Famous Imps

On Living Fossils, Botanical and Literary

I’m at the far back end of my current translation project, The Parson in Jubilee by Jean Paul, and so have been preoccupied with it. Lately, my health has been mostly bad—a flareup of a lifelong still undiagnosed chronic cough—but the work has been going well, so that doesn’t bother me too much. Being preoccupied is as good a pill as any I’ve taken for it. In the middle of all this, one of my houseplants has bloomed, a Pachypodium, producing a single white fragrant flower, long and trumpet-shaped, like what an archangel might sound. I can’t recall the specific species, having lost the tag from the nursery, but all in all Pachypodiums (Pachypodia???) are strange, native to southern Africa, primarily to Madagascar but some to the continent proper. The diagnostic features are spines and succulent elephantine trunks, thick-footed, as the name of the genus suggests. Many species can grow directly on rock. As houseplants go, they are easy to maintain—a cross-country move didn’t kill mine—but they rarely flower, and that makes me a little bit houseproud. The fragrance is strange, unlike any other flower I can recall—it’s musky but pleasant, not overpoweringly so.

As I said, Pachypodia are easy to cultivate, but the flowering has reminded me of how strange houseplants are as a concept. Even in a controlled environment, it surprises me that something from half a world away, from a rocky desert no less, grows more or less contentedly, rather than straight up withering to die. Madagascar being a very poor country, the native flora and fauna aren’t doing well at all, and it might be that these plants survive for the most part in cultivation, even in humid cities on the Eastern Seaboard. Philadelphia is notable for this. A lovely flowering tree in the camelia family, Franklinia alatamaha, was collected from a single site by the botanists John and William Bartram in 1765, along the namesake of the species, the Altamaha River in what is now Georgia. The trees were a remnant, we now know, of Ice-Age flora left isolated by the retreat of the glaciers. And yes, the genus (monotypic) was named after that famous imp of early American history, Benjamin Franklin. Nobody has been able to find and recover the wild population since then, but the tree survived in West Philly, at Bartram’s Botanical Garden, the first established on the continent, and now can be found in quality home and garden stores.

I can’t help but analogize those two vocations, horticulture and translation. J.P. had a madness for them too. My main literary interest is in old and obscure. Stylistically, these books are living fossils, remnants of an artistic and linguistic environment that no longer exists. Though often very beautiful, they take quite a bit of research to germinate. I’m glad that the Germans (not a phrase often said), in their taxonomic mania, have made a library’s worth of 18th and 19th-century dictionaries freely available to me online. A book is more alike to a cottage garden—I won’t steal valor and say a farm—than it is to a single houseplant, but the labor, at least its cyclical nature, is comparable. Water at this time, fertilize at that time, research this, write that, edit edit edit edit edit. Rather than an artist or an educator, I prefer thinking of the translator as a gardener or at least a flowerpot. Through patient cultivation, something can grow, even if the world has changed so much between the fruit and the flower.

Franklinia alatamaha by William Bartram (1782)