“ork?” repeated the penguin1
Hi.
I just found this article on emperor penguins which I think may have been translated from the Belgian. From the Belgian who has a bit of an…um…unscientific style, let’s say. All in all, what results is as charming and odd as a penguin itself. Here are my favorite observations:
“End April the animals gather in colonies and organise a courtship that lasts 3 to 5 weeks.”
“Organise a courtship�” Is this like a big penguin mixer? I can just see them swaying stiffly to “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” their little penguin flippers resting awkwardly on their partners’ penguin shoulders—particularly awkwardly because penguins have no shoulders…
“End May, early June the female lay one egg. My job is done, she says and she leaves her husband alone with the egg. She has gone to the sea for a holiday of two months.”
Goddamn those deadbeat penguin moms.
“Emperor penguins are very untrue. After one year 78 percent of the couples separate.”
WHAT could be sadder than penguin divorce?
The above author’s website also has a pretty impressive collection of cartoons that involve penguins and/or Antarctica. Of course, most of them are in Belgian (or maybe it’s Dutch, I don’t know), but the language of pinguïns is pretty much international, I’d say.
1 Richard Atwater, Mr. Popper’s Penguins (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1992), 25.
quote to go:
“Emperor penguins still are shrouded in mystery. The reason is that they arenot seen a lot.”