You, of course, would never be the sort to play silly pranks on harried editors. But if you were that sort, you might try sending an email to the editor at Penguin Random House who is responsible for the backlist:

Madam,

I found a very embarrassing error in your edition of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. It is on page 267. I will not repeat it, but it will be obvious the moment you see it.

You would—hypothetically, if you were the sort to play silly pranks on harried editors—send that off and never respond to any messages sent in reply.

 

In Chinese literature, four works are considered the Four Great Classical Novels. Unfortunately, they are almost unknown to Westerners, and—with the exception of Dream of the Red Chamber—it is hard to find them in translation.

But now we have computers! The Chinese texts are on line, and Google Translate us up to the task. For a peek at what we’ve been missing, here is the beginning of the second chapter of Journey to the West (traditionally attributed to Wu Cheng’en), as translated for us by Google:

Satoru Tooru second time off the magic Bodhi really Miaoli owned by the co-soul

Monkey King got word table names, contend enthusiastically, before the ceremony to Bodhi Kai Xie. That Patriarch ordered that the public cited Monkey out two door sweep teach him to deal with, deal with the advance and retreat section. Immortal pursue out. Wukong to the door, and thanks to the public brother, sleep at the arrangements between the Gallery veranda. The next morning, and all the brothers learn verbal politeness, preaching on the road, copybooks incense. Daily true. That sweeping leisure garden hoe, gardening repair tree, lights the fire and look for firewood, pick waterway pulp. Where things used, and both equipment. Six or seven years in the cave feel prosperous.

Day, founder Gordon Gaozuo altar, Zhu Xian call set, lecture Avenue. So it’s: hype, Musella lasiocarpa. Three times wonderful play to teach, subtle methodology whole. Slow roll stag tail jet bead, move the ringing thunder nine days. Said a Club Road, talk for a while Zen, three with this as natural. Gui Cheng enlightened word processor, no guidelines had sex mysterious.

Magic! Sex! Gardening! Typing! Now, with the aid of almost supernaturally intelligent machine translation, we can see why this is one of the Four Great Classical Novels in Chinese literature. It’s got Finnegans Wake beat all hollow.

Arthur Schopenhauer espouncing his philosophical pessimism.

—

From a short paragraph on Arthur Schopenhauer:

He is known for having espounced a sort of philosophical pessimism that saw life as being essentially evil and futile, but saw hope in aesthetics, sympathy for others and ascetic living.

Dr. Boli actually looked up the word “espounce” to make sure it was not a word that had been out there in the wild all this time without his noticing it. It does not seem to be very common, at any rate.

But we can see what happened here. To espouse a philosophical position, in the current use of the term, is to adopt it as one’s own (or, in the original sense, to marry it, which may or may not be legal in your jurisdiction). To expound an idea is to set it forth in detail. A philosophical writer naturally does both: one expounds the ideas that one espouses. The two notions go together and are easily conflated, and we end up with something like espounce. If jaguars had philosophical ideas, they would certainly espounce them.

This is a more perfect portmanteau word than most. Your average portmanteau word, like “transponder,” is an obvious combination of the first part of one word and the last part of another. In espounce the words seem to have collided at such a high velocity that they have become inextricably blended. It is possible to recognize the blending, but it is not possible to see where one begins and the other ends. It is something like mocha, in which chocolate and coffee combine to make a flavor that is obviously chocolate-and-coffee, but not first chocolate, then suddenly coffee.

In fact, it is a portmanteau word in the original sense of the term, for the term “portmanteau” was adopted by Humpty Dumpty to explain some of the unusual vocabulary in “Jabberwocky”:

“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

Slithy is just the same sort of construction as espounce. It is not first one word, then the other, but the two words folded together completely. Or, if you prefer a chemical metaphor, it is not a suspension, but a solution.

So we have discovered a new word. Now, we could mock the writer for an obvious mistake. In fact, that is what Dr. Boli set out to do. But instead he began to like the word espounce, and is now disposed to suggest that we should embrace it as expressing an idea not otherwise easily expressed: the idea of simultaneously espousing an idea and expounding it to others.

Another victim sinks into the tomb,
Struck by Consumption,s dire
unering dart again fond friends
are call,d to bewail the doom of
one whom love had link,d to
many a hart.

This was the epitaph on the tombstone of a young man who died in 1830 at the age of nineteen. Our friend Father Pitt found it in the old Bethel Cemetery, and it immediately struck him that it was probably not an original composition. It looks like a semiliterate transcription of a published poem. But where was the poem published? asked old Pa Pitt. It took exactly twenty seconds to type the first line into Google and come up with the answer:

It is from The Casket, a popular American magazine of the day; click on the image above to be taken to the full volume in Google Books.

Twenty seconds, and we have the answer. Think about that for a moment. How long would it have taken a mere quarter-century ago? Dr. Boli suspects that it literally could not have been done. The poem was, as far as he knows, never reprinted after its initial appearance; it can be found only in the June, 1830, issue of The Casket. Probably half a dozen libraries in the world, at the very most, have  copies of that magazine in dusty bound volumes somewhere. The odds are pretty well stacked against stumbling across one of them by accident. It might occur to one in a brilliant flash of insight that the poem had come from a current magazine; but even then, to search through all the extant magazines published in 1830 in all the libraries in North America would have been such a daunting project that one would almost certainly not have begun it.

Every once in a while, when we wonder whether the Internet is good for anything but YouTube comments and quack cancer cures, we can remind ourselves that it makes whole species of knowledge possible that were not possible before.

From an article at the end of a long stream of clicks:

So ended one of the most notorious (and mostly unknown until now) chapters in NFL history.

This is a sentence that leaves one staring into the screen in puzzlement. Dr. Boli has not run into this meaning of “notorious” before. But it is an adjective, after all, and as a certain Mr. Dumpty once said: “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

This is a short review of Robur-le-Conquérant by Jules Verne, which appeared in La Nouvelle Revue when the book came out in 1886. Dr. Boli has hurriedly scribbled a translation from the French, for no other reason than that nobody else would do it.

The work of Jules Verne, which has numerous enthusiasts, certainly has its detractors as well. They accuse it of mixing up fantasy too intimately with science, and of troubling young intellects with ideas that are false, or incompletely true, about the phenomena on which modern science has still shed little light. Either way, no one can deny that the ingenious and audacious author has marked out a new territory all his own in our contemporary literature, and that is certainly a kind of talent that is not without merit. His new work is no less original and no less bold than its predecessors. Again an engineer is the hero, but this time it is the immensity of the heavens that is the theater of his adventures and experiments. Robur the Conqueror is the inventor of an aerodrome with seventy-four helices and two propellers: the Albatross, which guarantees him the empire of the air. Alone, convinced that each invention must come at its proper time, and that science ought not to outstrip morality, he disappears, taking with him his secret that could change the social and political conditions of the world. But he announces that he will return the moment humanity is knowledgeable enough to profit from that secret, and wise enough not to abuse it. Of course, as in all his novels, M. Jules Verne has added a considerable amount of humor and gaiety to Robur the Conqueror, and his innumerable readers will once again pass some delightful hours in enjoying these marvelous and entertaining adventures.

—

The book is available on Project Gutenberg: 

Robur the Conqueror (English)

Robur-le-Conquérant (French)

By a Friend.

—

CHAPTER 1: PROTO-PROFESSOR.

A story is told of Prof. Wenzell’s early days at Duck Hollow University;—and when I say that it is told, I mean that I seem to recall having heard it somewhere, perhaps years ago, but of course the details may have become clouded with the passage of time and sherry. But here is the story.

At that time, Prof. Wenzell had only just arrived, either the day or the year before (that is one of those clouded details, you see), and he had not yet achieved the reputation which his later work would one day thrust upon him. It would not be saying too much, or putting the case too strongly, to say that he was a relative unknown in the field he later came to dominate so dominantly. So much so, indeed, that one day he had forgotten the key to the office he shared with another faculty member (and although it seems impossible to imagine a time when Prof. Wenzell was considered so unimportant that he shared an office with another faculty member, yet we are assured that there was a time when he was even more unimportant than that): and for that reason he asked the custodian, who was known to possess a pass key to all the faculty offices, to open the door for him; whereupon the custodian looked him directly in the eye, and, without any sign of irony whatsoever, asked him, “Who are you?”

Astonishing and unlikely as this anecdote seems to us today, I have chosen to begin with it because it illustrates (whether it is strictly true or not) the obscurity from which our subject rose. The depths at the beginning of our story make the heights at the end all the more dizzying; for height, after all, is a relative measurement, as Prof. Wenzell himself so conclusively demonstrated when he utterly demolished the notion of “sea level.”

We begin, therefore, at the beginning of the story; or, rather, a little before the beginning, with the necessary preliminary information regarding Prof. Wenzell’s ancestry. His mother was a part-time state senator of good Anglo-Iberian stock, and his father was the only banjolele player in the Coral Sands Hotel Mandolin Orchestra. They rarely saw each other, and still more seldom their son; so that young Rutherford was reared mostly by a pack of half-domesticated wolves living in the back yard of the family home in Stanton Heights. The wolves taught him basic arithmetic and read him bedtime stories from the Critique of Pure Reason, and indeed I recall very clearly what a surprise, one might almost say a shock, it was to Prof. Rutherford to discover, during the course of a lecture to a freshman philosophy class, that hardly a one of his students had been acquainted with Kant before junior high school at the earliest.

As soon as young Rutherford learned to read, he devoured with eager relish the only books in the house, which were the instruction manuals for the various kitchen appliances. Their influence on his own style has been incalculable. They were kept in a drawer next to the refrigerator; and, for the rest of his life, whenever our subject saw a refrigerator, he immediately felt an overwhelming desire to read a book. Many of us among his acquaintances believed that this unusual mental association accounted for his almost emaciated appearance later in life. Often he would walk into the faculty lounge intending to retrieve his lunch, only to come running out again at a gallop in the direction of the library. There were whole weeks, nay months, when the same lunch bag sat in the refrigerator; and at the end of that time, of course, the food was hardly fit for consumption. It was generally at about that stage that Prof. Wenzell consumed it.

I have been told that Prof. Wenzell never set foot in a school until the day he arrived at Duck Hollow University to assume his professorship. But I have also been told that he was homecoming king and the star quarterback on his high-school football team. I have been told both these things at different times by Prof. Wenzell himself, so you see that I do not know which one to believe. I regard it as a matter for further research. But I have not done the research yet, and experience has taught me to expect that I shall probably never do the research.

Something ought to be said of the early romantic life of our subject, since such formative experiences often have a great effect on one’s thoughts and notions of the way the world is constituted. Something ought to be said, but it will not be said by me. Prof. Wenzell was a very private man when it came to the subject of his,—well, of his private life. When I knew him at the university, there were of course always rumors that one heard and dismissed. I do recall that once, arriving slightly early for a meeting in his office, I saw three attractive young women emerging from his door, each dressed as a chimney sweep and carrying a copy of Kalkbrenner’s Reflections on the Theaetetus of Plato. I assumed there was some perfectly ordinary explanation for their presence and appearance, and for the cricket bats and bits of broken pottery that were strewn about the floor of the professor’s office, and therefore did not bother him with trivial and superfluous questions. At any rate, a man may have his private peccadilloes without being called to account for them every moment of the day. I myself am immoderately fond of apricots.

The rest of the story of young Rutherford Wenzell cannot be told in a connected fashion, but only as a series of images or vignettes. Though he seldom spoke of his early life per se, Prof. Wenzell allowed little flashes of it to leak out in conversation once in a while. Thus we are able to say with some certainty that he knew want and deprivation: for I recall his telling a group of students on the grand staircase in Wheedle Hall (I cannot remember what brought the subject up), “When I was your age, we didn’t have fripperies like stairs. When we wanted to go upstairs, we had to wait for the elevator.” This indicates a youth of poverty, since it is well known that stairs were in use among the well-to-do more than a generation before Prof. Wenzell was born. Again, when the Acting Professor of Nineteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic Literature (who at the time was the youngest member of the faculty) complained that her feet were aching from a long walk across town, Prof. Wenzell replied, “I couldn’t afford feet when I was your age,” which speaks for itself.

Some critics have detected hints of a hidden sorrow in Prof. Wenzell’s work, and in their speculations have invented tales of early losses or romantic disappointments. They may well be correct, but I should like to ask them how they have detected this sorrow if it is hidden. I say that there are enough sorrows in the world to account for any taint of sadness in anyone’s writings: there is war, and disease, and asphalt, and artificial sweetener, and pitch correction, and television. What need have we, then, to turn over the dead sod of a man’s past life to find the root of a present melancholy? I have no recollection of the professor’s having mentioned anything about a secret sorrow himself, except once, when he told me, “I always weep when I see a dinette set, and nothing will console me for hours”; but what, after all, is there in that? Who has not felt the same?

On the whole, it seems useless to speculate any more on the unknown and unknowable youth of our subject. We may find fodder for infinite speculation in some of his quirks and eccentricities; but perhaps, after all, if a man runs screaming from the room whenever he sees a single sprig of celery, it may mean nothing more than that the man does not like celery. It is time, therefore, to leave the youth behind, and to face the man fully formed; it is time to meet the professor who astonished the world with his first work at the tender age of thirty-eight. It is time, in other words, to begin another chapter.

Arrogant (adjective). Refusing to accept my preconceived notions without investigation or debate.