Clever old penguin!

Penguin Books is 75 years old 

From the Penguin website’s “Company history” page

Penguin paperbacks were the brainchild of Allen Lane, then a director of The Bodley Head. After a weekend visiting Agatha Christie in Devon, he found himself on a platform at Exeter station searching its bookstall for something to read on his journey back to London, but discovered only popular magazines and reprints of Victorian novels.

Appalled by the selection on offer, Lane decided that good quality contemporary fiction should be made available at an attractive price and sold not just in traditional bookshops, but also in railway stations, tobacconists and chain stores.

The first Penguin paperbacks appeared in the summer of 1935 and included works by Ernest Hemingway, André Maurois and Agatha Christie. They were colour-coded (orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime) and cost just sixpence, the same price as a packet of cigarettes. The way the public thought about books changed forever - the paperback revolution had begun.

There's a Penguin 75th anniversary minisite about all the ways that decisive moment is being remembered this year. If all you can spare is a glance, do it just to see the banner with all the penguins from the last 75 years: skinnier ones, fatter ones, one that looks almost The New Yorkerish, and in 1945 a happy penguin executing a Fred Astaire dance step for Victory.

The famed orange covers are being honoured by Douglas Coupland in his “Speaking to the Past” project as a fantastic element of interior design for home or crack den, and oh yes, also something which communicates. He asks, “How would you speak to someone in the year 1935 from 2010, using a Penguin cover?” and shows some clever mock-covers he’s made with titles like Every book ever written fits into a shoebox, which surprises even modern me.

You download a Penguin cover template, add your title and image, and upload it to a group pool on Flickr. Of the ones uploaded so far, most seem to be about 2010 problems – energy wars, credit cards -- or inventions -- ipods, the internet -- rather than 1935 problems. Now, if you could speak to people in the past, wouldn't you be tempted to pass along some wisdom? I suggest a cover with an image of the first stretch of the German autobahn, in 1935 just completed and being sold as a "jobs creation programme", and the title The practical art of moving armies ( borrowed from the Baron de Jomini’s treatise on the art of war).

My favourite anniversary initiative is Penguin Decades. These are 5 books each from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, re-issued with new covers by famous designers from each period. The blurb says “Discover Penguin Decades. The scandalous, misunderstood, and most celebrated novels which have defined the post-war generations.” I definitely want to try them all. I might even re-read the ones I’ve already read, which are only three: From Russia with Love (50s), and A Clockwork Orange and The British Museum is falling down (both 60s). I’m not sure how I ever managed to define myself with such a poor track record, but this is definitely a chance to make up for lost time.

The Penguin decades pages on the minisite give thumbnail sketches of the decades and show all the new and old covers, including the very edition of A Clockwork Orange which my husband bought on a youthful trip to London (moving on from the more youthful still purchases of Health & Efficiency, a British magazine which lauded the salutory effects of sunbathing, even better if done naked) and which is still on our shelves. They’ve got it down as a 60s cover, but it’s actually the cover which David Pelham created in the 1970s for the movie tie-in edition. I vividly remember when the movie came out, because it quickly earned a reputation as a shocker, and doubly so for me, as my mother unexpectedly proposed that she and I go see it together, shooting us up a couple of notches in our evolving mother-daughter relationship.

Someone at Penguin should have reread the transcript of the talk David Pelham gave five years ago as part of their 70th anniversary celebrations. It's online on the Creative Review blog; it’s got lots of good anecdotes about book covers, from Lennon to Nabokov, if not Lenin.

Rest assured, a small error like this is not going to displace Penguin Books from its special place in my heart. I liked this part of the Company story about Allen Lane choosing a logo:

"He also wanted a 'dignified but flippant' symbol for his new business. His secretary suggested a Penguin."

I couldn’t help thinking of the Edward Lear nonsense alphabet of my childhood.

A was an ape
Who stole some white tape
And tied up his toes
In four beautiful bows.

Funny old ape!

That's from Edward Lear. And here's from me:

P was a penguin
Dignified but flippant  (it’s assonance, okay?)
He turned seventy-five
Spry and alive.

Clever old penguin!

The Owl and the Poussiquette

Edward Lear goes multilingual

Being fond of a good nonsense read myself, I was pleased to come across the following quote from Carolyn Wells’s introduction to an anthology of nonsense writing (via Kenneth Gangemi, an author, also an engineer and a bartender, from Bronxville, New York who is so cult I hadn’t even heard of him until my friend Nick told me about him, in a great interview in Gargoyle magazine).

"On a topographical map of literature, nonsense would be represented by a small and sparsely settled country, neglected by the average tourist, but affording keen delight to the few enlightened travelers who sojourn within its borders."

Besides Lewis Carroll, my favourite nonsense writer is Edward Lear, not the limericks -- perhaps too antique for my taste -- but the “story” poems. I find it fascinating, or maybe I mean heartrending, how this depression-prone, epileptic, lonely man who earned his living painting watercolours of rare birds, was also the creator of wild and exuberant poems about Pobbles who swim the Bristol Channel with their noses wrapped in scarlet flannel (my all-time favourite), Jumblies going to sea in a sieve, and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

But the emotion inspired by the man is not the reason I love his poems. I love them because of how it’s impossible to read them silently, at least for me. Last night I spooked my family because I was rereading “The Owl and the Pussycat” and they thought I had gone crazy whispering away to myself at the kitchen table at midnight. But how can you not? “And there in the wood a piggy-wig stood, With a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose…”

A couple of years ago I stumbled on a website which everyone who ever loved having “The Owl and the Pussycat” read to them as kids, or reading it to their kids, or both, should visit. You have to know that in the 1950s or 60s an American named Francis Steegmuller, one of the most famous Flaubert scholars of his time and translator of Madame Bovary, translated “The Owl and the Pussycat” into French. It was published in The New Yorker and is probably the most felicitous translation of a poem I have ever encountered.
The flair is there right from the start when he rhymes Owl (hibou) and kitty (minou), but the refrain is pure genius, when he comes up with “Poussiquette” for a perfectly scanned “O Poussiquette, comme tu es rare!” for “What a beautiful pussy you are!”

 I’ve never been able to find out any more details about the translation beyond the fact that it only took one afternoon to do and that Francis Steegmuller bought a Rolls Royce with the money it earned. This leaves me free to imagine that it happened in Capri, where Steegmuller and his wife, the writer Shirley Hazzard, had a villa. They made friends there with Graham Greene, who also had a villa in Capri, after Shirley broke the ice by supplying the missing line in a Robert Browning poem Greene was trying to remember over a drink in the Gran Caffe'-- I am thinking not coffee -- with a fellow Englishman (I know about this from having read her memoir Greene on Capri).


I like to think it would have been over a long lunch and vodka gimlets with Graham Greene and Yvonne Cloetta that the translation took form. “They dined on mince and slices of quince… I’m damnedly becalmed here, Graham.” And the tormented Catholic novelist would have taken a sip of his gimlet, leaned back in his chair, and produced a Lent-inspired “Ils firent un repas de maigre et de gras” -- "They had a meal of lean and fat".

The website

You can read Steegmuller's (and Greene's?) "Le Hibou et la Poussiquette" on a ridiculous but fantastic -- or maybe we could just say nonsensical -- website dedicated to "The Owl and the Pussycat" translations, which includes versions in Volapuk, an invented language which only 22 people in the world speak (I googled it), and… Morse Code. It grew out the collection of a Mr. Hugh Stewart and all in all it contains over a hundred translations.

For many of the languages, including Morse Code, you can hear the poem read aloud, or in the case of Morse Code, I suppose I should say transmitted. I listened to some of it just to see if it were at all possible to tell it was poetry -- it wasn't. I recommend trying the Russian (a Flemingesque KGB-spy-in-tight-skirt-posing-as-a-translator-type voice) and also the Cornish (local historian/pub poet), whereas the Latin is great on the page but an unpleasant read offered up by a know-it-all schoolteacher type.

The Italian translation was contributed by Domenico, an employee of an Italian restaurant in England. “Ah, just a couple of doubts here”, as Graham might have said. The piggy-wig has become a pigeon, and the turkey who lives on the hill has become a Turk. It reminded me of how I once said something about the Persian blinds at our bedroom window to my (Italian) husband, and made the word masculine instead of feminine, thus calling them “Persian men” instead of “Persian blinds”. I still have the funny picture he drew me of dozens of little men with Persian headdresses swarming at the window glass.

Try it now! www.bompa.org.