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| A snazzy edition of Ed Wood's short stories in Portuguese. |
You might think I have a treasure trove of Ed Wood rarities and memorabilia stashed away somewhere, but you'd be wrong. I live in a fairly small apartment, so I don't have room for much stuff, and I wouldn't have the money to pay for it anyway. Mail room clerks aren't exactly rolling in dough. Most of my Wood collection (Woodiana, if you will) exists only virtually—various videos, pictures, and documents saved to my hard drive. It doesn't take up any extra room in my place, which is nice.
On top of that, I do have some physical objects, including DVDs, videotapes, paperback books (nothing old or valuable), and little novelties like the Drew Friedman-designed Ed Wood, Jr. Players trading cards, a matchbook from the Hunters' Inn, and one of those glow-in-the-dark Criswell dashboard figures. My only truly extravagant Wood purchases were the I Led 2 Lives poster and Mexican Plan 9 lobby cards I bought at auction in 2015. I still don't know what I was thinking when I bought those, and I may well have to sell them someday.
Okay, so maybe I do have a collection of Ed Wood detritus. I don't try to collect Eddie memorabilia, but it does sort of accumulate over the years. Recently, I threw another item onto the pile: a beautifully-designed, hardbound collection of Ed's short stories called Contos & Delírios (2022) from a Brazilian publisher called Darkside. That title translates as Tales & Delusions, and the 33 wild and woody stories contained within this volume are translated into Portuguese, a language I cannot read or speak.
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| A peek inside the book with an illustration. |
So if I don't know any Portuguese, why did I buy Contos & Delírios? How could I hope to understand it? Well, the strange tales in it are taken directly from Blood Splatters Quickly: The Collected Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2014), a book curated by Wood superfan Bob Blackburn. Contos & Delírios even presents this material in the same order, starting with "Scream Your Bloody Head Off" (1972) and ending with "Final Curtain" (1971). In case you're wondering, the front matter of Contos & Delírios does acknowledge that it is a translation of Blood Splatters Quickly, and there is a paragraph-long biography of Bob at the end of the volume.
The real reason I had to buy Contos & Delírios was because it's a unique and quite lovely presentation of Ed Wood's best short stories, the likes of which I'd never seen before. The collection is nicely bound and has a striking pink, black, and white color design. Even better, each of the 33 stories has a new illustration by transgender Brazilian cartoonist Laerte Coutinho aka Laerte. As a non-Portuguese speaker, it's fun to flip through Contos & Delírios and try to guess which of Ed's stories is being illustrated. "Hellfire" (aka "Fogo do inferno") has Satan lying on his back with a volcano emerging from his crotch. "To Kill a Saturday Night" ("Matando o sábado") has two anthropomorphic penises, complete with arms and legs, casually chatting. "Breasts of the Chicken" ("Os seios de galinha") has a pudgy restaurant customer picking lobster-sized mermaids out of a glass tank.
As for actually reading the stories within this volume, well, I had to rely very heavily on my copy of Blood Splatters Quickly. I thought my decades-ago college Spanish courses might help me, but they didn't. At least not much. I did find it interesting that "The Wave Off" became "Voando em círculos" or "Flying in Circles," while "Calamity Jane Loves Hosenose Kate Loves Cattle Anne" became simply "O amor delas" or "Their Love." I was also amused to see that the aforementioned "Fogo do inferno" carried a footnote explaining that Ed Wood's "lived/devil" pun was "untranslatable in Portuguese." As for the newly-written introduction ("Preliminales dark") by director Paolo Biscaia Filho, I'm afraid it's lost on me, which is a shame. It looks interesting.
I should mention that getting my hands on a copy of Contos & Delírios was trickier than I expected. I bought it from an Ebay seller in Brazil because the price seemed quite reasonable. (I hadn't factored in shipping, which I should have.) The book took many weeks to reach me, and when it finally arrived at my apartment, the mailman wanted a signature that I was not able to provide because I was at work. After trying without success to use the USPS website and hotline—both useless for international packages, apparently—I made the cataclysmic decision to drive to the local post office. At rush hour. On the hottest day of the year. I was still not able to claim the book immediately, but I did set into motion a series of events that ended with the item in my hands. It was a process, let's say.
This was also the year that I tried (legal) edibles for the first time, and I think it says something that getting those shipped to my apartment was much quicker, cheaper, and easier than getting an Ed Wood book. Seriously, though, Contos & Delírios is a neat keepsake for Wood fans, even those who don't speak Portuguese. I wish more of Eddie's stories would receive this deluxe treatment.