h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Congratulations! I am happy to deliver to you the exciting news that your pages on English 17th Century Nonsense poetry, Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo, and soon, your page on Thoreau's Walden have been/will be inducted into the H2G2 Literary Society -- where it's our goal to maintain a list of what H2G2 has to offer for the literary-minded. You can visit the H2G2 Literary Society at http://www.h2g2.com/U127122

Of course you already know that...as I noticed you link to our site in your introduction. Thank you.

I am impressed with all of your entries, and feel you should submit them. They are certainly good enough in my opinion for the Guide (but then again, I'm just a researcher myself, and don't make such decisions)

Gavroche
Librarian at the H2G2 Literary Society

Thank you, Gavroche, for this glorious vindication of my literary skills. After so many years of neglect...

Yes, I will submit those articles someday, but I think they could use a little editing beforehand, to clear away some of the self-indulgent stuff that I tend to leave lying around in there. I submitted the Orwell piece about a month ago, but so far haven't heard anything...

I think that Recommendations page is a good idea, by the way. I have one or two ideas myself for future articles, although I'm afraid I'm a bit tied up with other things at the moment. But leave the American writers Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo and William Burroughs to me, if you will, and also the old Irish miserabilist Samuel Beckett. They'll get their just desserts, some day...

Keep up the good work, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Yours, Lear (Random Nonsense Generator)

I'm not paid by H2G2, and am just a researcher who's decided to maintain this page, so I really can't prevent someone else from writing about those authors before you get a chance. (When I noted a few weeks ago that someone else beat me to Les Miserables, I kicked myself for not getting my act together. But of course it linked to my earlier entry on Hugo, so I can't be too upset.) My personal focus is on several French writers (primarily Hugo, Baudelaire, and Montaigne) and perhaps I will write something on a few American poets such as Whitman, Ginsberg, or Poe -- so you have nothing to worry about me stealing your entries.

I look forward to your future writing.

I was sort of joking when I asked to reserve those writers. Naturally I realise it has to be on a first-come-first-served basis - I don't see how else the idea could work. I don't know too much about French writers, but I have an ongoing project to try to learn some of the French language so that I can read Beckett in the original. The interesting thing about Beckett is that he translated most of his major work himself, from French into English - I can't think of any other great writer who did that, translating their own work I mean. Normally one has to rely on the vagaries of a translator, which in effect makes it a rewrite by someone else...

It's always nice to come across other literary-minded researchers. I don't see a great deal of it on h2g2. Or is there some great writers' confab going on somewhere here that I'm missing out on? That would be the usual way of things...

While there are a lot of fans of science fiction/fantasy on here, which isn't surprising, I think you're right that the number of researchers who have an interest in the classics is small. Which is unfortunate. One of my hopes for the Literary Society is that it might help create a confab of sorts.

On Translation, Beckett might be alone. Baudelaire may have been able to, if he had lived longer, though. He had learned English in order to translate Poe into French. However, I don't know how well he knew English, since being able to read a language well enough to translate it into your own, doesn't require as much fluency as being able to write in it.

I have a volume of some of Baudelaire's work in which the poems are printed in the original French with the editor's prose translations underneath in footnotes. Although they are a little rudimentary, this seems perhaps to be the most 'honest' way of translating because the editor is simply presenting his own work as humble footnotes to the original, useful resources for the English-speaking reader to begin their own 'translation' of the poems. Whereas normally translations are presented almost as though they were the author's own work - perhaps a bit misleading.

Actually I only really know Baudelaire as an art critic and a general theorist of 'modernity'. I'm not too well acquainted with his poetry. But it sounds like he had a fairly sombre take on life. Something to do with the disillusionment of a lapsed Catholic in an increasingly secular society, perhaps. I always think that without some kind of sense of the 'sacred' there is no real impulse to make art at all. Then again, sometimes I wonder - maybe this wouldn't be such a terrible thing after all...