Nazaroo

R - E - D - R - U - M : redrum = murder.

Chris Weimer

I'm not a moderator.

hallq

Here's an argument, a rather meta one, for its being a translation: translations come in many flavors, and are thus harder to find via search engines, and therefore is a logical choice by a puzzle maker who wants to prevent cheating.

Febble

This is fun.

Chris says it's "in a dialogue", so I'm trying to figure out whether the other speaker's lines are missing. If not, it's a soliloquy. And it does sort of sound like a translation.

Ionesco?

Beckett?

Clivedurdle

Sorry, I thought you were on one of the forums here, or used to be.

Ecrasez L'infame

Perhaps, since it's a dialogue, the first paragraph is the first person speaking. After all, Chris does say

- an adjective that obviously doesn't apply to the one beginning "But I disagree with you" but might to the one beginning "This is a known work". If we are looking at the two voices of a dialogue, the parties seem to be talking past each other. Chris and his Conscience, perhaps?

Clivedurdle

http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg...mages/336.html

Is it a surrealist work?

Febble

Now I'm thinking it's got a Martin Amis rhythm to it.

doctorzb

I'm no literary scholar, merely an engineer, but I'll present my interpretation.

First, I agree with those that say it is modern due to the use of modern idioms, like "phony" and "to the core." I don't buy that it is a translation, or if it is, it's a bad translation. I also think the short sentences with repetitive structure ("I'm not great. I'm a fraud. I'm a phony") suggest something recent, too.

As far as dialogue is concerned, this sounds like a letter more than spoken dialogue. First, it's very long-winded for a response to someone--and the rhetorical questions, "What hope do I have in this world?" and "What of faith?" seem weird in a spoken setting. I would suggest that this is a letter in response to someone who propose "hope for the future," "faith," and "love" as reasons to live. I find the last two questions incongruous--He asks, "what does it mean to be great? Do we agree?" I understand the first--the person he is writing to seemed to have offered a pep talk, but the second doesn't make sense, because the first line was "I disagree" and since the whole paragaph concerns the stuff they disagree about, it's not clear why he would think they might agree on any part of it.

As for the nature of the author, the text makes references to being "the best in my field" and having children, but both spoken as if they are in the future. The basic theme of existential angst and self-deprecation suggest someone very young. The awkward structure--the use of modern phrases and informal abbreviations ("it'll" especially) mixed in whith formal and sometimes laughable archaic structure like "Love has pained me," "I believe still," "learn more still" also suggest someone young, with a very immature style, who knows enough to borrow literary constructs from the books he's read, but not enough to use them in a coherent way. For example, "a perfectionist who'll never become perfect" seems especially goofy, since I think the failure to achieve perfection is assumed--that's the point of saying you are a perfectionist. "Tears I cry every night" also seems a bit melodramatic to me.

The religious content suggest that it was written in a religious context (the other person suggesting faith as a reason to live), but it doesn't seem very significant (I also note the lower-case reference to god). I don't think this is the kind of letter a youth would right to an adult in a position of authority or to a lover, so I suspect it's written to a friend. Since letter-writing is not so popular today, and has not been in a long time, I think that limits how recent it can be.

So in summary--I believe this is an excerpt of a letter written between 1925 and 1960. The author is between 16 and 22, he is intelligent and well-educated. It's part of a longer-term corrospondence between these two individuals who are close friends

-Zac

RED DAVE

Not bad for an engineer!

RED DAVE