It's a line in the Immigrant's Song.
"Always sweep with threshing oar,
Our only goal will be the western shore."
The song comes on at the end of the movie on Netflix "Thor Ragnarok," a fairly interesting film, a good diversion from politics, like a comic book in which the characters are likable, mostly. The gods are regular guys, while the costumes are overblown and the action is completely over the top. Made to appeal to the little boy in you.
When the song comes on you're all, "Oh man, I know that song." What are the words again? Ice and snow where the cold winds blow."
It's about Vikings. Apposite to the movie. Now I get it. It totally fits.
I recalled trying to interpret this song decades ago as a boy and gave up because it's too weird.
Sometimes poems are the worst. They're just word salads to evoke certain emotion. In this case intrepid adventure.
A threshing oar doesn't even exist. It's not a real thing. It's a poetic contrivance. There is no good way to show this ridiculous non existing thing. Any reasonable interpreter would simply skip it. What visualization is the poetry even trying to conjure? If you say the word "threshing" then you're talking about wheat, separating the chaff. If you say "sweeping" then you're talking about a broom. If you show an oar being pulled as on a Viking ship then you're talking about water and the "threshing" is forfeited because wheat does not go with Viking ship being propelled by a team of oarsmen. The explicitness inherent in sign precludes goofy poetry blending wheat threshing with ship oars. Combining them causes confusion, not insight, not clear communication. The phrase raises more questions than it's worth.
That's why I gave up on this song.
Winnowing oar, Wikipedia: In Homer's epic Odyssey, Odysseus is instructed by Tiresias to take an oar from his ship and to walk inland until he finds a "land that knows nothing of the sea," where the oar would be mistaken for a winnowing fan. At this point he is to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon, and then at last his journeys would be over.
Winnowing oar.
I suppose a winnowing fan would be a large fan woven from palm leaves used by a second person to provide the breeze necessary for winnowing on a windless day.
How the ancients managed to separate the husks is beyond me. Probably stones with grooves that didn't crush completely. It's known that the ancient Greeks did manage a white bread, valued for its refinement, but the rest of the world kept breaking their teeth all the time on tiny stones that found their way into the coarse flour that made exceedingly coarse bread.
I feel sorry for them. All these people with broken teeth all over the place running around with aching mouths all due to something fundamental as bread. The regular people had terrible dentistry. Even pharaohs suffered bad teeth because of bread.
Back to the Immigrant Song. Just try translating that. It's a really cool song. Shame to give up on it.
* Midnight sun. -- Fine.
* Where the hot springs flow. -- Fine. Hot water, bubbling, little river.
* Hammer of the gods. -- Fine.
* Will drive our ships to new lands. -- Fine.
* To fight the hordes and sing and cry. -- Fine. Fight, crowd.
* Valhalla, I am coming. BLAH! If you spell Valhalla you lose. If you say "heaven" you lose. Stuck. I give up again.
* Always sweep with a threshing oar. BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! If you say "threshing" you lose. If you show "rowing a boat together as a group" then you lose. I give up again.
* How soft your fields so green. Can whisper tales of gore. -- Fine.
* Of how we calmed the tides of war. We are your overlords. -- Tides are fine, tide of war -- not fine. If you say "tides" then connect it with "war" then you cause confusion. If you say "threat" then you forfeit the poetry of the song. Lose/lose, I give up again.
* So now you'd better stop and rebuild all your ruins. -- Fine.
For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing. -- Fine.
* Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh Ooh. Ah. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh Ooh. -- Fine.
Maybe the song is still worth trying even with its impossibilities. Because the song is so cool.
Maybe threshing oars is intended to evoke the splashing of water droplets like wheat seeds. I don't know. Maybe that would be how to get out of that poetic word-trap. Maybe it's not so bad forfeiting ridiculous poetry for the sake of clarity. It's just such a shame.
8 comments:
To thresh is to separate grain from husk. A definition I read speaks of the flailing motion of a thresher (whether the threshing be by hand or machine). Perhaps that motion is what the poet is suggesting: an oar that threshes, flails at the rising and falling sea.
It's odd what we get hung up on. Never had a problem with the threshing oar but I don't have high literary/linguistic expectations from popular music. Great pop music is not specific and shouldn't be overanalyzed. It's feeling, not thinking. It's not supposed to be "high art" (as opposed to "high" art) and when it pretends to be, the pretension irritates. Led Zep can get irritating with all the Tolkien references but somehow, this threshing oar thing passed me by. To me, it's a perfectly sensible visual image. An oar being used in a threshing motion. They probably started out with "thrashing" but decided that wasn't quite the image they wanted and landed on the next best thing. There were probably drugs involved in the decisionmaking process.
The threshing motion (sculling) is used on a single rear steering oar. They were used before rudders were invented.
http://www.schools2.cic.ames.cam.ac.uk/photos/viking_ships/gokstad_ship_model.jpg
Midnight sun refers to Iceland. the sun doesnt set for many months, so at 12 midnight it still sunny. Iceland has the hot springs and the ice. Threshing oar means that the oars are hitting the sea hard.
That only Robert Plants rendition of that poem,,,it's really about a process of iron ore.,,I can't remember the name-calling(or process),,,but it's not at all about rowwing ships,,,it's about processing iron ore for sowrds and axes to fight thier way Westward...It's actually a poem about a viking being cought steeling a chicken from an ordinary farmer in a new unknown land they had just Concord,,,after being cought the Viking was worried about the Viking reputation being thought of as just a simple thief,,,so he went back to that same farm and killed the farmer to uphold the Vikings reputation,,so they would NOT be thought of as just a simple thief...and also the (soft fields of green) can tell the tale how THEY won the war..
Stop trying to be too literal. I'd say that's your Achille's heel. Get the concept, imbue yourself in the song, try to understand what the artists are trying to do here. Obviously they took a few liberties language-wise to fit their music. It's your duty as a translator to identify these and mirror them as closely as possible while keeping the experience for the listener as close as possible to the original. Here's what I'd do in Spanish:
Ahh! Ahh!
Venimos de la tierra
de la nieve y el fuego
Donde el sol poniente,
las termas y fuentes
El martillo de los dioses
impulsará nuestros navíos
Lucharemos y venceremos
en nuevas tierras...
Por Valhalla!
Remaremos
con gran fragor
Y alcanzaremos
la costa... por Thor!
Ahh! Ahh!
Venimos de la tierra
de la nieve y el fuego
Donde el sol poniente,
las termas y fuentes
El verde de estos campos
Alberga mil batallas
De guerras vencidas
Y paz ganada
Somos los guardianes
Remaremos
con gran fragor
Y alcanzaremos
la costa... por Thor!
Así que aprende esta lección
Y empieza a reconstruir
La paz y el bien
siempre vencen
¡Nunca lo dudes!
From a Kipling poem. I guess if you can figure out what Kipling meant you could understand it’s meaning here. As a waterman i believe it means the water that is displaced when you row or paddle.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46785/song-of-the-galley-slaves
From a Kipling poem. I guess if you can figure out what Kipling meant you could understand it’s meaning here. As a waterman i believe it means the water that is displaced when you row or paddle.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46785/song-of-the-galley-slaves
Post a Comment