Saki (writer)

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

Saki (born December 18, 1870 in Akjab , Burma as Hector Hugh Munro , † November 14, 1916 in Beaumont-Hamel , France) was an English writer and satirist . His pseudonym Saki ('companion'), he had borrowed from a Rubāʿī ("quatrain") of Omar Chayyām .

A master of short stories, Saki is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker . With his witty exaggerated, often macabre and cruel stories, he caricatured the Edwardian “better” society of England before the First World War.

Life

Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akjab, Burma (now Myanmar), when that country was part of the British Empire. His father, Charles Augustus Munro, was Inspector General of the Burmese Police; his mother, Mary Frances b. Mercer, was killed by a wild cow in 1872. HH Munro spent his childhood together with his brother and sister with his grandmother and his aunts in England; it was a very strict budget. It was only later that he became aware of the potential that his childhood observations offered him for his narratives. His aunts' harsh upbringing methods are reflected in many of his stories, such as Sredni Vashtar , in which a lonely boy secretly holds and worships a ferret .

HH Munro attended Pencarwick School in Exmouth and Bedford Grammar School . In 1893 he joined the Burmese police. Three years later he had to resign due to poor health and returned to England. He became a journalist and wrote for the Westminster Gazette , the Daily Express , Bystander , Morning Post and Outlook .

In 1900, Saki published his first book, The Rise of the Russian Empire , a historical study modeled on Edward Gibbon's famous decline and fall of the Roman Empire . Not So Stories , a collection of short stories , followed in 1902 .

From 1902 to 1908 Munro was the Morning Post's foreign correspondent in the Balkans, Russia and Paris, after which he settled in London. Many of his stories from this period feature Reginald or Clovis, elegant and effeminate dandies who play embarrassing and memorable pranks on their conventional and conceited relatives with sadistic pleasure (e.g. in "The Restless Cure"). In 1914 his novel When William Came was published, in which he describes an England that was conquered by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II . The book makes fun of the behavior of the Prussian occupiers (who renamed the Victoria Monument in front of Buckingham Palace the "Grandmother Monument"), as well as the "predictable" embarrassing attempts by large sections of the British upper class to approach the winners.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I , Munro volunteered for the army, as according to the regulations he was actually too old to be called up. He turned down an officer’s license and fought as a simple soldier. During a night mission at Beaumont-Hamel in France, he was shot by a German sniper. His last words - addressed to a comrade - were supposedly "Put out the damn cigarette!" After his death, most of the documents he left behind were destroyed by his sister Ethel; she wrote her own report about their childhood together.

Saki's works are in the public domain and some of them can be read on the internet. Many of his works were only published posthumously. It was not until the 1960s that the Zurich-based Diogenes Verlag , and later the Haffmans Verlag , began to publish Saki's stories in German .

Works (English editions)

• The Rise of the Russian Empire. 1900.
• Not So Stories. 1902.
• The Westminster Alice. 1902 (with F. Carruthers Gould)
• Reginald. 1904 English text
• Reginald in Russia. 1910 English text
• The Chronicles of Clovis. 1911 English text , German The Clovis Chronicles. Haffmans, ISBN 3-251-20074-7
• The Unbearable Bassington. 1912 English text , German The unspeakable Bassington. Insel, ISBN 3-458-14317-3
• Beasts and Super-Beasts 1914 English text
• The East Wing 1914 (short story, in Lucas's Annual ) English text
• When William Came. 1914 (novel) German When Wilhelm came. Heyne, ISBN 3-453-05418-0
• The Toys of Peace 1923 English text
• The Square Egg and Other Sketches . 1924.
• The Watched Pot 1924 (play, with Cyril Maude)
• The Works of Saki . 1926–1927 (8 volumes)
• Collected stories. 1930.
• Novels and Plays. 1933.
• The Miracle Merchant. 1934 (in One-Act Plays for Stage and Study 8)
• The best of Saki. 1950 (Ed. G. Greene)
• The Bodley Head Saki. 1963
• Saki. 1981 (Ed. AJ Langguth, with 6 unpublished short stories)
• The Complete Saki 1976
• Short Stories 1976 (Ed. John Letts)
• The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope, and Other Stories . 1995.
• All the stories . 1998, translated by Werner Schmitz and Claus Sprick , Haffmans Verlag ISBN 3-251-20279-0

literature

• Thomas Bärthlein: The short stories by Hector Hugh Munro (Saki). Erlangen-Nuremberg: Univ. Mag.-Work. 1994.
• Lorene Mae Birden: "Ones's bitterest friends". Dynamique de caractère et humor chez Saki. Nice: Univ. Diss. 1996.
• Ralph Gätke: literary comedy. Saki - Nabokov - Kafka. Oldenburg: Until. 1998. (= lectures - speeches - report / library society Oldenburg; 24) ISBN 3-8142-0627-4
• Brian Gibson: Reading Saki: The Fiction of HH Munro. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. 2014. ISBN 978-0786479498
• Charles H. Gillen: HH Munro (Saki). New York: Twayne. 1969. (= Twayne's English authors series; 102)
• AJ Langguth: Saki. A life of Hector Hugh Munro. London: Hamilton. 1981. ISBN 0-241-10678-8
• George James Spears: The satire of Saki. A study of the satiric art by Hector H. Munro. New York: Exposition Pr. 1963.

Web links

Commons : Hector Hugh Munro  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Saki in the catalog of the German National Library
• Saki in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• www.fantasticfiction.co.uk - Bibliography
• Five Short Stories by Saki . English text in writing and as an audio version in two speaking speeds. On: ESL bits .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Hakim of Nishapur Omar Chajjám and his Rubaijat. Based on old and newest Persian manuscript finds by Manuel Sommer, Guido Pressler Verlag, Wiesbaden 1974, p. 116 f.