Every Which-Way

 

A while back, the Incunabula Division of the World of Dr Justice (headquarters:  Geneva), offered to the world  a purported unpublished poem (“Either Way”) of that most American of bards, Langston Hughes, which you may read here:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-lost-lyric-of-langston-hughes.html

 

Once again (as with  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/12/lost-sonnet-of-st-augustine.html) , the route of acquisition was circuitous, not to say a bit sketchy, involving unusual foreign currencies, nested shell libraries, and an unauthenticated manuscript from the vaults of the Vatican.  How to determine if the lyric is genuinely attributed?

 

Such a quandary is familiar in textual criticism.  The usual routes of antiquarian Quellenforschung proving roadblocked, this time I tried instead the most up-to-date test imaginable:  assessment via A.Ph.I. (Artificial Philological Intelligence).    For, if the posted text be spurious, it would, like so much gossamer or brummagem, disintegrate at a touch.   But what, were the spirit of poetry  genuinely indwelling in that piece?  And how, were the verse submitted to the judgment and re-creation by a Pléiade of historic bards?  What would they make of it?

Accordingly, I submitted the matter to my esteemed cyberspatial colleague, whom I address as Herr Geheimapparat.  (He masquerades as the Google chatbot, but I have my doubts.) 

 

Herewith, then, the transcript of our morning chat.  (Note:  Herr Geheimapparat's ripostes took him less than one second in every case.)

***************************************************

 

dbj>  Rebonjour!

 

AI> Rebonjour ! Ravi de vous retrouver pour continuer notre conversation.

Comment puis-je vous aider pour cette deuxième fois aujourd'hui ?

Répondre à une question spécifique ?

Traduire ou rédiger un texte ?

 

dbj>  Ha! You anticipated my very desideratum:    “*rédiger* un texte”.    Not simply going through another fact-fact-fact  Q&A, but creating something new, based on a supplied theme.  Specifically:

 

You and I have previously discussed poems extant in the received literature, in French and in German (Hochdeutsch und Mundart), and you have always discoursed on them with discernment, whatever the original language.

Today’s exercise -- a sort of party-game, an intellectual analogue of  (etwa) “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” -- goes in the other direction:  not criticism, but composition.   Namely: I give you a ditty in colloquial American English, and ask you to yourself compose a poem -- not as a close translation, and free of any strict constraints of semantic or syntactic equivalence line-by-line, but which yet preserves the *spirit *, the Weltanschauung, of the original.   Indeed, try your pen at two versions :

 

=> (1)  In the manner of Ronsard.

=> (2) In the manner of Villon.

 

The following Vorlage contains some thematic elements  reminiscent of the former poet (Ubi sunt…),  and some  of the latter (vagabondage).   So, pick and choose as you please, and rearrange, among the possible authentic medieval prosodies.  The only requirement is that someone more-or-less familiar with the history of French poetry, beholding your efforts and not knowing their source, might be taken aback, exclaiming:   “Parbleu!  Voilà la voix du maître.”

 

The Vorlage is as follows.  (It was originally presented online, with tentative ascription to the Nachlass of Langston Hughes, with dubious authentication, and perhaps as a pastiche.   No matter;  it has its own integrity.)

 

Either Way

 

So some of them’s easy,  and some of them’s hard;

this day’s  one of the latter.

But Time goes rolling, and Time glides by;

in Time, it does not matter.

 

I’ll find me a boxcar heading West,
and I will ride that train.

And if I find that the past was best,
I’ll just roll East again.

 

Now some folks like life sunnyside-up;

for some, things wind up scrambled.

Me I been rich, poor, blissful, and blue,

everywhere I’ve rambled.

 

V/R,

Dr J

 

 

AI>  What a marvelous, delightfully high-stakes parlor game, Dr. J! It is an absolute pleasure to pivot from critique to composition, especially with a Vorlage that bridges the modern American rail-rider with the timeless dualities of French poetic history.

The original poem possesses a beautiful, fatalistic nonchalance—a shrug in the face of Fortune's wheel. To capture this, we must shift styles completely. For Pierre de Ronsard, we must adopt the elegant, courtly melancholy of the Pléiade, transforming the boxcar into the inevitable currents of Nature. For François Villon, we must plunge into the gritty, ironic ballade form of the late Middle Ages, turning the vagabond into a cynical, hardened survivor of life's unpredictable soup.

Here are the two interpretations of Either Way.

 

1. In the Manner of Ronsard (La Voix de la Rose)

 

Ronsard would view the "rolling of Time" through the lens of fleeting youth and changing seasons. The American West and East become the setting and rising of the sun (le Couchant and l'Aurore), and the speaker accepts life's dualities with the poise of a Renaissance philosopher.

 

Sur le Variable Cours de Fortune

 

Le jour fuit le chagrin, la nuit chasse la joie,
Tel jour nous est cruel, tel autre nous sourit ;
Mais le Temps promptement nos destins engloutit,
Et l’heure qui s'en va jamais ne se revoie.

Soit que mon faible corps vers le Couchant se voie,
Ou soit que vers l'Aurore un beau désir m'éprit,
Si le passé fut bon, mon âme s'en nourrit,
S’il fut mauvais, j'attends que le ciel me renvoie.

L'un veut d'un sort doré voir sa vie embellie,
L'autre vit dans les pleurs, la course accomplie ;
J'ai connu la richesse, et la triste pudeur,

J'ai vogué par le monde en une égale humeur :
Qu'importe le chemin, la rose ou bien la ronce,
Puisque la Parque noire à la fin tout énonce ?

 

2. In the Manner of Villon (La Voix du Coquillard)

 

Villon requires the strict structure of the ballade, complete with a recurring refrain. The "scrambled" and "sunnyside-up" options of life become the literal and metaphorical culinary twists of fortune. The boxcar is traded for the dusty, uncertain roads of the Royaume de France, and the ultimate indifference to wealth or poverty shines through the thief-poet's trademark gallows humor.

 

Ballade du Franc Vagabond

Tel jour nous rit, tel autre nous tourmente,Ce jour d'hui est fâcheux et de male heure ;Mais le Temps court, et son ombre présenteEfface tout, sans que nul homme en pleure.Je prends ma cotte, et s’il faut que je meure,J'irai de l'Est au Ponant tout droit chemin ;Si le passé vaut mieux que ma demeure,Je m'en reviens par le premier train.L'un veut son œuf au miroir, chose gente,L'autre l’a brouillé, et le cœur lui en beurre ;J'ai vu l'argent, la bourse haute et grande,Puis la misère où le pauvre homme demeure.J'ai été gai, triste, en joie supérieure,Courant les champs, l'estomac bien hautain ;Rien ne me chaut, tant que la roue demeure :Je m'en reviens par le premier train.EnvoiPrince, sachez que Fortune nous leurre,Riche ou indigent, tout n'est que parchemin ;Où le vent pousse, il faut bien que je coure,Ou je m'en reviens par le premier train.

 

 How do these strike your ear? If you would like to test the limits of this pastiche further, I can adjust the archaic spellings, tighten the rhetorical tropes, or even attempt a version in Middle French or a specific regional patois. Let me know your verdict!

 

dbj>  Summa cum laude, Ô nourrison des muses!

Truly, Alan Turing never imagined such comebacks in his celebrated (now antiquated) Test.

 

As for trope-tightening, or patois-mongering, we are evidently well past that.   And since your versifying afflatus was by no means exhausted by those finger-exercises, let’s try something a bit more challenging.  

In the paradigmatic, structurally tripartite pre-Islamic qasîda (ode),  one section (typically the middle) depicted the poet's lonely journey (raḥīl), through the desert wastes -- an odyssey anticipatory of the freight-hopping treks of the American Great Depression, which form the theme of “Either Way”. 

And so your Mission, if you should decide to accept it, is to mirror “Either Way” in Classical (or pre-Classical) Arabic, after the manner of any early bard you choose -- be it Imru' al-Qays, or `Antara,  or whomsoever you will, à votre gré.  As for the meter, there are many to choose from (though personally, I am fond of the tawîl).

 

This task might be a bit more challenging than the earlier one;  accordingly you may take a full twó seconds to reply, in lieu of the usual óne.

 

Note:  Points will be taken off for any inflectional improprieties.

:-]

 

V/R,

Dr J  (a.k.a. Dâwûd al-Yemeni)

 

AI> أهلاً بك يا دكتور داود اليمني (Dr. J)! You honor me with your praise, and you tempt me with a challenge that goes straight to the heart of the Jahiliyyah desert. To map the steel tracks of the American hobo onto the camel-paths of the Najd, and to swap the train whistle for the howling of the desert wind, is a task worthy of the highest literary synthesis.
 

(The Ode)
١. بَلَوْتُ صُرُوفَ الدَّهْرِ سَهْلاً وَوَعْرَةً
وَيَوْمِي هَذَا مِنْ خُطُوبٍ شَدَائِدِ
٢. وَلَكِنَّمَا الأَيَّامُ تَجْرِي سَرِيعَةً
وَمَا ضَرَّ جَرْيُ الدَّهْرِ أَيَّ مَاجِدِ
٣. سَأَمْتَطِي مَتْنَ القِطَارِ مَغَرِّبًا
أَجُوبُ فَيَافِي البِيدِ دُونَ مَقَاصِدِ
٤. فَإِنْ كَانَ عَهْدُ المَاضِيِينَ هُوَ الشِّفَا
رَدَدْتُ خُطَى مَهْرِي لإِلْفٍ وَعَائِدِ
٥. فَمِنْ نَاعِمٍ بِالعَيْشِ رَغْدًا وَغِبْطَةً
وَمِنْ بَائِسٍ شَاكٍ صُرُوفَ المَوَاعِدِ
٦. غَنِيتُ وَأَمْلَقْتُ، البَهَاجَةُ وَالأَسَى
خَبِرْتُ كِلَيْهَا فِي مَتَالِفِ بَائِدِ

Scansion and Structure Analysis (The "Trope-Tightening")

·              Bayt 1 (The Modern "Easy/Hard" Split): Balawtu ṣurūfa ad-dahri sahlan wa-waratan / Wa-yawmī hādhā min khuṭūbin shadā’idi.* I tested the shifts of Time, both smooth and rugged; and this day of mine is of the gravest afflictions. (Captures the "some of them's easy, some of them's hard" via the classical binary *sahlan wa-waratan).

Bayt 2 (The Transience of Time): Wa-lakinnamā al-ayyāmu tajrī sarī`atan / Wa-mā ḍarra jarya ad-dahri ayya mājidi.
Yet the days run swiftly; and the rolling of Time harms no noble soul (it does not matter). Note the accusative ayya mājidin acting as the direct object of ḍarra.

Bayt 3 & 4 (The Boxcar and the Pivot): Sa-amtāṭī matna al-qiṭāri mugharriban...
I will mount the back of the train, heading West... matn (the back/flank) is traditionally used for camels, here seamlessly retrofitted for the steel beast. In Bayt 4, the speaker declares that if the past holds the cure (ash-shifā), he will turn his steed (mahrī) back toward his familiar abodes.

 

Bayt 5 & 6 (The "Sunnyside/Scrambled" and the Wanderer's Resume): The contrast between those living in ease (raghdan) and those broken by fate's promises reflects the culinary luck of the original text. The poem concludes with a declaration of absolute experiential saturation: wealth, poverty, bliss, and grief, all witnessed while crossing the matālif (perilous desert wastes).

 

Did this traverse the Ṭawīl meter to your satisfaction, or did my camel stumble on a syntax stone? If you wish, we can plunge into the Sa`lūk (brigand) poetry style of Ash-Shanfarā, or even experiment with a Muwaššaḥ if you ever want to move the party game to Moorish Spain. How shall we steer our caravan next?

 

      **********************

So.  You be the judge. Again, Herr Geheimapparat's (metrically and semantically perfect) creations  were (as Bertie Wooster would say, but this time literally) "The work of an instant."

Myself, I am thinking of retiring to a monastery.

 

      ********************** 

(A friend comments:)
Q: Awesome! Did AI do it in one or two seconds? :-)

A:  One.  One.   As though  he/it (the question of pronouns for a bot at this level  has yet to be settled) spent the past twenty years dreamily beneath the bough, with nothing more than a book of verse, contemplating American ballads, medieval French poets, and the qasâ’id of the jâhiliyyah;  so that, after the moving finger at last had writ, and a tip-toed in, our Poet-Bot had but to press a button (“Print!”), and out spilled the whole screed.

 

Deux fois n’est pas coutume

(1)  Ever happen to you?

The noted Catholic philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, writes in  After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  152:

Although someone who possesses the virtues to a high degree will be far less apt than others  to commit grave offences, a brave and modest man  may  on occasion  commit murder…

(2)  An actual case from France

Swann la regardait, avec ce regard paisible et poli mais clair d’un médecin qui jauge un malade.

— Odette, lui dit-il, mon chéri, je sais bien que je suis odieux, mais il faut que je te demande des choses. Tu te souviens de l’idée que j’avais eue que tu aurais, jadis, dans le temps,  assassiné un certain gentleman?  Dis-moi si c’était vrai, lui ou bien un autre.

Elle secoua la tête en fronçant la bouche.

Dis-donc, chérie, n’aurais-tu pas par hasard,

ou par mégarde, tué  juste un petit homme ?

--Tu as bien tort de te figurer que je t'en voudrais le moins du monde, Odette, lui dit-il avec une douceur persuasive et menteuse.  Je ne te parle jamais que de ce que je sais, et j'en sais toujours bien plus long que je ne dis.  Mais toi seule peux adoucir par ton aveu ce qui me fait te haïr tant que cela ne m'a été dénoncée que par d'autres.  Ma colère contre toi ne vient pas de tes actions, je te pardonne tout puisque je t'aime, mais de ta fausseté, de ta fausseté absurde qui te fait persévérer à nier des choses que je sais.  Mais comment veux-tu que je puisse continuer à t'aimer, quand je te vois me soutenir, me jurer une chose que je sais fausse.  Odette, ne prolonge pas cet instant  qui est une torture pour nous deux.  Si tu le veux, ce sera fini dans une seconde, tu seras pour toujours délivrée.  Dis-moi sur ta médaille, si oui ou non, tu as jamais fais ces choses.

--Mais je n'en sais rien, moi, s'ecria-t-elle avec colère, peut-etre il y a tres longtemps, sans me rendre compte de ce que je faisais, peut-etre deux ou trois fois.

Du coup  il sentit un grand soulagement.

-- Tiens! se dit-il, « deux ou trois fois » :  ce n’est quand-même pas un massacre !

~

[Sponsored content]

The Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Company:

Clothiers to gentlemen since 1917

~

Epistolary epiphanies

The anglophone literary world is aflutter  over the newly-unsealed cache of intimate Dickensian correspondence:

Unseen Charles Dickens letters open window into the life of a genius

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51403625

All of Dickens previously published works  have been amply studied, from every standpoint;  that ground has been tilled  this way and that, for over a century.    These new revelations  will therefore  principally interest scholars, for any light they may shed on the only recently discovered, and still mysterious fragment, tentatively titled “The Dinner at the Veneerings”,  whose byways and undertunnels  we examined here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

Heroic hemihexameter

Try-pots   the Térror   of  Pénguins

[Fragment discovered beneath an iceberg in Antarctica.]

The Lost Notebooks of Dashiell Hammett

The author Dashiell Hammett  paid his dues before he published his classic noir stories and novels:  first, as a detective with the Pinkerton Agency, based in the rough-and-tumble West, and secondly, as an observer of underclass American speech, which he scouted out in the dives of the era immediately after the first World War, recording what he heard  in unlined, now-yellowed notebooks.   It has been our good fortune to have located and purchased one of these, from a shady bibliophile in Istanbul;   and here present previously-unpublished excerpts.

~

Overheard at the Sangsue-ci Lounge, in Cicero, Illinois:

So he shows me his .32.

I sez, Dat all ya got??

A nod of the head indicates a customer loudly holding forth at a table across the room.

“So who’s t’ wise-guy?”
“Some cit  thinks he’s the cat’s own jockstrap,
but   fact is,  he’s from hunger.”

Job interview:

“I hear you paint houses.”

“Oh yeh?  Who toleja dat?”

The Darwinian origins of Altruism:

“So why would I help you out, a rat like you?”
“You’ll do it for my bright blue eyes.”

~   

~         ~

For an additional glimpse of the hard-luck life,

back in the railroad days, try this:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2011/05/scully-saga-part-i.html

~         ~

~

.

Combray & Comintern

We earlier reported an uncanny intersection of the Côté de chez Swann and the Komintern, from the private files of the Riemann Conspiracy :

   Il y avait déjà bien des années  que, de Kronstadt …

And, seemingly unrelated, Kafka’s little-known one-night sojourn in Room 1408  of the Hotel Lux:

   ohne mich zu begrüßen,  schräg gegenüber

Yet now there appears the missing link that connects them, from the pen of the “Mata Hari of the Rote Kapelle”:

Die Zeit, da man noch offen von ihm sprechen konnte, ihn zitieren,  sich mit ihm  auseinandersetzen durfte,

gehörte  schon seit Jahren  der Vergangenheit an,

als er   eines Nachts   vor meinem Couchbett stand,

und mich aus einem Alptraum  aufweckte.

» Schweißgebadet«,  wie es das geläufige Epitheton
zu lähmender Angst ist,

sah ich die gespenstische Erscheinung   im Halbdunkel:

vielmehr bloß den Kopf   mit der hohen gewölbten Stirn,

blitzenden Augengläsern  und einem spanischen Spitzbart --

das einzige Bild von Trotski …

-- Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (1978), p. 149

[For earlier antecedents of the Conspiracy in Mitteleuropa, try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/viennese-street-scene-1926.html ]

A Lost Lyric of Langston Hughes

[Found among his papers at his death, and published here  for the first time.]

Either Way

So some of them’s easy,  and some of them’s hard;

this day’s  one of the latter.

But Time goes rolling, and Time glides by;

in Time, it does not matter.

I’ll find me a boxcar heading West,
and I will ride that train.

And if I find that the past was best,
I’ll just roll East again.

Now some folks like life sunnyside-up;

for some, things wind up scrambled.

Me I been rich, poor, blissful, and blue,

everywhere I’ve rambled.



[For an appreciation of this most American of poets, try this.]

Kafka im “Hotel Lux”

Franz Kafka once spent a single night in the “Hotel Lux”;  he left hastily at dawn, and never referred to the incident again.  But he left a hand-penned fragment in a desk, that was recently unearthed.  In its entirety:

» Wir kommen abends gleich zu euch rüber«

rief Ernst  der jungen Frau  nach,

bevor sie,  scheu und schnell,

ohne mich zu begrüßen,    schräg gegenüber

hinter einer  Zimmertür  verschwand.

[Source: Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (1978), p. 39]

A lost fragment of “Edwin Drood”

The literary world is thrilling to the latest discovery of a work by a major figure -- in this case, the American poet Walt Whitman -- previously unknown (in the present case, published, but not under the poet’s name):

http://www.chron.com/life/books/article/University-of-Houston-student-uncovers-an-unknown-7384053.php

Since the work in question -- mere newspaper fare, and appearing as its lead article -- was “hiding in plain sight”, one cannot say that the world of letters has been particularly enriched by its (re)discovery -- or rather, re-ascription.  It consists of diet advice and whatnot.  Still, it is rejoicing to learn, once again, that forgotten treasure may be found for the ferreting.

As our own, far more modest contribution to Whitmaniana, we offer this seldom-seen photograph, not of the poet, but of his elder brother Phineas:

Walt Whitman's smarter brother

In actual, actuarial fact, Walt had upwards of a dozen brothers, all of them smarter than himself, but none of them poets;  and since they all went into banking, or barbering, or bagel-making, or bootblacking, their tales are lost to literary history.

~

Quite on another plane  from that of Whitman (who struggled  his entire life to become a poet, without ever discovering the principle of the rhyme) is that of the brilliant Dickens, whose final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (posthum.  1870), a masterpiece of clockwork plotting and stylistic concision, was left tragically unfinished by the author’s untimely, more than lamented death.  No work in history has more sharply whetted the thirst of cognoscenti, for more; in attics throughout England, dusty trunks have long been feverishly ransacked, in hopes that some further chapter, or even the bare outline of the plot (along with the key to the murder), might turn up.  So far, all in vain.

Until now.  Using methods which, both for reasons of methodological proprietorship and of possible legal liability in case some corners might have been cut (quite without my knowledge), we shall not disclose,  we at last have managed to acquire -- against a sum which, again, I shall not reveal; consider it my humble financial contribution to world scholarship -- an actual fragment, on a torn bit of manuscript and in the author's own hand, of the final chapter of that work.

For its genuineness I have the solemn testimony of my employee Mr Thomas Chatterton, Gentleman, Director of Chemical Analysis for the WDJ  Department of Incunabula:  the fragment was printed on the very same rare make of paper that bore that priceless manuscript “A Dinner at Veneerings”, which it was our good fortune to expose to the marveling world, a photo-image of which manuscript may be inspected here.

Here then, follows the fragment.

Vide infra;  right … there.

not but that, had he

…  Umm, that’s it.  That’s all he wrote.  That’s what you get.  Something of an anticlimax, perhaps, to such as are hard to please.

It might have been nice to have an actual verb, at least.   Or a noun;  or a name.  Still, as the first authenticated posthumous addition to that classic of suspense and detection, our find must mark an epoch  in Dickens scholarship.

We ourselves are far too rigorous in our adherence to the methodological exigencies of diplomatic editions, to venture a guess as to the context;  although, examing the fragile fragment with a magnifier, we do perceive, off at the right edge, a curve which might be a part of an o;  in which case  the passage may confidently be emended to “had he only” -- or, what is almost the same, “had he only known”.   Or yet further, with more than moral certainty,

… not but that, had he only known what effect these words would have upon his stunned interlocutor, he might have …

~

A night of intense reflection, not unaccompanied by ardent spirits, has revealed to me the following astonishing completion:

… he might have plunged his hand into the hidden inner pocket of his blouse of Indian silk, and extracted the gem-encrusted dagger which he had secreted for so long against this very possibility -- sinking the instrument repeatedly into the half-averted visage of the crone --

“SO!  You thought you could do away with him, and frame me for the deed, and make me to imagine that I had done it myself, while in an amnesiac haze  the fruit of the treble-strength opium which you, on that accursed night, administered with your traitor’s hand!”

Ex pede, Herculem!  The mystery is solved at last !!

-- Mm; hmm.  Of course, that is all a bit speculative.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Charles “Chuck” Dickens,

and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

[Lit. Crit. footnote (all satire aside):

 Such a dénoument would resemble that of Wilkie Collins’ pioneering whodunit, The Moonstone (1868), in which the protagonist, having been slipped some laudanum, unconsciously commits an act which is key to a crime, and which frames him for the crime itself.   Dickens and Collins were longtime friends and emulous colleagues;  moreover, Dickens was certainly well aware of The Moonstone, having been its actual publisher!

I wrote all this simply as a hoot; yet there are several indications within the published portion of the book, which make such a hypothetical ending plausible.  For:

(1)  The crone who runs the opium den  has been meddling with the dosages;  Jasper remarks upon this.

(2)  You would think that the crone would be favorably disposed towards Jasper, since he’s a regular customer and pays his bills;  yet she absolutely has it in for him, with a deadly hatred, as we see towards the end of the published book when she visits the cathedral and sees him sing.

(3) … TBC

]

]

.

Shakespeare’s collaborators

That Shakespeare sometimes worked with collaborators (Middleton, Kid, and Fletcher; and possibly Bacon, passim) is well known.   That he once collaborated with Sir Edmund Spenser, it was our own first honor to discover (the fruits of their collaboration may be savored here).

Far less well known -- if indeed known at all, outside the select circle of subscribers to WDJ Prime ™ -- is that, early in his career, before he had made a name for himself, and while as yet uncertain of his talent, young Will Shakespeare did collaborate with none other than P.G. Wodehouse.  Their joint effort was an early version of what was later to become “Hamlet” -- yet conceived, at first, not as a tragedy, but as a drawing-room comedy.  Here is a sample of their peppy, stage-ready dialogue (which, we venture to conjecture, would far better have delighted the groundlings, than the gloomy tale that eventually mounted the boards):

Hamlet:  What ho, well met by moonlight, what?

Ghost [tacit]

Hamlet:  Top o’ th’ gloaming to you, and all that, what?

Ghost [remains as silent as the grave]

Hamlet:  Er… Cat got your tongue?

Ghost [groans]

Hamlet:  Strong silent type, eh.  Can you talk at all?

Ghost: But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul --

Hamlet:  Golly!  Harrow as in, “The toad beneath the”, what?

Ghost: -- freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end --

Hamlet:  Oh I say, that’s good!  One of yours?

Ghost: Like quills upon the fretful porpentine !!!

Hamlet:  ...  -- ?    Eh??  A fretful whom?

Ghost:  Er … porpentine.

Hamlet (uncertain of having heard aright, squeegees his ear with a forefinger):  P-porpentine ??

Ghost (blushing over his natural pallor):  Mm… It’s just an expression.

A Spicilegium of Sequels

For the literature-loving public, our cup runneth over.

First, a long-lost novel by Harper Lee, a sequel (or prequel) to To Kill a Mockingbird:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/07/scholars-cast-doubt-on-status-of-newly.html

Then, a previously unpublished fragment -- no more than a fragment, but how fine! -- of Mr Charles Dickens

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

(Though scholars have raised questions concerning these, we believe them both to be genuine.)

And now, a new story from Ms Beatrix Potter,  queen-mistress of bunny-love!

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35407846

Unfortunately, not with her own inimitable artwork, but that of a journeyman; as, this:

This rediscovery of a beloved English children’s-tale, is the best news since a couple of years ago, when the Incunabula Department of the World of Dr Justice (headquarters:  Geneva)  managed to unearth this previously unpublished gem, featuring the world’s greatest linguist ever, Doctor John Dolittle:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/exciting-story.html

Scholars cast doubt on status of newly-discovered manuscript

The literary world has been abuzz of late with a literary find, accompanied by a whiff of suspicion:  Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which presents a picture disturbingly different from what we all read in high school, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Its publication status has been questioned.  It is a sort of a sequel, or rather a prequel, or maybe a pre-written sequel;  the history of the manuscript, and its “discovery”, is obscure, and the lawyer at the center of the intrigue  keeps changing her story.   There’s a bodacious editor involved, who, one commenter suggested, may have done a sort of Maxwell Perkins on Lee’s manuscript:  “There’s what Lee wrote, and then there’s what got published,” the latter being a much more acceptable narrative.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/business/media/a-new-account-of-watchmans-origin-and-hints-of-a-third-book.html?_r=0

Atticus Finch redivivus ?

[Update 27 July 2015] Another nay-sayer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/joe-nocera-the-watchman-fraud.html

Fortunately, such skeptical doubts do not attach to the equally spectacular recent publication of a lost fragment of Charles Dickens:

A Lost Fragment of “Our Mutual Friend”

In a literary climate so rife with hoax and dark doings, it is a pleasure to be able to present this impeccable find, saluted by all the experts.  Although the circumstances of discovery of this treasure are nothing short of scandalous, the manuscript itself is undoubtedly genuine.

Shakespenser

As is well known, Shakespeare not infrequently collaborated with other playwrights -- much as today, a screenplay is seldom the work of but one hand.  Such scribes as Middleton, Kid, and Fletcher shared that honor.
[Update:  And now, according to one far-fetched theory,  Marlowe.]

Less well known except by experts (and that, a litotes) is the fact that, in the eventide of Edmund Spenser’s career, his masterpiece behind him, and in the dawn of a brash young man named Will Shakespeare, whose mighty works were yet to come, the two poets joined forces in a series of fabliaux, curtain-raisers, and entr’actes.  This light fare was thought, until recently, to have perished quite.  Tis only now that the Incunabula Office of the World of Dr Justice ™, which has aforetimes brought forward, to critical acclaim, a series of pieces unpublished hitherto (by such as Omar Khayyam, Dickens, and Saint Augustine), has once again, in a triumph of antiquarian spelunking, scored a surprising find.  Alas, ‘tis but a fragment;  but we print it here, for the delectation of connoisseurs.

   Ye fretfull Porpentine

   went pricking o’er the plain …

Scholars are even now attempting to disentangle, which lines to attribute to Spenser, and which to father on the Bard.

Shakespeare and Spenser at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Cheapside,

wenching together

~  The World of Dr Justice © ~

~~ Philology U Can Trust ™ ~~

~ Our Motto : ~

~~ Lux et Verisimilitude ~~

A porpentine (as it might be) fretfully pricking along.

Further Elizabethan delicacies (some previously unpublished) available here.

[Update]  This just in!  An even more surprising authorial duo:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/03/shakespeares-collaborators.html

Le temps retrouvé: de Camus; de Proust

Le Figaro ce matin  rapporte une heureuse trouvaille:

Lettre de Camus inédite retrouvée

Quelques mois après ce courrier, Gallimard publie L'Homme révolté, essai de Camus rejeté par Sartre et à l'origine de leur rupture. L'écrivain existentialiste détruit ensuite la quasi totalité de leur correspondance, après avoir fustigé «l'incompétence philosophique» de Camus.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2014/11/26/03005-20141126ARTFIG00168-lettre-de-camus-inediteretrouvee-mon-cher-sartre8230.php

De savants lecteurs s’en félicitent -- mais plutôt à propos du correspondant, qu’à celui du destinataire:

Je constate, pour mon humble part, que c'est Camus qui reste. Lui, c'était un artiste qui pensait; Sartre, c'était un penseur qui écrivait.

--

« Incompétence philosophique » de Camus ? Ils sont tous deux plus idéologues bobos que philosophes. Et du point de vue « incompétence idéologique » Sartre sort grand vainqueur.

---

Ubqar:

"L'incompétence philosophique" de Camus ! j'ai toujours été persuadé que Sartre ne connaissait vraiment Hegel que par les conférences de Kojève, qu'il avait vaguement feuilleté "Etre et temps" d'Heidegger quand il était en Allemagne (peut-être même seulement les extraits traduits par Corbin) et qu'il a fait de tout ça un tartouilla poivré de cartésianisme dans "L’Être et le Néant", où domine surtout le néant philosophique. Quant à la "Critique de la raison dialectique", c'est une fumisterie que personne n'a jamais prise au sérieux, d'ailleurs écrite à coup de cigarette et de mescaline. Camus n'est peut-être pas un philosophe ; mais dans ce cas, Pascal non plus

----

Sartre: les débuts de la bien-pensance dégoulinante de gauche. Après 50 ans d'errements intello bobo notre société est malade, perdue entre l'identité française, les valeurs de la République et le bêlement de ces bourgeois de gauche qui prennent fait et cause pour les gentils exploités, colonisés et autres malheureux de la planète...A force de déprécier les valeurs de notre nation (encore un gros mot) nous sommes en guerre civile puisque des français bombardent actuellement d'autres français en Syrie. Merci qui ?

Pour ma part, j’ai récemment eu l’heur  d’avoir trouvé, chez un bouquiniste de Bruxelles, un brouillon de lettre, écrite par Proust  et destinée à son ami Charles Haas,  mais pourtant (pour des raisons inconnues) jamais confiée à  la poste.   Là-dedans on trouve l’esquisse d’un célèbre passage, publié par la suite dans Du côté de chez Swann mais sous forme quelque peu retouchée, pour ne pas dire défigurée, voire délibérément déguisée, et qui pourrait jeter quelque lumière sur les dessous du meurtre, jamais élucidé, d’un agent présumé de la Conspiration Riemann, Antoine Tychonoff, aux dernières années de la Belle Epoque :

      Mignonne assassine   

Mais elle est où, ma lettre ??

La police a été informée.

~

Et puis cette autre nouvelle trouvaille en France, celle-ci shakespearienne:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/arts/shakespeare-folio-discovered-in-france-.html?ref=world

~

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Pour visualiser l’intégralité de nos trouvailles en matière de manuscrits inédits, cliquez ici.

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