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Post by Dante on Sept 12, 2009 12:48:22 GMT -5
Monday, unless anyone has any complaints.
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Post by cwm on Sept 12, 2009 12:51:39 GMT -5
No complaints. I'll probably start contributing Wednesday.
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Post by Hermes on Sept 14, 2009 11:38:32 GMT -5
I've been wondering something. Could the twelft letter in TBL and the party held in LSUA's Prologue be... The same event told from two different points of view ? Is Béatrice Dénouement the woman who ends up at the VFD party ? Really interesting theory, thedoctororwell! I think there's definitely a link between TUA and TBL, which I hadn't noticed before. I'm not sure whether it's the same event, though, or whether it's the kind of parallel story of which we get a number in The End. I don't think I've ever seen this cover. Can someone direct me to a copy of it? But hadn't Beatrice given up the ring before her meeting with Lemony? I'm sure you're right that we're meant to see a connection between the questions in TUA and the questions that Beatirce says she has in TBL _ and indeed some of the questions might be the same, since they are questions fans often ask about the books. (Oh, and the 'official' title of the thirteenth chapter - the one put in by the editor - is a question - 'Who is Lemony Snicket?' - though we don't know what the 'real' title, the one Lemony substituted, is.) Well, we don't know that the person speaking is a Snicket. And the line 'I don't suppose I'll have a nephew or a niece, what with my brother's rash' suggests he doesn't have a sister. It's suggestive, though - and the theme of family heirlooms in the Snicket family does come up more than once. All this makes a lot of sense. Not quite so sure about this bit; to write the main part of The End I think he must have been on the island and read A Series of Unfortunate Events (the book) (by the way, how is that translated in French?), and in that case he would already have had the information he needed for chapter 14. (I think Kit tells the Baudelaires to call her child after their mother in chapter 13, so if he had written that he must have known who she was.) I agree that something new must have happened to make him write Ch. 14, and it may have been meeting Beatrice, but not so much because it gave him new information - perhaps just a new motive.
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Post by Dante on Sept 14, 2009 11:51:44 GMT -5
I don't think I've ever seen this cover. Can someone direct me to a copy of it? It's beneath the dustjacket on hardcover copies of the U.A. Not a Julie Blattberg, interestingly - copyright Howard Huang, 2002.
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Post by Sophie-Senpi on Sept 14, 2009 17:00:22 GMT -5
BTW handeler made at least one mistake, he said what with his higene,count olaf might get lice. but lice actually like clean people better than dirty ones, if u dont wash your hair for a long time, they will go away.
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Post by thedoctororwell on Sept 15, 2009 11:50:38 GMT -5
But hadn't Beatrice given up the ring before her meeting with Lemony?
Doh ! You're right. The running theme of rings and duchesses is still interesting, though.
Well, we don't know that the person speaking is a Snicket. And the line 'I don't suppose I'll have a nephew or a niece, what with my brother's rash' suggests he doesn't have a sister.
Yeah, but at the same time, the mention about his brother seems rather out of place if we assume that this man is not Lemony. One other reason I think Kit is not mentionned is simply that, back in the days LSUA was published, we didn't even know who could be Snicket's sister, not even her name. This allowed Handler to put red herrings in TSS which made people think that the Baudelaire's mom may have been Lemony's sister. Of course TGG later jossed that theory out of the way, but I truly believe Handler avoided giving away too much information about the sister to keep a mystery here.
Not quite so sure about this bit; to write the main part of The End I think he must have been on the island and read A Series of Unfortunate Events (the book) and in that case he would already have had the information he needed for chapter 14. (I think Kit tells the Baudelaires to call her child after their mother in chapter 13, so if he had written that he must have known who she was.) I agree that something new must have happened to make him write Ch. 14, and it may have been meeting Beatrice, but not so much because it gave him new information - perhaps just a new motive.
Ah, true. However the timeline of the books' writing is completely contradictory anyway. It only makes sense if you assume that Lemony keeps adding new annotations and comments throughout the books with new editions, as his investigation progresses. So maybe he went to the island, looked up the big book and wrote the main plot of The End thanks to the Baudelaire's writings. Then he met Béatrice Jr and added the bit about the theme-naming.
(by the way, how is that translated in French?)
Badly, like everything else. The translator went for something like Désastreuses Aventures : Chroniques d'Infortunes en Chaîne. I think she should have went for Désastreuses Aventures and nothing else. That boat had already sunk a long time ago anyway.
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Post by Hermes on Sept 15, 2009 14:08:42 GMT -5
Well, we don't know that the person speaking is a Snicket. And the line 'I don't suppose I'll have a nephew or a niece, what with my brother's rash' suggests he doesn't have a sister.Ah, true. However the timeline of the books' writing is completely contradictory anyway. It only makes sense if you assume that Lemony keeps adding new annotations and comments throughout the books with new editions, as his investigation progresses. So maybe he went to the island, looked up the big book and wrote the main plot of The End thanks to the Baudelaire's writings. Then he met Béatrice Jr and added the bit about the theme-naming. Yes, that makes sense. Indeed, as we've just discovered, the first chapter of The End refers to the series as containing 170 chapters, which implies he's written chapter 14 by the time it's prepared for publication. Well, at least the French translator tried. In Spanish, I believe, VFD is rendered as 'VFD', and the fact that those aren't the actual intials of the various VFD's in the story is ignored. Whereas the French translator, having settled for 'VDC', put some effort into coming up with examples, which must have been terribly difficult, given that the didn't know in advance what it was going to stand for.
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Post by thedoctororwell on Sept 16, 2009 11:26:11 GMT -5
Yeah, I know. Did Rose-Marie Vassalo tried ? Definitely. But this was also for the worse at times ; her willingness to try again and again, when there was nothing left to be done, lead to some pretty disastrous results at times. It was as if she tried adaptations for the sole sake of showing she tried, rather than simply giving the best solution available.
Désastreuses Aventures : Chroniques d'Infortunes en Chaîne is actually a good example of what I'm talking about. As you know "Unfortunate Events" was changed by the french editors to "disastrous adventures." The book in TE should therefore have simply been "Une Série de Désastreuses Aventures," or something like that. But no, she added the useless "Chronicles of Multiple Unfortunate Events" at the end. This gave us a very long and unelegant title. What is even more infuriating is that she probably went for this title just to give a wink at the bilingual fans who know the series' english titles ; which is completely useless since these fans read the series in English from the very start. Moreover Rose-Marie Vassalo didn't keep track of the things she had already translated : these adaptations change from book to book, there's very little consistency in the details. And it's a pain in the ass to re-connect the dots to french-speaking fans.
Still, she at least tried, as you said. The best thing about Vassalo, I think, is simply that she seemed to be, like us, a great fan of the series ; she's sometimes clueless and willing to bring out misery on herself through stupid ideas, but she's a fan. She was very disappointed not to have convinced Nathan to release TBL in French, for example.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Oct 27, 2009 17:45:40 GMT -5
A note I came across in My Scilence Knot; In the second line of the second stanza, it reads: In the play my role is baticeer. The rest of the poem's lines have ten syllables, but this one has nine. Instead of a baticeer, it just says baticeer. Is Beatrice trying to say "In the play my role is Beatrice"? The anagram for 'baticeer'? But then it says: Which here means person who trains bats, which doesn't fit that definition.
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Post by Dante on Oct 28, 2009 3:41:01 GMT -5
I think you're right in that the use of "baticeer" as opposed to "a baticeer" is supposed to highlight the Beatrice-baticeer duality, and it's worth noting that since Beatrice is indeed a baticeer, it's true to describe her as a person who trains bats. As to the actual drop from ten syllables to nine, I actually think it flows a little better that way.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Oct 28, 2009 14:43:09 GMT -5
I agree the nine syllables makes it flows better, but I was actually wondering whether the fact it was nine was supposed to make the line stand out.
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Post by Dante on Oct 28, 2009 15:59:58 GMT -5
It can be both.
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Post by cwm on Dec 8, 2009 13:24:11 GMT -5
I've just been turning out my attic in search of christmas decorations (I never knew I had *two* artifical trees) and lo and behold, my copy of TBL has turned up underneath a box of old Beanos. I don't know what it was doing there either, but here it is. Is it still worth commenting...?
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Post by Dante on Dec 8, 2009 16:15:35 GMT -5
If you have anything new or particularly interesting to contribute, please go ahead.
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Post by Teleram on Nov 19, 2017 23:25:27 GMT -5
Could it be the theory that like nobody's ever agreed with me about and which Daniel Handler himself has implied is incorrect?! I kinda hope not. The fights about that were boring enough the first time. I know it's ridiculously stereotypical of me to dig up old-ass posts like this, but I simply couldn't resist: What's the theory?
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