Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(1/5 through 1/9 were days of great anxiety for me, on both medical and personal fronts; I am at my wits’ end, and I’m also now hopelessly backed up on postings in preparation, probably never to recover. So I’m just posting whatever I can get done fairly easily in the moment.)

In Facebook / Meta / Zuckie’s Litter Box (just Zuckie for short) / whatever on 1/8, Marina Muilwijk posted this diagram from the Terrible Maps site, with a comment:

[Terrible Maps caption:] Europe Divided (again)
[MM’s comment:] See that bit where couscous and herring overlap? That’s where I live [in the Netherlands] (no, I haven’t tried having both in one dish).

Now the site is called Terrible Maps, and the maps are indeed dreadful (but often thought- or laugh-provoking); in this case, having the three regions pictured via circles in a Venn diagram is utterly inappropriate for culture areas, so the picture is absurd (couscous in Wales?).

Responses to MM in Zuckie:

— Michael Palmer:  It’s even better with eel!

— AZ: So: is it then true that you can get anything you want in Berlin? Including a fabulous herring and couscous goulash.

— Gadi Niram: So you’re telling me that I can learn to cook either couscous or herring in order to attract a Dutch husband? Between my dislike of fish and my allergy to it, I think I’ll go with the couscous.

And then GN’s response served as the basis for commentary:

— AZ > GN: Pickle, yes; cook, no.

[See my 12/18/24 posting “The inevitable slide into fishy fruit”, about bananas wrapped in pickled herring, with a section on my previous postings about pickled herring]

— MM > GN: If he’s a real Dutchman, he’ll eat his herring raw.

— GN > MM: You know, my family is Ashkenazi Jewish and we’ve had our share of herring eaters. I have no idea why I thought that one would cook one’s herring. 😂

— AZ > MM: eat his herring raw called up for me the Blitzstein translation of the “Cannon Song” from the Brecht / Weill Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper):

If we get feeling down
We wander into town
And if the population
Should greet us with indignation
We chop them to bits because
We like our hamburger raw.

[beefsteak tartare would be a more literal translation, but hamburger raw is earthier — and, from the times I saw the show at the Theatre de Lys in NYC back in the 1950s, for me an earworm]

I can’t offer you the Theatre de Lys, but here’s a wild performance of the “Cannon Song” / “Army Song” (Blitzstein translation) by Bremner Fletcher Duthie, live at The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh, Scotland  (1/20/22).

This entry was posted on January 10, 2025 at 9:35 am and is filed under Language and culture, Language and food, Language and geography, Music, My life, Plays, Translation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.