Eugenie Satterwaithe

Another excerpt from The Wreck of "The River of Stars"
This one is a retrospective on the career of Eugenie Satterwaithe, sailing master on the Riv'. 

Pleased at the Movies: 42

TOF and the Incomparable Marge went to the movies today and saw 42.  No, not forty-two movies, a movie about Jackie Robinson, No. 42 for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Although a black man had played pro ball for the old Toledo Blue Stockings back in the early days of base ball, Robinson was the first in the modern era of Major League baseball.  His spirit and valor cannot be underestimated.

As TOF understands the story, the movie seems to have gotten it pretty much correct. Durocher's lecture; Chapman's vile hazing.  Bragan's change of heart.  Pee Wee Reese's magnificent gesture in Cincinnati.  The two major exceptions were that Dixie Walker, who had circulated a petition against playing with Robinson, actually grew to respect him, which the movie does not show.  The other is that Durocher's 1947 suspension was due to his association with gamblers, not due to a Catholic Youth Organization boycott threat over his adultery. 

TOF grew up as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, favoring Duke Snider, who rookied the same year as Robinson, though less memorably.  By then, much of the 1947 team was gone - Reiser, Branca, Walker, et al. - cut Reese, Furillo, and Hodges were still in place.  Robinson by then was playing 3rd base instead of 1st.  It never occurred to TOF that there was anything strange about black men playing baseball.  In fact, TOF was a Pennsylvania boy and never saw or heard any of that Jim Crow crap until in college when he met a student from Baltimore.  The Incomparable Marge, however, grew up in Tulsa and 'whites only' water fountains and the like were the rule.  She once as a child tried to drink from a 'coloreds only' fountain and could not understand why she was prevented.  She was thirsty. 

TOF gives the movie three approving nods of his head.  (The nod is my new rating system.)

Patron Saint of the Internet

Quotes of the Day

But isn’t objectivity an ideal? No: because the purpose of human knowledge—indeed, of human life itself—is not accuracy, and not even certainty; it is understanding.
-- John Lukacs

Our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
-- C.S. Lewis

Finally, an old inspiring quote from the Late Dr. Jack Kevorkian, known with tender affection as Dr. Death.  Sometimes the mask slips, a little.

I feel it is only decent and fair to explain my ultimate aim . . . It is not simply to help suffering or doomed persons to kill themselves—that is merely the first step, an early distasteful professional obligation (now called medicide) . . . What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish—in a word, obitiatry. [emph. added]

-- J. Kevorkian, Prescription: Medicide, p. 214

On the Exigencies of Translation

Cover art for the Wreck
prior to composition

While browsing through that well-known, though not well-sold, SF classic, The Wreck of "The River of Stars," TOF ran across the following line.

Beneath Grubb’s singlet she could mark the contours of his affection and so knew not only his longing, but how long it was. 

A bit of archly lascivious punning.  Impelled by curiosity, TOF consulted Der Fluss der Sterne, where he found the line rendered thusly:

An Grubbs leichter Hose zeichneten sich die Konturen seiner Zuneigung ab - sie konnte nicht nur sein Verlangen erkennen, sondern wusste auch, wie groß es war. 

At iGoogle, this back-translates as 

At Grubbs lighter pants loomed the contours of his affection - she could not only recognize his desire, but also knew how big it was.

And then El Naufragio de "El Rio de las Estrellas," where it ran as follows:

Bajo la camiseta de Grubb podía apreciar los contornos de su afecto y por tanto sabía no sólo de sus ansias sino también que eran antiguas. 

This back translates from iGoogle translations as

Under Grubb's shirt [she] could see the outlines of his affection and therefore know not only their anxieties but they were old.

The intriguing thing is that neither translation preserves the pun between longing and long.  Both translate the crude physical reality: that the Lotus Jewel could see Grubb's erection outlined in his coveralls. 

The German Verlangen does have the quality of English "longing": ver-langen.  But "long" has been grossly rendered as groß, which can be translated: big, great, tall, high, wide, long, grand, full, etc., though there is a perfectly good adjective lange, which would have preserved the pun:

...sie konnte nicht nur sein Verlangen erkennen, sondern wusste auch, wie lang es war. 

It's also noteworthy that while English gets by with a single "knew" ("...knew not only his longing, but how long it was."), the German wants two verbs.  The longing was erkennten but the length was wusste.  I'm reasonably certain that this is because the latter is known by direct sensing but the former is known by intuition or inference. 


The Spanish translation is odder, at least do far as TOF can tell, which is admittedly not very far.  Ansia includes "longing" among its meanings, but also anxiety, anguish, and worry, which is not strictly denoted by either longing or Verlangen.  If antiguas was an attempt to pun -- perhaps the ansias/antiguas pronunciations are similar? -- it produced a strange meaning.  Old?  I admit I don't get it. 

Digression: English needed 23 words to say this and German needed 24.  (TOF counted "zeichneten ... ab" as a single word: "abzeichnen" but the reflexive form "sich abzeichnen" as two words.)  The Spanish needed 26 words.  TOF understands that Spanish generally needs more words, mostly perhaps because where German can add -s or English can add -'s, without increasing word-count, Spanish adds de or de los or something of the sort, one or two extra words.  Also the German ability multiwordcombines to create and the English word-trove that lets us shade a meaning by word choice rather than by adding an adjective or adverb.  

 So the thought for the day is that you can't always depend on a translation to capture every nuance of the original.  In German, "the cow is on the ice" is not a scientific assessment of bovines on frozen water.  It is an idiom that means one is confronted with a difficult problem.  (Think: how do you get a cow off the ice?)  There will be turns of phrase, shades of meaning that will be lost from one language to another.  St. Augustine noted that "in some languages there are words that cannot be translated into the idiom of another language."  And he gives multiple examples of faulty translation of Hebrew and Greek into Latin.  

But hasty and careless readers are led astray by many and manifold obscurities and ambiguities, substituting one meaning for another; and in some places they cannot hit upon even a fair interpretation. Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the thickest darkness.

-- Augustine of Hippo, On Christian doctrine, II:6

Headline of the Month

"Despite a reputation for social liberalism, California scores badly on personal freedoms."

--FreedomInThe50States.org, March 28

That "despite" is priceless.  

Best Coin Ever Spent

h/t Mark Shea

He sure could write 'em.