Tag: 1964

¿Donde Duermes, Elderado? Y Otros Poemas (1964) by Clérigo Herrero

Am pulling out of a bad physical slump and have not done too much work, apart from the writing of poems in Spanish, some of which I hope to place sooner or later with Latin-American periodicals. They have been checked over by a good Spanish professor, who did not find too much to correct.
—Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, 31 March 1950, Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith 364

English was the language of Weird Tales during its first run (1923-1954), though stories might have snippets of any number of languages, natural, artificial, and fictional.

Neither H. P. Lovecraft nor Robert E. Howard were ever fluent in Spanish, though both of them were at least somewhat familiar with it. The evidence for Lovecraft’s knowledge is fairly slight: the two passages in his story “The Mound,” which had been ghostwritten for Zealia Brown Reed Bishop, both of which are largely accurate (the final portion was deliberately designed to appear somewhat crude); Lovecraft’s library included a copy of Ollendorff’s New Method of Learning to Read, Write, and Speak the Spanish Language (Lovecraft’s Library 139), which may have served him as a reference. Lovecraft also used Spanish openings and closings to some of his letters to Bernard Austin Dwyer in 1928 (during the period “The Mound” was written, and when Lovecraft recounted his dream of Roman Hispania), signing himself once “Luis Randolfo Cartero y Teobaldo” (LMM 468)

Robert E. Howard’s knowledge of Spanish was probably more utilitarian. In at least a casual way, he had picked up at least a small stock of Spanish and Mexican words—exclamations, terms of address, names of food and drink. Certainly, when Spanish-speaking characters appear in his stories their English dialogue tends to be sprinkled with a few choice Spanish terms, although sometimes with some peculiarities of spelling; a common technique when Howard wanted to express something of the rural or uneducated nature of the speaker, though it’s hard to tell sometimes if he is doing it on purpose or not, as he seems to have dropped this tendency in Spanish relatively quickly. So, for example, in “Red Shadows” (1928) he writes “Senhor,” in “Winner Take All” (1930) he writes “Senyor,” but in “The Horror from the Mound” (1932) he writes “Señor.”

In late 1948 or early 1949, Smith learned Spanish, made his first translations of Spanish poetry, and wrote his first poems in Spanish.
—Donald Sidney-Fryer, “A Memoir of Timeus Gaylord: reminsicences of Two Visits with Clark Ashton Smith, &c.” in The Romanticist #2 (1978) 3

Smith had already taught himself French from dictionaries and grammars in the 1920s; Lovecraft would praise his translations of Baudelaire. A decade after the death of Howard and Lovecraft, Smith would do the same with Spanish. All three men shared a love of language and poetry, and were autodidacts, but Smith was the only one of the three to attempt anything like fluency in Spanish, at least to the point of translating and composing poetry in that language.

His hopes of being published in that language do not appear to have been fulfilled during his lifetime, although some of his translations of Spanish poetry from Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, José A. Calcaño, and José Santos Chocano (“El Cantor de América”) did see print in zines and his poetry collections, and some of the English translations of his Spanish poems also appeared in his Arkham House poetry collections—including a translation or two of “Clérigo Herrero,” Smith’s Spanish pen-name (“Cleric Smith”—Clark, clerk, cleric).

After Smith’s death in 1961, his widow attempted to continue to publish his work, and selling some of his letters and manuscripts in conjunction with letterpress printer and bookdealer Roy A. Squires. One of these projects was the small pamphlet ¿Donde Duermes, Elderado? Y Otros Poemas (1964), done entirely in Spanish, publishing eight of his poems as by Clérigo Herrero. The colophon says this printing was only 160 copies, although the bibliographies say 176.

Donde-inside

Typescripts of some of his other Spanish poems, discovered after this printing, were published in Shadows Seen & Unseen (2007), showing something of his process:

SSU-sample

For long decades, the Spanish poetry of Clark Ashton Smith was relatively unavailable: published far apart in limited editions. Today it has all been republished as part of the Collected Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith (2012) …and it is a testament to one of the great voices of Weird Tales to extend himself this way, to explore and express himself in another language. Because there is far more to this world than just the English language.

El mundo es el suyo,
El sol es el tuyo,
La luna es la mía.

The world is yours,
The sun is thine,
The moon is mine.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

“I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) by Joanna Russ

Before the story begins, before the very first word, Lovecraft fans will recognize the title as the the climactic revelation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” (1926). The title is the hook to reel the reader in, and the import of that one line doesn’t hit the reader until the penultimate sentence. Despite the fact that “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1964, it would not appear in a Mythos anthology until Cthulhu 2000 (1995)… and it hasn’t been reprinted in a Mythos anthology since.

This might seem odd, considering that Joanna Russ might be the first female prose writer who contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos. H. P. Lovecraft himself collaborated with “Elizabeth Berkeley” (Winifred Virginia Jackson) on “The Green Meadow” (1918-1919) and “The Crawling Chaos” (1921), Anna Helen Crofts on “Poetry and the Gods” (1920), and his future wife Sonia Haft Green on “The Horror at St. Martin’s Beach” and “Four O’Clock” (1922). None of these are Mythos tales per se, although “The Crawling Chaos” became a sobriquet for Nyarlathotep. Later, working as a revisionist, Lovecraft ghost-wrote tales for  female clients including “The Curse of Yig” (1928), “The Mound” (1929-1930), and “Medusa’s Coil” (1930) for Zealia Brown Reed Bishop; “The Horror in the Museum” (1932), “Winged Death” (1932), “The Man of Stone” (1932), “Out of the Aeons” (1933), and “The Horror in the Burying-Ground” (1933-1934). HPL also “collaborated” with Catherine L. Moore insofar as both contributed sections to the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935); Moore herself never appears to have written a Mythos story.

From Lovecraft’s death until 1964, when Russ’ “I Had…” was published, the sub-genre of Mythos fiction appears quite bare of female writers—although it is hard to say this with utmost certainty, given the prevalence of the fanpress (for example, Virginia “Nanek” Anderson contributed the poem “Shadow Over Innsmouth” to The Acolyte Winter 1942). Certainly the first edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969) was all-male, as were several anthologies that followed. Russ finally made it in to the revised version of Tales, the 1990 edition, with her second and final Mythos story “My Boat” (1976).

The problem for editors and anthologists is that “I Had…” was way ahead of its time. It is a reference to H. P. Lovecraft and his Mythos, but it isn’t a Mythos story in itself, does not use or expand the mythology. August Derleth, if he had been in a litigious mood, could hardly have found anything to issue a cease & desist about except the title. The crux of the story is that if you recognize the title, if you pick up the story to read it, if you go in there expecting another pastiche or sequel to “Pickman’s Model”… then you the reader have taken the bait.

Which is all the more apt when you consider that the story is almost cruelly accurate portrait of a certain segment of fandom itself; the socially awkward nerd, the obsessive Lovecraft fan which is a Western prototype of the otaku. Even today the caricature of Irvin Rubin she sketches cuts precisely because fannish collectors not only knows something of the type, but if they’re reading the story then they probably identify at least a little bit with that dark side of fandom. Rubin is the bookish kid with no friends who grew up to be a bookish adult with no friends, no lovers, no real life but a long delayed adolescence. There but for grace may have gone us all. For many such fans starved of human companionship, the possibility of real interaction is enticing as it is abnormal…so it is when Rubin meets a woman.

On a technical level, Russ is playing a stranger game than even the premise of the story. In format, it is not quite a Lovecraftian pastiche; Rubin is the vaguely Lovecraftian protagonist, but the story itself is told through two narrators—the good-hearted, older Miss June Kramer he works with, and a nameless narrator who provides the final piece of the story. Kramer’s narrative gives a view of Rubin by someone who is at once wiser and sympathetic, though we see little enough of her: the Miss suggests a woman who never married or divorced, rather than a widow; her age is somewhere north of 40, putting at least 12 years between her and Rubin; she has sufficient regular social interaction to have a group of ladies over for bridge and to share a story over a cup of coffee in the company cafeteria—and who is moved enough by Rubin to leave her bridge game and go to his cold room, just to prove that he does have at least one friend. The nameless narrator we never see; Kramer’s narrative serves to get us to the anticlimax, where Rubin is about to be married. The nameless narrator carries the story through the last part, which Miss Kramer never saw—perhaps because Russ didn’t want her to see it, wanted her to preserve the innocence of knowing what really happened to Irvin Rubin. Yet Russ definitely wants the reader to know what happened to him…

It is the reader that completes this story. If you haven’t read “Pickman’s Model,” if you aren’t familiar with Lovecraft and that certain type of obsessive and lonely fan, then the story is a fine weird tale, but nothing special. Maybe even a little hokey, because like M. R. James it leaves a great deal unsaid, unexplained; the meaning is implied between the lines. The catch requires recognition, and a very different use of Lovecraft than almost any other author has ever used. Arguably, Russ didn’t have to use Lovecraft for the story—but who else would she use, in 1964? Lovecraft already had the legend for it, the myth built up around himself and his writings.

Once you read the story, once you get the cruel joke, you may never read it again. The prose is not beautiful, the essence of the story a one-note tragedy. That couldn’t have helped it with the anthologists either: many fans want pastiches, stories that celebrate and expand on Lovecraft & co.’s artificial mythology, and many writers want that too. It’s fun, it’s part of the game. “I Had…” is ultimately more adult and demanding—a story with insight, which demands a moment’s reflection. One you may be glad to have read, if only because it is so different from what most people consider a “Lovecraftian” story.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)