(no subject)

[kradeelav]

"The sheer number and wild variety of pen names in Yiddish literature urges the reader to take the subject of literary personae far more seriously than simply seeking the “real” name of this or that author. (Indeed, there are so many pen names in Yiddishland I could never even begin to take in all of their forms and meanings.) As Dan Miron writes in his landmark study of Sholem Abramovitch (Mendele Moykher Sforim), A Traveler Disguised, “The mere classification of a name like Stendhal or Mark Twain or Sholem Aleichem as a pseudonym is … almost meaningless. Only when the specific artistic uses to which the names were put, the functions they fulfilled, the meanings they acquired in different social and psychological connections …” only then can the designation of “pseudonym” have any usefulness.

[...] I never ended up taking on my own pseudonym, for various reasons. Perhaps part of that can be blamed on my reading A Wizard of Earthsea at an impressionable age, imbibing (perhaps too deeply) the idea that there is a true name out there for each of us and that names contain (dangerous) power. What if I chose the wrong name?

What I love about Pierre Pinchik’s story is the suggestion that a name change is not necessarily an endpoint or an attempt to hide one’s past, but can be a process of self-discovery, and an invitation to dialogue, with the self, and other."

- What's in A Name

Comments

[tei]

Oh, I really love this.

[kradeelav]

<3