Poem: "His Fearsome Horse"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is spillover from the April 7, 2015 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from mama_kestrel. It also fills the "phobias" square on my 3-16-15 card for the genprompt_bingo fest. Based on an audience poll, it has been sponsored by the general fund.


"His Fearsome Horse"


Once there was an Oglala warrior
so skilled in battle that he was named
Tȟašúŋke Kȟokípȟapi, because
his enemies feared him so much
that they would run away from his horse,
even if he was not on it.

But the wašíču translators did not
understand or respect his name.

They rendered it as Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse,
or worse yet, shortened it to Man-Afraid,
hiding the true meaning.

Other times they made it
His-Horses-Are-Afraid,
which was hardly better.

People thought -- as perhaps
they were meant to think --
that he was a coward.

The bad translation made him sound bad,
combing causality in the wrong direction.

Later on, a better translation emerged:
They-Fear-Even-His-Horses.

By then the damage had been done, though,
and people remembered the funny name instead of
the great warrior and brilliant negotiator
sitting on his fearsome horse.

Now Láadan has words upon words
for language and the handling of it:

héedan -- to translate

rahéedan -- to mistranslate

rahéelhedan -- to mistranslate,
deliberately and with evil intent.

While there is no proving a crime
committed so long in the past,
a look across the many mistranslations
of tribal names does make a good case
for either incompetence or malice
or some combination of both.

Speak, then, of Tȟašúŋke Kȟokípȟapi,
They-Fear-Even-His-Horses,
or if you must have a shorter form,
Fearsome Horse.

Speak, and let history be restored.

* * *

Notes:

Read about Tȟašúŋke Kȟokípȟapi.  The Dakota-Nakota-Lakota Human Rights Coalition cites him as Chief Young Man Afraid Of His Horses.  I favor original language names myself, but where there's a tribal consensus, I'll back them for public use purposes and reserve my personal preference for my own writing.

Wašíču is a rude word for the European invaders and their descendants.

Comments

[redsixwing]

Learned a thing today; thank you. This is beautiful and sad and educational all at once.

(And Wikipedia notes that the mistranslation is a mistranslation and then uses it all through the document. GRAH.)

Names

[dialecticdreamer]

I get annoyed when people cannot spell my given name. I don't expect many to know the original Hebrew word it's derived from, or the implied meaning as a result.

But I expect them to /try/ to get it right.

That there's STILL a problem with a reference citing the /mistranslation/ decades after it was first corrected, well, that says a lot about why it's hard to break down cultural barriers in certain parts of the US. (And frankly, makes me wonder how my great-grandparents even MARRIED.)

Still thinking about meanings and implications...

Follow his own people's usage

[thnidu]

I'm a wiki editor, and after reading this discussion I went to the page.

The only section on the talk page of the article is titled Move to a correctly translated name version. Here's my addition to that discussion:
=====

Oppose. I saw discussion of this issue outside Wikipedia and came here for a look, intending a possible change. Having read this discussion and copyedited the article, I now oppose the change. The Dakota-Lakota-Nakota Human Rights Advocacy Coalition is one of the three external links for this article, and their page on him is titled "Young Man Afraid Of His Horses". However noble our motivation, we are not — at least, I am not — of his people, and if we wish to be their allies, we should not second-guess them.
=====
Note that the article lists and discusses alternate translations, including the more accurate ones, in the infobox and the lede paragraph. I've also redistributed the boldface in that paragraph to emphasize the accurate translations of the name.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

"Speak, and let history be restored."

So mote it be.