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Grateful Dead


Credits and Notes

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.) Uncredited translations are my own.

The same online dictionary helped me add the diacritical marks ("accents") and found the ones shown below. (Since HTML and the ISO Latin-1 character set don't support the double acute accent, I represent it here with õ and û.)

[2003-03-20]The Grateful Dead Lyric And Song Finder may help find some of the remaining unfound items.

Rights in the lyrics quoted on this page are held by Ice Nine Publishing.

Fenarian Geography

Cukros Élõfa
Sugar Magnolia (well, the dictionary said "tree", not "magnolia", but come on...) (EP)
Dobpergés Ördög
"dobpergés" = "drumbeat", "ördög" = "devil". "Rhythm Devils" is the name of one of Dead member Mickey Hart's albums. (MP)
Fenario
Vlad's ancestral homeland and the setting of most of BP. The name is from an old folk song. It is also mentioned in the Dead's song "Dire Wolf" (Irtózatos Farkas) (MP):
In the timbers of Fennario *
the wolves are running round
Fodrozódás
Ripple (EP)
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. (EP)
"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.
Ingyenutas
"ingyen" = "free of charge", "utas" = "passenger"
"Deadhead" is long-established American slang for a nonpaying passenger. (DG)
Serious Grateful Dead fans are called "Deadheads".
Irtózatos Farkas
Dire Wolf (EP)
Koldus Sirbolt
"koldus" = "beggar, pauper"; "sírbolt" = "sepulchral vault", according to SZTAKI's Hungarian-English Dictionary. That would be the line "I live in a silver mine and I call it beggar's tomb", from "Uncle John's Band". [2003-03-07]
Mordfal
(couldn't find it)
Könnyü Szél
Easy Wind (EP)
Rozmaring
Rosemary [name of the herb] (EP)
Sárgacukorférfi
"sárga" = "yellow", "cukor" = "sugar", "férfi" = "man"
There's a well-known blues/folk song "Candyman" that I thought the G.D. might have recorded, but Dan Bloch pointed out the Dead's own song "Candyman" (Hunter/Garcia). [2003-03-20]
Sötét Odu
Dark Hollow (EP)
Terrapin
(well, duh, that one's English) (EP)
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 (EP)
Vegyít Erdõ
Minglewood, as in Minglewood Blues (EP)

Other

Brokedown Palace
The name of a Grateful Dead song, with these lyrics pertinent to the plot (MP):
Goin' to leave this Broke-down Palace *
On my hands and my knees I will roll roll roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time - in my time - I will roll roll roll
 
In a bed, in a bed
by the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul
Master Hunter
The references to "Master Hunter" at the end of TPG and FHYA allude to Robert Hunter (GD lyricist) (MP)--
"the historian makes no choice, seeing his task, as Master Hunter has so aptly put it, as merely the shedding of light into the dark spaces of the past." [TPG 484]

"As we humbly ask for our recompense, whether in gold or in esteem, we do not do so with the arrogant conviction that there is no more to tell, for, as Master Hunter has pointed out, the end, where it is possible to determine it, can never be expressed" [FHYA 547]

and the song referred to in both books is his song "Terrapin Station" (check out the last 2 stanzas) (MP):
The storyteller makes no choice *
soon you will not hear his voice
his job is to shed light
and not to master
 
Since the end is never told
we pay the teller off in gold
in hopes he will come back
but he cannot be bought or sold
Mica's Route [2004-04-11]
Tim in San Francisco writes:

In The Phoenix Guards right before "our friends" are about to engage the Eastern army, Mica is sent on a mission to get word of these development to Lord Adron. At one point Paarfi writes something to the effect that Mica soliloquizes: "I could return at once to my lady, and tell her that there is help on the way along the Slipknot past Nil K' Narf's Tower."

The first three songs on the GD's Blues for Allah album are:

  • Help on the Way
  • Slipknot!
  • Franklin's Tower ["Franklin" spelled backwards is "Nil K' Narf"]

Live, it was not uncommon to hear them play those three songs in order, arranged as a kind of psychedelic suite. When I first noticed it I perused the rest of the TPG and all of Brust's works looking for similar "shards". There were a few but none come to mind right now.

This passage is on p. 357 in my copy (Tor edition, first mass-market printing, June 1992). There it is "Nilk'arf's Tower"; "Nilk'arf" is one "n" off from "Franklin" reversed. But unless the text is different in another edition, Tim is only supplying the letter replaced by the apostrophe, for we read on p. 356 that this "tower" was actually

two rocks upon which watch-stations had been built, and which were called Nilk'arf's Tower (the one on the right being named for Nilk e'Terics, the one on the left for her brother, Narf)
Morrolan
The name means Dark Star [POTD 35], not just another GD song, but the quintessential GD song. (MP)

* Rights in these lyrics are held by Ice Nine Publishing.

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last modified 2005-03-06