ASL Masterpiece #3 – Joe Velez’s Jabberwocky

The third Masterpiece of ASL Literature will be THE Joe Velez’s Jabberwocky.  You can view it for “free”.

The link to this full video is at the Gallaudet website.  I am disappointed still that the video at the library in Gallaudet University can not be embedded in my wordpress in deafread blog.  Go ahead and click on the below blue-hued word.

Joe Velez’s Jabberwocky

the full URL is this

http://video.gallaudet.edu/x21668.xml?video=6518

Commentary:    Eric Malzkuhn was the brain behind this excellent ASL translation Joe Velez did with Lewis Carroll’s word-wacko poem .  There is something about the video that future signers will enshrine forever.  Bernard Bragg told me a couple of stories about Joe Velez who is the father of Michael Velez, the half of the performing CODA duet of Half and Half.  They still have their website up so click at these blue words. I won a Joesph M. Velez book award from the National Theater of the Deaf one summer signed by no one but him BB.  Joe left too early due to cancer so his friends such as bragg started an award at NTD to enshrine the memory of this ASL master artist.

Is translation into ASL from English literature ASL literature?  This is a morsel for thought to chew on.  The NTD plays – are they ASL Literature?  Probably not all except those originals like the My Third Eye play.  What about the other NTD plays?  The Gilgamesh in ASL.  Gertrude Stein’s incomprehensible Four Saints in Three Acts?  Universallian Campbell’s A Hero of Thousand Faces in ASL.  I hope all of the NTD performances were recorded on video – thus preserved forever.  Anyone know, please leave comments here. I would like to know.  I look forward to the increasing digitization of ASL literature from old technological formats into cyberspace.  We will see more of them in the coming days.

Like in other literature, translation into ASL is a form of literature sort of could be considered part of the canon of ASL Lit.  See the category listing on the right side.  This 1967 video will be considered one of the earliest videorecording of sign language 100 years later.   I can see the future in this ASL literary piece in the field of ASL Literature in classes everywhere.  The spirits of Joe with Eric and their work translating Jabberwocky in google, youtube, and gally website and everywhere.

A true champ! this literary work.

it deserves a spot, the third, in the first FOUR the ASL Literature Hall of Fame.

And what literary piece will be the fourth of the Masterpieces of ASL literature at the website called an Ark of ASL Literature?

Hang on . . .  for the next post.