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- Herausgeber: Cronos Classics
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
This book contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure! Mark Twain's "The Jumping Frog : In English, then in French, then clawed back into the civilized language once more by patient unremunerated toil" (1865), also known as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." Containing the original story (in english), a french translation which was published in la Revue des Deux Mondes and which Twain finds to be a travesty of the original text, and Twain's re-translation of the french back into english, word for word (this is where things degenerate). A masterpiece of babelfishien nonsense dating from well before babelfish was even a gleam in the binary code of its creator (1903). Best appreciated if you can read both French and English, but even if you skip the french version it's truly brilliant. If you have ever translated random text using babelfish just because it's funny, don't miss this book. As good old Samuel Clemens himself put it in his foreword "I cannot speak the French language, but I can translate very well, though not fast, I being self-educated."
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The Jumping Frog
Mark Twain
THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY
In English. Then in French. Then clawed back into a civilized language once more by patient, unremunerated toil.
Prologue
Even a criminal is entitled to fair play; and certainly when a man who has done no harm has been unjustly treated, he is privileged to do his best to right himself. My attention has just been called to an article some three years old in a French Magazine entitled, Revue des Deux Mondes (Review of Some Two Worlds), wherein the writer treats of “Les Humoristes Americaines” (These Humorists Americans). I am one of these humorists Americans dissected by him, and hence the complaint I am making.
This gentleman’s article is an able one (as articles go in the French, where they always tangle up everything to that degree that when you start into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or not). It is a very good article, and the writer says all manner of kind and complimentary things about me—for which I am sure I thank him with all my heart; but then why should he go and spoil all his praise by one unlucky experiment? What I refer to is this: he says my Jumping Frog is a funny story, but still he can’t see why it should ever really convulse any one with laughter—and straightway proceeds to translate it into French in order to prove to his nation that there is nothing so very extravagantly funny about it. Just there is where my complaint originates. He has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than I am like a meridian of longitude. But my mere assertion is not proof; wherefore I print the French version, that all may see that I do not speak falsely; furthermore, in order that even the unlettered may know my injury and give me their compassion, I have been at infinite pains and trouble to retranslate this French version back into English; and to tell the truth. I have well-nigh worn myself out at it, having scarcely rested from my work during five days and nights. I cannot speak the French language, but I can translate very well, though not fast, I being self-educated. I ask the reader to run his eye over the original English version of the Jumping Frog, and then read the French or my retranslation, and kindly take notice how the Frechman has riddled the grammar. I think it is the worst I ever saw; and yet the French are called a polished nation. If I had a boy that put sentences together as they do, I would polish him to some purpose. Without further introduction, the Jumping Frog, as I originally wrote it, was as follows [after it will be found the French version, and after the latter my retranslation from the French]:
THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY
(Pronounced Cal-e-va-ras.)
In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend’s friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W.Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded.
