Lost in translation

"It's strange how life can bludgeon you into a situation you never dreamed you could handle."

From his 1959 autobiography, "Groucho and Me," those are the words of Groucho Marx.

That is, unless you're using Google, which located a Japanese translation of the book somewhere on the World Wide Web and at the click of a mouse translated the page back into English:

"How doing, when it can insert in the hand, life whether it keeps facing, is strange ones to the kind of circumstances you have not never dreamed."

In this section of the book, Groucho is telling the story of how he and his brothers found out that they were funny all on their own and no longer needed to pad their vaudeville act with dancers or singers or other comedians. They were in the dressing room of a theater in Champaign, Illinois, when a singer named Manny Linden informed them an hour before a matinee that he was the reason for the success of the act and unless he got a raise from thirty-five dollars a week to fifty, he wasn't going on.

(If you Google "'Manny Linden' vaudeville" to find out what ever became of him, all you find is a Japanese translation of Groucho's book.)

The Marx Brothers told Manny Linden they would "struggle along without him" ("without he it can keep doing sufficiently"), and threw him out of the theater.

Groucho writes that after the singer's departure, he was "shaking with the feeling of impending doom" ("foreboding of the ruin which is imminent was shaken"). With less than an hour until the performance, he and his brothers went up on the bare stage of the empty theater and developed a comedy routine that would become their "first timid step over that mysterious line that divides the small time from the big time" ("the first step which and, exceeds the mysterious one line which separates with three flows and the top rank, does timidly").

"Naturally, we were nervous," Groucho writes, "because these college kids could be awfully tough if they didn't like what they saw ("because the university students do not like this, tried probably to mean very thing"). But it worked. They ate it up." ("They advancing, accepted that.")

"For the first time in our career we realized that we could succeed as an act without any outside help," Groucho concludes, "We had finally freed ourselves from always having some outsider along to put us over ("We finally, always borrowing the help of the person outside, from the fact that it makes the self recognize became free"), and from then on we were able to steam along under our own power." ("From that time, following to our yourselves abilities, it reached the point where spirit well it can advance.")

The purpose of telling you all this is two-fold: first, to prove that Groucho Marx is funny in two languages, and second, to plead with the federal government never to spend any tax dollars on automatic translation software, no matter how hard it is to find Arabic translators who can pass an FBI background check.


Copyright 2006


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