Tranter is a writer who knows how to make lemonade out of lemons.
Don't rewrite it! Give me a Zen tea cup without a crack and I'll
give you a cup made of formica. On what day did the Sirens impell
Odysseus to tie himself to the mast?
>Stuart Flynn recently drew the list's attention to a factual inaccuracy in
>a poem on the Internet, at
>
>http://www.asauthors.org/web_of_poets/Tranter/poems/elegy.html,
>
>for which I'm grateful. It's my poem, an elegy for my friend Martin
>Johnston who died in 1990. In the fourth stanza I recalled a remark of
>Martin's I had overheard very late one night at a party twenty years earlier:
>
> ... a tricky ploy with a bishop in the final moves
> of a game that seems to have fallen into a pattern
> remarkably similar to Botvinnik's closing tactics
> in the 1949 Moscow Chess Olympiad - don't you
> think? - the party still going at 4 a.m.,
> an old Miles Davis record on the gramophone,
> the ashtray spilling over - your move -
>
>There was no Chess Olympiad in Moscow in 1949.
>
>Martin may have been drunk at the time - the party had been going for a
>while - and he may well have misremembered the match, though Martin's
>memory and his knowledge of chess were both so extraordinary that this is
>unlikely. Far more likely is my own faulty memory, or perhaps faulty hearing.
>
>My knowledge of chess is scant, and when I wrote the poem the Internet was
>not the wonderful research tool it is today. I've now looked up Botvinnik's
>games on the Net, and it seems that the one I thought Martin mentioned may
>have been the only game for which I can find evidence of Botvinnik playing
>in 1949: a radio match with Alexander, though this seems unlikely.
>
>It may have been a game in the USSR championship, which he held in 1931,
>1933, 1939, 1941, 1944, 1949 and 1952.
>
>Or it may have been the World Championship held at The Hague and Moscow in
>1948, which Botvinnik won.
>
>Or it may have been the World Chess Championship, 1951: Botvinnik -
>Bronstein Title Match, Moscow, III-V, 1951 (part of the World Chess
>Championship 1949 to 1951 cycle).
>
>There are many other possibilities, but sadly Martin is not here to tell
>us. I'll just have to choose one, and rewrite the poem. I know Martin
>wouldn't have minded much. Some months before his novel "Cicada Gambit" was
>published in 1983 Martin had shown me a page of the proofs with patent
>delight. The publishers, Hale & Iremonger, had a computerised typesetting
>machine that used punched-paper-tape. In the middle of printing out the
>proofs for the novel, something went wrong with the computer, and it spewed
>out a page of gibberish - asterisks, colons, umlauts and random letters.
> 'Isn't it wonderful?' Martin exclaimed. 'I've asked them to
>leave it in.'
> But, sadly, the typesetter operator was unable to make the computer
>produce the gibberish a second time - or perhaps the publisher was
>unwilling to allow the gibberish to appear under its imprint - and the
>novel was published without it.
>
>John Tranter, Editor, Jacket magazine
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