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Keep the Aspidistra Flying
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Cultural references in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying"
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The next one I'd like to ask about is a phrase towards the end of the book, when Gordon is flipping through a woman's magazine, looking at the ads."He flicked over the pages more slowly. Flick, flick. Adorable—until she smiles. The food that is shot out of a gun. Do you let foot-fag affect your personality? Get back that peach-bloom on a Beautyrest Mattress. Only a penetrating face-cream will reach that undersurface dirt. Pink toothbrush is her trouble. How to alkalise your stomach almost instantly. Roughage for husky kids. Are you one of the four out of five? The world-famed Culturequick Scrapbook. Only a drummer and yet he quoted Dante."
What is "foot-fag"? My search on Google gave me no results whatsoever.
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I wonder for what product the ad is for. Comfortable shoes? Muscle pain relief cream?
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Bionic Jean wrote: "Well if you're "fagged out", you're exhausted - extremely tired. Do you think it could have something to do with that? Anyone?"I'm not an expert by any means by any means, but that's what I've always assumed: when your feet feel really heavy and hard to move because you're so tired. Tired feed basically.
I assumed that "Do you let foot-fag affect your personality? Get back that peach-bloom on a Beautyrest Mattress." went together as the mattress advertisement. The mattress is supposed to cure the exhaustion.
The confusing thing is that it's referring to several advertisements in that paragraph that each get 1-2 sentences. Easy to get the gist but some individual references have to be teased out.
On another topic, I didn't know that whole thing about an alkaline diet went back that far! I thought it was a newish fad, but I guess it's a recycled one. :)
I will have to get back to looking at George Orwell. I haven't for such a long time.
It sounds as if Orwell is pointing out how the advertisements in magazines affect our thoughts and, perhaps, ideas about ourselves and our bodies. Tired feet make you grouchy (personality). Cure the tired body with a specific mattress. Clean facial skin by using a specific cream. Etc.
The paragraph is a spoof of the advertising in Women's magazines (possibly all magazines). He's really quite astute at honing in on how advertisements change our thoughts about ourselves and our needs.
Like Greg, I'm surprised at the mention of alkalizing diets.
I recall when pants came out for girls. They were in pink only (I believe) and made out of a stretchy material. The reference to a pink toothbrush made me wonder how many other "woman/girl" products were manufactured in pink and reminded me of my first pair of pants.....which were pink (not my favourite colour even back then....but I loved the pants).
Thank you, Jean, Greg, and Petra. I initially thought that the foot-fag and the mattress were referring to two different ads. But what you all say makes sense.As for the "alkalise your stomach", I'm thinking that it might refer to antacids and the ad is claiming that the product can relieve your heartburn or indigestion almost instantly. What do you think?
And what do you think about the last one? "Only a drummer and yet he quoted Dante."
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Hi Femmy,
As Greg says "The confusing thing is that it's referring to several advertisements in that paragraph that each get 1-2 sentences."
In this case, I think the product is advertised over two sentences. So if we look at both ...
"The world-famed Culturequick Scrapbook. Only a drummer and yet he quoted Dante."
My guess is that the product the advert is trying to sell, is the "Culturequick Scrapook", and that this is the equivalent of our "Idiot's Guide to (Culture)" or "Bluff your Way in (Culture)". This would then lead to the claim that anyone (e.g. a drummer) could look as if they were knowledgeable and expert in high culture (Dante) if they just read a short easy "how to" book, rather than undertaking years of study.
But it's only my guess! I suspect that the readers of the time might be familiar with the exact reference, just as we would be in the "Bluff your Way in ..." series.
You say that this comes near the end of the book. Perhaps since Gordon is flipping through a woman's magazine, this passage indicates through Gordon, how superficial and transitory our concerns are? Again though, this is only a guess, out of context.
Jean, this is all so helpful. Thank you!This paragraph is when Gordon (view spoiler) is flipping the magazine and looking at the ads, trying to imagine how he would feel about himself being involved in writing these ads.
Another line from an ad. "Are you a Highbrow? Dandruff is the Reason."What's being a highbrow got to do with dandruff? Is there another meaning for "highbrow" other than "intellectual"?
Femmy wrote: "Another line from an ad. "Are you a Highbrow? Dandruff is the Reason."What's being a highbrow got to do with dandruff? Is there another meaning for "highbrow" other than "intellectual"?"
Not sure on that one - hopefully someone else will be able to help.
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If you think of the literal meaning of ""highbrow" i.e. to have a high forehead, we think of a receding hairline, which many men (mostly) are prone to. The suggestion is that dandruff - an itchy condition of the scalp - if not treated can also result in baldness (which is true).
So the joke is a play on words. "Highbrow" is a slightly insulting word to use of intellectuals, and obviously nobody wants their hair to fall out either. The advert is suggesting that their product will counteract a receding hairline, so you are no longer a "highbrow". (Nowadays we would say "nerd" or "geek".)
Although of course now I have to think of a translation that's as funny.
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Jean, Petra, and Greg--I just wanted to say how much I was enjoying you helping Femmy interpret Orwell's writing. It just hit home how much language, idioms, and cultural references can change in 85 years. I hope the group will be reading this novel some day. Femmy will have it all figured out by that time, and maybe she'll be the one helping us!
I used to find it so difficult when I was teaching idioms to students because to them they make no sense unless they had heard them used before
Laura Cort wrote: "I used to find it so difficult when I was teaching idioms to students because to them they make no sense unless they had heard them used before"So true Laura, sometimes they seem to make no sense at all ... raining cats and dogs? And when I taught English as a second language to adults, I would occasionally discover that against all odds, another language would have a similar idiom. Languages can be so strange!
Connie wrote: "Jean, Petra, and Greg--I just wanted to say how much I was enjoying you helping Femmy interpret Orwell's writing. It just hit home how much language, idioms, and cultural references can change in 8...":)
I wish I could read Indonesian so I could read it when Femmy has finished. Translation is an art and also a gift in exchanges between cultures! I am grateful that so much translation work is done!
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Anyway, please jump in if you see Femmy's question first Connie, or anyone :)
I'm glad everybody is enjoying this conversation. Now I don't feel like I'm bothering you with these questions. :-)When I translate contemporary novels, figuring out idioms and cultural references is relatively easier thanks to Google. Even new slangs can be looked up in the Urban Dictionary.
But translating novels written in the past presents challenges like these. I'm so lucky I found this group and you are all so helpful! Thank you.
Very interesting thread. This Orwell group has discovered that there are many differences in usage even between English-language countries.
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Femmy, you're welcome :)
Jean, I've never eaten Christmas pudding.
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We are talking about it in the thread for this month's essay LINK HERE, which is why I mentioned it Petra. Charles Dickens made it famous in A Christmas Carol
This is a description of a character:=========
A youth of twenty, cherry-lipped, with gilded hair, tripped Nancifully in. Moneyed, obviously. He had the golden aura of money. He hadn't been in the shop before. Gordon assumed the gentlemanly-servile mien reserved for new customers. He repeated the usual formula:
'Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book?'
'Oh, no, not weally.' An R-less Nancy voice. 'May I just bwowse? I simply couldn't wesist your fwont window. I have such a tewwible weakness for bookshops! So I just floated in—tee-hee!'
...
He stole a glance at the Nancy, who had drifted away from the poetry shelves and taken out a large expensive book on the Russian ballet. He was holding it delicately between his pink non-prehensile paws, as a squirrel holds a nut, studying the photographs. Gordon knew his type. The moneyed 'artistic' young man. Not an artist himself, exactly, but a hanger-on of the arts; frequenter of studios, retailer of scandal. A nice-looking boy, though, for all his Nancitude. The skin at the back of his neck was as silky-smooth as the inside of a shell. You can't have a skin like that under five hundred a year. A sort of charm he had, a glamour, like all moneyed people. Money and charm; who shall separate them?
==========
This R-less way of speaking. Is this to reflect an effeminate way of talking? Or maybe instead to reflect a certain class in society? A certain type of character? Or maybe it doesn't reflect any group of people, just a personal quirk of this particular character?
Femmy, a "Nancy" is an offensive British term for a homosexual or an effeminate man. It's very sad to see this type of writing.
Yes, it's very sad. I can sense it in the tone of the passage. I apologize for having to bring this up in the conversation.
If this makes people uncomfortable, I'll delete and ask about other things in the novel.
Femmy, I completely agree with Connie that the description is disappointing and a little sad.But at least for me, I don't think you need to delete anything and I don't think there is anything to apologize for. Those sorts of things can be found in a lot of literature and popular media of the period when this was written. It isn't great, but those stereotypes that are a part of history.
I know that I have watched some older films where the depiction of black characters felt quite offputting. There were a few Charlie Chan movies in particular that were particularly shocking. But the fact that those depictions were "acceptable" or even "normal" then is interesting in itself, and it's useful to know from a historical standpoint. I think if I had a child and if I watched something like that with them, I'd be sure they understood why it was the way it was and that they knew the context, but I don't think there's any point in shielding from it. That's just my personal opinion.
Anyway, going back to your original question: my guess is that the R-less speech is a variation of lisping speech which is very commonly a part of the stereotype applied to effeminate men.
Greg wrote: "Anyway, going back to your original question: my guess is that the R-less speech is a variation of lisping speech which is very commonly a part of the stereotype applied to effeminate men."Thank you, Greg. This gives me a starting point for figuring out how to reflect this R-less speech in the translation.
My pleasure Femmy!Maybe the idea is that the R (like the T) is a hard sound and that by softening a hard T into a softer S sound or a hard R into a softer W sound is a sort of effeminate affectation?
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As Connie said, a "Nancy Boy" was one of several deliberate insults used by some people in the UK for a homosexual man, until about the late 1960s. Homosexuality ceased being a crime in the UK in 1967, and in this case the law was largely led by public opinion.
However George Orwell was personally against homosexuality, and in common with many men of his time, (in particular) would sadly poke fun at and exaggerate what he saw as overly effeminate characteristics. This was thought to be amusing.
This is a particularly horrible example. I hope it's his worst ... but on the other hand please do not delete it, Femmy, and there is no need to apologise for posting it either. Yes, it's offensive, but as Greg says, it is what he wrote. If we begin to whitewash these examples of social attitudes in literature, we create a whole raft of problems. Upcoming generations cannot put things in context, and ultimately it leads to a denial of the true facts of history.
George Orwell is someone I really admire, but he had feet of clay like everyone else, and I think this is a hateful aspect about him 😔.
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It could be that George Orwell is describing a graceful man, who is seen negatively by the narrator as effete (and exaggerated for effect) - or even that the character described deliberately affects a camp demeanour, to get a response (though it doesn't really sound like that). It seems to go with the description of "highbrow" which is a rather negative word to use, in preference to "intellectual", which you also quoted. Femmy.
Oh, and George Orwell's description of "r-less" is also a slur for another reason. It is another way of poking fun at someone, because they have a lisp, and can't pronounce their "r" (or sometimes "l") properly. Speech therapists were probably in the future ... at least those who mispronounced words were seen as "fair game" to be teased.
As Greg suggested it could also be allied to a perception of effeminacy.
The viewpoint character is Gordon, the bookshop assistant, and it's always in third person.If the r-less speech is a speech impediment in the character, this can easily be replicated in translation. However, in Indonesian, I don't think it's related to effeminacy.
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Was it seen as shameful, or an inadequacy in itself, at the time the novel was written Femmy? If so it might be worth preserving the speech impediment (or possible affectation).
I think I'll keep the speech impediment and add speech characteristics in Indonesian that is commonly attributed to effeminacy.
The protagonist Gordon rents a room to live in. Here's the description:"Bed-sitting-rooms, with gaslight laid on and find your own heating, baths extra (there was a geyser), and meals in the tomb-dark dining-room with the phalanx of clotted sauce-bottles in the middle of the table."
In my understanding, this means that the rooms come with:
* gaslight installed
* a heating system (?) but you buy your own coals
* baths (bathtubs? bathrooms?) but you have to pay extra
* meals
I'm having trouble with the second and third item. Is my understanding about "find your own heating" correct?
What about the "baths extra"? When Gordon moves to a poorer accommodation later in the story, it does mention that he has to go to a public bath to bathe, so I think there's some kind of bathing facilities provided in this accommodation. But what does he pay extra for? For using the geyser each time he uses it to heat water to bathe? And what kind of "baths" is provided, do you think?
There is probably a bathtub at the end of the hall. He would give the rooming house owner extra money for a warm bath. I don't know when coin-operated baths/showers came into existence. Some rooming houses had stoves in the hallway. People could heat bricks to keep warm in bed. I'm not sure what "find your own heating" means. It could be Orwell's way of saying that heating was not provided in the rooms or hallway, so you had to go downstairs to a community sitting room to stay warm.
I found this: https://forum.wordreference.com/threa..."No, the gas was included in the rent, but you needed to buy your own coal for the fire. From the description, I imagine we are talking about the rooms having coal fires. I wonder if Mrs Wisbeach employed someone to make up the fires and take out the ash."
Oh and I remember something about buying coals. I searched the text in the book and found this:"To spend your days in meaningless mechanical work, work that could be slovened through in a sort of coma; to come home and light the fire when you had any coal (there were sixpenny bags at the grocer's) and get the stuffy little attic warm..."
Connie wrote: "There is probably a bathtub at the end of the hall. He would give the rooming house owner extra money for a warm bath. "Thank you, Connie.
The New Albion was one of those publicity firms which have sprung up everywhere since the War--the fungi, as you might say, that sprout from a decaying capitalism. It was a smallish rising firm and took every class of publicity it could get. The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity--advertising--is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanised, go-getting type--the type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. Gordon still despised and repudiated the money-code. He was in the money-world, but not of it. As for the types about him, the little bowler-hatted worms who never turned, and the go-getters, the American business-college gutter-crawlers, they rather amused him than not.My questions are, what are "gutter crawlers"? And what does "turned" in this sentence mean?
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1. "little bowler-hatted worms who never turned,"
"little bowler-hatted ... " refers to Everyman of the day - clerks who would conventionally wear bowler hats for work, and never rebel or argue out of turn.
"worms who never turned" ... the exact idiom is "the worm has turned" which refers to someone who has tolerated a lot of bad treatment from other people without complaining, and who now unexpectedly changes their behaviour and starts to behave in a more forceful way.
2. "gutter-crawlers"
If someone is in the gutter, they are condemned by this term as being no better than a tramp. A "kerb-crawler" is someone who is looking for a prostitute - either a client or as a pimp. The gutter is next to the kerb.
It's just a lot of insults!
George Orwell Matters!
Books mentioned in this topic
A Christmas Carol (other topics)Keep the Aspidistra Flying (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
George Orwell (other topics)George Orwell (other topics)
Charles Dickens (other topics)
Like I said in the introduction folder, I'm currently translating Keep the Aspidistra Flying into Indonesian. Some of the cultural references and idioms are difficult to figure out, so I hope I can ask for your help.
Okay, for my first question. What is exactly the Prince of Wales? I looked it up in Wikipedia and found an article about the Prince of Wales Theatre.
However, the book has these sentences:
"A light sprang up in the Prince of Wales. They would be swabbing out the bar."
"He strolled into the Prince of Wales for a bite of food."
So I'm guessing that it's a restaurant instead? I hope you could enlighten me on this. Thank you!