On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Anders Engwall wrote:
> > In the fifties Finnish translations of "The
Long Goodbye" they left out
> > the scene where Marlowe resents some Finnish
client for being ugly and
> > misbehaving.
> Was it really in "The Long Goodbye"? I remember the
scene,
> but somehow my memory says it was in "The High
Window" or
> "The Little Sister".
I should say it was "The Long Goodbye", but I'm not so sure
now. I'll check when I get home.
> Anyway, Chandler must have had some sort of
special
> relation to Finland, since there is also a
Finnish
> hotel detective in "Playback". That makes it two
out
> of seven novels that have Finnish characters,
albeit
> minor ones. What were the odds, considering
the
> (presumably very low) number of finns living in
L.A.
> in the fifties?
Don't forget Albert Salmi (since we discussed Sam Peckinpah -
Salmi plays one of the bandits in "The Wild Bunch"). But to
get more serious, Chandler writes in one of his charming
letters that he received ten copies of the Finnish
translations of "Lady in the Lake", the first Chandler to be
translated, and makes some notions about the Finnish
language. Maybe it was so funny to him that he wanted to
include Finnish characters into his books. But isn't there in
"Red Harvest" a thug called Pete Finn or something like that?
I'll write an essay: "An Influence of Finnish Language and
Finnish Folk Nature as Imposed on Hard Boiled Literature,
seen from the Viewpoint of Postfeminist
Poststructuralism".
> ObOffTopic: it's not clear who was the first to
record
> "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone". There's even a
third
> contender; The W.C. Fields Memorial Electric
String
> Band. Well, at least they get bonus points for
their
> name.
They certainly do. Smack, a Finnish Stooges-wannabe band who
tried to make it big in the US back in the eighties, also
recorded it.
Juri
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