Pity (or admire) anyone who can switch languages using the common names of flowers.
Our friend Audrey Wick, author and English professor of La Grange, Texas, gave us a head-scratcher a few years ago, declaring this flower “a buttercup.” How’s that? We grew up in Kentucky; that was primrose and this was a butter cup, while in other parts of the Southern U.S., so is this.
Bedevilment of nurserymen, gift to folklorists, the common names of flowers continue to incite human flower projects in every language.
Jerusalem artichoke
Photo: Garden Betty
Ammar Ch’s article for NamesinEnglish describes some of the reasons for variation: mispronunciation, the heavy hand of religious symbolism…. But we think flowers have multiple names principally because, for centuries, identifying them has been a matter of local knowledge, not scientific expertise. Outside the realm of horticulture (a relatively recent field), who cared that the Jerusalem artichoke didn’t come from Jerusalem or that it’s not an artichoke either? What matters is that we both know we’re talking about this plant, not something else.
Linnaeus is credited with devising a “universal” system that could iron out the wrinkles, and, today, two-part Latin names are used internationally, at least by those in the business of precision. But applying his system with confidence becomes difficult if not impossible when we introduce the elements of time, poetics and especially translation.
Ancient texts pose new problems
Yichen Yang and Chuanmao Tian of Yangtze University published an account of their great challenge with the Li sao. A poem from the famed Song of the South anthology, circa 250 B.C., it overflows with references to plants and flowers. The scholars examine the choices and commentaries of many respected translators, and it seems each is more perplexed than the next.
“In the first place many ancient Chinese flower-names are no longer identifiable with any certainty. In the second place, even when they are identifiable, the only available equivalent is often a jaw-cracking botanical name which no translator of any literary pretentions whatever could for a moment consider using.”
Further complicating matters, most of the poem’s plants were allegorical. Translator Wang Yi emphasizes, “Good birds and fragrant plants are used to represent loyal ministers, while evil birds and foul plants symbolize sycophants”. We have a few associations like this left in English, where oaks and lilies embody strength and purity, willows and thorns suggest mourning and irascibility. But these associations wouldn’t be likely to translate accurately or at all into other languages.
Probably the best known of the English translators, Arthur Waley, reminds us that “in ancient times, there was no systematic nomenclature based on structural differences, and one name often covered plants which had different meanings in different places and at different times.” We’re back to the buttercup problem.
What sparked this question was a line from Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Canción del Jinete (1860)” as translated by English poet Stephen Spender.
Drawing by Federico Garcia Lorca
Image: Escena de Domador
Moody and dark, Lorca’s poem addresses a riderless horse:
Caballito frio.
¡Qué perfume de flor de cuchillo!
Little cold horse.
What a scent of the flower of a knife!
This clunky word-for-word translation sent us off to investigate “flor de cuchillo.” Flower of a knife? We asked two Spanish friends; neither knew a plant with such an evocative name or had heard that phrase at all. Then we came upon two types of Carpobrotus (what we’d call “ice plant”) — Carpobrotus acinaciformis and Carpobrotus edulis — that go by “flor de cuchillo” among other names. Presumably, the “knife” refers to the thick and pointed leaves of these succulents. “Uña de león,” lion’s claw, is another common name.
These plants — naive to South Africa — are plentiful, even invasive, in parts of Spain. And indeed “flower of the knife” conveys a lot more romance than “Sour Fig” or “Inland Pigface.” The problem is that like many succulents, they have no scent at all.
Carpobrotus acinacformis
Photo: Useful Tropical Plants
Lorca certainly enjoyed the rhyme of “frio” and “cuchillo”. It’s poetry, after all.
But it was this article by Maureen Buja, not about plants but music, that gave us a new perspective. “Perfume de flor de cuchillo” she translates as “What scent of knife in bloom”. In the same vein, this Spanish literary critic notes that in other poems by Lorca, “the blood from a wound is a carnation or a pomegranate.” Consider that elsewhere in “Canción de Jinete (1860)” and “the night spurs its black flanks” and the mountain side bleeds.
It’s not that there’s a patch of ice plant or any other flower named for a knife. There’s a knife that’s “fragrant” with blood!
Could we have done any better than Stephen Spender?
Cold little horse
What a floral-scent on the knife
(OK, That’s pretty bad.)
Looks like we need to track down Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation to do any better. In the meantime, this terrific website cross-references common and scientific names AND includes common names from many languages.
As for the complexity of translating floral references from one poetic source to another, we recommend expanding the terminology for plant naming. There are common names and scientific names, usually in Latin, and there are also uncommon names. These are the ones that will keep translators of poetry up late into the night.
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