The Blue Peril
Page 36
56 The wordplay in this passage poses acute difficulties in translation, and must have challenged Renard’s original readers. Faucheux are long-legged hunting spiders; their name is adapted from the verb faucher [to mow] and is suggestive of the Grim Reaper. Atocalts and galeodes are also intimidating spiders, the latter being a general term for fearsome-seeming solifugids, or “camel spiders.” The Victor Hugo reference is to La Légende des siècles, specifically to the early section entitled “Puissance égale bonté” [Power equals generosity], in which God and Iblis (the Devil) engage in a creation competition, in which Iblis’ pièce de resistance is the spider—but God turns the tables on his adversary in the last line: “Car Dieu, de l’araignée, avait fait le soleil” [For out of the spider, God had made the Sun.” In Renard’s transfiguration, it is, of course, Man who makes the Sun into a spider. The reference to Sisyphus also has an arachnid connection, Theridion sisyphium being known as the mother care spider—because the mother feeds her newly-hatched young—as well as the Sisyphus spider. The odd term out is phrynés, a common noun improvised from the name of an Athenian courtesan famed for her success in her chosen profession, but whose name is derived from a Greek word for toad.
57 Pipa is a genus whose only species is the Surinam toad, which is not actually found in Brazil; its eggs are carried on the mother’s back until the tadpoles are released, although that hardly licenses its description as a “hopping abscess,” especially as the species is entirely aquatic.
58 François Rabelais’ Panurge actually derives his name from the Greek panourgos [cunning], and it labels him as a trickster figure, but the name is easily misconstruable, as pan signifies “all” in both Greek and Latin and the Latin urgere gives rise to such French words as urgence [urgency], so that he becomes a seeming model of reckless instinct.
59 The President of the French Republic from 1906-1913 was the aging radical Armand Fallières (1841-1931). The conservatively-inclined Renard disapproved of him strongly.
60 The Roman statesman Cato (232-147 B.C.) used to end every speech in the Senate with the declaration that Carthage must be destroyed.
61 Henri Fursy (born 1867) was a prolific composer of popular songs; his chansons rosses carried forward a sturdy French tradition of satirical songs dealing with topical issues, to which Félix Bodin, author of Le roman de l’avenir (1834; tr. as The Novel of the Future, Black Coat Press) had been a prominent early contributor. The translation of “Un p’tit bou d’Ain” depends, even for a French listener, on whether the ambiguous phoneme bou is construed as boue [mud] or bout [end]; the Ain is the department in which Bugey is situated. A petit boudin is a small black pudding or any other object commonly twisted into a torus, but the words also occur in a slang expression meaning “to fizzle out.”
62 The equivalent English euphemism for craziness would be “bats in the belfry,” but that does not retain the same “singular propriety.”
63 The West Caroline Trench is nowadays known as the Yap Trench; the deepest part of the world’s oceans is located at its junction with the Mariana Trench, but it is not as deep as Renard’s estimated figure suggests; the figure for the Tuscarora Deep is similarly overestimated, also by approximately a thousand meters.
64 The phrase I have translated as “innocent agitation” is “secousse bleue” [literally “blue agitation”]; its meaning is a trifle enigmatic. I have assumed that “bleue” is being used metaphorically to refer to callow innocence (as “green” is sometimes used in English), as well as contriving an untranslatable pun with reference to “Blue Peril.” The reference to the possibility that humans might be reincarnated sarvants is an echo of the thesis of cosmic palingenesis, which was employed by several French writers of scientific romance, most notably the astronomer and spiritualist Camille Flammarion.
65 Renard was to return to this hypothesis in several later works, including “L’Homme truqué” (tr. as “The Doctored Man”—in which he acknowledges its earlier development in J.-H. Rosny aîné’s “Un Autre monde” (1895)—and “Eux” (tr. as “Them”), both translated in volume 4 of this series.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River; The Givreuse Enigma; The Mysterious Force; The Navigators of Space; Vamireh; The World of the Variants; The Young Vampire
Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
Han Ryner. The Superhumans
Brian Stableford (anthologist) The Germans on Venus; News from the Moon; The Supreme Progress; The World Above the World; Nemoville
Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
Kurt Steiner. Ortog
Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion
Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Scaffold; The Vampire Soul
English adaptation, introduction and afterword Copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2010 by Gilles Francescano.
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ISBN 978-1-935558-17-0. First Printing. April 2010. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.
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