1984
Deep archival cuts (Founding Members bonus)
Stalwart readers! I congratulate you on the continued functioning of your eyeballs (and/ or other organs of textual consumption). I’m hard at work on a new post, so that is coming up in the not-too-distant future… but in the meantime, I wanted to share some very deep archival cuts as a special thank-you for the Founding Members whose extra-generous support has been extra-welcome these past weeks.
So OK, I recently came into possession of a spiral notebook in which I started to write my first novel, at age seven… which I am realizing would have been in 1984… which is wild since, for a variety of reasons, I’m currently rereading both Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 and Murakami’s 2010 novel 1Q84—the latter of which is about some people who live in 1984 and who get sucked into a new reality, and one character (the hot assassin) decides to call it 1Q84 (“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question”). This sent me down a rabbit hole: “How could that title be translated into English in such a way that it (a) avoids the common misreading/ mispronunciation, ‘IQ 84’ (and why even ring that bell); and (b) conveys a pun—because ‘19’ in Japanese is pronounced ‘juu-kyuu’ (juu-Q).” So I was trying to think of a meaningful-to-English-readers phoneme that sounds like “nine,” and I came up with “nein” (Nein-teen 84: nein for NO WAY) and “Y” (Y-teen 84: Y for WHYYYY), and this, friends, is why I am not a literary translator.
But all right, enough stalling. The idea for today is to share some pages from the 1984 notebook… and even though it’s making me nervous, that is what I am going to do. So, if you are a Founding Member, read on. And, if not, I will see you just a little bit further along in this year of our Gourd, 20-20 JIVE.
Thank you for reading!