Gulliver's Voyage to Phantomimia

---

Gulliver's Voyage to Phantomimia is a 2020 transcreation of Volter Kilpi's unfinished and posthumously published Finnish novel Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle by Douglas Robinson. Kilpi is widely regarded as Finland's greatest writer; his 1933 novel Alastalon salissa ("In the Alastalo Parlor") was voted Finland's greatest novel in 1992. Alastalo is the first volume in a trilogy known as the Archipelago series, all based in Kustavi in the Turku archipelago between Finland and Sweden; after he had completed the trilogy, he wrote a brilliant little book of poem-like texts titled Suljetuilla porteilla ("At Closed Gates"); and after that, Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle.

Kilpi began it in summer, 1938, mainly to pass the time; he found is far easier to write than his great experimental modernist works of the decade, and was amazed as how quickly it poured out of him. He read his manuscript pages to family and friends, and the general consensus was that it was the most accessible and even exciting thing he had written in decades; he himself, however, thought it a slight thing, and when after writing 500 manuscript pages he suffered a debilitating stroke, he put it aside, and it was left unfinished at his death in June, 1939. It was published in 1944, in its incomplete state, by Kilpi's literary executor, Vilho Suomi.

The novel is a time-travel tale couched as the fifth voyage by the narrator-hero of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Plot

Lemuel Gulliver meets his old friend Cartwright, a whaling skipper, in the local pub every day for a few drinks, and they decide to sail to the North Pole. What they find when they get there--here Kilpi was inspired by Bertel Gripenberg's Swedish translation of Edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent into the Maelström"--is a polar vortex that sucks them deep beneath the earth's surface. When Cartwright figures out how to extricate them from the vortex, they are shipwrecked on the ice, where they are rescued by an expedition from the British Geodetical Society in three airplanes--it turns out that their month in the polar vortex has propelled them forward in time two centuries, to 1938, the year Kilpi was writing the novel. They are flown to London, where they find modern civilization absolutely terrifying and appalling--and that's where Kilpi left them.

Robinson's continuation of the plot involves an invitation to have lunch with the king (a Trump parody) and contact with pink Venusians, who help them escape in a stolen plane. They fly to the North Pole to cycle the vortex in reverse (the plot device that Kilpi reported to his son he was planning), but the rope they try to dangle in the water keeps bouncing out, so they tie it around Gulliver's father's Bible--and are propelled into the King James Bible. Ethel Cartwright, the skipper's 15-year-old son, rescues them from there and flies them back to 1738 and their home in Blyth.

Transcreation

What Robinson does is a "transcreation" in the sense that he not only has completed the novel, writing the ending for it that Kilpi told his son he was planning, but plays along with Kilpi's "found manuscript" conceit: Kilpi claims in a "translator's preface" that the manuscript appeared on his desk at the University of Turku, where he served almost twenty years as University Librarian, very old and faded and bundled in twine--and in English. For his (Finnish) readers' sake, he adds, he himself translated the manuscript into Finnish. Robinson creates a sketchy alter ego who claims to have found the same manuscript decades later and edited and annotated the entire thing in the "original" English.

This epistemological play is continued throughout the text of the novel and introduced in an editor's foreword, but is angrily challenged by a fictitious Finnish Kilpi scholar created by Robinson--a professor of Finnish literature at the fictitious University of Nuorgam who actually tells the truth, that Kilpi wrote the novel and Robinson translated the completed part and wrote the uncompleted part to the end.

Robinson also adds an English translation of Kilpi's "translator's preface" and an invented set of "random notes toward a vorticist manifesto," which pretends that Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis and gang found the same manuscript (written by Gulliver himself?) back in around 1914 and were inspired by it to create Vorticism and write the Vorticist Manifesto in BLAST! (1914).

Style

Kilpi's novel is stylistically a change of pace for the great modernist experimentalist: no more extended stream-of-consciousness passages. Still, the reinvented Finnish morphology carries over from the previous books of the 1930s, again in the service of archaism, but this time harking back to the mid-eighteenth century--a full century older than the setting of the Archipelago Series.

It's not clear that Kilpi's style in Finnish is an imitation of Jonathan Swift's style in Gulliver's Travels, but Robinson does write both the translation of Kilpi's part and the continuation to the end in a pastiche of Swiftian English.

Bibliography

• Kilpi, Volter. Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle. 1944. Reprint. Helsinki: Kensington, 1993.
• Robinson, Douglas, trans. Volter Kilpi, Gulliver's Voyage to Phantomimia. Bucharest, Romania: Zeta Books, 2020.

External links

• The Zeta Books web page for the transcreation
• The Modern Novel review
• The Collidescope review
• The Complete Review review
• Asymptote review
• The Feeling Bookish podcast about Robinson's transcreation
• Joel Kuortti reviews Robinson's transcreation (in Finnish)Category:Novels set in fictional countries

This article "Gulliver's Voyage to Phantomimia" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Gulliver's Voyage to Phantomimia. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Libraries in fiction
• Tales of Brother Goose
• Old Time
• List of boats in Arthur Ransome books
• 20th-century events
• Maritime science fiction
• List of S.L. Benfica founders

---