archy and mehitable
archy and mehitabel is the title of a series of poems by the American author Don Marquis , which began in his column Sun Dial in the Evening Sun newspaper from 1916, in his column The Lantern in the New York Tribune from 1922 and in Collier's Magazine from 1926 published.
The main characters
In 1916, Don Marquis introduced the character Archy to his column. Archy is a cockroach who was a Vers libre- Poet in a previous life who was unfortunate enough to be reborn in this form . Archy writes his poems on Don Marquis' typewriter. Since, as a cockroach, he can only type by climbing onto the typewriter's cart and jumping from there onto the respective key, it is impossible for him to use characters that require the shift key . Archy poems therefore have to do without capital letters and special characters such as exclamation marks, question marks or quotation marks. That is also the reason why the title of the poem is given in lower case as archy and mehable . When Don Marquis wrote about his cockroach, he used the correct capitalization - which is why there are both forms - archy and archy, since the shift key was available to him as a human.
The second main character of the poems is the street cat Mehitabel, of whose experiences and thoughts Archy often reports. In a previous life, Mehitabel was not a simple cat either, but Queen Cleopatra . In her younger years, but then as a cat, she was also an actress in the theater. Mehitabel's motto is - despite all the hardships she has to go through - the French "toujours gai" (always happy).
Content
In the poems, which mostly do without rhyme and mix slang with a high poetic tone, Archy expresses himself on topics of the time such as prohibition , literary fashions or even great politics. Most of the time, however, he limits himself to bitter considerations about the despised life that he and Mehitabel have to live in their wrong bodies. He often reports of encounters with other animals and the resulting conflicts or the tragic life stories of these beings, also trapped in a wrong body. The wit of the poems often arises from the twisted perspective Archy has to take as a cockroach, and which stands in sharp contrast to the life plans that he and Mehitabel once knew and still pursue as a wish. This tension of content is congenially supported by the archy imposed, limited typography , which, born of necessity, often makes his poems appear more modernist than they actually are.
The archy and mehitabel poems are the most famous work of Don Marquis. Edited volumes were already published during his lifetime, some with congenial illustrations by George Herriman , which are still being reprinted today and are very popular in the USA.
expenditure
- archy and mehitabel , 1927
- archys life of mehitabel , 1933
- archy does his part , 1935
- the lives and times of archy and mehitabel , 1940
- archy and mehitabel , New York 1990 ISBN 0-385-09478-7 (reprint of 1927 edition)
- archyology , 1996
- archyology ii , 1998
- Don Marquis. allow archibald. Intimate confessions . Preface by Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt . Translated into German by K. Oppermann-Kostra. Illustrations: Bernd Geiger. Bärmeier & Nikel, Frankfurt, 1965