Re “translating” names into English — I had in mind something like what Norman Davies does in “Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw”.

I’d like to suggest you have to remember your readers use your book in ways you may not be thinking of. I am just now working on a paper about a 17th century English/Scots woman and reading secondary sources in which the internecine politics of the royalist and protectorate spy groups and conspiracies are detailed. I trawl through looking for citations of a man who was a spy at the time and this woman’s husband/bethrothed. Also of her.

So I want complexity.

As a writer I’ve confronted this problem in the one biography I wrote. I opted for simplifying in the text and adding details in the notes.

Ellen

Anyway, I think it would be considered bad form to translate the names–most of them don’t have a literal meaning, but also even those that do aren’t understood as such by indigenous people, any more than you think that someone named “John Smith” is the child of a blacksmith.

The flock of bees thing actually connects to a larger argument in the chapter, which is that Shona political theory, in my view, generally embraces a concept of political agency which is about indirection and the use of invisible powers. This is somewhat similar to common ideas about illness throughoout southern Africa, that a good deal of illness reflects social antagonism rather than purely naturalistic causes. Another example of this is actually the failure of Raguma to assassinate Munhuwepayi–he ended up just blowing off Munhuwepayi’s arm. Many people believed that this was evidence that Munhuwepayi was meant to be chief, not evidence that Raguma was a bad shot–there’s a deep assumption here that events in the natural and physical world are a kind of visible evidence of the action of invisible powers.

1. Is there a chance some of the names have another meaning that can be translated into English? Calling a character “Runs With Water” is no improvement (and you don’t want to sound Native American); I’m thinking more of names like “Jimmy the Snake” which fit the conspiratorial narrative. You could have both “Gomba” and “Gomba the Weasel” and no one will confuse the two.

2. The biggest problem with the quoted passage is an over-compressed exposition. It’s hard to meet 50 people at a party all at once, but it’s possible one at a time.

For example, after the passage where Chirodza stages “a coup d’etat by sending a flock of bees to sting Mungate to death,” I would want to know:

— How do you “send” bees anywhere?
— Had this method of assassination ever worked before?
— How old was Chirodza? Was this a childish fantasy?
— Was the story apocryphal and told to mock Chirodza, or to justify his later assassination?

After a paragraph on the bee issue, Chirodza’s name will finally sink in. And then on to the drowning…

By the way, hello Tim! I took one of your classes in Spring 1998, and you came in to co-host my radio Botticelli show for a couple of months the next year. Long-time listener, first-time caller, love the blog…

A useful reminder of the title of the blog…

Don’t tempt me with the action figure idea, seriously.