a spirit on the mountain

The bear spirit rumbles through the trees, dragging the wind and pushing the sun. In his footprints burst new sprouts from the earth. His claws open the way for seedlings to the air and worms to the soil. His hair combs the dust from the breezes. His voice is the thunder, rolling on the mountainside at night, under dark clouds and chilling drops of water. He keeps the wheel of life turning relentlessly, uprooting a tree that has stood for centuries, or for months. A baby bird is protected from a fox or hawk, or crushed under his paw. His saliva slithers to the ground to form a stream that feeds the green plants, or rushes over them, drowning or pulling them from their earthy bed. He seeks out the parcels of cracked, parched earth and leaves a swamp in his wake. He moves at the speed of wind and the slowness of sunlight over the skin of the world. The mountain spirit is always present but never there.

attempted translation 1

I happened on a collection of e.e. cumming's poems in a book store I like to browse through. This poem wasn't among them. They weren't bad translations, being certain things about cumming's syntax and punctuation that are simply impossible to convey as the presumedly meaningful oddities they are in a foreign language with its own, different style of expression. I want to try my own translation. I don't think it's very good; it's too literal and attached to the original to be artistic like a poem should be. Maybe later I'll artify it a little.

vestido de verde mi amor montaba
un destier dorado hacia el alba plateada
ante cuatro galgos burlones agachados al suelo
corrían los ciervos alegres

más velozes son que sueños moteados
los ciervos queridos y apurados
los ciervos rojos e insólitos
ante cuatro rojos corzos al agua blanca
cantó el clarín cruel

llevando la trompeta mi amor montaba
el eco hacia el alba plateada
ante cuatro galgos burlones agachados al suelo
se abrían las planas praderas

más suaves son que un sueño acolchonado
los ciervos flacos y flexibles
los ciervos velozes y volados
ante cuatro velozes ciervas en un valle dorado
cantó la flecha hambrienta

con el arco en el cinturón mi amor montaba
la montaña en el alba plateada
ante cuatro galgos burlones agachados al suelo
se levantaban los picos escarpados

más pálidos son que la muerte desalentadora
los ciervos lustrosos y delgados
los ciervos altos y tensos
ante cuatro altos venados en un monte verde
cantó el cazador suertudo

vestido de verde mi amor montaba
un destier dorado hacia el alba plateada
ante cuatro galgos burlones agachados al suelo
cayó muerto mi corazón

Joan Baez singing Cumming's original words in English.

Erste Geschichte

Es war einmal ein Drache, eine Katze, und eine Krähe. Sie wohnten auf eine schwarze Berg ohne Leben. Der Drache wußte alles, was passiert war; die Katze wußte alles was gerade passiert; die Krähe wußte alles was passieren wird. Viele Menschen kamen von weither um die magische Tiere um weise Ratschläge zu bitten. Jedem Besucher war es erlaubt drei Fragen zu stellen, aber alle drei konnten nur an einem der Tiere. Die meisten fragten nach der Zukunft. Manchmal ersuchte ein Besucher zu betrügen, indem er sein Tier daher fragte was andere antworten würde. Der Drache antwortete: Das ist nicht passiert, daher kann ich nicht sagen; die Katze antwortete: Das passiert nicht, daher kann ich nicht sagen; die Krähe antwortete: Das wird nicht passieren, daher kann ich nicht sagen. Einige Menschen, die viele Jahre lebten, machten sich zwei oder drei Mal auf die Fahrt. Sie bemerkten, daß der Drache immer grösser wurde und die Krähe immer kleiner. Die Menschen glaubten, daß die Vergangenheit immer länger werden wurde und die Zukunft immer kurzer weshalb sich die Tiere veränderten. Viele hatten Angst. Die Krähe hatte schon die Größe einer Männerhand erreicht. Schließlich ist jemendem eingefallen, daß man die Krähe immer beobachten müßte, so daß alle Menschen auf das kommende Ende vorbereitet sein würden. Aber wer würde sich um die Krähe kümmern? Sofort brach ein Krieg zwischen den umliegenden Städten aus, und die Verkleinerung der Krähe beschleudigte sich. Einige sagten, daß der Krieg schuld daran war, daß die Zukunftskrähe bald verschwinden würde, und die einige Lösung wäre Frieden zwischen allen Menschen zu schließen. Natürlich, schenkten die meisten den Friedenskämpfern keine Beachtung. Als die Krähe schon die Größe eines Daumennagels angenommen hatte, besteig ein Gesandschaft der wichtigsten Bürger aus den bedeutendsten Städten, um mit der Katze zu sprechen. Die Katze veränderte sich nicht, sie behielt die gleiche Größe, Farbe und das gleiche Alter. Der Bürgermeister der Stadt nördlich des Bergs fragte: Was passiert jetzt, das die Verkleinerung der Krähe verursacht? Die Katze lächelte (soweit eine Katze lächeln kann) und antwortete: Nicht alle Menschen stellen diese Frage, daher bleibt sie unbeantwortet. Die Delegation reiste enttäuscht ab.

names pt. 1

first draft

"A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet."
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"Not if you called it a stinkweed."
- Bart Simpson, The Simpsons

The personal name is an important label. It gives us a sense of self, a direction, a mold to fit, shoes to fill, even expectations to fight against. A name given by others always carries with it their expectations for the receiver - parents naming a child; an owner naming a pet; friends or classmates assigning a nickname - and this can fill the named one with pride, hope, or horror. The personal name, in Western societies at least, is more flexible than the family name and can be used to show changing national or social alliances. The children of immigrants have often been given names common in their parents' adopted country rather than their homeland for this reason. In some cultures, a personal name has been a flexible thing, easily changed with the passing time and the development of the person through experience and maturity. Slate magazine, my favorite online news source, had this to say about the matter in current Chinese society. The author, Huan Hsu, mentions the fluidity of identity in China, something that is lacking in other countries: "people tend to view names and identities as absolute things," he writes. This seems to have been true for all of recent Western history. Even when a surname could change with relative ease, the first name was stuck to a person like a lamprey to a shark.

Many European countries have or have had stringent laws governing personal names. In many, it was not legally possible to change a name, once given. The flip side is that the law had a lot to say about giving the name in the first place, sometimes to a ridiculous extreme. In Catholic countries, the baptismal name was the name, and for many centuries the priest had the final say on a baby's label. A child might be automatically called officially by the name of the saint honored on the day of birth or baptism, no matter what the parents wanted to call the child. In Poland, a name day celebration was, at least at one time, more important than a birthday. Under the Franco regime, all children born in Spain had to have Spanish names, unless there was no possible Spanish equivalent. These naming laws have been softened in the last decades, but only a couple of years ago the Spanish Civil Registry refused to allow a couple, both born in Colombia, to name their daughter Beliza, saying that the name didn't exist. The parents argued that it was from a play by Lope de Vega (Lope de Vega, for the love of god), but in the play the name was spelled with an s, so the Spanish bureaucrats, in their ceaseless quest to serve the public, refused to allow a variation with z. The language must be protected somehow, you know.

By being careful about naming in the first place, a government may prevent some petitions for name changes in the future. In the United States, apparently, we prefer the "better to say you're sorry than to ask permission" system, whereby the parents have much more authority in the beginning, and the children more rights to change later. There are rumors and documentation of ... unfortunate names. Some seem to be jokes played on uneducated parents by wiseass doctors (Placenta, Chlamydia); some make an interesting combination with the surname (United States, Wanna Koke, E. Pluribus Ewbanks); and some are just odd all by themselves (Five-Eight, Pennsylvania and Erie Railroad, Whom-the-Lord-Preserved).

An unusual name has a definite effect on the psyche. As Christopher Andersen observed several decades ago in The Name Game, children with strange names likely have strange parents, and will grow up to be strange themselves. The oddly monikered may be pleasantly unusual or criminally weird, but they tend not to be "average". Speaking of criminals, there have been cases of such people who, when fleeing the law or their past, begin to use new names and really seem to become different people, at least on the surface. Of course, some are lawbreakers or assholes no matter what their names are. However, because the name is such a big part of the first impressions people make, a different name can easily provoke a different reaction from people one meets, and in turn different reactions from the newly-named.

When name changes are allowed, there are often still restrictions. One cannot name oneself after one's favorite brandname, product, or celebrity, in most cases. Unfortunately for the children involved, these restrictions might not be in place for the initial naming and this produces examples like Adolph Hitler Campbell. The father might have a point in saying that a name is just a name, not a destiny, but saddling his child with such a psychologically weighty title seems like a cowardly way to make his point. A person with full confidence in this belief would take the name himself. It may be, however, that this change was prohibited by law, while naming a child after an infamously angry Austrian is not.

Names go through cycles of popularity. Some rise and fall in numbers, while others become so tied to a particular time period that when they go, they enter a kind of onomastic limbo where they are known, but only as ghosts or musty old ideas from years gone by. Sources appear and lose their value, from legends, celebrities, family members, to random joinings of sounds. In some languages, a name still means something objectively, but in others, it only means what, or rather who, it can be connected to.

Many names of Black Americans seem to be the only ones that are absolutely without etymology and history. The reason for this could be related to cultural identification. A Black American may have little reason to identify or to even want to identify with mainstream (white) culture and its names; the family is many generations and centuries from its African roots and any family, tribal or cultural naming traditions have been utterly lost; instead of glomming onto somebody else's name culture, why not create their own?

underground

I was riding on L2. First the train appeared at San Bernardo like a ship rising over the horizon of the sea, except the sea was a dark cement lined tunnel and the horizon was the top of the hill to the old center of town. First you see the yellow-lit end station sign, rising up from the darkness, and then the headlights, like some nocturnal ogre's eyes, searching for prey in the eternal subterranean night. Then the train zooms into the station and the otherworldliness of its exterior is gone. This time, there weren't many passengers inside when I got on. I must be late, I thought. The train rumbled through the tunnels, the noise of the wheels on the tracks, shrieking like the souls that had been disturbed when the tunnels where carved out of the early century's earth, and the passengers took no notice. It's all the same journey, every day you descend to the old lines. Narrow tracks, rattly cars. Soothing chunketa-chunketa of the machine rolling down the rails. Then we reached our destination, just one stop down the line (you can even see the stations down the track from each other if you're on the right side and lean out a little). The magical trip was over and I was moving on my own two mundane feet.