The kugelmass episode. The Kugelmass Episode (Audiobook) by Woody Allen 2019-02-02

Woody Allen’s The Kugelmass Episode Essay Example

Sometimes first exposure to a foreign culture is less violent, but is still perceived as a form of violence by comfort-lovers who would rather not confront the new, the alien, the different: almost certainly the vast majority of foreign language learners in classrooms all around the world not just in the Anglophone world, conditioned to monolingualism by a century and a half of political and cultural imperialism respond this way to foreign languages at first, some longer than others. Acute schizophrenia… Out of the 26 episodes of Criminal, I chose to listen to Episode seven: J. And speaking of interculturality: note that the Spanish textbook isn’t just a foreign text. But, at the end of the episode, the whole situation changes. The same wonderment overcomes a Stanford professor. I wouldn’t: I’d throw it in a corner and haul it out whenever I needed it, then take it to the shop when it didn’t work right. And with that, he terminated his therapy.

Woody Allen’s The Kugelmass Episode Essay Example

A glass of wine, perhaps? We can also safely assume that the professor is a linguist that specializes in Arabic. The wife, Wendy, thinks that her husband, Malcolm, is having an extra-marital affair. This is the foreign with a vengeance! The irony shows up two times. We might begin by asking whether a student will “learn” Madame Bovary more fully or effectively by engaging it as Kugelmass does, falling in love with Emma “acting out” , or as the Stanford professor probably does, analyzing its narrative structure or symbolic structure or cultural situatedness. Earlier, the Professor had repeatedly insulted the qaouaji with his cultural aloofness.

Essay about kugelmass episode

Some front part of me was looking up words in the dictionary, building coherent Finnish sentences, doing various analytical tasks; a back part was somewhere else, lost in a reverie that felt vaguely romantic, though probably only because it remained romantically vague. Persky tucked the bills in his pants pocket and turned toward his bookcase. Maybe if he ever gets himself out of Remedial Spanish he will finally learn to be happy with what he has. I 'm speaking of the episode where Hugh Laurie is interviewed shortly after his blues album, Didn 't It Rain, went triple platinum. Professor of humanities at New York City college. Horrifically as the Spanish textbook is portrayed, it is certainly not a dull or unimaginative place: it is populated by great hairy spidery monsters! Activity In groups of 3, analyze the characters and select one to discuss with the class. Point of View Irony There are a good amount of ironic elements within the story.

The Kugelmass Episode Summary & Study Guide

When given the opportunity to enter any book and interact with the characters, he takes advantage of the opportunity. ” Hence also, while the granting of tenure and promotion for literary and scholarly translations is still a controversial issue in academia, nobody even raises the possibility of granting tenure or promotion for the translation of technical texts. In similarly-themed stories, the recipient of the three wishes usually ends up where he begins or even worse, the latter being unfortunately the case for Kugelmass. It was a cheap­looking Chinese cabinet, badly lacquered. Frank Baum's Oz books, in order and unabridged. Persky tosses a paperback copy of Flaubert's novel into the cabinet with Kugelmass, taps it three times, and Kugelmass finds himself at the Bovary estate in Yonville in the French countryside.

[PDF] The Kugelmass Episode (1977) Book Review by Woody Allen ePub

But in fact, by creating a multisensory scene or context for my translation, my semiconscious reverie was actually helping me translate. The peak age of onset of the first psychotic episode is early to mid twenties for males and late twenties for females. He seems to be unfulfilled and bored with his life as a whole. Indeed the story’s boundaries and transgressions seem to be as much academic as marital: Fivish Kopkind, for example, the comp lit professor who recognizes Kugelmass in the book and threatens to go to his wife with the news of her husband’s affair, is described by Kugelmass as someone “who has always been jealous of me” 75. The novels Persky offers him are all English translations, but Kugelmass doesn’t exactly protest—it’s hard to imagine him whining, “Doncha have any originals in here!? Far too often people think they deserve better than they have and in the pursuit of higher contentment, they often screw themselves up more than ever. New York and London: Routledge.

Essay about kugelmass episode

In my reverie I was reliving all the times I used a chainsaw in Finland, usually with a Finnish friend or brother-in-law—often, for some reason, in the snow. Allen uses colorful dialogue to first disconnect the reader from the main character, bring irony and humor to the story, and use that humor to teach the reader a thing or two about being satisfied and happy with what you have. Translation and Literature 4 1 :5-29. Famous fictional characters are simply just as strange and quirky as the average modern day New Yorker. The story draws on Jewish humor and culture as well as classical and modern literature, using lowbrow humor to spoof high art. These ruminations have important implications for the training of translators as well.

The Kugelmass episode, Woody Allen

And as I say, this happens to me a lot. But the story obviously has pedagogical implications, and I want to conclude this essay by considering a few of them. The story was included in Allen's collection Side Effects in 1978, and has been widely anthologized. Kugelmass only brings her for the weekend, which he tells his wife he’s spending at a conference in Boston; but when it comes time to send her back, the box malfunctions, and it takes The Great Persky a week to fix it. New Haven: Yale University Press. Translation tout court is shunned by many humanist scholars as limiting, confining, imprisoning for the imagination; but at least literary translation partakes at second hand, but still! We assume he’s not an English professor, since he gloats the first time he and Emma make love: “‘My God, I’m doing it with Madame Bovary! It is natural to humanize a machine like that. This will be doubly important for students reading in a foreign language, where, depending on their exposure to the culture in which the language is spoken natively, it may be difficult for them to make the text “come alive,” feel vibrant and real.

The Kugelmass Episode

At one time I might have been tempted to say that my mind only wanders when I translate boring technical texts, that I’m 100% on task when I translate literature; but it’s not true. He sets all kinds of rushing records. They show us things rather than tell us about things. Infidelity is one of the topics Allen satires on his short stories. As often happens when I translate, my mind started wandering; I wasn’t even sure where.

The Kugelmass Episode Summary & Study Guide

‘Me, who failed freshman English’” 68. He wants a French lover, so he chooses Emma Bovary. Maybe someone by Saul Bellow? Kugelmass chooses Madame Bovary, and appears in Emma’s bedroom at an auspicious period in between her affairs with Leon and Rodophe. The answer is: whatever movies the translator is capable of playing. I could feel the cold, feel the leather gloves on my hand, feel the crusty snow packed on the logs, hear the snow crunching under my feet, feel the hairs in my nose freezing together. In the beginning of the story, he speaks of having an affair with his ideal woman referring to her as beautiful and passionate. Simpson’s murder trial, I find that reference to him particularly telling: for Kugelmass O.

The Kugelmass Episode Essay

Author: Woody Allen Setting fdsfds Point of View The point of view is third person omniscient. And it seems likely to me that some of the horror that Allen humorously paints for us in the ending stems from Kugelmass’s and by extension our own realization that he is no longer in the familiar world of the translated literary classic, but in a how-to manual of sorts, a technical text that “lacks” the “imaginative” and even “human” element of Madame Bovary. The magic cabinet, however, allows one to step into the fictional realm and even characters from this side could move into the sphere of reality as Madame Bovary does when she follows Kugelmass into New York from the world of her book. At present it seems to be more or less a default choice, as no one knows what else to do —what else might be done. ” No wonder Woody Allen imagined tener as a giant spider. When I was learning the Spanish subjunctive I could never keep the endless lists of rules straight in my head, not even with plenty of time, when I was doing a written exercise; when I was trying to say something— quiero que.