The Comanegra publishing house has had the good idea of publishing Extravagant Tales, by the great Mark Twain, translated by Jaume Creus. Revisiting the classics is always interesting, and revisiting the author of the unforgettable Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is always a pleasure. But I'd say this edition was written with a very specific intention, as the stories' translator, Jaume Creus, who also selected them, points out in his prologue.
As you know, Mark Twain is an ironic and biting author, and in these stories he truly displays these talents. But the curious thing—shocking and hilarious at the same time—is that the plots Twain's brilliant mind imagined to write these extravagant stories, intended to make us smile and laugh, are very similar, too similar, to the current situation we are living in right now. The second decade of the 21st century, an extravagant time.
To make his readers laugh, Mark Twain imagines journalists who don't know what they're talking about, silly characters dazzled by fame, the compulsive fabrication of lies... You see.
The first story, How I Ran a Farm Newspaper, made me laugh, perhaps because I've been part of the profession portrayed for many years. The protagonist is a journalist with years of experience who temporarily takes over the management of an agricultural newspaper in the absence of the regular editor. Undeterred, this substitute editor publishes some rather steep nonsense, such as that turnips grow on trees or that pumpkin is a citrus fruit.
The frightened regular editor interrupts his vacation and shows up to put an end to the disaster, although he admits that "it's true that we've never had such a demand for the newspaper before, nor sold such a large circulation, nor achieved such celebrity..." but common sense makes him think about his thought: "but who wants their own makes them think: "but who wants their own with their own makes them think: mental?" And now tell me: how many names come to mind to answer this question? Several rich and famous journalists and even a President of the United States.
The substitute editor, when he hears the criticism, defends himself with truly extravagant arguments, such as "I've been in the newspaper business fourteen years and in all that time this is the first time I've heard it said that someone must know something to run a newspaper." And he drives the nail home: "I can tell you that the less someone knows, the greater the rumor they cause, and the higher the salary they receive."
As I was saying: we live in extravagant times, and that is the mildest adjective we can apply to the nonsense we must see, hear, and experience every time we turn on the news or open the newspaper. Surely Mark Twain, if he were still alive and could see this first quarter of the 21st century, would say again, even more convincingly: "It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
A visionary man, as he spectacularly demonstrated by stating that, since he had come into the world in the year of Halley's Comet's arrival, in 1835, he hoped to be able to leave in 1910, with the comet's return. He died on April 21, 1910, the day after Halley's reappeared to make its closest approach to Earth.
