NYPL Blogs: All Possible Worlds

The Eighteenth-Century Oriental Tale and Candide

Nicole Horejsi — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:43:48 -0400

Habit of a Turkish standardbearer,
in 1749 (NYPL Digital Gallery)In sending Candide off to Constantinople to reunite with Cunégonde, Voltaire invokes the contemporary vogue for oriental tales, stories set in the near and far Easts as well as North Africa that first achieved popularity at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

In 1701, the French Orientalist Antoine Galland published his translation of Sinbad the Sailor, a text he had encountered during his travels in Syria. Sinbad’s favorable reception then led to the publication of a group of texts that would forever change Western literary history. Between 1704 and 1717, Galland published his translation of the Thousand and One Nights, the story of Scheherazade’s attempt to save her kingdom from the murderous sultan, Schahriar. Convinced of women’s unfaithfulness after his first wife’s infidelity, he daily marries a new bride only to behead her the next morning, but Scheherazade’s heroism puts an end to his bloodshed.

The popularity of the Nights captivated the European imagination. In France and England, adaptations and parodies appeared immediately, and oriental tales inspired by the Nights found their way into novels, plays, and even periodical newspapers throughout the eighteenth century. Appealing because of its magical elements and visions of a luxurious East, the oriental tale was also eminently accessible as a genre. Unlike epic, which sat at the pinnacle of eighteenth-century literary hierarchies, the oriental tale—with its often nested stories, fabulous adventures, and stock characters—belonged to romance, a genre that sat in tension with epic and didn’t require the extensive learning of an elite classical education.

Tchingui, danseur turc,
Digital ID 94431Though critics often conceived of romance and epic as literary antagonists, contemporary responses suggest that eighteenth-century readers saw the Nights as a natural complement to classical epic. In his Memoirs, the historian Edward Gibbon relates how, as a boy, he found both Pope’s Homer and the Arabian Nights “books which will always please by the moving picture of human manners and specious miracles”; later, he would write, of a friend’s recent visit, that the two men talked “much of books, from my own, on which he flattered me very pleasantly, to Homer and the Arabian Nights,” indicating that the Nights, as much as Homer, had become part of England’s common patrimony. In 1789, Horace Walpole, the originator of the Gothic genre and a writer of oriental tales himself, would be bolder still in a letter to Mary Berry: “read Sindbad the Sailor’s voyages,” he assured her, “and you will be sick of Aeneas’s.”

While its excitement and accessibility made the oriental tale popular with eighteenth-century readers, its didactic potential also attracted writers eager to champion virtue. In this, they followed the mandate inherited from Horace’s Ars Poetica, “to delight and instruct.” Many eighteenth-century critics expected literature to be not only pleasurable but moral, and the oriental tale (though sometimes used to more scandalous ends as well) proved to be an ideal vehicle for moral instruction. The Eastern settings—stereotypically renowned for their wealth and luxury—allowed writers to warn against the evils of temptation, while contemporary fears about Eastern despotism resulted in meditations on tyrannical sultans and unruly subjects.

Habit of a Franc Merchant in 1700,
Digital ID 1638269For these reasons, the oriental tale became a favorite genre of eighteenth-century satirists. Setting familiar conflicts in the Orient successfully defamiliarized everything from European politics to social expectations, creating the distance necessary to perceive seemingly natural cultural practices and institutions in new ways. Although satires of this kind often relied on Orientalist tropes—for example, on stereotypes of Eastern luxury and despotic power that were more fictions of the European imagination than accurate reflections of reality—Voltaire avoids simplistic distinctions between “good” Europeans and “bad” Turks. Indeed, the text concludes with Candide embracing the very strategy that has brought so much happiness to his new Turkish companion. The old man explains that the cultivation of his garden “preserves” his family “from three great evils—weariness, vice, and want,” leading Candide to declare to his friends, “we must cultivate our garden.” A far cry from conventional stereotypes about Eastern greed, the “honest Turk” instead furnishes a model of dedication and humility that resonates with Candide’s values. By concluding in this way, Voltaire extends his satire to common Orientalist tropes: though not an eminent man or a Christian, the Turk offers Candide the very solace that Pangloss’ optimism was never able to provide.

Candide, or Optimism, Dude: The Challenges of Translating Voltaire's Candide

Lauren Walsh — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:40:02 -0400

In 2002, I revised Henry Morley's translation of Candide. What, you might ask, does it mean to revise a translation? Does one go back to the original French, or do you work solely from the translation? What, in fact, gets revised? As the editor of Barnes and Noble's Candide explained when he approached me, this would be a project of tightening up some of the translation work itself and updating the language that Morley had chosen for his nineteenth-century translation. And this is pretty much exactly what the project entailed.

Yet whereas I'd thought it'd be a simple job—tweaking a few spots—I realized, once in the midst of it, that even revising a text entails a tremendous amount of work. Essentially I went line by line, word by word, and though I was working with a translation, I still, simultaneously, needed to do all the work of a translator. In fact, I had the task of "translating" the translator for a new audience. Over a period of weeks, I immersed myself in Voltaire's garden; I covered my desk in paperwork—Morley's translation and Voltaire's original in French—and began my task.

* * *

"You see, dude, how fleeting the riches of this world are; there is nothing solid but virtue."

Imagine this line from the mouth of Candide. It feels almost correct, and, to be sure, it is different from the Barnes and Noble edition by just one word. And yet how easy it is to guess which word! And how vastly does that one word change our appreciation of this line!

What I found most interesting with this revision project were not the big theoretical issues of translation, which I'll address briefly later on, but rather temporally local issues. That is, Professor Morley's translation reflected his place and time; it offered Candide to British English readers of the nineteenth century. Morley died in 1894 and during his life he was a friend of the Gaskell as well as the Dickens families—and his translation sounds quite a bit like it dates from this time. (Morley's translation, it should be noted, was first published in 1922.) Thus in revising Morley's work, I set about, paradoxically, to update his nineteenth-century translation in order to best capture Voltaire's eighteenth-century masterpiece for us twenty-first-century readers.

As but a small example, I recall changing Morley's usage of "good fellow" or "chap" as forms of address. It's funny to our ears to hear Candide addressing, say, Martin as "chap," but stepping back from the seeming silliness of it, we have a fascinating issue in translation studies. How does one weed out the phrases or terms that are so ingrained in our colloquial speech that we cannot even recognize them as marked by time or place? We can see now, of course, that "chap" is marked; it does stand out. But was Morley aware of this? And further, does my own revision of his translation introduce new terms that will date this 2003 edition of Candide in ways that may ring silly to future ears? Moreover, should one attempt to weed out those terms? Or is the task of the translator to use language that renders her translation most accessible to contemporary readers, if that language reflects similar colloquial (and marked by place and time) terminology in the original? Would it have been perfectly appropriate, for instance, for me to use "dude" in place of Morley's "chap"? I did not do this, and my example, of course, is a bit extreme (and again, silly!), but it illustrates the question I'm pondering. How often do translators imbue their work with temporal signifiers, those that don't stand out so readily as "dude"?

From such questions we can see that the work of revision and translation follows no standardized rules—and this is a good thing that allows multiple editions and multifaceted approaches to the translation of any work of literature. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost time—a title formerly translated as The Remembrance of Things Past—comes to mind. Not only has this immense text of modernist profundity been translated (into English by, among others, C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, as well as Stephen Hudson and later Andreas Mayor for the final volume of the novel) and revised (by D.J. Enright), but most recently, Viking Press has published a new translation where each volume of the novel has a different translator, presumably because no one translation can ever fully capture and re-render, from one language to another, any work of literature. Thus the multi-translator schema expands the breadth of approaches, drawing upon the varied subtle and poetic literary readings and perspectives that these translators bring to the text. At the same time, it also means a lack of continuity for Proust's longest work.

In the case of Candide, wit and dark humor are particularly important yet sometimes subtle (though sometimes also not!) literary attributes that, I feel, the translator must critically endeavor to convey. And yet how to do so? Translating a piece of literature from one language to another presents, as we can see already, numerous challenges, including but not limited to, capturing the author's sense and style, securing the tone, remaining faithful to syntax, and preserving idioms and specific word choices. It is impossible to do all of these things. Syntax, for instance, is sometimes reworked in favor of content; as a translator, I think of that conundrum as: meticulous semantic exactitude versus authorial intent and literary essence.

Dr. Pangloss Surveys the World (from the 1922 Henry Morley translation)I encountered the above-mentioned issues of translation, issues that Morley and I—as is likely the case between any two translators—differed on in practice. (I can't say if we would have differed in theory, though my guess is that even two translators who hold the same goals when translating a work, will nevertheless arrive at two unique translations.) To that end, I wound up revising long passages here and there, as well changing isolated sentences and words on any given page, to achieve, to my mind, the best balance between those simultaneously conflicting goals that constitute the very core of translation work.

Voltaire and his titular character caution against Pangloss' Leibnizian philosophy and instead give us that wonderful image of the garden. Borrowing that and "translating" its application, one could say that I have here cultivated a re-rendering of Voltaire, sewing together various seeds of translation theory and practice, in endeavor to give full bloom to this renowned work of literature.

Cultivate Voltaire's garden anew in Candide 2.0

Diamonds are a Diva's Best Friend

Jody Mullen — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:11:12 -0400

In the third installment (see 1, 2) of the series on "Glitter and Be Gay" from Leonard Bernstein's Candide, we turn to a different perspective: Jody Mullen, a self-proclaimed "coloratura geek" who teaches voice in Manhattan and is interested in the history of coloratura as a form.

Barbara Cook as Cunegonde in the original 1957 production"Glitter and Be Gay," Cunegonde's showstopping aria from Leonard Bernstein's operatic interpretation of Candide, is a challenging part of the lyric coloratura repertoire on a number of levels. In addition to the technical virtuosity and stratospheric "money" notes inherent to most arias in this fach, the role of Cunegonde calls for a strong singing actress who convincingly ricochets between despair and glee as she ponders her new station in life and adorns herself in jewels. (Think Marguerite from Gounod's Faust after too much Starbucks.) She's also required to deliver a miniature monologue in the middle of the aria—an unusual occurrence in the standard operatic repertoire. To do justice to this role, it simply isn't enough to stand there and tweet like a nightingale (or, as we sometimes say in the business, to "park and bark"). The diva has to have some serious dramatic chops to pull this one off, and if she does—take note of Natalie Dessay, Kristin Chenoweth, and Barbara Cook—she steals the show.

As a soprano who performs repertoire of this nature, I often find that coloratura passages are, on a dramatic level, indicative of laughter (see the famous Laughing Song from Strauss' Die Fledermaus or Oscar's arias from Verdi's Un ballo in maschera) or sobs (see the final cabaletta of the Mad Scene from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor or the cadenza at the end of "Ah non credea" from Bellini's La sonnambula). I love that Bernstein blurs the line between the two—how the singer, in the midst of a florid, agile passage, dissolves into hysteria. Isn't that often the way of it?

Natalie Dessay performing "Glitter and Be Gay""Glitter" is technically demanding due to its florid phrases and plentiful high notes. The singer must maintain a beautiful legato line in the lower, more lyric passages (when Cunegonde is waxing poetic about what might have been) without tiring the voice in order to facilitate a seamless transition to the quick, staccato "laughter" phrases. She must also treat the notes in the coloratura passages as though they are all in one place vocally in order to avoid producing glaringly different sounds in the high and low registers. One of the chief goals of operatic singing is to maintain a consistent tone quality throughout the range, and "Glitter" is an excellent measure of that skill.

So how does the singer tackle this difficult work? Here, as in all operatic singing, it's all about good posture, maximum resonance, and, above all, BREATH SUPPORT. When the singer inhales, she expands her ribs, engages her lower abdominal muscles, and energizes her facial muscles in order to produce a healthy, free, resonant sound. She keeps her consonants quick, clean, and clear and her vowels unadulterated. (A common exercise to improve vowel purity and legato is to sing the entire piece on vowels only while in the practice room, feeling no space whatsoever between the notes in a phrase.) When she practices the coloratura passages, she may elect to sing them all staccato to develop laser-like accuracy. (Coloraturas who feel especially confident singing staccato ornaments will thank Bernstein for using them so freely!)

I have not, to date, used "Glitter" as an audition aria, although I'd certainly consider it, as I've retired "Willow Song" from Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe for now. While it is a good fit for my voice, I just haven't connected to its humor on a personal level yet, and I see no point in singing it if I'm not going to be amazingly funny! But when I develop a powerful subtext that helps me to become Cunegonde, I'll certainly add her aria to my repertoire. Maybe all I need are a few diamonds and rubies to inspire me…

Jody Mullen is an American lyric coloratura soprano who lives, performs, and teaches in the metropolitan New York area.

www.jodymullen.com

Cunegonde and Coloratura: Harolyn Blackwell on Musical Technique

Alice Boone — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:44:15 -0400

Harolyn BlackwellCunegonde's aria "Glitter and Be Gay" from Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide is a performance of a performance, a show-stopping coloratura solo in which the character describes how she has been "forced to bend my soul to a sordid role" of being the caged slave of the Grand Inquisitor and Don Issachar. The character switches back and forth between her disgust at her situation and her temptation at the jewelry, furs, and champagne that come with her new status. It's a tricky song, not least because it requires the actress to hit high E flats in the coloratura solo. "It's an endurance piece," said Harolyn Blackwell, who sang the part in the 1997 Broadway revival.

When I spoke to Blackwell about her thoughts on the piece and on playing Cunegonde in general, a funny thing began to happen. To recall the performance, Blackwell began to perform it again over the telephone, singing the lines and then pausing every so often to interject her own comment. Here I got a sense of Cunegonde through the lens of a singer's technique, as she rehearsed the technique so many years after performing it five days a week. This is not news to any actress who can talk about her craft, but it was striking to hear Blackwell speak in three different voices—her singing voice, her speaking voice as Cunegonde, and her own voice as she explained the technique. "There's a more optimistic look on life for Cunegonde. She goes through all these tribulations…" she said. She began to sing lines from the final song of the show, "Make Our Garden Grow": "I thought the world was sugarcake…"

"Yes, we both thought that," Blackwell explained, taking on the voice of Cunegonde as she reminds Candide what they have both learned on their travels. "But this is what life is about." Then she modulated her voice again. "Through that optimism there's a practical way of living." In Voltaire's telling, Cunegonde takes control of the story as she narrates her story for two chapters. In Bernstein's operetta, she rules the stage. "I think ‘Glitter and Be Gay' says it all," said Blackwell. Here Blackwell became Cunegonde once again: she sang the lyrics of the song as her explanation of the character.

"Maybe I can have the jewels, the champagne, that extensive wardrobe," Blackwell explained Cunegonde's attempt to make sense of the situation. "Perhaps it is ignoble to complain. She goes back and forth!" Cunegonde tries to convince herself of how she'll "show her noble stuff, by being bright and cheerful."

Pearls and ruby rings
Ah, how can worldly things
Take the place of honor lost?
….
Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes to shame?

"The lyrics are great," Blackwell said as she remembered the lines and acting out Cunegonde's story. "They really do say it all." I ask if the aria's virtuosity is the musical equivalent of all those baubles, where any actress can glitter and be gay. "Yes, exactly! That's it. It's an endurance piece."

She described the technique: "Well first of all the first half of the aria you have to sing it very legato. When you get to the ‘ha ha ha' part you have to keep the legato but you have to have the marcato, too. You have to think of the staccati notes as legato notes, but shortened. … It will cut off the air if you don't think of the legato line under it. Keep thinking from the beginning of the phrase to the end—never think of it note by note. You have to learn the passagio from top to bottom. You don't want to hear breaks from one note to another. It has to be as clean and as tight as possible. It's like have a gearbox in a car? Do you know what I mean? If you don't go through the gears properly, it starts to shake."

It was here that I sensed that Blackwell had taken on yet another role: teacher. "Do you teach voice now?" I asked. "It sounds like you're teaching someone how to perform the piece now."

Blackwell paused. "Oh, yes, I hadn't thought of that." She has been teaching voice at Barnard College for a few years. "I probably wouldn't have been able to explain it like this when I was performing it," she said, "but I have a different perspective now, and I have to be able to teach it, not just perform it."

She resumed her instruction: "You have to speak in the middle of this piece. What you have to learn is how to support your voice in speaking and in singing. When we speak normally, we don't support. Here you're supporting your voice from the beginning to the end, from the singing to the speaking. It would be interesting to see how it would be different from an opera singer's perspective, as opposed to someone from musical theater training.

"Working with a great voice teacher and coaches can help… When you're doing this five shows a week, it's tough. I asked Barbara Cook [who played the role in the 1957 production] how she did it. In the opera houses, they have a day or two off, but on the Bway stage you're doing it five shows a week. At the end of the week I was saying, ‘just give me one more E flat! Just one more!' I would say that technically, that show taught me what it was like to survive, from a technique standpoint. Some days you can go out there and interpret all you want to but other days, you really have to focus on technique."

Arrange to see a variety of Candide-related videorecordings at the Theater on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT) at the Library for the Performing Arts. For example:

'You have not known misfortunes such as mine!': Storytelling and Trauma in Candide

Alice Boone — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:30:59 -0400

Jessica AlpertCandide is a story composed of other stories, as the hero spends much of his world travels listening to others. Few stories are as long and involved as the old woman's in chapters 11 and 12, and she even spurs other characters to tell their stories of misfortune and tragedy at the end of her tale: "I advise you to divert yourself, and prevail upon each passenger to tell his story."

Jessica Alpert works as an Assistant Producer at Radio Boston, a program based at WBUR, a Boston NPR affiliate. Before turning to radio, Jessica worked in the area of oral history; she traveled to El Salvador on a Fulbright scholarship to compile stories from the 60-family Jewish community. She and Alice Boone, curator of NYPL's Candide at 250: Scandal and Success exhibition, discussed how readers can think about the old woman's imploring words. Alpert brought her experience talking to people about traumatic events—her radio piece about a violent attack on a community of elderly nuns in Waterville, Maine aired nationwide on NPR and garnered awards and citations from the Dart Center for the Study of Journalism and Trauma and the Religion Newswriters Association—to bear on the old woman's tale.

How do readers of oral history, memoirs, interviews, and other forms of storytelling these features and craft them into narratives?

What strikes me as most interesting is the depth of the Old Woman's story. Humility and modesty are thrown out the window. She gives it to us raw. The end of Chapter 12 is a call to listeners everywhere: each person you meet, whether poor or privileged, has a story. The challenge might be getting them to tell it.

Most individuals wrestle with the fear of losing their audience. Why explain a difficult memory when the person across the table isn't really listening? This is the challenge I often face as a story listener. Sometimes people don't have a problem getting it out, but they do find it challenging to organize the narrative. Obviously our Old Lady does not suffer in this regard. Even if the content is riveting: organization and pacing are the nuts and bolts of re-telling a good story.

I love that the Old Lady's narrative starts with memories of childhood which also happens to be the same place I like to start with my subjects. When conducting oral histories with the Jewish community of El Salvador, I started with the oldest members of the community. I did this both because I thought it was a prudent and culturally correct decision but also because I "wanted to get the Holocaust taken care of." The duty of recording and documenting Holocaust testimonies is a heavy one...and I so wanted to do it well. I also wanted to get it right on the first try. Since this would likely be the most sensitive part of the interview, I started with the most basic of questions: "What is your first memory....ever?" Some responses were playful, others dark. This set the stage for the rest of the interview; it told me what kind of storyteller I was sitting in front of. As a listener, you can control the flow of detail through the art of effective questioning—and listening. There is nothing like silence to encourage people to go deeper.

The great thing about these oral histories is that I present them with little performance. The reader studies a transcript that was never edited for radio or for print; the progression of the interview (and the resulting intimacy) is visible through the line of questioning—and sometimes the push-back. It feels raw and untouched.

The Old Woman has a limited amount of time for her oral history but one thing is for sure: she never loses her audience. She was in a moment of performance: sentimentality, exaggeration. These were integral elements of her success. And while its fantastical nature can inspire doubt, this testimony is truly her oral history. These voluptuous details do not detract from the fact that she feels the need to include them in this telling. Oral histories give us a narrative but sometimes more importantly, they tell us about the way people choose to remember and narrate their lives.

What details strike you about the old woman's narration of her story in chapters 11 and 12 if you were thinking of it as an oral history about events that are traumatic--and at the same time representative of acts of violence against women in general, as most women in this story will tell stories like this one?

The shared trauma by all of the women and the idea of speaking for the whole group is something that I find quite a bit of in the Salvadoran Jewish testimonies. In the case of the Salvadoran Jewish women, many provided the same skeleton of a story: "I left my family behind, I never recovered from that loss, but I continued and tried to make a home here. My children had a new life and I hoped they would never experience the hell I did." Obviously I'm providing a grossly oversimplified account but this is the essence of it. They all presented these "skeletons" the first time we met. Yet after I established a sense of intimacy and a good rapport, many more details came out. Painful accounts such as the idea of non-acceptance by other Jewish women, the threat of losing their husband's attention, the insecurity of being an "Eastern European minority vs. a Western European Jew," the fact that they suffered unique challenges during the war (in hiding or fighting in the Resistance or being abroad without contact). I was amazed by these details...and the fact that they had never been shared with the wider community (remember: I was talking to members of a community of 60 families).

With their permission, I took the sharing to a new level.

After gathering these stories, I provided quick summaries of the testimonies in a blog format. The community read each other's testimonies online and were completely shocked by each other's stories. The women had never shared these details with each other. "I didn't know she was in the Resistance." It turns out that these women never asked each other to share their experiences. It took an outsider, an oral historian, to walk in and encourage them to remember and coerce them to share and listen to each other. The skeleton was the safe story—and it was embedded in everyone's minds because the women felt safe adopting that narrative as their own. It was the details and stories of detachment from each other that trickled out as afterthoughts. The raw testimonies would differentiate the women from each other, and that was far too risky.

There are two (or more) versions of the old woman's story if one considers the version in the Bernstein operetta, "I Am Easily Assimilated," which highlights some dramatic features of the story by turning it into a mixture of tango/Jewish folk dance. Here's a great performance by Patti LuPone from a 2005 evening of Live on Broadway with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Bernstein famously marked the tempo as "moderato hassidicamente" in the score and incorporated his father's immigration story into the lyrics.

Click image to go to YouTube clip

This theatrical version of the old woman's story casts a different light on the story, perhaps, in that it highlights how such storytelling is a performance. It's obviously a performance when Patti LuPone is singing it--is it also a performance when she's telling it in the book, with Candide and Cunegonde as her audience? I noticed some self-consciously dramatized features of her story from the beginning of her tale and the ritual performance of the stripping: "It appeared to me a very strange kind of ceremony; but thus one judges of things when one has not seen the world."

These violent parts of the story are less present in the Old Woman's story as it's rendered in the operetta, where the focus is on the origin story. So it's fascinating that there are different parts of the story that can be performed in storytelling as a transcript or as theatrical performance. I'm interested that you mention that stories end up in unexpected places and that readers may have reactions based on form. In what ways does the adaptation in song reveal something new about her method of storytelling?

The operetta version is so fabulous. I think I watched Patti Lupone's performance almost ten times. The song, witty and entertaining, also mirrors the experience of so many Salvadoran Jews:

"I never learned a human language
My father spoke a High Middle Polish
In one half-hour I'm talking in Spanish: Por favor! Toreador!
I am easily assimilated.
I am so easily assimilated."

There is honesty here. Yes, we laugh, but let's be clear, this assimilation was the only way to survive. I remember my own grandmother telling me about her first few days in El Salvador. She and my grandfather were living in Chinameca where he was working as a traveling salesman. Chinameca was then a rural village with no running water, no electricity—quite the change from Amsterdam and Berlin! On a visit to the capital, she encountered some Salvadorans who, upon learning of her German background, exclaimed, "Oh we love Germany! We just love Germany!" This was 1938. She was taken aback and responded, "Germany may have been my home....but my home doesn't want me." The raw emotion of exile. Assimilation was the only way to reclaim one's own identity. She could no longer be German and while she would never be considered "fully" Salvadoran, she had to at least try. She was fluent in Spanish in less than a year. I think she would've chuckled at Lupone's performance, but I think she would have nodded her head at the same time. It's a funny performance—but it's reality.

Lupone gives quite a sexualized performance. She explains her situation and her background, sauntering around the attending men, shaking her hips and establishing her sexual prowess. While it may seem somewhat counterintuitive, I feel the Old Lady gives a similarly sexualized account of her past life. She describes her throat, her virginal body, her innocence, her innocence taken.... In order for her audience of Cunegonde and Candide to be effectively lured, she has to connect with them through trauma they can understand. The rape and abuse speaks to Cunegonde's own violation; the powerlessness of being imprisoned and mistreated appeals to Candide's nearly fatal situation in Portugal.

Oral histories are certainly affected by the listener. I imagine some of my subjects subconsciously appealed to my own understanding and experience—or adversely, in order to keep me at a distance (also very common, specifically when re-living trauma), they pushed me away by denying details and refusing to answer certain questions.

We as narrators of our own lives will forever respond to our audience for it is impossible tell stories in a vacuum.

Pangloss Regained

Arika Okrent — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:06:59 -0400

Dr. Pangloss Surveys the World (NYPL General Research Division)Thanks to Candide, the term "pangloss" has come to mean "overly optimistic fool." The Greek roots in the name, "pan-" and "gloss-" can be read as "all tongue" – an apt characterization of the tutor's speaking-without-thinking style. But I have another sense of the word in mind when I say that Candide was published in the hangover years of a nearly century-long panglossomania binge.

In the 17th century, "pangloss" was sometimes used to mean "language for all" -- a universal language that all can speak. Many of the great thinkers of that era were involved in creating such a language. Latin was losing ground as a lingua franca just as major innovations in science were being made, and scholars worried about the best way to propagate their findings. At the same time, the development of mathematical notation was giving rise to modern physics and calculus. The new method of mathematical description – symbols and variables instead of words, equations instead of sentences – made it easier to draw generalizations that hadn't been noticed before. It was also universal; it could be understood no matter what your national language was. A tantalizing idea took hold: what if we could express all our thoughts this way? What if we had a universal language that could expose the truths of the universe?

René Descartes considered the idea in a 1629 letter, but thought it was unlikely to succeed "outside of a fantasyland." As a student in the 1660s, Issac Newton drafted a preliminary version of a universal philosophical language. In 1666 the educational reformer Comenius published a sketch of a language he called "Panglottie" ("glott-" being a different version of the same greek root "gloss-").

The most thoroughly worked-out version of a philosophical language was published in 1668 by John Wilkins, a founding member of the Royal Society. Wilkins's manuscript was a 600-page taxonomy of every concept in the universe along with instructions for composing words that would stand for those concepts. It was received with high praise by the scientific community and studied by Newton, Locke, and Leibniz (who later made his own attempt at a language based on the mathematical combination of concepts). The king even expressed an interest in learning Wilkins's language. But the king never did learn it, and within a few decades the whole universal-philosophical language idea had become a subject of mockery. Jonathan Swift satirized the idea of a perfect language of concepts in Gulliver's Travels when Gulliver visits the "grand academy of Lagado" and learns of its "scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever." And Voltaire, with the character of Pangloss, skewered the naïve optimism behind the quest for a universal language.

In the 18th century, plans for universal languages or writing systems continued to crop up here and there, but the era of language invention was over-- the first era, that is. In the second half of the 19th century the fever for language engineering would take over again. The new languages would not be perfect philosophical systems, but regularized hybrids of European languages. Of the nearly 300 languages created from 1860-1940, the most famous and successful one was also the most optimistic one – Esperanto. Its name is based on the Latin root for "to hope."

Kandid : aŭ, La optimismo / Esperanta traduko de E. Lanti. Antaŭparolo de la tradukinto. Ilustroj de R. Bartelmes.

Arika Okrent received a joint Ph.D. in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology's Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago. She has also earned her first-level certification in Klingon, and is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers who tried to Build a Perfect Language. She lives in Philadelphia.

inthelandofinventedlanguages.com

Terry Southern and Voltaire: The Lost Art of Blasting Smugness

Nile Southern — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:51:17 -0400

Enter Candy Christian: Candide's Sexpot Alter-Ego

"The story I have in mind is in the tradition of Candide, with a contemporary setting, the protagonist an attractive American girl, Candy, an only child of a father of whose love she was never quite sure, a sensitive progressive-school humanist who comes from Wisconsin to New York's lower-east side to be an art student, social worker, etc. and to find (unlike her father) 'beauty in mean places.'

— Terry Southern, in a 1956 letter to notorious French publisher of 'erotic' novels Maurice Girodias, about his proposed book Candy.

One of numerous pirated editions of 'Candy'When my father began updating Voltaire's Candide into a pornosophic satire on '50s America, he had no inkling how eerily his book's fate—and consequently his own—would mirror Voltaire's. The parallels abound: Terry wrote Candy in Geneva—almost precisely 200 years after Voltaire had written and published Candide there. Upon publication, both books caused immediate literary and cultural sensations—complete with copy banning, legal actions, huge sales, and massive piracy. Both Voltaire and Southern were forever 'branded' by the whimsically caustic visions and commercial success of their satirical books—a notoriety which launched Voltaire to the top of his literary game. With Candy's popularity, its widely debated "obscenity," AND the release of Dr. Strangelove (which Terry co-authored), in 1964, Terry Southern became, as Victor Bockris put it, "the most famous writer in America".

While Terry intentionally mimicked aspects of Candide (including its episodic format and charming, sleaze-ball windbags), it was the escalating outrageousness of Candy's undoing—and the ultimate hypocrisy of 'doing' her—that compelled Terry to land similar 'Voltarian' punches—in the form of outrageously coarse monologues, over-the-top characterizations and whack philosophies—all serving to smash mainstay ideas taking hold of society. In Terry's time, these included: Psychology, television, advertising, paternalism, anti-Communism, the quest for enlightenment, and the arrogance of doctors and University professors.

Terry SouthernCandy opens with the ultra-stuffy Professor Mephisto, delivering a full-on Panglossian oratory to his class (on 'Contemporary Ethics') designed to bed the girl. "I have seen the wonders of the world," he croons, "but I've never seen anything to compare with the beauty of the human face!" At her odyssey's end, Candy winds up in religious/meditative training at the hands of Guru Grindle, his opening salvo setting the stage: "First… we'll want to get out of this worldly apparel." He then hoodwinks Candy into having sexual intercourse under the guise of his 'instruction,' their Cosmic Rhythm Exercise Number Four quickly achieving his aim:

"I shall presently demonstrate still another mastery of the so-called glandular functions," claimed Great Grindle, breathing heavily, "naturally, in willing the chemistry of the semen, I would eliminate the impregnating agent, spermatozoa, as a constituent for it would be of no use to our purposes here you see."

"Now then," he continued after a moment, "tell me if this does not almost exactly resemble the philistine 'orgasm'?"

"…Oh gosh," murmured the darling closed-eyed girl… and how!"

Candy was banned outright upon its publication in France in 1958. When it was published in America in 1964, it was, like Candide, a 'media event'. Putnam's had anticipated the censorship laws in the U.S. collapsing—thanks to intrepid test cases of Barney Rosset's Grove Press, including the publication of Lady Chatterly's Lover, Howl, and the much-anticipated (yet warehoused for years) Naked Lunch. But it wasn't just the novelty of sex in literature that attracted people to Candy—nor solely its hip hilarity—it was also the timeless, agitational, iconoclastic sensibility—echoing Voltaire and Twain—at a pivotal time of cultural change. As my father told Newsweek at the time, "The world has no right to complacency…where you find smugness, you find something worth blasting."

When I began writing The CANDY Men; The Life and Times of the Notorious Novel, Candy, my aim was to capture the creative spirit of three literary renegades; my father, Terry Southern, the poet and Candy co-author, Mason Hoffenberg, and their indefatigable publisher of transgressive (mostly erotic) fiction, Maurice Girodias.

Mason HoffenbergI also wanted to showcase my father's letters illuminating that rich period—when many American writers and artists were developing their talents and convictions shuttling between the bars and cafés of Paris and Greenwich Village. Finally, when New York attorney Leon Friedman provided me with a complete set of correspondence, it enabled me to bring to life the full story behind what became one of the most mind-boggling literary cases to be litigated in a trans-Atlantic copyright battle.

I look forward to immersing myself in this garden of Voltarian delights, and hope the electronic readership will indulge my occasional allusions to Candy and Terry Southern—and that a thread might begin (someday to be picked up by a thesis student?). In any event, my thanks to Alice Boone and NYPL for the terrific rekindling of this literary spirit that questions, provokes, and indeed, entertains.

Nile Southern is a writer living in Boulder, Colorado, and Thessaloniki, Greece. His book, The CANDY Men; The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel, Candy, won the 'Book of the Year' award in Colorado for Non-Fiction. Nile is working on a new anthology of his father's unpublished and uncollected writings; The QUALITY LIT of Terry Southern, as well as a documentary film about his father, currently in development. www.terrysouthern.com/candymen/press.htm

Terry Southern is the author of Flash and Filigree, Candy, The Magic Christian, Blue Movie and Texas Summer. He received Academy Award Nominations for his writing on screenplays Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, and also co-wrote Barbarella, The Cincinnati Kid, The Loved One, and End of the Road. Southern's short stories, essays, and 'new journalism' are anthologized in Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, and Now Dig This; The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995 (edited by Josh Alan Friedman and Nile Southern). Grove/Atlantic 2000. Terry Southern's literary papers are in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. www.terrysouthern.com

Wilbur, the Translator

Anne Garner — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:34:05 -0400

In Chapter 18 of Candide, our hero and his valet Cacambo arrive in the utopian kingdom of El Dorado, where the streets glitter with precious stones. The people of El Dorado speak Cacambo's mother tongue, a Peruvian dialect indecipherable to Candide, and Cacambo becomes the sole communicator and interpreter. Candide relies on his valet to communicate with the natives of this strange and beguiling country.

The travelers are invited to dine at the King's palace. The dinner proceeds merrily, led by their affable royal host:

"Cacambo explained the King's bon-mots to Candide, and notwithstanding they were translated they still appeared to be bon-mots. Of all the things that surprised Candide this was not the least.

Voltaire hits on an especially vexing difficulty of translation here. Translation is by nature imperfect. Even the most skillful translations reveal the incompatibilities between the languages bridged. The writer R .S. Gwynn regards the translator as a diplomat, who must "make the best of a bad compromise between languages", just as nations must account for their myriad cultural differences in acts of negotiation. On the one hand, a translation has the potential to exultantly innovate, to take the essence of a literary work and express it in another key. On the other, translations will always be duplicates--diluted copies of a choate original.

As a translator, Cacambo possesses a rare power. Not only has he proved an effective interpreter, but he's also managed to spin what is clever and witty in one language into what is clever and witty in another. The king's charm and skill in wordplay are no less powerful after translation. In the eyes of Richard Wilbur, lyricist of Bernstein's operetta Candide and a renowned translator himself, this is translation's most desirable effect.

The literary critic Dana Gioia counts Wilbur, along with Longfellow, Pound and Fitzgerald among the four greatest American translators of poetry. Wilbur's reputation as a poet is common knowledge, but his role in reviving seventeenth-century French drama for English-speaking audiences is less well-known. The poet first encountered Moliere's work in 1948, at the Comedie-Francaise (In chapter 22, Candide has his first encounter with Corneille's work here). Seeing Cyrano de Bergerac gave Wilbur the idea that old French plays could be relevant for the American theater. Since 1952, the year he began work on Moliere's Misanthrope, Wilbur has translated half a score more and has added to his belt two plays by Racine and three by Corneille. Corneille's El Cid and The Liar, were just published late last year.

Moliere's greatness stems from his facility with comedy in all forms: he is equally adept at satire, farce, comedy of manners, romance and tragicomedy. His plays are remarkable for their timeless characters, and their author, for casting a discerning but gentle eye on human frailties. Moliere relies on meter for much of his work's potency: for musicality, for drawing contrast between his characters speeches, and for enhanced snap and rhythm in his rapid fire dialogue.

For Wilbur, the English translation is no different. The poet insists that Moliere's alexandrines must be rendered as rhymed pentameter, and not in prose form. Brian Bedford compares the effect of Wilbur's couplets to a ping pong ball afloat on a jet of water, where the couplets buoy the text up and fizz delectably.

Wilbur's approach to translation, detailed in a 1975 interview, is instructive. At times, he uses a gamer's language to describe his process, invoking the importance of "rhyming solutions" and likening the work of translating a Moliere speech to completing one corner of a crossword. To the claim that the Russian poet Yevtushenko once estimated only one or two unused rhymes left in the world, somewhere in Argentina, Wilbur agrees. He argues that creating natural verse is a matter of exercising patience, and of creating rhymes that sound fresh, even if they've been well used. Even so, he refuses to see English as a rhyme-poor language. Wilbur recounts looking at an already-published English verse translation of Moliere's School for Wives after finishing his own, somewhat fearful that he might have unintentionally duplicated the rhymes within. The first two rhymes were the same. After that, the rhymes in the two translations rarely overlapped.

Racine, often characterized as untranslatable, was more challenging. Wilbur admits to finding him harder going, and here, takes the position that a more faithful translation of his work is the most viable. He has emphasized that the translator's role is not to recast Racine as if a contemporary soap opera: In a Fall 1984 issue of The Sewanee Review, Wilbur is quoted as saying,

"Our best hope, I think, is to see whether a maximum fidelity, in text and in performance, might not adapt us to it [author's emphasis]."

Wilbur admits that after completing an 1800 line Moliere play he's been known to spend the next few months thinking in couplets--an intriguing side effect for one already predisposed to creating original verse. He has said in interviews that writing the libretto for Candide did not infect his brain nearly to the extent that translating the seventeenth-century dramatists did. Wilbur translated his first play, The Misanthrope, without attention to how it would sound spoken aloud, but after working with the actors for its maiden production, he revised his process. For his next Moliere project, he began to sound out every line in his head, selecting of all possible iterations the one that an actor could speak most effortlessly. He credits his translation work with making his own poetry more dramatic.

Wilbur has spoken about the responsibilities of the translator--responsibility both to the original text, and to its writer. By his own account, choosing the words doesn't always come easily. One is reminded of "The Writer" at the heart of Wilbur's poem of the same name, a poem in which Wilbur recalls his daughter Ellen in the act of composing:

A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

Last year, Wilbur spoke of his own aptitude for the task at hand:

"My chief virtue as a translator is stubbornness: I will spend a whole spring day, a perfect day for tennis, getting one or two lines right."

Candide on Broadway: An Interview with Maureen Brennan

Alice Boone — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:05:48 -0500

Maureen Brennan as Cunegonde, 1974 (click to go to online gallery)Maureen Brennan was nominated for a Tony Award and won a Theatre World Award for her professional debut as Cunegonde in the 1974 revival of Leonard Bernstein's Candide (IBDB), directed by Harold Prince. She has since appeared on Broadway as Madeleine Manners in Going Up, Tina in Knickerbocker Holiday, Goldie Gates in Little Johnny Jones, and Stardust. I sent her the following questions about playing Cunegonde:

AB: What are your thoughts on Cunegonde as a character? She's more present in Bernstein's musical than she is in Voltaire's story, as she changes from a two-dimensional character to a comic foil in the operetta.

MB: I love Cunegonde. Resilient, practical, ever hopeful and smart, she is a survivor. Like her lover Candide, she begins the play as an optimist but shortly thereafter life deals her some terrible blows. After this she becomes a pragmatist and finds some very creative ways to adapt and ultimately survive.

AB: How did you think about interpreting Cunegonde in the revival?

MB: I tried to be careful to observe Voltaire's point of view. I read Candide several times before I started rehearsing and referred to the novel often throughout. Since a portion of the novel is omitted in Mr. Wheeler's script, Cunegonde's arc is quite different. In this version, the characters are just barely three dimensional, almost cartoonlike. I relied heavily on the lyrics and score as well as the new libretto to give me what I needed to make her live I love the humor in Hugh Wheeler's script. Every terrible thing that happens is done with humor, much like the novel.

In our production, Cunegonde does not turn into an ugly hag at the end of the play. Instead we discover her in the harem of a noble man of Constantinople. She happens to be doing a particularly awful belly dance when Candide finds her with most of her beauty still intact, though quite bedraggled at this point. Mr. Prince was of tremendous help in interpretation. He felt that Cunegonde should be simple and innocent and as the play progresses becomes wise to the ways of the world but retains her simple forthrightness. She never loses hope of seeing her true love again. That is the key to her survival. It keeps her from becoming too jaded. Hal wanted the words and behavior to reflect the hardness that Cunegonde acquires through the play. He guided me to steer clear of being too knowing and stay with simplicity.

AB: What was your experience racing around on the elaborate set?

MB: In general, I enjoyed it. Our environmental set was circular and consisted of five larger platforms and two elevated smaller platforms. It was laid out in clocklike fashion. All of these platforms were connected by ramps, steps and drawbridges. The audience sat within the circle as well as around and above the circle. Traveling from one stage to the other on the series of ramps was not only fun but also helped us as actors to have the actual feeling of being swept along by life like the characters. Interacting with the audience was very interesting. You never knew what would happen.

When we first tried out the show, we were located at the Chelsea Theater Center—a small theater atop the Brooklyn Academy of Music—but when the show moved to the Broadway Theater, the scale of the set (and consequently all of the distances traveled) doubled, maybe tripled. The first rehearsal we had on the Broadway set, I had an exit from one scene on the platform at 6:00 and I had to travel through mazes backstage to the 9:00 platform which was three times the distance it had been in Brooklyn and climb up a step ladder on to the stage for "Glitter and Be Gay." I then pulled up a trap door for the 'harpsichord player' who was wearing all the jewels to get into place before we started the scene. I was huffing and puffing before I started singing. I joined a gym that afternoon and started pacing myself to walk at the slowest tempo I could that would get me to the next stage on time. It took about two weeks to adjust. Thank goodness, we had that rehearsal time, so I was ready when we opened! I was also very young and the 'natural ebullience of youth' was on my side.

AB: Do you have favorite scenes or moments?

MB: I always loved performing the "Oh Happy We" scene. Working with Mark Baker, who played Candide, was a joy. During the course of the song, we disrobed to our matching underwear and gave our clothes to the audience members sitting around us to hold. I looked forward to the reactions we would get.

Of course I loved singing "Glitter and Be Gay." I hadn't realized until I started performing the show what a cult following Candide (and that song in particular) had. It surprised me the first time I saw members of the audience actually mouthing the words along with me. I especially loved plucking the jewels off my fake harpsichordist's wig. At one performance during previews in Brooklyn, I actually kicked the wig right off her head and the brilliant actress playing her, Mary Pat Green, gave the audience and me such a look and smashed the wig back on her head and kept playing. All I could do was laugh!! Thank God the lyric at that point was ' Ha, Ha Ha, Ha, Ha,'

I also loved the end of the play and singing "Make Our Garden Grow." Having run, danced, crawled and sung through the play and gotten to that moment where we stood still on stage as a group and sang that beautiful anthem was very moving.

AB: What kind of preparation does it take to sing "Glitter and Be Gay" as a coloratura soprano? From a technical standpoint, can you describe the difficulties (and pleasures!) of the aria, phrasing, voice and breath control, and how you practiced it?

MB: Well, when I first learned "Glitter and Be Gay," I was as a musical theatre student at The University of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music. I heard the wonderful original recording of Candide, fell in love with it and decided to learn "Glitter and be Gay." This meant going to the piano and learning the music phrase by phrase.

Then, I got together with accompanists to sing through the piece under tempo, noting all the places I got lost and going back to the practice room to work on them. I would sometimes listen to Ms. [Barbara] Cook's recording and follow along with the score so that I would know where I needed to be in terms of tempo and also listened for examples of how to attack a run or a coloratura passage. Then it was back to work with my voice teacher and an accompanist and eventually I got it up to the correct tempo. Finally I felt ready to start looking at interpretation. The vocal coloring and interpretive choices change breathing, dynamics and can also affect one's energy and ability to accomplish the technical demands of the piece. I compare singing "Glitter and Be Gay" to walking a tight rope. You need great balance!

The most difficult part of this song is that you sing strenuously for almost five minutes and the sustained highest notes are at the end of the piece. You also have to hit numerous high C's and D's before you get there. This takes a great deal of energy and stamina. It also requires pacing yourself through the song, and always being careful not to allow your attack on lower notes to get too heavy, thereby making it more difficult to easily float up to those stratospheric notes. One must think light and high at all times. I do thank Mr. Bernstein for his perfect placement of "Glitter and Be Gay" in the score. He gives you a couple of songs to warm up and then while you are warm and energized you sing the aria. It is such a brilliantly constructed piece. I looked forward to singing it each performance and I am grateful that I got the wonderful opportunity to do so!

Forced to bend my soul to a sordid role: women and violence in Candide

Alice Boone — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:45:14 -0500

Mahlon Blaine illustration for 'Candide', 1930 (click for larger view)Our interactive reading of Candide continues with chapters 7-12. Here's a roundup of recent discussions...

"The diligence with which these gentlemen strip people!" American illustrator Mahlon Blaine chose the old woman's story as one of the full-page drawings for his 1930 edition of Candide. The exotic nude woman posed between two men in various states of undress is of a piece with Blaine's erotic illustrations for William Beckford's Oriental tale Vathek (1928) or for the Marquis de Sade's Justine (1931).

But this is a story that begins with the old woman's warning: "alas! you have not known such misfortunes as mine." Cunegonde and the old woman recite, and even insist upon, a litany of sufferings: rape, humiliation, slavery, starvation, mutilation, and debasement. Elsewhere on All Possible Worlds, Eric Palmer has connected Candide's themes to the photographs from Abu Ghraib; in the old woman's and Cunegonde's stories, we have some early version of "torture porn." That term, as it was introduced to contemporary cultural discourse, was a distancing device, a way of describing how abuse of power links with titillation.

Any illustrator of Candide has some difficult, fascinating choices to make about how to render these stories in chapters 7-12. What is an illustrator—and, by extension, any reader—to make of this sexual violence shot through with anti-Semitic caricature and odd, discordant bits of humor? The stories are so extreme, so excessive that any highlighted element of the story threatens to overwhelm the whole narration. These debates about perception and who controls how a story is told (and heard by other characters) are built into Candide itself, as the layers of narrative reveal a contest of interpretations.

Nicole Horejsi, an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, shows how the competition among Don Issachar and the Inquisitor to share sexual access to Cunegonde is based on his "impossible" view of Cunegonde as a manipulator: "His interpretation turns Cunegonde into a voracious and demanding lover and allows him to recast himself as the victim of her romantic scheming, thus masking the sordid reality of his arrangement with the Inquisitor."

Chapter 9 annotations: click to go to book

Candide 2.0 commenters Christopher Cleveland and Samantha Morse have noted how these anti-Semitic caricatures function in the text, while Rinku Skaria has drawn attention to the "immaturity" of Candide's raised eyebrow at Cunegonde's wounds--"I hope I shall see it!"

Indeed, as he listens to the story, Candide's own interpretations of his lover's story become mixed up in the violence. Candide responds to Cunegonde's beauty by "devouring her with his eyes." Horejsi points out "the subtle violence behind the metaphor of ‘devouring' ... Perhaps the point is to distinguish Candide from Cunegonde's Bulgar ‘ravisher' and other masters—for the ‘gentle' Candide, this is no doubt a ‘gentle' kind of devouring—but the proximity of the terms (‘devour'; ‘ravish') draws him nearer to them, too."

Horejsi argues that Cunegonde asserts some authority by recasting the story around her personal virtues of survival: "But Cunegonde insists that her virtue stems from her modesty, a personal rather than physical quality, a distinction that clearly separates the violation of her ‘self' from the violation of her ‘body.' This fairly unusual move has important consequences: it both allows Cunegonde to relate a story that would otherwise be nonnarratable, and enables her to live her life without the stigma of violation. That Cunegonde is raped and doesn't die undermines familiar narratives in which the modest, raped heroine perishes in order to maintain the fiction of bodily sexual virtue."

Voltaire has satirized the twists and turns of an Oriental tale by piling on so many sufferings in these chapters: the characters emerge from the debasement indignant rather than destroyed. Some of Candide's sequels were parodies, where the (often anonymous) authors retold the stories in broader strokes. Oddly enough, these treatments miss Voltaire's irony and end of reverting to a mere exaggeration of the titillations inherent in the Oriental tale.

The 1761 sequel, for example, transforms the unveiling into a stock pleasure den scene, and the originally charged language of devouring and unveiling turn once again into conventional set pieces. Upon meeting the dark-haired Circassian beauty Zirza, Candide reconsiders Cunegonde's diminished beauty. The language mirrors the original scene, but with all the violence replaced by ineffable exotic pleasure:

"What difference between Cunegonde grown ugly, and violated by the Bulgar heroes, and a young Circassian of eighteen, who was never ravished! This was the first time that poor Candide had tasted pleasure. The objects which he devoured were repeated in the glass. Which way soever he turned his eyes, he saw the black satin contrasted with the whitest skin in the universe. He beheld—-but I am obliged to comply with the false delicacy of our language. Let it suffice to say, that our philosopher was completely happy."

Mahlon Blaine did not illustrate this scene—it's missing the frisson of irony upon which his work depends—but Clara Tice imagined this Oriental fantasy as an unveiling of exotic nudes for her 1927 illustrations of Candide and second part.

'Candide, or All for the Best.' Illustrated by Clara Tice. New York: Bennett Libraries, 1927. NYPL, General Research Division. By Permission of the Clara Tice family.

Cunegonde's story becomes sensational in "Glitter and Be Gay," the show-stopping aria from Bernstein's operetta adaptation of Candide. Cunegonde's conflicting desires to laugh off and weep at her misfortunes become an opportunity for a coloratura soprano to show off her vocal flexibility. "Glitter and be gay/ That's the part I play," she sings, revealing another strategy by which the character can distance herself from her story, by considering it a kind of performance. Harolyn Blackwell, who played Cunegonde in the 1997 Broadway revival, describes these coloratura passagios as the musical equivalents of the baubles that the woman covets:

Pearls and ruby rings…
Ah, how can worldly things
Take the place of honor lost?
Can they compensate
For my fallen state,
Purchased as they were at such an awful cost?

Bracelets, lavalieres
Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes to shame?
Can the brightest brooch Shield me from reproach?
Can the purest diamond purify my name?

By chapter 11, the villains and jewels are both gone, and Cunegonde's response is part comic, part baffling, as the irony resumes full-tilt: "Who was it that robbed me of my money and jewels? … How shall we live? What shall we do? Where find Inquisitors or Jews who will give me more?" Director Robert Carsen revamped this number for his English National Opera production of Candide (premiered in 2003) by insisting on the performance aspect of the story. In this production, Cunegonde becomes Marilyn Monroe performing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Monroe's performance is so iconic that it has become a set piece, which Madonna seized to introduce irony to eroticism in her "Material Girl" music video—a move that Voltaire's old woman, Mahlon Blaine, and many others had already perfected.

Candide in New York (or the Problem of Evil)

Eric Palmer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:54:04 -0500

In 2003 I began work on an edition of Candide for Broadview Press that was published in 2009. For the cover image, I suggested a photograph of the twin towers in flames. I also had an idea for an image to balance it on the back cover: the famous snap from Abu Ghraib of a hooded man standing on a box, arms outstretched and apparently in mortal fear of electrocution. If you find that poor taste, or cannot conceive of why I would choose those images, please read on.

Though it is a comedy, Candide is also about what philosophers have called "the problem of evil." In Voltaire's time and before, the problem was framed in terms of God's role in evil. The problem gets its classic, clear characterization in philosophy as a tangle of problems authored by the Roman-African scholar Lactantius (240 - ca. 320 CE), who attributes it to the Greek thinker Epicurus (341-270 BCE). Lactantius writes:

"God, says Epicurus, is either willing to remove evil, and is not able: or else he is both willing and able. If he is willing and not able, he must then be weak, which cannot be affirmed of God. If he is able and not willing, he must be envious, which is likewise contrary to the nature of God. If he is neither willing nor able, he must be both envious and weak, and consequently, not God. If he is both willing and able, which only can agree with the notion of God, whence then proceeds evil?"

After Epicurus, philosophers also divided the argument further by making a distinction between two types of evil: physical and moral. An earthquake – like the one that occurs in the fifth chapter of Candide – is an example of physical evil, of suffering for which God is the sole author.

Earthquake in Haiti: Port-au-Prince, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 (AP Photo/Carel Pedre)Earthquakes appear to produce great undeserved suffering for which humans cannot be blamed in the least – not before the era when seismology and building codes were feasible, anyway. But war, rape and torture – which are found throughout Candide – seem to be of our manufacture. Though a physical evil of pain is bound up within them, we ourselves choose to inflict that suffering. We are responsible for such moral evil, but are humans the only source? How could a good God present us with the choice of evil, and how could a good, all-seeing (omniscient) and all-powerful (omnipotent) God allow the victims to suffer, rather than foresee and forestall our damaging choices?

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) re-acquainted Europe with these arguments at the end of the seventeenth century. He wrote in a compelling fashion that prompted a chain of response and discussion over more than half a century by Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope and many others, including Voltaire. (By the way, a collection of such writing accompanies Candide in the Broadview edition). Voltaire was one of a few thinkers who, giving a nod to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), attempted to remove God from the tangle of evil. Voltaire's writing suggests that he retains a role for a creator of the universe, but he expects that human happiness is not the point of that universal order and he suspects that our ideas of good and evil might not be present to the creator's mind. If either holds true, then we should not expect that this is the best of possible worlds.

Voltaire finds that all is decidedly not well, but if we sever the Gordian knot that links God to good, the problem becomes much simpler. The natural evil in the make-up of the world we might never understand, but we can use our reason to produce sensible building codes to limit the damage done by earthquakes. Human-made evil we can also prevent or avoid. Voltaire attempted to prevent it by writing Candide and other criticism of his society, and his character Candide attempted to avoid it by tending his garden.

Broadview Press did not go with my suggestion: they decided instead to feature a melancholy photo of the wasted city of San Francisco following the earthquake of 1906. It suits the tone of lament found in Candide as well as the aesthetics of the book jackets of the series within which the volume was published. It will raise fewer alarms than a snap from Abu Ghraib, but I think Voltaire is more concerned about the moral evil we willingly do to each other than the natural evil we suffer from the unforeseen hazards of nature.

Explore Eric Palmers annotations in Candide 2.0 »

Noting Candide at 250

Eric Palmer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:00:51 -0500

Frontispiece of the 2006 Project Gutenberg copy of 'Candide,' taken from 1918 Modern Library editionType "Candide Gutenberg" into Google and you will swiftly find your way to a delightful English translation of Voltaire's wonderful work. It would cost you a whole $1.50 to get the same text on paper, in the remarkably inexpensive Dover Thrift Editions series. Spend $500 on a new iPad and you can get the Gutenberg version practically for free! Why bother going anywhere else?

Well, first, compare Gutenberg's version to Candide 2.0, in the "Candide at 250" online exhibit on the NYPL site. Candide 2.0 uses the same English translation, but it allows you to see others' comments on what they have read. And it allows you to reply to their comments, and to post your own comments, inviting others to reply. You get something more for your money, and you haven't even spent any money! Surely it's the best of all possible media. Or, perhaps it's one of a set of them.

Broadview Editions 'Candide' (2009)In 2003 I began work on an edition of Candide that Broadview Press published in 2009. It is available, to this point, exclusively in dead tree format. Fortunately, by the time they find themselves between the covers, the trees are entirely post-consumer recycled material. What's more, near to 2/3 of the intellectual content is also recycled: you could find much of it online, or in a good library. So, why might you bother to look at it? What is the relevance of traditional publishing in this age of digital downloads and cooperative wiki-products?

Simply put, there's much more to an old book than meets the eye. For example: In the very first paragraph of Candide there are references to "Westphalia," "Thunder-ten-tronckh," and "seventy-one quarterings." A well educated reader might be able to grasp one of those references: Westphalia is an area of northern Germany. A very well educated reader might catch a second: quarterings are units of genealogical measure within heraldry. A very technically educated reader, such as one I consulted, would see the oddness of the number seventy-one – for quarterings cannot advance by odd numbers (quarterings, that is, according to my consultant: as opposed to impalings, which I don't even try to grasp). Sixty-four quarterings would signal a highly unlikely standard that would be reflected in heritage of arms from all parents for six generations. Finally, nobody knows just why Voltaire came up with the name ‘Thunder-ten-tronckh,' but a few have guessed that he thought that it would sound very ugly, and so, riotously funny as a reflection on Germany for a French audience.

So, here is one answer on why to look to different editions of Candide: you might use the footnotes, which are not essential for enjoying Candide, but can greatly increase your understanding of history and of Voltaire's wit. I learned a great deal when presented with the task of writing about two hundred footnotes for Candide, and one hundred fifty more for the historical material I assembled around that text. I can assure you, since I have consulted footnotes in a half-dozen other editions, that you will learn different things from different editors' footnotes. You might learn the most from René Pomeau's edition (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980). That might not suit your needs or taste, however: you will learn different things from each of the Broadview edition, the Hackett edition, and the Norton edition. And you might find still other ideas online at Candide 2.0, including some fresh ones that are in none of the printed editions.

If you want to learn a bit from Candide, pop into a bookshop (or a good library) and see which edition can best teach you. If you want to learn a bit more from Voltaire regarding his times, you would do well to start with Letters Concerning the English Nation, edited by Nicholas Cronk (Oxford University Press, 1994). Very useful footnotes in that one!

Novelist as Contrarian: James Morrow Reads Voltaire

Alice Boone — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:45:08 -0500

Note: for those of you just joining us, the following is a digest of the latest round of comments on Candide 2.0, an interactive edition of Voltaire's book mounted in conjunction with the Library's exhibition Candide at 250: Scandal and Success.

James Morrow names his 10th-grade World Literature teacher, James Giordano, as his literary hero. In the reader’s guide notes to his novel, The Last Witchfinder, Morrow describes how “Mr. G” assigned his high school students a challenging syllabus: Kafka’s Trial, Camus’s Stranger, Candide, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and other classics. From these authors and his teacher, he learned to admire the novelist as a contrarian, someone who tested ideas.

He writes of his classroom experiences: “Enduring fiction evidently occupied some indefinable domain where intellect and feeling met and fused, fueling an eternal conversation about the mystery of it all. The most valuable novelists, poets, and playwrights didn’t simply tell stories; they didn’t just solicit our vicarious involvement in imaginary adventures. Fiction writers had something to say. They were on fire with ideas. But the novelist wasn’t essentially a philosopher. The Trial and Madame Bovary got at truth obliquely, subjectively—emotionally.”

Morrow’s annotations for Candide this week show Voltaire as a humane contrarian. As chapter 4 begins, Candide is traveling with his syphilis-ravaged tutor Dr. Pangloss. The tutor rationalizes every event with the refrain that this is the best of all possible worlds, an echo of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theodicy. Morrow explains:

***Note: "[text »]" links will take you to the corresponding passage in the Candide 2.0, a networked edition of the book***

“Voltaire and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers saw the flaw in Leibniz’s reasoning. If we can envision a superior world that nevertheless operates by natural laws – a Peruvian Eldorado, say, or a planet on which famine is unthinkable because fruit trees grow everywhere – we have come close to demonstrating that ours is not the best of all possible worlds." [text »]

Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibniz,
1646-1716 (NYPL Digital Gallery)The riposte to Leibniz, “if this is the best of all possible worlds, what then of the others?” [text »] has become an inspiration for writers, filmmakers, and other artists. Morrow’s science fiction satires are dizzyingly, stunningly well plotted romps through controversial philosophical debates. He recast Mr. G as a gadfly high school teacher in Blameless at Abaddon (1996), about a man who puts God on trial for his indifference to human suffering. The Last Witchfinder (2006) is narrated by Isaac Newton’s Principia—the book itself witnesses how new methods of scientific experiment and explanation circulated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America.

The Philosopher’s Apprentice (2008) is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, with nods to John Locke’s tabula rasa, theories of ethics and justice, Darwinian thought, and bioethics. He is working on what he calls a “loopy retelling of Darwin’s trip to the Galapagos” with a female protagonist and says there may be echoes of Candide in the book.

Morrow’s contemporary forms of the conte philosophique reveal some fascinating features of Candide: its retelling of other stories and debates, its pacing and plot twists, and its moments of change. With his attention to how stories are remixed and refashioned, he makes connections between Voltaire’s retelling of the Book of Job and others who have adapted the story. [text »]

Amid the rapid pacing of Candide’s travels, there are also deliberate moments, such as the poignant image of the relief workers moistening the bread with their tears [text »] after the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Voltaire had expressed grief in his Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake (1756): “Lisbon lies in ruins, while in Paris they dance.” That anguish becomes satire when Pangloss uses his reason to explain God’s benevolence in this best of all possible worlds: “If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere.” [text »]

The satirist’s art comes not only in presenting ideas but in staging scenes which test them. As Candide refashioned debates about theodicy and justice in the eighteenth century, it is adapted to comment on contemporary debates. Lillian Hellman had the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s and her own blacklisting in mind when she translated Voltaire’s auto-da-fé scene in her original script for Leonard Bernstein’s operetta, Candide. In her telling, the Portuguese tribunal evokes the language of the House of Un-American Activities to explain Morrow turns to Richard Wilbur’s and John La Touche’s lyrics for “It’s a Lovely Day for an Auto-da-Fé” (Hellman’s book was revised in later revivals—Morrow quotes from the 1998 revival recording) to show the auto-da-fé as a set piece about the Lisbon earthquake. [text »]

That emotional debate continues today. Morrow notes that it is “impossible to read Voltaire’s account of the Lisbon earthquake without thinking of the cataclysm that recently devastated the country of Haiti, leaving at least 200,000 dead and one million homeless.” [text »]

Televangelist Pat Robertson interpreted the event as divine retribution for what he explained as a Haitian pact with the Devil. Biologist Richard Dawkins called Robertson out for his comments, offering plate tectonics as an explanation before getting to the meat of his On Faith column in the Washington Post: “The religious mind, however, restlessly seeks human meaning in the blind happenings of nature.”

The other side, or a possible denouement, of these debates is the dramatizing of the changed mind. In Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder, the protagonist, Jennet sets out to use science to explain the world rationally, to disprove her father’s fervor for diagnosing witches in seventeenth-century England. Yet her scientific understanding of the world must adapt as new systems of explanation circulate among natural philosophers who debate Isaac Newton’s theories of motion. These debates about the nature of scientific explanation and philosophical discussions move the narratives forward in Morrow’s work—and in Voltaire’s contes philosophiques and other work.

'Elémens de la philosophie
de Neuton'
(NYPL Digital Gallery)NYPL’s 2004 exhibit The Newtonian Moment was a stunning exposition of this historical development. Voltaire played a key role in popularizing Newton for Continental audiences when he composed Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton in 1738. Yet Voltaire was initially skeptical of Newtonian philosophy as it compared to Descartes’ theories of motion that were popular at the time. In the catalog to accompany the exhibit, curator Mordechai Feingold quotes Voltaire’s initial skepticism about Newton from his Lettres philosophiques (1734): “For your Cartesian everything is moved by an impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr. Newton it is by gravitation, the cause of which is hardly better known. In Paris you see the earth shaped like a melon, in London it is flattened on two sides.”

A moment of literary fantasy: what would a scene look like as Voltaire changed his mind? Voltaire collaborated with his companion, Madame du Châtelet, in composing the Elémens, and he credits her help with assisting him in understanding the system. We have one picture of his changing his mind with his companion’s help in the allegorical frontispiece to the first edition of the Elémens in NYPL’s Rare Book Division. Feingold describes the figures:

“There, attired in a Roman toga, the poet’s laurels resting on his head, books and mathematical instruments all around him, Voltaire sits at his desk composing the Elémens. Directly above him is Newton, regally seated on a throne of clouds, his right hand positioning a compass on a celestial lobe, the index finger of his left hand pointing at the glove. All the while his gaze fixes on Mme du Châtelet—levitating halfway between Newton and Voltaire, thanks to some helpful putti—who returns the gaze. The dynamics of the scene seem to suggest Newton the master impressing an important lesson on his admiring Emilie. More telling still, the oval mirror in du Châtelet’s grip collects the rays of light (truth) emanating, as it were, from the heavens behind Newton—and reflects them onto the inspired Voltaire, busy at work below.”

This scene is, in some ways, reflective of how Morrow described his own encounters with new ideas in his high school classroom: an “indefinable domain where intellect and feeling met and fused, fueling an eternal conversation about the mystery of it all.”

In 2008, John Brockman of edge.org asked scientists, philosophers, inventors, professors, and other public figures the following question: what have you changed your mind about? Richard Dawkins responded that he wanted to appropriate ‘flip-flopper’ from its charged political discourse and praise those who would reconsider a scientific question given new evidence. Changing one’s mind is a sign of intellectual flexibility. But there are few fiction-writers among that survey of habitual reconsideration, although novelists must describe adaptation, growth, and reflection for their stories to resonate.

And so we should ask such a question of Candide: are there episodes when the naïve hero changes his mind? Do these characters change their minds, or do they have another purpose in Voltaire’s satire? What sets these scenes in motion? We have noticed scenes of suffering and deprivation; in Morrow’s reading of chapter 6, Pangloss renders any emotional reaction into a pedantic lesson in language games. [text »]

When will Candide’s ever-expanding world become a different sort of classroom?

Visit Candide 2.0 »

Voltaire's 'Candide' as Media Event

Nicholas Cronk — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:11:47 -0500

The title page of the [Geneva]
1759 true first edition
(NYPL Digital Gallery)To say that Candide enjoyed an immediate success is an understatement. Candide was a phenomenon. The novel was published through the medium of print, a fact which we too easily take for granted. The print world of the eighteenth century was unlike our own and posed two particular challenges.

The first was censorship. England enjoyed a fairly free press, but most European countries had various systems for controlling the output of publishers. In France, for example, a book might be censored by the King, by judges or by the Catholic Church – or by any combination of these three. The second challenge was piracy: the notion of copyright in a printed work was still a relatively new idea in the eighteenth century, and in most countries, once a book was published, it was considered to be in the public domain and therefore liable to be copied, or ‘pirated’. Many European printers earned their living as pirate publishers.

Voltaire knew that Candide was liable to be censored. And he knew too that it was likely to be pirated. But he turned these apparent constraints into advantages. The ‘first’ edition of Candide was printed early in 1759 by Voltaire’s regular printer in this period, Cramer, in Geneva. But to speak of a first printing is misleading. Before handing over a final manuscript to Cramer, Voltaire went behind Cramer’s back and sent a (slightly different) version of the manuscript to John Nourse, a printer in London; he may well have dispatched copies to other publishers too. The result was that within weeks of the first edition of Candide appearing in Geneva, other editions appeared in Paris, London and Amsterdam. There was an enormous buzz surrounding the new work – it was not signed by Voltaire, a fact which only confirmed that he must have written it – and numerous pirated editions soon flooded the market all across Europe.

Before the year 1759 was over, there had appeared no fewer than seventeen different French editions of Candide. Only two libraries in the world own all seventeen editions: one is the Taylor Library in Oxford, and the other is the New York Public Library, and all seventeen editions are currently on display through April 25, 2010 in the exhibition, Candide at 250: Scandal at Success.

The 17 first editions on display in the 'Candide at 250: Scandal and Success' exhibition at the Wachenheim Gallery, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (© The New York Public Library, 2010)

Translations are further evidence of the Candide craze. Voltaire was popular in England, and in the course of 1759, no fewer than three different English translations of Candide were published in London.

Of course, the censors tried to halt the progress of the work, and of course they failed: the more they criticized the work, the more it sold, and the more it sold, the more pirated editions were produced. The censors and the pirate publishers – often seen as the author’s enemies – all contributed hugely to the success of Candide. Part of Voltaire’s genius lay in his understanding of the medium of print and his ability to manipulate the book market for his own ends. If he had lived today, we can only imagine his career as a spin-doctor working in the modern media of TV and Twitter…

(...or on our own digital spin on the text, the Candide networked edition.)

A few of the 17 "first" editions of Candide:

Geneva edition
London edition (John Nourse, publisher)
One of the Paris editions
Amsterdam edition
Last of three English translations from 1759 (trans. William Rider)

Nicholas Cronk is director of the Voltaire Foundation and professor of French literature in the University of Oxford. He is also general editor of the Complete works of Voltaire: this edition, due for completion in 2018, is the first ever complete scholarly edition of Voltaire and will number some 200 volumes. He has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Candide 2.0: A Reading Experiment Begins

Alice Boone — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:52:15 -0500

For the next ten weeks, the New York Public Library will host a public, interactive reading of Candide, in connection to its ongoing exhibition at 42nd St.. This edition will look familiar to readers who remember the story, or even just its famous lines about “the best of all possible worlds” and “we must cultivate our garden.” But the innovative format, which facilitates reader annotations and discussions in the digital margins, will also yield surprises, as we have taken that closing line and used it as inspiration for a “cultivated” edition, with “seeds” of discussion sown by readers, opening up the text for public participation. We are thus extending the invitation to NYPL readers to add to these annotations: to make our garden grow, to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein.

To begin the annotation-cultivation of Candide, Nicholas Cronk, president of the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford, takes a new look at the opening chapter of the book, noting how what seems like a familiar narrative structure of the story immediately becomes unsettling, as the narrator disappears in the first paragraph (click "text" link at end of quote to jump to this place in the book):

“The narrator leaves us on our own after this brief and apparently pointless appearance. We are not, after all, to be guided through the story; the narrator has let us down by stealing any old plot from Tom Jones; nothing is quite as it seems; and we are on our own, left to make sense of things as best we can…” [text »]

Candide has been expelled from his family castle in Westphalia and has lost his love, Cunegonde. He has some questionable guidance from his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, whose metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology insists on a circular understanding of cause and effect: “the nose is formed for spectacles—thus we have spectacles!” [text »]

Cronk shows how the examples Pangloss uses to support his philosophy are designed to appeal to the Baron’s small universe in his Westphalia castle:

“The argument from design is meant to prove the existence of God: here it only proves the existence of German barons.”

The narrative perspective—through Candide’s eyes— shows both the limitations of the naïve hero’s experience and the universality/banality of the Panglossian system, as Candide describes “this best of all possible worlds, [as] the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses” [text »] and Pangloss as “the greatest philosopher of the whole province, and consequently of the whole world.” [text »]

Cronk asks what we are to make of these repeated phrases—“sufficient reason,” “cause and effect,” “best of all possible…” The repetition is humorous, but more than humor is involved. Cronk puts it, “It seems that the more we play with these terms, the more they lead a life of their own.” [text »]

Bust of Voltaire and original 'Candide' manuscript on display in the Wachenheim Gallery, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (© The New York Public Library, 2010)It was a similar sense of how Candide’s philosophical debates and peripatetic travels were adapted and led lives of their own that inspired my own interests as curator of the NYPL Candide at 250: Scandal and Success exhibit in Wachenheim Gallery. I saw a counter-history of the novel in the way that its readers had transformed it, as if its canoncity were reflected in a funhouse mirror: the odder iterations of the story (Esperanto experiments, 1960s countercultural rambles, contemporary human rights campaigns) could be encapsulated in the opening line of the second chapter: “Candide, driven from terrestrial paradise, walked a long while without knowing where…” [text »]

With Candide’s errant wandering as my inspiration, I became interested in the errors that the text has picked up in its 250 years of translation. For example, in some translations, the Bulgars become Bulgarians; the puerile wordplay on Bulgars/buggery (in reference to Frederick the Great) [text »] would have been familiar to some readers, but it did not translate for others who did not consider the context. Most translation differences, of course, should not be seen as errors, as translations have wandered around a (supposed) central or original sense with different emphases, references, overtones, and felicities of language—vagaries of translation that are new sources of life for the text.

For this annotation project, we have used a public domain translation available in digital form. If it is not the best of all possible translations, it nevertheless facilitates what could be the best of all possible discussions, as the annotating facilities at each paragraph allow interested readers to communicate with others about how translation choices affect reading.

The history of Candide is a history of adaptation for different cultural periods and different philosophical and political arguments. Playwright Stanton Wood has updated the story to the past 10 years of world events in his Candide Americana with Rabbit Hole Ensemble, which showed at the NYC Fringe Festival in 2009. In Wood’s retelling, the Seven Years War becomes the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and Candide witnesses the fall of the World Trade Center on September 11, Hurricane Katrina, and other events. In his annotations to chapter 3, Wood reflects on the relevance of eighteenth-century philosophy to considering contemporary events. Wood uses another type of counter-history as his inspiration: Susan Nieman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002). [text »]

Wood is also attuned to the strangeness of the story when he notes Candide’s encounter with a miserly preacher who advocates charity: “Incorporating this kind of ironic moment into the natural flow of the action was one of the challenges of adaptation - every moment in the book seems to include an example of someone saying one thing while doing the opposite in a particularly delicious way.” [text »]

Like Cronk, Wood is interested in how the features we expect to see in a novel—here, a genuinely nice character in Jacques the Anabaptist—disappear almost immediately. [text »]

What is the effect of these destabilizing devices in these early chapters: baits and switches, irony, and wandering as novelistic structure? What do they reveal about Voltaire’s work in the conte philosophique, the philosophical tale? How do these devices lend themselves to further adaptation?