Dernier cri
Fun in translation from Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths
Dernier cri1
Which it isn’t any longer. That is to say it was, when it was, but once gone by, it is not.
We’re talking man-buns here. But we are so over them, are we knot? We are.
Glad we got that out of the way.
[Kind of a joke picture to spare you something more graphic. See below.]
Oh, and while we’re clearing the deck, subsequent to the exquisitely artful composition of the previous story I found a dead mouse under my pillows, whilst fluffing them up as a back-rest for my habitual morning consult with a New York Times® crossword. It appears my four companions will not require diminution of their daily bread after all. Though in truth, I’d rather one of them had eaten the evidence.
Rodents, as we’ve learned as recently as page 76, constitute a tasty and nutritious dietary component. Left under a pillow they are prone to decay.2
Erskine Prentiss does not have, and never has had, a man-bun. I think that tells you much of what needs to be known about our protagonist. Nor, we can also note, does he have, nor never has had, a rag-top VW® Beetle. [“Officially the Volkswagen Type 1, informally in German the Käfer, in parts of the English-speaking world the Bug, and known by many other nicknames in other languages”—per Wikipedia®.]
That, I think we can agree, narrows the field considerably.
Now that we have a pretty clear picture of the fellow in question, we can move along to the interesting part of the current parable.
Erskine’s brother, Clarence, is the kind of person you’d want to have for a neighbor if you found yourself in need of a cup of flour, say, when you’re in a hurry to mix up a batch of Christmas cookies and find yourself short.
I’m inclined to interject here—and in my position as a much respected [or ought to be, considering] author, who’s to tell me “No?” So, interject I will: If you are, in fact, short, it seems a bit odd to “find yourself short” does it not? I mean, you knew, right? And hey, don’t feel bad. As long as your feet reach the ground, you know?
It’s when they don’t that you’re short in a bad way, everything being sort of “up in the air.”
So Clarence is the real deal for a neighbor. A go-to sort of gentleman, with a smile and a handshake and dimples.
When all else fails, dimples will carry the day.
But Clarence has yet to fail, and to what extent his dimples have paved the path to success is not easy to determine. We know how dimples brighten a smile and we know that a bright, toothy smile will get you in the door any number of times when a less than shining visage would have found you turned away. So, we can think that Clarence’s success in life is due to his sterling character, his way with words, his general demeanor, his fine sense of fashion, his care with investment and attention to detail, his selection of a wife (and here we have to credit her perspicacity, do we not?), his care in purchase of a house in your neighborhood for goodness sake!
Your neighborhood!
And Clarence is of average height. Feet easily reach the ground on even the worst of days.
Erskine, though, is a whole ‘nuther kettle of fish and as we learned some eleven paragraphs in our shared past, Erskine is the subject of this story. Also the object. Erskine, we can rest assured, is about as unlike his brother as two apples from the same tree can be. Most fall near. Some, sad to say, roll.
Mom and Dad were a lot like Clarence, and their influence is apparent in nearly every moment of that near-monumental man’s life. Gosh, they deserve to be proud! Someday someone is bound to raise an actual statue to that towering figure!
Erskine? Not so much.
Not at all, really, when you come down to it. Lack of both a man-bun and a rag-top VW® will only get you so far. Dimples? Nada. You know?
We know.
Take Multiples, for instance, which originated as a special issue of McSweeney’s.3 It is a typically Oulipian exercise in which 12 short stories are translated by 61 novelists into 18 different languages. Each story is translated into or out of English several times, until something new is found in translation.
Try it yourself. Use an online translation program if you aren’t fluent in several languages. [Again, who are these book-sellers selling books to? Total ignoramuses?] But avoid drinking coffee while so-doing. The hilarity can be breath-taking or breath-venting, and coffee-thru-the-nose is nobody’s idea of a picnic.
Just ran that last sentence through a translator program, through a random series of languages and landed on this:
“Information like this can be made or cooled, and drinking coffee through your nose are not picnic ideas for others.”
I could die laughing!
If you read my obit before you read this, I likely did.
*******
Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [113] French. Oui? Ever and always making your life, what shall we say? Dernier cri?
2 [114] Really. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.
3 [115] A nonprofit literary journal. But you knew that, right?
Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved
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