Frickin’ cool: translator Barbara Wright’s personal copy of her 1951 translation for Gaberbocchus Press of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, inscribed by Wright to former Lilly Library director (and fellow translator) Breon Mitchell.
Alfred Jarry was just a teenager in 1896 when he premiered the irreverent play Ubu Roi (sometimes translated as “King Turd”) to an audience that was so scandalized they rioted. But in the case of such then-little-known audience members as W.B. Yeats, the play felt like a revolutionary event that presaged avante-garde movements like Surrealism and Dadaism in how it mixed high art and vulgar humor, homages to classical literature and parodies of contemporary figures.
Wright wrote in her essay “How Themersons turned me into a Translator” that the publication was delayed due to “phynance” issues, Franciszka Themerson “invented a technique according to which I wrote the text in black ink directly onto lithographic plates, [Themerson] then doodled (in her inimitable fashion) around my handwriting, and the whole was printed by photo-offset on yellow paper. The bits and pieces fore and aft of the main text were printed in red ink on grey paper.”
(Special thanks to Jacob Siefring for mentioning Barbara Wright in my call-out for great 20th century translators last week on Twitter, and to Breon Mitchell for bringing to my attention that the Lilly holds Wright’s papers.)
Lilly Library | PQ2619.A65 U15 1951
Aw no! Ye commentes be closed.