The Hunting of the Snark

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Front of the book cover

The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in Eight Fits) ( Engl. For "The hunt for the Snark - an agony in eight fits") is a nonsense ballad by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known as Lewis Carroll , Author of Alice in Wonderland . The verse ballad was first published in 1876 with numerous illustrations by Henry Holiday.

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The butcher teaches the beaver arithmetic (illustration by Henry Holiday)

The poem is a ballad about a strange hunting expedition that sets out with care, hope and a completely empty map of the sea to catch a mysterious being called Snark.

The snark combines extraordinary properties. So he's handy when lighting lights, has a habit of getting up in the afternoon, doesn't take jokes and loves bathing carts . When the baker at the end of the ballad thought he had finally found him, he was gone, because the snark was a boojum.

The crew is led by the bellman with his bell. It consists of eight representatives of the most varied of professions: a butcher, a boot cleaner, a hood maker, a lawyer, a billiard marker (scorer in billiards ), a banker, a stockbroker and a baker. All of these have in common that their job titles begin with the letter B in English . This also applies to the beaver, the tenth figure who is the only animal in the hunting party. One of the characters (The Baker) had received the warning on the day the hunting party set sail that some snarks are boojums, and anyone who is unlucky enough to hit a boojum will be immediately "gently and suddenly" disappear.

In the further course of the text, the hunting adventures of individual participants in the expedition are described, with the snark appearing in all kinds of roles and situations and not only appearing frightening, destructive or autocratic, but also being portrayed as a harmless being in its usual form that one is supposed to be can bring himself home.

structure

The text is divided into a foreword and eight chapters, called "Fit" in the original English.

The English subtitle An Agony in Eight Fits is ambiguous: “Fit” means both “fit, feel good” and “convulsive or paralyzing seizure” as well as “ Canto ” in the ancient parlance , ie a section of a poem. The individual chapters are named Fit the First to Fit the Eighth . In their translations of the poem by Lewis Carroll, Michael Ende, Klaus Reichert and Oliver Sturm chose the term “cramp” for “fit”.

  • In the foreword, the author points out that an accusation that he wrote nonsense can only be based on the line “Sometimes the bowsprit and rudder get stuck”. However, he is in fact unable to write nonsense. However, he does not want to point out the “moral purpose” of the poem, its “arithmetic principles” and the “honorable instructions in natural history”. Only the Bellman and the Boots are mentioned by the hunting party in the preface . In a footnote to the preface, Carroll points out that the boat usually takes on the role of helmsman.
  • The first chapter describes the landing of the expedition on a strange, unnamed beach. The members of the hunting party are introduced. With 32 lines, the description of the baker is the most detailed.
  • In the second chapter, the Bellman gives a speech with a rather cryptic description of the snark.
  • The third chapter deals with the terrifying history of the baker.
  • In the fourth chapter, after a motivational speech by Bellman, the actual hunt is prepared.
  • The fifth chapter describes how the butcher (who wears a beaver fur hat and can only slaughter beavers) and the beaver become friends.
  • In the sixth chapter, the lawyer meets the snark in a dream.
  • The seventh chapter deals with the banker's misfortune.
  • In the eighth chapter there is the final confrontation with the snark.

The hunting party

With the exception of Boots , all characters are shown in Henry Holiday's illustrations:

Snark Bellman.jpg
Bellman
(crier)
Snark Boots.jpg
Boots
(boot cleaner)
Snark Bonnet Maker.jpg
Bonnet Maker
(hood maker )
Snark Barrister.jpg
Barrister
(lawyer)
Snark Broker.jpg
Broker
(Trader)
Snark Billiard Marker.jpg
Billiard marker
(billiard marker )
Snark Banker.jpg
Banker
(Banker)
Snark Butcher.jpg
Butcher
(Metzger)
Snark Baker.jpg
Baker
(Baker)
Snark Beaver.jpg
Beaver
(Biber)

There are a variety of other artists who made illustrations for Carroll's ballad depicting members of the hunting party, including Max Ernst and Tove Jansson .

interpretation

Henry Holidays illustration (in the first edition 1876) for the last chapter "Fit the Eight - The Vanishing". Engraver: Joseph Swain.

Since 1962 there has been an edition with a foreword and extensive comments by Martin Gardner , who has also worked up Carroll's much more famous stories about Alice in Wonderland . Gardner refers in his observations on ballad that Carroll told himself that the Snark a portmanteau was in the Snail (Snail) and Shark will together (Hai). Continues to lead Gardner in a statement that also Snake (snake) could be included in the word. In a reference in which the word "snarking" is used in 1866, the word describes a sound.

To understand the “difficult words” in the text, Carroll himself advises in the foreword of the ballad to stick to Humpty Dumpty's “theory” for such words: two meanings are packed into one word. Carroll wrote about the various attempts at interpreting the Snark in 1897, a year before his death, in a letter (translated accordingly) that Snark only had the meaning of Boojum :

"To your question, 'What did you mean the snark was?' To answer: You can tell your girlfriend that I only said that the snark was a boojum [...]. As far as I can remember, I really had no other meaning in mind when I wrote this; but people have since tried to find any meaning in it. The one I like best (and which I think is partly my own) is that it can be seen as an allegory for the pursuit of happiness. "

In his studies on literary nonsense , Klaus Reichert doubts the seriousness of such statements by Carroll. Reichert suspects that Carroll is only “playing stupid” with such “feint” attempts to explain. Oliver Sturm interprets Carroll's remark that he suddenly remembered the last line of the ballad while taking a walk on a beautiful summer's day as a "stick for critics".

Henry Holiday understood Carroll's ballad not as nonsense, but as a "tragedy". On a letter he received from Carroll, Holiday left the note: "LC has forgotten that 'the Snark' is a tragedy."

Holiday features a hooded snark in his Fit the Sixth illustration. There the snark appears to the lawyer in a dream. Carroll declined to publish the front view illustration of a snark, which Holiday proposed for the final chapter, The Vanishing .

It is believed that Lewis Carroll made reference in the text to Thomas Cranmer's Forty-Two Articles (1552), with an emphasis on the final article on eternal damnation, which was not carried over to the later Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) of the Church of England . In addition, Henry Holiday's illustration for the eighth and final chapter contains a pictorial allusion to the burning of Thomas Cranmer at the stake in 1556.

The ballad in German-speaking countries

Legendary in the English-speaking area, the poem is hardly known in the German-speaking area. However, there are several German translations of the "Agonie in eight convulsions", including The Hunt for the Snark by Klaus Reichert ( Insel-Bücherei 934), the Reclam edition The Hunt for the Snitch by Oliver Sturm and The Hunt for the Schlarg by Michael End . Michael Ende also wrote the libretto for Wilfried Hiller 's musical play of the same name .

Influence of the ballad

The term is used as a designation in graph theory and physics , among other things , and also appears in the novel version of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , in which two scientists refer to their discoveries as snarks and boojums. In English-speaking countries reference is made to the ballad from time to time. For example, part of Bellman's Speech is quoted in which the leader of the hunting party defines that what he says three times is true. In its decision of June 20, 2008 on military tribunal proceedings in Guantanamo , an American federal court wrote: “We are not persuaded. Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true ”, referring to Fit the First.

In music, the snark has been adapted in a number of variants for the stage and as a musical or concept album, e.g. B. by Mike Batt . Batt worked on the subject from 1986, which led to concert performances from 1987 and a stage show in 1991.

A composition for the snark itself is Arne Nordheim's Return of the Snark (1987) for trombone and tape. "The Hunting of the Snark" by the jazz collective NYNDK (2009) was based on Nordheim's composition. All eight chapters of Snark are also available as jazz vocals on a CD by jazz / soul singer Bajka Pluwatsch (2010).

In the radio version of his novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , Douglas Adams chose a numbering of the “Fits”, as can also be found in Carroll's ballad. In Douglas' novel, the number 42 also plays an important role. Martin Gardner points out that this number has "some kind of special meaning" for Carroll: Carroll used the number 42 as randomly selected appearing in Alice , in Phantasmagoria and in Snark , there in two different contexts.

In the computer game Half-life there is a creature about the size of a fist, reminiscent of a rhinoceros beetle , called Snark . Also as a computer game in the steampunk style there is a (so far) three-part game series by the Russian developer Alawar called "Snark Buster". Here the respective protagonist receives an invitation to hunt the snark.

In the first episode of the sixth season of the English crime series Lewis , a valuable copy of a book by Caroll about the snark and the hunt for the snark plays a significant role.

Illustrations

Web links

Commons : The Hunting of the Snark  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: The Hunting of the Snark  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

Back of the book cover
  1. See the last two lines of the ballad in Fit the Eighth, THE VANISHING : “He had softly and suddenly vanished away— / For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.” What Boojum could mean has been known since 1876 by the ballad's readers discussed.
  2. See “fihtea” in en: Heliand  : “… The suspicion of some earlier scholars that the Praefatio and the Versus might be a modern forgery is refuted by the occurrence of the word vitteas, which is the Old Saxon fihtea, corresponding to the Old English fitt, which means a canto of a poem. ... "
  3. http://folk.uio.no/herbjora/snarkillustrators.html
  4. Gardener in note 4: "In her article 'Lewis Carroll' (Strand Magazine, April 1898, pp. 413-425) Beatrice Hatch says that Carroll once told her that snark was a trunk word for snail and shark ." Gardener then offers further alternatives.
  5. ^ Martin Gardner: The Annotated Hunting of the Snark . 2006, p. 15
  6. ^ Notes and Queries (September 29, 1866), Series 3, Volume 10, p. 248 doi : 10.1093 / nq / s3-X.248.248-f (currently unavailable) , facsimile
  7. ^ Klaus Reichert : Lewis Carroll, studies on literary nonsense . 1974, pp. 145–186: The Hunt for Self-Realization , ISBN 978-3-446-11927-7
  8. Oliver Sturm's translation The Hunt for the Snitch . 1996, ISBN 978-3-15-009433-4 , p. 85
  9. Henry Holidays handwritten note on a letter from CL Dodgson in 1876: "LC has forgotten that 'the Snark' is a tragedy ...", Source: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/ english-literature-history-childrens-books-illustrations-l14404 / lot.646.html
  10. ^ Plate XII The Snark-Boojum . In: The Hunting of the Snark . William Kaufmann Edition (authors: Martin Gardener, Charles Mitchell, Selwyn H. Goodacre), 1981, ISBN 978-0-913232-36-1
  11. ^ Karen Gardiner: Life, Eternity, and Everything: Hidden Eschatology in the Works of Lewis Carroll . In: THE CARROLLIAN No. 31 . July 2018, pp. 25 ~ 41. ISSN  1462-6519 .
  12. ^ Goetz Kluge: Burning the Baker . In: Knight Letter No. 100 . III, No. 1, July 2018, pp. 55 ~ 56. ISSN 0193-886X .
  13. Parhat v. Gates . (PDF; there p. 28) Judgment of the Federal Court of the District of Columbia from June 20, 2008 (English)
  14. The Hunting of the Snark , Theatrecrafts.com
  15. ^ How to survive a stage flop: Mike Batt shares his West End disappointment , Express, May 4, 2014
  16. Bajka (musician) in the English language Wikipedia
  17. bbc.co.uk
  18. ^ Martin Gardner: The Annotated Hunting of the Snark . 2006, p. 37, note 34