Slack for RL / Fawkes / Snape = Snake?

[lucky_kari]

No: HPFGUIDX 34220

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "judyserenity" <judyshapiro at e...> wrote:
> In message #34196, Lucky_Kari suggested that if Guy Fawkes was a 
> wizard, this would explain why Dumbledore's phoenix is named 
Fawkes. 
> Actually, JKR may have named Fawkes after a character in another 
book. 
> I've heard that there is a children's fantasy book, featuring a 
> phoenix named Fawkes, and that JKR really likes this book.  
> Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it. 

"The Phoenix and the Carpet", by Edith Nesbit, by any chance? The 
phoenix there isn't named Fawkes, but he arrives in conjunction with 
Guy Fawkes day, IIRC. That probably is the explanation outside the 
book, but I'm one of those people who hunt for elusive explanations 
inside the book, that never would have occurred to the author in the 
first place. I felt guilty of this many years, till I read Moby Dick. 
The justification that book afforded me in this habit by its 
treatment of symbolism etc. has made it very dear to me, even though 
it is an acquired taste.

> In fact, the name "Snape" makes me think of snipe and snide, not 
> snake. 

Hear! Hear! Snipe and Snap were what I took from it. Though I am a 
firm opponent of translating personal and place names in foreign 
translations. (Unfortunately, I'm not at home so I can't find 
Tolkien's wonderful rant against the practice: directed, I think, at 
a would-be Dutch translator of "The Hobbit") True, readers miss the 
connotations of some names, but they are also getting something much 
more valuable: the feeling that this is England, not a Spanish 
England, not a Russian England, but an English England. I do not 
want, next time I read a Russian novel, to have the names all 
anglicized. Is it Solzhenitsyn's "The Cancer Ward" where one of the 
characters is named Kostoglotov(sp?), which according to the 
footnotes means bone-chewer, thus making it very funny when a new 
arrival to the ward makes a comment that he looks like he chews 
bones? Of course, to an English reader, this isn't very funny, 
because one has to look the joke up in the footnotes. But it's better 
that way than if the translator rechristened him "Chewbone". (On this 
note, I suspect the OLD translation of "War and Peace" of something 
along these lines with its "Andrew, Mary, and Nicholas" while newer 
translations work along the lines of "Andrei, Marya, and Nikolai". 
But it grows more complicated. I found another translation in which 
many of the names were Frenchified: "Marie", for example (though I 
would think that made more sense than "Mary". "Helene" vs. "Helena" 
also seems to jump about in translations, but with no predictable 
pattern. "Pierre" and "Natasha" are about the only things that keep 
stable.)

Now, sometimes these changes can be called for. I was impressed by 
how the Spanish translation handled Erised=Desire and Tom Marvolio 
Riddle=I am Lord Voldemort. But, on the whole, bury the sense in the 
footnotes, where people such as myself will look for it and try to 
laugh over it.

Eileen