At first, I found the dictionary part very hard. Old Low Norse is pretty damn old, and the origins are rather obscure. It was actually easier to look ahead, at Swedish and Danish and Norwegian, to see what those Old Low Norse words would become. Mainly, I discovered, they were just bad pronunciations of Old West Norse and Old East Norse.
Then I found a way to make the dictionary part easy. Since no one knew anything about Old Low Norse, I could make things up. I made up a lot of origins. This made the translation of Akthelt and Gunnel easier too. I started making up a lot of words. It's very hard to tell real Old Low Norse from made-up Old Low Norse.
Dr Wolfram Holster never knew the difference.
But I had some difficulty finishing the thesis. I would like to say that I stopped out of reverence for the main characters. It was a very personal love story and no one knew what it meant. I would like to say that I stopped because I felt Akthelt and Gunnel should be allowed to keep their privacy. But anyone who knows me at all would say that was a shameless lie. They would say I stopped simply because I hated Akthelt and Gunnel, or because I was bored, or because I was lazy, or because I had made up so much phony Old Low Norse that I could no longer keep the story straight.
There are elements of truth in what they would say, but it's also true that I was deeply moved by Akthelt and Gunnel. To be sure, it is an awful ballad. It's impossible to imagine anyone singing it for example; for one thing, it's much too long. Also, I once characterized its metrics and rhyme scheme as 'multiple and flexible'. Actually, it has no rhyme scheme; it tries to rhyme when it can. And metrics were simply not known to its anonymous Old Low Norse author. (I imagine that author, by the way, as a peasant housewife.)
There is a false assumption usually made about the ballads of this period: that since the subjects were always kings and queens and princes and princesses, the authors were always royalty too. But peasants wrote about those kings and queens. The royalty was not alone in thinking that kings and queens were somehow better; part of being a peasant was thinking that kings and queens were better. I suspect that a fair portion of the population still thinks that way.
But Akthelt and Gunnel were better. They were in love; they were two against the world; they were formidable. And so was the world. I thought I knew the story.
I started out being faithful to the original. My translation is literal through the first fifty-one stanzas. Then I followed the text of the story fairly closely, just using my own details, until stanza one hundred and twenty. Then I translated pretty loosely for another hundred and fifty stanzas or so. I stopped at stanza two hundred and eighty and tried a literal translation again, just to see if I'd lost the hang of it.
Gunnel uppvaktat att titta Akthelt.
Hanz kniv af slik lang.
Uden hun kende inde hunz hjert
Den varld af ogsa mektig
Gunnel loved to look at Akthelt.
His knife was so long.
But she knew in her heart
The world was too strong.
I stopped reading with this wretched stanza and gave up on Akthelt and Gunnel. Dr Holster laughed at this stanza. So did Biggie. But I didn't laugh. The world is too strong - I saw it all coming! - the author was trying to foreshadow the inevitable doom! Clearly Akthelt and Gunnel were headed for grief. I knew, and I simply didn't want to see it out.
Lies! they would be shouting at me, those who knew me then. Old Bogus's mush-minded ability to read his own sentimentality into everything around him! The world was too strong - for him! He saw himself headed for grief - the only one we knew who could see a lousy movie and love it, read a rotten book and weep, if it had a flicker or a jot to do with him! Muck in his mind! Goo in his heart! What do you think he's called Bogus for? For truth?
Never mind them, the heartless schlubs. I live in another varld now.
When I showed Tulpen two hundred and eighty she reacted in her solemn fashion. She put her head down to my heart and listened. Then she made me listen to hers. She does this when she recognizes a vulnerable situation; there are no sarcastic breast-flips when she's moved.
'Strong?' she said. I was listening to her heart; I nodded.
'Mektig,' I said.
'Mektig?' She liked the sound; she went off playing with the word. Playing with the words was one of the things I really liked about Old Low Norse.
So there. Yogurt and lots of water, and a certain sympathy when sympathy matters. I'm all right. Things are straightening out. There is the matter of my urinary tract, of course, but in general things are straightening out.
6
Prelude to the Last Stand
Bogus Trumper
918 Iowa Ave.
Iowa City, Iowa
Oct. 2, 1969
Mr Cuthbert Bennett
Caretaker/The Pillsbury Estate
Mad Indian Point
Georgetown, Maine
My Dear Couth:
Am in receipt of your fine encouragements and most generous check. They have Biggie and me down and under at Iowa State Bank & Trust; I relish the feeling of plunking your check on them. If Biggie and I are ever in the chips, you'll be our honorary caretaker. In fact we'd love to take care of you, Couth - to see that you eat enough during your long, alone winters; that you brush your mane forty strokes before sleep; and to provide a fine young fire for your sea-draughty bed. In fact, I know just the fine young fire for you! Her name is Lydia Kindle. Really.
I met her in the language lab. She takes freshman German, but little else has touched her. She approached me yesterday, chirping, 'Mr Thumper, are there no tapes with songs? I mean, I know the conversation. Aren't there any German ballads, or even opera?'
I stalled her; I browsed through the files with her bemoaning the lack of music in the language lab, and life in general. She's as shy as a cat underfoot; she fears her skirt might brush against your knee.
Lydia Kindle wants German ballads whispered in her ear. Or even opera, Couth!
I harbor no such musical illusion for my new job, my most degrading employment to date. I sell buttons and pennants and cowbells at the Iowa football games. I lug a large plywood board from gate to gate around the stadium. The board is wide and tippy with an easel-type stand; the wind blows it down; tiny gold footballs are scratched, buttons chip, pennants wrinkle and smudge. I get a commission: 10% of what I sell.
'Just one dollar for this Hawkeye pennant! A bell for two bucks! Big badges only seventy-five cents! It's a dollar, madam, for the pins with the little gold footballs attached. The kids love them; the footballs are just small enough for the wee ones to swallow. No, sir, this bell is not broken! It is simply a little bent. These bells are unbreakable. They'll dong forever.'
I get to see the game for free, but I hate football. And I have to wear this bright-yellow apron with a fat change-pocket. A large, shiny badge on my coat says: HAWKEYE ENTERPRISES - GO HAWKS! Every badge is numbered too; we communicate around the stadium by numbers. Competition is fierce for the best stand. On Saturday Number 368 said to me, 'This is my post, 510. Lug off, will you?' He wore a tie with red footballs on it; he sold many more pennants and buttons and cowbells than I did. I cleared just enough for a three-month packet of birth-control pills for Biggie.
Root for Iowa, Couth. Next game I might clear enough to have myself sterilized.
I was told that if Iowa ever won a football game, we would all sell many more things. The psychology of the fans was outlined to us in our Warm-up Meeting by the concession sales head of Hawkeye Enterprises, Mr Fred Paff, who told us that Iowans were proud folks, in need of a winner before they'd adorn their aerials and sprout badges and pins on their coats. 'Nobody likes to be associated with a loser,' Paff said, and to me he said, 'Well, we're both Freds, you know. How about that?'
'I know another Fred in Spokane, Washington,' I told him. 'Perhaps we should try to get something going.'
'A sense of humor!' Fred Paff cried. 'You'll do well here. A sense of humor is essential with the fans.'
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Let it be known, Couth, that you have more loyal and constant fans than these Iowans. Biggie and I appreciated your photographs almost as much as your money. Biggie especially liked your 'Self-Portrait w/Seaweed.' I frankly suspect it's illegal to send such photographs through the mail, and I don't mean to insult your body, but I preferred 'Dead Gull No. 8.'
Please dip into your darkroom and print one like that for me; in fact, make it of me. Make me prone and sort of sallow; fold my hands in the appropriate fashion and place the ready coffin near my figure; crack the casket's lid ajar, waiting for Fred Bogus Trumper, who at any moment now could easily be tempted by that plush velvet liner. Destroy the negative. Print only one 8 x 10. Superimposed, include the faces of my family: Biggie solid grief, but not bitter, and Colm at play with the casket's ornate handle. Please underexpose my father and mother. Move my father's mouth; in fact, blur it. He orates over the dead. The caption reads: 'A professional man must suffer his training ...' Then seal it in a black mat-board and mail the whole thing to the University of Iowa Business Office, with a curt note of apology for the failure of the deceased to pay his tuition. Which has been raised again, by vote of the trustees, to include an additional recreation fee. To pay, no doubt, for new gold football cleats and a Homecoming Day parade float: millions of yellow roses, shaped to form a giant ear of corn.
You're lucky to have a darkroom, Couth. I see you naked in your eerie safelight, awash in chemicals, developing, enlarging; you print yourself on a clean white sheet. Sometime, if there ever is time, you must teach me photography. The control of it amazes me. I remember watching you bathe your prints; I saw the images emerging and defining underwater; it was more than I could stand! As if so many ameboid things swam into place and made a man.
I think of this while translating the eighty-third stanza of Akthelt and Gunnel. It's the last word that bothers me: Klegwoerum. My thesis chairman thinks it should be 'fertile'. I say 'fecund'. My friend Ralph Packer suggests 'rank'. And Biggie says it doesn't really matter. There is a hurtful ton of truth in Biggie.
I think she's cracking, though. It's not like her, but she's taking it personally that some octogenarian in the hospital gooses her when she empties his bedpan. But do you know, Biggie never cries. Do you know what she does do, though? She finds a hangnail and tugs it slowly down her finger; I've seen her tease one past the first joint. Biggie bleeds, but she never cries.
Couth, I have felt close to you ever since I caught your clap from Elsbeth Malkas. Or we both caught and shared what Elsbeth had to start with. The details of who began it have never seemed to me essential for our friendship.
Once more, flush all seventeen of the johns for me. It would do my heart good to know that somewhere there are toilets which are not clogged with jockstraps. Choose a foggy night, open all the windows - sound bounces best off water in the fog - and flush away! I will hear you and rejoice.
Biggie sends her love. She's in the kitchen peeling her fingers. She's pretty busy, otherwise I'd ask her for a hangnail to enclose, a shred of her Trumpering fortitude boldly traveling from Iowa to Maine.
Love,
Bogus
7
Ralph Packer Films, Inc. 109 Christopher Street New York, New York 10014
TULPEN AND ME at work. She does the editing; actually, Ralph is his own editor, but Tulpen assists him. She also does some darkroom work, but Ralph is his own developer too. I don't know anything about developing and not much about editing. I'm the sound tracker; I tape in the music; if there's sync-sound, I get it right; if there's a voice-over, I lay it in; if there's offstage noise, I make some; when there's a narrator, I often do the talking. I have a nice big voice.
The film is nearly finished by the time it's brought to me, with most of the unusable footage cut out, and the sequence of shots pretty much the way Ralph wants it, at least rough-spliced - more or less the way Ralph will finally edit it. Ralph is very close to a one-man band, with some technical help from Tulpen and me. It's always Ralph's script and his camera-work; it's his movie. But Tulpen and I have great technique, and there's a Ralph Packer Fan Club kid named Kent who runs errands.
Tulpen and I are not members in The Ralph Packer Fan Club. The kid named Kent is a one-man band at that. I don't mean to suggest that Ralph Packer's films are unknown. His first film, The Group Thing, won first prize in the National Student Film Festival. My nice big voice is in that film; Ralph made it when he was a graduate student in the Cinematography Workshop at Iowa.
I met him in the language lab. In a lull between lab-sections, I was editing tapes for freshman German when this shuffling man of hair came in. Possibly twenty, or forty; possibly student or faculty, Trotskyite or Amish farmer, human or animal; a thief lumbering out of a camera shop, laden with lenses and light meters; a bear who after a terrible and violent struggle ate a photographer. This beast approached me.
I was still doing my translation of Akthelt and Gunnel then. I felt myself confronted by Akthelt's father, Old Thak. As he came closer a musk moved with him. One hundred glints of fluorescent light, off his lenses, buckles and polished parts.
'You Trumper?' he said.
A wise man, I thought, would confess it all now. Admit the translation was a fraud. Hope Old Thak goes back to the grave.
'Vroog etz?' I asked, just testing him.
'Good,' he grumbled; he understood! He was Old Thak! But all he said was 'Ralph Packer', freeing a white hand from an arctic mitten, pushing this toward me out of the cuff of his Eskimo parka. 'You speak German, right? And you know tapes?'
'Right,' I said cautiously.
'Ever done any dubbing?' he asked. 'I'm making a film.' A pervert, I thought; wants me in his blue movie. 'I need a German voice,' he said. 'Some kind of clever German slipping in and out of the English narration.'
I knew those film-making students. Passing by Benny's and seeing through the window a terrible fight, a girl with her bra torn off, holding her tits, I rush inside to this lady's aid, only to spill a cameraman from his dolly, tangle my feet in extension cords, jar a man with his hands full of microphones. And the girl says tiredly, 'Easy, hey. It's just a goddamn movie.' She gives you a look to say: Because of nuts like you, I'm on my fourth bra today.
'... well, if you like playing with tapes and recorders,' Ralph Packer was saying, 'jamming voices, jumbling time. You know, sound montage. There's just a couple of things I want done, then you can play with it - you know, do what you want. Maybe give me some ideas ...'
It was such a shock at the time: to be a football-pennant salesman, and here's someone suggesting I might even have ideas!
'Hey,' said Ralph Packer, looking at me. 'You speak English too, don't you?'
'What do you pay?' I asked, and he whomped his arctic mitten down on my tape stack, sending one reel flopping like a stunned fish.
'Pay you!' he shouted. A great shrug of his shoulders sent a zoom lens around his neck swinging. Scenes of Old Thak in a rage sprang to mind.
Though well into his dotage, and weak
With the arrow sunk deep in his chest
Which was wider than Gurk's wine cask,
Old Thak strode up to the assassin-archer
And strangled him with his own bowstring.
Then, with his great palm, hardened
By holding the reins for a hundred horses,
Thak drove the arrow through his own chest
And drew it out his back, groaning mightily.
With the shaft still slimy with the old one's gore,
Thak slew the treacherous Gurk - a disemboweling
Thrust! Then did the Great Thak thank Gwolph
And blessed the banquet laid before him bloodily.
Thus did Ralph Packer storm about the listening booths of the language lab, and a frightened gathering of freshman German students cowered in the door while he ranted on.
'Sweet fuck! I should pay you? For an experience? And an opportunity! Look, Thumper' - a titter from my disloyal students - 'you sho
uld pay me for giving you the chance! I'm just getting started, I don't even pay myself! I sold fifteen hundred fucking football pennants for one wide-angle lens, and you want to be paid for your education!'
'Wait! Packer!' I cried; he was heading out the door, the students scampering.
'Fuck you, Thump-Thump,' he said. And turning fiercely on the freshman Germans: 'Fuck him, I say!' For a moment sensing their blind dread, I feared the lot of them would rush me and impulsively obey his command. But I ran after him. I found him watering himself with deep, greedy draughts at the drinking fountain in the hall.
'I didn't know you sold football pennants,' I said.
Later, when he was pleased with my sound-tracking games. Packer told me he'd be able to pay me one day. 'When I'm able to pay myself, Thump-Thump, there will be work for you.'
So Ralph Packer was true to his word. The Group Thing was a mild success. That part where the 'Horst Wessel Song' is played over a beery crowd at Benny's? That was my idea. And the part with the Maths department meeting at the University of Iowa, with German dubbed in and the subtitles reading: 'First you arrest them with the proper court order, then you start arresting so many that group trials become acceptable, then you've got them so worried about the detention camps that they don't bother you about having to have a court order any more, so then ...'
It was a kind of propaganda film. The evil was the innate hostility directed at the individual by groups. It was not a political film, however; all groups were equally misrepresented. The enemy was any unified crowd. Even a classroom with nodding heads: 'Yes, yes, I see, I agree, jawohl!'
Everyone thought that The Group Thing was 'innovative'. Only one major complaint was ever leveled against it, and it came to Ralph in the form of a letter from the German American Society of Columbus, Ohio. They said the film was anti-German; it 'raked over a lot of old coals', they said. There wasn't anything especially German about groups, they said, and there wasn't anything wrong with groups, either. Ralph was referred to as a 'nut'. The letter was not actually signed by anybody, by any real person. It was stamped, with one of those ink stampers: THE GERMAN AMERICAN SOCIETY.