Ignore the warnings your parents gave you as children. Be nosy and talk to strangers.

Wander. If you sit in one place all night you will miss everything.

If you have any questions or need assistance come and find me. I will whisper secrets in your ear.

Cheers,
Cynthia von Buhler

Send from the future.”

I received this email the day before participating in Cynthia von Buhler’s immersive play Speakeasy Dollhouse. A few days before this, I was sent emails containing real documentation from the coroner’s office, as well as newspapers clippings about the murder of Frank Spano, von Buhler’s grandfather. You don’t attend this event, you are immersed in the ongoing attempts to solve the mystery about why Spano was killed. Despite that rather dark description, Speakeasy Dollhouse is actually a festive, carnivalesque affair. I arrived at the location, which is staged in a mobster’s former Lower East Side speakeasy. Two policemen greeted me and engaged in some friendly chatter—but what they really wanted was a password to let them know I was an okay dame.  I went down a dark flight of stairs, and then opened a doorway into the holodeck of Star Trek.

Seriously.

Almost everyone was dressed up—I could not differentiate the actors from the audience. The set is elaborate and every detail threw me back in time to a 1920’s speakeasy. At the bar I ordered a special cup of coffee, talked to my friends, and drank in the ambience. I couldn’t say when the play started or when it ended. I was given a part to play—that of a hired killer. I talked to mobsters, socialites, burlesque dancers, Frank’s possible lover, his pregnant wife, and his son. I had to ask the mobster Dutch Shultz where the after party was, but not let on that he would soon be murdered as well. It was a time-travel experience where I wandered in between the real and the unreal, the known and unknown. Von Buhler’s grandfather was shot and killed by John Guerrieri, but despite a confession, was let go. Von Buhler wrote about meeting the granddaughter of Guerrieri , who had no idea of this history. The more I heard, read, and relived, the further I fell into the rabbit hole of a weird narrative that invited me to participate even after the event ended. Attendees are asked to go to the Speakeasy blog to speculate on the reasons behind Spano’s killing, and these answers then add evidence to the next production.

Even more deliciously macabre,  the play is modeled upon an actual set of dollhouses that von Buhler built to explore the circumstances regarding her grandfather’s murder. We can have all kinds of uncanny fun with that, of course, but understand that even this creepy little detail is part of American history. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, created in the 1930’s by Frances Glessner Lee, were dollhouses that detectives used to “better assess visual evidence” in the most mysterious and violent of deaths. These studies inspired von Buhler’s own grotesque recreation of events (von Buhler). Such layering of storytelling, reporting, and mythmaking is but one reason to experience this play if you live or are visiting New York City.  The other is this: Imagine Edgar Allen Poe has created a speakeasy in the Enterprise’s holodeck, and you get to play in that universe for three hours, attending the most fabulous party while helping to solve a real-life crime. There you go.

To order tickets, go here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/214593

To view evidence and more of the history about life and murder of Frank Spano, visit the Speakeasy Dollhouse blog 

Photographs used with permission

Want to win a Big Box of Weird that includes a hardcover copy of The Weird compendium signed by editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer? That’s right, not just a copy of the huge, 800,000-word anthology including 116 stories that’s been written up everywhere from the Huffington Post to the Wall Street Journal…but also a whole large box of weird stuff. Knowing Ann and Jeff, this could include just about anything.

How do you go about winning such a wonderful prize? It’s simple. As we all know, The Weird changes people. We want to document the wide range of reactions to reading a weird story–call it a pseudo-scientific survey. So….

1–Post a photo of yourself reading The Weird (on your blog, livejournal, twitter, or elsewhere on the internet). The photo must include your face and the anthology’s cover. Indicate what story you were reading when you took the photo.

2–Post the link to the image in the comments section of this blog post.

3–Ann and Jeff will pick a winner for the best expression/story combination, with extra points awarded for originality of composition, etc. (Yes, the criteria will be totally subjective.)

4–The winner will receive a big box of weird stuff. Runners-up may receive honorable mentions.

The deadline is midnight Eastern Standard time on June 1st. The contest judges reserve the right to use your photo in a “Weird Montage” for later posting on this site.

Need an example? Here’s “Dan” reading Eric Basso’s The Beak Doctor from The Weird.

Writer and professor Stephen Graham Jones has been teaching a course at the University of Colorado on weird fiction, using The Weird compendium. His story “Little Lambs”–one of our favorites–is included in the anthology. As part of that class, he had his students create flowcharts to differentiate The Weird from other traditions. Above you’ll find Jones’s own flowchart, created at the beginning of the class, which we find fascinating. You can look at a larger version here.

We appreciate the “probably,” since some weird fiction will deviate from these patterns, but he has gotten at the heart of some of the distinctions between weird fiction and other types of fiction. And as Jones told us, by the end of the class he had come up with a more inclusive definition: ”If it deviates from a reality we’re meant to accept as real, and if that deviation is threatening (or dangerous), and if that threat makes us less significant, and if that threat is neither conquered nor explained, then it’s weird fiction.” The threat part is interesting, as we here at WFR sometimes see the weird element as not necessarily threatening so much as pursuing its own aims.

What are your thoughts, dear weirdies? Agree? Disagree?

My initial reaction to Heym’s “The Dissection” came after reading stories like Blackwood’s “The Willows” and James’s “Casting the Runes”, where there is a clear element of the supernatural functioning within the narrative–The Weird, that unsettling sense I receive from those stories, is a result of these supernatural, larger-than-humanity components. “The Dissection”, however, performs The Weird quite differently, and this captured my fancy. The story is lucid and intimate and concise, and, for me, a student of poetry, its elegant gore and poetic sensibilities opened the door to reading more Weird fiction.

In putting this poem together, I very much wanted to retain Heym’s imagery–the green-yellow intestinal snakes, dripping faeces, vultures’ crooked beaks forever craving flesh–but I wanted to erase as much of the narrative’s ‘connective tissue’ as possible. I felt that by distilling “The Dissection” into a poem, into an image-heavy crystallization of language, “The Dissection” could be more potent, more unsettling, and even more jarring than before. Readers won’t have time to readjust themselves with punctuation and conjunctions; there is no filler meant for sense-making. I’d argue that Heym was able to achieve this effect to a certain degree through his narrative form, however, I wanted to take it a step further.

In reanimating “The Dissection”, there were certain images and moments of which I could not let go. Lines like, “his body resembled the iridescent calyx of some gigantic flower”, “the thumping of hammers resounded on his skull”, and “as you strolled across poppy fields, a flaming poppy yourself”, are so beautiful and carry such weight through the narrative, I was compelled to keep them. After all, Heym’s poetic leanings are what draw me to his work. I also wanted to maintain the backbone of the narrative where the cadaver is given a sentience, a beautiful lament amid such morbid carnage. What I decided to leave out included, for the most part, the moments of what I saw as Heym’s over-articulation. Where Heym wrote, “Splendid reds and blues sprouted down his limbs, and in the heat the large wound under his navel slowly split open like a red furrow, releasing a foul stench”, I replied with:

Splendid reds and blues sprout
down his mottled limbs
to the wound under his navel
splitting in the heat, a furrow
ruddy with a foul stench

In short, I sought to refine and condense the verbosity of his prose by scraping away the ancillary language. 

***

The Dissection: An Extolment

The dead man lays naked, alone
on a white cloth in a wide room
white walls with a cruel sobriety
they scream of an endless torture

Daylight bathes him
awakens dead spots
a conjuring of green
a bloating of his body
like a sack of water

The iridescent calyx of a giant flower
shyly laid at the altar of death
Splendid reds and blues sprout
down his mottled limbs
to the wound under his navel
splitting in the heat, a furrow
ruddy with a foul stench

Doctors enter in frayed white coats
with white crates of hammers, saws
hideous sets of tweezers, tiny knives
like vultures’ crooked beaks
forever craving flesh

Blood flowing on their hands
digging deep into the corpse
like white cooks gutting a goose
innards coiling, green-yellow snakes
faeces dripping warm and putrid
a cold urine glistens like wine

The dead man sleeps soundly
with thumping on his skull
while a remainder of love
awakes in him a shining torch

Outside the sky is sweeping
small white clouds swim
like gods in the silent afternoon
swallows quiver in this warm July

Black blood streams
across the dead’s forehead
a bluing putrefaction
decay creeps over him
with dappled claws
his skin flaking apart
his belly turned white
as an eel under greedy fingers
of doctors elbow-deep
and plunging into wet flesh

Decay pulls his mouth apart, smiling
the dreams of beatific stars
of a fragrant summer evening
his lips tremble as though under a kiss:

‘How I love you. I have loved you so much.
Should I say how I love you? As you strolled
across poppy fields a flaming poppy yourself
you swallowed the entire evening. The dress
that billowed around you was a wave of fire
in the setting sun  you bowed your head
hair still burning inflamed by my kiss

‘Turning to look back at me as you walked away
the lantern swayed in your hand, glowing
of a rose lasting in the twilight long after you’ve gone
I will see you again in the hour of dawn
we will never part. How I love you!
Should I tell you how I love you?’

The dead man quivers on his white death table
in happiness as iron chisels break up the bones of his temple.

Georg Heym (1887– 1912) was a German poet and playwright who also wrote one novel. Heym believed in the idea of the “demon city,” which symbolized his repudiation of romanticism in the midst of the rise of industrialism and repressive systems. Still, he lived a wild and passionate life, accompanied by depression and restlessness. In 1910 he dreamed of a death by drowning and two years later fell through the ice while skating.

Gio Clairval, the translator of the version of “The Dissection” featured in The Weird (and also recently featured on this site), has written an appreciation of both Heym and his story, by itself and in relation to the rest of his creative work. Despite his brief life, there is much to learn about Heym and his writing, with both full of the kinds of ideas that can invigorate artistic movements and individual authors, even now, 100 years since Heym’s death.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

The Poet Who Dreamed in Light Blue

PART ONE – The Author

Juggler (The Surface and Beneath) by Heather Wilcoxon, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art

In cities strange and yet weirdly familiar, women watched by monstrous demons give birth to headless infants, vast gods straddle apartment blocks and gaze balefully out on an urban hell, and the savage giant War dances wildly on the mountains while a mighty city sinks into an abyss. (in Georg Heym’s Poems,bilingual edition, translated from the German by Anthony Hasler, 2006, Northwestern University Press.)

Georg Heym’s works are an enthralling mixture of classical German lyricism and arresting visions of urban dysplastic images à la Metropolis. The city of Berlin, under the domination of the City God (Der Gott der Stadt), is the theater of Gothic horrors—visions of war and death where the romantic macabre walks hand in hand with images taken from Greek myths.  Heym is also known for the formal beauty of his sonnets, which place him amongst the greatest poets of the German tradition. Heym was saluted as the first expressionistic poet, a decade before Expressionism became the dominant artistic trend in post-WWI Germany.

I translated the short-short story “Die Dissektion”—in fact a poem of six hundred words packed with images so strong they hurt—for The Weird, and I fell in love with the author.

Two (very different) innovative authors and their similar upbringing

I recently translated one of Gustave Flaubert’s juvenile short stories, “Quidquid volueris”[1]. As I was trying to establish the first publication date, I found an uncanny resemblance between Flaubert and Heym’s formative years. There is no similarity between the two authors’ works in terms of the aesthetic of their writing, but both Flaubert and Heym tackled themes ahead of their times.

Flaubert unleashed a storm of criticism after the publication of his scandalous (for the time) novel Madame Bovary. The public outrage dragged him to court, and the author was condemned for describing the antics of a young housewife in search of evasion. A long, suggestive scene was censored (a case of too much showing instead of telling). As for Heym, his works were less known outside the literary circles, but had the larger public read about his headless infants and monstrous demons, he would have surely been branded unhinged and dangerous.

Heym was born in 1887, a year before Flaubert died; nevertheless, his family context – upper middle class – resembles Flaubert’s, and both authors received a classical education (high school classical teaching remained consistently the same across Europe until the late twentieth century). I wondered whether these ingredients were needed to obtain an individual who would later bring new themes to literature, breaking with the past.

Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner

Recipe for a Modern Poet (or “Bake Your Own Georg Heym”)

Take a well-to-do but sine nobilitate family and mix with lackluster results in school. Add an authoritarian and irascible father and a loving, sentimental mother. Sprinkle with blank, monochord verses later labeled as “juvenilia.” Encourage the subject to marinate in passionless high-education studies, preferably Law.

Your Heym-dough will seek solace in epic deeds (drinking, dueling, whoring and getting kicked out of several schools), and he will chant the fearless protagonists of past revolutions, thus cutting his poetic teeth on grand plays imbued with classical German lyricism.

Despite the stiff theatrical production produced in this early period, it is crucial that you do not skip this step: later on your poet will have to express his internal turmoil in perfectly formed verses.

At some point, your poet-dough may be exposed to the influence of the Nietzsche yeast. He may write in his diary that he longs to realize the Übermensch ideal in his own person (1906). Do not panic and do not take the dough out of the oven; a story will spurt from this idea: “The Madman,” in which madness is depicted as a form of ultimate salvation. Because madmen are above ordinary laws, insanity entails the most perfect form of freedom, as illustrated by the final image: the madman soaring like a bird high above reality.

If the previous procedure is correctly applied, the blooming author, disappointed with his contemporaries, will join a club of think-alike youths (it will be Der Neue Club, The New Club, in Berlin, 1910). Inspiring meetings will simmer in a café that should preferably sport an ironic name (the Neopathetische Cabaret or Neo-Pathetic Music-Hall). If you keep the fire going, the group leader, Kurt Hiller, will salute your artist as an expressionistic poet, which will brand him a true precursor; Expressionism—a creative movement in pre-WWI Germany fostering the idea that art’s purpose is to express the subjective feelings of artists—will be at its zenith during the 20s.

The baking is going well. You should now be satisfied to see the subject’s first poems appear (the same year, 1910) in the radical magazine Der Demokrat, and the first collection, Der ewige Tag (The Eternal Day), will be published in 1911, to be favorably reviewed by the famous poet Ernst Stadler. Given the positive critiques, your lyrical dough will decide to abandon his career in Law.

Meanwhile, let a resonant, clichéd tragedy, Atalanta, find its way into print (1911) and do not despair but look at your creation through the oven glass: the dough is now golden.

Take your poet out of the oven, for he is baked.

Portrait of Georg Heym

And from now on things become very, very serious, albeit for a very short time.

The new poet displays both an exquisite sensibility and a tormented spirit. A few poems, like his tragedies, are inspired by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, but with more elegant results; others are haunted by classical myths and Gothic tropes; others still, from his later years, are widely considered some of the finest love poems ever written in the German language.

You have in fact created one of the most characteristic voices of German literature.

Too soon did he go

In contrast with his morbid visions, Georg Heym is known for his exuberant good health and stocky appearance. A friend says Georg makes him think of a butcher boy, and everyone thinks our romantic author a force of nature. But Heym dies young, at twenty-four years of age. In 1910, he had noted down a dream in which he advanced hesitantly across a kind of thin “stone slab,” which turned out to be a sheet of ice  (Hasler, op. cit.). Uncannily, Heym drowns during a skating expedition on the ice of the Havel River, in 1912. At his funeral, friends dance around his casket, declaiming Hölderlin (a major German poet, 1770–1843).

I do not know which verses were chosen to bid the young poet adieu, but here is a poem Georg wrote in 1905, in memory of Hölderlin:

To Hölderlin

And you, too, you are dead, son of the springtime
You, whose life only resembled
blazes shining in the night’s basements
where men forever look for
conclusion and liberty.
You are dead. For they have foolishly reached
for your pure flame
to put it out. For these beasts have always
hated the sublime.
And, as the Moirai
plunged into infinite pain
your spirit which faintly trembled,
God wrapped into a cloth of darkness
his virtuous son’s tortured head.

One of Hölderin’s poems that influenced Heym:

From “In Lovely Blue” (In lieblicher Blaue)

Translated by by George Kalogeris

Like the stamen inside a flower
The steeple stands in lovely blue
And the day unfolds around its needle;

The flock of swallows that circles the steeple
Flies there each day through the same blue air
That carries their cries from me to you;

We know how high the sun is now
As long as the roof of the steeple glows,
The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin;

Up there in the wind, where the wind is not
Turning the vane of the weathercock,
The weathercock silently crows in the wind.

Hölderlin’s style is more descriptive, more classical, compared with Heym’s verses, but we can recognize the theme that will find an echo in Heym’s formal sonnet “Reverie in Light Blue,” which you will find below, with the original text and my translation.

A collection of poems, Umbra Vitae, is published posthumously (1912), followed by a collection of short stories, Der Dieb (The Thief, 1913, English translation by Susan Bennet: The Thief and Other Stories, 1994, Libris, first published April 1985), and a collection of sonnets, Marathon (1914).

In 1924, Kurt Wolff publishes the collection of poems compiled by Heym’s literary group Der Neue Club: Umbra Vitae, including forty-seven xylographs by Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner.

After the poet’s untimely death, enthusiastic readers will find echoes of cataclysmic prophecies in his work, as in “Mit weissem Haar in den verrufnen Orten” (With White Hair, on Barren Plains), which foreshadows 1917. The poem describes the suffering of the enslaved working class in the mines of cold Russia. When night comes, the slaves dream of a head perched on top of a pole, riding the agitated waters of a “rebellious sea,” and it is the Czar’s head…

The City’s God

Georg Heym expressed the despair and solitude of urban life.

Fascinated by death, he was obsessed with the modern phenomenon of the metropolis: in his view the triumph of technology was destined to explode and unravel into apocalyptic involution. Nothing will change the city’s fate. Living in the city is unnatural.

In “Der Gott der Stadt” (The God of the City), sprawling cities kneel to Baal, who straddles blocks of buildings, his belly glowing red in the setting sun, and millions cower in the streets, booming their music made of praises and terror, while factory fumes and grime of smokestacks rise in the air towards the giant’s feet. And the elements themselves, perverted by the god, stare at the crushed humanity, sending tempests and seas of fire cracking on the asphalt.

We can read here the influence of a Belgian poet, Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916), one of the founders of Symbolism. In “L’âme des Ville” (The City’s Soul, in Les villes tentaculaires, Tentacular Cities, 1895), Verhaeren writes:

Un air de soufre et de naphte s’ exhale,
un soleil trouble et monstrueux s’ étale;
l’ esprit soudainement s’ effare
vers l’ impossible et le bizarre;
crime ou vertu, voit-il encor
ce qui se meut en ces décors,
où, devant lui, sur les places, s’ élève
le dressement tout en brouillards
d’ un pilier d’ or ou d’ un fronton blafard
pour il ne sait quel géant rêve?

An air of sulfur and naphtha exhales,
a hazy and monstrous sun expands;
the mind suddenly staggers
towards the impossible and the weird;
crime or virtue, can one still glimpse
something that moves in this decor,
where, right ahead, in each plaza, soars
the blurred height
of a golden pillar or a bleary pediment
for who knows what gigantic dream.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis

Verhaeren’s verses—rhymed in the original French—strike me as overwrought and melodramatic. Still, these images inflamed the imaginations and influenced many artists of the time.

In Heym’s poems, however (and it is the difference between mere imagination and genius), the chill, perfectly stylized form frames and contains the vivid images, distancing the reader. The distance and “monumentality”, in John Holfson’s words, quoted by Hasler (ib.) make, by contrast, the excesses of Heym’s apocalyptic visions even more horrific.

Heym was a unique figure in the pre-war poetic landscape. His aggressive images set him apart as more than a mere harbinger of Expressionism. Georg Heym was the first poet to use the stylistic epitomes that would later become the movement’s most characteristic tropes.

Blood Red and Powdery Blue

On one side, the bleeding images of apocalyptic cities, on the other, soft landscapes of waters blending with the sky. Nature, when left to her own devices, embroiders the world with harmony.

Träumerei in Hellblau (Reverie in Light Blue)

Alle Landschaften haben
Sich mit Blau gefüllt.
Alle Büsche und Bäume des Stromes,
Der weit in den Norden schwillt.

Blaue Länder der Wolken,
Weiße Segel dicht,
Die Gestade des Himmels in Fernen
Zergehen in Wind und Licht.

Wenn die Abende sinken
Und wir schlafen ein,
Gehen die Träume, die schönen,
Mit leichten Füßen herein.

Zymbeln lassen sie klingen
In den Händen licht.
Manche flüstern, und halten
Kerzen vor ihr Gesicht.

Here is my take (as usual, not so literal):

All the expanses of land
Are filled with blue as are
All the bushes and trees of the river
That swells in the north afar.

Blue countries of clouds,
Sails scattered white,
The shore of the sky in the distance
Sprinkled in wind and light.

When the evening falls
And we close our eyes,
Lovely dreams tiptoe
With winged feet inside.

The cymbals they let clink
In their hands that glimmer.
Many whispers, and then shadows
Before your face they flicker.

PART II: Translating the Untranslatable

The hardest part of doing this translation

German is such a romantic language. Reading German authors like Heym or Rainer Maria Rilke (although the latter was Bohemian-Austrian), I often wonder if Romanticism, and particularly expressionism as a literary style, could only be invented by author who wrote in that particular language of Gothic ascent. In English, at least contemporary English, an ornate style can easily teeter on the banks of the purple sea, but the best romantic style flows so beautifully in German. As I translated “The Dissection,” I faced the difficulty of dealing with a prose that was so formally perfect in the original that the mere idea of “transporting” it into another system of references seemed iconoclastic to me.

Translating is making decisions, and sometimes the text lures the translator into the easy path, which is the most obvious translation of a word with multiple meanings. It is particularly difficult with German, which is a highly polysemous language. Still, the translator should resist the sirens of “first-level” or “most-common” meaning.

The strongest example of the above, and the most difficult translation decision in this text was the passage:

Die Ärzte traten ein. Ein paar freundliche Männer in weißen Kitteln mit Schmissen und goldenen Zwickern.

The most obvious translation is:

The doctors entered. Several amicable men in white gowns with duelling-scars and gold-rimmed pince-nez.[2]

But I wondered, why the duelling-scars ?

The translator explains in the footnote #5: ‘”Schmiss”: “duelling-scar”. Traditionally, many male university students belonged to fraternities known as “Studentenverbin– dungen”. The members of a fraternity usually drink together
and engage in duelling. The scars resulting from the wounds received were considered a sign of bravery and boldness.’

This translation is plausible, given that Heym himself engaged in duels during his university years. Moreover, in one of his diary entries, he used “Schmissen” in a figurative way, referring to his heart with dueling scars.

On the other hand, the structure of the phrase in weißen Kitteln mit Schmissen indicates that “Schmissen” may refer back to “Kitteln” (gown, which I rendered with the more modern “coat”). How did the doctors’ white coats sport dueling scars? Did the frat boys carry out their dueling deeds in their surgeons’ gowns? It seemed more logical, and simpler, to me, to use the other meaning of “Schmiss”: rent, a hole in fabric.

I translated the sentence:

The doctors entered. A few friendly men in white coats with rents and gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Suddenly, the passage made more sense, even though the explanation based on duels was more romantic.

And the final version became:

The doctors entered. A few friendly men in frayed white coats and gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Those who have haunted hospitals wearing white, like I have, will recognize the much-washed coats that fray at the cuffs and hems…

But then again, the author may have wanted to imply both meanings: the down-to-earth frayed coats, and the remainders of ancient duels on the faces of the doctors, now older and wiser (because they wear glasses for near vision).

A short-short, a poem in prose

Translating a very short story is more difficult, given the relative weight of the words. Georg Heym was a poet above everything else, and the first expressionistic poet, at that: the use of images, and particularly colors, as vehicles of emotions is the foundation of the story itself. Colors serve to create similitudes and transitions from the gritty reality of the dissection table to the dream that forms in the dead man’s head, as a resonance of the doctors’ hammering on his skull.

“Splendid reds and blues” sprout on the dead man’s body. Why “splendid”?  The colors of decomposing flesh announce new life more than decay, and the wonderful colors foreshadow the explosion of reds in the second part of the story, the memory of a past love in summer: poppy fields; the man’s lover “a flower of flames;” and a billowing dress as a “wave of fire in the setting sun.”

The contrast between the doctors, who were “friendly” a minute before, but now resemble “hideous torturers, blood flowing on their hands as they” dig “ever more deeply into the frigid corpse and” pull “out its innards, like white cooks gutting a goose.”

It is a poem, and every word carries a strong meaning.

Repetition as a style

To get across the author’s intent, I had to keep certain repetitions: in a six-hundred-fifty-seven-word story (a little more than two standard-manuscript pages), there are ten occurrences of the word “white.” It is typical of Heym’s style, as you can see in the poem “Reverie in Pale Blue.” In my translation of the poem I did not keep the repeated words as they did not have the same effect in English, the words being in too close proximity. In “The Dissection,” though, repetition could and was used to render as much as possible of the original style.

In Heym’s work, repetition serves two purposes: first, it creates a contrast, as the same word is used in a gruesome and then a lyrical context; second, repeating a word accentuates the rhythm of a sentence with an obsessive insistence.

In other places, in a variation around the sentence structure, the same word is found in a different position. A paragraph begins with Die Ärzte traten ein. And, in the next paragraph, the beginning is Sie traten an den Toten.

The word “traten” is a counter-example, as I made the decision of using two different translations because the repetition added little in English:

Die Ärzte traten ein. (“Traten” means, generically, “to join,” but the meaning changes in different contexts. The most logical translation was “The doctors entered.”)

Sie traten an den Toten (They stepped up to the dead man.)

How this story influenced me personally

“The Dissection” influenced my writing directly. It was one of those famous multiple repetitions that inspired me:

In front of the large window, opened a wide sky filled with small white clouds that swam in the light, in the silent afternoon, like small white gods.

I liked the sound of this sentence so much I used a similar repetition as I was largely rewriting a story that was published in the magazine of my high school when I was fourteen (my first published story ever).  And the restyled story, “The Hand,” appeared in the #358 issue of Weird Tales (August 2011), edited by Ann VanderMeer.

Amos Tutuola

I think that reading Tutuola, coming from a  solely English language background makes the horror of something like Bush of Ghosts effectively lurid, just like I thought that Stoker’s language, all that theatrical melodrama, was effective as far as enhancing the horror in Dracula.  This is just my own cockeyed theory, though.  The Tutuola books were powerful experiences and also very liberating because you could see this guy who had grown up with these stories and he just cut loose with them.  There’s undeniable energy to his work.

Geoff Wisner writes in a forthcoming book:

Steeped in Yoruba storytelling traditions but peppered with modern-day references, crowded with strange monsters and improbable events told with perfect sincerity, and enlivened with psychologically charged imagery that would make even a non-Freudian sit up and take notice, this tale violates dozens of grammatical rules and novelistic conventions yet provides in abundance the one indispensable quality of literature: it is alive.

We’re pleased to offer an excerpt from the novel here on WFR.com this week. I also was fortunate enough to be able to conduct a long, exclusive interview via email with Amos Tutuola’s son Yinka Tutuola, an engineer in Nigeria who represents the estate of Amos Tutuola…

Weirdfictionreview.com: What do you remember about your father growing up?

Yinka Tutuola: He was a very simple, humble and hard working gentleman. He loved his family, people and community. He was always interested in helping people. He was passionate.

But he was always busy writing his stories. Whenever he was not having visitors or doing some kind of domestic work, he would be at his table writing or typing till as late as two, even three in the morning. He was never tired of writing and typing.

Whenever he was on annual leave (before he retired from government work) he would travel to his village with an old Pye reel-to-reel tape recorder; we used to go with him if we are on holidays, and there he collected stories of all kinds. At nights in the village, he would buy palm wine to entertain his guests who would be competing to tell the best stories they could. He would record these stories still very late in the night. This is what he did every time he was on annual leave. He enjoyed being in the village so much. I think if he was not working with the government he would rather have preferred to live there among the village people – probably because of their simple ways of life.

But he used very few of these stories in his books, for he himself could develop a story from just about anything, any event. But he loved recording these stories anyway. When he returned from the village he would play them back to entertain himself and his visitors. His life was just intertwined with stories– collecting, forming, writing or telling them. I could remember when I was in primary school, I was busy with myself, but if he wanted to tell me a story and I was not in the mood for stories, he was very angry with me. This happened to almost everybody in the family. He was always looking for audience. Stories gave him so much joy that he lacked interest in many other things, like going to social parties; in fact I never saw my father dancing. He loved songs, but they are folk songs again, with stories in them. So everything about him is story, story and story. He would just look at you or an event and turn it into a story.

When reel-to-reel tape recorders got out of fashion and were replaced with more compact cassette recorders, there was a problem. He couldn’t transfer all his stories, for they were too many. He lost a great part of his collection. He was able to transfer only a few. He seemed to me to have lived two kinds of lives. While one was real, factual physical life, the other was fictional, folkloric and mythological. However, there was no doubt that it was the mythological one that gave him the greater joy.

WFR: Did he have a sense of humor? Was he an introvert or very outgoing?  And did he give public readings? Do you remember those?

Tutuola: Anyone who had the opportunity of meeting him when he was alive would quite agree that he was far from been an introvert. He had a very good sense of humor. In fact ‘humor’ could be said to be his language or way of expression. He never liked being too serious about issues. He believed life should be handled with a sense of humor at all times; he believed this makes the challenges of life less intimidating and helps keep one better focused on what lines of action to take. At home and at work he was a man of humor. He taught, advised, entertained and corrected with humor. All his novels are written demonstrations and extensions of his sense of humor, for he saw and believed himself to be an entertainer (as a storyteller) rather than a writer. Actually it was for lack of audience at his workplace that made him turn to writing out the stories on paper. Humor was not peculiar to him alone; rather it is a Yoruba character –a way of talking, passing messages, teaching morals, warning, and so on.

I could well remember a time (many years ago) when he believed I spent too much on music and drinks. Instead of saying so directly, he asked me if I had any money with me right there and then. I told him I had and he asked me to bring out a note – any denomination. I brought one out and the next question was ”Who owns it?” To this I said “I, of course!” He asked me to prove it since my name was not on it. I didn’t know how to prove it, so I asked “Who owns it then?” He said “Nobody!” I knew then that he wanted to teach me something in his usual humorous way, so I asked him “Explain how money I brought out of my pocket isn’t mine!” After a rather long pause (he always liked being dramatic) he said “Know from today that money by itself is a long-winged bird that flies away whenever it wills, to wherever it wills; it is an illusion until it is spent on valuable things, and as such it only belongs to someone who ties it down by using it to get tangible, worthy assets having commercial value. Know that it is what you do with ‘money’ that is money!” I never forget the lesson!

But he was far more humorous with children and teenagers (they were his best friends and he had many, because they always listened with rapt attention) than older people. He was always happy telling them folktales, and giving them funny nicknames from stories. At times he would buy them refreshments. They loved him so much and always liked to be with him. Adults joined them at times to enjoy themselves, too. He was like a village-chief living in a city. He was always accessible and approachable.

But he was not outgoing that much–in the real sense of the word. In this regard he was kind of choosy. He disliked meetings that are strictly formal and with all kinds of rules, etc. He disliked being in places where you cannot express yourself the way you think is appropriate, especially when you need to dress formally, follow rigid protocols, like in board meetings, etc. This I believed was why he had academics as friends, for they care less about formalities. So he was always willing to attend their parties, lectures, discussions and so on. He seldom traveled, especially if it would mean spending days there. This was on many occasions not his will, for throughout his adult life he suffered from very severe duodenal ulcer and as such he lived on very special diets. For this reason he always avoided places where it would not be possible or convenient for him to get his kind of food. However, he accepted some local and foreign invitations, to give public readings, to lecture on Yoruba customs and traditions, to tell stories, and so on. He traveled to the United States, France, Italy, the United Kingdom. But he rejected more invitations than he accepted.

WFR: Do you remember reading his works when you were a child? If so, what did you think of it?

Tutuola: When I was in school we read both English and African literatures in English. I enjoyed reading all the books (both English, like “The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn” and the African, like “The Drummer Boy”, etc). But it was the African ones that I was able to identify with. However, my father’s books were unique, both to me and my friends who read them. Like in Alice in Wonderland, we were always trying to figure out the odyssey of the heroes in his books. We imagined ourselves facing the rigours, ordeals and dilemma the heroes faced. I enjoyed all my father’s books and I used to discuss them with him. I also asked questions. But as small as I was then I could easily pick on his grammar and at times I would make suggestions. Looking behind some years later I discovered that he preferred direct translation of the Yoruba words, thoughts and usage into English word-for-word, rather than using their English equivalents or expressing them the way an Englishman would do. This according to him added “flavor to my stories.” For example, the word ‘second’ (a unit of time) is expressed as ‘a twinkle of an eye’ by the Yoruba people and this is exactly how he used it in his books. There are many examples of words like this which many thought he coined or which they attributed to his ignorance of the rules of grammar, but these kinds of expressions are the real day-to-day Yoruba way of expressing such words, thoughts, or actions. Professor Ogundipe-Leslie noted this well when she pointed out that he “has simply and boldly (or perhaps innocently) carried across into his English prose the linguistic pattern and literary habits of his Yoruba language, using English words as counters. He is basically speaking Yoruba but using English words.” This, I think, is one of those things that made him unique among African writers. He believed folk stories, by all means, should be told choosing words that would ultimately express the original local meaning or thought, even at the expense of good grammar. This is where some went against him. But he stood his ground and many loved him for it.

WFR: Do you think Tutuola was surprised by the initial reaction to his work in England and elsewhere?

Tutuola: He was surprised quite alright! In fact to say surprised was an understatement. I think it is more appropriate to say he was shocked. It was a big, far dream that became a reality. He had always wanted to entertain as many people as possible, for as much as applause, and all of a sudden he got an unexpected and, perhaps at that time, unprecedented foreign attention, praise and pay from no less a country than the United Kingdom. It was a dream come true. He was more than surprised! And when he was published again in the United States…! But his joy was almost doused by some of his academic kinsmen from West Africa, from Nigeria in particular. They took it upon themselves to defend the English language more than the English and the Americans combined, and refused to see anything good in the efforts of a semi-illiterate writer (by Western standards) but an undeniable professional raconteur (by Yoruba standards). To them anything, everything, must be judged, evaluated, and recommended only if they passed Western tests and standards. And that was a time when they were fighting Western colonialism, imperialism, culture, influence, you name it, through the writings of their novels, poem, etc. These West Africans were surprised, too! But thanks to those who stood by him and encouraged him. Many at the University of Ibadan, and later Ife, being nearby (geographically), were always encouraging him to move on and write more. He was always invited to their campuses for storytelling, public readings, discussions and parties. But many others outside West Africa were encouraging too. In the United States people like Professor Bernth Lindfors and the late Professor Robert Wren were at the forefront, always in contact, while researching his works, and they criticised with encouragement.

WFR: Was his work known in Nigeria before it was published in England, and if so, how did the reaction to it differ?

Tutuola: His work was not known in Nigeria until The Palm-Wine Drinkard was published in 1952 in England by Faber and Faber. It was in England that he was first acknowledged and admired, for originality. However, knowledge of his work quickly (almost simultaneously) spread to Nigeria in particular, and Africa as a whole.

WFR: What are your thoughts about the claim that some of the positive early Western reactions to Tutuola’s work were, in a way, racist?

Tutuola: I absolutely disagree that there was any element of racism in either the publication or the positive reactions The Palm-Wine Drinkard enjoyed at any time. I believe we all like to read (at least, occasionally) something unique, odd, exotic or “… thronged, grisly and bewitching …” as Dylan Thomas described it in his review of the work in 1952 (the first ever, by anybody). I believe the Palm-Wine Drinkard only evoked the interest (no matter how curious) of the non-African literary world. The reactions were genuine. Otherwise, the work, immediately after publication, would have been trashed if the initial reactions were aimed to discriminate against African literary standards in any way, or to just ‘push’ the book into the market.

Apart, the work ought to have died out after the publications of many books written by many African (especially Nigerian) writers who are by now almost too numerous to mention by name. But, instead, it soared in sales and praise in Europe and the United States alongside later works by African intellectuals. In addition, it has been translated into (at least) twelve European and non-European languages. All these mean genuine interest and acceptance to me. So, I cannot see any racism in the positive reactions to The Palm-Wine Drinkard or later works by my father. Eldred Jones, in an article in the Bulletin of the Association for African Literature in English, 4(1966), 24–30, wrote “Many West Africans  could not share the general enthusiasm because they feared that Tutuola’s language would be taken as being representative of West African English,and also because recognizing, as they no doubt did, the folk stories which Tutuola so grotesquely embroidered, they gave his imagination less credit than would someone who came fresh to these fantastic adventures.”

So, what the work suffered, initially, was what I will call academic intimidation or discrimination from some West Africans, especially Nigerians.

Some even believed the days for folktales were over. In this group of Nigerians was Adeagbo Akinjogbin (he was much later a professor of History, now late). He wrote from Durham to West Africa, a magazine (June 5, 1954 edition):

Most Englishmen, and perhaps Frenchmen, are pleased to believe all sorts of fantastic tales about Africa, a continent of which they are profoundly ignorant. The “extraordinary books” of Mr. Tutuola (which must undoubtedly contain some of the unbelievable things in our folklores) will just suit the temper of his European readers as they seem to confirm their concepts of Africa. No wonder then that they are being read not only in English, but in French as well. And once this harm (I call it harm) is done, it can hardly be undone again. Mr. Tutuola will get his money and his world-wide fame all right, but the sufferers will be the unfortunate ones who have cause to come to England or Europe. I am not being unduely anxious.

It is then clear that there were some people who preferred “our folklores” to be swept under the carpet of history. What kind of historian would like to keep the culture and tradition of his people hidden or unknown? Please note that Akinjogbin was not against the use of English in the book but the writing of “some of the unbelievable things in our folklores.” It is good to note, however, that most of these West Africans were not writers or teachers of literature. To such people who believed that the positive reactions to The Palm-Wine Drinkard (especially) and other books by Tutuola were European mockery of African literature, I think the history of the The Palm-Wine Drinkard (now sixty years old) has proved them wrong. In addition, Chinweizu and others have written in strong terms against such “eurocentric critics” of African literature:

The prejudice against the oral form manifests itself most strongly in the claim that whatever there was in the African narrative tradition has had a negative influence on the African novel by contaminating the African novel with the “deficiencies” of the oral medium.  This prejudice is inculcated and employed by eurocentric critics to shore up the eminence and authority they would like permanently to confer upon European literature over the minds of Africans. The schema of their argument is as follows: oral is bad, written is good. African narrative is oral, therefore bad; European narrative is written, therefore good. If Africans desire to progress from bad to good they must ape European narrative. Furthermore, they must not allow their apery of European narrative to be marred by influences from African narrative which, being oral, is of course indelibly bad, or beyond redemption. As examples of what they consider characteristically faulty in oral narrative, these idolators of Europeana allege that African oral narratives have thin plots, thin narrative textures, and undeveloped characters. –Chinweizu,et al, Toward The Decolonization of African Literature, Vol. 1,1980. Fourth Dimension Publishers.

To conclude, I think it is appropriate here to quote Taban Lo Liyon in “Tutuola, son of Zinjanthropus” from Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola edited by Bernth Lindfors,Three Continents Press, 1975.

Now, in all that he has done, Amos Tutuola is not sui generis. Is he ungrammatical? Yes. But James Joyce is more ungrammatical than Tutuola. Ezekiel Mphahlele has often said and written that African writers are doing violence to English. Violence? Has Joyce not done more violence to the English Language? Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is written in seven dialects, he tells us. It is acknowledged a classic. We accept it, forget that it has no “grammar”, and go ahead to learn his ‘grammar’ and what he has to tell us. Let Tutuola write “no grammar” and the hyenas and jackals whine and growl. Let Gabriel Okara write a “no grammar” Okolo. They are mum. Why? Education drives out of the mind superstition, daydreaming, building of castles in the air, cultivation of yarns, and replaces them with a rational practical mind, almost devoid of imagination. Some of these minds having failed to write imaginative stories, turn to that aristocratic type of criticism which magnifies trivialities beyond their real size. They fail to touch other virtues in a work because they do not have the imagination to perceive these mysteries. Art is arbitrary. Anybody can begin his own style. Having begun it arbitrarily, if he persists to produce in that particular mode, he can enlarge and elevate it to something permanent, to something other artists will come to learn and copy, to something the critics will catch up with and appreciate.

WFR: How different is Tutuola’s reputation now in Nigeria in contrast to in the 1950s and 1960s?

Tutuola: Though in literary circles criticism of any particular work that is still relevant will never end, his reputation has clearly differs now to that of the period between 1950 and 1960 in terms of better understanding and placement of his works. Through calmer reassessments the virtues in these works are emerging and are being recognized and praised. Among people who later appraised or reappraised his works (particularly The Palm-Wine Drinkard) is Professor Wole Soyinka who wrote in ‘From a Common Backcloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image’, in The American Scholar, Vol. 32, N0. 3 (Summer 1963), p360:

Of all his novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard remains his best and the least impeachable. This book, apart from the work of D.O. Fagunwa who writes in Yoruba, is the earliest instance of the new Nigerian writer gathering multifarious experience under, if you like, the two cultures, and exploiting them in one extravagant, confident whole.

Professor Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, in her own reassessment “The Palm-Wine Drinkard: A Reassessment of Amos Tutuola,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, N0. 9 (1970), p48-56, wrote:

What commands acclaim is Tutuola’s use of his materials, chosen from all and sundry, and minted to make something beautiful, new and undeniably his own. He has handled his material with all of the skill of the good story teller and he has been able to endow it with the qualities of a ‘well-told-tale’. His denigrators who think it devastating to name him a mere folktale-teller must realize that not all folktale-tellers are necessarily good. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Tutuola has infused the life of his hybrid with the energies of a well-wrought tale. There is the urgency in the telling, the rapidity, indispensable to the Quest-motif, with which life unrolls itself; the fertility of incidents; the successful maintenance of our interest through the varying scenes. And the good-story teller is ever present in The Palm-Wine Drinkard, speaking to us in warm human tones, genial, good-natured and unpretentious.

O.R. Dathorne in “Amos Tutuola: The Nightmare of the Tribe” (from Introduction to Nigerian Literature, edited by Bruce King, p66) also said:

Tutuola deserves to be considered seriously because his work represents an intentional attempt to fuse folklore with modern life. In this way he is unique, not only in Africa, where the sophisticated African writer is incapable of this tenuous and yet controlled connection, but in Europe as well, where this kind of writing is impossible.

J.P. Sartre, contrasting poetry in French by Frenchmen and Africans, had this to say:

It is almost impossible for our poets to realign themselves with popular tradition. Ten centuries of erudite poetry separate them from it. And, further, the folkloric inspiration is dried up: at most we could merely contrive a sterile facsimile.

The more Westernized African is placed in the same position. When he does introduce folklore into his writing it is more in the nature of a gloss; in Tutuola it is intrinsic.

WFR: With regard to The Palm-Wine Drinkard, how much influence is there from folktale, and how much is from Tutuola’s imagination?

Tutuola: With regard to The Palm-Wine Drinkard, to start with, there is nobody like the hero ‘the drinkard’ in the traditional folktales. This character is wholly his creation. Like the ‘drinkard’ he also created other characters, and it is in the lives and journey of these characters that the folktales always, straight or refashioned, manifest. Without the creation of the ‘drinkard’ and other characters there would be no central figures to ‘live’ the folktale-life.  So, he weaved folktales into his imagination, or vice versa; and it is very difficult to separate Tutuola from the folktales, or to separate the folktales from Tutuola. Eustace Palmer said this much in The Growth of the African Novel (Heinemann, 1979): “Taking his stories direct from his people’s traditional lore, he uses his inexhaustible imagination and inventive power to embellish them, to add to them or alter them, and generally transform them into his own stories conveying his own image.”

Also, Alastair Niven, in an article “Obituary: Amos Tutuola” in the Independent (London) of June 16, 1997, wrote: “Tutuola was a born story-teller, taking traditional oral material and re-imagining it inimitably. In this way he was, though very different in method and craft, the Grimm or Perrault of Nigerian story-telling, refashioning old tales in a unique way which made them speak across cultures.” This is very true of all his works, not just The Palm-Wine Drinkard. In his work, it is therefore very difficult to separate folktales from Tutuola, or to separate Tutuola from the folktales.

WFR: In what sense is there autobiography in Amos Tutuola’s fiction?

Tutuola: There is basically no autobiography in his works for they are mainly based on Yoruba folktales. Except to say that like the heroes in his works, he passed through many ordeals in life. His education and literary ordeals are well known, but there were personal ones like ulcer, which strongly deprived him of enjoying many kinds of food and drinks throughout his adult life. It was when he went for an award in Italy that his publishers took him to the hospital there and he was greatly relieved. Generally, he did not write himself into his books.

WFR: To what extent have Nigerian writers been influenced by Tutuola?

Tutuola: “Although his first book came off the press in 1952, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town continues to excite readers and inspire literary scholars today close to a half century later. The nine novels (counting The Wild Hunter in the Bush of Ghosts) and two collections of short stories he published in the course of his controversial but commendable and courageous career place him among the most productive of African writers, and one can argue that, like the intrepid Ogun, he cleared the path for later literary stalwarts like Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, and Wole Soyinka.” – Professor Oyekan Owomoyela, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in “Amos Tutuola: A Man of His Times“

WFR: What do you think Tutuola’s legacy is — in Nigeria, in Africa more generally, and in the world?

Tutuola: “Amos Tutuola passed away in June of 1997 at the age of seventy-seven. Whatever else may be said about his work, it undeniably is part of the foundation of African writing– that part which is sunk most deeply in the substratum and psyche of African culture and imagination. However high and wide the African literary edifice grows, we’ll keep coming back to Tutuola, not just as an historically important entity, but as a necessary counterpoint  to other developments. Tutuola has become, and as time passes, will continue to become, less exotic and more inevitable as a contributor to the realm of African lit/orature. While we mourn his death, let us celebrate the life of his writings.”  –Robert Elliot Fox, “Tutuola and the Commitment to Tradition. (Amos Tutuola). Vol.29, Research in African Literature, 09-22-1998, pp203(6).

AMOS TUTUOLA: Selected Honors and Bibliography (provided by the estate)

Honours, Awards & Membership:

*Mbari Club – Co-founder.

*Visitig Research Fellow, University of Ife, (now Obafemi Awolowo University) Nigeria, 1979.

*Honorary Citizen of New Orleans (USA), 1983.

*Honorary Fellow of International Writing Program, University of Iowa, (USA), 1983.

*Winner of Grimzane and Cavour Award, Italy, 1989.

*Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America, (the third African ever to be granted this honor).

*Noble Patron of the Arts, Pan-African Writers Association, Ghana.

*Meridian Award, Odu Themes, Nigeria,1995.

*Special Fellowship Award, National League of Veteran Journalists, Nigeria, 1996.

Writings:

- The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town, Faber, 1952, Grove, 1953.

- My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Grove, 1954,reprinted, Faber, 1978.

- Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle, Faber, 1955.

- The Brave African Huntress, Grove, 1958.

- The Feather Woman of the Jungle, Faber, 1962.

- Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty, Faber, 1967.

- (Contributor) -Winds of Change: Modern Short Stories from Black Africa, Longman, 1977.

- The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town, Faber, 1981.

- The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts (facsimile of manuscript), edited with an introduction and a postscript by Bernth Lindfors, Three Continents Press, 1982, second edition, 1989.

- (Compiler and translator) – Yoruba Folktales, Ibadan University Press, 1986.

- Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer, Faber, 1987.

- The Village Witch Doctor and Other stories, Faber, 1990.

- and many short stories

Now we started our journey from the Deads’ Town directly to my home town which I had left for many years. As we were going on this road, we met over a thousand deads who were just going to the Deads’ Town and if they saw us coming towards them on that road, they would branch into the bush and come back to the road at our back. Whenever they saw us, they would be making bad noise which showed us that they hated us and also were very annoyed to see alives. These deads were not talking to one another at all; even they were not talking plain words except murmuring. They always seemed as if they were mourning, their eyes would be very wild and brown and every one of them wore white clothes without a single stain.

NONE OF THE DEADS TOO YOUNG TO ASSAULT.
DEAD BABIES ON THE ROAD-MARCH TO THE DEADS’ TOWN

We met about 400 dead babies on that road who were singing the song of mourning and marching to Deads’ Town at about two o’clock in the mid-night and marching towards the town like soldiers, but these dead babies did not branch into the bush as the adult-deads were doing if they met us, all of them held sticks in their hands. But when we saw that these dead babies did not care to branch for us then we stopped at the side for them to pass peacefully, but instead of that, they started to beat us with the sticks in their hands, then we began to run away inside the bush from these babies, although we did not care about any risk of that bush which might happen to us at night, because these dead babies were the most fearful creatures for us. But as we were running inside the bush very far off that road, they were still chasing us until we met a very huge man who had hung a very large bag on his shoulder and at the same time that he met us, he caught us (my wife and myself) inside the bag as a fisherman catches fishes inside his net. But when he caught us inside his bag, then all of the dead babies went back to the road and went away. As that man caught us with that bag, we met inside it many other creatures there which I could not describe here yet, so he was taking us far away into the bush. We tried with all our power to come out of the bag, but we could not do it, because it was woven with strong and thick ropes, its size was about 150 feet diameter and it could contain 45 persons. He put the bag on his shoulder as he was going and we did not know where he was taking us to by that night and again we did not know who was taking us away, whether he was a human-being or spirit or if he was going to kill us, we never knew yet at all.

AFRAID OF TOUCHING TERRIBLE CREATURES IN BAG

We were afraid of touching the other creatures that we met inside that bag, because every part of their bodies was as cold as ice and hairy and sharp as sand-paper. The air of their noses and mouths was hot as steam, none of them talked inside the bag. But as that man was carrying us away inside the bush with the bag on his shoulder the bag was always striking trees and ground but he did not care or stop, and he himself did not talk too. As he was carrying us far away into that bush, he met a creature of his kind, then he stopped and they began to throw the bag to and fro and they would take it up again and continue. After a while they stopped that, then he kept going as before, but he travelled as far as 30 miles from that road before daybreak.

HARD TO SALUTE EACH OTHER, HARDER TO DESCRIBE EACH OTHER, AND HARDEST TO LOOK AT EACH OTHER AT DESTINATION

Hard to salute each other, harder to describe each other, and hardest to look at each other at our destination. When it was 8 o’clock in the morning, this huge creature stopped when he reached his destination, and turned upside-down the bag and the whole of us in the bag came down unexpectedly. It was in that place that we saw that there were 9 terrible creatures in that bag before he caught us. Then we saw each other when we came down, but the nine terrible creatures were the hardest creatures for us to look at, then we saw the huge creature who was carrying us about in the bush throughout that night, he was just like a giant, very huge and tall, his head resembled a big pot of about ten feet in diameter, there were two large eyes on his forehead which were as big as bowls and his eyes would be turning when­ever he was looking at somebody. He could see a pin at a distance of about three miles. His both feet were very long and thick as a pillar of a house, but no shoes could size his feet in this world. The description of the 9 terrible creatures in the bag is as follows. These 9 terrible creatures were short or 3 feet high, their skin as sharp as sand-paper with small short horns on their palms, very hot steam was rushing out of their noses and mouths whenever breathing, their bodies were as cold as ice and we did not understand their lan­guage, because it was sounding as a church bell. Their hands were thick about 5 inches and very short, with fingers, and also their feet were just like blocks. They had no shape at all like human-beings or like other bush-creatures that we met in the past, their heads were covered with a kind of hair like sponge. Though they were very smart while walking, of course their feet would be sounding on either hard or soft ground as if somebody was walking over or knocking a covered deep hole. Rut immediately we came down with them from the bag and when my wife and I myself saw these terrible creatures, we closed our eyes, because of their terrible and fearful appearance. After a while, the huge creature carried us to another place, opened a rise-up hill which was in that place, he told the whole of us to enter it, then he followed us and closed the hole back, we not know­ing that he would not kill us but he had only captured us as slaves. When we entered the hole, there we met other more fearful creatures who I could not describe here. So when it was early in the morning, he took us out of the hole and showed us his farm to clear as the other more fearful crea­tures we met in the hole were doing. As I was working with these nine creatures in the farm, one day, one of them abused me with their language which I did not understand, then we started to fight, but when the rest saw that I wanted to kill him, then the whole of them started to fight me one by one. I killed the first one who faced me, then the second came and I killed him too, so I killed all of them one by one until the last one came who was their champion. When I started to fight him, he began to scrape my body with his sand-paper body and also with small thorns on his palms, so that every part of my body was bleeding. But I tried with all my power to knock him down and I was unable to as I could not grip him firmly with my hands, so he knocked me down and I fainted. Of course, I could not die because we had sold our death away. I did not know that my wife hid herself behind a big tree which was near the farm and that she was looking at us as we were fighting.

As there remained only the champion of the nine terrible creatures, when he saw that I had fainted, he went to a kind of plant and cut 8 leaves on it. But my wife was looking at him by that time. Then he came back to his people. After that, he squeezed the leaves with both his palms until water came out, then he began to put the water into the eyes of his people one by one and the whole of them woke up at once and all of them went to our boss (the huge creature who brought us to that place) to report what had happened in the farm to him. But at the same time that they left the farm, my wife went to that plant and cut one leaf and did as the champion did to his people, and when she pressed the water in that leaf to my eyes, then I woke up at once. As she had managed to take our loads before she left that hole and followed us to the .farm, we escaped from that farm and before the nine terrible creatures reached the hole of our boss, we had gone far away. That was how we were saved from the huge creature who caught us in his bag.

As we had escaped, we were travelling both day and night so that the huge creature might not re-capture us again. When we travelled for two and half days, we reached the Deads’ road from which dead babies drove us, and when we reached there, we could not travel on it because of fearful dead babies, etc. which were still on it.

TO TRAVEL IN THE BUSH WAS MORE DANGEROUS AND TO TRAVEL ON THE DEADS’ ROAD WAS THE MOST DANGEROUS

Then we began to travel inside the bush, but closely to the road, so that we might not be lost in the bush again.

When we had travelled for two weeks, I began to see the leaves which were suitable for the preparation of my juju, then we stopped and prepared four kinds which could save us whenever and wherever we met any dangerous creature.

As I had prepared the juju, we did not fear anything which might happen to us inside the bush and we were travelling both day and night as we liked. So one night, we met a “hungry– creature” who was always crying “hun­gry” and as soon as that he saw us, he was coming to us directly. When he was about five feet away from us, we stopped and looked at him, because I had got some juju in hand already and because I remembered that we had sold our death before entering inside the white tree of the Faithful– Mother, and so I did not care about approaching him. But as he was coming towards us, he was asking us repeatedly whether we had anything for him to eat and by that time we had only bananas which were not ripe. We gave him the bananas but he swallowed all at the same moment and began to ask for another thing to eat again and he did not stop crying “hungry-hungry-hungry” once, but when we could not bear his crying, then we loosened our loads. Perhaps we could get another edible thing there to give him, but we found only a split bean and before we gave it to him, he had taken it from us and swallowed it without hesitation and began to cry “hungry-hungry-hun­gry” as usual. We did not know that this “hungry-crea­ture” could not satisfy with any food in this world, and he might eat the whole food in this world, but he would be still feeling hungry as if he had not tasted anything for a year. But as we were searching our loads, as perhaps we could get something for him again, the egg which my tapster gave me in the Deads’ Town fell down from my wife. The hungry-creature saw it, and he wanted to take it and swallow but my wife was very clever to pick it up before him.

When he saw that he could not pick it up before my wife, then he began to fight her and he said that he wanted to swallow her. As this hungry-creature was fighting with my wife, he did not stop to cry “hungry” once. But when I thought within myself that he might harm us, then I per­formed one of my jujus and it changed my wife and our loads to a wooden-doll and I put it in my pocket. But when the hungry-creature saw my wife no more, he told me to bring out the wooden-doll for identification, so I brought it and he was asking me with doubtful mind, was this not my wife and loads? Then I replied that it was not my wife etc., but it only resembled her, so he gave the wooden-doll back to me, then I returned it to my pocket as before and I kept going. But he was following me as I was going on, and still crying “hungry.” Of course, I did not listen to him. When he-had travelled with me to a distance of about a milt-, he asked me again to bring out the wooden-doll for more identifica­tion and I brought it out to him, then he looked at it for more than ten minutes and asked me again was this not my wife? I replied that it was not my wife etc. but it only resembled her, then he gave it to me back and I was going as usual, but he was still following me and crying “hungry” as well. When he had travelled with me again to about two miles, he asked for it for the third time and I gave it to him, but as he held it he looked at it more than an hour and said that this was my wife and he swallowed it unexpectedly. As he swallowed the wooden-doll, it meant he swallowed my wife, gun, cutlass, egg and load and nothing remained with me again, except my juju.

So immediately he had swallowed the wooden-doll, he was going far away from me and crying “hungry” as well. Now the wife was lost and how to get her back from the hungry-creature’s stomach? For the safety of an egg the wife was in hungry-creature’s stomach. As I stood in that place and was looking at him as he was going far away, I saw him go so far from me that I could hardly see him, then I thought that my wife, who had been following me about in the bush to Deads’ Town had not shrunk from any suffering, so I said that, she should not leave me like this and I would not leave her for the hungry-creature to carry away. So I followed, and when I met him I told him to vomit out the wooden-doll which he had swallowed, but he refused to vomit it out totally.

BOTH WIFE AND HUSBAND IN THE HUNGRY-CREATURE’S STOMACH

I said that, rather than leave my wife with him, I would die with him, so I began to fight him, but as he was not a human-being, he swallowed me too and he was still crying “hungry” and going away with us. As I was in his stomach, I commanded my juju which changed the wooden-doll back to my wife, gun, egg, cutlass and loads at once. Then I loaded the gun and fired into his stomach, but he walked for a few yards before he fell down, and I loaded the gun for the second time and shot him again. After that I began to cut his stomach with the cutlass, then we got out from his stomach with our loads etc. That was how we were freed from the hungry-creature, but I could not describe him fully here, because it was about 4 o’clock a.m. and that time was very dark too. So we left him safely and thanked God for that.

Tomorrow is the official North American release date of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Tor), and we’re going to celebrate with lots of new content. The fact is, The Weird was the catalyst for creating the site, our research having turned up so much interesting material that we wanted to share.

You can already read the introduction to The Weird, peruse its table of contents, sample a century of first lines, and check out this brief conceptual view of the anthology. We’ve also re-posted Leah Thomas’s awesome web-comic, Reading The Weird—and in our archives you can find interviews with such The Weird contributors as Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, China Mieville, and Kathe Koja among others.

Today, we’re running Gio Clairval’s wonderful translation of Georg Heym’s classic short-short “The Dissection,” also from The Weird. It’s just one little teasing glance at the amazing translation work included in the book, most of it by Clairval (with whom we’ll soon run an interview). Also check out Lisa Tuttle’s “Replacements” from The Weird, never before posted online.

Tomorrow, we’ll run an excerpt from Amos Tutuola’s The Pine-Wine Drinkard and an interview with Tutuola’s son.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at some of the praise The Weird has already started to receive on this side of the Atlantic. You can check out the UK accolades on the Amazon sales page for the book.

–An Amazon selection for May
–A Barnes & Noble pick for May
–A Powell’s pick for May
–A Kirkus Reviews selection for May

–A British Fantasy Society Award Finalist
–Ann and I are finalists, best editor category, for the Locus Award (primarily due to The Weird)

Publishers Weekly, Starred, Boxed Review: “Ambitious in the extreme, the Vandermeers’ latest genre-blurring endeavor…is one of the most far-reaching and inclusive speculative anthologies to ever see print. Alongside familiar names — from Lovecraft and Kafka to Link and Kiernan — the Vandermeers unveil a menagerie of obscure authors and impressive stories from around the world….This standard-setting compilation is a deeply affectionate and respectful history of speculative fiction’s blurry edges [with] stunning diversity, excellent quality.”

Booklist, Starred Review: “[Icons Kafka and Lovecraft appear] herein alongside other stellar performances by writers who have faded from top best-sellerdom into obscurity (F. Marion Crawford, Hugh Walpole); are literary stars of the highest magnitude (Rabindranath Tagore, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Jorge Luis Borges); live through only one unforgettable story; and who busily augment the worldwide catalog of weird stories as this is written (most of the contributors). No popular-fiction library should not have this treasure trove.”

Edited in the context of:

• Avoid the Great Certainty (certainty and making assumptions based on certainty kills thought: look at the evidence)
• Meticulous test previous attempts (Black Water/Dark Descent)
• Rigorously test of existing canon and individual stories in that canon
• Identify of pastiche previously presented as canon
• Leave out that which has become too archetypal and therefore too known
• Ignore most self-referential and metafictional stories as sophisticated fan fiction
• Balance “historical relevance” with “modern readability”

(Incomplete) Initial Conclusions Drawn:

• Kafka is interior weird and Lovecraft exterior weird, with both representing important main threads that carry forward to the present-day.
• Weird ritual and strange science fiction also partake of “the weird”.
• Beauty and fascination are as wedded in these stories as are horror and fear of the unknown.
• Although “the weird” may at times be identified by “feel” that a certain type of “feel” can be quantified, even as it remains elusive. This “slippery” quality may frustrate academics but it also helps explain why weird fiction remains difficult to commercialize or commodify—the slippery quality allows it to shift.

Approaches:

• Overthrowing the Tyranny of Subject Matter: Exploring writers typically not associated with The Weird who wrote weird stories, in addition to many other kinds of fiction. (James Tiptree, Jr., for example)
• Repairing the Pointless Rift: Paying no attention to the vagaries of the “literary” versus “genre” divide. (Okri and Lovecraft, Tanith Lee and Murakami)
• Repatriating the Fringe with the Core: Acknowledging the role of cult authors and more experimental texts, which sometimes represent a form of the “road less trodden” and not excluding those works from the dialogue that is the anthology.
• Crafting More Complete Genealogies:  Acknowledging the debt on the weird from Decadent and Surrealist sources, even if these influences are subsumed in others.
• Articulating the Full Expanse: Exploring permutations of the weird from countries beyond the North American/UK/Australian axis, and then further exploring beyond continental European influence.
• Reinterpreting through Translation: Commissioning new translations to provide a more complete understanding of important stories. Given that the weird relies on “feel” to some extent, style in translation has a huge affect on the effect of certain stories .

Related ideas:

• Regret over taxonomy (exclusion is inevitable but not a cause for relief or happiness)
• Confront invisibility (carry forward beyond the anthology efforts to render visible to English-language readers writers not yet translated into English, or not to any great extent; render visible English-language literature that has been marginalized)
• Acknowledge the inherent imperfection of the attempt
• Never resignoneself to the inherent imperfection of the attempt

We are pleased to present this new translation by Gio Clairval from The Weird compendium, our 750,000-word anthology published in North America this week by Tor Books. The translation corrects errors in prior versions, including the use of “The Autopsy” as the title. It also keeps the intended repetition of certain words like “white.” Master of the weird Thomas Ligotti has called it one of his favorite tales. – Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

***

The dead man lay alone and naked on a white cloth, surrounded by depressing white walls, in the cruel sobriety of a wide dissection room that seemed to shiver with the screams of an endless torture.

The light of noon bathed him and awakened the dead spots on his forehead; conjured up a bright green from his naked belly, bloating his body as if it were a sack of water.

His body resembled the iridescent cup of some gigantic flower, a mysterious plant from Indian primeval forests that someone had shyly laid at the altar of death.

Splendid reds and blues sprouted down his limbs, and in the heat the large wound under his navel slowly split open like a red furrow, releasing a foul stench.

The doctors entered. Friendly men in frayed white coats and gold-rimmed pince-nez. They stepped up to the dead man and observed him with interest, as if at a scientific meeting.

From their white cabinets they took out dissecting instruments, white crates full of hammers, saws with sharp teeth, files, hideous sets of tweezers, knives with large saw teeth as crooked as vultures’ beaks forever screaming for flesh.

They began their revolting work. They resembled hideous torturers, blood flowing on their hands as they dug ever more deeply into the frigid corpse and pulled out its innards, like white cooks gutting a goose. Around their arms coiled the intestines, green-yellow snakes, and faeces dripped on their coats, a warm, putrid fluid. They punctured the bladder, the cold urine in it glistening like yellow wine. They poured it into large bowls, and it reeked of pungent, acrid ammonia. But the dead man slept. He patiently let them tug at him and pull his hair. He slept.

And while the thumping of hammers resounded on his skull, a dream, a remnant of love awoke in him, like a torch shining in his personal night.

Outside the tall window stretched a wide sky filled with small white clouds that swam like small, white gods in the light of that silent afternoon. And swallows darted high across the blue, feathers quivering in the warm sun of July.

The dead man’s black blood streamed across the blue putrefaction on his forehead. In the heat, it evaporated into an awful cloud, and the decay of death crept over him with its dappled claws. His skin began to flake apart; his belly turned white like that of an eel under the greedy fingers of the doctors, who plunged their arms up to the elbows in the wet flesh.

The decay pulled apart the mouth of the dead man. He seemed to smile. He dreamed of beatific stars, of a fragrant summer evening. His rotting lips trembled as though under a brief kiss.

“How I love you. I have loved you so much. Should I say how I love you? As you strolled across poppy fields, a flower of flames yourself, you swallowed the entire evening. And the dress that billowed around your ankles was a wave of fire in the setting sun. But you bowed your head in the light, hair still burning, inflamed by my kisses.

“So you went down there, turning to look back at me as you walked away. And the lantern swayed in your hand like the glow of a rose lasting in the twilight long after you were gone.

“I’ll see you again tomorrow. Here, under the window of the chapel, here, where the light of the candles falls about you, making your hair a golden forest, and daffodils nestle around your ankles, tenderly, like tender kisses.

I will see you again every evening in the hour of dusk. We will never part. How I love you! Should I tell you how I love you?”

And the dead man quivered in happiness on his white death table, while the iron chisels in the hands of the doctors broke open the bones of his temple.