A few weeks ago, we had a beautiful lunar eclipse visible in North America. It was well worth sitting out to watch the Earth’s shadow advance until the Moon was completely covered and glowing with a warm red hue, then retreat until the Moon shone bright once again. Here is a combination of a poem written for a workshop many years back, inspired by another lunar eclipse, with a few photos from this year’s event. Multitudes of astrophotographers caught fine images of that eclipse. This time, my equipment on hand was my hardy little point-and-shoot Lumix, which yielded many images suitable for artistic manipulation, especially with effects added by the drifting fog that interrupted our clear view. Mars was in view as well, so I’ll include one image with Mars. Can you spot it?
I watch the Mother walk my night,
spreading her darkness through my shadows.
She turns to me as the night turns, and I watch, I gaze,
rapt in the music of her light.
Wrapped round and full in the stillness of this, my night,
she draws in light and darkness from the sky,
and sets them in my hands and at my feet,
until the whole land is an image of sky,
until I am full, full round and whole,
wholly wrapped in the music within my darkness.
She waxes as the night wanes, and I gaze, gaze,
until I dream I am a fish which has never before known water,
and now, for the first time, breathes …
until I dream I am a child who has never known her name,
and now, for the first time, dreams …
dreams she stands with a woman, a stranger,
in a land which bears an image of sky.
The other, the stranger, is silent beside her,
while she speaks to the mother as a favored daughter.
Translations In the Real World (Photo by Tflanagan at KSU, Saudi Arabia, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
One of the first things people ask me when they read certain of my stories is “What’s the right way to pronounce all these weird words?” My stock answer is: “However you like! It’s all made up, whatever sounds right inside your head is fine by me.”
Starting the process of doing an audio book for All That Was Asked has forced me to face the fact that, well, really there is a “right” way. For one thing, the story centers on language–in fact, the working title of the book was “Translations by Ansegwe.” In general, for the stories where I have a made-up culture with their own language or an “evolved” culture that’s grown from more-or-less familiar cultures but uses a language other than English as their root language, I do know how those words should be pronounced. I’m that wonky sort that blows off an entire afternoon at Worldcon to attend a linguistics workshop, so, well, that’s where I’m coming from.
In the real world, I know French pretty well, I watch a lot
of foreign-language TV (though of course I’m relying on subtitles), I live in
place where I hear Spanish and Russian regularly, and I have technical-world
acquaintances with a great variety of language “homes” from India to
Europe to Africa to both Chinas. I’ve
struggled to learn a smattering of my culture-base language–Gaelic. And I grew
up being hauled around to various places in the U.S. and England. I even still “hear” (and alas for
spell-checkers, spell) most English as Brit-style. End result:
I love the interplay of languages and the way everyone talks. I
do not claim to be a polyglot, but I’m a diligent researcher and I just love
all those sounds.
In my writing, most of the problematic words are names, because I think of such stories as having been “translated” from the alien/alternate history language set. Names tend to get left over after a translation, because even if I’m translating a story from French to English, I wouldn’t change “Tourenne” to “Terence” or “Gervais” to Gerald, because a) the names aren’t really the same and b) the sounds of names add the flavor of a language without requiring a reader to actually know a foreign tongue directly. Spoiler? My current work-in-progress has characters named Tourenne and Gervais, and they live in a francophone culture that doesn’t exist anywhere in the real world.
In the made-up language base for All That Was Asked, I have lots of names for people, place-names from more than one country in the alternate-universe world, and a few name-based terms. (The academic types in the story have dreams of winning their version of the Nobel prize, so they talk about it a lot. The Nobel prize is named for a person, but . . . it’s a thing.) I wanted the central names to make sense, to have relateable sounds, and to have some commonalities. For instance, in English we have a lot of names that end in ‘-y’. I selected some sound elements that would fit into different names and tried to make them sound like they came from a distinct self-contained culture–except for a few names I made up specifically to sound like another culture, in the same world.
I decided on a family-personal naming order that made sense
for the culture–Family first, Personal second, and most people refer to each
other and address each other by their personal names, because everyone knows
what family everyone else belongs to. And
I made names longer than we’re used to in English. In our culture “power names” tend
to be short, in theirs, most people have multisyllable names, and powerful people
tend to have longer names.
For other sets of words in this story, ones that are “translated” to English, I “hear” the words in British/European English rather than American English, because that fits better with the social style of the people and gives it a little bit of distance for American readers. It may sound really fussy–especially for such a short little book–but I think having a clear auditory sense going into it helped me with building the alien culture. I just have to hope it carries through to readers and listeners–not a burden to cope with but an added feature of the story.
In my next post, I’ll give you a blow-by-blow pronunciation guide for All That Was Asked, with a few background bits to liven it up a bit.
Ever since my story “Coke Machine” came out, I’ve been feeling pressure to share more about life in the Truck Stop Universe. Marichka, of course, is the talented engineer who’s at the center of that story.
Just to be clear, she’s not too enamored of rule books.
Here are some rules she knows about that perhaps you’re not aware of. I’m not sure you’ll want to follow her example.
Do NOT criticize the formatting of the Handbook for SkipShip Operators. It has to be cute or nobody will even open the thing. Do NOT mistake cuteness for mild, gentle, tentative advice.
RULES FOR INCURSIONS BY GOD-LIKE ALIENS
DO NOT ENGAGE
All interaction is engagement.
(Worship is engagement.)
Do NOT do what they tell you to do
Do NOT accept “assistance”
Do NOT accept gifts
OBSERVE AND TAKE NOTES
Do NOT allow the entity to know you are observing
Keep all communication lines open to your shipmates
Compare notes with your shipmates
Do NOT attempt to reconcile notes; Notes will never agree
REPORT ALL INCURSIONS TO AUTHORITIES
Surrender all information or objects acquired
Erase all records of the encounter
By NO MEANS tell anyone else
Oh, my god, do NOT tell everyone
DO NOT FOLLOW ALIEN TO ITS BASE OF OPERATIONS
Leave that to the experts
Absolutely, don’t do this
Don’t even imagine doing this
Don’t believe any suggestions the alien has what you want there
Though it seems I just got started on the Grand Canyon project, this day is one to set aside for thinking about tornadoes. This afternoon, I listened on the radio to an interview with a recent immigrant from California to Moore, Oklahoma. With tears in her voice, she spoke of how “scary, really scary” she found frequent tornadoes in her adopted home state. When I interned at Argonne National Lab many many many years ago, a local described the tornado that had passed through the fringe of the lab a few years previously. He said the noise of the approaching tornado made him think of a T. Rex roaring through the forest. This was before the Jurassic Park movies had transformed T. Rex into a helpful bad-guy removing plot device.
On the positive side, just down the road from Moore, college students at the University of Oklahoma are designing ways to use the DOD money invested in drone technology to create drones capable of collecting essential data which will vastly improve the ability to forecast tornadoes and predict their motions more accurately. Check out their work at the Government Technology e-mag page. To understand how important it is to gather data to analyze, consider this NOAA consolidation of data over time which suggests when and where tornadoes are most likely…you can check in on these data on NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center site, daily.
