Dragaera

Grateful Dead in Fenario

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Sun Feb 9 17:26:08 PST 2003

Cracks and Shards already lists most of the G.D. references on the map
of Fenario, at

http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/jokes.html#Grateful_Dead

Sorry if you can't see the diacritics here, but I'm not going to fix
them for this email; look at the site if you want them.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/
   a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website

>>>>>

Grateful Dead

[NEW 99.9.07] Brust has told us that the names on the map in Brokedown
Palace are Grateful Dead song titles, translated into Hungarian. I don't
know the music much better than I do the language. (I know, I know, I'm
too lazy to listen to one or learn the other. See my motto.) Erika
Peterson fed them into an on-line Hungarian-English dictionary and
deciphered most of them, with some help from Dan Goodman.
Erika didn't use any diacritical marks ("accents"), but they're hard to
send by email. Suspecting that this much Hungarian text, even
disjointed, should have more of them than the two I can see in my copy
of BP, I went to the same online dictionary and found the ones shown
below. (Since HTML doesn't support the double acute accent, I represent
it here with õ and û.)

Könnyü Szél -- Easy Wind

Terrapin -- (well, duh, that one's English)

Tüz -- the handy on-line Magyar/English dictionary says "fire", so given
its location in the mountains, I'm going with Fire on the Mountain

Rozmaring -- Rosemary [as in the name of the herb -- MAM]

Vegyít Erdõ -- Minglewood, as in Minglewood Blues

Sötét Odu -- Dark Hollow

Fodrozódás -- Ripple

Cukros Élõfa -- Sugar Magnolia (well, the dictionary said "tree", not
"magnolia", but come on...)

Irtózatos Farkas -- Dire Wolf

Two items that Erika couldn't decipher, with Dan's explanations in
italics:

Ingyenutas -- "ingyen" - "free of charge", "utas" = "passenger"
Deadhead -- if that's not in your dictionary, look it up in a dictionary
of American slang. [Serious Grateful Dead fans are called "Deadheads".
-- MAM]

Sárgacukorférfi - "sárga" = "yellow", "cukor" = "sugar", "férfi" = "man"
Try "candyman". As in a fairly common blues/folk song which the Grateful
Dead may have done:
	Brand new candyman's come to town;
	Got a stick of candy nine inches long.

Two more still unexplained, again quoting Erika:

Hálás Csend -- "hálás" = "grateful", "csend" = "silence, quiet"
I mean, "Grateful Dead" is the obvious leap to make here, but I don't
know that it's correct.

["Dead" occurs in a few of this dictionary's translations of idioms,
such as "dead calm" and "dead quiet". I don't think Brust actually knows
Hungarian. If he was just looking words up in a dictionary, he might
have taken "csend" as an appropriate translation for "dead" in the name
of the band. -- MAM]

Dobpergés Ördög -- "dobpergés" = "drumbeat", "ördög" = "devil" [Brust
plays the drums. I wonder if anyone calls him a "drumming devil"... --
MAM]