As Nabokov says, the translator is the betrayer. This is why Muslims who call attention to the sublime poetic quality of the Qur’an also deny that any translation of the book can rightly be called the Qur’an at all. You can’t pour fine old wine into new skins. Somehow it is the old skins that made it fine wine! It is only because of the logocentric bias of traditional Western theology that no one seems to have realized that the Bible is "revelatory" not because of any special informational content it may contain, but because of its poetic character. It is only to be expected that dumbed-down paraphrases like the Living Bible or the New International Version or the New Revised Standard Version just plain stink. The fools who translated them and priced them at thirty pieces of silver destroyed the one thing that made the Bible worth reading in the first place.
Sadly, it is precisely this element of poetic diction, that which makes Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” a chilling revelation (just listen to the Fedogan & Bremer audiorape of it!), that seems to me utterly lacking in Lin Carter’s "Dreams from R’lyeh." Thus I think it really belongs here as one more (prose) story in the Xothic cycle, manifestly linked to the others by internal references. This one just happens to rhyme.
“Dreams from R’lyeh” appeared originally in the Arkahm House Lin Carter collection of that same title in 1975.
Dreams from R’lyeh:
A Sonnet Cycle
by Wilbur Nathaniel Hoag [1921-1944]
(edited for publication by Lin Carter)
Eternal is the Pow’r of Evil, and Infinite in its contagion! The Great Cthulhu yet hath sway o’er the minds and spirits of Men, yea, even tho' He lieth chained and ensorcelled, bound in the fetters of The Elder Sign, His malignant and loathly Mind spreadeth the dark seeds of Madness and Corruption into the dreams and Nightmares of sleeping men.
—The Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, III, 17; the Translation of Dr. John Dee, circa A.D. 1585.
Death is no deterrent to the mighty dead. Even in decay their vast intellects can fill our sleeping minds with nightmare visions of the Pit and ultimate insanities beyond the reach of reason.
—Necrolatry (The Worship of the Dead), Ivor Gorstadt; Leipzig, 1702.
"Alhazred’s image of the Sleeping God leads one almost to the interpretation of Cthulhu as one of the dream-gods such as Hypnos; he is set forth as a god who infects the minds of those asleep with dark and terrifying dreams, nightmares, visions—spreading the germs of his own evil through the world through the medium of his own dreams."
—Cthulhu in the Necronomicon, Laban Shrewsbury, Ph.D., I.L.D., etc.; from an unpublished, fragmentary manuscript written circa 1938-39.
DR. Milton Avery Barnes, senior curator of the Manuscripts Collection of Miskatonic University in Arkham, Mass., has asked me to edit for publication the following verses which were discovered among the papers of the gifted young poet, Wilbur Nathaniel Hoag. Nearly thirty years have elapsed since the discovery of these poems, which are now published here in their final and corrected form for the first time.
The disappearance of Mr. Hoag from his ancient family home on State Street occurred during the night of September 13, 1944, and is still an unsolved mystery. He has since been declared legally dead by the County Court, however, and as he died intestate, leaving no clearly defined heirs, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has formally bequeathed his papers and his library to the University, on whose behalf my editorial labors have been performed.
The Hoag family was established in the old seaport town of Arkham in 1693, when Isaiah Hoag and his wife and eldest son settled there from Plymouth, England. The family fortune's were built on the South Seas trading voyages of Isaiah’s son, the famous "Yankee trader" Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag, who pioneered the rum and copra trade in the Pacific. Folklorists, anthropologists, and occult scholars may, however, know Captain Hoag best for his reputed discovery of the obscure and debatable Ponape Scripture in the Carolines circa 1734, which manuscript currently is in the possession of the Kester Library in Salem, Mass., and concerning which the late archaeologist Harold Hadley Copeland published his shocking and controversial book The Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the Ponape Scripture (1911 ).
For well over two centuries, the Hoags have been prominent in Massachusetts history. Their connections with the great Marsh family have been the subject of considerable genealogical research (it was, in fact, this same Abner Exekiel Hoag who wed Bathsheba Randall Marsh in 1713, and thus became the son-in-law of the famous Captain Obed Marsh, whose exploits as a merchant skipper are part of local Arkham legend). Still later, about 1780, the Hoag family also intermarried with the old Kingsport line founded by Amos Tuttle in 1604; the house of Hoag may, then, most fittingly be set among the ancient patriarchal families of Colonial New-England and in the light of their distinguished history it is exceedingly regrettable that the old line has become extinct at last.
Our poet, Wilbur Nathaniel Hoag, was of course the last of his line, and with his death or disappearance yet one more living link with the Colonial past of our country has ended. He was only a youth of twenty-three when he vanished so mysteriously, and in all the years since that time the facts of his disappearance have never been adequately explained, nor have the circumstances surrounding his death, or presumed death, ever come to light. Official queries at the time elicited from his neighbors that for some months before he vanished into the unknown, Hoag had become a virtual recluse and was seldom if ever seen, and then only during the hours of darkness. The morbid strain evident in his verses, the continual references to death and madness, the profusion of occult themes borrowed from, obscure, unwholesome mythological texts, indicate an unstable intellect bordering perhaps on severe aberrance. This is a question for the psychologist, however, and our principal concern here is purely a literary one.
In preparing these sonnets for publication, I have imposed upon them an order and sequence not indicated in the original manuscript. I have been aided by the rapid degeneration of Hoag's handwriting. What I assume to be the earlier verses, those relating to his childhood, are written in a dear and classic Spencerian hand; rapidly, however, the clarity decays to a hurried scribble, and, in the latter half of the sonnets, the penmanship has become an almost animal scrawl, the pages splotched and stained by the oddest pus or slime. Indeed, the latter verses are all but illegible, and so uncouth is their ragged scrawl that I have almost fancied them indited on the page by the deformed paw of some hybrid beast, than by the scion of a fine old Arkham family.
The mystery of Hoag’s disappearance—so oddly akin to the mystery of his late uncle, Zorad Ethan Hoag, murdered and repugnantly mutilated by an unknown hand (our poet makes shuddering reference to the crime in the sonnet I have numbered VII)—will probably never be solved at this late date. But the dark brilliance of his macabre verses, savoring of the more poisonously beautiful pages of Baudelaire, or Poe, or the late Rhode Island poet H. P Lovecraft, is dearly evident in every jeweled page. Morbid these poems are, but in the phrase of H. P Lovecraft, Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.