Competition: Language Barrier
Competition No. 2656: Language Barrier
Wednesday, 21st July 2010
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2656 you were invited to submit a dialogue between two well-known figures from different centuries, each using the argot of the time.
You responded to this challenge with your usual verve and skill, and I especially liked Frank McDonald’s conversation between Julius Caesar and Churchill (Templumcollis) on the trials of wartime leadership.
The winners, printed below, get £30 each and the bonus fiver goes to Brian Murdoch for an entertaining exchange between literary giants about Britain’s woeful performance in sport and song, of the sort that is to be heard in pubs up and down the land.
GC: ‘By Christes bludde and Goddes bones, saye me, Shakespeare, what men in Engeland nowadaye tell sootheliche of sporte and of playe.’
WS: ‘Well, as I am Will, so will I tell you, Dan Chaucer, and with a will, yet there will be naught for your comfort.’
GC: ‘Pricketh it not in hir corages, that the yonge carles of oure lande do winne at the balle?’
WS: ‘Not so. For by High Germanie was Albion’s expectation laid low, although the judges were, meseems, playing rather at Hoodman Blind. And at tennis was hope dashed by a naughty Spaniel. Ill-luck it be henceforth to name the Scottish Player.’
GC: ‘And eke with the troubadours? Whilom we could wel indite and singe lhude...?’
WS: ‘Swounds, yet there was Europa’s crown granted by Erato the Muse to a maid of Allemayne, for she had made the better musicke.’
GC: ‘Enow! I shall maken pilgrimage.’
WS: ‘And I’ll to bed betimes!’
Brian Murdoch (Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare)
DB: ‘Glad you could make the Manchester Derby, Mr Dickens. United will get stuck in till the final whistle.’
CD: ‘Indeed, I had to derby my watch and live on whistle-belly vengeance for days to pay for the train ride. I hope there will be some rare tackle, some fine victuals and a cheerer or two.’
DB: ‘We’re set on victory and there’ll be fans round the pitch.’
CD: ‘Ah, I could fanny a pitch in my time.’
DB: ‘We’re counting on our goalie to keep a clean sheet.’
CD: ‘Clean straw is that? Well he’ll be a clevershins!’
DB: ‘We don’t play foul, just a bit of handbagging. Our aim is to pitch in and get the ball in the onion bag.’
CD: ‘Give ’em onions do you? What a fine lark! Then you celebrate with your pissy pals and get three sheets in the wind?’
DB: ‘Yes, sir!’
Shirley Curran (David Beckham and Charles Dickens)
TL: ‘I dig your whole vibe, Tom. You are a beautiful human being. You are a child of the universe. I love you, brother. So I have to tell you that your title is, like, totally a bummer. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. That heavy mea culpa trip is not what we’re into, man. You’re not confessing your sins here. No way, Jose. You’re sharing tales of your adventures. You’re telling it like it is. You’re a bard. You’re a prophet.’
TDQ: ‘You are most gracious and congenial, Dr Leary. I collect that your own investigations into the nature of altered perceptions, with particular emphasis on some of those compounds, vegetable in origin and otherwise, implicated in such episodes of elevated consciousness, if so I may designate it, have endowed you with a salutary appreciation of Horatio’s imperative: to enlarge his awareness beyond what was dreamt of in his philosophy.’
Chris O’Carroll (Timothy Leary/Thomas De Quincey)
James I: ‘Master Wilde, I ken. Are you as wilde as your name?’
OW: ‘Never make play of a man’s name: you may be sure he has heard the joke before. A cigarette?’
James I: ‘Never. It is a vile, unnatural, stinking custome, fit only for heathen Indians. It fouleth the breathe and burneth out the braine.’
OW: ‘Ah, but what about the aesthetic spectacle of the curling smoke? Pure Beardsley. And there’s an oxymoron for you. Do you like oxymorons?’
James I: ‘I like Gods pure air, not the foule filthinesse of Tobacco smoake. The Almighty vouchsafed us fire to seethe our victuals, not our lunges.’
OW: ‘But one must be wreathed in something, and smiles are so bourgeois.’
James I: ‘You wax light with me, but I knowe whereof I speake.’
OW: ‘I certainly admired your fin de siècle. Mine went rather badly. As the wisest fool in Christendom, you must allow that I am the most foolish sage.’
Noel Petty (James I/Oscar Wilde)
SJ: ‘You were commended to me, Sir, as an enemy of cant. But I discover that you dismiss the cant of others merely to make room for your own.’
GBS: ‘When I hear a Tory speak of cant, I await a crackpot defence of every outmoded institution from monarchy to wage-enslavement.
SJ: I perceive you have no regard for rank, Sir. As a playwright would you place yourself above Shakespeare?’
GBS: ‘In ideas, far above. My concern, however, is with social order, with equality of wealth.’
SJ: ‘Sir, you talk the language of ignorance. In a general state of equality nobody would be happy. Levellers would drive out human nature with their pitchforks but it will always come running back.’
GBS: ‘Bosh! In this century the whole world-situation will change and allow sanity and socialism to prevail.’
SJ: ‘Two centuries of Whiggery and still dull hope triumphs over wise experience!’
W.J. Webster (Dr Johnson/George Bernard Shaw)
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