RUR: Heritage and Controversy

The version of RUR we are reading in class is the one that made the play known and has been standard for many decades. However, that translation by Paul Selver and collaborators has been superceded, some would argue, by a more recent one by Claudia Novack-Jones (1989).  As Robert Philmus notes, Paul Selver has frequently been attacked since the late 1980s for his treachery as a translator of R.U.R. But Philmus argues that "neither of the two different editions of R.U.R. bearing Selver's name, even when combined, represents his original work," and that the translation was "translation by committee."  (see "Matters of Translation: Karel Capek and Paul Selver," Science Fiction Studies 28.1 (March 2001): 7-32).

For a taste of the charges against Selver, please have a look at comments by Merritt Abrash in his "R.U.R. Restored and Reconsidered," Extrapolation 32.2 (Summer 1991): 184-192):

Considering that Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots)
is generally regarded as a science fiction classic, and that it popularized
one of the most distinctive science fiction words,' it is treated rather
slightingly by science fiction historians. They cannot very well omit the
play, but, in major survey by Nicholls, Gunn, Barron, Aldiss, and Suvin,
it receives only passing mention or a few descriptive sentences. Similarly,
all teachers of science fiction presumably mention R.U.R., but rare
indeed are those who assign it to be read. It has become a kind of
historical artifact, treated with unfailing respect but not as a work of
contemporary viability.
Lack of availability does not seem to be a factor, since the play has
been in at least one anthology during every decade (although this is a
considerable dropoff from the 1930s, when, according to Scholes and
Rabkin, R.U.R. was a "standard high school text" 129]). More to the
point is the possibility that for several decades readers have dismissed
it as merely an early example of the now hackneyed theme that "robots
take over and wipe out humanity" (a description by Aldiss [184]),
undeserving of serious attention. The exact mix of literary, sociological,
and technological reasons behind R.U.R.'s marginalization is a matter
of conjecture; but the long decline—even among students of science
fiction—from the worldwide excitement which greeted it in the 1920s is
a striking fact.
In 1990, however, there is a unique opportunity for reappraisal: the
first new English translation of the play in nearly seventy years, by
Claudia Novack-Jones, has been published in Toward the Radical Center,
a collection of Capek works almost all in fresh translations. This new
version of R. U.R. includes many pages missing from the standard English
one by Paul Selver (1923) and is superior to it in concept, coherence,
and literary quality. The R.U.R. familiar to generations of English language
readers stands revealed as severely distorted by extensive bowdlerization,
scores of textual omissions, and the blunting of statements
which fall outside the usual cliches about robots making life easier for
humanity, or, alternatively, dehumanizing it.' The remainder of this article
will, in the course of presenting the significant ways in which the
translations differ, consider whether the play's increasingly nominal status
in the science fiction canon its ascribable to the inadequacies of Selver's
version or has more deep-seated causes. (The Selver translation, as printed
in Lewis (3-58), is identified below by "PS," and the Novack-Jones by
"NJ." Page numbers for PS refer to the Arthur O. Lewis, Jr. anthology.
Of Men and Machines [New York: Dutton, 1963].)
The bowdlerization of Capek's original text is astonishing; not only
is anything dealing with sexuality omitted (even the words "infertile"
and "sterile"), but strong oaths and violent images are toned down, and
words and phrases with possible unpleasant connotations are replaced.
A sampling:

NJ                                                   PS
worm                                            beetle
abortions                                  monstrosities
organism                                   mechanism
Jesus Christ                                good gracious
Jesusmaryandjoseph                     my goodness
charbroiled                              charred to cinders  [referring to burned robots]
bloody chunks of meat               shapeless clods
I'd kill to know                       I'd give a good deal to know

While none of this seriously alters what Capek intended to .say (although
"sterile flowers," omitted in several places in PS, is an important
metaphor bearing on Helena's inability to have children—itself a theme
skirted in PS, it contributes mightily to a flatness in the dialogue, an
absence of vivid and memorable language for which Capek was taken
to task by no less a literary critic than Kenneth Burke (49-50).
Even more of an eye-opener is the elimination of a powerful episode
of stage violence. Damon, a robot omitted in PS, but "The Ruler of
the Robots" in NJ, insists on undergoing unskilled surgical experimentation
performed by Alquist—the last human—in the desperate hope
that a way to make new robots can be found. From offstage, we hear
Alquist reluctantly proceeding with the dissection while Damon screams,
six times, "Cut!" or "Aaaa!" Alquist then runs on stage, flings off his
bloody lab coat, and looks in horror at his hands:

ALQUIST: Bloody claws, if only you had fallen from my wrists! Pss, away!
Out of my sight, hands! You have killed—
(Damon staggers in from the right, swathed in a blood-stained sheet.)
ALQUIST (shrinking back): What are you doing here? What do you want?
DAMON: I am al-alive! It—it—it is better to live! (102-03)
Alquist orders other robots to take Damon away, then turns to washing
his hands with a futile vigor equaled only by Lady Macbeth (expressing
sentiments similar to hers, too). The entire jolting scene is rendered in
PS as follows:
RADIUS [Damon is omitted in PS]: Ready. Begin—
ALQUIST: Yes, begin or end. God, give me strength. (Goes into dissecting
room. He comes out terrified.) No, no, 1 will not. I cannot. (He collapses
on couch.) O Lord, let not mankind perish from the Earth. (He falls asleep.)
(55)
The absence of exclamation marks is not the least of the peculiarities
in this translation.
The material cut from NJ, ranging from the two-page Damon scene
down to single words, totals no less than seventeen of seventy-four
pages—almost twenty-five percent. Over half of NJ's Act III is excised
from PS, which may account for the latter being divided into Acts I,
II, III, Epilogue, whereas in NJ the division runs Prologue, Acts I, II,
III. The most astonishing single change is the complete omission from
PS of the entire thirty-two line speech by Alquist (to be described below)
which ends the play.

Silent Film and Literature

Steven J. Ross argues that before World War I silent films often portrayed working-class life sympathetically, but that after 1917, films became substantially more conservative.His choice of date works for both the ending of the war (it would conclude the following year) and the Bolshevik uprising that led to the fall of the Russian Tsars, the rise of Communism, and a western paranoia about "Reds" that has never completely subsided. Ross adjusts our ideas of who made and consumed silent films, though his historicist bent is toward a rather standard view that reactionaryism affected culture post WW I.
What about the arts?  Specifically cinema? The word "silent films" is rather a misnomer, perhaps, in that they were accompanied by music and (in lower class halls) plenty of commentary from the peanut gallery.  How "interactive" was cinema?  If vaudeville was any gauge, "tremendously."

Ross, Steven J.  Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1998.

This Side of Paradise

"The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol."
-- Matthew J. Bruccoli, A Brief Life of Fitzgerald

Having said this, Bruccoli tries to take the position that it does not matter how fascinating Fitzgerald's life was, nor how many parallels we find in the work--what matters is that work itself. In the case of This Side of Paradise, it seems very hard not to return to The Romantic Egoist (the rejected version of the novel) and the list provided above by Bruccoli as deeply explanatory of the novel that was eventually published in 1920. Yet, giving the book its right to exist independently of its author--which is a core principle of the "New Criticism" that was to achieve a decades-long supremacy starting in the late 1930s--one is struck by the immaturity and lostness of its protagonist, Amory Blaine.  He thinks of his sophomore year in college as the height of his life, and he is struck in the later pages of the novel by the realization that "modern life" has begun to change "year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before" (272).  Blaine seems often ironically presented, and his being labelled a "Romantic Egotist" suggests he has a way to travel.  How far does he really get by the end of the novel, beyond the realization just quoted?

Toomer, Cane, Anderson

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) grew up in Washington D.C. and attended six universities or colleges in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Illinois and New York (graduating from none), before returning to New York City in spring 1919. He claimed as his heritage "seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Italian" (letter in the Liberator of 1922). He was also, as Robert M. Crunden has said, in Body and Soul, a man of many enthusiasms: socialism, Buddhism, Theosophy, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Quakerism, Jungian psychoanalysis, and eventually Scientology (Crunden 27-28). He formed a close friendship with Hart Crane. He loved Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and one can see its influence in Cane (1923), (see below for more on this topic) which grew out of experiences he had as the substitute principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute, a co-educational African American institution founded in 1910 in Hancock County, Georgia (about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta), an area where his own father had been born into slavery. He had never been in the deep South before, and it made such an impression on him that he began writing the poetry and sketches that eventuated in Cane. He submitted the long story "Georgia Night" to the Liberator in New York while he was still in Sparta.
Before completing Cane, he returned to the South in 1922 with his friend, Jewish novelist, historian, literary and social critic, Waldo Frank. Toomer had light skin, often "passing" for white, but it had been darkening in the intense sun of the South, so they had to travel at times in Jim Crow rail cars, and since Frank was swarthy, they posed as black academics. Crunden says that Cane "remains a mélange of poems, meditations, and sketches and is not a novel," and that it "combined naturalism, realism, symbolism, and surrealism," and "excited Toomer about his black heritage" (29). However, when the publisher Horace Liveright wanted to advertise the book as by a black author, Toomer objected loudly: "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine," he said, telling Liveright that he did not "expect to be told what I should consider myself to be, and further that any "statements I give will inevitably come from a synthetic human and art point of view, not from a racial one" (qtd. in Crunden 29). 

In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, dated 18 December 1922, Jean Toomer wrote about the travels that preceded his writing of Cane, and the influence of Anderson upon his work.  This passage bespeaks a closeness of the two writers, and it would seem as though Anderson's work is indispensable to understanding what Toomer tried top achieve in Cane--if Toomer can be taken at his word:

Just before I went down to Georgia I read Winesburg, Ohio. And while there, living in a cabin whose floorboards permitted the soil to come up between them, listening to the old folk melodies that Negro women sang at sun-down, The Triumph of the Egg [i.e., The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems (1921), by Anderson] came to me. The beauty, and the full sense of life that these books contain are natural elements, like the rain and sunshine, of my own sprouting. My seed was planted in the cane- and cotton-fields, and in the souls of black and white people in the small southern town. My seed was planted in myself down there. Roots have grown and strengthened. They have extended out. I spring up in Washington. Winesburg, Ohio, and The Triumph of the Egg are ele­ments of my growing. It is hard to think of myself as maturing without them.

Ther[e] is a golden strength about your art that can come from nothing less than a creative elevation of experience, however bitter or abortive the experience may have been. Your images are clean, glowing, healthy, vibrant. . . . . It seems to me that art in our day, other than in its purely aesthetic phase, has a sort of religious function. It is a religion, a spiritualization of the immediate. And ever since I first touched you, I have thought of you in this connection. . . .

Wont you write and tell me more in detail how my stuff strikes you? And at first opportunity I would certainly like to have a talk with you.

Crunden,  Robert M. Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
 A Jean Toomer Reader:  Selected Unpublished Writings, ed. Frederik L. Rusch. New York, Oxford:  Oxford UP, 1993. See pp. 17-18.

The Waste Land and Popular Song

As David Chinitz pointed out almost twenty years ago, the original manuscript of The Waste Land shows Eliot citing popular songs more than the Grail myth. For the poem’s title, he wanted a sentence from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” And for the opening of the poem he considered several lyrics from popular musicals, like "I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me / There's not a man can say a word agin me," from "Harrigan," a song in a 1907 George M. Cohan show titled Fifty Miles From Boston.  Out of two songs from the minstrel tradition he concocted "Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon Vine / Eva Iva Uva Emmaline." And from The Cubanola Glide he appropriated the lines "Tease, Squeeze lovin & wooin / Say Kid what're y’ doin’?"

As Chinitz says, Michael North pointed out that these lines are "the first examples in the draft of [Eliot's] famous techniques of quotation and juxtaposition," and suggested the miscellaneous format of the minstrel show--or, Chinitz adds, the English music hall--can help explain the form of The Waste Land. Thanks to the deletion of the original opening section, however, the first line ("April is. . . ") remakes the poem within English poetry’s main traditions. As Chinitz says, “One can only imagine the effect of a long poem called He Do the Police in Different Voices beginning, ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place.’”

—David Chinitz, "T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide." PMLA 110.2 (March 1995).

See other comments on the composition of The Waste Land, including those synopsized above from Chinitz.

Sitwell & Stein?

On June 12, 1923,  Façade premiered at the Aeolian Hall in London.  There was (supposedly) hissing and booing, though nothing like when Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was first performed, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913. Virginia Woolf attended the opening of Façade, and described a puzzled but polite audience. Reviews were rotten. A sample headline: “Drivel They Paid To Hear.” After this night, William Walton acquired a reputation as the enfant terrible of British music, probably because Sitwellspread stories that they were almost physically attacked by the audience.

Sitwell's early verse comprised  "abstract patterns in sounds" to overcome "verbal deadness" and "rhythmic flaccidity" in English poetry. They are experiments in rhyme, assonance and dissonance, and syllabic combinations. Belgian writer Emil Cammaerts said Sitwell's verses were "poetry gone mad, poetry on the verge of becoming music."

Walton treated the voice as just another instrument, and sometimes the orchestra overwhelms it. Sitwell put the orchestra behind a screen on one occasion, and spoke through a megaphone on another. The work changed as they added, subtracted, rewrote and reordered things. Another early change was the addition of a flute and saxophone to the quartet, giving a music-hall or dance-band flavor to things. Walton parodies popular and classical music, and also various dance styles, from tap-dance and waltz (as inherited from Tchaikovsky, Ravel and the Strausses), to folk reels ("Scotch Rhapsody"). The "Jodelling Song" quotes Rossini's William Tell. Most of the movements are a kind of extended word-painting, ideally suited to the extended onomatopoeia of the verses, and in most cases contain some more literal translation of the words into music. In this aspect, would you agree that Sitwell was following a path blazed by Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons?

The Modernism Lab at Yale is an ambitious project to pull together information and links relating to major modernist figures, with author-pages and a timeline. It is a Wiki, and not that easy to navigate, but there is some excellent material there.
On H.D.'s page the site defines Imagist poems as "austere in structure and diction, [blending] mythology and symbolist techniques to create a verse form that was classical yet modern, spare yet complex" [VIEW PAGE].
The timeline shows that Amy Lowell hosted a "rival" party on July 30, 1914, following the Blast celebration dinner on July 15. Lowell's party was attended not by Ezra Pound, but by H.D., Richard Aldington, D.H. Lawrence, and John Gould Fletcher  [VIEW PAGE].
The term "rival party" indicates a competition between Pound, Lewis, and the Blast gang on the one hand, and the others mentioned above.  Yet Pound had already published Des Imagistes in March 1914. He engaged in a skirmish with Lowell about who "invented" Imagism:

My dear Amy: Are you going to get onto the Band Wagon?
You tried to stampede me into accepting as my artistic equals various people whom it would have been rank hypocrisy for me to accept in any such manner. There is no democracy in the arts. And now what is this nonsense you write to Miss Anderson about "bitterest" enmities?

(from The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941)

Does Blast seem like it is putting forth ideas compatible with what comes to be known as "Imagism," which is later seemingly encapsulated in MacLeish's "Ars Poetica"? Does MacLeish's manifesto-poem seem consistent with the definition given above on the H.D. page of "Imagism" as blending "mythology and symbolist techniques"? n.b.: the term "symbolist" refers to the literary movement of Symbolisme, which published its own manifesto in 1886.