What’s My Name in Darkovan?
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| Title: | What’s My Name in Darkovan? |
| Creator: | Marion Zimmer Bradley |
| Date(s): | 1978 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Darkover |
| Topic: | |
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What’s My Name in Darkovan? is a 1978 essay by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
It was printed in Darkovan Language Review.
The topic is the influences of language and other people's books on Bradley's writing.
From the Essay
When I mentioned to Walter, my husband, best friend and favorite critic (not necessarily In that order), that I was intending to write an article answering this commonest of questions asked me in the NEWSLETTER, his approach to the subject was to sit down and methodically go through all our books of BOYS' NAMES and GIRLS' NAMES, listing their equivalents in Spanish, Gaelic and other Darkovan linguistic sources, for my greater ease in answering that question in print. Walter Breen is firmly given, like Hercule Poirot, to the use of order and method and what he would never call "the little grey cells."
And I felt so ungrateful and guilty and unmethodical and all the other things which people like Walter, and Jacqueline Lichtenberg, and Judy Kopman, and all those other clever, orderly, methodical and mentally tidy people always make me feel. Because my mind doesn't work that way at all. I am incredibly UNmethodical and mentally chaotic. I often start a novel without more than the haziest idea of how it will end, with only a couple of fascinating names and a few characters who intrigue me with their interplay.
Names...All too often it is the sound of a strange name which spurs the first faint glimmering of a story in my mind. Once, at a flea market, where a young woman was minding a stall of hand-made skirts, I saw a "personalized" label, and a card saying "You have an original KINDY skirt. Write to KINDRA (...say. Smith) at (such-and-such) Street, Oakland." The name Kindra seized upon my imagination. What a good name for a Free Amazon! Kindra lurked in my mind, hand on her knife, and suddenly the book I had promised to write (a vague idea about some Amazons) leaped into my mind, almost full-blown, with Kindra as the precipitating figure. That's how my mind works.
Where did I get the original Darkovan names? I started, of course, with the Robert W. Chambers fantasy, THE KING IN YELLOW, with snatches from an abominable and beautiful book, by that name, which maddened everyone who read it. As a very young teenager, I thought it might be fascinating to reconstruct, from the snatches and hints about the book, the original King in Yellow...I think I abandoned that project before I was fourteen! But I began writing scraps of fantasy. In the manner of that strange book, frankly imitative and of course using the names Hastur, Cassllda, and others equally bizarre and unusual.
I think I know now, by the way, where Chambers got the idea for the savage beauty and horror of THE KING IN YELLOW. Many, many years later, in my thirties, when I had studied the literature of the decadence of the Nineties, I came across a book called OSCAR WILDE AND THE YELLOW NINETIES. Frances Winwar, the author, held the theory that the color yellow was symbolic of the curious decadence of that decade, when Victorianism was rotting at the core and strange things festering at its heart.
I began to write fantasies in childish and naive emulation of Chambers, and of Maeterlinck's PELLEAS AND MELISANDE. The scheme of a lengthy play, "Kierestelli, The Crystal Maiden" (of which maybe 8 or 9 longhand pages were actually written, though endless scenarios were constructed), later became a basic myth of Darkover. What was important were the highly colored dreams the writing constructed in my mind, and the names I went on collecting....names.
When, in my middle twenties, I began to arrange these childish fantasies into science fiction, originally on what Karen Anderson called "The woman's Mars," a landscape mapped by Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore with their Low-Canal towns settled by Eric John Stark and Northwest Smith, and later on a world I called Darkover, the names involved were a tangled mishmash of languages, be cause for many years I snatched up any name I thought pretty or unusual or "fantastic" and promptly started writing a story around it.
This should be enough to tell you that if you want to find your name in Darkovan, you now know my methods. You can translate your name, and find a Darkovan word which approximates it, You can find its equivalent in Spanish or in Gaelic, and amend it so that it SOUNDS Darkovan to you. Or, you can invent one...and that is probably best of all. For this is a fantasy world. ..and in a world where children are given such curious names as Beulah Mae, Ananda, or Taurus Mobius (for whom Walter did a horoscope a few years ago...) names are fluid, and the Darkovans, too, probably name their children by whim and fantasy. Nothing would be "duller than to codify Darkovan names and to state that one, and only one, name fits you in 'Darkovan. What do I call myself in Darkovan?
Felizia, of course. Why not?