...Of Matters Related To The Dr. John Blaisedell Translation Of The Necronomicon by Fred Phillips ...I am beginning to dig my city once again... yesterday I walked up Broadway from Canal St. after work, just looking at people and buildings. I was enjoying the poured-concrete imitations of cast-iron imitation pillar fronts of Neo-Graeco-Roman-design office building entrances. I made it over to the Bowery, and up along 7th St. past McSoreley's Old Ale House, where St. Basil's Eastern Orthodox Church bares its copper-green onion domes to the fading sun, in a neighborhood where the kids playing ball will shout, "Hey, Ronnie -- shto svamya gavareetz!" I stopped in a little second-hand bookstore to pick up a parcel of books I had paid for last Tuesday. Nothing terribly exciting, just the Niebelungenlied, Vasari's Lives of the Artists, Yama the Pit (the story of a 19th century Russian whorehouse), by Alexander Kuprin, and an old Avon Classics copy of the Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred. I couldn't believe it; everybody thinks it was just a joke or a literary trademark of the 1930's American horror writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Most people who are part of the 1930-ish horror literature revival call him "HPL" -- you know, like RLS or GBS, and among a small but devoted following of "Lovecraftians" he is quite as famous as Stevenson or Shaw. He has been called the Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century. But the weirdest thing, man... I open the book and find that it's a translation by a Dr. John Blaisedell, Professor of Islamic Literature at Cornell, and I start reading in Anglicized transliteration of what appears to be one of Alhazred's incantations: "Ya melik imsha ti-pukul ge-yesuruh istahan yesemliq..." It is supposed to be a filthy corruption from the opening of one of the sacred Surahs of the Mohammedan Bible, the Qu'uran, and there is all this controversy attached to it. You must understand that religious feeling among Muslims today approaches the intensity of belief which existed in Europe during the Dark Ages, so much so, in fact, that devout Muslims take for granted the Shahadar: "Lailla ey lala Allah..." there is no God but God -- "ey Mehomet Rasoul Allah..." and Mohammed is the Prophet of God. They accept this subconsciously as living fact, and regard the Hegira, or the story of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Yathrib on El-Kaswa, his favorite camel, as the pure, living gospel. So naturally, they will consider Abdul Alhazred, who invokes El Shaitan repeatedly, the same way that Bishop Montague Summers, and all good Christian theologians, consider someone like, for instance, Gilles de Rais, or Cornelius Agrippa, or Dr. Faust -- not just as a sorcerer, but as an anti-Christ, or in this case, an "anti-Allah" or devil-worshipper. Three of Blaisdells's students quit his course when they found out he was translating the Necronomicon. The Necronomicon is the Arab version of the Egyptian and/or Tibetan Book of the Dead. (Literally, it means "Laws of the Dead," from the Greek "nekros," dead, plus "nomos," law.) A lot of people have erroneously been translating it as a Greek-Latin hybrid word: nekros, dead, plus nomen, name; hence, "Names of the Dead." This is wrong, according to Blaisedell, and according to Thomas E. Lawrence (the T. E. Lawrence of Arabia) who found a copy of it when he entered Deraa, and recognizing it, hid it instantly in his kit-bag, for fear that he would be killed on the spot by his soldiers if they knew it to be in his possession. He was at that time a Mohammedan, having converted for political and military purposes, and a subject to the religious laws of Islam, which had placed such an interdict on the book, that if anyone was caught even looking at it, he would have been obliged to show reason to what would be the Mohammedan version of a Hebrew Council of Judges or a Christian Ecclesiastical Court, why his eyes should not be put out for offending the sacred memory of the Prophet. Any connection whatsoever by a Mohammedan with the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred is considered, even to this very day, as the most profane and horrible heresy, and to touch it is, according to their theology, akin to announcing to El Shaitan that you wish to strike a bargain with him; to actually open it is sacrilege of the First Water, and to read from it is ordinarily punishable by death... Naturally, Lawrence could have made no mention of the book in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or run the real risk of enjeopardizing Britain's foreign relations with the Mohammedan nations of the world whose oil, remember, she needed for her Royal Navy to guard her merchant shipping trade lanes. So he brought it back to England with him, and secretly began translating it in 1921, six years before he changed his name to Shaw. Remember, also, that Lawrence was originally an archaelogist, and a discovery like the Necronomicon would understandably have represented a unique prospect for cultural investigation. Some plans interfered with the work, and then he began piling up material for his memoirs, the "Seven Pillars," and when Blaisedell paid him a visit in June, 1924, Lawrence sold him the book and the manuscript of the translation for five hundred pounds, on condition that Blaisedell keep Lawrence's name out of it. So up until chapter V, which Blaisedell re-checked and found grammatically accurate, what we actually have is a Lawrence translation, although Blaisedell gets the credit for translating the remaining fifty-two chapters. Avon Classics paid through the nose to get their hands on it, and printed about 20,000 copies. The first edition sold so poorly, however, that they discontinued its publication and got stuck with a considerable deficit. The three students who quit Blaisedell's Islamic Lit. course at Cornell were the children of the Egyptian ambassador, the Syrian Consul, and the daughter of the chairman of a trade delegation from Trans-Jordan, and they managed to raise quite a stink for 1933... My copy is very much yellowed by age, being printed on a particularly inferior grade of pulp crap, which sold at the time for 50 cents. The date of publication is March, 1934, during which time Blaisedell was still a member of the Cornell faculty, although he had already had conferences with the Dean of the School of Humanities and a private talk with the President of the University, Dr. Keegan. Blaisedell is living on pension now in his home town of Pockumtuck, N.Y..... [pp. 61 - 66, NO-EYED MONSTER #15, Spring 1969]
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