Read Online Dog Years by Günter Grass & Ralph Manheim - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Günter Grass & Ralph Manheim
Ads: Link
finished product with its own ragged hide.
FIFTEENTH MORNING SHIFT
Our friend the actor is creating difficulties. Whereas Brauxel and the young man write day after day—the one about Amsel’s diary, the other about and to his cousin—he has come down with a light case of January flu. Has to suspend operations, isn’t getting proper care, has always been kind of delicate at this time of year, begs leave once again to remind me of the promised advance. It’s been sent, my friend. Quarantine yourself, my friend; your manuscript will benefit by it. Oh sober joy of conscientious effort: There is a diary in which Amsel in beautiful newly learned Sütterlin script noted his expenses in connection with the fashioning of scarecrows for field and garden. The pig’s bladder was free. Kriwe procured the worthless cowhide for two sticks of chewing tobacco.
On credit balance, what lovely round words: There is a diary in which Amsel, with figures plump and figures angular, entered his receipts from the sale of various scarecrows for garden and field—eels on udder netted him a whole gulden.
Eduard Amsel kept this diary for about two years, drew lines vertical and horizontal, painted Sütterlin pointed, Sütterlin rich in loops, put down blueprints and color studies for various scarecrows, immortalized almost every scarecrow he had sold, and gave himself and his products marks in red ink. Later, as a high school student, he wrapped the several times folded little notebook in cracked black oilcloth, and years later, when he had to hurry from the city to the Vistula to bury his mother, found it in a chest used for a bench. The diary lay among the books left by his father, side by side with those about the battles and heroes of Prussia and underneath Otto Weininger’s thick volume, and had a dozen or more empty pages which Amsel later, under the names of Haseloff and Goldmouth, filled in with sententious utterances at irregular intervals separated by years of silence.
Today Brauxel, whose books are kept by an office manager and seven clerks, owns the touching little notebook wrapped in scraps of oilcloth. Not that he uses the fragile original as a prop to his memory! It is stowed away in his safe along with contracts, securities, patents, and essential business secrets, while a photostatic copy of the diary lies between his well-filled ash tray and his cup of lukewarm morning coffee and serves him as work material. The first page of the notebook is wholly taken up by the sentence, more painted than written: “Scarecrows made and sold by Eduard Heinrich Amsel.”
Underneath, undated and painted in smaller letters, a kind of motto: “Began at Easter because I shouldn’t forget anything. Kriwe said so the other day.”
Brauksel holds that there isn’t much point in reproducing here the broad Island idiom written by Eduard Amsel as an eight-year-old schoolboy; in the present narrative it will be possible at most to record in direct discourse the charms of this language, which will soon die out with the refugees’ associations and once dead may prove to be of interest to science in very much the same way as Latin. Only when Amsel, his friend Walter, Kriwe, or Grandma Matern open their mouths in the Island dialect, will Brauchsel’s pen follow suit. But since in his opinion the value of the diary is to be sought, not in the schoolboy’s adventurous spelling but in his early and resolute efforts in behalf of scarecrow development, Eduard’s village schoolboy idiom will be reproduced only in a stylized form, halfway between the Island brogue and the literary language. For example: “Today after milking recieved anuther gulden for scarcro what stands on one legg and holds the uther croocked Wilhelm Ledwormer tuk it. Throo in a Ulan’s helmet and a peece of lining what uset to be a gote.”
Brauksel will make a more serious attempt to describe the sketch that accompanies this entry: The scarecrow “what stands on one legg and
FIFTEENTH MORNING SHIFT
Our friend the actor is creating difficulties. Whereas Brauxel and the young man write day after day—the one about Amsel’s diary, the other about and to his cousin—he has come down with a light case of January flu. Has to suspend operations, isn’t getting proper care, has always been kind of delicate at this time of year, begs leave once again to remind me of the promised advance. It’s been sent, my friend. Quarantine yourself, my friend; your manuscript will benefit by it. Oh sober joy of conscientious effort: There is a diary in which Amsel in beautiful newly learned Sütterlin script noted his expenses in connection with the fashioning of scarecrows for field and garden. The pig’s bladder was free. Kriwe procured the worthless cowhide for two sticks of chewing tobacco.
On credit balance, what lovely round words: There is a diary in which Amsel, with figures plump and figures angular, entered his receipts from the sale of various scarecrows for garden and field—eels on udder netted him a whole gulden.
Eduard Amsel kept this diary for about two years, drew lines vertical and horizontal, painted Sütterlin pointed, Sütterlin rich in loops, put down blueprints and color studies for various scarecrows, immortalized almost every scarecrow he had sold, and gave himself and his products marks in red ink. Later, as a high school student, he wrapped the several times folded little notebook in cracked black oilcloth, and years later, when he had to hurry from the city to the Vistula to bury his mother, found it in a chest used for a bench. The diary lay among the books left by his father, side by side with those about the battles and heroes of Prussia and underneath Otto Weininger’s thick volume, and had a dozen or more empty pages which Amsel later, under the names of Haseloff and Goldmouth, filled in with sententious utterances at irregular intervals separated by years of silence.
Today Brauxel, whose books are kept by an office manager and seven clerks, owns the touching little notebook wrapped in scraps of oilcloth. Not that he uses the fragile original as a prop to his memory! It is stowed away in his safe along with contracts, securities, patents, and essential business secrets, while a photostatic copy of the diary lies between his well-filled ash tray and his cup of lukewarm morning coffee and serves him as work material. The first page of the notebook is wholly taken up by the sentence, more painted than written: “Scarecrows made and sold by Eduard Heinrich Amsel.”
Underneath, undated and painted in smaller letters, a kind of motto: “Began at Easter because I shouldn’t forget anything. Kriwe said so the other day.”
Brauksel holds that there isn’t much point in reproducing here the broad Island idiom written by Eduard Amsel as an eight-year-old schoolboy; in the present narrative it will be possible at most to record in direct discourse the charms of this language, which will soon die out with the refugees’ associations and once dead may prove to be of interest to science in very much the same way as Latin. Only when Amsel, his friend Walter, Kriwe, or Grandma Matern open their mouths in the Island dialect, will Brauchsel’s pen follow suit. But since in his opinion the value of the diary is to be sought, not in the schoolboy’s adventurous spelling but in his early and resolute efforts in behalf of scarecrow development, Eduard’s village schoolboy idiom will be reproduced only in a stylized form, halfway between the Island brogue and the literary language. For example: “Today after milking recieved anuther gulden for scarcro what stands on one legg and holds the uther croocked Wilhelm Ledwormer tuk it. Throo in a Ulan’s helmet and a peece of lining what uset to be a gote.”
Brauksel will make a more serious attempt to describe the sketch that accompanies this entry: The scarecrow “what stands on one legg and
Similar Books
