The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain rereleases two early albums

The re-released

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain will soon be making its entire back catalog available for purchase in the form of mp3 downloads; despite this, they have reissued two of their early albums as CDs, Pluck (1997) and Hearts of Oak (1989.)  A copy of each came to our house came a couple of weeks ago.  Mrs Acilius and I have been listening to them more or less continuously ever since.   

Hearts of Oak features eleven originals and four covers. Pluck features twelve covers and four originals.  Two cuts from Hearts of Oak (“The World’s Number One Scat Singer” and “Western Lands”)  and seven from Pluck (“Try Hard,” “Sugar Plum Fairy,” “Completely Broken Hearted,” “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” “Devil’s Galop,” “In a Monastery Garden,” and “I Think You’re Neat”) were among the eighteen tracks on the 2006 compilation album Top Notch.  The band no longer offers Top Notch for sale on their website.  I don’t know whether this means that they plan to make all of the tracks on it available in their original contexts by rereleasing 1994’s  A Fistful of Ukuleles  and 2000’s Anarchy in the Ukulele as CDs, or if those numbers will only be on the market as mp3s.  I hope for the former; not only are the individual tracks worth having, but they flow into each other to make terrific sets.   

Hearts of Oak is structured as an overture and two movements.  The overture is “Chord Trick,” an abridgement of Henry Purcell’s 1695 Funeral March for Queen Mary arranged for electric ukulele; the result sounds vaguely like 80s Progressive Metal.  The set is 21 years old; while several other cuts are recognizably artifacts of the period, this opening number is the only one that has aged badly.  The flat electronic sound captures none of the urgency that builds so insistently through the original.  An attempt to render the Funeral March for Queen Mary in the style of Queensryche may be  typical of the UOGB’s eclecticism, but this performance is by far the weakest on the disc.  

The next seven tracks represent what I call the set’s first movement, a series of vocals in various genres.  “Just a Game” is as much part of 1989 as is “Chord Trick,” but evokes the bubblegum pop of the period far more successfully than “Chord Trick” evokes the metal.  “Whatever It Takes” led Mrs Acilius to exclaim that Kitty Lux has the perfect voice for hillbilly music; as the missus is a card-carrying hillbilly herself, this was high praise.  Indeed, Kitty Lux is the undoubted star of the band in these two albums.  I can’t help but think it’s a bit of a shame that she’s taken a lower profile in recent years.  On “There Was a Man,” Kitty sings about a man who needed shoes and was so excited when she gave him hers that he wore them out dancing for joy.  When I first heard this folk-inspired number my main response was to wonder what it might have sounded like if it had been written in Spanish.  It’s grown on me with subsequent listenings, but it’s not for those with a low tolerance for the twee. 

The liner notes quote the Guardian hailing the fifth track, “Anything is Beautiful Which…,” as the moment when the ukulele “at last found its avant-garde.”  The reviewer probably said that because of the lyrics, which consist of Kitty’s electronically distorted voice making little references to various nineteenth-century theories of aesthetics.  If you aren’t up on these theories, don’t worry- the words are no more distracting than the nonsense lyrics of most pop songs, and the rhythm is powerful enough to get me, the missus, and both of our dogs up and dancing every time we play the disc.  If you are up on aesthetic theory, the song is actually pretty funny, but you’ll have to take my word for that.  Even funnier are the lyrics to “The World’s Number One Scat Singer,” which is George’s one turn as vocalist on this album.  The song, which  would appear on Top Notch as “The World’s Greatest Scat Singer,” actually does include some first-rate scatting, as well as lines that can get a laugh from any audience.  “Easter Sunday,” a cover of Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s “Ostersonntag 1935,” is dark and dissonant, as one would expect from a Brecht/ Eisler lied.  Though it is an arrangement of a song that was already 54 years old by the time the disc was first released, it is much closer to being avant-garde than is “Anything is Beautiful Which…”  The speaker’s anxiety about an upcoming “Holocaust/ that will destroy this island, and these people,/ and the continent of Europe” calls for a great deal of dissonance, and the players execute the song brilliantly.  That fearful song is the perfect lead-in for the title track.  “Hearts of Oak” is short and arresting, a simple chord progression backing lyrics that express complex ideas about human connectedness.  Following “Easter Sunday,” a song with lines like “Isolation and communion are written in hearts of oak” prompts deep thoughts about what it means to live a peaceful life as a human being among human beings.     

With that, we move on to the third movement, seven instrumental tracks.  To keep the pairing of “Easter Sunday” and “Hearts of Oak” from taking the listener too deep into intellectualism to enjoy the music, this starts with a sort of Texas two-step number, “Western Lands.”   I don’t actually know the Texas two-step, but Mrs Acilius and I have devised a little dance for this one where I do a quasi-foxtrot and she dances with her shoulders while seated.  “Nevada” is a quiet, steady number that might have sounded somber immediately after “Easter Sunday” and “Hearts of Oak”; with “Western Lands” lightening the mood in between, it’s no more downbeat than is a spaghetti western.  The pace slows down even more for an arrangement of Rentaro Taki’s koto classic “The Moon over the Ruined Castle.”  I used to live next to a professional koto player; she had a low tolerance for the ukulele.  This performance is impressive enough that I might be tempted to play it for her, if she and I were still in contact.  If anything could raise her opinion of the ukulele, this would be it.

After those two slow pieces, the pace picks up again with “Formica Top,”  a Memphis Soul number that would have made Booker T and the MGs proud.  Then comes an equally fast-paced novelty tune, “Minimal Rag.”  “Minimal Rag” is the one Mrs Acilius wants me to learn.  “Karaoke Corral” is another Western-swing themed fast dance. 

The set closes with “The Con Man’s Chord Trick,” an arrangement for acoustic ukulele of the same Purcell march which had started it off in so unsatisfactory a fashion.  This acoustic version is far superior to the electronic one.  The repetitions that had been so tedious on the electric uke give this version an irresistible driving force.  If only it had been chosen as track one and the electronic version had been cut, the album would have been in a different league.   

Unlike Hearts of Oak,  Pluck shows the UOGB in their now familiar form.  Several members of the band take turns on lead vocals, most of the tracks are covers, and comedy is never far away.  The band redid a couple of numbers in later performances.  The version of “Life on Mars” here features Jonty Bankes giving a far less assured vocal performance than he would turn in when he sang the same song at the Barbican in 2005, even though the later performance also included several more voices making a melange of other, similar tunes.  Here, Jonty’s only competition is George chiming in with the occasional line from “My Way.”  That Barbican set also included Will Grove-White clowning through “Hot Tamales,” which he sings on this disc in a relatively straight version.  The version here is more danceable, and I’m glad to have both. 

The Wild West influence that is so much in evidence on Hearts of Oak peeks out a bit on Pluck, notably in the theme from “The Magnificent Seven.”  Slowed down from the original version and played with reggae-like holes in the rhythm, this number will remind most listeners of the UOGB’s version of the theme from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (also part of the 2005 Barbican set.)  That’s a shame; while the later piece is a much more impressive feat of musicianship, this one is also fun, and an interesting comment on the original. 

Anyone who laughed at Tom Lehrer’s “Masochism Tango” will howl through “Can I Break Your Heart?”  Not only they; Mrs Acilius, for example, doesn’t seem to care for Tom Lehrer or that song, but she sings along and laughs when “Can I Break Your Heart?” comes on the CD player. 

Amid all the jokiness, there are some serious songs.  The lyrics to “Try Hard,” with its criminally-inclined narrator, may read like a joke, but the song as they play it turns out to have a touch of pathos; George and Kitty’s “Completely Broken Hearted” is quite affecting; and George’s rendition of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” makes me want to jump up and cheer every time I hear it.  

The best introduction to the band is a live show, or failing that, a video.  So, if you are going to start buying their stuff, I would recommend starting with the videos they’ve released so far, one showing the 2005 Barbican show and the other showing last year’s performance at the BBC Proms.  Once you have those, I would recommend Hearts of Oak.   Pluck is a treat for confirmed fans, but I suspect most others would rather just download the mp3s of a few selected tracks.

by acilius on July 27, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
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Posted by acilius on July 27, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/27/the-ukulele-orchestra-of-great-britain-rereleases-two-early-albums/

What James K. Polk Knew

President James Knox Polk

I’ve long tended to look at American history and see in the presidency of James Knox Polk (1845-1849) the origin of a great curse.  President Polk led the United States into war with Mexico.  In consequence of that war, the United States forced Mexico to cede its claims on all territory north of its present boundaries.  The US victory was quick and easy; for a loss of about 13,000 soldiers, the USA gained an internationally undisputed claim to almost a million square miles of territory, stretching from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.  Americans would flood into this territory, displacing and slaughtering the native peoples on whom the Mexicans had made so little impression during their years of nominal rule.  Northern and Southern states vied with each other for influence over this newly secured territory, a contest that laid the political groundwork for the Civil War twelve years later.  As the USA’s first successful attack on a sovereign nation, the invasion of Mexico crossed a psychological boundary which previous attacks on native peoples and British possessions had left in place.  Moreover, the relatively low cost and fantastically rich rewards of the US victory fed in Americans the cannibal appetites of militarism.  So the curse that I have seen as the legacy of the Polk administration includes nearly all of America’s subsequent wars.    

President Polk represented the Democratic Party; his chief opposition was the Whig Party.  I’m a bit of a Whig myself, which is one reason why I chose a cartoon image of Millard Fillmore as my WordPress avatar.*  Leading Whigs like Fillmore spoke out against the invasion of Mexico.  The Whig-dominated Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution during the war denouncing the US effort as the result of a criminal conspiracy to extend slavery into the West.  When Polk claimed that Mexico’s hostile greeting to a US cavalry column he had dispatched into Mexican territory between the Rio del Norte and the Nueces somehow constituted an act by which “American blood was shed on American soil,” Illinois’ Whig Congressman Abraham Lincoln introduced a resolution into the US House of Representatives demanding that the president show the Congress the spot on which this had occurred.  The so-called “Spot Resolution” had the support of the congressional Whig party, and made Lincoln a national figure.  Among future President Lincoln’s colleagues in the House was former President John Quincy Adams.  Technically an independent, Adams was a hero to the Whigs, a friend to Whig Party mastermind Henry Clay, and a reliable supporter of the Whigs’ core policies.  Adams would collapse on the House floor and die in the Capitol; virtually his last earthly act was to vote against a resolution commending US veterans of the war against Mexico.  Many young Whigs who fought in the war would afterward match their elders in the fervor with which they denounced it; Ulysses S. Grant, for example, would write in his memoirs that as a young captain he had won his medals as a perpetrator of “the most unjust war ever waged.”     

The Whigs championed industrialization.  They saw economic centralization as indispensible to industrialization.  Therefore, they were allies of big business and generally sympathetic to established elites.  As such, they would have to be called a conservative party, and their opposition to the war against Mexico would qualify them, if only for the duration of the Polk  administration, as specimens of the antiwar Right.  Chronicles magazine is a voice of today’s antiwar Right, but not of renewed Whiggery.  Their July issue included a review of Robert W. Merry’s A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent which praises Merry for making a case that Polk was right.  Since I’m so far out of sympathy with Polk and his war, I will quote at length from this review:

Here is the geopolitical reality that Polk grasped.  In the 1840’s, the western third of the North American continent was in play.  The players were the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Mexico.  Each claimed some portion of that vast territory.  Polk understood that the question was not which of those claims was most legitimate (who, after all, would decide that?),  but which of the four powers had the means and will to enforce their own claims.  Mexico did not.  She “was a dysfunctional, unstable, weak nation whose population wasn’t sufficient to control all the lands within its domain.”  Bernard deVoto made the same point two generations ago:

[I]t is a fundamental mistake to think of Mexico in this period, or for many years before, as a republic, or even as a government.  It must be understood as a late stage in the breakdown of the Spanish Empire. 

There was no stability or institutional legitimacy in Mexico.  Revolution followed revolution, coup succeeded coup.  Mexican governments could neither govern, protect, nor populate the country’s far northern provinces.  That incapacity was most obvious in New Mexico, where the people were oppressed by taxes and terrorized by Indian raids, and consequently not inclined to fight in its defense.  Thus did Gen. Manuel Armijo’s army of conscripts flee at the approach of the Americans.  Col. Stephen Watts Kearney’s army of frontier dragoons and Missouri volunteer cavalry took Santa Fe without a fight.   

There are some good points in this.  What Mexico ceded to the USA in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was not land that was populated by people loyal to Mexico and protected by its government, but was instead a claim on territory chiefly inhabited by native people who were barely aware of the existence of Mexico.  It is not too harsh to say that by 1846 Mexico had failed to make good on this claim.  And it is also true that in the mid-1840s Russia and Britain were both very active in the nortwestern parts of North America.  So if Polk had lost 1844 election to Whig nominee Henry Clay, and Clay had as president refused to make war on Mexico, then there would have been a considerable likelihood that instead of confronting each other in a the Crimea in 1854-1856 Britain and Russia would have had their showdown in San Francisco Bay.  But I’m still not for the Mexican War.        

*Here’s the cartoon Fillmore, for those of you who’d like a look:

by acilius on July 24, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Chronicles, Wars and Rumors of Wars
Tagged

Posted by acilius on July 24, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/24/what-james-k-polk-knew/

Ambrose Bierce and The Man Without Illusions

Several weeks ago, The Nation ran a review-essay about Ambrose Bierce.  A few days before happening on this piece, I’d my old Dover Thrift Edition collection of Bierce’s Civil War stories, a paperback I’d bought for a dollar in 1996 and had been meaning to read ever since.  I was interested in the reviewer’s remarks about one of those stories in particular:

In another powerful story, “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch,” Bierce writes of a face-off between two batteries of well-fortified Confederate cannons, twelve in total, and a single Union cannon crew led by Captain Coulter. Coulter’s crew is forced into an open notch and ordered to engage in a firefight just because a general in the field wants to see if the stories of Coulter’s bravery are true. Though Coulter hesitates, he follows the order. He and his crew wheel one cannon out to the notch and commence firing. Soon the twelve Confederate cannons respond and the two sides are lost in the thunderous explosions and enormous clouds of artillery smoke. Each time one of Coulter’s cannons is destroyed, his crew wheels a new one up to the notch so the fight can continue. Eventually the Union officers ride up to the notch to check on Coulter and his men:

Within that defile, barely broad enough for a single gun, were piled the wrecks of no fewer than four. They had noted the silencing of only the last one disabled—there had been a lack of men to replace it quickly with another. The debris lay on both sides of the road; the men had managed to keep an open way between, through which the fifth piece was now firing. The men?—they looked like demons of the pit! All were hatless, all stripped to the waist, their reeking skins black with blotches of powder and spattered with gouts of blood. They worked like madmen, with rammer and cartridge, lever and lanyard. They set their swollen shoulders and bleeding hands against the wheels at each recoil and heaved the heavy gun back to its place. There were no commands; in that awful environment of whooping shot, exploding shells, shrieking fragments of iron, and flying splinters of wood, none could have been heard. Officers, if officers there were, were indistinguishable; all worked together—each while he lasted—governed by the eye. When the gun was sponged, it was loaded; when loaded, aimed and fired. The colonel observed something new to his military experience—something horrible and unnatural: the gun was bleeding at the mouth! In temporary default of water, the man sponging had dipped his sponge into a pool of comrade’s blood.

The cannon drooling blood is certainly a memorable image, and as I read the story I was sure it would be the detail that stayed with me.  By the end, however, even that horror has been put into the shade.  At first we think that Captain Coulter’s commanding officer sent him to that desperately exposed position and ordered him to shell the house opposite simply because he “wants to see if the stories of Coulter’s bravery are true.”  Then one officer tells another that Coulter was a southerner who had left his family behind Confederate lines to join the Union army.  He goes on to report a rumor that the commander had led an occupying force that patroled the area where Coulter’s family was.  This rumor held that the commander had made advances to Coulter’s wife.  She rebuffed him, and the officer wonders if that was why the commander put Coulter in such danger.  By the end of the story, even this grotesque idea is shown to be short of the full horror of the situation. 

The Nation‘s reviewer quotes Bierce’s definition of “realism” from The Devil’s Dictionary as “The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.”  This quote is at the center of a little disquisition on Bierce’s use of improbable events in his fiction.  The last two paragraphs of the review sum this disquisition up:

Bierce often resorted to horror, whether grisly war stories or even supernatural tales, but he didn’t do this to avoid writing about reality; he used the genre to confront the truths of his day—the monstrosity of battle, the terror of extinction.

Read Bierce and try not to think of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read Bierce and consider the ways “probability” can be a poor test; sometimes realism just fails. Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself. We are living in the age of the uncanny once again. Time to testify.

This point is very close to something that came to my mind while I was reading that collection of Bierce’s Civil War stories.  The stories are full of wildly improbable events; random shots fired at distant enemies can be relied upon to kill the gunners’ fathers, brothers, wives.  Bierce presents these freak occurrences not to undercut the sense of his stories’ reality, but to emphasize their truthfulness.   

What truth does Bierce want us to think fills his stories?  I think it is the same truth that was publicized almost two decades ago, when a hit movie was advertised with an image of a Marine colonel shouting “You can’t handle the truth!”  Even though the movie passed through theaters in 1992,  a Google search for “You can’t handle the truth” restricted to results that went up this week draws over 16,000 hits.  I wonder if the resonance of that line and the power of Bierce’s stories don’t combine to show that there is an idea at large in American culture of truth as something necessarily violent, of war as the ultimate truth.  If so, the colonel in the movie and the highly decorated Civil War veteran Bierce would both figure as men with a privileged access to truth, as warriors who had seen the heart of battle. 

Read the full post »

by acilius on July 23, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Irving Babbitt, The Nation
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Posted by acilius on July 23, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/23/ambrose-bierce-and-the-man-without-illusions/

No one was barred from the conversation back when there was a conversation

Three paragraphs from Bill Kauffman’s column in the latest issue of The American Conservative:

The War Party called the Peace Party Nazis in 1941, Communists in 1951, Soviet dupes in 1961, dirty hippies in 1971 … must I go on? In 2011, those who heed George Washington’s counsel to seek “peace and harmony with all” will be called mullah-headed appeasers of Irano-fascism.

[snip]

Blame war. Blame TV. Blame the nationalization of political discourse, as regional variations and individual peculiarities are washed away by the generic slime of poli-talk shows. Radicals—even naïve Tea Partiers or idealistic left-wing kids—are dehumanized in ways unthinkable when America was a free country. No one was barred from the conversation back when there was a conversation. No dispatch ever read, “Wingnut Henry David Thoreau today issued a manifesto from his compound near Walden Pond…”

[snip]

The squeezing out even of establishment dissent—especially since 9/11—has left us with an antiwar movement so feeble it makes the Esperanto lobby look like the AARP. Enter the new organization Come Home, America, its name taken from the magnificent 1972 acceptance speech delivered by George McGovern in the last unscripted Democratic convention.

I don’t agree that there was ever a time in the USA when “no one was excluded from the conversation”; when Thoreau published Walden in 1854, after all, chattel slavery existed in 15 states, women’s suffrage in none, and the one thing every US voter could support was war against Native Americans.  That said, Come Home, America and its goal of a left-right coalition against militarism seem to be worth a cheer or two.

by acilius on July 19, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in The American Conservative
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Posted by acilius on July 19, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/19/no-one-was-barred-from-the-conversation-back-when-there-was-a-conversation/

Remarkable coincidence

Here’s a comment I just had occasion to post on Alison Bechdel’s site:

This morning, I was teaching a class about English words derived from Latin and Greek. One of the exercises required them to write definitions of English words and illustrate their definitions with examples of the words in use.

I wanted to show them how they could use Lexis-Nexis* to find example sentences. So I projected the computer onto the screen in front of the classroom and opened the Lexis-Nexis search window. I asked the class which word they wanted me to look for in my demonstration. From a list of several dozen words, someone picked “neurosis.” So I typed “neurosis” into the search window. Up came hundreds of results. Looking these over, we could see not only potential definitions, but a good deal about the usage of the word. For example, finding it in hundreds of daily newspapers but only one medical journal we formed the hypothesis that it is a word that is no longer in technical use, an hypothesis which that one journal reference** explicitly confirmed.

Then I wanted to show them that you can narrow the search so that it only brings up items posted today. When I did that, paragraphs six through eight of this article appeared on the screen***:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/18/comics-grow-up-graphic-novels-harvey-pekar

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I gave a little eulogy for Harvey Pekar and said something like, “Hey, Alison Bechdel! She’s great!”****  Then it was back to lexicography.

*Here’s a link to Lexis-Nexis.  My students and I have access to their “Academic” service. 

**It was the 2 May 2009 edition of The Lancet, in case you’re curious; “Twisted Science, Regulation, and Molecules,” by Peter Tyrer, Pg. 1513 Vol. 373 No. 9674, wherein appear the sentences “The condition from which my patient suffers used to be called depressive neurosis. It was not a very good diagnostic label, and its boundaries were unclear, but it did allow anxiety and depression to coexist without the need for splitting them into interminable subgroups that, when they were subsequently found together in one person, were pompously described as “comorbidity.”” 

***The portion that appears on screen starts with the search term you used to find the article.  The first appearance of “neurosis” was near the top of paragraph six, and the screen I was using had room for that paragraph and the next two. 

**** Come to think of it, it may have been closer to “Whoa, there’s Alison Bechdel!”  Or maybe “Whaa–!  Alison Bechdel!”  It may even have been “Alison Bechdel!  Golly!”  I taught another class right after that one, so I can’t be certain of my exact phrasing.

by acilius on July 19, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Comics, Narratives, Thunderlads at Large
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on July 19, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/19/remarkable-coincidence/

New Post on Weirdomatic

FotB Alexandra has posted a new gallery on her terrific site, Weirdomatic.  The title is “Happy Things Pictures,” and it’s irresistible. 

by acilius on July 14, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Weird Pictures
Tagged

Posted by acilius on July 14, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/14/new-post-on-weirdomatic/

Tuli Kupferberg, RIP

They say there’s a “rule of threes,” that celebrities always die three at a time.  It’s nonsense, of course, but it often seems that way.  So, the other day we lost Harvey Pekar.  Yesterday, we heard that George Steinbrenner had died.  And now, news comes to us of the death of Tuli Kupferberg.  We featured Tuli’s song “Nobody for President” here in November 2008; here it is again.

by acilius on July 14, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events, Nobody for President
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on July 14, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/14/tuli-kupferberg-rip/

Tom Tomorrow, Today

A quote from General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Afghanistan.  As always, click on the picture to go to the original site:

by acilius on July 13, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Afghanistan, Comics
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on July 13, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/13/tom-tomorrow-today/

Harvey Pekar, RIP

Obits for Harvey Pekar from NPR, The New York Times, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

by acilius on July 12, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Comics, Current Events
Tagged

Posted by acilius on July 12, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/12/harvey-pekar-rip/

The Interpreter

I teach at a university deep in the interior of the USA.  Most of the residents in the apartment complex where I live are students at that same university.  Several of these neighbors are Iraqis who have come here as part of an exchange program between our university and one in Baghdad. 

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I left my apartment and walked to the bus stop.  Two of my Iraqi neighbors were sitting on the bench, a man named Abdullah and a woman whose name I did not know.  Abdullah greeted me; his friend turned her face shyly and tugged on her headscarf.  Abdullah offered me his hand.  I declined to shake it, explaining that I had a cold and did not want him to catch it.  Abdullah turned to his friend and said a few words in Arabic.  She nodded at him and gave a grateful smile, saying nothing.  As we waited for the bus, Abdullah and I talked about colds and remedies for them.  After each exchange, Abdullah turned to his friend and spoke for moment in Arabic.  Each time he did, she nodded at him and gave the same smile, never saying a word.  It was clear to me that he was interpreting for her. 

I wondered how well Abdullah was doing as an interpreter.  I was talking slowly and making an effort to keep my vocabulary simple, but still I came up against the limits of his English a number of times.  That didn’t stop Abdullah.  Even when he wrinkled his brow and paused for a few seconds, he still turned to his friend and talked, I suppose offering an Arabic version of whatever he had gathered from my words.  His friend seemed quite pleased with Abdullah, impressed with his gallant efforts. 

The bus came into sight.  Distracted to see it, I forgot to keep my English simple.  Thoughtlessly, I gave poor Abdullah a challenge that even professional interpreters can rarely meet successfully: I made a joke.  “Well, there’s a saying,” I told him.  “A cold usually lasts about seven days, unless the patient is under a doctor’s care.  Then it lasts about a week.”  When I said this, Abdullah’s friend immediately burst out laughing.  Abdullah gave a blank stare for a moment.  He wrinkled his brow and leaned forward.  Then he turned to his friend and interpreted.  She nodded at him, smiled gratefully, and said nothing.

by acilius on July 9, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Language, Narratives

Posted by acilius on July 9, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/09/the-interpreter/

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