Forty-four

Surely you’ve heard this old cornball.

Three guys are stranded on a desert island for 20 years. Not only have they told all the jokes they know, but they’ve told them all so many times that by now they just refer to them by number.

So when one guy says, “Thirty one,” it sends them all into a giggling fit.

And when another guy says “Ninety-six,” they crack up over that.

Then the third guy says, “Sixty!” and nobody laughs.

“Hey!” he says. “That’s a funny joke!”

“Yeah,” says one of the others. “But you always screw it up.”

Pan man

The joys of travel caught up with us last week, and we spent an unscheduled 24 hours in Ohio. We muttered and sputtered, but we came out ahead overall — because we happened to pick up a copy of J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan at an airport shop.

We’ve long been partial to Mr. Pan, a heathen deity who shows up often in legend and literature. For one of his darker turns, read The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen.

Barrie’s play and novel, written at the turn of the 20th century, were darker than the Disney version — no surprise there. But what stunned us was the writing: Barrie was a perfectionist, unrelenting.

That’s all we ask.

Lost in translation

Funny quiz on literary back-translations by Henry Alford in today’s NYT Book Review.

Best of show: Angry Raisins, the English version of a Japanese publisher’s attempt at The Grapes of Wrath.

Alford’s own multiple-choice offerings are worth the read.