The Perilous Preparation: The Bad Beginning

[gliquey]

Nov 6, 2016 17:40:14 GMT -5 Dante said:

I believe I have observed in the past that Sunny is almost more of a plot device in TBB, and might be safely replaced with a puppy, or an antique vase (or a clock). Handler quickly figures out how to get a bit more out of her - perhaps, sometimes, too much (but we can save that discussion for a later book).

Indeed. This was the first thing I was planning to point out. TBB is, I think, the only book where Sunny doesn't do anything productive. I have high hopes for Netflix in regards to their adaptation of TBB: the book failed to give Sunny a proper role; the movie deprived Violet of her grappling hook scene; hopefully Netflix will be able to provide all three Baudelaires with an opportunity to show off their talents and bravery.

[bear]

Nov 6, 2016 18:06:15 GMT -5 A comet crashing into Earth said:

Apropos of nothing, does anyone know where the coloured illustration in the banner in the first post comes from? Has it been coloured by Helquist himself, or did someone from 667 do it? Either way, it's beautiful and makes me long for a comic book adaptation.

there was a leatherbound, limited edition version of TBB published in the UK, which had color illustrations.

[Linda Rhaldeen]

BTW, since people were discussing Olaf's house earlier and the possible size, I was on a walk this afternoon and found this house which, despite its tower, is not a mansion. I like the visual of this being his house.

[Teleram]

Adding to what Dante or Hermes was talking about earlier, I think Olaf in TBB is strangely the most frightening portrayal of him in the books- obviously he remains a despicable person throughout ASOUE, but as the series goes on you tend to notice that he gets slightly more humorous and over-the-top, running a bit contrary to characters's descriptions of him. The Olaf you see in the earlier books slap Klaus across the face (I think that was the only time a villain actually physically hurts the Baudelaires in the series) and a more overt of a creep to Violet. There are also moments between Olaf and his cronies that make it clear that he is more abusive to them than Snicket lets us see, which is interesting when you compare them to stuff like the opening chapter of TCC, where the arguments between the troupe members and Olaf are played a bit more for comedy rather than for establishing how scary he is.

[mortinson51]

I feel like this book is the most grounded in our reality. Which is a way to get the reader invested in snicket's world. As the books go on the situations become more absurd. This one is a very "real sistaution" that could happen. Olaf in this book is when he is at his creepiest. Having him and Hookey lust over Violet.
Snicket has a way of making a situation that isn't really that long take up a whole chapter that is one of my favorite things about his writing. One of my altime favorite scenes is the breakfast of oatmeal. For me this is one of the true time where Olaf gives them details about his past. even if it is nothing much at all it is one of the times where we see the true Olaf and not just the villain. I'm hoping Netflix will do justice to this scene because I was truly upset when it was cut from the film version

[Linda Rhaldeen]

The Olaf trailer containing Olaf holding a plate of cupcakes with raspberries on top makes me wonder if that is replacing the oatmeal scene, since they both contain raspberries.

[Invisible]

That's a very pretty house, Linda. I can see what you mean about its visual style. I can totally see it all messed up with empty wine bottles cluttering up the front step. A smashed window or two.


I haven't started reading yet (long story), so I can't say much yet. But what seems to stick out for me (particularly in TBB) is that in the earlier books, Violet is always referred to as a little girl or child. Despite her being 14. It just seems a bit odd to me, because I would call her a teenager. I'm sure that was done for the young readers, so that they have someone to relate to and to look up to.

[A comet crashing into Earth]

Alright, so: Since there's a relatively small chance that on my umphteenth reread of TBB and TRR, I'll think of anything to say that hasn't already been said by anyone in the thirteen years this forum has existed, I've decided that my reread of the first two books, in their Danish translations, will focus entirely on the decisions and inventions of the translator. I will at no point be promising to keep this up any longer than I already have, but on an irregular basis, I'll be presenting a relatively thorough list of things I've noted as I'm sitting down with my copies of TBB in Danish and English, respectively.

If anyone feels like doing something similar in their own language, I'd be thrilled to read about it - we could compare the translators' respective tactics and see whether the same things are problematic in different languages.

Translating Snicket isn't an easy task, so I have to acknowledge the achievement of translator Susanne Vebel, whose interpretation of Snicket's words is responsible for getting me hooked on Snicket in the first place, all those years back. A huge thank you to her!

The page numbers for each note give first the page of the quote in the English version (Egmont 1999), then in the Danish version (Sesam 2004).

TBB, Chapter 1

P. 1/1

Already in the first sentence, some creative liberty is taken. A small bit of text is added, so that it reads: ”If you're interested in stories with happy endings, in which everything turns out all right by the end, you would be better off reading some other book.” I find it interesting that the translator would make the decision to add something here, since a more direct translation wouldn't really result in the reader missing any of the information.

I note that 'A word which here means' is translated as 'With the word ____, I here mean”. I'll be keeping my eyes open to see whether this is consistent with later instances.



P. 4/9

While in the English version, Sunny is ”scarcely larger than a boot”, her Danish counterpart is ”scarcely larger than a normal boot”. This is yet another addition that seems to come out of nowhere, but which, when I think about it, does seem to get the tone of the text across better than a more literal translation would (to me, Danish can sometimes seem a little more 'bare' than English, if that makes any sense, so adding an adjective here and there can actually help the text get closer to its original tone).



P. 9/14

The 'executor/executioner' play on words doesn't translate very well into Danish – the translator has used 'eksekutor/ekspederet', which are only slightly less phonetically similar than the original pair, but which don't belong to the same part-of-speech: 'Eksekutor' is a direct translation of 'executor' (though using it anywhere outside of legal documents sounds odd in Danish), and 'ekspederet' means 'executed' – since 'executioner' isn't phonetically similar to 'executor' in Danish, an inflected version had to be used, which in my opinion makes for a notably smaller impact.

The translated phrase goes something along the lines of "Although he said he was their executor, Violet felt as though he'd said he'd make sure they were executed." Which is less elegant in Danish because both 'exe'-words very rarely occur in natural speech in comparison to their English counterparts.


P. 10/14

Danish doesn't have a noun for 'orphan', which makes the use of the word in ASOUE a little awkward in general. Instead, we use an adjective: 'Forældreløs', which literally means 'parentless'. As a result, the interposed phrase in the chapter's last line changes from ”[...] The three Baudelaire children - The Baudelaire orphans, now - […]” to ”[...] The three Baudelaire children - The three [parentless] - [...]”
.
(In Danish as well as in English, you can often use an adjective as a noun, and the translations do this in a way so that most of the time, this isn't a problem – 'En forældreløs', lit. 'A parentless', can be used in exactly the same way as 'An orphan' in most cases.)

[Dante]

Interesting notes on the Danish translation, Comet; I'd be happy to read more of these reports whenever you have time to compose them. I find it particularly interesting that Danish is such a potentially "bare" language that inserting extraneous detail is necessary to pad the text up to something more like the original. When back-translated, it sounds a little redundant, but I take your word for it that in Danish it helps to conjure up a more individual style.

[Esmé's meme is meh]

Sorry for disappearing. As Linda said, I had to travel to Buenos Aires during the weekend and I'm just getting back to normal life.

I'm so happy to see your opinions already! I said spoiler-free just in case people who are just reading the books now or want to have an idea of what they are about and not ruin the surprise

I think we should include the Rare Edition, as we include the translated versions.

I'll post some stuff later and during the weekend!

[lorelai]

Everyone's thoughts/opinions so far are fun and fascinating!!
I'll be making a proper post tomorrow, since thanks to a scary amount of mental planning I now have the weekend free. I've decided to listen to the audiobooks, since I'd reread the series in braille before joining 667, and the audio was how I was introduced at 13. Plus this way I can rread the rare edition notes while I listen and get a full immersion, and prep myself for the bulk of listening I'll be doing come January.

[lorelai]

I finished the first CD--the first five chapters--so thought I'd make a few comments.
Although Sunny is at her least useful in this book, as others have said, I think 'she does display how children have an innate sense for when things are off-kilter/people can't be trusted; Violet and Klaus are both at an age where they've grown out of this knack, thoughKlaus still has a child's bluntness compounded with that almost-a-teenager cheekiness. She's the first person to make a sound ("like an angry bird") before Mr. Poe relays the news about the fire, and also the first to vocalize distress at Olaaf's house. Her cry of, "No! No! No!", which is described as "sudden", when Olaf reacts to the kids not being mind readers, also seems to be a reactionary moment , this time fueled by the heightened tension. Also, Edgar complains that, "the baby bites", but although Sunny later bites their shoes, I think it's telling that he doesn't specify that Sunny "bites things", especially since we learn with Justice Strauss that Sunny will bite gently or "very very hard" depending on whether she likes or dislikes a person, and the narration makes a point of saying Sunny's too frightened to bite Olaf's hand. I wouldn't be surprised, especially given Sunny's later character growth, if she bit Edgar, and all of this also shows that Sunny is the Baudelaire who is the best judge of character.
There's a bit of foreshadowing when Olaf first hear's he can't access the fortune where Violet thinks Olaaf will strike Mr. Poe across the face. I wonder if the show will do its own foreshadowing, a hand lift or twitch, for instance?
The Rare Edition notes suggest there were cameras/lenses in the Baudellaire mansion and two people watching the children at the end of chapter four, things the show will hopefully explore. Also, in relation to things the show could work with, I'm thinking Olaf signing notes with an eye drawing may have been/could be viewed as a kind of taunt to the Baudelaires. If he thinks they know about VFD--he was in it at Violet and Klaus's ages--it may be a bit of subtle mockery that goes right over their heads.
We're told Olaf's house is large, so is it that he HAS more than just his tower bedroom and the room he gives the siblings, but simply refuses to let them each have a room, or does he only have those two rooms, despite his house being large?
I love that Tim Curry inserts coughing into Mr. Poe's dialogue, not only during the expositional mentions, but directly after we're told he coughs so much you can barely have/finish a convaersation with him. Also, his naration of Olaf prior to the troupe entering (a little slurred and certainly overly loud), that he "slid" towards the Baudelaires, and that he's the one who brings up the wine, makes me wonder if he might have been tipsey before coming home (we're reminded of how much he likes wine in TCC , and then specifically by Olalf inTGG). NPH did mention the wine/drinking in the interview, so that might be an interesting thing to have clarified or see more of in the show, or just Olaf enjoying wine too much as is shown by after the wine's been drunk and the comments about wine in chapter five, if I'm overanalyzing this moment.
There's a moment in chapter five when Violet looks up at the sky and wishes she could invent something to take them all away; I can see the seed for Hector's invention being planted here, even if the details were a long ways off.

[Dante]

Nov 13, 2016 3:23:46 GMT -5 lorelai said:

Although Sunny is at her least useful in this book, as others have said, I think 'she does display how children have an innate sense for when things are off-kilter/people can't be trusted; Violet and Klaus are both at an age where they've grown out of this knack, thoughKlaus still has a child's bluntness compounded with that almost-a-teenager cheekiness. She's the first person to make a sound ("like an angry bird") before Mr. Poe relays the news about the fire, and also the first to vocalize distress at Olaaf's house. Her cry of, "No! No! No!", which is described as "sudden", when Olaf reacts to the kids not being mind readers, also seems to be a reactionary moment , this time fueled by the heightened tension. Also, Edgar complains that, "the baby bites", but although Sunny later bites their shoes, I think it's telling that he doesn't specify that Sunny "bites things", especially since we learn with Justice Strauss that Sunny will bite gently or "very very hard" depending on whether she likes or dislikes a person, and the narration makes a point of saying Sunny's too frightened to bite Olaf's hand. I wouldn't be surprised, especially given Sunny's later character growth, if she bit Edgar, and all of this also shows that Sunny is the Baudelaire who is the best judge of character.

I'd forgotten, actually, that although Sunny doesn't do much in TBB, the Baudelaires are at their most distinct as individuals in the early books in the series. It's notable that Klaus is that bit more immature in the series and occasionally loses his temper, whilst Violet does her best to remain calm and take responsibility. These distinctions mostly fade over time, but I think Klaus does frequently show that bit more irritability and suspicion even later on.

The Rare Edition notes suggest there were cameras/lenses in the Baudellaire mansion and two people watching the children at the end of chapter four, things the show will hopefully explore. Also, in relation to things the show could work with, I'm thinking Olaf signing notes with an eye drawing may have been/could be viewed as a kind of taunt to the Baudelaires. If he thinks they know about VFD--he was in it at Violet and Klaus's ages--it may be a bit of subtle mockery that goes right over their heads.

There's a lot about the Rare Edition that remains unexplained, and I don't know if the Netflix series will touch on much of it - but I think Olaf's house being filled with peepholes hidden in the eye decoration should be irresistible. It's an interesting thought, that Olaf at this point may have believed that the Baudelaires already knew about V.F.D., and we could potentially say that it perhaps made him pity the children a little less (in much the same way as Hangfire had a particular hatred for Lemony as a member of V.F.D. in ATWQ, though you wouldn't necessarily need that explanation either).

We're told Olaf's house is large, so is it that he HAS more than just his tower bedroom and the room he gives the siblings, but simply refuses to let them each have a room, or does he only have those two rooms, despite his house being large?

It's hard to say. I'm sure he has more rooms, but would he necessarily have more intact beds? I could believe that a lot of the remaining furniture he'd either sold off, or it had fallen into disrepair and simply wasn't suitable. At the same time, though Olaf's standards of cleanliness and hygiene aren't great, I'm sure his own bedroom is a lot nicer than the children's.

[gliquey]

I've not finished re-reading the book yet, but I've already got plenty to say:

I think Snicket does portray Sunny as less aware of what's going on, and less helpful, in this book, but it seems like sometimes she has a very good idea of what's going on and other times she hasn't a clue. For instance, at the start of chapter 2, Snicket explicitly says Sunny was "too young to really understand what was going on" but, as lorelai has pointed out, on several occasions she seems to sense danger - such as noticing Mr. Poe arriving before her siblings. Her Sunny speak is all over the place in this book - we have real words ("No! No! No!"), phrases close enough to English to be understandable ("Odo yow"), words needing translations from Snicket ("Gack!" and "Book!") and words like "Jook!" and "Hux!" which apparently mean nothing at all. I think, in fact, this is the only book where Sunny says nonsense and Snicket doesn't explain what it means; additionally, she seems to be shrieking rather than saying, and everything she says has an exclamation mark. So she definitely acts differently from TRR onwards.

Chapter 1 was a lot more bleak than I remember it being - I guess that now, I don't take Snicket's "don't read this book" and "the children's lives were very unfortunate" warnings very seriously, especially when they are turned into jokes later in the series (e.g. the water cycle nonsense in TGG). But the first page of TBB must have felt very somber when I first read it, and I think the emotional impact of the first chapter must have faded for me by now. When re-reading, this paragraph in particular struck me as very depressing: "Klaus pictured all the books in the library, going up in flames. Now he'd never read all of them."

Still, even the first chapter isn't without Snicket's dry humour - "Like most fourteen-year-olds, [Violet] was right-handed" always strikes me as an amusing bit of absurdist humour, as the statement isn't untrue, but of course age has nothing to do with handedness. In fact, most of the humour in the book - one of the few things preventing the series from being unrelentingly dark - is from Snicket, so I hope Warburton is given a very active role in the Netflix series, and I think from what we've seen already he will be. Although other jokes might be adapted from narration to dialogue, such as the "blanched"/"boiled" joke on page 13, which we've seen from a script fragment is changed to an argument between Klaus and the Poes.

I used to be unsure whether the Baudelaires spent (for example) 3 days or several months at the Poe household, but I've decided they were there for quite a while - longer than I had previously thought. It's one off comments by Snicket like "for the first time in a long while Violet felt as if her life [...] might turn out well" (p.19) and "Violet felt more comforted than she had in some time" (p.44) that make me feel like when the Baudelaires get to Olaf's house, it has been a few months since their parents died.

Is school mandatory in the Snicketverse? Surely if it was a legal requirement for children, the Baudelaires would mention it when complaining to Mr. Poe about Olaf, so this implies it's not, but it does appear to me like they went to school before the fire. In TAA (p.36), Klaus says "I've missed being in a real classroom", so there must be a school in the city that they went to. However, other than obviously TAA, the children do not get to go to school after the fire, so the Snicketverse seems rather inconsistent about education. But there must have been a school in the city they went to; this is also probably where they met all their friends that have "fallen by the wayside" after the fire (and are never really mentioned - I think Violet's friend Ben is the only pre-fire friend of theirs ever mentioned by name, in TEE).

As someone from England, I never understood the "rickety trolley" properly - ironically, the word Snicket defined ("rickety") was the one I already knew. I used to picture a shopping trolley the children used to carry their toys/books in, although I knew that didn't really make sense. It was only a couple of years ago I realised "trolley" means "tram", and now I presume the illustration on the first page is of the Baudelaires going to Briny Beach rather than going back to the Poe household.

On page 29, we see Olaf gives the Baudelaires "a small pile of rocks". Later (TSS p.57), Fernald says "I usually keep something around to help pass the time, like a deck of cards or a large rock". I wonder whether everyone in the Snicketverse considers rocks to be a form of entertainment, or whether it's just the theater troupe.

Sunny bites "very, very hard" if you try to give her a bath (p.36) - her hatred of baths appears again in TGG (p.147), when she mentions the Hobson's choice "Bath or pink dress". I think these are the only mentions made of Sunny hating baths - in which case kudos to Handler when writing TGG for remembering the one-off comment he made 10 books ago.

Nov 13, 2016 3:23:46 GMT -5 lorelai said:

We're told Olaf's house is large, so is it that he HAS more than just his tower bedroom and the room he gives the siblings, but simply refuses to let them each have a room, or does he only have those two rooms, despite his house being large?

I think Olaf's house does have more than those two rooms. On page 28 it says "Even though Count Olaf's house was quite large.." and in TRR, after the children are surprised and grateful that Monty offers them a room each, I think they're alluding to the idea that they were cooped up in Olaf's house for no good reason. As Dante says, maybe Olaf just didn't have enough beds (or a cot for Sunny), and couldn't be bothered to buy anything for them.

[lorelai]

I don't know why, but I always assumed TBB took place at the start of summer; this would certainly account for why none of the children in the Poe household, for however long the Baudelaires are there, attend school, and why Albert complains so specifically about them not wanting to do anything. By the third book it seems like it would have been fall or winter, to account for it no longer being the tourest season in the town.