Persnicuit gladio

misia has discovered a trove of Jabberwocky translations, including "Le Jaseroque," which has been stuck in my head since I first encountered it in the notes to the Annotated Alice at a tender age. For some reason "Un deux, un deux, par le milieu, / Le glaive vorpal fait pat-à-pan! / La bête défaite, avec sa tête, / Il rentre gallomphant" works just as well for me as "One two! One two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! / He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back," and is just as likely to go jingling through my head at inopportune moments.

But what I really wanted to point to are the three Latin versions, of which my favorite (from which the title of this entry comes) is Augustus A. Vansittart's Mors Iabrochii.

And the Iabrochium is inspiring me to post a poem which my undergraduate classics department used as part of the course description for the first-year Latin class.

( The Motor Bus, by A. D. Godley )

("The Motor Bus" can also be found online here, (with English translations for all the Latin bits) here, (set to music) here--and, no, I haven't listened to it and don't intend to. Also, Dorothy Sayers pays homage to Godley and his poem in an article here.)

types of short stories?

First, thanks to everyone who has posted congratulations and cries of enthusiasm in response to yesterday's exciting news. Much appreciated!

Second, I had this random thought yesterday. I'm not sure if it's an epiphany or a delusion, so I thought I'd post it and see what y'all think. I was thinking about my short stories and realized they fell into two categories, each of which has, to me, a distinctly different feel. One is the straight narrative group, the ones that are like novels only shorter (the two novellas I sold to Alchemy are this way, as are all the other sales I've made that haven't been to LCRW). The others, the ones that LCRW likes, aren't like novels. They're something else, some different way of story-telling. (I think there are people who can write novels that are more this way--Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine is the example I thought of immediately--but I am not one of them.) I don't quite know how to categorize what I'm talking about. Partly it's that the narrative isn't linear, but there's more to it than that. There's a difference in the quality of the stories. It's not necessarily a matter of there being more or less external action, since some of the more traditionally narrative stories have very little that "happens" in them, either. I don't know what it is. But I think one of the reasons I've been having trouble with the current necklace story is that it's a story of the second type that is insisting on being told in the manner of the first (i.e., it wants to look like a traditional narrative when it really isn't).

At this point I shall channel China Miéville and mutter, "Numinous!" and fall silent again.