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.

Diagram Prize announces year's oddest title!

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes is the winner of the Diagram Prize for the year’s oddest title, followed by What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua? and Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich.

My vote had gone to Collectible spoons of the Third Reich. I was disappointed to see it come in behind a kids book (shouldn’t kids books be handicapped, like overly endowed racehorses, in a contest for odd titles?) but Horace Bent, custodian of the prize, more than made it up to me with these comments quoted in the The Bookseller's official announcement on March 26th:

"Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes proved to be the initial front runner. It defended its poll-topping position despite strong support for the spoon-carrying Third Reich, once again attempting to muscle in on someone else’s territory.

"But the public proclivity towards non-Euclidian needlework proved too great for the Third Reich to overcome. If only someone had let the Poles know in ’39.”

Titles have been on my mind recently. I finally got around to reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin, one of my favourite literary personalities since the times of In Patagonia, considered one of the great travel books, which it is, but not only. In Patagonia is the reason why, when we had to clear out my childhood home after my parents died, I put at the top of the list of the things I wanted the fragment of dinosaur egg which a student of my father’s had sent him from some dig somewhere in France, and which resided ever after on the dining room bookshelves amid H Rider Haggard books, family snapshots and rock samples. Those of you who have read In Patagonia will get it: it's my brontosaurus skin. If you haven't read it, do.

When I saw how thick Nicholas Shakespeare's book was, I was afraid that it might be one of those biographies like Norman Sherry’s magnum opus on Graham Greene, in which for every day of Mr. Greene’s life we are given such details as where he had tea and what kinds of cakes he had, or the postcard he sent to his colleague at The Times, and what room that colleague's office was in. But it wasn’t. In fact, 600 pages seemed the only length one could possibly use to close in – a bit – on someone as complicated, contradictory, elusive and talented as Bruce Chatwin.

I kept it on my bedside table and every night for about a month I’d pick it up and read ten or twenty pages wherever the book opened to, and every time there’d be a different -- how does Yeats put it, "the careless planets in their courses”. Loulou de la Falaise, Werner Herzog, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gregor von Rezzori, and so on and so on, and… a British film maker named Peter Adam, who wrote an autobiography with the fantastic title Not drowning but waving. Maybe it’s because I’m not English (I was told, as I went around the library enthusing, that it’s a common phrase in Britain) but for me this went right up on there on the best-ever autobiography titles list.

Who out there has played the game of  'What would be the title of your autobiography'?  Back in my twenties I found this jewel in an old phrasebook for travellers and thought it could be mine: The lady wants hers with cream.

And now I’ve found a new one, for my prime. Danger vehicle exit lane. Driving into the Civic Car Park the other day I caught sight of this trenchant, punctuation free warning on a sign posted alongside the carriageway opposite mine.  My first thought  - I swear this is true - was that it was indicating an exit lane reserved for “danger vehicles” eg giant diggers and such. And it flashed through my mind that if they only knew, they’d be making me use that lane. This was a few days after I’d knocked off a hubcap on the approach to the Hopetown bridge. I had an image of my little white Vitz with its missing hubcap, like a tomcat with a torn ear, bursting out of the Danger vehicle exit lane into the night.

Which is my favourite autobiography title? Probably this one from the great adventurer Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo over the Atlantic from east to west:

West with the night

At the library:

Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

West with the night by Beryl Markham