Washington Crossing the Delaware

[Brian Olewnick]

Washington Crossing the Delaware, by David Shulman (1936)

A hard, howling, tossing water scene
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
O silent night shows war ace danger!

The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When general's star action wish'd "Go!"
He saw his ragged continentals row.

Ah, he stands--sailor crew went going
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens--Winter again grows cold;
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.

George can't lose war with 's hands in;
He's astern--so, go alight, crew, and win!

[bluenoter]

Washington at Valley Forge
Bitter cold but up spoke George
Said vo-doe-de-o, vo-doe-de-o, doe

Crazy words, crazy tune
All that George could croon and swoon
Was vo-doe-de-o, vo-doe-de-o, doe

On his ukulele, daily
He would strum
Beedle um bum
Dancing, prancing
And then he'd holler "Red Hot Mama"

Crazy words, crazy tune
All that George could croon and swoon
Was vo-doe-de-o, vo-doe-de-o, doe

--from Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band's 1963 adaptation of
"Crazy Words -- Crazy Tune" by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen (1927)

[Brian Olewnick]

Ach, Rita. I thought you might get this one.....

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

Ach, Rita. I thought you might get this one.....

The diction was odd enough that I suspected a word puzzle of some sort, honest.

But hey, why me? Do you really think that anyone browsing in the Alley would notice that every line of the poem is . . .

[bluenoter]

Up for Brian.

Her radicalness was not the gig now.

[Brian Olewnick]

Gold star!

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

Gold star!

Rainbow nickel!

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

A charade, sinners -- stow the glowing!

[Bluebrew]

Roe vs Wade - What Washington had to decide befire he crossed the Delaware.

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by Bluebrew

Roe vs Wade - What Washington had to decide befire he crossed the Delaware.

Bluebrew--

That's great! Did you make it up?

Originally Posted by Squaredancecalling Steve

A charade, sinners -- stow the glowing!

Square--

[Tom Storer]

"Washington Crossing the Delaware" is impressive. The one that falls down for me is "Redcoats warn slow his hint engage." It doesn't seem to make sense no matter how much I try. You could just about make vague sense of "Redcoats warn, slow his hint engage." Without the comma I'm baffled. Rita, can you figure it out?

[Brian Olewnick]

Tom, yes, I think you could pick it apart if you like. But, on the whole, being able to construct a fourteen line sonnet that not only makes reasonable sense but also rhymes and (pretty much) scans---that's impressive.

I came across it in my ongoing re-read of Douglas Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot" which concerns problems and approaches in translations. This was included in a section of, arguably, untranslatable writing. How would you translate "Washington Crossing the Delaware" into French, for instance?

Or, how would you translate this French reflexicon into English and retain its unique quality?:

Trois a, trois c, trois d, neuf e, quatre f, deux h, neuf i, six n, quatre o, deux p, cinq q, six r, sept s, huit t, neuf u, cinq x.

[Pete C]

Will one of you geniuses explain the thing?


Brian, I recently read a book you might enjoy, The Missing Piece. I didn't LOVE it, but it might be up your alley.


From Publishers Weekly

Debut novelist Bello's intricate murder mystery satirically imagines an alternate 1990s world in which spectators tired of chess and Scrabble tournaments have made jigsaw puzzle competitions the latest craze of the nerdy set. The puzzle contests, requiring a great amount of dexterity, have swept through Europe, and now developer and millionaire Charles Wallerstein, president of the American Puzzle Federation, hopes to bring the "professional puzzle circuit" to the States. As if the puzzle craze wasn't perplexing enough, a deranged madman is systematically drugging and dismembering the high-ranking competitors in these contests. But who and why? Does it have something to do with Wallerstein's rival Upton Sutter and his ultra-conservative Puzzology Society? The society has turned up its nose at the jigsaw puzzle craze in favor of comically arcane experiments like the Gleaners Project, in which one man builds a brick wall while another follows behind him and disassembles it, as Puzzology members study their work patterns and the fluctuating configurations of the half-built wall. The novel's 48 chapters consist of newspaper articles about the slayings, magazine interviews with key puzzle-world figures, minutes from meetings of puzzle societies, and other documents relevant to the case, and the reader is invited to piece together these clues. Bello's conceit is clever and amusing, though the intrigue loses steam before the end of the novel. Some readers will find the story's hermetic world exhausting and claustrophobic, but those who love brainteasers will cheer.

Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

[Brian Olewnick]

Originally Posted by Pete C

Will one of you geniuses explain the thing?

Hmmm...I was gonna let it linger a while longer in case anyone was still baffled but wanted to work it out. OK, spoiler below:



















































Each line of the poem is an anagram of the title of the poem.


Hofstadter goes through a number of these curiosities in a back-alley way to get to more "serious" translation issues. For instance, there have been several pieces (novels, even) written in English without the letter "e". If you're attempting to translate this into a language in which that particular constriction is all but impossible, would it be "okay" to, perhaps, do one without another vowel, say "u"? Is the sense of the original still carried over? What if you wanted it translated into Chinese?

He writes of a trivial (?) example from one of his earlier books in which, expressing an idle, silly fancy, he likened it to "taking a bus to Kalamazoo". When the book was translated into German the phrase was rendered (back-translating) as "taking a bus to Busnau", where the translator had sought to substitute a obscure town with a silly name. Does "Busnau" conjure up the same image in German minds as "Kalamazoo" does in American ones? Moreover, you necessarily drop one level of meaning as Hoftadter discovered when a German reader wrote him wondering how it made sense that Hofstadter, sitting at his desk in Bloomington, Indiana, could possibly consider taking a bus to a small, German town.

Other things along the same lines (how do you translate English palindromes into Chinese?) but getting into deeper issues like Nabokov's problems with anything but the most literal, concrete-bound translations, etc.

[bluenoter]

Tom--

What Brian said, but no, I can't get that line to make sense.

Pete--

Had you Googled the title and author, you would have seen the explanation right away.