(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Chrononauts main theme)
introductions, recent non-podcast reads
Hello everyone, we are Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. And you can find us on a lot of the regular podcasting platforms that are available nowadays like Spotify and Apple music and Google and Stitcher, but most importantly, the most important spot for our podcast resources is in fact our blogspot, and that is chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. And that's basically where you should go, your one stop shop, so to speak. Unless you're on YouTube, then you can follow us and subscribe on there and stuff too.
But anyway, I'm here as usual with my co-hosts, Gretchen and Nate. How's everyone today on the 30th of June, my birthday.
Nate:
Happy birthday.
Gretchen:
Happy birthday.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. It's a nice hot humid day, but things are going generally well here. I got a lot of interesting things to talk about coming up. So I'm definitely excited about that.
JM:
It's a very humid day here in Southern Ontario, and we've had air quality issues for a while now due to some of the wildfires that have been going on, which probably headed down your way to at least Gretchen.
Nate:
We got it about a couple weeks ago.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that was the same for us. We got it quite bad, probably near the beginning of the month rather than now.
JM:
I mean, it doesn't seem so bad to me, but I guess like sometimes, you know, it smells a bit like you're perpetually around a campfire or something like that. It's a little weird, but it doesn't smell like toxically dangerous or anything, but you kind of think like, well, those these fires are pretty out of control. They've been burning for a long time and doing quite a bit of damage.
Yeah, this is indeed a very special episode of Chrononauts. This is our second what we like to call "host choice". And yeah, I suppose you could argue that we kind of have a host choice every month in a way. But here we just basically pick whatever one of us wants. And if you're tuned in last time, you've heard me roll the dice and Nate is picking all the stuff for today.
And not only that, but this is a really special episode because none of the works we're doing today are originally English works. And so they've all been translated, some of it in house, and it's going to be a really interesting excursion into places we haven't really been to before.
Nate:
Yeah, I think so.
JM:
So before we get into that, you guys want to just talk briefly about what you've been reading for non podcast material? I don't have much. And I think Gretchen, I have been sort of reading the same books.
Gretchen:
Yes, yes, I have been reading "The Satanic Verses". It's been really the only major thing I've been reading outside of the podcast and outside of the editing that I've been doing recently. But it has been a nice pleasure read to take a break from everything else with I've been really enjoying it. I have about a fifth of it left.
I've been wanting to read it for quite a while ever since I've had the book probably a year or so and wanted to read it, especially after what happened to Rushdie last year.
Nate:
Yeah, that's horrible.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and I wanted to read it in sort of solidarity, I guess, to understand what his writing was like. And yeah, I mean, his writing style, I very much enjoy. It's very quick to read and really delightful.
It's also quite funny at times. So I'm really enjoying that book. And I know that, J.M., you've also been reading that.
JM:
Yeah, I have been rereading that. This is actually my third time reading this book. The first time I read it, I believe it was 1999. And I think the reason I probably picked it up was that I wanted to see what all the controversy was about. You know, I wanted to know, was this blasphemous book that made everybody so angry, right? And, you know, I mean, I was I was already at that point kind of used to Christian blasphemy. So I guess I wanted to get another side of it. And yeah, it's not quite what I was expecting back then. But I ended up really, really liking it.
And I read it again about 10, maybe 12 years later. And I still liked it. But I don't know if I liked it as much as I did the first time. And I think that was maybe just because of how I was feeling in my life at that time and what I was thinking. And now I'm really liking it again. Like, I mean, I still liked it the second time. But I don't know, there was something something that didn't quite connect for me that time. And I think it was just the writing style is very like, I don't know, it's sort of like prancing around and it's sort of fun. And there's a lot of references flying at you like really fast, like a lot of pop culture references. But a lot of the pop culture references are from both the East and the West. And some of them are pretty obscure. And some of them are a lot of fun. And some of them just make you pause and want to find out what the hell he's talking about, right? And it can sort of be a little bit distracting sometimes.
But I don't know, it's really good and fun, especially if you get some of the things he's aiming at. And I think the first time I read it, there's a lot of mixing historical narratives and a sort of a contemporaneous, I guess you could say, fantastical or magic realism kind of narrative. And I really liked the historical stuff, but some of it really went over my head. Like, I didn't really understand, like it was almost like pure fantasy. And now I'm reading it and I kind of feel like I get it a little bit more because I understand the history just a little bit more. And I kind of think there are some sections where he's deliberately referring to not just historical figures, but people like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and like how he was in exile in France and some other countries.
And in the book, he doesn't actually name him. It's just some sort of mysterious political revolutionary figure who seems to be in exile in England. So he's taking some liberties and disguising things a little bit so he doesn't actually have to call anybody out and name somebody.
But obviously, certain people figured out or they thought they figured out who he was talking about and they were very angry about that. And we're also very angry about the way he depicts the birth of Islam. So it's really interesting getting all into that. But like, it's actually an extremely fun book. And obviously that's somebody who's really angry about the book is not going to see it as being fun, but it really is.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I personally, I know kind of the more broad strokes of Islam. I don't know many specifics. Although reading the book, it is interesting, even just like it does make me from like an academic stance want to learn more about Islam and like the theological perspective of it.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely had the same feeling of like, oh, I want to know more about this after I read it. And I went and read "Midnight's Children", also my Rushdie after that. And that one is really more about the history of India during the end of and after the British Raj or occupation and the founding of the state of Pakistan and stuff.
Gretchen:
Partition.
JM:
Yeah, it was really good too. I think I'd like "Satanic Verses" just a bit more. But I don't know, I see why "Midnight's Children" got so much praise and I really liked that one too. So I kind of went and read those two books almost back to back because I just I really wanted to get more into into that and into his stuff. I haven't read anything else. I don't think he has more than a couple of other novels, maybe maybe three. I don't think he's been terribly prolific in recent years. So I could be wrong about that.
Gretchen:
I'm not too familiar with the more recent works, if he has many.
JM:
He actually has a science fiction book. So maybe one day we'll get him on Chrononauts.
Nate:
Yeah, that would be cool.
JM:
Yeah, his first ever book, "Grimus", I think it's called is supposed to be a science fiction story. So, and we are kind of looking into, I mean, one of the things we're, I think, kind of interested in is authors who you wouldn't necessarily associate with science fiction. A lot of them actually do have science fiction works like Forster, for instance, he's not normally associated with science fiction.
And yet "The Machine Stops" is such a clear example of very ahead of its time science fiction. So it's not like that with every author. Sometimes when a mainstream author or, you know, a quote, literary author tries his hand at this stuff, it's kind of laughed at by both the community and the mainstream. But it's still pretty interesting, even in those cases, I think, sometimes.
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
What about you, Nate?
Nate:
So I've read a fair amount of non podcast stuff since last time. So last time I was in the middle of Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust", which is one of his shorter works is kind of like a Southern Gothic murder mystery type thing. So I finished that up. At first I wasn't really into the narrator who was doing the audiobook, but I grew to like it more towards the end. So that was pretty cool. Then after that I tried a reading of Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt", but I really was not into the narrator at all. So I jumped ship pretty early and did Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth", which is one of her New York City socialite type novels. The other one that I've read by her is "The Age of Innocence". And while I like "The Age of Innocence" a lot more, I think "The House of Mirth" is still pretty good. The main character, Lily Bart, is a really interesting character. I mean, she's both fascinating and sharp and witty, but also just totally exhausting and exasperating to be around for 400 pages, especially because there's some people in real life who I know kind of remind me of her.
But after that I did Willa Cather's "The Song of the Lark", which is one of my favorite novels by her in the narrator, and both Song of the Lark and "House of Mirth" do a great job, Eleanor Braun and Barbara Caruso, respectively. But yeah, "Song of the Lark", not really a lot like dramatic stuff happens. It's kind of a lot of Cather's typical themes of the American West and Scandinavian immigrant families and an aspiring musician and all that, but there's just some really nice prose and a lot of the pieces come together in a way that I think is pretty cool.
JM:
Sounds pretty interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, no, I like Cather a lot. I do like "Lucy Gayheart" a little more than that one for that kind of story, but again, "Song of the Lark" is really good, I think. After that I did Mervyn Peake's "Titus Alone", which is the final book in the Gormenghast trilogy. I didn't like that much at first, but I came around to a little more of this second reread. When I read it last time, it felt more like an extended epilogue, and now it kind of more feels like an extended prologue to a second set of novels that he never was able to get around to finish. It does feel very fragmented in ways that I guess are less satisfying than the first two novels, but it still has some really interesting parts to it. There are some overtly sexual lines that just don't jive at all with a tone and especially stick out more when you're listening to the audiobook version, so I wasn't really into that so much. It's still pretty good even when you consider that it's not as great as the first two. It is kind of an interesting end to what he was actually able to complete in his lifetime. His wife wrote a novel based on his unfinished notes for a fourth book, which kind of came out to mixed reviews. I'm interested in reading it, but again, there's a caveat there that it's not actually his.
JM:
Yeah, I really like "Titus Alone", but it actually does make me feel like those experiences of creation that feel like they were a problem for the creator. It kind of makes me feel bad. Like you said, it's fragmented, but it's fragmented in a way that's not like some of the examples that we might have done on the podcast where things just don't seem to add up. It's more fragmented in a way like you can picture him kind of sleepless and maybe not feeling too good and maybe in a lot of pain and getting up in the middle of the night and scrolling down a bunch of really feverish stuff and that's like a chapter.
Nate:
Yeah, that's definitely how it reads.
JM:
Yeah, it feels kind of like, I don't know, like madness and despair are sort of setting in, although the end of this is quite hopeful, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, it is.
JM:
But during a lot of it, like it's kind of, you know, you've been in this huge gothic environment for two books and then all of a sudden you're like thrust into this crazy post-apocalyptic future setting that you really don't expect and there's a lot of, I don't know, madness, I think, in it.
Nate:
It's definitely a really weird book and even the setting changes from place to place. Like the whole final third takes place in this weird forest community of, I don't know, it's very strange in a way that is different from the first two. Yeah, it's an interesting end to what he was able to complete in his lifetime and the, I guess, book that I'm in the middle of now is a reread from the podcast, so it is "The King and Yellow" and I've just finished with the four horror stories at the beginning of the book and I'll probably be finishing with the other non-horror stories sometime this week.
JM:
Yeah, I thought you'd already read "The Street of the First Shell", right?
Nate:
Yeah, I read the entire collection before but now I'm just listening to the audiobook version that this horror production company, Horror Babble, did.
JM:
Oh yeah, I know that one.
Nate:
Yeah, they did a pretty good job. A couple of the lines of dialogue in "Repair of Reputation" were a bit stilted, at first I was like, I don't know about this, but then I realized that, oh, these are British actors and they're trying to do an American accent, that's why it comes out weird like that.
JM:
That's always good.
Nate:
Yeah, the narration on the other stories is really good. Sound design is pretty good. They incorporate some effects and some music and that. It's really well done, generally.
JM:
Yeah, I haven't really listened to a lot of their productions, so I didn't really realize they did sound design and stuff. I thought it was just a straight reading. I should listen to more of their stuff. I mean, I guess I really like audio dramas, but sometimes audiobooks just make me feel like I want to be reading it myself. So even though I might be a little slower sometimes, sometimes that's just my reaction. So listening to an audiobook.
Nate:
Yeah, I listened to these on my morning commute and driving around town. So I mean, it works well for this setting. But yeah, fair amount of stuff. So all rereads and like I do with all the audiobook stuff, haven't done any actual new stuff. That's non-podcast, but we've certainly been busy with the podcast stuff this month.
So these three stories that we're covering tonight, I chose for different reasons. The first one we're looking at, "Aniara", is a epic poem. And when I came across it, I just thought the idea of a science fiction epic poem sounded so cool that we had to cover it for the podcast. The second one, Graal Arelsky's "Tales of Mars" is one of the ones that I translated. And it's a really neat piece of mid-20s Soviet fiction that, in a way, is a predecessor of Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles", as well as other types of stories that are set in the same universe. But I guess in this case, there are centuries, if not millennia, apart from one another. So an interesting historical example of that.
And the third one, Renato Pestriniero's "A Night of 21 Hours" is the story that Mario Bava based his film, "Planet of the Vampires" on, which has been one of my favorite movies for a while now.
So I figured these three, even though they're kind of loosely in the same theme of like getting lost in space somewhere, are a nice bunch of stories to combine together in this kind of miscellaneous host choice format we've been doing.
So I guess with that out of the way, let's get into our first story tonight, which will be Harry Martinson's "Aniara".
(music: echoey space synth)
Harry Martinson biography and non-spoiler discussion
Harry Martinson was born on May 6, 1904, and his father was a retired seaman who died early, and his mother fled to America, leaving him and his sisters to the mercy of a parish in South Sweden. His childhood was spent doing manual labor, and he had little schooling and was largely self-taught. He ran away to sea at the age of 14, going out on a total of 14 voyages, and he returned to shore in 1927 after catching black lung disease, working as a stoker on board one of the ships.
And while he was able to see the world on these voyages, the conditions while he was working in the ships left him with permanent health issues that he was never able to fully recover from. So this left him unable to work and reduced him to begging on the streets in Gothenburg, where he found friendship among young socialists and anarchists. One of these socialists and anarchists he married in 1929, a Moa Martinson, who herself was quite a renowned writer. According to Richard Beckman Vowles, modern Swedish poetry started in 1929, when Martinson and four other poets published the volume "Five Youths".
During the 1930s, he regularly publishes poetry and travelogues, quite well-acclaimed in Sweden, but 1933's "Cape Farewell" was the most popular one in America until the publication of "Aniara". His early poetry seems to deal a lot with travel and the sea, certainly themes we've covered extensively on the podcast before, and as we'll see directly tie into science fiction.
Descriptions of these early poems don't necessarily indicate anything in the way of science fiction or the weird, but they still might be interesting to read, though I'm not sure how much of them are translated in English. It appears that some of his works are, but I think a fair amount or at least some of them are, untranslated.
In 1934, Harry and Moa traveled to the Soviet Union for a writers' conference, where it's possible they met Gorky and Pasternak. However, the relationship between Harry and Moa didn't last that long. The two of them divorced in 1940, and Harry spent the winter of 1939-1940 in Finland, ostensibly to serve in the Finno-Russian War, but was in too poor health to be able to do so.
Martinson himself was skeptical of Lenin and Marx's view on the engineer and the cult-like behavior towards technology, which certainly feeds into the work that we'll be looking at tonight.
One of his novels from the 1940s "The Road" from 1948 is noted to be a predecessor of Kerouac's "On the Road". I've never really particularly cared for the Kerouac novel, but the Martinson one was very acclaimed in Sweden, and shortly after its publication he was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1949.
The beginnings of "Aniara" started in 1953 as a series of 29 poems, or songs, or cantos or whatever you want to call them, published as "The Song of Doris and Mima", largely as a response to the development of the hydrogen bomb and its potential effects on human civilization. This technological advancement coincides with advancements in rocketry that realistically allow for objects to break away from Earth's orbit, as well as other advancements in astronomy showing us that galaxies like Andromeda are much, much further away than we previously thought.
By 1956, 70 more poems are added to "Aniara", bringing the total up to 103, and it's published in this form. It was an immediate success in the literary scene and was pretty much universally praised.
A opera written by Karl-Birger Blomdahl made its premiere on May 31, 1959, and was performed at several places around the world, and a recording of the performance was released on vinyl in 1960.
Martinson was never able to follow up the success of "Aniara" or regain some of the energy that he had in his later work. In an interview, he said, "to have written 'Aniara' is like having done a large rya rug. After that, you can always sit down and do little maths and people say, why doesn't he get a rya done instead of these lousy old mat ends?"
Despite this, he jointly won the 1974 Nobel Prize with Eyvind Johnson for, "writings that catch the dew drop and reflect the cosmos", of which "Aniara" is obviously a major part.
So about the Nobel Prize for a bit, the prize in literature has only been shared twice, the other time being in 1966. The prize was first awarded in 1901, and while the Nobel's trend towards Scandinavian authors a disproportionate amount, which might indicate some sort of bias, the Scandinavian authorship in this one was indeed noted as a potential conflict of interest, as Martinson was a member of the Swedish Academy. But even with that in mind, this one ranks up with the works by the other laureates that I've read.
So the laureate, probably the most interest to the podcast is Rudyard Kipling, who was a recipient of the award in 1907, but plenty of other huge names have won, Sinclair Lewis, William Butler Yates, George Bernard Shaw, Sigrid Undset, Hermann Hesse, William Faulkner, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Boris Pasternak, Ivo Andrić, John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to name a few. So generally speaking, a very different set of authors that we're typically likely to be covering on the podcast. And the science fiction world and the quote unquote high brow literature world seem to rarely intersect with one another. And "Aniara" really is a fascinating case of that happening that will in some ways make it quite unlike anything we're likely to cover on the podcast. But as we noted with "The Machine Stops" and the Kipling stories and a couple other authors here and there, they do intersect in other ways, though certainly ones that are rather different than this particular work.
This one has been referred to in sources as the first space poem, but of course, depending on how you stretch it, there's obvious precursors like Flammarion, or even like an author we're going to be covering later tonight. So who knows what else could be out there like this, but this is certainly the first one that I've come across in our research that is an epic poem in this kind of way.
So after winning the Nobel Prize, as noted, he was heavily criticized for the potential conflict of interest. As critic S. Delblanc said "derision and laughter roll around the globe in response to the Academy's corruption and will sweep away the reputation of the prize."
JM:
Poor Harry.
Nate:
Martinson just couldn't take the criticism, and he entered a period of great depression and was institutionalized in the psychiatric clinic of the Karolinska hospital and Stockholm, and it was here on February 11 1978, he took a pair of scissors and cut his abdomen open, dying in what sounds like a very horrible and painful death.
It's a pretty grim and bleak end and the work we're looking at tonight is similarly grim and bleak in a lot of ways.
So "Aniara" as mentioned before was a series of 103 poems written between 1953 and 1956.
In a non spoiler summary sense, the poem is about a large spaceship carrying a great deal of passengers which gets permanently knocked off its course and more or less becomes a generation ship as it is a drift in space.
It is rather difficult work, certainly one of the most difficult that we've covered on the podcast. Martinson himself felt that poetry was untranslatable, though our translators here do the best of it that they can. And while his style doesn't lend itself to an easy translation, so the full effect of this probably can't be felt in any language other than Swedish. Fortunately for us, Swedish isn't that terribly distant from English. I can't really claim to have any skills in Swedish, but both English and Swedish are Germanic languages. So a lot of the vocabulary and English does come from the same root as Swedish does. And what you do a side by side compare of the translation and the original you can easily see what words are what, and that a lot of the words really aren't that terribly different from one another.
The translators do a pretty good job of preserving things like rhyme scheme, alliteration as well as vocabulary choice. So this will be a case where the translation will be closer to the spirit of the original rather than a language that's really distant from English like Hungarian or Finnish or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, it's really different from when I was watching "Ruslan i Lyudmila", the Russian film and reading along with the songs, I guess, because it's mostly an opera. And the translations are definitely very, they're trying to force things into rhyme schemes and it's really awkward. And kind of like you kind of think yeah, Pushkins was probably better.
Nate:
Yeah, I actually have a dual language version of that. It's pretty cool. And yeah, Russian is just, it is an Indo-European language. And there are some cognates with English and more, I guess, frequently Romance languages, but they're much fewer in frequency than, say, English and Swedish with one another. And Russian grammar, and I guess Slavic grammar, in general is a lot more terse in ways that, again, lends itself to more translation difficulties, like, then a language like Swedish, which grammatically is quite similar to English, it doesn't have the quirks that German have with the grammar. And it's not like slightly differently structured like Romance languages are. So, I mean, at least we have that advantage going for us here with the translators and the translators are legitimate PhDs from respected universities and all that that are probably sunk several years into translating this and pouring over every single syllable.
JM:
And they have some notes where they talk about that a little bit.
Nate:
They do.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. The addition of this that we read has a very nice introduction of which we're drawing some from the biography as well as a very lengthy translator's note. So it's kind of a humbling note to read as I did translate two of the stories for tonight's episode. And, you know, they're way above my skill, but I think, you know, we do a pretty okay job for a fanzine level at getting some of this stuff out there.
But yeah, the poem is somewhat nonlinear, despite containing the format of a travel log, like this is what happened in year X of our voyage. And in a way it feels like a "Canterbury Tales" type setup where we meet a bunch of characters and hear their stories and their relationship to this bizarre world.
JM:
Most of them do seem to be more or less from the perspective of a narrator, which is the Mimarobe.
Nate:
Right. Yeah. And the Mimarobe is an interesting character in that it is very much the viewer's look into this world. And it's interesting. And we'll talk about the film when we get to that point, but they present more of a character in Mimarobe than is presented in the actual poem itself, because I think that it's pretty much meant to be like Martinson himself describing this strange world for us and us meant to see it through his point of view. Yeah, it's a cool setup for sure.
But Martinson was well read and interested in Taoism, and there's lots of references to ancient Greece and India. The poem often presents scientific, religious, and mythological terminologies fused one and together in a way tying into Martinson's feelings towards the idea of the cult of the engineer.
In another way, representing the breadth of the human experience, the culture and the history on board the ship, and our different perceptions of science and technology. But the feeling mostly permeating throughout the entire work is grief. Martinson is trying to express the sum of human emotions and experiences while simultaneously mourning the loss of the human race in ways that I thought was incredibly powerful.
On his approach to poetry, Martinson said, "I have been asked, how and why does one become a poet? And then I answer, generally speaking, one becomes a poet because so many things in this life cannot be treated in any other way except as poetry. The poet is an imaginative being who turns to other imaginative beings. By imaginative beings, I mean such persons who find life more or less meaningless if it is not accompanied by feelings and emotional movements. The experience of the world, which is not also to some extent an emotional adventure, becomes only a mechanical registration, not a commitment in existence. This goes for all forms of art and the practicing of art. The feeling that the words we habitually use are inadequate and that they therefore do not in the long run do justice to life, puts the pencil in the hands of the poet."
So I absolutely loved this one. It might be my favorite thing we've covered on the podcast so far. It's definitely not an easy read in terms of both the difficulty and the subject matter. And it's certainly not for everybody. But if what I've just described sounds appealing to you, I really can't recommend this one enough.
JM:
Yeah, I like this. I don't know if I would go quite that far, but I really actually do appreciate how unique this is. And I really enjoyed sort of the emotional aspect of it. I think that the difficulty in the story is really due to the way that it's told. Like, I think that actually, even though Martinson is not, I don't know, part of the science fiction community, and maybe we can talk about that a little more because I'm kind of struck by the fact that nobody seems to talk about this.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
I mean, there were generation ship stories around before 1953. But I don't know, it's just, it seems weird that this is literally doing this for the podcast. And I mean, I think you brought this up when we were picking our last host choices and we ended up picking "Kindred". So this has been in your mind for a while to do this one.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Before that time, I had never heard of this at all. Yeah. And it's interesting, and yeah, like you were saying, normally, the kind of literary world that partakes in the Nobel Prize and the science fiction world are quite separate.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So, and I don't know, it seems like he got a little backlash for daring to win the Nobel Prize with someone else. I don't know. It's kind of... Like they were saying, I guess he was being a member of the Academy, maybe he was perceived to have had a lot of influence.
Nate:
So, yeah, I mean, they are the body that awards the Nobel Prize. So it is a conflict of interest on its face. Yeah, I would rank this up there with all the authors I've listed off, the ones I've listed off are the ones that I personally read. There's obviously a whole bunch of them on the list that I haven't read. I really haven't gotten too much into the weeds of Scandinavian literature. The only other one that I've read, I think, is Sigrid Undset, whose novel, the novel series, I should say, the "Master of Hestviken", it wasn't the one she won the Nobel Prize for, but the first one was like, outstanding. I wasn't really a fan of the other three. But yeah, I haven't read too much Scandinavian stuff aside from that.
I've read a couple Ibsen dramas, but I don't think he won the Nobel Prize. I don't think I've read any other authors from up there. It's not really a world that I'm too familiar with, even though, again, disproportionately, Scandinavian authors are the recipients of the Nobel Prize for literature, especially early on.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm not well versed in Scandinavian literature as well. I think one of the few authors that I have read that is from that area is Tove Jansson, she wrote the Moomin, which is a children's series, but she's also written a lot of it, really good short stories. But other than that, I can't really think of too many other authors I've read from that region.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, what's really coming to mind is Ibsen plays and Knut Hamsun. So, and yeah, I haven't read too much. I like a couple of the plays and "Hunger" by Hamsun. So anyway, definitely a lot more to explore in that area.
Nate:
I guess there was that Hollow Earth story we covered early on the, the Holberg.
JM:
Oh, yes, Holberg, right. Yeah. Definitely. I was reminded of him doing a little bit of research for something that's coming up. So yeah, his name may be brought up once again. But yeah, there is him as well. And I was also, of course, thinking of the Icelandic, some of the Icelandic sagas, which I remember reading on Project Gutenberg, like when it started. Like, oh, I want to read the Cormac or whatever it's called. But yeah.
So yeah, I mean, I think the difficulty inherent in this is really down to the style of it. And yeah, it is a bit nonlinear. I think that for the most part, it's pretty straightforward. Like, I think there are sometimes when it's difficult to grasp what he's like, what he's getting at a little bit in some of the poems, but it's usually, they follow a certain format. I think where in the beginning there was a clear statement or two, right? And so it sort of grounds you and puts you somewhere where you're like, okay, so this is a situation we're in. And he'll describe a conversation or he'll describe something really simple, like the way the way the stars are receding or something like that. And then he'll expand on that and get into some kind of philosophical aspect of it and emotional aspect of it.
And sometimes too, yeah, that time period is a little strange. Like, you kind of realize in poem number 50 or something like that, that it's in fact thousands and thousands of years into the future. And there seems to have been like six different holocausts, right? I don't really know, is it a nuclear holocaust? Is it an Ice Age? Which one are they talking about now? The one from 12,000 years ago?
Nate:
Earth is in pretty rough shape.
Gretchen:
That's something else that's interesting is even though the major draw to this work is the style of it, because that is what's so unique and it's really well done. It's also like the world building aspect is also pretty interesting, like the way that there's all these things that are implied at, but aren't necessarily as clearly stated as they would be in something that was like a piece of prose.
Nate:
Yeah, we don't get any data dumps explaining, this is what happened during the first nuclear war. This is what happened during the second nuclear war. Here's the shipping system between Earth, Mars and Venus. Here's what's in the outer planets and all that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, which I will say as much as I like the Arelskys we'll be talking about that sometimes does feel like the case once in a while.
JM:
Yeah, and you've got to think, if you get a whole bunch of people, it's basically this community of something like 8,000 people to start with, right? And they have nothing to do but talk to each other and have sex. And look at the Mima, they're going to be telling each other stories. And it's going to kind of start in the middle and sometimes you're not going to be quite sure whether you can believe everything the person is saying or not, right? But I don't know, I think all the stories in here seem pretty sincere, but I just mean like there's a certain randomness to people just hanging out together and telling each other about things in their past and the past of their ancestors.
And he'll do some really crazy stuff like start describing a weird sex cult and from that go into talking about wood and how wood is no longer a thing anymore because all the trees have died on earth, right? And it's still a double entendre like the whole time, right? But he's also giving you a useful piece of information about this future, right?
Yeah, I really enjoyed like it's quite subtle, but also I really do think, I kind of wonder, Martinson really seems to have been caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to this series of poems. Obviously it was very well liked and yet there seems to have been perhaps some castigation as well and how many people read this and like, I'm just kind of curious because we were talking about this Nate and to me this was quite a bit easier to read than Alfred Jarry. Like I definitely thought this was and I feel like a part of the reason actually is because I've read so much science fiction. And so I can just take a face value a lot of the weird things that he says and he's just like making up techno babble to some of the techno babble was ridiculous.
Nate:
I mean, there's a lot of multilingual puns and again, it is a fusion of technology, mythological terms and religious terms in that the technology literally functions as like a divinity, as we'll see with the Mima. And a lot of the divinities aren't, it's not like Christian mythology, but it is references to Hinduism and Taoism and things like that. So it does feel very allworldly and not European specific. And so it has a difference from maybe some of the American pulp sci-fi where it's very, you know, American Western in its tone and cultural references and its imagery and all that.
JM:
But sometimes I think he was just kind of playing around too. Like, I don't know, sometimes I wonder how seriously we're supposed to take. I mean, like you said, there's a lot of multilingual puns and stuff like that. I do think there's shades of humor or jacosity in this kind of.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. And I mean, like I said, it's like the sum of human experience and part of that is joy, it's laughter. We get a lot of silly scenes with dancing, and there's a song that's sung to the melody of a bicycle built for two, you know, the Daisy song from 2001. So, I mean, yeah, he's obviously trying to elicit laughter.
And at the same time, juxtaposes it with images of mass destruction and grief and hopelessness and all that. It really puts you on a roller coaster throughout its entire length.
JM:
Yeah, so there's 103 poems. And I don't know, it's an interesting reaction to reading this. And I really think that this is definitely the kind of thing that will, will and does benefit from being read more than once, especially the way he'll just throw in new words, like almost towards the end of the series of poems. And you're like having to realign almost the way you thought about everything. And like, what's that? What's Xinombra now? What is he talking about? Right. And yeah, I mean, a lot of it made sense to me right from the start. Like he uses all these code words. And he even says the names of the characters are code words, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And the code words are like, not only things like Mimarobe, but also the names of the places and the names of the like, like Doris always represents earth. Right. All right. And I guess Doris is supposed to be something homely and something friendly and has this innocuous name Doris and all throughout the book, it's called Dorisburg, Dorisvale, Dorishold. It's got all kinds of different names that all are, they all have the Doris prefix, right? So it kind of gives you the feeling, oh, maybe there are people from all these different cultures and stuff, right? And they're just like, to them, it's something slightly different, but it's still Doris. Right. And the characters all do seem to symbolize something. Like they're definitely more, they don't come across so much as characters in the poem, although you really feel their emotions. They almost feel like representations of humanity in certain aspects. Yeah. Like Libidella is obviously limited as sexual and Daisy is silly. And what are some others? There's a few others that maybe I'll remember when we do the summary, but it just seems like a lot of the, the names always have some kind of meaning or representation behind them that I guess most readers would get.
So it's not that complicated once you get into the feeling of it, I think. And I may say that if you're not in the right mood, I think it maybe can get a little bit repetitive and kind of like, you really want to keep track of the story. And I guess if you're not like, it's dealing with a lot of subjects that we're talked about in the pulp magazines at that time, but it's not that style.
Nate:
No, absoutely not. Yeah.
JM:
There's definitely no action in the conventional sense, but the scenarios are very familiar, I find. And that's again, probably because I mean, not only lost in space, but lost in sea narratives or as old as time, right? And they're always really good. I mean, I always love that kind of story. And reading this reminded me of so much science fiction that I've read from before and after.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And in fact, it kind of reminded me a bit, JM and I, we've been watching Space 1999 for a while. And sometimes like the kind of tone of the melancholic feel that you get is similar to some of the moments that you have in that series.
JM:
Yeah. And I like how he, like again, when you were talking about the world building, Gretchen, the way that when it starts out, like there's not a lot of exposition. So again, you don't even know necessarily how large the ship is, right? And all these things are revealed to you kind of as you go. And he keeps revealing different rooms to you as well. And by the end, you're like, well, Aniara is pretty awesome. Like it's got a lot of cool stuff in it, right? It's not just a tin can flying through space, but it's still a prison. But it's like, all of a sudden you find out how it has like this awesome computer that you can put any question to it. It has like a giant garden, beautiful garden, and it has halls of religious ceremony and like it's vast. And that's definitely not a sense you really get from the film version. I think.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
If I'm wrong, correct me. But I definitely felt that it was a much smaller space.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, we'll talk about the film at the end here. But in relation to the popularity of the poem, when I was looking on Twitter and the internet in general for discussion of this and people in our sphere of, you know, science fiction, podcasters and bloggers talking about it, pretty much all the discussion is in relation to the film, which only came out a couple of years ago. So it is still relatively recent, but the amount of comments and posts about the actual poem itself were very few and far between in comparison to the film, which it doesn't interesting things about it. But again, we'll talk about that more at the end.
JM:
Yeah, well, we'll definitely get to that. But I thought this was really fascinating, definitely. And like doing RUR last time, it's a very different experience.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure.
JM:
Reading poetry, right? And although it does read like a story, it's all there. And sometimes you forget that you're reading a rhyme scheme, at least I did. And then I'm like, really, I'm like suddenly clicked into it and getting the rhythm of it and going, oh, you know, but also kind of wish I could have read it in Swedish.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Although the translators did seem to do a fine job and I definitely want to shout out to them and also you, Nate, but not this for the next ones, I mean, but I don't know. It must have been an interesting challenge for sure, especially a work like this.
Nate:
I would say so. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I definitely found it to be very, like again, it was very interesting to look at this unique style. And like JM said, it did feel like with RUR, that kind of new experience. We haven't really gotten much of from like other works that we've read so far. And yeah, I think it's definitely really, you know, I'm someone that I have only recently really started to explore poetry and get into more poetic works. And I'm glad that I've read this at this point. And I really enjoy the style that it went for.
Nate:
Yeah. He has a really cool style and he brings a lot of really interesting ideas together. So I guess since we all like this, unless you guys have anything further to say in the non-spoiler section, why don't we check out what happens in the poem?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
(music: increasingly intense and crazy piano music that crashes into disaster alarm sounds)
plot summary and spoiler discussion
So our poem starts off with the narrator of the poem being processed in some major shipping facility by a gorgeous woman named Doris. And the light is just shining through her hair and he kind of compares it to all the beauty of the earth and this port, and really everything else related to earth, is then named after and referred to as Doris. This port is for evacuating refugees from a radiated earth, perhaps going to Mars, maybe going to Venus. It uses a gravity well to get up out of Earth's gravity, but the ship that the narrator is on finds itself off course quite quickly.
It's the Aniara, and it swerves to avoid collision with an asteroid and while a ways out of the solar system, a meteor shower breaks the Saba unit. While the shift is adrift and heading towards Lyre, doomed, its life support functions still work, but this obviously dampers everybody's mood. One of the female pilots often stares into the Mima in the hope that she can find some salvation.
The Mima is a type of sensor system, which has an immersive multimedia component and beams in images from faraway places. And it's like fishing in a huge galactic ocean. And our narrator tends to the Mima and is the Mimarobe, which takes on an almost religious-like role by the sixth year of their journey, people coming to the Mima to worship and bow down before it.
On board the Aniara, Earth's customs are still observed, days and hours are kept, dances are held to the rhythm of the Mima almost, dancing the Yurg, which the Mimarobe frequently dances with a daisy duty from Dorisburg. The Mima is a comforting presence, which from a panic to apathy to despair until the people on board were able to be soothed by the Mima. The Mima has transformed past its initial construction and has improved on itself, becoming an intelligent entity, bringing in hope and strange sights and sounds from the universe. Many living full-time in this Mima fantasy world.
JM:
Yeah, and because I'm a science fiction reader, I have to say I was a little... I mean, obviously the Mima is very, very important to this story. And it's something that Martinson keeps referring to repeatedly, even after it's gone. But I still didn't really understand it, right? And I don't know that I was really supposed to. You know, like, I feel like he kind of wanted to keep it very mysterious. Like, I couldn't quite tell sometimes if the images were coming from outside or from the character's own experiences. And it seemed to be a mix of both.
Nate:
It does, yeah.
JM:
Right? Yeah. And I think that was really cool. I mean, it's interesting too, because it's kind of... You want to be like, oh, yeah, it's a typical futuristic society that's obsessed with living dreams and they're not engaged with reality at all. But it's not portrayed that way. It's kind of portrayed as being something really beautiful and desirable and like a wave almost, even though I didn't quite understand the relation between what was private and what was shared by the community. And maybe we can talk about that a little more in a few minutes, but there's some interesting things that are brought up. And I guess, like, I can't help but be engaged by that world-building aspect too, and the technology aspect. You're like, okay, so how does this work? Right.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I'm supposed to think about it too much, right? Yeah. Like, it could be inside your head. It could be out there in the world, right? Maybe when you're dreaming, that's what you're experiencing anyway, sometimes, who knows, right? So it's sort of mystical. Yeah. But in a cool way.
Nate:
Yeah, there's definitely the feeling of mysticism. And again, the powerful emotions running throughout the entire thing is very, I guess, less tangentially based in the world than what it's supposed to make you feel. And it's an interesting approach to these kind of stories.
But High Command says that 60 years ago, another ship went off course and crashed into Jupiter. The Aniara is fortunate to have survived the disaster and is still racing through space towards the Lyre Cluster, like a little bubble in the glass of Godhead. In that bubbles through glass will eventually move to the edge, but over the course of centuries or millennia. So how long will it take the Aniara to get there? Nobody knows.
A mystical sect called the Ticklers has sprung up the first of many cults that we'll be seeing on board, mostly women but led by men who are called Tinkers. This is an old word deriving from some sort of flame, would now, of course, being an extremely rare material.
JM:
Yeah, this is the poem that I was talking about. The whole thing is a very obvious sexual metaphor. And he segues from that into useful information. And it's like, yeah, okay, that's good to know. It's good to know about the wood.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, sex and eroticism definitely play a major part throughout the entire poem. And again, it's another thing that is linked to mysticism and divinity and religion and that kind of thing. And it comes up many, many times, especially in these weird cults.
But here we get a first, again, many stories about a woman named Nobby, who is a woman who has been severely burned by radiation. But she is just good to her very core. And she helps out refugees with their trips to Mars and Venus.
Mars and Venus are both uninhabitable wastelands, better in the process of being terraformed. Mars being a frozen tundra and Venus being an incredibly oppressive hot swamp. Both employ a great deal of prison labor for the hard task of eventually, I guess, after centuries or millennia, turning them into something that may resemble what Earth was.
JM:
This very much reminds me of pulp SF interpretations of Mars and Venus too. Probably just because I didn't forget to mention in the what we were reading section earlier, but I didn't read a longer Leigh Brackett story, "The Enchantress of Venus". And that was totally that. It was set on Venus and it was all swampy. But you could never see the sun because there was always clouds covering everything. Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Nate:
Yeah, apparently that was like her bread and butter is those planetary adventure stories. And it'll be cool to bring that kind of stuff on the podcast. I know the magazine Planet Stories is one of those publications that is one of those public domain loopholes, like somebody didn't renew the copyright on it or something before the whatever year in the 60s or 70s it was.
JM:
Yeah, you can actually find the entire archive of Planet Stories very easily on the internet.
Nate:
Yeah, it's on Project Gutenberg and I think it's on a bunch of other places. So it's all public domain stuff. So it might be neat to dig into some of that stuff later. But yeah, we don't get too many descriptions of Mars and Venus here, but it is implied to be that same kind of descriptions of the two planets that we get in a lot of the pulp science fiction of being incredibly cold.
JM:
And don't forget like people enslaved and chains being forced to work in radium mines and stuff like that. Which is what this is.
Nate:
Yeah, pretty much.
JM:
But it's like there's all the people on the Goldonder, a ship of refugees of some kind because Earth is basically a wasteland now. And so even going to the tundra of Mars seems pretty attractive right now.
Nate:
Yeah, though, honestly, it sounds better being on board Aniara than any of those places, but maybe the people on board feel a little bit differently or had different views or maybe there's a class divide on Mars and Venus where some people are rich and some people are poor. It's never really gone into that much.
But the one woman pilot that comes into view the Mima quite frequently is grandiose and she silently indicates to Mimarobe to activate the Mima. Earth is growing quite distant and looks like a star now. The Mima shows the pilot a wide range of emotions from ecstasy to depression and the experience just seems quite intense. But it's still the only thing that brings hope. The doctor observes among them that the lust for life is fading, the senior astrolabe dies.
Survivors tell of the horrible wars on Earth that deafened and blinded them, presumably from nuclear explosions, and the Mima itself brings back these horrible images of scenes of Earth destruction and horrifies the viewers of the Mima.
Mimarobe finds solace in his girlfriend Daisy who's carefree as if she only existed to dance the Yurg. However, the Mima's intelligence breaks and it creates a personification called the detonee and it tells us how grim it always is, one's own detonation and then suicides. Chefone, the lord of the craft, takes this news on as somewhat of a doomsday preacher would adding a grim color to the Mima's religious significance. He orders persecutions and Mimarobe takes refuge from the absurd notion that their behavior is what caused the Mima's tragedy but is jailed in the lowest cells along with the female pilot.
The deprivation of the Mima is quite jarring. The narrator has no name and is of the Mima and is called no more than just Mimarobe. And three years he's in prison, expected to fix the Mima, and the female pilot's position is Isagel which establishes her name. It's a code word that she whispers to the narrator, one that he cannot repeat. During his captivity, the Mima worship religion takes on a sexual nature of which the Mimarobe plays a divine significance in. There's a lot of weird erotic abstract verse where various women, Isagel, Libadel, Yaal, Heba, Chebeba all take part in these sexual religious rites. These parts are kind of hard to summarize or get a handle of and it's something that should just really be kind of experienced and read.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
But around the time Isagel makes a discovery, solving the problem of Jender Curves, that is gender with a J, this relates to Aleph numbers and this is kind of juxtaposed against the imagery of childbirth as a way of manifesting solutions and conceiving them out of one's own mind.
JM:
Yeah, so I was very confused by that poem. It sounds like she had a baby too.
Nate:
That's what I thought when I initially read that, but then I was looking at some commentary and when I read it again, she's just kind of juxtaposing it with the idea.
JM:
I guess that makes sense because I don't, I mean, it's never mentioned again.
Nate:
Right, there is one part later that I thought, I guess we'll get to in a second, but yeah, where there is an infant in a bit.
But here we get the first of a couple poems that are actually named. So this is "The Space Hand's Tale" again, like the Canterbury tales of we get the tale and life of one of our passengers. So the space hand on the eighth Goldonder or out of evacuation of gone, we got a return to the first poem of the processing of ID cards and the destinations to Mars or Venus. There are some recollections of the fictional Central American city of Xinombra, I'm not sure if it's pronounced Hinombra or Zhinombra, I don't know if it's intended to be Spanish or Portuguese. But regardless, it's destroyed in a nuclear war.
On Tundra Two they hope to go out with Nobby when Mars is terraformed but until then Mars is just a harsh, cold and grim wasteland. And still Nobby is not deterred from her work, helping people where she can in their forced exile to Mars' cesium mines. So not a very pleasant sounding place.
Then we get another name poem of "The Infant", which is I initially thought it was Isagel's child, but it's Chebeba's infant, who is taken care of by this weird sex cult. And the infant just appears dead one day. It's a pretty pretty sad poem.
But the poem again shifts perspectives around various travelers we get reflections on how the Mima had relayed the worst of mankind's butcheries. In chamber seven, the files of thinking reside and are rarely visited. Calculators are calculating the hope of survival games are played with coins. Isagel seems to have risen to a goddess status. She's often visited by philosophers and mystics, and a blind poetess from Rind becomes quite popular. We get some of her poetry and she talks about Rind before the blast. Someone tells her to shield her eyes, but since she has never seen, she only felt the land of Rind. She escapes from the disaster and prays for help, which comes and she winds up on the Martian tundra. The section is again difficult to summarize, but it's really intense and it's sorrow and melancholy. Her words not only moving us, the Chrononauts readers, but also everyone else on the Aniara too.
There's some brief verse about the Arch-comic Sandon whose life is also rather brief. It kind of reminded me of a bit from the beginning of Tristram Shandy, where the priest Yorick is not too popular.
But then we get a portrait of a Yetis noblewoman. Mimarobe finds such people when sorting the Mima shards, its destruction has been profound. In the eleventh year, they encounter what is referred to as a spear, traveling from the universe, from where it comes from as a mystery. It spins off on its own course, but this void spear causes many to go mad, all of them being struck by the spear in a metaphorical sense. I guess the strange object coming close and somewhat serving as a grim hope or an omen in some ways reminded me of what we got in Arthur Gordon Pym where he spies the plague ship and it just kind of sets everybody's mind turning in a weird way.
We then get some recollections on how High Command is concerned with preserving the greenery on board. There is a galactic Eden. And in this Eden, Mimarobe encounters a nude woman, the mythical maid of the Mount and she's a slave of Chefone who hates the upper class as they're responsible for the mass extermination. An astronomer tries to convey his love for the heavens to an audience but is met with a less than enthusiastic response. Mimarobe meets Chefone in a passageway who rudely mocks him for examining the Mima shards. He says that Mima died of grief.
Libadel too dies of a drug overdose and a rival religion to Chefone's cult arises worshipping light and flame, the cult of fire. The maid from Rind is their priestess and Mimarobe finds comfort in the astronomer talking about the pre-apocalypse times then the 16,000 year Ice Age comes.
Mimarobe figures out how to hook up a primitive scanner from the Mima shards to form a screen with a limited range and tries to teach cadets on the Gopta theory of mathematics. I get another fusion of technological and religious terms. There are some sad musings on a widowed woman who is constantly gazing towards Lyreland. There's some more verse on the destruction of Xinombra city. There is a vision of the future where everybody is long dead and the narrator is awakened by Chebeba screaming. She doesn't want to live anymore with the clear memory of Xinombra and her brain. Suddenly it feels like they're being pulled off course. Many hope that the end is near and they enter something like a fog bank with shimmering rings all around the ship. The excitement however is soon quelled by some kind of particles that spark dread into everybody and it's over as abruptly as it starts. However, the impact and whatever the particles are doing to the ship kill many, maybe a some kind of ice cloud or something.
JM:
It sounds like it's like so much tossing about and like extreme extreme turbulence.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, I guess there's no seatbelts or anything like that. But this is around the twelfth year of the voyage and the ship is somewhere before Ghazilnut off in the Milky Way somewhere. The space hand recollects of Nobby working in the mines of Tlaloctitli in the Doraima Highlands.
Life on board the Aniara grows more listless and even Daisy is asleep. The narrator reflects on his home country of Karelia, presumably some of Martinson's own reflections and experiences in Finland. There's a song about Libidella in wooing almost baby talk. This is the one that's sung to the melody of a bicycle built for two. And is sharply followed by the musings on the absurd horror of the vastness of empty space.
A reward for anybody who can turn the ship around is posted though obviously never claimed. They encounter a black hole on the scanner. The chief engineer from Upper Gond dies and at his request his corpse is shot out of the ship towards Rigel.
Nineteen years on and the darkness grows. Isagel's spirits are growing dimmer. And on the 20th year, a grand ball is held and everybody can see how hard the years are on all of them. And they realize in those 20 years they've only traveled a 16 light hour path that is nowhere close to a light year or any habitable star or world.
Despite this a galactic religion arises praying towards a faraway galaxy, probably Andromeda. But it's massive on a scale that the human mind can't comprehend. Boredom further sets in the idle brain becomes a burden to itself and they come near an unknown sun. Isagel wonders if they should crash into it which Mimarobe declines to do.
Isagel's mind starts to break down. She's channeling some unknown voice from the Mima's grave and makes some cryptic remarks about the fate of the ship and like the Mima, also dies.
Space is vast and brutal and it looks like Mimarobe has once again fallen out of favor with Chefone and is jailed. Isagel's thoughts come to him in dreams and he realizes that Isagel is the soul of the Mima and he's free to locate the defect in the Mima with Isagel's guidance, presumably. There's some undetermined fault in the gravity works which is repaired but human sacrifice has become socially acceptable in the despairing mood on the ship. While Chefone grimly enforces the sacrifices, slaughtering his priest who refused to carry out the orders, this makes him lose his position of power and he has his minions find another way of doomsday. The High Command can't keep the incoming doom a secret anymore and in the 24th year thought breaks down and fantasy dies out.
The Mimarobe asks the spirit of Isagel for death.
The Aniara is like a sarcophagus now and in the grave halls of the Mima systems break down and the ship with everybody dead on board flies towards Lyre over the course of 15,000 years with all the relics and the corpses on board from her. And that is how Aniara ends after 103 poems.
JM:
Yeah and at least 25 years?
Nate:
Yeah about that.
JM:
And then in the end of course it's even longer. There's so much about the passage of time and all this. It's just so interesting the way he shows it to you because there's things that seem very mundane like the opening where you're just in a line of people signing papers and stuff and you're getting on a ship and you're going to go away somewhere. And then you find out as you read on so much has happened in the world and to the earth and all these different societies spring up on the Aniara too. And some of them are gone into, some of them are hinted at, he gives his opinion of some of them, some of them you're kind of left to wonder. And yeah it's really fascinating definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah and I think because there's such a difference between the way some aspects of this world are hinted at and some are like gone into more detail. It feels almost like more natural in that way I feel.
Nate:
Yeah it's a good world building process I think where again we don't get any data dumps. It's just following people living their normal lives and how they would view the world, not how a reader from 2023 would view the world with a whole historical backdrop on how we got to where we are, describing the technology of the Aniara and the life support systems and the military hierarchy of the crew and all that stuff it's just never really gone into.
JM:
It's definitely not yeah it's not trying to I guess invest you in those particular matters as much but there is a lot of the background there that's given to you in a very natural way, and you know it's not written for your benefit necessarily so that everything gets explained to you.
Gretchen:
Yeah because as we kind of have mentioned a bit it's not really about that information but more about the emotions that are the cause of it.
Nate:
Absolutely, yeah, and again the one emotion really permeating throughout the entire poem is grief, and mourning the entire human race in a way that I think is kind of similar with some sections of "House on the Borderland".
Gretchen:
I was going to bring up "House on the Borderland" as it did remind me of it quite a bit in certain areas.
Nate:
Yeah because I mean we got the entire reflection of, again, the entire human race and the progression for through thousands and thousands of years and mourning its loss, and the destruction of everything and what it would mean without a earth with what it would mean without a homeland any breathable atmosphere or anything like that. What it would do to culture and the psyche of humanity and I think it's a really fascinating exploration.
So I want to read a couple excerpts from the poem here that kind of convey the nature of grief and how they're expressed so poem 18:
Efforts at escape through flights of mind
and slipping back and forth from dream to dream—
such methods were to hand.
With one leg drowned beneath a surge of feeling
the other braced by feeling dead and gone
we’d often stand.
Myself I questioned, but gave no reply
I dreamt myself a life, then lived a lie.
I ranged the universe but passed it by—
for captive on Aniara here was I.
and then poem 25:
We ride in our sarcophagus in silence,
no longer offering the planet violence
or spreading deathly quiet on our kind.
Here we can question freely, true
while the vessel Aniara, gone askew
in bleak tracts of space, leaves vile time behind.
Some brief excerpts from a couple of the shorter poems but the nature of destruction and grief and mourning of what has passed really does come through the entirety of the work especially getting towards the end where the situation is even more bleak.
JM:
I mean it sounds like Martinson had about 10 years worth of nightmares about the atomic bomb.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, pretty much.
Nate:
Yeah, I think everybody did. I mean it was terrifying. I mean we saw the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those were small in capability to the hydrogen bomb which was introduced and demonstrated in 1953, and the prospect of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union was just much more in everybody else's minds at the time.
JM:
Yeah. And what really gets you here is that it seems like there's been so many catastrophes already, and it's all the same one but it kind of feels like he's trying to say yeah it just keeps happening over and over again and it reminds me of "Canticle for Lebowitz" by Walter Miller which I'm sure will do sometime. The famous science fiction book and Hugo winner now and I think it was written in the early 60s maybe or late 50s.
Nate:
Yeah, I haven't read that one but I know it's very well acclaimed.
JM:
Yeah, it's very good, but it has to do with this post-nuclear apocalypse world kind of rebuilding itself. So it starts after the first nuclear holocaust. How many were there before? Who knows? Right. It's a cyclical idea of history that things just repeat themselves all the time and like the idea of learning from history is absurd. Like that doesn't happen. Yeah, it's really grim that way when you think about it. Like there's a lot of hopeful poems but that every time there's hope it has to be dashed and there has to be another holocaust. Right. Even if it's in the past, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, one of the poems number 43 that briefly described Xinombra goes:
The number of butcheries we thus beheld,
the number of see-saw battles we were in,
is legion. We would look upon the felled
lying prone and still, but then rushed past
to be in on it when the next wave swelled.
The faithful mima relayed all of it
with steadfast clarity and no redactions.
And even if sometimes we might well sit
rigid and repelled by many actions,
still these actions were so very many
that memory could preserve only the worst.
These we named the Peaks, and put out of mind
the gulfs to which the others were consigned.
Yeah, lots of scenes of destruction of Xinombra in particular, but the earth in general related to in somewhat mythological terms, like it's almost like a legend that we're getting repeated to us by various characters. I guess it literally takes on a poetic nature.
JM:
So did you understand the meaning of that dragon? I didn't.
Nate:
Which one?
JM:
The dragon in the garden. The nude woman was talking about.
Nate:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I didn't really get the significance of what he was getting at there. I mean that one kind of called back to me some of the weird Arthurian stories from the Middle Ages, but yeah, I'm not sure what he was trying to say with that. So obviously calling back some sort of mythological stuff, but some of his meetings for the imagery and symbolism can be a bit obtuse, which again lends to the difficulty of the work sometimes.
Gretchen:
There is throughout the work, even though it's such a futuristic work and it's inspired by that age of the Cold War, it does feel kind of medieval. Like you bring up, it did feel kind of like the "Canterbury Tales" with how people present their stories and there is sort of something ancient in it. Despite it being materially a futuristic place, there's that mysticism and like timeless quality.
JM:
I can see why somebody thought it was a good idea to make an opera.
Nate:
Oh yeah, I mean it is very dramatic and it lends itself well to that kind of intense emotion and feeling we get in a lot of the verses.
JM:
But I would say that because a lot of operas are like they do have that medieval kind of fantastic feeling to them, right?
Nate:
Absolutely, yeah.
JM:
There's kind of stories and I'll be talking about them a little more towards the end of the episode when we get into Italian Fantascienza, and all these connections with medieval and Renaissance poetry and stuff like that, which was obviously considered real literature in Italy, whereas space adventures...
But we'll get to that, but I think there's definitely, I guess, some of that weird bias all over in many Western cultures where it's like, oh, we have our epic, fantastic, crazy myths and those are sacred, but you put in spaceships and stuff like that. Like somehow it's, I don't know.
Nate:
Yeah, silly kid stuff.
JM:
Yeah, so Martinson is kind of showing how you can integrate all of that and make it work. And it's really cool, I think, and that's always something that I thought was really cool. I mean, other writers do that too, some of them not as well as Martinson does.
Nate:
Yeah, and I mean some of the other characters represent trends we see in history. Chefone's character calls back to the Inquisition and it's an interesting approach for sure.
The, I guess, other thing that runs throughout the poem, aside from the grief as the juxtaposition of sex and eroticism and beauty and pleasure, as well as the strange mindless games with like coins and some of the various other amusements we get on the ship. I want to read briefly from poem 37, which says:
Desire and piety crowd into one place,
in rolls the chariot drawn on by a brace
composed of men and women of the cult.
The chilly stave held up by Isagel
is lifted while with cultic lantern Libidel,
augustly followed by eight libidines,
assumes position, lying down to please.
And when they have been warmed by pelvic fire,
all lying happy, sleepily at ease,
Isagel comes forth with lowered stave
and touches with her lamp three times for luck
our reliquary, blessed Mima’s grave.
There comes a sough like river reeds when Yaal,
her bosom peaceful, sated in her needs,
pauses at the saintly vault and pleads
in gentle whispers to the deity’s bier.
And what deep peace around her features plays
when swells the holy hymn of “Day of Days,”
and Isagel and Libidel and Heba
form the graveside chorus with Chebeba.
Yeah, the mixture of the, I guess, sexual and divine and mysticism imagery, all together, we get these weird fertility cults that pop up over the course of the poem and they take different forms and they kind of go through different leaderships and all that. It's again sharply contrasted with the grief and sadness that we get in the other parts. I guess the pleasure and the happy experiences the characters are feeling.
JM:
Well, he's also, he does this thing at one point where it's like he's saying, when people get really intellectual, like the astronomer, for example, it leads to greater despair and sadness because then you start contemplating the void around you and you start like, and this could happen even if you were able to experience all the Doric veils you needed. You would still have that feeling. And so being reminded of that by highbrow intellectual things is it becomes frowned upon. And so all the pleasurable things and all the things that are instant gratification become most desirable and most wanted. And I guess people have to live in the moment because if they think about the future, it's nothing but emptiness and imprisonment. They can't really use the Mima anymore to go into the past. So what else are they going to do, I suppose.
Gretchen:
I think that brings up, there's kind of that contrast as well between something that's like more intimate and more close and like the vastness and like incomprehensibility of the sort of things that cause the grief and cause that feeling of the void, which also reminds me quite a bit of "House on the Borderland" with that contrast between even personal emotion and personal grief and the entirety of the universe and the destruction of something that's so grand we can't even wrap our mind around it.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, the people are trapped in a void, but they're trying to close the void between, I guess, one another. And they're doing so in a very drawn out, ritualistic, mystical way. It's not like a hedonistic party or anything like that where everybody's doing a bunch of drugs and getting smashed and all that.
JM:
Well, there is some talk about that.
Nate:
There's like some kind of divine order to it. And in a way, it kind of reminds me of some of those scenes from Gormenghast where they're performing these very strange rituals and you're kind of wondering what the purpose is, but there really isn't a purpose aside from the ritual itself. It's just something to get lost into to be doing at the moment and forming a tradition and an escape.
JM:
We do it because we've always done it.
Nate:
Right, exactly. Yeah. It's an interesting approach. He certainly could have taken it in a different direction. And I think he handles a subject matter well, as far as how he did here.
Gretchen:
I'm not sure if, JM, you have any specific poems to read, but the one that I thought I would read that stuck out to me was 85:
The galaxy swings around
like a wheel of lighted smoke,
and the smoke is made of stars.
It is sunsmoke.
For lack of other words we call it sunsmoke,
do you see.
I don’t feel languages are equal
to what that vision comprehends.
The richest of the languages we know,
Xinombric, has three million words,
but then the galaxy you’re gazing into now
has more than ninety billion suns,
Has there ever been a brain that mastered all the words
in the Xinombric language?
Not a one.
Now you see.
And do not see.
Which I feel like really encapsulates that sort of incomprehensibility and vastness.
JM:
Yeah, that's a really good one.
Gretchen:
And in a way also kind of feels like it kind of encompassed the whole idea of like translation that we've been talking a little bit about with this.
Nate:
Fortunately, most languages on earth have nowhere near 3 million words, but the point still stands. Space is vast and enormous. And even when compared to a language like English, which has a relatively large vocabulary compared with a lot of other languages because it's more or less the fusion between medieval French and the medieval Germanic language that they were speaking in Great Britain at the time. But when compared with even in 1953, their knowledge of the universe and the galaxies and how many stars are in the Milky Way and how far away Andromeda is from us. It's just a drop in the bucket. It's just so enormous that's beyond the scope of calculation and comprehension of the human mind. And even now a couple of decades later, we know the universe is just much, much bigger than that and much more complex and enormous. And it's even more mind blowing just to think about.
JM:
Yeah, I don't really know if kind of debating whether I wanted to read any of the poems, but I think I will just change talk a bit and just kind of try to show people I guess what you mean for if you decide to tackle this in terms of like some of the, I guess, emotional states and stuff like that. But we'll start with poem 12, which is the dance poem. And because let me see if I can do this. This is kind of a hard one, I practiced once or twice.
The orchestra plays fancies and we take the floor.
The girl I lead about is hors concours.
Originally she’s from Dorisburg,
but though she’s danced here now for several years
in Aniara’s ballroom she insists
that, far as she’s concerned, she hears
no difference whatsoever in the yurg
they dance here and the one in Dorisburg.
And when we dance the yurg it’s evident
that everything called yurg’s magnificent
when Daisy Doody wriggles in a yurg
and chatters in the slang of Dorisburg:
You’re gamming out and getting vile and snowzy.
But do like me, I never sit and frowzy.
I’m no sleeping chadwick, Daisy pouts,
my pipes are working, I am flamm and gondel,
my date’s a gander and my fate’s a rondel
and wathed in taris, gland in delt and yondel.
And lusty swings the yurg, I’m tempest-tossed—
the grief I’m nursing threatens to be lost
upon this womanchild who, filled with yurg,
slings at Death’s void the slang of Dorisburg.
So it's not all grief and misery. There's some funny, amusing stuff in here for sure. And the slang talk is pretty great, I must say.
Nate:
Yeah, there's a lot of made up words that remind me of Joyce or Jabberwocky or things like that. And there's a couple poems that are almost all in the nonsense words that I think are really fun.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I did find another translation of this poem and I was just kind of looking to see some of the differences and stuff. And there was a glossary in the back for all the different like terms that come up through the poem. But there were probably about a third of them were from that poem, the slang that she uses.
JM:
Yeah, the other translators did a lot of speculation about what certain things meant and sometimes it seems like they couldn't really figure it out. So, yeah. And again, I think that Martinson was playing around a lot. Like, I don't think he means for you to sit there for hours trying to figure out what rondel means. It sounds like a dance. It sounds like a rondo or something, but it's probably futuristic. Yeah. Right, so.
Gretchen:
I don't think your main takeaway from Aniara should be what a Chadwick is.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I see some so the words are sort of familiar, but not quite familiar. Right. It's like they sound like, yeah, that fits right. I didn't really look at the Swedish so I didn't see exactly what words he used there. But anyway, good job, for sure, translators.
Nate:
Yeah, it's hard work, for sure. Because the translator we read again preserves the rhyming scheme. They preserve a lot of vocabulary. They do preserve a lot of the alliteration. I didn't do a whole compare side by side with Swedish, but I looked at some of the more, I guess, stranger poems. And yeah, it seems like they did a really good job and put in a lot of effort onto this.
Gretchen:
So, I believe that the one that I had checked out, it seemed like they didn't really keep the rhyme scheme and we're more going for like a literal translation.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's, I guess, different approaches to doing that. It's complicated with poetry because it does rhyme in a lot of cases in the original language. And words are chosen for how they flow.
JM:
Right.
Nate:
Can again make it difficult when you translate things, if you want to go for a literal approach or kind of preserve the meter and rhyme.
JM:
There's a lot of obviously thinking, he must have been, Martinson, and having traveled along all over the world on the sea and destroying his health in the process. He must have seen a lot of stuff. And there's a lot of like slavery and talk about slavery and dictatorship and, you know, like brutal executions and like, it's not as much as sometimes these people seem pretty decadent. A lot of them have undergone a lot of hardship. And again, like they represent entire swaths of the human race, I guess. And Chefone is definitely the little dictator on Aniara.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
The other poem I wanted to read, I actually have put down a few, but I don't want to read too many because, like, you guys got some too and maybe you already read a few. But just sort of randomly, as I was thinking about it, just now, column number 56, which is where Mimarobe encounters Chefone at some point, quite a bit, years after the Mima is not working. So we're still thinking about this.
One day I met Chefone in the passageway
leading into Gopta Chamber Three.
With scorn he asked: “What do the birdies say
this year, your Doris-thrush and chickadee?
Is the mima now recovered from her smart?
I saw you hunting long and feverishly
beneath her bosom for what ailed her heart.
Perhaps you found the wee locality.”
I blurt a scared goldonder-salutation,
reporting to him that she died of grief.
Although clairvoyant, she saw no salvation
for people caged within this demon-fief.
Then Chefone guffaws as though he saw
the funniest of sights in Mima’s dens,
and I want to collapse in mute despair,
remembering my home in Doric glens.
But Chefone, bored senseless by all tears,
walks on and leaves me standing stiff and cold,
minded when springtimes of a thousand years
turned winter without end in Mima’s hold.
Is our redemption ever to be won
in Aniara after that event?
I look in every corner but find nothing,
worrying every wish and argument.
That's a really good stark encounter. And I will say, I don't find Chefone, I mean, I don't know, him throwing Mimarobe into prison for years at Isagel, for, you know, just speaking the truth, probably is pretty shitty. But I don't find him that, like, you know, although sometimes his reactions seem almost understandable. And then at the end, when things are really bad, he really does pull together and start really helping people and stuff like that. All the systems are failing. And he's like, oh, they need me now. Like, I'm here to organize everyone. And I can really do this. So it's like, you know, almost like he has nothing to do, almost, because he's like the one in the most power, and he has nothing to do but order people around. So it seems like he's going a bit stir crazy than a lot of them are.
Nate:
Yeah, I got the impression he was like an incompetent fascist type character where he wants to be this all powerful dictator, but it's just kind of bad at it. And it's just kind of power trips when he can, again, his overreaction of throwing Mimarobe and Isagel in prison for no reason. But he isn't really able to maintain order over everybody and loses power pretty quickly when he pushes it too far. He's a kind of interesting character in that way where he's definitely the main villain, if you want to call him that, of the story, but he's, in a sense, a very three dimensional character in that way where he just doesn't feel like a comic book villain or anything over the top.
JM:
No, he's not in it very much. Like he's only referred to in maybe four or five poems, max. But but he's always like the presence is there. They talk about the high command and stuff like that and orders from on high and stuff like that. And so yeah, definitely an interesting, interesting portrayal.
Nate:
So did you guys have anything else on the poem?
JM:
Yeah, I think we covered a lot of how we all kind of feel about it. And I think the sense of it is pretty strong. You kind of have to read it to really fall into the mood of it. I think it's such a moody thing. And it has some of the poems, like it's definitely not about advancing the plot, right? That's, that's fine. Like it's not very long. And the poems are quick to get through.
So I guess if you just kind of let it flow over you and don't worry too much about the linearity of it and what order things happen in and how much time has passed, even though it's quite clear about how much time has passed on the ship. And like I said, a lot of the poems start out with very decisive statements about what's happening. So like, it's almost like he's conceding that for your benefit so that when you start the poem, you get one or two sentences of just explaining, okay, here is where we are now, you know, we're 25 years on. And Mimarobe is hanging out with Isagel or something like that. Although she didn't live that long, yes, but you know what I mean.
Nate:
Yeah, I do like how he keeps a lot of things vague. And again, appeals more to emotion and feeling rather than linear plot. But I guess before we move on to the tie in pieces of media, I just want to read the last poem, poem 103:
I turn the lamp down and appeal for peace,
Our tragedy is done. Occasionally
I’ve used my envoy’s warrant to release
scenes of our fate through the galactic sea.
With undiminished speed to Lyre’s figure
for fifteen thousand years the spacecraft drove
like a museum filled with things and bones
and desiccated plants from Dorisgrove.
In our immense sarcophagus we lay
as on into the empty seas we passed
where cosmic night, forever cleft from day,
around our grave a glass-clear silence cast.
Around the mima’s grave we sprawled in rings,
fallen and to guiltless ashes changed,
delivered from the stars’ embittered stings.
And through us all Nirvana’s current ranged.
A truly excellent end to what I thought was a really excellent work that I can highly recommend this one. If you're interested in pretty much everything we've described I know this one isn't going to be for everybody but I think if what we've described in the structure and the approach to this kind of literature appeals to you I think you'll get a lot out of this one.
(music: floating space synth)
opera and film discusion
So, the opera is how I stumbled upon the poem. And as I'm a fan of early electronic music, I found the opera by searching discogs for all electronic music that came out in the 1950s and 1960s. And comparatively speaking there isn't a lot of electronic music from before 1970 compared to now especially the avant-garde stuff, maybe a few hundred records or so, so it's rather possible to hear a significant chunk of what was recorded and released during that time, so the description of this one being a science fiction opera sounded incredibly cool. And when I saw in the notes that it was based on a poem I knew we had to cover it for the podcast in some way.
The opera was written by Karl-Birger Blomdahl and was first performed on May 31st of 1959. Blomdahl was younger than Martinson who was born in 1916 and the libretto was adopted from Martinson's text by Erik Lindgren. A performance of the opera was televised on Swedish TV in 1960 and released on a double vinyl set the same year on stereo and mono on Columbia in the United States and in Sweden on Phillips. All three pressings have a more or less similar cover which is a pretty cool gatefold.
An excerpt from this performance appears on one side of the 1968 Columbia Masterworks record, the other side being music from 2001, A Space Odyssey, so kind of a science fiction double combo there. And in 1985 the opera was re-released with a new recording and cast on a two LP set on Caprice Records and then on CD which I believe is still the only CD version of this, though the earlier Columbia LPs aren't too difficult to find. I think roughly $20 or so on the used market. And the two performances don't sound very dissimilar from one another.
There is a fair amount of early electronic music in the score, maybe 15 or 20 so minutes that are really prominent, as well as a lot of avant-garde sounding vocal lines that get pretty intense at times. And I think it's a really interesting snapshot of music, especially as it relates to the electronic music world at the time, as a lot of electronic music from the 1950s and 60s was performance based and came out of the avant-garde classical music world. Obviously the major exception to this being science fiction film and TV soundtracks like "Forbidden Planet" or "Doctor Who" or perhaps even a film that we'll be talking about later tonight.
But some of those early composers like Stockhausen or Berio have some really intense vocal parts in addition to the electronics. And while the electronics don't make up a huge portion of the "Aniara" opera, they're certainly there for several minutes. So if you like 1950s electronic stuff and avant-garde pieces in general, then you'd probably be interested in this one too, even if it didn't have anything to do with this story, but it is a rather faithful adaptation of the themes and plot of the poem and the libretto.
Did you guys listen to this one? I think JM, you said you did?
JM:
Yes, I listened to one performance. I listened to the, I believe it was the one that was on CD.
Nate:
Yeah, the 85 one, yeah.
JM:
And yeah, so I have a little bit of history with opera. I've been to a number of performances, mostly when I was a teen. And it's not really something that I listen to a lot. As probably everybody knows, the traditional Italian opera is very different from traditional German opera that tends to be a lot more melodic and easy to get into. Even though there are pretty prominent arias of individual singers that it's not necessarily like, I don't know, I've always been more of a fan of instrumentalists when it comes to classical music. So, you know, I mean, obviously there's some really good opera singers out there and I respect them, but I couldn't name too many names offhand, just some of the really famous ones.
This was definitely, I guess, my one like them kind of frame of reference is some of the like arias and Wagner, and they're very, very focused on declamatory vocals. And so I found the opera really interesting, but there were some parts where I was kind of just acting waiting for the next interesting instrumental part.
And that's kind of how I felt about some of it. But in general, I started to like it more as it went on, I think, like some of the beginning, like the first act, although there's an interesting overture at the beginning that I liked. Some of that stuff is not very interesting to me. But then in the second act, there's this like electronic suite that lasts for maybe four or five minutes.
And then there's like, actually, I think this part is before that, but there's a part with a female singer and she has a very like mezzo soprano voice, but it's very like closed vibrato, and it's very different for opera. And it sounds really good and really haunting. And I don't know, in my head, I kind of pictured that as the Mima voice, like when she was talking to Mimarobe, like at the end, you know, whereas like he's like, it's suddenly she spoke to me. And what he makes him think that she's dying of grief, right? And I don't know if that's actually the part it was, to be honest with you.
Nate:
I think it was. I looked at the libretto and the, I guess it gives you a breakdown of the scenes.
JM:
I don't look at that too much, to be honest, that would get into it with the opera, but that's what I pictured anyway. Did you say, did you say you, did you think that was the part?
Nate:
I believe so, yeah, yeah.
JM:
Gretchen, did you get a chance to listen to the opera?
Gretchen:
So when it comes to both the opera and the film we'll be talking about, I didn't have a chance to watch either in full, though I did kind of check out like a little bit of each, like bits and pieces. Just to get a taste, like a feel for it. And concerning the opera, I'm not very knowledgeable about opera myself, but I do enjoy the style of music. And I did hear the overture and thought that I would like to listen to more of it and give the rest of it a try.
Nate:
Yeah, it's about an hour and a half or so in length. I think both the performances on the 60s vinyl and the 85 vinyl are roughly the same runtime. There's some pretty amazing evil laughter by Chefone at one part in the opera.
Gretchen:
That feels appropriate.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, the best evil laughter since Big Boss of Root.
Nate:
The mastering on the 85 version is pretty dynamic, though, where the, you turn it up to hear the quiet parts and then the loud parts just come thundering in and, you know, I was listening to it. I was like, gee, I hope my neighbor's like Swedish opera.
But yeah, I enjoyed it. It's definitely an interesting take on it. I think it's kind of fitting for the poem and how strange it is to adopt it in this strange opera. It kind of works. And the special effects that are in the TV version are kind of neat. It's very primitive, but you get some, I guess, onscreen flashing and lights and everybody's in weird costumes and stuff like that. So you can check that out on YouTube if you have an interest in seeing the dancing and the singing and stuff like that. It's the same group of singers and musicians that appear on the 60s vinyl version. So it's that initial run of performances, which apparently they took it a fair amount outside Sweden and it did get some international attention.
And while it didn't win the Hugo Award, the opera did get an honorable mention in the 1962 Hugo Awards for best dramatic presentation. The winner in that category that year, of course, was the Twilight Zone. Kind of hard to compete with that one.
But I don't know. I thought the opera was pretty cool. And some places reminded me of the band Magma, who kind of came out of the progressive rock scene, but I think they're at their best when they're doing like this weird futuristic opera military march type music, and they have a concept that is somewhat similar to the plot of "Aniara" where a bunch of people flee a radiated earth on a generation ship. But instead of drifting out into space, they end up on a planet, and their albums are stories about their journey and culture and this weird made up language that's kind of a mixture of German and Polish.
JM:
It sounds like German.
Nate:
Yeah, German and Polish. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Was Magma the band that was originally going to be in Jodorowsky's Dune?
Nate:
Totally. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I remember hearing about that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I love Magma. I saw Magma live in 2017. It was amazing.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It was like one of the best concerts I've been to in the last 10 years, probably for sure.
Nate:
Yeah, no, I know they still play. I'd like to see them, but I've never seen them live before. But yeah, interesting connection with the Dune failed attempt.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, that whole production was just like incredibly over ambitious and it would have been amazing if it got made, even if it was a total train wreck.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Based on everything going into it, even if it wasn't as successful as it was planning to be, it would have been an interesting project.
Nate:
Yeah. Some of the concept art especially is pretty amazing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I do like what Lynch did with it and I like what the new version did with it, but I don't know. I think that with the imaginative surrealistic nature of what Jodorowsky was trying to do kind of suits the story better than the, I guess, more straightforward-ish, although there are some surreal aspects of the new production. It does feel more, I guess, familiar in a way.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Than, I guess, something like way out there.
JM:
I don't know. I think Jodorowsky probably would have taken Dune and just done his own, like he would have, it would have been a different thing.
Nate:
It would have. Yeah, it would absolutely.
JM:
It would feel like it wouldn't have been Dune.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Jodorowsky has this weird messianic thing. Like, I mean, I guess you could argue Dune does too because the second book is called "Dune Messiah".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. It's definitely Paul Atreides in Dune is false Messiah of sorts. I don't think the book wants you to think otherwise.
Nate:
Yeah, Frank Herbert was very clear about that point.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And it's interesting how he sets it up and the end of the first book tying into what happens at the beginning of the second book. And that's why I'm kind of curious as to what direction the new film franchise is going to go in. The second installment, which is going to be, I guess, the second half of book one comes out in November. And it'd be really cool if they did "Dune Messiah" too.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I thought the Sci-Fi Channel version was kind of lackluster, to say the least.
JM:
Yeah, it was pretty good with following the story, I guess. But yeah, some of the acting seemed really questionable.
Nate:
Yeah, just kind of drab in the presentation and the set design, which ties into the other piece of tie-in media of "Aniara", which is the 2018 film, which was very well-acclaimed. And there's certainly a lot of things to like about it. It was directed by a Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja. I'm probably mispronouncing those names, so apologies.
But the film was very low budget and shot for under $2 million, which, again, for a sci-fi movie in 2018 is like almost nothing. I was trying to compare it to episodes of The Expanse or other popular sci-fi media today that, I guess, would be on the lower end of scale, budget-wise, not like Star Wars or Marvel movies that cost an absurd amount of money, like $300 million or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, way too much money.
Nate:
It's kind of insane how much they are. But even compared with like the Deep Space Nine pilot or a Next Generation episode, I don't know. The set design and costuming of the "Aniara" film was just really, really drab and unimaginative. The interior of the Aniara looks very modern, like 2023 modern, and they literally shot parts of it in a shopping mall and it looks it. Like, if I didn't know any better, I think they shot it in the World Trade Center Oculus. Like, it just, it looks like a shopping mall, because it is. And they shot some scenes in a hotel, they shot some scenes in like a college lecture hall, and they don't look anything other than like a hotel and a college lecture hall.
JM:
Yeah, that's disappointing. Gretchen, did you get a chance to watch that?
Gretchen:
I did, like, look, just kind of bits and pieces, like with the opera, and yeah, you can kind of tell that the budget wasn't too high. When I was watching it, I could kind of see that there wasn't a lot of funding going into it.
Nate:
Yeah, and it's too bad. I mean, even the costuming is unimaginative. They just look like modern flight attendant uniforms. It almost seems like no effort went into the set design, the costuming, or the cinematography, which is kind of disappointing. But with that aside, there are some things I did like about the film.
Mimarobe and Daisy are both gender swapped, which is interesting. Mimarobe in particular is more of like a character than Mimarobe in the poem is, as in the poem Mimarobe is just kind of like your view into this world, whereas Mimarobe of the movie doesn't really function that way. She's a character who interacts with the world, and she has a romantic relationship with Isagel in a way that's more pronounced in the film than in the poem. So I mean, a fair amount of the film focuses on the relationship between the two of them, which is interesting take on it. And I really like what they did with Mimarobe's character and the aspects of the poem that they did choose to focus on and how they handle the subject material.
The sex cult stuff and eroticism, it doesn't feel exploitative at all. It's like one of like the least male gaze-y sex scenes I've seen despite being like quite explicit in what they show on camera. So again, an interesting take on the subject material with lesbian representation of Mimarobe and Isagel's characters, presenting it from a respectable point of view in a way that makes it feel like these are two characters who love and care about one another. And that does come across really well in the film, so to give credit where credit is due.
But I think a lot of people who praised and liked the film probably weren't familiar with the poem and weren't expecting this like otherworldly bizarre mystical experience with a lot of cross-cultural references.
JM:
A lot of the reviews I read didn't even, they didn't comment on that. And actually they commented on, one commented on how much better it was than the 1960 version. And I guess they were talking about the opera.
Nate:
Yeah, right, the opera.
Gretchen:
The opera as the source material.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Yeah, well, so that was kind of reminded of that when you were talking about being in the opera, everyone was wearing weird costumes and it looked weird, right? Like, I mean, it was probably just as low budget in its way.
Nate:
Oh, far more, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, but it looked like, you know, it looked like they, because it's an opera, right? And so they put in a lot of effort to make it look kind of distinctive and kind of like befitting of an opera, right? So, yeah, I mean, maybe people are not dressing like they would in a Renaissance court or something like that, but they're still dressing in a way that's like, it's definitely not going to be modern, right? It's not going to be from 1960. So, yeah.
I can't really comment on a lot of that stuff about the film, I did check it out, in the way that I could anyway, and it seemed really likable. Like, I don't know, I'm kind of disappointed to hear that they didn't seem to put effort into that end. Maybe something went wrong, some wires got crossed, something didn't get done on time, there wasn't enough money for this or that or enough time. Who knows, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And when I was only reading about "Planet of the Vampires", it just seemed like it brings home to you and as do a lot of things when you look into the making of film productions and TV productions, all the trouble that goes along with it. And I don't know if this one had trouble, because it seems like the writing department was on board.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And so it seems like they could have, like, maybe they had that thing where because their budget was so low, they were worrying about people not taking them seriously or something, and they just kind of thought, we just use some like empty white painted corridors. It'll be cool and everybody will wear jeans and it's fine.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. But taking on its own, it's a pretty good film. I mean, it does capture the themes of the poem really well. And it does more or less stick to the plot, even though there are some changes, I think the changes that are made to the plot work in the context of the film, so I'm not really like complaining about that at that anyway. And it does handle the subject matter respectfully, even if it's like very difficult subject matter. It's just, I don't know, I guess sometimes you do have to take things on their own and not as an adaptation of the work, even if it is, you know, an adaptation of it.
JM:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's poetry. What are you going to do?
Nate:
Right, yeah.
JM:
It's not like you can do it word for word.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So, I don't know. It's not that aspect is totally fine. I liked Mimarobe. She was fun. I listened to the English dub, unfortunately, maybe it wasn't too bad, but Isagel had a voice like Whoopi Goldberg, and I don't know if that's really appropriate or not. I don't know. Maybe it is. I'd start to say, right? I don't know. It was good. I liked it. The music was kind of cool. There was some that was pretty atmospheric. And of course, as you pointed out, 90s sounding techno a little bit.
Nate:
A lot of 90s techno.
JM:
There was also like, yeah, not that much. There was a little bit, there was a little bit like one scene where there was a ton of it, right? Yeah. But there was also some like folky, proggy kind of track.
Nate:
Uh-huh.
JM:
And there was also, yeah, like some pretty atmospheric music towards the end. And again, I think Chefone, like he wasn't, you know, he wasn't that villainous. He was a little bit unpleasant at certain points because that's just the way he was. But like in the end, he kind of, you could tell that he was trying his best to keep everybody together and stuff. And so, you know, and he was more present in the film than in the poems.
Nate:
Definitely. Much less of an inquisitor and more of like a kind of prickly middle manager.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Nate:
Yeah. An interesting take on it. I guess if you're interested in a modern science fiction film that covers these themes, it's definitely worth checking out. But I wouldn't say quite on the level of the original poem as far as how much I liked it.
JM:
Yeah. The scale did strike me like reading the poem, how vast Aniara was and how many people were actually there. And in the film, I did not get that impression at all. It felt a lot smaller and that's fine too. Like, you know, maybe the passenger ship wouldn't have 8000 people on it. And it does seem almost like all the holocausts of the past are like de-emphasized a little bit in the film. Like it seems like, yeah, maybe it's not that far in the future, like in the film.
Nate:
No, yeah.
JM:
I don't know if they really can go into that ever.
Nate:
They had a couple of Mima visions and the way they portray the Mima visions is like a Deep Space Nine orb experience kind of, which kind of fits. But yeah, they don't really dwell on the horrors of Earth's eradication or the forced labor in the mines of Mars and Venus aren't really gone into at all. Yeah. You just kind of see the brief scenes of destruction through the Mima.
JM:
And it seems like this could take place in like 2100 or something like that. It could be the very near future.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And at first you kind of think that way about maybe the poems too, but then you kind of see the truth of it. And it's like, oh, okay, we're really far in the future now. Yeah. Earth's been through a lot. People have been through a lot. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Really, really interesting pick for Chrononauts.
Nate:
Yeah, I loved this one. So I guess if you're interested in this sort of stuff, definitely read it. It should be relatively easy to find. I think there's still, I guess, multiple translations in print. The Swedish text is easily available online too if you speak Swedish. So if you do just read in Swedish, but yeah, if not the English versions are easily available. So yeah, highly recommended from me.
JM:
I only looked at one translation. Gretchen, you said you were looking at another one, right? Nate, did you see any of the other ones?
Nate:
No, I only saw the one that we all read.
JM:
I wonder, sometimes we do look into that kind of thing, but like for RUR too, I mostly just concentrated on one translation that we all read.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But sometimes it's interesting to see how others might have interpreted certain things. Gretchen, the one you looked at was an older or slightly older one, right?
Gretchen:
Yes, I believe it was from the 60s, I believe, 63 or something. I can't remember the exact year. I did look but I can't remember exactly now.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, with poetry, there's always a lot of room for interpretation, especially something as vague and abstract in places as this one.
Gretchen:
Yeah, there was one poem, I can't remember which one, but one of the poems wasn't even translated in that work. They just said it was untranslatable and did not translate it.
Nate:
That's pretty funny.
JM:
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, yeah, I can see that happening too.
Nate:
All right, well, I think we're going to take a quick break and we're going to head a little bit east to the Soviet Union.
Bibliography:
Generation Spaceship Project - text and notes of "Aniara" https://gsproject.edublogs.org/gs-texts/texts-used-in-2017/aniara-by-harry-martinson-3/
Johannesson, Eric O. - "Aniara: Poetry and the Poet in the Modern World" Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4 (November, 1960)
Klass, Stephen - introduction to "Aniara" (1999)
Sjöberg, Leif - "Harry Martinson: From Vagabond to Space Explorer", Books Abroad, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Summer, 1974)
Sjöberg, Leif - translator's note to "Aniara" (1999)
Smith, William Jay and Sjöberg, Leif - "On Harry Martinson", The American Poetry Review, Vol. 14, No. 4 (July/August 1985)
Titelman, David - "On Nomadic Shores Inward - Harry Martinson’s Journey to Late-Life Suicide", The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 90:2, 2021
Vowles, Richard Beckman - "Harry Martinson, Sweden's Seaman-Poet", Books Abroad, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 1951)
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