The Red Diary/The Re[a]d Diary

by Teddy Kristiansen, Steven T. Seagle

Teddy Kristiansen nos trae una historia donde realidad, ficción y arte se combinan en un misterio por resolver. El Cuaderno Rojo es una obra muy personal de Teddy Kristiansen ( Metrópolis, House of secrets), quién ya demostró sus habilidades para mezclar ficción y realidad en Es un pájaro… Un escritor en busca de su propia redención empieza a investigar la vida de un pintor de la belle epoque, Philip Marnham, del que no existe ninguna biografia. Poco a poco, encontrará el rastro de ese sus inicios y su adicción al opio, la vida en París, su alistamiento en el ejército durante la Gran Guerra, la guerra en las trincheras y finalmente el alto precio de la identidad del artista.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, World War I, Fiction, Art, Historical

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Teddy Kristiansen]

Well its my own creation so I cannot rate it:-) Great to find it at GoodReads.

[Bren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una historia dentro de otra historia y además contadas a través de imágenes.

Por un lado, el libro nos refleja el trabajo de investigación de un escritor que intentando realizar la biografía de un famoso poeta se encuentra con cartas y diarios de un pintor que vivió en Paris a principios del siglo XX, esto lo intriga y comienza a investigarlo.

Dentro de lo que se cuenta de este personaje es su paso por la Primera Guerra Mundial y esa parte de este libro, es realmente triste, fuerte y dura.

El libro no tiene realmente una secuencia tan lógica, tanto en tiempo como en espacio, es decir, da saltos en el tiempo y sin avisar, lo que al principio hizo que me confundiera, pero no hace que no pueda o no deba reconocer que este libro es realmente interesante.

Las ilustraciones son realmente fantásticas, tienen un estilo que hace precisamente que refleje toda la angustia, la tristeza y lo deprimente de algunas escenas, están hechas en un estilo impresionista en el arte que lo hace también algo digno de disfrutar.

Ambas historias, la del escritor y la del pintor nos refleja sentimientos de pesar, una trágica la otra triste, pero al mismo tiempo esperanzadora.

Creo que la parte más impactante ha sido lo contado por el pintor durante sus diarios en la Primera Guerra Mundial, es realmente desgarrador y las imagines ayudan a expresar ese sentimiento de tristeza y de derrota que tiene el personaje.

Me ha gustado mucho.

[Seth T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This weekend Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight lands in metropolitan theaters across America [review originally published in May 2013]. It’s a film that I am hotly anticipating and one I’m hotly anticipating landing in less metropolitan regions of the country. Before Midnight is the third in what may be my all-time favourite film series and follows Before Sunrise and its sequel, Before Sunset. And while I currently feel my blood vibrate in anticipation for a new sequel to Before Sunrise, this wasn’t always the case.

A decade ago when I heard there was going to be a sequel to Before Sunrise, taking place nine years after Sunrise's final moments, I was skeptical. The audacity that Jesse and Celine would happen to meet again for the first time in nearly a decade screamed: “Gimmick.” I will admit to some excitement and anticipation, as I was a tremendous fan of the first film and was cautiously optimistic. Still, I had a hard time seeing how a sequel set nine years later could in any way seamlessly flow from Jesse and Celine’s Long Conversation in Vienna (not official title). I was terrified that one of my favourite films would be diminished by someone’s need to force a sequel. But the funny thing about gimmicks is that they sometimes pay off.

In Before Sunset, the gimmick does pay off and Linklater delivers a maddeningly compelling film that actually enhances the value of the earlier film.[1] Happily for Teddy Kristiansen’s and Steven T. Seagle’s gimmick-steeped collaboration on The Red Diary/The Re[a]d Diary, their own gimmick pays off well and each half bestows a kind of blessing on the other half.

Explaining this book’s gimmick is almost certainly going to be obnoxious, but without the explanation it will be almost impossible to convey the wonder of the work. I’ll try to keep this brief.

The project began as a single book, Le Carnet Rouge, written and drawn by Seagle’s occasional collaborator, Teddy Kristiansen.[2] Seagle loved Kristiansen’s art on the book and wanted to bring it over to America under Image’s Man of Action imprint—only Seagle would have to be directly involved in the book’s writing for the work to be published through Man of Action. And as the book was already written by Kristiansen, that wouldn’t fly. Seagle might have gotten away with publishing via a translation credit, but he speaks neither French nor Danish (Le Carnet Rouge had already been translated into Danish. So he came up with the bizarro gimmick that would give us two books in one (the volume is presented flipbook-style, with each story reading from its respective front cover to the book’s center).

Here's a Vine showing the book's layout: https://vine.co/v/bVO2JOPjOWY

Through a process Seagle terms transliteration (but is really nothing like what everyone else means by transliteration), Seagle took the Danish version of the text and adapted its sounds into something like English, then cleaned that up and massaged it into a coherent story. (In the end notes I’ll provide the example that Seagle uses to illustrate the process.) The surface-level trick is that his story is wildly different from Kristiansen’s. Using the same art. The real trick though is that both his version and Kristiansen’s are very good stories, regardless of either their process of generation or how very little they resemble each other.


[Here’s an example. Seagle’s “transliteration” is on top and Kristiansen’s original is below.]

Both tread some of the same thematic ground, exploring characters whose identities are in flux, who submit to war as means to escape the self, and both feature a man named William Ackroyd who seeks to untangle a history divulged through a collection of diaries. But in Kristiansen’s book, Ackroyd is a biographer researching a poet who stumbles upon a more interesting story. In Seagle’s, Ackroyd is a former artist whose works are celebrated though the War took his ability to produce. In Seagle’s, Ackroyd experienced the fullest measure of WWI’s trench warfare. In Kristiansen’s, Ackroyd may not have yet been born at the time of WWI. Both stories concern a British painter in 1910 Paris (Seagle specifies Montparnasse), but their stories and experiences are very different. Both end up fleeing Paris, but in Kristiansen’s in fear for his life and in Seagle’s in fear for his soul.



Both stories are excellent, but at less than seventy pages perhaps rather slight. Put together and in contradistinction, Kristiansen’s and Seagle’s sororal twin stories present a powerful exploration of both the human condition and the narrative craft. Taking the opportunity to tell the two fully different stories under an identical restrictive framework gives the reader a unique porthole through which to observe the vagaries of the human spirit. Where Seagle’s story might initially appear as mere technical exercise (perhaps a challenge to himself if nothing else), the final result is intriguing and entirely worthwhile. In comparing the two stories while reading—almost an inevitability due to the format of the project—the ingenuity of both creators is magnified through a sort of meta-story that extends beyond the words and plotlines and art.



As with another big release from 2012, Building Stories, the order of revelation may be important as well. Depending on which version of the story a reader takes in first, impression of the other will shift and be somewhat governed by the experience of the first. The first time I read the two stories, I tackled Seagle’s “transliteration” first and followed that with Kristiansen’s original. Two days ago, I reread the work and reversed the order. My experience of the two short stories was quite different. Part of this would owe to the removal of suspense over just what is going on, but I think the larger part is how the reading of one book informs the phenomenon of the second. And vice versa.



Kristiansen’s art is brilliant as usual and is the strongest part of what makes Seagle’s gimmick here plausible. He conveys the variant Ackroyd’s stories through his usual downbeat palette and lightly impressionistic strokes. The art is vague enough to be read through multiple lenses (essential for Seagle’s scripting conceit), but concrete enough that we can grasp his figures as material solids, people whose lives matter with the kind of tangibility that breeds empathy. And while Kristiansen relies often on desaturated and muted earthtones and blues (lending a weighted mood to much of the work), he includes bursts of occasional red that feed fire into the reading. As well, some brighter outdoor scenes lend a trickle of the verdant to both stories, reminding us that even the reccountment of past woes can be lent verve in the manner of the telling.



Unlike Before Sunset, I find myself unable to forget entirely my initial thought that The Red Diary/The Re[a]d Diary combination is forged of a gimmick. It’s too thoroughly the book’s foundation and identity. But it doesn’t matter. The project embraces its gimmick completely and shows definitively that such tricks cannot determine the success or failure of a work; instead and unsurprisingly, it comes down to the usual mystery of craft, vision, and competency. Read this book/books/whatever it is.

“Transliteration”
Seagle provides an example of his process in the book’s backmatter (which is really actually middlematter since this is a flipbook). These are the opening lines of the book:

Kunsten kan, på sin egan brutale måde, få alle til at føle en rus, som en frygtelig sygdom, men måske den smukkeste af alle sygdomme.

Through “transliteration” this becomes:

Constant can father’s sin even brutality made for all til it falls in ruin some in foretelling wisdom men made the mistake of all wisdoms.

Then he cleans it up a bit:

Forever will man’s sins of brutality make for mankind until it fall in ruin wisdom itself foretells that man makes his mistakes in the name of wisdom.

And finally another pass renders it:

Forever will man’s sins of brutality make pain for all men—until they fall to ruin—who claim that their mistakes were made in the name of a greater wisdom.

Pretty weird, huh? Regardless, Seagle does something magical between the Danish and his final script. I don’t know just how much massaging was done to the text but I imagine that in places, the conscious reinvention had to be pretty substantial in order to maintain the fluidity of the narrative (especially with regard to names of characters).
_______

[Review courtesy of Good Ok Bad.]
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Footnotes
1) And if critics are to be believed, Before Midnight does the same for both of its own precursors.

2) The two worked together on the lauded It’s a Bird… and the soon-to-be lauded Genius . There are other collaborations, but I have not read them and so they do not yet exist for me.

[Cudeyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novela gráfica corta pero con mucho que decir. En pocas páginas y menos palabras aún el autor nos muestra el duelo del escritor, la locura del pintor y el horror de la guerra. Esta novela te sobrecoge el alma, sobre todo las escenas de la guerra, la I Guerra Mundial.

[Raina · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a neat idea. Two stories using the same illustrations - changing only the words. It's like an exercise in making sure the text of a graphic novel is just as important as the pictures. The stories have similar themes and subject matter, but are quite different. It's a fascinating concept.

So I'm glad I read it. For the experimental-ness. The illustrations are beautiful, but ultimately not specific enough to grab me. They're impressionistic, shadowy, undetailed. And I didn't find them particularly engaging. The pictures force the story into topics that I typically don't enjoy reading about. So maybe that's my problem.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic. I much prefer the original story, but they are both fantastic. The art captures the mood and darkness of WWI perfectly. A must read for anyone who loves graphic novels.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea for this book is fascinating. Two separate stories using the same images. First the original story translated into English in the normal way, then a different story "transliterated" from Danish into English by someone who doesn't speak Danish. He basically makes guesses about what the words might mean based on how they look.

That is a neat concept that seems like it could have been devised by the "Oulipo" group. Unlike much of the works from that group, the result is easily readable and makes sense, probably because the images also guide the story and the rules are much less strongly constrained than typical Oulipo formulas.

The watercolor art is often beautiful. Both stories are interesting. Melancholic and sad, with some painful scenes of WWI. I read the stories separated by about 2 months, so I can't easily make direct comparisons.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

En este comic se evocan reflexiones, recuerdos, sentimientos y búsquedas interiores, no lo conocía me llamo la atención y lo cogí por pura casualidad, me gusta descubrir nuevas cosas.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful art, ink and watercolor, and pretty interesting, interwoven stories from WWI. . . with some reflections on diaries and art and biography in the process. And that's just one story, Red Diary, written and drawn by Teddy Kristiansen.

Once you get to the middle of the book, you work from the back to read R(e)ad Diary, which is written by Stephen Seagle based on a silly idea he came up with back in college: If you can't read something in translation, use English words that look like the words you are reading and make up the story (!). He dignifies the process by calling it "transliteration," which sort of ruins the whole project, in my opinion.

So R(e)ad Diary is the same pictures from Red Diary, with a made-up "translation"! Is the story he invents interesting, good, against the original? I don't think so, and who cares? Does it tell us anything new about what we see? Not really, that's not the point of transliteration. Could any one of us invent what we think could be the dialogue in a graphic novel, if we want to? Sure, go ahead, but why call it "transliteration" and be constrained by your guessing what words in another language might mean? Yikes. Not to insult sophomores, but this seems to me sophomoric, pseudo-intellectual.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this without knowing anything about it other than I liked the cover art. I read the first and what turned out to be the original story translated from French and thought, good. Great art, fantastic painting-quality art and a somewhat muddled story about a biographer looking for information on an unknown artist who died in WWI. Then I got to the middle, where the first story ended and had to flip it over to read the other story, told with the same art by a different writer who had no knowledge of what the original story was about. I didn't know this until the end when I read the author's note so SPOILERS, I guess.
The concept behind the two stories is interesting and makes the work maybe more intriguing than if it didn't have this conceit. I like both stories about the same and thought they worked independently and created unintentional contrast and comparisons. Again the art is stunning. Overall not what I was expecting and I'm kind of glad I went into it blind, with no clue what was going on.

[Warren-Newport Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this without knowing anything about it other than I liked the cover art. I read the first and what turned out to be the original story translated from French and thought, good. Great art, fantastic painting-quality art and a somewhat muddled story about a biographer looking for information on an unknown artist who died in WWI. Then I got to the middle, where the first story ended and had to flip it over to read the other story, told with the same art by a different writer who had no knowledge of what the original story was about. I didn't know this until the end when I read the author's note so SPOILERS, I guess.
The concept behind the two stories is interesting and makes the work maybe more intriguing than if it didn't have this conceit. I like both stories about the same and thought they worked independently and created unintentional contrast and comparisons. Again the art is stunning. Overall not what I was expecting and I'm kind of glad I went into it blind, with no clue what was going on.

~ Amanda

[M.H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, it's an interesting enough experiment, but as a reader I felt cheated by the whole 'transliteration' thing. There was so much potential for, and indeed an expectation of, truly intricate and interwoven tales, even if both used the same graphics. (But that too left me feeling shortchanged, as we weren't treated to 60 new pages of the fantastic art.) Instead, in Re[a]d, we just get an echo that doesn't hold nearly the emotional resonance of the original. Four stars for "Red", two stars for Re[a]d" equals three stars.

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

a very interesting experiment in what Seagle calls "transliteration". And the art itself is somewhere between Munch and Kirchner - it's a treat.

[StrictlySequential · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so glad that I had a hard time understanding the "re[a]d" and switched to the "Red Diary" side of the book- it would have meant absolutist nothing without knowing the real story that it was attempting to translate.

READ RE[A]D AFTER YOU'VE READ RED!!

Seagle's "transliterated" (phonetic freestyle translation) "Re[a]d Diary" side is only interesting -even funny at times- AFTER you've read the authentic translation on the other side.

[Kristy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Confusing

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is interesting because of the concept behind it and the art work but unfortunately neither story is particularly special.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smuk og bevægende. Elegant historie

[Highland G · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the idea, not sure I picked up all the nuances in the translation. I definitely prefer the original over the ‘remix’ but I enjoyed the experience.
Feels like a very reflective book overall.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.
I read The Red Diary first, and then The Re[a]d Diary, which meant that I did not come to Steven Seagle's explanation of the stories' juxtaposition until after I had finished both versions. I was reading the second one (Seagle's "translation") under the impression that it was a retelling of the original story in some way related to the content, not just the art, and I spent much of the second story confused. I flipped the book over several times to go back to the first story, trying to regain the context, and figure out what was going on with the narrator's identity, but ended up no less confused--obviously. The way the book was printed, with the barcode and price on the side of The Re[a]d Diary, implied to me that I ought to start with The Red Diary, but I think I would have been better off the other way around, so that I would have understood that the second story was, in fact, a second story.

But putting the confusion of my poor random choice aside, I found this book remarkable. The art is wonderful and evocative. I think the fact that Seagle's story came so close to the original in many ways (such that I could confuse them for two angles on truly the same story) is a testament to the skill of the art. It tells a compelling story without the need for words. And I found Seagle's idea of "translating" languages he doesn't know clever and interesting. While I agree with him that at the beginning such work is merely a play on words and lacks depth, I think finding meaning out of that random assortment of words to make them something meaningful and interesting is a great exercise in language and creativity.

Perhaps I'll re-read the book at some point now that I know what's going on.

[Rachel C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two stories with the same set of artwork.

Teddy Kristiansen originally wrote and illustrated "Le Carnet Rouge." Steven Seagle wanted to bring the work to his publishing house and release it in English, but they needed him to get a writing or illustrating credit. He might have been able to get away with a translation; problem was, Seagle didn't speak French or Danish (the extant translation).

So instead, he did something funny. He took the Danish translation and "matched" English words to it based on appearance. (Sort of like how "voiture" in French means "car" in English but looks more like "vulture.") He then took the result and smoothed it into a story that fit the illustrations.

The result is that the two stories use the images completely differently. The themes are the same but the approaches are unique. Of the two, I actually preferred Seagle's. There was an unexpectedness, a freshness to the language. The story is metaphorical, diaphanous. Kristiansen's is more logical and literal.

The interesting thing, though, is reading the stories together. Because both feature a mystery of identity, they feed into each other, adding a meta-level of uncertainty.

A fascinating exercise in inspiration and collaboration.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've only read a hand-full of graphic novels. I'm learning to appreciate them as a genre.
This book was an interesting read. It wasn't super dynamic, but it kept my attention. I did have a little trouble following the story(-ies).
Without spoiling the book for anyone, this is a "flip" book containing more than one story. The concept of how it was put together was really an interesting one. A pretty cool idea.

[Whatsupchuck · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't realize it when I picked this up, but it's two separate stories. When you flip the book vertically the back cover isn't the back cover, it's the front cover again for a slightly different tale.

The art is identical in each story, but the plot and characters differ; both versions are written by two different authors.

Neither story really did anything for me personally, but I still admired the deviation from the norm and the spirit of sharing between the writers.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was really cool. I started with the Re[a]d Diary side, and I'm glad I did, but I don't really know if that's the side I was supposed to read first. I don't think it matters which order you choose. I do recommend reading the notes at the end of Re[a]d Diary at some point, unless you already know the deal with this book, which I didn't. I don't think I would have enjoyed it so much without knowing the idea behind splitting it the way they did. Good stuff.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book. One side is a translation of a graphic novel by Teddy Kristiansen about a writer researching the life of a forgotten WWII era artist. The other side of this flip-book is the story Steven Seagle wrote to go with Kristiansen's art before he read the translation of the text. Both stories are very good and deal, in one way or another, with issues of identity.

[Stewart Tame · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting idea. Through chance, I wound up reading the "remix" story first. It's interesting to see the similarities between the two stories. In the end, I think the idea behind the book is at least slightly more interesting than either of the two stories.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing how drawings can be interpreted. This flip graphic novel features that same art work but completely different stories - both of which I thoroughly enjoyed.

[Cecile · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting concept, but the story confused me (and not in the way that I think the authors intended), and the dialogue felt stilted (which is probably partly a problem of translation).

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully illustrated in watercolors designed to tell one story that are reinterpreted for another -- fantastic book!

[o · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. This was just okay. I immensely enjoyed the conceptual idea (transliteration), but didn't find either of the stories depicted especially interesting. Ah well.

[César · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5