lee, let alone at least a score of other fine female writers?" Pace Pierre Comtois, any extensive reading in weird fiction shows that honors in supernatural literature are due on almost equal basis between the genders.

Lovecraft is the only author of the pulps to make it into both GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL and THE DARK DESCENT. Leiber, Bloch, Sturgeon and Wellman make appearances in the latter. Smith, Howard and others appear in harder to find anthologies by the likes of Kaye, Karloff, Carr and others, but in neither of these.

Jim

I live in the tropics, however, and books don't last long here

oh it must be just terrible living in the Virgin Islands.
:-D

Boyd.
Living in just awful New Zealand

Virgin Islands?

Home of the great (and unjustly neglected) Henry Whitehead!

What source of information do you have about Henry Whitehead's life? I was unaware that he was from the Virgin Islands.

Well, he was not FROM the Virgin Islands, but he was the Episcopal Archdeacon there for many years and his stories are often set there.

Quite an excellent writer, Whitehead. I think he's rather unfairly neglected.

I agree with Gabriel that Whitehead's work has received much less attention than it deserves. His work seems to have fallen between two stools (and suffered from snobbery from both sides as a result):

1) He was a pulp writer which largely rules him out for most connoiseurs of the classic ghost story tradition

2) His focus on the mostly British classic ghost story tradition makes him seem pallid next to those who favor his more adventurous, lurid American confreres.

How many people who have ruled out the significance of Whitehead's work have actually tested their prejudices by READING him?

Jim

Is there anything currently in print by him, or posted on the net?

Not at present.

Jim

His two key collections are JUMBEE and WEST INDIA LIGHTS, both from Arkham House. Expensive these days, although I believe they were also reprinted by Neville Spearman and the reprints are less expensive.

Jim is correct that he writes within the English ghost story tradition rather than the pulps, but it's worth emphasizing that his stories are set for the most part in the VI and are centered around the folklore of the island natives. And although his writing is not "of" the pulps, he was most certainly a Weird Tales writer. He even collaborated on a story with Lovecraft, if I recall correctly.

Gabriel M

I have the 1971 Ballantine edition of The History of the Caliph Vathek. Who is the translator of the third episode of Vathek "The Story of the Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah" in this edition. Sir Frank T. Marzalials or C. A. Smith? It doesn't say in the book.

==========================
Author: Ludde (---.telia.com)
Date: Mar-30, 09:59

I have the 1971 Ballantine edition of The History of the Caliph Vathek. Who is the translator of the third episode of Vathek "The Story of the Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah" in this edition. Sir Frank T. Marzalials or C. A. Smith? It doesn't say in the book.
==========================

[Jim Java]
I have the 1971 BB ed. of __Vathek__ and Panther's 1972 ed. of __The Abominations of Yondo__; a cursory look at the first few pages of "The Third Episode of Vathek" in each made them look identical to me. . . .

Odd if they used Smith's translation for the third episode, instead of using Marzalials' for all three episodes which would have been homogeneous.

According to a Beckford scholar I spoke to, Smith never made a tranlation of The Third Episode. In that case it is Marzalial's text used in THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO, followed by Smith's own free ending of the story (I believe Beckford never finished The Third Episode).

This is correct, Smith did not translate "The Third Episode of VATHEK," he only completed it, making him one of the earliest posthumous collaborators! Of course, Smith's continuation is always marketed as his work and not as Beckford's. Although he had read VATHEK at age 15 or thereabouts, CAS had never read the Episodes until HPL lent them to him in 1932 and suggested that he try his hand at completing it. Since he was very much involved in the composition of stories for possible magazine sale, along with taking care of his parents, chores, and odds jobs such as fruit picking or gardening, there's no reason why he would have translated the Episode himself if there were a half-way decent translation already extant. CAS needed a certain amount of leisure to work at translation, viz. his first crack at Baudelaire occurring while he was laid up with a sprained toe from woodcutting. Best, Scott

He, he, interesting stuff! I never heard that about his translating poems with a sprained toe before. How skillfull to be able to translate from french (and also spanish) which I don't even think he ever spoke.
I once tried to translate his Midnight Beach into swedish (my own language), to be able to show it to friends with small english knowledge, but I only made a mess of it, all rythm lost, so I gave it up. English is the way it should be and remain, and no other language will exactly capture the same exact meaning of it, since all languages are made up of symbology differing slightly or much from each other.

I haven't read the first part of The Third Episode closely enough to detect if there is a lack of Smith's voice in it. :-)

Seeing the latest posts to the Forum led me to read for the first time this entire thread. Although I have arrived quite late to the party, I cannot help making the following comment.

Jim Rockhill:

Quote:

Pace Pierre Comtois, any extensive reading in weird fiction shows that honors in supernatural literature are due on almost equal basis between the genders.

Although, of course, such "honors" will always be apportioned according to personal taste, I would love to see some evidence for this extraordinary assertion. I have read "extensively in weird fiction", and I could not possibly disagree more.

By the way, would anyone else who is proficient in that evil language known as French ;-) care to comment on the quality of CAS's translations of Baudelaire? My view is that, although they are often quite excellent CAS poems, they are mostly travesties of M. Charles-Pierre.

Oh lordy, will Pierre [/i]ever[i] live down his [/i]faux pas[i] regarding female horror writers?!!
Philippe Gindre of La Clef Argent posts fairly often, and as a native francophone tells me that CAS' translations are quite good. Clark was assisted at first both by the local high school language teacher, John Gregory, and by HPL protege Alfred Galpin, who lived in Paris for many years (in fact was married to a Parisien IIRC), and who was Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I knew Alfred well, visiting him twice in Italy, and he had a high opinion of Clark's poetry.
Best,
Scott Connors

I am not a native francophone, but I did live in France and am fluent in the language. CAs does not make many direct errors in his translations, as I recall (although he does make a few), but his archaisms are completely alien to baudelaire's tone in the original works. Also, the effort to replicate the alexandrines and other formal aspects of the poetry is heroic, but in several instances it fatally distorts Baudelaire's meaninig.

>>Jim Rockhill:
>>By the way, would anyone else who is proficient in that evil language known
>>as French ;-) care to comment on the quality of CAS's translations of
>>Baudelaire? My view is that, although they are often quite excellent CAS
>>poems, they are mostly travesties of M. Charles-Pierre.

>Scott Connors:
>Philippe Gindre of La Clef Argent posts fairly often, and as a native
>francophone tells me that CAS' translations are quite good.

Well, yes, as far as I can judge they are very sensitive, as could be expected from someone whose main motivation was his literary interest. But I see your point Jim, some of them are adaptations rather mere translations, for example he chose to render some rhymed poems as prose poems in order to keep the special atmosphere.

>Kevin Shelton

>I am not a native francophone, but I did live in France and am
>fluent in the language. CAs does not make many direct errors in
>his translations, as I recall (although he does make a few), but
>his archaisms are completely alien to baudelaire's tone in the
>original works.
That's right. On the other hand Baudelaire's vocabulary was not especially modern if compared with other poets of his time, though not deliberately archaic. But yes it is sometimes hard to understand/justify some of Smith's choices. Donald Sidney-Fryer maintains that his main motivation was prosody, but the archaic connotation is still there for most readers.

Philippe:

Salut! The quotation you attribute to Jim is, in fact, from me. Perhaps my "formatting" of the quotation in my earlier post was confusing. As to Baudelaire's language, I am surprised to read your statement that it was less modern than that of his contemporaries. It seems much more so than that of Lamartine, for instance, although perhaps a little less so than Hugo's? In any case, when I recently re-read CAS's renditions of Baudelaire and compared them to the originals, it seemed to me that CAS's archaic tone and, at times, convoluted syntax (often required by the demands of the prosody) are not very often faithful to Baudelaire's original works as I understand them. It is, however, interesting to read diverse opinions on the subject. In the Selected Poems, the Baudelaire works appear under the general heading "Translations and Paraphrases". To me, the Baudelaire poems (even those in verse) most definitely fall under the heading of "paraphrases", although, as I mentioned, many of them are superb CAS poems, and are as easily recognizable as CAS's "cigarette characterization" for Fantasy magazine. A good translator must, I think, be a little more self-effacing than CAS was in this instance.

Bonjour Kevin!

>The quotation you attribute to Jim is, in fact, from me.
I guess it's because I'm not used to this online forum. With ZN for example, I'm used to receiving and sending posts through my mailer.

>As to Baudelaire's language, I am surprised to read your statement that it
>was less modern than that of his contemporaries. It seems much more so than
>that of Lamartine, for instance, although perhaps a little less so than
>Hugo's?
You are right of course. Perhaps I should downtone my statement to something like "he didn't rely on neologisms or new forms of expressions to enhance his poetry, so he wasn't noted as a modernist in that field". Of course he is best known for having introduced prose poem but at a time when the litterary word was almost ready to accept it. Besides, I suppose the Symbolists wouldn't have been so found of him if he had been more renowned for new form of expressions. But I just don't consider myself as competent in that field to start with, that's just an global impression I have.
BTW I think I've found the message Scott was alluding to (I hope Scott doesn't mind my posting it!). It was more about his French poems in fact:

---
>Incidently, what do you, as a native Francophone, think of Smith's
>efforts at composing poetry in your language?
Unfortunately, I have always been more interested in prose poetry than in verse (and to my knowledge all of his efforts in the field were concentrated on rhyming poetry), which gives me very little authority in the field. However, I have already "tested" some of his poems on several friends and none of them seemed to guess that the author was not a Francophone. They were indeed impressed upon realizing that CAS was almost a self-taught French speaker. I did the same thing with my wife who is a native Spanish speaker concerning his poems in Spanish, with almost the same result.
In some of Smith's French poems, syntax is sometimes stretched in a somewhat unexpected way, but it was also the case in Symbolist French poetry at that time.
However, I did find some minor mistakes. For example:

L'on aurait y cru voir* sortir du bois féerique,
Du** forêt des romans, une reine montée
Sur sa cavale pâle au harnais mirifique.
("Le Miroir Des Blanches Fleurs")
* word order: L'on aurait cru y voir
** Gender problem: "Du" should be replaced with "de la" since "forêt" (forest) is feminine, but obviously this would no longer fit!

Les pétales des vieux pavots*,
Et les boutons des lys perdus,
Au bord du Léthé sont déchus
Pour joncher le fleuve sans flots**.
("Au Bord du Léthé")

* Level of language: "vieux" ("old") does not seem to fit with the rest of the vocabulary. For example "déchus" ("fallen", as in "anges déchus" > "fallen angels") is of a higher register than "tombé" (as in "tombé de sa chaise" > "fallen from one's chair"). To keep the same register, "fané" (withered) would seem more appropriate than "vieux".
**Loan translation: "sans flots" does not ring any bell in French (to my poor knowledge!). We understand from the context that the river is waveless, but literally speaking, "sans flots" tends to be interpreted in French as meaning "waterless", i.e., "dry". In fact the meaning of "flot" is indeed "wave", "moving water", but since the expression "sans flots" does not exist in French as a set phrase, we tend to infer a literal meaning. I suspect CAS coined this literal translation from "tideless". To stick to the style and the level of language of the rest of the poem, the most obvious adjective would be "étale" ("steady", "becalmed"), which would sound like: "le fleuve aux eaux étales" ("the river with tideless waters") but once again it would no longer fit.

But these are really minor details. His global mastery of a purposely old-fashioned French style is highly impressive. The most elegant way in which he solved some translation problems in his bilingual version of "Alexandrins" is simply astonishing.
---
Philippe

Philippe:

Thank you for sharing this very interesting information. It's intriguing to see a native francophone taking a close look at CAS's French verses.

Because this point is completely off-topic, I shall mention it only in passing: Since you appreciate the prose-poem, do you also enjoy the works of Julien Gracq (of course, although he is associated with the Surrealists, he is not really an author of the "fantastic")? Although Gracq's principal works are nominally "novels", I prefer to read such works as Au Chateau d'Argol or Un Beau Tenebreux as extended poems in prose. In this respect, I find the magnificence of certain passages in these works to be pre-eminent in 20th-Century literature, vastly excelling comparable selections by Proust, or even by our own redoubtable CAS. I should add that what Gracq has in common with CAS is a common love for (and the concomitant influence of) the works of Poe.

CAS' goal in translating Baudelaire was not to present a literal translation, but rather to transmit as much of the emotional expeience of reading Baudelaire in the original as he could to the English-speaking reader. To that end he would sometimes take liberties with strict meaning in order to preserve the music and spirit of the original. There is quite a bit of discussion along these lines in [/i]Selected Letters[i], which is now at the corrected proofs stage and should see the light of day before August 14, may Thaisadon so will it.
Best,
Scott

Scott:

That's interesting information regarding the CAS translations. As I mentioned, CAS's attempts to preserve the music of Baudelaire's poetry was heroic, and quite well done, but I do not think that he captured the spirit and meaning of Baudelaire's original work very well at all. When I read these works, I am acutely conscious of the fact that I am perusing the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, not of Baudelaire. (Do you recall that one of the Baudelaire translations, "The Owls", was actually credited to CAS--writing as "Timeus Gaylord"--in Derleth's anthology of weird poetry Dark of the Moon? Almost an in-joke, it would seem).As I stated, a translator needs to be more self-effacing. As adaptations, "posthumous collaborations", or "Clark Ashton Smith re-writes the works of Baudelaire", however, they make very enjoyable reading. Anyway, that's just my opinion of the matter, to be taken or left as its merits demand.

That's very exciting news regarding the selected letters. As you mentioned in a different thread, I shall, indeed, be a very avid and appreciative reader of his correspondence. I realize that CAS is not reputed to be an epistolarian on the level of Walpole or Lovecraft (then again, who is?), but the paucity of available personal statements by CAS will make the publication of these letters a very welcome event (that statement includes your CAS biography in progress, as well). Steve Behrends did us a great service in publishing CAS's selected letters to Lovecraft, but a more substantial course is long overdue.

Will the Selected Letters include many other letters beside the ones found in Necronomicon Press' Letters to Lovecraft and those here on The Eldritch Dark?

OH YES. SELECTED LETTERS contains generous selections from his correspondence with George Sterling, George Kirk, Albert M. Bender, Senator James Duval Phelan, Ina Donna Coolbrith, William Whittingham Lyman, Helen Hoyt, Donald Wandrei, H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, R. H. Barlow, Lester Anderson, Margaret St. Clair, Rah Hoffman, Sam Sackett, L. Sprague de Camp, George Haas, and others. Each letter is fully annotated, and the book includes an introduction, photographs, bibliography, and index: IOW, the full academic monty! The index alone came to 28 single-spaced 8.5x11-inch pages: that's more words than in THE DARK CHATEAU and SPELLS AND PHILTRES combined! Plus the volume features a very tasteful dj showing a selection of his carvings.
If this book doesn't jumpstart Smith scholarship the way HPL's letters did, then I'm a rapping kangaroo!
Best, Scott

Well, I will surely pick it up! :-) Whoopee! Can't wait for it!

I am glad it will feature that dj. Back to the grand old Arkham House style.

SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE (I've given up trying to put book titles in italics cos the italics thingie seems dysfunctional here at Eldritch Dark) is probably one of the most widely reprinted essays on weird fiction ever -- it's newest publication being in the Barnes & Noble collection of HPL's work. My favourite version of it is the magnificent single volume THE ANNOTATED SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE, edited by S. T. and publish'd by Hippocampus. The book includes preface, lengthy introduction, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" definitive text, appendix, notes, bibliography on authors and works, and an index!

"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 29 Jan 09 | 01:20AM by wilum pugmire.