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Under the Pyramids (1924)

H. P. Lovecraft 108 opinionesEscritor

El misterio atrae al misterio. Desde que mi nombre se ha difundido ampliamente unido a la ejecución de proezas inexplicables, me he tropezado con relatos y sucedidos extraños que, dada mi profesión, la gente ha relacionado con mis intereses y actividades. Unos han sido triviales e irrelevantes; otros, profundamente dramáticos y absorventes; otros han dado lugar a horribles y peligrosas experiencias; otros, en fin, me han involucrado en extensas investigaciones científicas e históricas. He hablado y seguiré hablando sin reparo de muchos de estos casos. Pero hay uno que no puedo contar sino con gran renuencia, y sólo tras repetida insistencia por parte de los editores de esta revista, quienes han oído vagos rumores sobre él por boca de varios miembros de mi familia.

Lovecraft escribió este relato por encargo. Basado en una historia del famoso ilusionista Harry Houdini (1874–1926). Publicado por vez primera, con el título de Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, en el Weird Tales - Vol.04 No.02 (1924) - (enlace).



Apariciones
VolumenEditorialAño
The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham 4 opinionesLiveright Publishing CorporationSep 2019
Lovecraft Illustrated Volume 14 - Herbert West Reanimator and Kindred Night Spawn 1 opinionesPS PublishingSep 2017
NecronomiconGollancz2008
The Doom That Came to SarnathBallantine BooksFeb 1971
The Tomb and Other TalesPanther1969
Dagon and Other Macabre TalesArkham House1965
MarginaliaArkham House1944
Weird Tales - Vol.04 No.02Edwin Baird (Rural Publishing Corp.)May 1924

Obras derivadas
TítuloAutorAñoIdioma
Encerrado con los faraonesEduardo Haro Ibars1974Español
Aprisionado con los faraonesEnrique de Obregón1981Español
Encerrado con los faraonesFrancisco Torres Oliver1983Español
Bajo las pirámidesJ.A. Álvaro Garrido1997Español
Sob as PirâmidesJosé Manuel Lopes2008Portugués
Encerrado con los faraonesMarcelo Caballero, Edgardo C. Lois2009Español
Bajo las pirámides (Encerrado con los faraones)Francisco Arellano2018Español
Encerrado con los faraonesJosé María Nebreda2019Español
Bajo las pirámidesLucía Márquez de la Plata2020Español


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JonathanStrange Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 13:55

3382 mensajes
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Tal como dijo Gorgo aquí:

¿Henry George Weiss?

El señor Houdini. No sé por qué razón no estaba en el relato original y lo he añadido al actualizar la segunda edición de Más allá de los eones.

Gorgo Héroe Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 14:08 (editado 25-03-2019 14:17)

3774 mensajes
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↕ 13 minutos ↕

Hasta donde yo sé, la autoría de este relato es únicamente de Lovecraft. Lo de Houdini es puro marketing. Lovecraft cobró bien por el encargo y todos contentos. De todas formas, consultaré mis fuentes.

JonathanStrange Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 14:25

3382 mensajes
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↕ 16 minutos ↕

Sí, eso lo sé. Pero estando en un libro de "colaboraciones"... A mí me parece bien dejar a Lovecraft únicamente si seguimos ese criterio, pero lo mismo habría que dejar alguna nota, ¿no? Algo más explícito.

Neddam Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 14:40

18154 mensajes
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↕ 15 minutos ↕

Howard P. Lovecraft: El escritor de las tinieblas

Entropía Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 14:49

16507 mensajes
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↕ 8 minutos ↕

Pero a ver, Henry George Weiss es otro individuo que nada tiene que ver con Erich Weiss (Houdini) .

Saludos,

Entro

JonathanStrange Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 15:14

3382 mensajes
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↕ 25 minutos ↕

My fault! Eso me pasa por tirar de memoria. Ya lo he quitado. Veo que Harry Houdini no está dado de alta en la DB. ¿Lo dejamos con Lovecraft?

Entropía Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 15:24

16507 mensajes
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↕ 9 minutos ↕

A ver, tal como yo entiendo la situación (corregidme). Joshi no incluyó este relato en su lista de colaboraciones porque lo considera sólo de HPL, pero Valdemar lo ha metido en la 2ª edición porque tampoco lo metieron en las obras completas, ¿correcto? En ese caso deberíamos dejarlo como sólo de HPL.

Saludos,

Entro

JonathanStrange Bibliotecario
25-03-2019 16:01 (editado 25-03-2019 16:15)

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↕ 37 minutos ↕

Por mí, perfecto. Estoy intentando localizar el Comprehensive Bibliography para investigar (juraría que lo compré en digital...).

Edito (y perdón por los fallos; viene de un PDF):

¡Spoiler!

“Under the Pyramids.”

Novelette (10,950 words); ghostwritten for Harry Houdini in February 1924. First published (as“Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”) in WT (May–June–July 1924); rpt. WT (June–July 1939); first collected in Marginalia; corrected text in D; annotated version in TD.

The escape artist Harry Houdini narrates in the first person an account of a peculiar adventure he experienced in Egypt. Some Arabs—led by a man who uses the name Abdul Reis el Drogman—bringHoudini to witness a boxing match on the top of the Great Pyramid; but after the fight is over theArabs seize him and cast him, bound tightly by rope, down a spectacularly deep chasm in the Temple of the Sphinx. After awaking, he struggles not merely to escape from the temple but to answer an “idle question” that had haunted him throughout his stay in Egypt: “what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?” As he seeks an exit, Houdini encounters an immense underground cavern—“Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight…mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance”—peopled with hideous hybrid entities. Houdini ponders the curiously morbid temperament of the ancient Egyptians, in particular their notions of the spirit or ka, which can return to its body or other bodies after it had “wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible way.” There are “blood-congealing legends” of what “decadent priestcraft” fashioned on occasion—“composite mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods.” Considering all this, Houdini is dumbfounded to come upon living embodiments of such entities: “their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns…. Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches… men should not have the heads of crocodiles….” But an even greater horror is revealed by Houdini’s discovery of the answer to that “idle question” he had asked himself earlier. The composite creatures appear to be laying down huge amounts of food as offerings to some strange entity that appears fleetingly out of an aperture in the underground cavern: “It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk… Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture.” What could it possibly be? “The five-headed monster that emerged…that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus…the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw….”

HPL recounts at length in letters how he came to write the tale. WT was struggling financially, and the owner, J.C.Henneberger, felt that Houdini’s affiliation with the magazine might attract readers.Houdini was the reputed author of a column (“Ask Houdini”) that ran in a few issues, as well as of two short stories probably ghostwritten by others. In mid-February Henneberger commissioned HPL to write “Under the Pyramids.” Houdini was claiming that he had actually been bound and gagged by Arabs and dropped down a shaft in the pyramid called Campbell’s Tomb; but as HPL began exploring the historical and geographical background of the account, he came to the conclusion that it was complete fiction, and so he received permission from Henneberger to elaborate the account with his own imaginative additions. Henneberger had planned to publish the story as by “Houdini and H.P. Lovecraft,” but was disconcerted that HPL had written the account in the first person; he thought readers would be confused by a first-person story with a joint byline, so HPL’s name was omitted. (His role in the story was acknowledged in an editor’s note accompanying the 1939 reprint of the story.) HPL received $100 for the tale, paid in advance. He wrote the tale hastily in the last week of February, but then left the typescript in the train station in Providence while leaving to go to NewYork to marry Sonia H.Greene. (The ad HPL placed in the lost-and-found section of the Providence Journal supplies his original title to the story.) Accordingly, he and Sonia spent much of their honeymoon preparing a new typescript of the story from HPL’s autograph manuscript, which fortunately he had brought with him.

The tale is surprisingly effective and suspenseful, with a genuinely surprising ending for those reading it for the first time. HPL’s Egyptian research was probably derived from several volumes in his library,notably The Tomb of Perneb (1916), a volume issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had seen many Egyptian antiquities firsthand at the museum in 1922. Some of the imagery of the story probably also derives from Théophile Gautier’s non supernatural tale of Egyptian horror, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”; HPL owned Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882). The writing is somewhat florid, but deliberately so; and there must be a certain tart satire in the fact that Houdini—one of the strongest men of his day—faints three times in the course of his adventure.

Entropía Bibliotecario
26-03-2019 14:53

16507 mensajes
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↕ 22 horas ↕

De ahí parece claro que HPL fue el único autor del relato.

Saludos,

Entro

Gorgo Héroe Bibliotecario
26-03-2019 18:07

3774 mensajes
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↕ 3 horas ↕

En realidad Sonia Greene estuvo mucho más cerca de la coautoría que Houdini.

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