![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Picking up from where I stopped yesterday, as my homeward train bounds through the southwest of England: please be forbearing about my even worse than usual typing.
The next three papers were grouped together under the heading 'Power and the Corporations'. I set out to describe this as 'a slightly naughty piece of wordplay', but of course it's entirely in Jones' style ("Power corrupts, but we need electricity.") so fair enough: two papers on power and power structures within the books, one on the treatment of one of the books at the hands of a - or rather, the (British Broadcasting) - corporation. Akiko Yamazaki presented evidence that the reason the Goon's head is disproportionately small is simply that he is not swollen-headed. Can it possibly be that simple? Well, compare this to the massive head created by Venturus as a temple to himself, and iyou end up agreeing that yes, perhaps it can. Aneesh Barai's presentation on money and the University in The Year of the Griffin argues that, give or take a griffin or two, it is all true, and ends with the rallying cry "Do we need to follow the neoliberal system?" Some of the discussion following this panel was fascinating, but I think I'm going to omit it here and put it towards that more general something I've been scribbling in the margins.
The final paper of this session was about the BBC television adaptation of Archer's Goon, an interesting choice as the only one of the books to receive this treatment, though The Ogre Downstairs and Charmed Life were used on Jackanory. It was also a tribute to Anna Home, champion of drama for children at the BBC. And it was illustrated with screengrabs of Archer's Goon from YouTube - very fuzzy screengrabs, but worth investigation.
The afternoon ended with a keynote speech from Gilli Bar-Hillel, whom I remembered vividly from Newcastle. She speaks well, vividly, and I enjoyed her memories of a peripatetic childhood, identifying each of DWJ's books with the American college town in which she first read it. But she has also translated DWJ into Hebrew (and published her, but that's another story): which you would surely assume was an impossible task. Hard enough to translate the huge vocabulary of English into the restricted vocabulary of Hebrew, whoever the author. But an author as playful with words, as profligate with allusions as Diana Wynne Jones? So The Homeward Bounders becomes in Hebrew 'Those Who Walk the Edge', abandoning the pun between bound as boundary/ leap/ tied, but playing up the edge / margin/ marginalised and throwing in for good measure that a walker is the name for a pawn in chess. Sometimes, she said, you pick up a reference, and all you can do is pat yourself on the back and move on, as she did when Howl calls Sophie a "Busy old fool" - but there was no way to escape the more prolonged reference in the same book to Donne's Song. So she translated it into Hebrew, and is justifiably proud of herself for it!
Am I, incidentally, the only person who first met that poem not through Howl's Moving Castle but on John Renbourn's first album? If I weren't restricted to CrossCountry wifi, I'd close this post with it, but things being as they are, it's on YouTube, if you don't know it go listen.
The next three papers were grouped together under the heading 'Power and the Corporations'. I set out to describe this as 'a slightly naughty piece of wordplay', but of course it's entirely in Jones' style ("Power corrupts, but we need electricity.") so fair enough: two papers on power and power structures within the books, one on the treatment of one of the books at the hands of a - or rather, the (British Broadcasting) - corporation. Akiko Yamazaki presented evidence that the reason the Goon's head is disproportionately small is simply that he is not swollen-headed. Can it possibly be that simple? Well, compare this to the massive head created by Venturus as a temple to himself, and iyou end up agreeing that yes, perhaps it can. Aneesh Barai's presentation on money and the University in The Year of the Griffin argues that, give or take a griffin or two, it is all true, and ends with the rallying cry "Do we need to follow the neoliberal system?" Some of the discussion following this panel was fascinating, but I think I'm going to omit it here and put it towards that more general something I've been scribbling in the margins.
The final paper of this session was about the BBC television adaptation of Archer's Goon, an interesting choice as the only one of the books to receive this treatment, though The Ogre Downstairs and Charmed Life were used on Jackanory. It was also a tribute to Anna Home, champion of drama for children at the BBC. And it was illustrated with screengrabs of Archer's Goon from YouTube - very fuzzy screengrabs, but worth investigation.
The afternoon ended with a keynote speech from Gilli Bar-Hillel, whom I remembered vividly from Newcastle. She speaks well, vividly, and I enjoyed her memories of a peripatetic childhood, identifying each of DWJ's books with the American college town in which she first read it. But she has also translated DWJ into Hebrew (and published her, but that's another story): which you would surely assume was an impossible task. Hard enough to translate the huge vocabulary of English into the restricted vocabulary of Hebrew, whoever the author. But an author as playful with words, as profligate with allusions as Diana Wynne Jones? So The Homeward Bounders becomes in Hebrew 'Those Who Walk the Edge', abandoning the pun between bound as boundary/ leap/ tied, but playing up the edge / margin/ marginalised and throwing in for good measure that a walker is the name for a pawn in chess. Sometimes, she said, you pick up a reference, and all you can do is pat yourself on the back and move on, as she did when Howl calls Sophie a "Busy old fool" - but there was no way to escape the more prolonged reference in the same book to Donne's Song. So she translated it into Hebrew, and is justifiably proud of herself for it!
Am I, incidentally, the only person who first met that poem not through Howl's Moving Castle but on John Renbourn's first album? If I weren't restricted to CrossCountry wifi, I'd close this post with it, but things being as they are, it's on YouTube, if you don't know it go listen.
