Well-caught banana fish

The story describes the stay of a young couple at a resort in Florida . Muriel, a young woman, is in her room on the fifth floor of the hotel. She calls up with her mother. During their conversation, the mother is constantly worried about her daughter because of the strange, in her opinion, behavior of her husband. Simor Glass, whom Muriel had waited since the war , according to her mother is mentally unstable, and she advises her daughter to beware. This conversation is constantly interspersed with topics about fashionable clothes and the weather. Simor himself at this time lies on the beach, wrapping himself in a bathrobe. He meets there with his friend - a little girl 3-4 years old by the name of Sibylla. She calls Simore to swim, and he tells her the story of the banana fish that eat bananas, swimming for the cave. One such fish ate seventy-eight bananas, swelled up, was unable to swim back out of the cave, and died of a banana fever. After swimming, Simor returns to the hotel. In the room where Muriel sleeps, he pulls a captured gun from his luggage and cockes the trigger. "Then he went to the empty bed, sat down, looked at the young woman, raised his pistol and fired a bullet at his right temple."

The meaning of the story is rather mysterious. The work does not fit well within the framework of modernism, its style is quite simple, and the plot, on the one hand, is simple, on the other - absurd. There are many different interpretations of the story.

The most common opinion is that Simor, who returned from the front with very unusual outlooks on life, is unable to endure both his boring - and rather vulgar - wife, and the same vulgar world, which leads him to suicide after talking with a little girl . Various authors here emphasize the motives of his remoteness from his wife (after the question of Sibylla - “Where is that aunt?”) ^[3] , self-identification of the hero with a gorged banana fish (“When Simor, joking with a little girl, tells her about the fabulous banana herring, which he swims into a cave where he eats a lot of bananas, but dies because he does not crawl through the door, he actually means his marriage. " ^[4] )

Interpretation of the story in terms of psychoanalysis is possible. The word bananafish in English has its own subtext - slang expressions to go banana , to get banana mean “ to go crazy”, “to go crazy” ^[5] . After the Second World War, a surge of interest in psychoanalysis arose in the United States. Two psychiatrists are mentioned in the story - one, whom Muriel's father went to about his daughter’s husband (it is reported that he gave Simor an extremely pessimistic diagnosis ), the second is at the hotel. Moreover, V. Rudnev draws attention to the motive of the legs constantly present in the story: Sibylla’s legs are constantly mentioned, and when Simor rises to the room by elevator, the following conversation takes place between him and the woman in the elevator:

““ I see you are looking at my feet, ”he said as the elevator went up.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear,” the woman said.
- I said: I see, you look at my feet.
- Sorry, but I looked at the floor! - said the woman and turned to the elevator doors.
“You want to look at my feet, say so,” said the young man. “Why the hell is this eternal pretense?”
- Let me out, please! - the woman said hastily to the lifters.
The elevator doors opened and the woman stepped out without looking back.
“My legs are completely normal, I see no reason to stare at them like that,” said the young man. ”

In psychoanalysis, the legs are a substitute for the genitals. Simor is not satisfied with the sex life with his wife (at the beginning of the story, an article is mentioned in the women's magazine that Muriel read titled “Sex is either joy or hell!”) And is content with latent sex with little Sibylla. The banana in this interpretation is a clear phallic symbol. The tale of the banana fish is a tale of sex and death, Eros and Thanatos . And suicide at the end is quite logical ^[6] .

One can consider the work through the prism of the fascination of J. D. Salinger with the East and Zen Buddhism . The story, “A Banana Fish Is Well Caught,” was Salinger's first published work on the Glass family. From other texts, a more complete picture of the hero can be made - he was a brilliant child, who knew and understood philosophy perfectly, was fond of poetry, Eastern teachings - in particular, Zen, while discussing this with his bride, and then his wife - Muriel, with whom He had a great relationship. All the actions and thoughts of family members (not just Shimor) are imbued with the ideas of Zen Buddhism. According to the same ideas, there is no juxtaposition of life and death. If enlightenment dawned on a person that he could kill himself, then there was nothing wrong with that. Simor could have killed himself not because he had everything bad, but vice versa, because he had everything good, from the fullness of life ^[6] .

There is also an “Eastern” interpretation related to other Indian religions . In Indian culture, a banana, its leaves are a symbol of love. So the very name of the story sets the mood for erotica, sensuality. The theme develops (completely imperceptibly for readers unfamiliar with the Indian tradition) throughout the story - thus, the paleness of the hero is constantly emphasized and the blue color is constantly being mentioned. In Mahabharata , Ramayana , etc., the hero’s pallor is the first sign of his love, and the blue color creates analogies with the blue lotus flower - the attribute of the god of love Kama . At the same time, love in Hinduism is not at all a positive feeling; it gives rise to base passions and brings a person out of equilibrium. So, in the story of Salinger, Sybil, jealous of Simor to her friend Sharon Lipschutz, demands that she be pushed off the stool the next time she sits with him when he plays music in the salon. Thus, Hindu philosophy considers love as the road to death, which comes either from mental illness (Muriel’s mother considers Simor sick) or from suicide (the hero kills himself at the end of the story). The numbers in the story also fit into this concept — speaking of a dying banana fish, Simor tells Sybil that she ate as many as 78 bananas. Then Sybil tells him that he sees a banana fish, but in her mouth she has only 6 bananas. Firstly, the banana in the Indian consciousness is not only a symbol of love, but also a symbol of weakness, fragility. Secondly, in Buddhism - 6 types of “unclean” passions ( tanha ). The number 78 may indicate 78 species of thirst for life (the number of these species may be different, 78 is one of the options). Thus, it is possible that the banana fish - a weak person - craves disastrous life pleasures - the continuation of life, but for Simor this is unacceptable. His suicide is the path to nirvana , the cessation of earthly reincarnation and suffering ^[5] .

As you can see, you can interpret the story in completely different ways, up to diametrically opposite points of view. What kind of meaning the author himself put into the story, obviously, will never be clarified for sure.

The story is known in four published Russian translations. The most famous, recognized by many as "classical" - is the translation of Rita Rait-Kovaleva . It is in her translation that the Russian title of the story sounds like “A good banana fish is caught”. In other translations, the story bears the title: “The best day of banana fish” (per. V. Golysheva and E. Nappelbaum ), “a wonderful day for banana fish” (per. S. Makhova ), “the very day for banabulka” (per. M Nemtsov ). In the magazine “ America ”, in a 1962 article, the name was translated as “A great day for herring” ^[7] - literally literally, in the USA bananafish is one of the varieties of commercial herring ^[5] . The latest translation, by M. Nemtsov, appeared in 2009, and caused extensive criticism (both negative and positive) of both the newest translation and the “classical” version of R. Wright-Kovaleva ^[8] .

In the version of Wright-Kovaleva, journalist and translator Alexandra Borisenko notes the following points: on the one hand, R. Wright-Kovaleva possessed undoubted literary talent , which made her translations well-perceived by Russian-speaking readers. On the other hand, the same literary talent of a translator often distorted the original work, Rait-Kovaleva actually became a co-author of the work in Russian, while some aspects inherent in the original were issued or transmitted in a somewhat distorted form. “... we can say that Rita Wright-Kovaleva introduced the reader to a somewhat simplified,“ harmonized ”Salinger, the very complexity of which was softened and shaded. This is a masterfully executed translation, consciously and consistently bringing the strange author closer to the mass reader ” ^[8] . They also point out the following drawback of translating the title of the story: the original name “ A Perfect Day for Bananafish ” can be understood both as “a good day for catching a banana fish” and “a good day for a banana fish” (that is, for the fish itself, and not for her fishing). The translation of Wright-Kovaleva omits the second meaning. The translation of M. Nemtsov (who re-translated both Salinger’s short stories and his novel The Catcher in the Rye ) is often criticized as poorly read, compared to the version of Wright-Kovaleva. At the same time, its advantages are also indicated - more exact matches with the original, attempts to save those moments that were important for Salinger himself.

• A Perfect Day for Bananafish - "guide" according to the story (English)