THE DEEP ONES: "The Violet Death" by Gustav Meyrink

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Violet Death" by Gustav Meyrink

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2artturnerjr
Oct 23, 2016, 7:19 pm

I've got this in 100 Wild Little Weird Tales.

3paradoxosalpha
Oct 25, 2016, 9:58 pm

I see the Roy Temple House Weird Tales version linked above is "adapted from the German" rather than translated. I'll definitely read the Price version in Acolytes of Cthulhu along with that. (It's a short one, after all.)

4paradoxosalpha
Oct 26, 2016, 7:57 am

The "Tristan Eldritch" blog link that's third in Miscellany is quite interesting, but frustratingly unsourced. (It also shows some flaws in the non-Meyrink material.)

5semdetenebre
Edited: Oct 26, 2016, 11:40 am

>4 paradoxosalpha:

That article seemed interesting so I stuck it in there to read later. I thought you might find something in it.

This tale made me grin. Being melted by a strange gas was probably a ghastly idea in 1902, but by the time of the 1935 WT publication, it would have been old hat. However... ahem... being melted into a violet pyramid-shaped jello mold was a pretty unique idea! There's some strange geometry for you.

6paradoxosalpha
Edited: Oct 26, 2016, 12:00 pm

Price, from his introduction to Acolytes of Cthulhu:
Other writers, without consciously seeking to write in the Lovecraftian vein, nonetheless may be numbered among the acolytes of Cthulhu in that they seem to have been, like the mad sculptor Wilcox, sensitive to the R'lyehian Dreamer's urgings. They were on the same wavelength as Lovecraft, even if they wrote independently of the Providence recluse. One such was Gustav Meyrink, whose novel The Golem Lovecraft highly praised. But I am thinking of a different work by Meyrink, "Der Violette Tod." An English version of the story, "The Violet Death" appeared in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Anyone familiar with the original German of Meyrink will recognize that the Weird Tales version is only a kind of loose adaptation, not strictly a translation of "Der Violette Tod." Thus I have commissioned a new, faithful translation by Kathleen Houlihan, called "The Purple Death." You will find it most revealing to compare the two English versions. (17)
Indeed, they are very different. The House "adaptation" in WT does preserve much of the language of the original tale, but there are crucial differences in structure and content. Meyrink actually gives the blasting word of the Tibetan sect ("Ämälän!"), and rather than having it perish with Pompeius Jaburek, Meyrink has it transmitted through the presses of the world to the population at large, causing an epidemic that is only arrested by having everyone submit to medical treatment to cause permanent deafness. "A few decades later, about 1950, a new and universally deaf population inhabited the globe. Customs and habits were different, rank and possessions all rearranged" (429).

I found the actual Meyrink plot to be far, far Weirder than what was in Weird Tales. It reminded me a little of "The Repairer of Reputations" in the extent of its invention of history. I was also tempted to take it as an occult teaching of some kind--almost a veiled myth accounting for humanity's primordial loss of certain spiritual sensibilities. (In modern hermetic magic, the sense of hearing corresponds to the quintessence or spirit.)

7semdetenebre
Oct 26, 2016, 10:47 am

>6 paradoxosalpha:

Thanks for that info. The original tale sounds much more grim, to be certain. "Ämälän!" - any idea as to its origin? It reminds me of "Aemaet", another kind of magic word used in the 1920 film version of The Golem. I think Meyrink actually used something different in his novel.

8paradoxosalpha
Edited: Oct 26, 2016, 10:50 am

>7 semdetenebre: "Ämälän!" - any idea as to its origin?

Besides the Meyrink story, the other main locus of search engine hits appears to be Russian pages about "My Little Pony"!

9semdetenebre
Oct 26, 2016, 11:20 am

>8 paradoxosalpha:

Hmmmm... I can definitely see MLP as the vector of some kind of alien evil.

10artturnerjr
Oct 26, 2016, 11:34 am

>6 paradoxosalpha:

That sounds much better than the WT version (i.e., the one I read), which didn't do much for me.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

Ha! My daughter will get a kick out of that. :)

11paradoxosalpha
Edited: Oct 26, 2016, 12:04 pm

The business about the Tibetans worshiping a demon in the form of a Peacock is present in both versions, and appears to be a confusion of Tibetan religion with the Near Eastern Yezidi sect--both of them "Satanic" foreign religions in the 19th-century Western imagination. A quick search for Tibetan religion peacock yields only: "Amitibha, the peacock-riding dhyani buddha who sits upon his Peacock Throne in the heaven of Sukhavati and occasionally takes a physical incarnation as the King of the World in legendary Shambhala, the land of immortals that flies the Peacock Flag" on a site about Yezidism.

12housefulofpaper
Oct 26, 2016, 4:58 pm

Maurice Raraty's translation in The Opal (and other stories) is also more faithful than the Weird Tales adaptation, so I was treated to the full version of the story as per >6 paradoxosalpha: and was - well not exactly surprised by the extent of the changes to the WT version. That type of rewriting for the pulps was HPL's main source of income after all (I know he didn't have a hand in this one, but I was aware of the practice).

Raraty's introduction talks about the satirical or anti-establishment thrust of Meyrink's pre-WW1 stories "with their withering attacks upon the pillars of order, of upright respectability and authority: the pompous, empty-headed Wilhelminian military officer, the self-important medical man or the bureaucratic government official." This gives another layer of meaning to the near-future scenario with the paterfamilias, the experts, etc. spreading the fatal word thoughtlessly or even in the moment of warning against it; ""Go to your ear-specialist, who will remove your hearing, and take care never to say aloud the word "Emelen". One second later, the scholar and his entire audience were nothing more than blobs of slime."(Rarity's translation)

13AndreasJ
Oct 27, 2016, 1:49 am

>5 semdetenebre:

Meyrink's choice of gas is odd - carbonic acid gas, nowadays better known as carbon dioxide, is neither exotic nor poisonous, though volcanic vents of it can constitute a suffocation hazard. Unless I guess the poisonous part is the adapter's - the precautions they do take seem more suited to avoiding suffocation than poisoning.

I, too, didn't like the WT version too much, but now I'm sufficiently intrigued to want to seek out the German original.

The word Ämälän sounds vaguely Turkic, or perhaps Finnish. Any proper pseudo-Finnish should however have at least one doubled letter!

14AndreasJ
Oct 27, 2016, 2:10 am

Turns out Gutenberg has "Der Violette Tod" as an ebook, happily in antiqua - most other online versions are scans in Fraktur. I'll give it a go later - now, apparently, I have work to do.

15AndreasJ
Nov 1, 2016, 5:24 am

Finally got around to reading the German original today. It's, indeed, much like the Raraty and Houhlihan versions mentioned above by housefulofpaper and paradoxosalpha. One difference they didn't mention is that it doesn't have the "documentary" conceit of the WT version - the story is told linearly, starting with Sir Roger's meeting with the Tibetan sannyasin, by a 3rd person omniscient narrator. This makes for a less Lovecraftian feel - as does the satirical tone that houseful remarks on.

We're told that the new world is ruled by an otologist: a definite contender for the least expected career path to world domination I've encountered in literature.

(And no, one can't blame the carbon dioxide on the adapter, that one is Meyrink's fault. It's either a mistake, or, as seems not unlikely given the general tone of the story, a satirical joke I'm not getting.)

16elenchus
Edited: Nov 6, 2016, 5:31 pm

I just got around to this one, business travel and events at work intervening. I started with the WT link and caught a couple phrases in the original which I questioned ("wonderful landscape of death", "lifted the trigger of his gun"), and so sought out the German original. I ended up reading both, my German is not so good as to capture tone and atmosphere, which I expected would be a vital aspect of the story. I didn't catch any significant differences not already noted by others, and agree the original structure and ending is much more affecting than the WT adaptation.

The hospital nurse / anonymous translation of the story reminds me of what happened with The Cabinet of Caligari, changing the meaning of the story by bracketing it, and calling into question the words of those directly involved.

With the potential occult reading mentioned in >6 paradoxosalpha:, I am especially taken with the idea of a viral meme used to destroy one's enemy. It is curious and presumably relevant that one need not understand the word, but only speak it. There is an implicit critique of scientism in this: mere following of form and procedure, without the necessary preparations to understand or discover that protocol for oneself. But understanding is no protection, as the fate of the Tibetans seem to demonstrate.

One joke missing from the WT / Temple House translation, since it omitted all reference to the world epidemic following from Sir Roger's story being published by various presses, was Meyrink's jab at the Austrians. They avoided the carnage for a time, since all they read were their local publications. The Austrian reputation for insular conservatism is older than I knew!

ETA Actually, one change I found interesting: Meyrink's original description of the transformation was that Sir Roger took the shape of a zuckerhut, translated as sugarloaf. It's not grossly different, but looking at the wikipedia entry I found it more visceral than the image of a pyramid.