Ah, sweet secret of life

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Ah, the sweet secret of life is a short story by the British writer Roald Dahl (1916–1990). It was published under the original title Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life, at Last I've Found Thee first published on September 14, 1974 in the American newspaper The New York Times . The later version, which first appeared in 1989 under the shorter title Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life in the collection of the same name , shows slight changes to the original. For example, in the 1974 version, the character Claud is not mentioned at all and the appearance of the bull's penis is not described.

No German translation of the original version from 1974 has been published. A German translation of the later version from 1989 with the title Ah, Sweet Secret of Life in the translation by Hans Heinrich Wellmann was first published in 1990.

action

This table of contents reflects the content of the version since 1989 and thus also the German translation from 1990.

The narrator's cow is fiery and cries out loudly for a bull. So the narrator and Claud, a neighboring gas station owner, set out to go to the farmer Rummins and let his bull cover the cow. Claud tells of Rummins, who has the best dairy cows around, that he uses a unique method of mating. This method is otherwise completely unknown because Rummins keeps it a secret. When they arrive at Rummins, he asks the narrator whether he wants a heifer or a bull as the deck result . The narrator chooses a heifer because he runs a dairy farm and not a meat farm. While Bert, the son of Rummins, Claud and the narrator hold the cow on ropes, Rummins goes to get his special bull. Before that, Rummins gives the instruction that the cow has to face the sun in spite of the overcast sky and to hold it tight so that it does not change direction during mating; a female calf is only born with certainty if these conditions are observed. Finally, the bull, who has a huge body and a huge testicle, mounts the cow and, with absolute precision, sticks his "long, scarlet penis, thin and stiff as a rapier " into the cow, "and after thirty seconds it was all over." If the narrator doubts the Rummins' breeding method, the latter presents him with the studbooks for the years 1915 to 1946. The success rate for a heifer is 98 percent. The two percent loss - Rummins only runs dairy farming - he explains by jumping around individual cows. Gender is due to the bull's semen. The female semen is attracted by the gravitational pull of the sun; if it is faster than the male semen and reaches the cow's egg cell before it, a heifer is formed. Therefore, the cow's head has to face the sun. If the cow stands in the other direction, the semen is pulled backwards and then the male semen wins. After further skepticism on the part of the narrator, Rummins refers to the attraction of the moon with the tides . When asked whether this method also works for humans, Rummins replies in the affirmative and points out that the mating does not happen in the cow lying down, but the cow stands on all fours and the mating must not take place at night. As proof that this method works in humans too, Rummins explains with a grin: “I have four boys, right? ... What you need on a farm are boys, and I have four of them, right? "

Origin of the title

Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life - 1910 sheet music edition

Roald Dahl took over the title of the short story Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life, at Last I've Found Thee or Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life from a song title from the 1910 operetta Naughty Marietta by Victor Herbert (1859-1924). Rida Johnson Young (1875–1926) wrote the text . A film adaptation of Naughty Marietta took place in 1935. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy sang the song .

See also

literature

  • Roald Dahl: Ah, the sweet secret of life, in: My friend Claud. Erzählungen, Reinbek 1990, p. 10 - p. 20 - translation by Hans Heinrich Wellmann
  • Roald Dahl: Oh, sweet secret of life, in: Scheibenwahn. Erzählungen, Munich 1999, p. 250 - p. 258 - translation by Erik Simon
  • Roald Dahl: Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, in: Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, London 1990, pp. 1 - 11

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ The New York Times, Sept. 14, 1974, p. 29
  2. ↑ Information on the short story
  3. ↑ My friend Claud, p. 15
  4. ↑ My friend Claud, p. 20