Oh All Right Then

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Another and still more amusing instance of self-revelation may be found in a manuscript familiar to many who have visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford. There, among other precious treasures, is a collection of notes scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and by Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile the tedium of Council. They look, for all the world, like the notes which school-girls are wont to scribble to one another, to beguile the tedium of study. On one page, Charles in a little careless hand, not unlike a school-girl’s, writes that he wants to go to Tunbridge, to see his sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer characters writes back that there is no reason why he should not, if he can return in a few days, and adds tentatively, ‘I suppose you will go with a light train.’ Charles, as though glowing with conscious rectitude, responds, ‘I intend to take nothing but my night-bag.’ Clarendon, who knows his master’s luxurious habits, is startled out of all propriety. ‘Gods!’ he writes: ‘you will not go without forty or fifty horse.’ Then Charles, who seems to have been waiting for this point in the dialogue, tranquilly replies in one straggling line at the bottom of the page. ‘I count that part of my night-bag.’

— Agnes Repplier, Essays in Idleness, 1893

| History

Lost in Translation

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Apocryphal but entertaining: Allegedly a Paris (or Genoese?) opera company provided this synopsis of Carmen to its English-speaking patrons:

Act 1. Carmen is a cigar-makeress from a tabago factory who loves with Don José of the mounting guard. Carmen takes a flower from her corsets and lances it to Don José (Duet: ‘Talk me of my mother’). There is a noise inside the tabago factory and the revolting cigar-makeresses burst into the stage. Carmen is arrested and Don José is ordered to mounting guard her but Carmen subduces him and he lets her escape.

Act 2. The Tavern. Carmen, Frasquita, Mercedes, Zuniga, Morales. Carmen’s aria (‘The sistrums are tinkling’). Enter Escamillio, a balls-fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: ‘We have in mind a business’) but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated her from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: ‘Slop, here who comes!’) but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them (final chorus: ‘Opening sky wandering life’).

Act 3. A roky landscape, the smuglers shelter. Carmen sees her death in cards and Don José makes a date with Carmen for the next balls fight.

Act 4, A place in Seville. Procession of balls-fighters, the roaring of the balls heard in the arena. Escamillio enters, (Aria and chorus: ‘Toreador, toreador, all hail the balls of a Toreador’). Enter Don José (Aria: ‘I do not threaten, I besooch you.’) but Carmen repels himwants to join with Escamillio now chaired by the crowd. Don José stabbs her (Aria: ‘Oh rupture, rupture, you may arrest me, I did kill der’) he sings ‘Oh my beautiful Carmen, my subductive Carmen …’

From what I can tell, the earliest date claimed for the opera performance is 1928, and this excerpt didn’t appear until 1966. No one anywhere makes any confident claim as to the writer.

| Humor · Language

Second Thoughts

In January 1984, Games magazine challenged its readers to create a form of communication in which a positive statement can be changed to a negative one solely by changing its punctuation. As an example, contributing editor Gloria Rosenthal offered this love letter:

Dear John:

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can forever be happy — will you let me be yours?

Harriet

How can Harriet tell John to get lost solely by repunctuating her letter?

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| Puzzles

In Other Words

Writing in the New Beacon in 1938, blind poet W.H. Mansmore describes a process he calls “mental alchemy,” “a transmutation of sensations from one order to another.” He takes up this visual description from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in which the nymph Asia watches dawn break over the mountains:

The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains; through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it; now it wanes; it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air;
‘T is lost! and through yon peaks of cloudlike snow
The roseate sunlight quivers; …

“I give below an attempt to render the same passage in terms of touch:”

One cold metallic grain is quivering still
Deep in the flood of warm ethereal fluid
Beyond the velvet mountains: through a chasm
In banks of fleece the heavier lake is splashed
With fairy foam: it wanes: it grows again
As the waves thicken, and as the burning threads
Of woven wool unravel in the tepid air:
‘Tis lost! and through the unsubstantial snow
Of yonder peaks quivers the living form
And vigour of the Sun …

“Or it may be put into sound, thus:”

One star pierces with thin intensity
The large crescendo consonance of morn
Beyond the drumming mountains: on the lake
Through stolid silence ghostly-faint is thrown
An echo: now it wanes: it grows again
Its echo fades, and splits into a swarm
Of singing notes that scatter in the faint air:
Then through a sound of breathing winds afar
Begins the throbbing anthem of the Sun.

He adds, “I owe Shelley an apology for publishing the above travesties of his work, but with all their inadequacy they may serve to make clear our method of realising the unreal world of light in the real world of sound and touch.”

| Language · Poems

Harmony

A puzzle by S. Dvoryaninov from the July-August 1994 issue of Quantum:

A very large military band marched in square formation on a parade ground, then regrouped into a rectangle so that the number of rows increased by 5. How many musicians were in the band?

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| Puzzles