Word: weird
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sendak's illustrations for E.T.A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker (Crown; $19.95). This is not the customary sugarplum rendition. As the artist points out in his introduction, the Christmastime ballet was based on a version of the tale by Alexandre Dumas, "smoothed out, bland and utterly devoid of the weird, dark qualities that make it something of a masterpiece." With characteristic wit and technical wizardry, Sendak has restored those qualities. Marie, journeying from childhood to the altar, old Drosselmeier the taleteller and Nutcracker himself are no longer marzipan creations. In Ralph Manheim's vigorous new translation, mice and soldiers...
...want to look with interest and contentment into a bay for any length of time, it is better that it doesn't have a whale in it. Now, it occurred to me that the freakish landscape of Cappadocia illustrated the same truth. What you need of such a weird spectacle is one good view of it, and this I had ... The uneasy moonscape stretched away on every hand, and, below me, clinging to the roots of the fortified pinnacle of rock I stood upon, were the ruinous mud huts of the old village, their terraces heaped with melons yellow...
...remained there. Presently a thaw arrived, and all the words, warmed up, came cascading down in a tremendous, unintelligible din. The owner of an answering machine knows that there may come a moment when the machine, for all its customary obedience, will disgorge, in a weird, surreal monologue, all the messages accumulated over months and months: disjointed voices, greetings and arguments and appointments long dead. And then one might hear a voice one does not recognize: a sort of gypsy croak, a voodoo voice, heavily accented and far away: "Please call. .. Eeet eees verrrry imporrrtant!" A cold gust goes through...
...rewards "exceptionally talented individuals." It singled him out for the top award: $60,000 a year, tax free, for life. Says Manheim: "My main pride is that I know how to be simple. When inexperi enced people run into an everyday ex pression in a foreign work that seems weird to them, they change it into some thing equally weird. But when you know a language well, you can translate the natural into the natural...
...last, Mondale, with the weird serenity of the underdog, cherished a mystical, or perhaps merely desperate, optimism. Transpose the last two digits, he suggested: 1984 is really 1948. Mondale is Harry Truman, with a handsome, vindictive grin, flourishing the headline of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Conjuring doubts to keep the pundits honest. The great hyperkinetic exercise had come to its final stage, like the jitterbugging burst at the end of a '30s dance marathon...