Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/In His Own Write/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Gog the Mild via FACBot (talk) 19 July 2021 [1].

In His Own Write

Nominator(s): Tkbrett (✉) 20:12, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Fifty years on and the music of John Lennon and the Beatles remains as relevant as ever, even among new generations. But in the decades since, many have forgotten that amidst the hysteria, John managed to release two collections of Lewis Carroll inspired prose and poetry. This article is about the first of those books – In His Own Write, published in March 1964. Tkbrett (✉) 20:12, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Image review: Licensing looks OK except File:John Lennon - In His Own Write - first drawing.jpg. The fair use rationale seems weak since this drawing doesn't appear to be actually discussed in the text. Lennon's art style is briefly discussed in other sections of the article but I'm not convinced as it is that "its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the article topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding" as required by WP:NFCC. (t · c) buidhe 20:36, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- buidhe: I was afraid this might happen. The book's drawings factor largely into things, but most commentators only discuss them in general and don't mention any specific drawings. I've gone ahead and removed it. I added an image of Lennon and McCartney that is PD thanks to the Dutch. Tkbrett (✉) 14:08, 27 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - Looks good! (t · c) buidhe 15:54, 27 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    - buidhe: I added an image that is PD b/c it was produced by the US federal government. Tkbrett (✉) 13:59, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      - 👍 (t · c) buidhe 19:58, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Coordinator note

This has been open for more than two weeks and has yet to pick up a general support. Unless it attracts considerable further attention by the three week mark I am afraid that it is liable to be archived. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:33, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. I'd be sad to see this archived without any discussion of the content. (I haven't been at FAC for almost 15 years, so please take my comments with a helping of salt). This is a very nice article about an interesting book of nonsense, and I will right now only talk about possible concerns with comprehensiveness (but am open to be persuaded that more detail would be harmful, and that satisfying my curiosity isn't worth bloating the article). I've read Lennon's book in its German translation In seiner eigenen Schreibe as a teenager, many years ago. Or more precisely, in a mostly (or even completely, I don't remember) bilingual edition. I do remember that "The Famous Five Through Woenow Abbey" was given in the original, together with a similar German version that was not referencing Enid Blyton, but Karl May. I'm curious whether other translators employed similar techniques of not just translating the text, but also adapting the references to a different cultural background. Do you know anything about the content of the translations other than that they exist? Another concern is that the analysis in the article is very much focused on the text, and the images play very little role. They do seem to differ from what I can see of Thurber's work online enough that one could try to say how they differ, or generally to comment on Lennon's style a bit more, even if just to say that while the texts make us (or Paul) wonder "Is he deep?" the pictures just make us go "I like the drawings too". Having a sample of art here to compare with one of Thurber's could help. To put this into context, did Lennon's style change for his next book that seems to have (relatively) more illustrations or was it just more of the same? —Kusma (talk) 22:51, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Kusma for your incisive comments. I wish I could write more about the translation process. I assumed – and your description of the German version confirmed – that a direct translation of a book like this, filled with English puns and British pop culture references, would obviously not be sufficient. The article hints at the difficulty involved by mentioning that the Finnish publishers hired their Joyce translator to do the job. Unfortunately though, I do not have much else to work with from available reliable sources. I haven't found any discussion on how translations differed, nor how effective they were. What is in the article is really all I have found.

I also wish I could add more on the illustrations. I have unfortunately been limited in that the sources do not generally refer to individual pictures, but only speak about John's drawings in general. (Refer to the image review above). The focus in all the sources is almost entirely on the text; the contemporary reviews that James Sauceda excerpts in The Literary Lennon do not refer to the drawings at all, except Christopher Ricks who says the book contains "[a] few expressive drawings". In Tom Wolfe's review, he says the drawings are like a cross between James Thurber and Paul Klee, but other than that the rest of his review is dedicated to discussing the text. Sauceda provides an interpretation of every one of the book's illustrations, but he is chiefly concerned with the literary aspects, and so does not describe the artwork itself and how it relates to John's influences. Maybe this is an option: both Sauceda and Tim Riley interpret a drawing of a woman accompanying the book's piece "A Letter" as depicting Christine Keeler. I'm not sure if that's enough to warrant its inclusion by the fair use standards, but that's the only drawing that Sauceda and another source both interpret, so I don't think there are really another other options. Tkbrett (✉) 00:22, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Tkbrett: I appreciate that it is difficult to write much about the illustrations, as the focus of most of the scholarly literature is the text. I'm wondering whether books focusing on Lennon's art like John Lennon: The Collected Artwork have more information? There's an amazing auction catalogue with many originals relating to In His Own Write (the auction was very successful). But if there's no thorough discussion in the literature, there shouldn't be a thorough discussion of the drawings in this article.

I've searched a bit for German literature relating to the translations, and will try to add a sentence or three with my findings. A highlight that may be interesting enough for this article is that the publisher tried and failed to persuade Arno Schmidt to translate the book (Schmidt later worked on translating Finnegans Wake into German). There also appears to be a revised translation that didn't do much except modernise the cultural references (replacing Sepp Herberger by Jogi Löw, for instance). But it is rare for Wikipedia articles to write in-depth about translations into other languages, even in cases where dedicated scholarship exists (Translations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is one), so perhaps I'm the only one who cares :) —Kusma (talk) 10:13, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wrote something much longer than one sentence, see the top of User:Kusma/sandbox. Probably too long to include in the article, so I haven't done that yet. —Kusma (talk) 21:27, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You could also try to use some of what Doggett writes on p. 49 of "The art & music of John Lennon" to mention a tiny bit more about the drawings, and use one of the illustrations he mentions. —Kusma (talk) 21:41, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And I have found something structural (with a little on translations, but mostly about the language transformations used by Lennon), a 1967 article by a German linguist that you can find on TWL. She says on p. 147 (all following translations mine), "its translation into other languages [..] does not depend on the objective equivalence of the German and English expression, but on a (not to be defined here more precisely) structural equivalence of the linguistic signs that in both cases can be connected by means of similar derivation relations to standardised forms of German or English." She then goes on and analyses at length how Lennon's replacement of standard English by nonsense English works (and perhaps the fact that such a scholarly study exists could be mentioned in the Wikipedia article?). Possibly interesting also to the non-linguist is her observation on p. 192: "This consequence is equivalent to the conclusion that the human author, too, is operating inside a frame of limited possibilities when creating linguistically distorted constructions. It is therefore unsurprising that, when reading the second volume A Spaniard in the Works, a feeling of tiring repetition gradually ensues for the reader: although new expressions are coined incessantly, he recognises — probably not consciously — the known method of formation." So if you think the second volume is just more of the same, there's a linguist who agrees with you. —Kusma (talk) 23:14, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is all fascinating, but does not move the nomination towards a consensus to promote, or not. I am archiving and suggest that the discussion be continued elsewhere, WP:PR would seem best as further contributions may be elicited there. Gog the Mild (talk) 09:21, 19 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Closing note: This candidate has been archived, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through.

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.