Pdr

[nkandpa2]

This PR is for scraping the Public Domain Review data closing #60. Samples from the collections, essays, and conjectures are below:

Sample Collection Example

{
  "id": "hippolyte-hodeau-trench-art",
  "text": "A Family Tree: Hippolyte Hodeau’s Trench Art (ca. 1917)\nText by Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes\nMar 26, 2024\n\n\n\nThierry Dornberger’s family keepsakes include a memento exceptionally delicate. His great-grandfather, Hippolyte Hodeau, was a World War I private who served in Argonne. As Dornberger relates, Hodeau “made the trenches and was gassed. Following the dull sound of a shell falling . . . he was wounded in the ear.” Like many soldiers, Hodeau spent hours huddled in these muddy channels. In order to kill time, perhaps, or lift his spirits, he gathered leaves from an oak tree — elongated, striated, forest green — and used a form of relief carving to inscribe the names of his daughters, Andrée and Eléonore, as well as the word “souvenir” and what looks like “Argonne”.\n“Trench art”, as it’s called, wasn’t necessarily fashioned in dugouts and wasn’t usually so fragile. Collectors seek out letter openers made of shrapnel; crucifixes made of bullets; and artillery shells fashioned into everything from bracelets to clocks to candelabras. Wooden walking sticks were festooned with intricate carved heads, and tiny valentine pillows sewn and beaded for sweethearts back home. Hodeau’s engraved leaves are part of this resourceful genre, but there is another artistic tradition to which they also belong — that of arborglyphs, or tree carving. Humans have long regarded trees as witnesses. Basque sheepherders in the American West wrote poetry on birch, Confederate Civil War soldiers graffitied their names in trunks, and various Aboriginal Australian tribes honored the dead on bark. Whereas these gestures leave a bit of the human in the landscape, Hodeau’s engravings take a bit of the landscape with the human. “I was here” says one; “I was there” says the other.\nAs unique as his objects may seem, Hodeau was not alone in carving leaves. The art form flourished during World War I as a way to enhance letters home with a unique lightweight enclosure. Soldiers used a needle or knife to whittle between the oak and chestnut veins, leaving only words or, sometimes, an image. Due to the partial opacity of perforated leaves, the carvings are especially enchanting when lit from behind; sometimes they’re called “feuilles de poilus”, or “tree leaf lace”.\nLittle has been written about this kind of memorialization, but French military history forums brim with amateur investigators and collectors. The user “GillesR”, for instance, reports tracing a leaf that reads “Souvenir Alsace” to an infantryman named Bringuier, who was left for dead on the battlefield in 1914, captured by the Germans, and subsequently released as unfit for combat after the amputation of his left arm. Andre Dupuis of the 52nd Territorial Infantry Regiment emblazoned “CapNap” in 1915, whereas Alfred Laperrière was fond of writing longer, more complicated phrases — “Souvenir de Serbie” (Serbian souvenir); “Je pense à toi” (Thinking of you); “Ton mari aimant” (Your loving husband).\nWords predominate, though there are startling exceptions. The Jardin Botanique de Nancy claims to have unearthed a silhouette of a soldier in profile, perhaps a self-portrait. Bernard Dauphin’s website gathers an assortment of leaves reading “Souvenir”, “Helene”, and “Yvonna” (the last enclosed in a heart), and tells of meeting a Frenchman who was deported to Germany during World War II under the service du travail obligatoire and who survived by traded carved leaves for sausage. Other specimens have no author, and no story. It seems that these type of leaves have only recently been gathered for exhibition. A 2022 show at the Halle Saint-Piere in Paris apparently included a “mémoire végétale de la Grande Guerre” (botanical memorial of World War I), while the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, exhibited a remarkable collection of leaf portraiture in that same year.\nThis eco-trench art might have quietly composted were it not for Europeana’s 1914–1918 project, which drew attention to the phenom by soliciting information from the public and digitizing thousands of fragile artifacts.",
  "source": "public-domain-review",
  "date": "Mar 26, 2024",
  "author": "Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes",
  "type": "collection",
  "added": "2024-05-01T21:38:18.287720",
  "metadata": {
    "license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
    "url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hippolyte-hodeau-trench-art/"
  }
}

Sample Conjecture Example

{
  "id": "last-pole",
  "text": "Last Pole\n\nBy Julian Chehirian\nMay 27, 2020\n\n“Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts.” So writes John Durham Peters in his brilliant and strange 1999 history of communication (and its failures), Speaking to the Air. At the heart of that study is a dialectical, prophetic effort to show that our purported yearning for error-free intersubjective encounters has always veiled a kind of obverse mystery: a “felicitous impossibility of contact” wherein we long for each other, ourselves, and a different world. Whenever technology is drafted into the service of “communication”, the resulting devices inevitably service that antinomic condition of spectral solitude, silence, and interception. In this affecting essay/experiment, Julian Chehirian goes looking for the history of telecommunication, and is left sitting in the slim shadow of a lightning rod, listening to a voice from beyond the grave.  — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor\n\nAfter acquiring an advanced degree in history I spent several years adrift, often on cheap inter-state buses. I continued to present bits of my dissertation on the history of telecommunications technologies (specifically, on dropped calls) to a series of miscalculated audiences including marxist archaeologists, military and maritime historians, and shortwave-radio repairmen at small colleges and public venues.\nFinally, after a time, I found stable work in Central New Jersey.\nThere I had been offered a job as a Records Retention Specialist for the State.\nEager to leave the antechamber of unsure employment, I accepted.\nApart from a terse letter informing me of the site that I am to report to and an overview of my responsibilities, I had little with which to move into my new residence in Lambertville — a little room set above an antiques store peddling mid-century modernity.\nThe position was “Statewide, as required”, but placed me in-town, in a foreclosed office building that had once housed the claims center of a flood insurance firm. From the vantage point of my desk I could see, alternately, deeds of sale that I was to examine and file, and a river too vacant for its breadth: lacking docks, void of boats, and broached only by the foundations of an absent bridge.\n*\nAt nighttime I enjoy listening to cassette tapes I
’ve collected from a church thrift shop. I have spent many nights in this way, after an early dinner, fixing my attention on a new cassette while allowing my gaze to flatten against the pale of plastered walls. One cassette offers astute marital advice, one projects a brassy Montreal marching band, and a third is “psychoacoustic”, containing, I have come to believe, the sounds of sailing. Cables tensing, water wiping forward on the hull, and the sound of fabric slapping back and forth. I listen in stillness.\n*\nIn late January my supervisor called me, uncharacteristically, with an assignment. It concerned a piece of land in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Now it was owned by the County — a park — but once it had been a telecommunications facility. There was, he said, a request from AT&T, the previous landowner, who wished to reclaim some unspecified thing from the land, which the County had since made into an ecological preserve — a rarified meadows habitat.\nBetween 1929 and the late 60s, he told me, transatlantic telephone calls made from the United States were usually destined to pass by short wave radio signal through this 800 acre farm once known as the “American Telegraph and Telephone International Radio Telephone Transmission Station”. The farm was punctured by hundreds of 85+ ft tall pole-antennas arranged in rhombic formations — with each projecting sounds made in Chicago, Albany, or Washington, towards London, Tangier, Damascus, or Buenos Aires. ※※Indexed under…PoleLast transatlantic telephone\nIn the 1960s some 16,000 conversations per day moved through here. By 1975 the facility had become obsolete, superseded by undersea cable and satellite communications. At the time when AT&T decommissioned the facility only one antenna remained in use, connecting the mainland to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.\nToday one last pole remains . Although poles were usually recycled by AT&T, Charles Bryan, a farmer who purchased the land, asked to keep one. That pole, once a trans-spatial and temporal bridge to Tel Aviv, served instead as a lightning rod between 1975 and 1998.\nThere was, my supervisor said, little chance for an easy resolution, but it would be best “if you produced a report for the State”.\n*\nI drove towards the site the following morning. The roads are small. Though there are many of them, few lead to others which lead to the site. Many pass into yet smaller roads, gravel roads and then truncate.\nI see, after some time, a sign announcing “Mercer Meadows County Park”.\nI circumscribe the park with my car, referencing aerial images of the land — tracing the outer bounds whose interior I am to survey.\nThe terrain of the park is varied. Some entry points allow passage on narrow pathways between thorny woods. Another spills out into a wide, grassy, rolling expanse. On the perimeter are failing rural houses. A view of one is blocked by a raised pool covered with tarp which rises and sighs very much like a chest. Another house rests uninhabited, a wound in its roof yawning and pulling the structure inward.\nI notice a smaller sign that directs me towards the Bryan Farm and find my place in a small gravel lot. Now on foot, my line of sight is reduced to the path ahead and the trees about. Walking past the occasional power walker and baby stroller, I notice a number of guiding displays spread throughout the pole farm-turned-nature preserve, providing descriptions of the antenna technology once used by AT&T as well as a historical chronology of the facility.\nBut my eyes catch on something else:\nA photograph from 1950 whose subject and object I cannot confidently distinguish.\nThe gazes of two of the people pictured seem to repeat the gaze of the camera towards something other than themselves. My own moves beyond the group, and thereafter I cannot help but unsee them, my attention taken over by the poles — those dark incisions receding into the pale. I know that there were in that very instant a thousand or more voices in exchange — like a vectoring cloud of gnats, an exchange of energy not visible, without trace, but there nonetheless.\n*\nMy historical training reminds me that what could be known of a place like this (or anyplace) either exists in the form of written records or else cannot enter into serious discussion.\nI remember a professor who liked to repeat to us: … “no traces, no history” … his lower lip pulsing with a kind of affectionate resentment towards the very idea.\nBut even historians can have their moments of lowered inhibition. Moments where such uncertain thoughts can be thought, if only for a time. I reach back for questions, questions that once seemed permissible in the stifled ecstasy of my graduate studies. I reach back for the memory of a night immersed in a paper on telecommunications. In this story there were patent applications, bureaucracies, federal regulators and the US military. Wartime protocols, engineers and scientists. Local landowners. Emerging technology and emerging forms of experience. For there were, after all, people making telephone calls.\nIn my own work I had been wanting to write about telephones as a “social history of intimacy” while also doing a history of the technology itself.  But I was, in the end, forced by professional considerations to choose only one. The latter, predictably, since the former was deemed hardly to make sense, and anyway to be quite likely impossible to achieve.  (I vaguely recall a text message from my supervisor, nervously double checking that I had understood his concerns.)\nSunset approaches, and I drive home without anything to report, advancing westward on a string of narrow roads pressed on both sides by corn fields and weathered houses.\n*\nIn the morning another message arrived from my supervisor. “On my docket” today was to call an Elizabeth Dawn to inquire about records on the land.\nAfter several encounters on the phone tree I was dialed in to Dawn.\n\"Hello Ms. Dawn\", I began. “I am calling from Parks and Forests. I am trying to get some information about a former facility of yours at 111-167 Cold Soil Road in Lawrenceville, New Jersey”.\n“Yes?”\nAll emphasis now on my next move, which must escape disinterest and disbelief.\n“Well, I’
m looking to find out if you have records on anything that the company left behind when it sold the property”, I said suggestively, making my mark and moving quickly out of the way in deference.\n“Oh, sure, okay.”\nDawn felt alright. But on the edge of her voice I could hear some sedimented, fierce, and forthcoming impatience if I made the wrong move. I could hear the sound of a coiled stationary telephone cable slinking against the edge of a desk in bunches, like tranches of something she has on her mind but awaits the right amount of pressure to put through to me.\n“Do you have”, she began, “an information authorization?”\n*\nSo I found myself at the county archive instead to check for anything on record with the State. The archive was occupied by other rank and file sent there, like myself, by higher ups to track down paperwork. I was pointed to a filing cabinet where I found only a permit for oversized-load deliveries to the site in 1967.\n*\nAfterwards I returned to the pole farm to search for anything left over from AT&T.\nI took inventory of what little remained amid the brush, on stumps, and in trees. Twelve pole tensioners that appear to be porcelain but feel like bakelite, like in the picture above on the lower right. Some thirty-five feet of braided metal cable attached to the tensioners. Elsewhere I noticed porcelain knobs, like the one pictured on the top left, some less intact. I ran my finger on the groove and found three downed telephone poles nearby with hand- and foot-holds. But I felt I had exhausted the space, and that what more there was could only lie at some remote threshold of access. Below, or above, or maybe both.\nI began to develop a taste for the land itself as an “archive” — but what, if anything, can it recall? Does it remember the first of the telephonic voices that trickled through its body?\n*\nIn a public library in Trenton, I wait for the rain to pass and rifle through A History of the Telephone, reaching a passage on the first transatlantic telephone call. On January 7, 1927, the president of AT&T, stationed on the East River in New York, announced to the secretary of the General Post Office of Great Britain: “Across three thousand miles of ocean, individuals in the two cities may by telephone exchange views and transact business instantly, as if they were face to face.”\nPower spoke first, but a closer examination by Cary O’Dell reveals that Power merely pasted over a prior day’s test call — which was more accurately the inaugural transmission.\nBeyond the terminal point of our recording, O’Dell notes that\na prophetic, if slightly rueful, chord is struck when the American speaker states, \"Distance doesn’t mean anything anymore. We are on the verge of a very high speed world….people will use up their lives in a much shorter time, they won’t have to live so long.\"\nWhat happened after the presidential ribbon cutting the following day has hardly been preserved, not even in the cracks of an archive. But if these first trickles created the conditions of transmission, what followed was an estuary of voices. Communions from afar, unpleasant news, stretched out friendships, loves, business affairs, and transactions.\nI think about this land as it is now, silent except for the crow and the rustling shrub. I think about this straddling of presence and absence, desire, and communicative possibility and improbability. How strange it is that even when the facility was operational, little — nothing — could be heard of the many conversations moving through here to elsewhere.\n*\nOn the pole farm I lose some confidence in my disciplinary training.\nI remember a book, Wisdom Sits in Places. There, an anthropologist (Keith Basso) had studied the meaning of places and memory for peoples of the Western Apache. He points out that memory and its possibility for survival and transmission is closely related to place. So the displacement of natives from ancestral lands has had the effect of stripping the past from its places of residence.\nThis park has a longer story than I know, taken as it has been from the Leni Lenape by the Dutch, and then sold to the British Empire to the Quakers to English farmers and then to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company before returning to the public domain.\n*\nAt the end of what can be said there remains, I think, space for a more concerted listening. Dislocated from history, I begin to listen to what is around. I had not listened enough.\nI follow a bend in the boardwalk and come upon a bench well occupied by a group.\nI stop. I accept a cigarette. I ask them how they were doing  —
about their day. They tell me that Chris Baranowski, whose name is printed on the bench, had passed away. Of an overdose. Due to Fentanyl. While attempting rehab. His friends did not realize the extent of the situation. His parents had placed this bench here for those who knew him to come to, and they had done so.\n“He was a great musician. Music meant everything to him”, the guy sitting on the left told me. “The service for him was at the Presbyterian church in Lawrenceville nearby. We came from different places. These guys from DC. This one from New York. I came from Philly. The church was really full. His family and some of his friends spoke and it was so much being there without him, while surrounded by everyone who loved him. After everybody had said everything that could be said, his family brought a stereo up to the altar. They put on a cassette of a one track recording Chris made. He was by himself in a room inside the world”, he said and looked elsewhere. “You know we could play it for you”, the one on the right offered.\nIn the recording Chris gives his interpretation of this song by Robbie Basho.\n\"Visions of the Country\" by Robbie Basho\n\nI felt something quite strange sitting on the bench with them, listening to a diminutive speaker that had been placed in the grass — a little telephonic grille spilling him into the surround. I could feel him present though I could not see him. The brittle barrier between his room somewhere in the world and this place at present had cracked and softened.\nChris’ bench looked out onto a valley and in the distance there was the last remaining pole  —  the one that farmer Charles had used as a lightning rod. The pole had pointed to Tel Aviv, but now it could point elsewhere, too.\nFor some time later I thought about poles and what they could index and what they could not. About being there in between the grasses and the streams and the fallen poles.\nI thought about the friends who came to listen and about a family’s grief too. Chris’ voice carries around these poles, delicately, appearing to those who can hear around for it.\nI did not locate other utterances that converged in those antennas. But I do not doubt that they are there.  In the air.  In that place.  As I listen and wait.\nScroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.\n\nThe text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.",
  "date": "May 27, 2020",
  "author": "Julian Chehirian",
  "source": "public-domain-review",
  "type": "conjecture",
  "added": "2024-05-01T21:47:37.858875",
  "metadata": {
    "license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
    "url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/last-pole/"
  }
}

Sample Essay Example

{
  "id": "pseudo-boccaccio-yiddish-pulp-fiction-and-the-man-who-ripped-off-joyce",
  "text": "Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce\n\nBy Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti\nApril 17, 2024\n\nIn 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth.\n\nDeep within the bibliography to the sixth volume of the journal Studi sul Boccaccio (Boccaccio Studies), we find this entry:\n[G. Boccaccio], Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta. Two hitherto untranslated stories by Giovanni Boccaccio with some unpublished sketches by Aubrey Beardsley. New York, Biblion Soc., 1927; for private circulation.1\nAnd beneath it, in smaller type, a peculiar note: “Sono operette inventate.” That is to say: these are invented little works, daring forgeries produced by some unscrupulous agent many years after Boccaccio’s death. Who was this agent? No translator is mentioned, but the stories were published by the Biblion Society. Though its name is shared with the Erotika Biblion Society of London, publisher of the pornographic novel Teleny (often attributed to Oscar Wilde), the Biblion Society that printed these stories was an American venture, based in New York. And it was run by none other than that archduke of literary piracy and pornography, Samuel Roth.\nRoth inscribed himself fatally into the history of literary modernism as the first person to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States. While The Little Review had previously published excerpts from the novel, many issues of this journal were seized and destroyed — and its editors charged with distributing obscenity by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice — creating an opportunity for Roth. He was able to plan an unauthorized, bowdlerized, and error-ridden edition of Ulysses to appear in 1928–29.2 Joyce tried to fight the forthcoming publication with the help of an American law firm, seeking an injunction in the autumn of 1927. In a typically audacious response, Roth appealed to his readers to subscribe to a fund for his defense in the name of “the liberty of beauty”.3\nRoth’s editorial license was not limited to radical modernist contemporaries — it extended even to the most canonized figures in the western tradition. In our case, Giovanni Boccaccio. Printed as a “literary supplement” to later issues of Two Worlds, “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” are titillating tales in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, accompanied with illustrations (supposedly) by Aubrey Beardsley. In “Pasquerella”, the doomed eponymous heroine marries Count Sandro Bernini when she is fifteen years old, and is quickly “made aware of the demands of her marriage”. She gets pregnant; Sandro grows indifferent. Thirteen years later, her son Phillip becomes obsessed with Bianca, the neighbor’s daughter, whom Pasquerella has hired as live-in help. Bianca pleads to her employer, explaining that Phillip has a key to her room and breaks in at night. Pasquerella doesn’t believe the young girl, and decides to sleep in the room herself. In the dark, Phillip mistakes his mother for his would-be lover. “Never before had the core of passion trembled in Pasquerella of its own accord. Under the delicate considerately tenuous fingers of her son it shot into sudden flower.” Disgusted the next morning, she sends him away, under the pretense of education, and gives birth to a child eight months after, whom she abandons to an abbey. Many years later, Phillip returns as a war hero with a new wife, Pamela, and Pasquerella is overcome with “strange, rapidly intensifying emotions”. She recognizes the young woman: it is her child — Phillip has married his sister and daughter. Like an Italian Oedipa, Pasquerella sneaks into their room while they are sleeping, returning to the primal scene — “strange forces were working within her, directing her daggered hand, forcing it . . .” — and ends the chain of incest once and for all.\nIn “Madonna Babetta”, a Neapolitan priest named Lorenzo befriends his Protestant neighbor, Cornelius, “a young man of remarkable physical attractiveness”. They take long walks, discuss religion: “Ah, I see, sighed Cornelius, We burn in hell for the sin of having intercourse with pretty women.” An aristocrat named Madonna Babetta captures Father Lorenzo’s ear and twists the sacrament of confession to her own sordid purposes, claiming that Cornelius has been ogling her in the evenings. Upon hearing these rumors from Lorenzo, Cornelius decides to do exactly the thing he is charged with, hiding in Madonna Babetta’s garden, “hoping to catch a glimpse of his evil double”. When he locks eyes with his accuser, she smiles at him knowingly, and Cornelius recognizes the ruse for what it is. They become lovers. One day, Madonna Babetta murders her husband Helvetius with a dagger, and asks that Cornelius bind her to the bed, arranging the room “as if a desperate struggle had taken place”. When Cornelius later expresses guilt for complicity in her scheme, Madonna Babetta embraces him, dagger in hand, and he slumps over, dead. Taking up the pipe and magnifying glass, Father Lorenzo enters the widow’s garden himself in order to ascertain how two respected men have returned to God before their time. He deduces Madonna Babetta’s role and storms into her bedchamber, demanding a confession for double homicide. “Father, she breathed. Would you not murder to have me now?” We cut to the future:\nThe sainted Father Lorenzo is seen often mounting the street to the Via Nilla at that hour between four and six when the sea about Naples seems to swoon at the approach of the fiery sun, but it is doubtful whether he is preoccupied with the state of Madonna Babetta’s soul, or that the Madonna has so many sins to confess, for the maid servant has never yet heard, that chant beginning. . . . In Nomine Patri . . . issuing from her mistress’ chamber.\nThe setting of Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta is a pastiche of premodern Italy à la Boccaccio: full of villas, confessors, and passionate, murderous women.4 The stories are rather entertaining, but there are irregularities of style and detail that would not be found in the authentic works of Boccaccio.5 Though there are many transgressive women in Boccaccio’s work, their depiction is in stark contrast to the lurid, extended violence of Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta. There are also issues of a historical nature. Touched as we may be by the friendship between Catholic and Protestant, it is important to remember that Martin Luther was born more than a century after Boccaccio’s death. Or take for example the colorful mishmash of names, whose morphological disunity is characteristic of archaizing, foreignizing works: the Italian Lorenzo and his good friend, the Latin Cornelius; Madonna Babetta and her husband, Helvetius.6\nBut Roth was not just content to expand the canon of Boccaccio — he wanted to do Aubrey Beardsley the same favor. The “hitherto unpublished” Boccaccio stories discovered by the Biblion Society were to be illustrated “With Some Hitherto Unpublished Sketches by Aubrey Beardsley”. In fact, all of the illustrations by Beardsley had already been printed. The first, depicting a naked angel, which Roth titled “New Sketch”, had already been published in 1898 under the name “Mirror of Love”. The next four full-page illustrations, all featuring people looking pensive and forlorn amid vegetation, come from the Dent edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1892) — the blank and white boxes in their top right corners were supposed to contain chapter numbers. The final full-page illustration is “Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Women”, from an edition of Aristophanes printed privately in 1896.7\nThere are also sketches that are falsely credited to Beardsley, including the repeated, semi-typographic motifs printed between paragraphs — two women in repose in “Pasquerella”, a young man wooing a woman lying on a phallic sofa in “Madonna Babetta” — and a full-page print entitled “The Governesses Disporting themselves in the Garden”. Finding the origin of these illustrations provides a helpful context for the Boccaccio stories published by Roth. All three of these drawings are in fact by the Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany, and were published as illustrations to a 1926 edition of The Songs of Bilitis. Released in 1894 under the title Les Chansons de Bilitis, these erotic poems were originally publicized as supposed translations from the Greek poet Bilitis, a contemporary of Sappho. In reality, they were written by the Belgian-born poet Pierre Louÿs who, in the 1926 edition from which Roth must have taken the illustrations, presents himself as the author, not the translator. Les Chansons de Bilitis are thus pseudotranslations: works of literature that claim to be translations from another language but are in fact original compositions by their would-be translator. Intentional or not, lifting illustrations from Bilitis associates Roth’s stories with contemporary European pseudotranslations.\nOne wonders why Roth would select images from a pseudotranslation for this volume. Was the decision, in fact, a sort of wink toward the camera, a playful admission of guilt for the inquiring contemporary reader, or, beyond the grave, toward the future collator of his work? Or was the inclusion of these images purely pragmatic: he saw they were effective for marketing one forgery, so why not for his own? Roth produces a space of unanswerable questions as his legacy.\nAt first glance, it can be tempting to group “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” with Pogany’s Bilitis or James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, relatively poor forgeries which purported an ancient source. A simple explanation for their provenance would be that “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” were fabricated by Roth or by someone in his employ. And if this were true, the case would likely be closed . . . but two pamphlets, written in Yiddish and published at the turn of the century by the Hebrew Publishing Company, make this story all the more strange.\n***\nEven if you are a student of Yiddish literature, there is a good chance you have never heard the name Dovid-Moyshe Hermalin. He, like Roth, was an immigrant to America. He came from Romania in 1885, when he was twenty years old, and died when Roth was seventeen. One is tempted to imagine a meeting between the two, perhaps in a cafeteria on the Lower East Side, where you could get stewed fruit: the Yiddish writer in the last year of his life and the young correspondent for the New York Globe. But, with no record of its occurrence, to describe such a meeting is pure fabulation. Though Hermalin was among the most prolific and popular Yiddish men of letters in his day, he has been all but forgotten. This is likely because his writings would be classified post facto as shund, and thus excluded from the Yiddish canon. Literally, shund derives from a German term referring to the unusable remnants of an animal left over after slaughter and processing, but in Yiddish it means, more or less, “trash literature”, or perhaps more generously “pulp fiction”.8 Shund literature usually appeared in newspapers, and the stories were often titillating, full of sex and suspense, and written to sell. Around the turn of the century, vocal Yiddish intellectuals began to rail against shund, decrying it a poor representative of Jewish culture and deleterious for the impressionable Yiddish-reading public.\nThis was a common critique: shund literature was too indebted to European models, too bound up in translation, to be properly Jewish. It did not conform to a politics of Jewish national autonomy. According to the leading Yiddish intellectuals at the time, Jewish literature, like the Jewish people, needed be one among many, on the same plane as the peoples and literatures of Europe, not dependent on or subservient to them. The Yiddish authors who have been canonized, and therefore disproportionately translated, are those whose work conformed, mainly, to a non-shund model. Recent projects have tried to turn the tide of research away from canonical Yiddish literature and toward shund, acknowledging its central position in the reading lives of Yiddish speakers and recovering its visibility.9\nHermalin wrote shund novels alongside works of popular philosophy and journalism, but it seems his real specialty was the translation or adaptation of popular European authors for the Yiddish-reading public. In our database of translations into Yiddish, we have so far identified twenty-four such works. He wrote “adaptations” of Goethe, Conan Doyle, Swift, Maupassant, Zola, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and, as you might have guessed, Boccaccio. He generally worked with the Hebrew Publishing Company of New York, one of the most prolific producers of Yiddish reading material during those boom times, when various Czars’ censors, all but banning the Yiddish publishing within Russia, inadvertently turned New York into the printing press for the Yiddish world.\nAround the turn of the century, Hermalin produced two adaptations of Boccaccio: Paskarela with the press of B. Rabinovits, and Madam Babeta with the Hebrew Publishing Company. In contrast to Roth’s “hitherto untranslated”, it is stated on the cover page of both stories that Hermalin had “baarbet” (adapted) these works from Boccaccio. This gives him a little wiggle room, though the introduction to Madam Babeta does explicitly state that it is “one of the best stories from the Decameron”.\nPaskarela and Madam Babeta are longer versions of those same stories that Roth printed in English twenty-seven years later. Unless some proto-version of these two stories surfaces, the most likely explanation seems to be that the tales were composed by Hermalin as pseudotranslations of Boccaccio, and that Roth (or someone close to him) translated these stories and passed them off once more as authentic, lost stories by Boccaccio. By birth a Galician Jew, Roth knew Yiddish, and used Yiddish sources to produce translations of Heinrich Heine, since he had no German.10 He was also an inveterate publisher of phony translations, with sensational titles such as 1941’s I Was Hitler’s Doctor and 1951’s My Sister and I, supposedly a lost work by Nietzsche. He had the means, the motivation, and the sheer brazenness necessary to take a pair of Yiddish fakes, translate them into English, and pass them off as genuine discoveries to an unsuspecting literary public.11\nRoth was situated in a strange middle place. The free way he dealt with authorship has much in common with the prior generation of Jewish-American literary production. He would have done well with the Hebrew Publishing Company, where, for example, Thomas Mayne Reid was falsely presented as Jules Verne, and German adventure novels were published as the work of Jewish authors.12\nOf course, if Roth were to market Hermalin’s pseudo-Boccaccio to his literary, anglophone market, the stories would have to be adapted. The English versions are significantly shorter than the Yiddish (in the case of “Pasquerella”, seventeen vs. eighty-three pages), and the style of the English is significantly more reserved. The Yiddish narrator delights in parables — he philosophizes on the incontinence of human nature, on inexorable desire, and he often addresses the reader directly. At one point, he asks us: “Have you ever plucked a rose from a bush? Yes?” and then uses the rest of the paragraph to compare Pasquerella to that rose. Roth’s version, conversely, sticks to indirect, third-person narration, and pretends toward a sort of Anglo-Saxon dignity. For example, that same rose simile is retained in the English, but it is framed instead as “Whoever has plucked a rose from its branch . . .” The Yiddish version is also significantly more explicit in its descriptions. Hermalin describes the large bosoms, plump arms, and broad shoulders of Pasquerella and Babetta with relish, over and over, and the blood of their murdered victims is bright red and comes forth in lurid sprays. Roth, publishing for a public with literary pretensions, seemed to think it wise to tone down the extravagance.13\nHad Roth wanted, he certainly could have found other famous works of questionable provenance in the Yiddish press. Hermalin produced two more Boccaccio “adaptations” entitled Printsesin Tsuleyka (Princess Zuleika) and Di Tsvey Poorlakh (The Two Couples). Printsesin Tsuleyka is actually a significantly expanded adaptation of a real story from the Decameron: the seventh story of the second day, about the Sultan of Babylon who sent his daughter Alatiel to the King of Algarve as a wife. But under Hermalin’s hand, Alatiel’s name changes to Zuleika, which also happens to be the traditional name for Potiphar’s wife, the Egyptian woman who tried to seduce Joseph. This biblical story is referenced in both versions of Babetta, and seems to have exerted a special force on Hermalin. And how could it not have? Being, as it is, one of the shund-ier parts of the Hebrew bible.14\n***\n“Madonna Babetta” and “Pasquerella”, in Yiddish and in English, are but two of countless examples of unlicensed literary appropriations. And although they are, in a sense, rather poor forgeries, they reveal the curious and irreverent ways in which literature is reproduced and kept alive across the boundaries of class and nation by means of adaptation. Boccaccio was an adapter himself: he took material for the Decameron from the whole wealth of narratives that were available to him — from French, Italian, and Latin sources — which in turn adapted stories of non-European origin, probably composed in Arabic and Sanskrit.15 Boccaccio reworked them as he saw fit, and wove them together to create his opus. The Decameron itself was an anthology of adaptations, held together by a well-wrought frame narrative.\nA history of translation is incomplete without a proper charting of the muddied streams of unlicensed adaptation, false attribution, and pseudotranslation. Born beside on tributary of the Dniester and buried near the Hudson, Roth, like Hermalin, called this contentious space home. As did Boccaccio, some six-hundred years prior. But while the Decameron has been thoroughly canonized, the texts that Roth, Hermalin, and their comrades produced by these practices have been forgotten, relegated to the dustbin of literary studies as shund, marginalized as curiosities. A shame, because texts of this sort constituted an outsized proportion of the material that readers actually read. Texts like these, and not the canonized classics, were the bread and butter of the popular press. To understand the functions and methods of translation as they were and are — not as they are supposed to be — we must turn attention to these stories.\nBoccaccio, Hermalin, and Roth all belong to the same tradition. They are collators, adaptors, collectors, and tellers of tales. And if we are to study them, then we must be too. All the more so because Hermalin and Roth did not provide frame narratives for their stories: they published no acknowledgements with their texts; none of that sinew which connects the femur to the hip. Perhaps out of piety, that fleshy byproduct, the origin of shund, was thrown away. So it is up to us to produce the frame story for Hermalin and Roth — to bring bones together, put tendons and flesh upon them. This is done by problematizing these fraught and fascinating moments of transmission: fleshing out the story. Or, otherwise, by fishing around in the trash.\nThe text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.",
  "date": "April 17, 2024",
  "author": "Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti",
  "source": "public-domain-review",
  "type": "essay",
  "added": "2024-05-01T21:47:57.442484",
  "metadata": {
    "license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
    "url": "https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/pseudo-boccaccio-yiddish-pulp-fiction-and-the-man-who-ripped-off-joyce/"
  }
}