by Walter Moers
7 Translator’s Note: The Zamonian alphabet contains a letter symbolic of polypody, or many-leggedness. It occurs in the name of every life form that possesses more than eight legs. No such letter exists in our own alphabet, so I have had to resort to using the letter X four times, which in my opinion neatly symbolises sixteen-leggedness. This does not, however, mean that the X has to be enunciated four times over. Simply pronounce the word Spinxxxx as if it were spelt with one X only.
8 Translator’s Note: Gnomes can glunk their teeth like Lindworms, it seems, because I assume that Yarnspinner meant they were expressing approval. How he could tell they were doing so with their teeth when their mouths were hidden from his gaze, I do not know. Let us simply put it down to artistic licence.
9 Translator’s Note: Selwi Rollcar and Weddar Rale were founder members of a Dullsgardian school of poetry notorious for its deliberate cultivation of unintelligibility. To this end they larded their verse with bizarre neologisms designed to reduce their readers to a state of mental confusion as profound as the one from which they themselves suffered. The school broke up when Rollcar, muttering incomprehensible gibberish, was carted off to a lunatic asylum in Atlantis, there to end his days embroidering pocket handkerchiefs with endless repetitions of the same word, Bandersnatch, whose exact meaning has never been elucidated.
10 Translator’s Note: Everyone in Zamonia has known what a Murch is since the publication of Gofid Letterkerl’s novel Zanilla and the Murch, so Yarnspinner dispenses with a description of that quaint little animal. Resident mainly in marshy areas, the Murch is a very rare creature best described as a cross between a duck and a frog. It gets its beak and downy plumage from the duck, its powerful hind legs and inflatable cheeks from the frog. The impressive sound a Murch can produce, known as ‘murching’, resembles the quacking of a duck and the croaking of a frog in equal measure.
11 Translator’s Note: Optimus Yarnspinner subsequently kept this undertaking in a work on the Booklings’ secret subterranean world.