LOST IN TRANSLATION

December 9, 2009, Vol. 1, No. 5


TABLE OF CONTENTS
(in scroll-down order)

THE BEARS OF WALDEN PUDDLE
by Dr. Ursula Whipple
Alonzo forgives and forgets ... or at least he forgets ... and returns to Dr. Whipple's cabin. She wants to make up for what she did to him the last time, so she shoots him with a tranquilizer dart, cracks open some double-A batteries, reaches for some Krazy Glue, and gets to work on his reward.

LOST IN TRANSLATION
by the Walden Puddle Writers Uncooperative
For ten years, Mme. Ludmilla Borisenko, the only Walden Puddler with a Russian accent, labored in obscurity, translating one of the greatest novels ever written from English into the world's most difficult language. Finally, her work is complete! We join Mme. Borisenko; her best friend, Ms. Priscilla Whipple; and Mme. Borisenko's 43 cats on the day she unveils her masterpiece.

THE TALK OF WALDEN PUDDLE
Reportage from the Agreeable Doughnut Cafe
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ... for many Walden Puddlers. We chat with an exception. PLUS: A whole new way to use Tic-Tacs.


THE BEARS OF
WALDEN PUDDLE
Notes from the Field, Plus Expert Advice

by Dr. Ursula Whipple

Field Notes: November 29, 2009. Thank goodness, Alonzo came back today. I believe he has forgiven me for smacking him in the nose with an old tennis shoe.

I wanted to reward him for that, so this time I plugged him with a tranquilizer dart, instead of like last time ... when I stabbed myself in the ass with it for my own selfish reasons.

As soon as Alonzo went down and stayed motionless, I went out and gave him a bear hug ... and lots of European air kisses ... and then I took his measurements and everything, like on the Science Channel.

Then I gave him his reward: a radio collar. I don't do this for every bear, because it gets expensive.

The radio was your basic AM-FM transistor model. You can still find those at flea markets. The best flea market is at Rev. Bisonnette's Church of the Definitely Saved. If you're a sinner ... and that would be me ... you're not allowed to touch anything. You point to what you want, and one of the saved shows it to you.

I know about the scientific-type radio collars, where you track a bear's movements by radar, or sonar, or something. We learned about those at Central Montana Normal, where I did my thesis, but I was distracted that semester because of an unhappy breakup I was having with a guy I don't clearly remember now.

When I first put a radio collar on a bear, I tune it to Classic Medium Rock ... not too hard, not too soft, but just right ... like in the Goldilocks story. In my opinion, bands like the Police and Creedence Clearwater are just about middle-of-the-road enough for a bear ... if you don't know what he likes yet.

I lock the dials in place with Krazy Glue, so the receiver won't migrate, and this way the poor bear won't get the shock of his life waking up some Sunday morning, and instead of Bruce Springsteen, his radio is playing church services at him.

Eventually, though, you will always get natural channel drift. When I hear that, I tranquilize the bear again, and I retune his radio. I also have to trank my bears when their double-A batteries run low.

Just between us, I think some of my bears deliberately mess with the tuning on their radios. A colleague has said that maybe they do this because I tranquilize them too much, and they are starting to enjoy the tranquilizer darts more than they should. I just don't know.

If a bear is clearly not enjoying Creedence Clearwater or Sting, I have to make a big decision: Do I tune his radio collar more toward heavy metal? Or do I tune it more toward Emmylou Harris and Jackson Browne? These are the moments of decision you dread as a field biologist.

Whenever I've made a mistake that way, it has always been in the direction of soft rock. I have seen Jackson Browne lyrics drive bears nearly to madness, punching trees and each other ... in response to what I personally regard as his hauntingly beautiful songs. I guess there is no accounting for taste.

What I do in these cases is ... I tranquilize the bear again ... and I tune his radio collar to heavy metal all the way: Iron Butterfly, Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy. I turn up the volume real loud, too. I am always amazed by how quickly the bears calm down when I do that.

From Day One, however, Alonzo seemed like a gentle soul. My instincts told me to tune his radio collar to Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles right off the bat. He seems very satisfied with my choice of listening. He is still in the yard as I write, and as I look out the window at him, I could swear he is air jamming.

Dr. Ursula Whipple is a freelance animal behaviorist and contributing editor of Walden Puddle. Since 1990, she has lived in an abandoned cabin outside town, studying the local bear population and being studied by them in turn. Often referred to, by herself and her mother, as the "Jane Goodall of the North Woods," she shares her field notes with us twice monthly, because no scholarly journal will publish them.


LOST IN TRANSLATION
(from The Walden Puddle Chronicles)
1,192 words, in the grand tradition
of lengthy Russian literature

by the Walden Puddle Writers Uncooperative

September 14, 1825,
and then again on
December 14, 2006

Mme. Ludmilla Borisenko was feeding her 43 cats. Her thoughts strayed briefly to what came next -- cleaning their 17 litter trays -- but she blocked it from her mind. She loved her 43 cats.

She also loved being a descendant of Russian nobility. Her distant forebear, Count Pavel Sergeyovich Kvaslubitelsky, had replanted the family tree in Walden Puddle in 1826. Although Mme. Borisenko only spoke English, she made a point of speaking it with a pronounced Russian accent. "I just like the sound of it," she would say ... with a pronounced Russian accent.

Count Pavel, her ancestor, had fled Russia. A political reformer, he had made enemies both in the court of Tsar Alexander I -- most importantly the Tsar -- and among his fellow reformers, who went on to attempt a democratic revolution on December 14, 1825. Sadly for many Russians, especially serfs, the uprising, known as the Decembrist Revolt, came to nothing. Had the Decembrists succeeded, say scholars, there might never have been a Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Count Pavel missed the whole thing.

This was because of a copy-editing error in a pamphlet printed by a group of radical Decembrists. Being radicals, they had little interest in proofreading. After studying the leaflet, Count Pavel understood, wrongly, that the uprising was definitely on for September 14.

The rest of the Decembists ironed out the misunderstanding, but Count Pavel never got word of it. On September 14, he personally staged the Septembrist Revolt of 1825, storming the Tsar's Winter Palace all by himself. He was easily subdued by the two sentries on duty.

The Tsar was furious with Count Pavel, not so much for his one-man revolution, but because it deeply depressed the Tsar to think that any member of the Russian nobility could be that stupid.

Count Pavel had two choices before him: Siberia to the east, or Paris and New York to the west. He brooded about the difficult decision for days. Finally, he flipped a ruble.

In August 1826, Count Pavel arrived in America. He decided to settle in Walden Puddle. "I have a gut feeling," he said to himself in Russian, "that I'll fit right in here."

Now, 180 year later, having tended to her 43 cats, Count Pavel's distant descendant, Mme. Ludmilla Borisenko, was having tea with her best friend, Ms. Priscilla Whipple.

Mme. Borisenko poured the tea from a samovar, and into glasses rather than teacups. This is how Russians have traditionally taken their tea. Many call it the best way in the world to drink tea. If your glass is too hot to pick up with your bare hands, you simply put it down for a while, and you don't burn your tongue.

"I am a poor emigre, Prissy, cast like driftwood upon your democratic shores," she told Ms. Whipple. "I am a storm-tossed political refugee."

"Give the Russian accent a rest, Millie," said Ms. Whipple. "You've been here since Andrew Jackson. Save it for the Elks Club Dance."

"Sorry," said Mme. Borisenko, now with a New England twang in her voice, "you forget with age."

"You close to finished?" asked Ms. Whipple.

"Ninety-nine percent there," said Mme. Borisenko.

They were referring to Mme. Borisenko's project of a lifetime, about which she said little. All she allowed was: "I'm working on a definitive translation of a Russian masterpiece." She had been working on it for ten years.

"When will it be done?" asked Ms. Whipple.

"I can finish it for you right now, Prissy. I have one paragraph left. Drink your tea."

While Mme. Borisenko worked, Ms. Whipple checked her text messages. One, from her daughter, the biologist Dr. Ursula Whipple, was a long e-mail about bears. Ms. Whipple bristled. She hated reading long messages on a one-inch screen.

"Y du U not lrn txt mssg?" she wrote back to her daughter. "U R a PhD. Uz ur brn."

"I don't have time to learn text messaging," wrote Dr. Ursula Whipple. "It's too hard."

"Mk th time! Dmmt!" wrote Ms. Whipple. "WTH is yr prob?"

Ms. Whipple loved text messaging. In her view, it was a great invention. She felt she had been born 60 years too early.

"Clueless child," she muttered. "I love her. But what a PITB."

Just then, Mme. Borisenko swiveled her antique Russian writer's chair away from her antique Russian writer's desk.

"My translation is complete!" she exulted.

"Oh, Millie, I am so tickled for you!" said Ms. Whipple. She gave her friend a bear hug.

"This is what it was," said Mme. Borisenko. She handed Ms. Whipple a thick book. She then gave her a 25-page manuscript. "This is my translation."

The translation began: "Hi, P., G&L now jst pvt prop of Nap. But WYA [watch your ass], if U du not agree w/me, I cut U no slack. U 2B OMSL [on my shit list]. U/me shld tlk."

"Oh, my God," said Ms. Whipple, her voice cracking with emotion. "This is brilliant! I had no idea. You were so secretive...."

"Ten years of my life."

"But well spent, my dear!"

"I'd like to think it's a translation for our times."

"For all times," said Ms. Whipple. "Plus it saves time."

"I hope I did it without sacrificing the essence of the story."

"Not one bit, Millie!" said Ms. Whipple. "If anything, the story is richer, and much more reader-friendly!"

The story was War and Peace. Mme. Ludmilla Borisenko had translated War and Peace into text messaging.

"I am honored to stand in your presence," said Ms. Priscilla Whipple.

"Thank you, Prissy."

"Why did you choose War and Peace? Other than it's so unreasonably long?"

"You know my family history. You know about Count Pavel."

"I do."

"The actual Decembrists, the ones who got the date right ... unlike my ancestor, who had already made Paris by then ... if it wasn't for them, War and Peace might never have happened."

"Oh?" said Ms. Whipple. She had majored in literature during her year at Fordham, but she had never heard of this.

"Forward-thinking people in Russia, Tolstoy included, were deeply pained by the whole thing. Tsar Nicholas, the new guy, came down hard on the Decembrists. Some ended up in Siberia; five ended up in a hangman's noose. All five of those nooses broke. Spontaneously. Think about that. Russian tradition says, 'If your noose breaks, you go free.' Tsar Nicholas says, 'Hang the bastards anyway.' So they got hung twice."

"Wow," said Ms. Whipple.

"Tolstoy started drafting a novel about democratic idealists in Russia. He didn't have a name for it. It was just a little draft. It was catharsis."

"Uh-huh."

"That little draft of a novel became War and Peace."

"Oh, my."

"I figured, it's the least I could do, after my own ancestor screwed up so badly. It's fitting I should finish today. December 14 is the anniversary of the Decembrist Revolt."

"That's so sweet, Millie."

"I had to do it. U knw, 2 mk amnds."

"You'll be on the talk shows, Millie. There'll be book-signing tours."

"That's what troubles me, Prissy."

"You don't want to be famous?"

"Hell, no. That's all I ever wanted. To be famous."

"So what is it?"

"I'm going to have to sign books for people."

"Well, just sign them in text messaging. WTP? [What's the problem?]"

"It could TMR [taint my reputation]."

"Why is that?"

"I can't figure out how to abbreviate my initials."


Editor's Note: All bracketed phrases in "Lost in Translation" are editorial insertions. They do not appear in the original manuscript submitted to us by the Walden Puddle Writers Uncooperative.



THE TALK OF
WALDEN PUDDLE
Over chai at the Agreeable Doughnut, Mme. Ludmilla Borisenko asked us to extend warm holiday greetings to the readers of Walden Puddle. She also asked us, pointedly, "Where, please to tell to me, are the blinchiki on this menu? To which manner of place did you brought me?"

Mme. Borisenko extends personal greetings to that reader of Walden Puddle who has given both her cats ... brothers from the same litter ... the last name Karamazov.

"Please tell to her that she possesses the very good potential to be not just a cat lady," said Mme. Borisenko, "but a Russian cat lady, who are the most advanced cat ladies in all the world. When Russians go crazy, we hold nothing back."

Mme. Borisenko is planning a Christmas party for January 7. In Russia, Christmas is observed on January 7 by the Russian Orthodox Church, which still uses the Old Style calendar. Here in America, Christmas is observed on January 7 primarily by Mme. Borisenko.

On Thursday, January 7, Mme. Borisenko invites all Walden Puddlers to her Christmas Open House. "I promise many delicious Russian dishes," she said, "based on secret recipes my ancestor Count Pavel stole from the royal kitchens ... while he was still in favor at the Imperial Court."

Mme. Borisenko asks that all guests share generously from their plates with her 43 cats.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We know that some of you have been passing the link to Walden Puddle on to friends. Thank you. We could use the help. Our Circulation Department consists of 15 middle-aged men and women who know nothing about publishing. They come to our offices every day and simply sit in chairs.

They were led to believe, by bad placement of our ad for "Circulation Help" in the Walden Puddle Tattler, that they were enrolling in a free clinical trial for the treatment of varicose veins.

Every day, we give each one a Tic-Tac for placebo.

Other editors have reminded us that coming to the office and sitting in chairs is what many circulation departments do anyway. Whatever the case, without a competent circulation staff, we rely on you to spread the word about our twice-monthly reportage from the North Woods. If you enjoy visiting Walden Puddle, please pass the link on to a friend who might enjoy it, too.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Our next post will go up the day after Christmas -- or on Boxing Day, if you're Canadian or British -- so here's wishing all you Walden-Puddlers-in-Spirit ... HAPPY HOLIDAYS!



NEXT POST: December 26, 2009

FEATURING: "A Walden Puddle Christmas Carol." It's Christmas Eve at the Village Idiot. Dave the Bartender calls last round very early, at 6:00 p.m. He wants to go home. The few sad souls still left in the Village Idiot nurse their drinks. They don't want to go home. Just then, three well-dressed gentlemen wearing bowler hats and carrying umbrellas stride into the bar. They speak with British accents, and they wish to speak with Dave. What the Dickens?!

THE BEAR FACTS: Dr. Ursula Whipple goes Christmas shopping for the bears who live, love, and overturn trash cans on her property. It isn't as easy as it sounds.

BONUS ITEM: Excerpts from the powerful Christmas Sermon of the Rev. Alvin Bisonnette. "Sinners are allowed to read it," Rev. Bisonnette told us. "And they can fold it up and take it to hell with 'em for all I care."


All printed matter in Walden Puddle copyright © 2009 by Walden Puddle Gift Shop. All photographs reproduced with permission. Original artwork courtesy of Aytsan.