Woody Guthrie— a fighting man By JOSEPH NORTH “This land was made for you and me.” —Woody Guthrie. HE folk bard Woody Guthrie has passed on, belongs to tradition now, and the young of this generation—wher- ever the guitars twang and song rises — honor him and mourn him. This man was a real-life. John Henry. of song, a Paul Bun- yan of protest, a ‘legend that lived and sang, and fought. For Woody was a fighting man. Woody Guthrie belongs to all America, the land he knew as though it were the living room of his own home, for that was what the lone prairies, soaring mountains and rushing rivers were to this Oklahoma boy. That was how he sang it. But he had no illusions, being a child of the Thirties. He.sang so that the people of this land would own this America, redwood forest to the Gulf- stream waters” ... He came up in that decade when to own a crust of bread was an ambition and hard to achieve at that. He was, too, a child of this newspaper (New York Worker); I remember his early columns, and that we rejoiced every day he brought a piece of his in. Who can forget what he wrote for us after he joined the merchant marine in 1943. He was in at the war’s climax and lived to tell the tale in our paper, March 31, 1946, when he said, in a full-page piece, “I was in the merchant marine’s three invasions, torpedoed twice, but carried my guitar_every drop of the way. I fed 50 gunboys, wash- ed their dirty dishes, scrubbed their greasy messrooms and never graduated up or down in my whole 13 months.” As I say, he was a child of this newspaper, which denotes a certain attitude toward life. A primary rule you live by is that you don’t make fun of humanity, you don’t laugh at the weakness- es of the poor, the down-and- out. You fight those’ who do. Woody did plenty of that. “from the - $o5 His observations on the pass- ing scene that appeared here were sharper than those of Will Rogers in other newspapers. Woody was “committed,” as the phrase has it today. He sang for us, the plain folk, whereas Will had to put his rope-tossing act on for an affluent, a con- servative class. Woody fought that class. His record was clean. He never broke and ran when the going got rough, either on the high seas. or on the home front during McCarthy’s hard riding times. Or when he could have made it an easier way, after Stinson, Folkways and Victor labels were on his songs in records that went into hun- dreds of thousands of homes. The N.Y. Times spoke of his career this way, in the obituary: “He had a profound influence on American folk-singing, from the countless youngsters who sing out at Washington Square Park to such well-known per- formers as Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Logan English, Jack El- liott and Phil Ochs.” So America sings his songs and will do so all the way in: hig “This Land Is Your Land,” his‘ “So Long It’s Been Good To Know you,” his war-time “Reu- ben James,” his ‘Round and Round Hitler’s Grave,” and a thousand more that he wrote. Space here does not allow the recital of his life; in a word, it was hard. Life played him many a dirty trick and he came down with the same nerve dis- ease that had killed his mother. For 13 years he was bedrid- den, almost completely para- lyzed; death took him at 55. Still, young, how much more could he have sung beyond his thousand songs that told the hardship of the American work- ingman and extolled the work- ingman’s dream. He would not think it corny if many an American working- man held meetings today to re- plenish his memory and his works and conclude with his own song “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” He’ll be around a long time, like Joe Hill, “who never died.” October 27;'1987—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 10°** >” “TRANSL By E. TSERKOVER and - A. SHLENKOV RANSLATION .from_ one language to another is hard work and can be treach- erous. Let us tell you about a little experiment the weekly Soviet magazine Nedelya carried out, half in earnest, half for a lark. It decided to pass a piece of Russian prose from translator to translator, and see what hap- pened when it got back to Rus- sian after the twentieth step. The piece chosen was from one of Gogol’s short stories, the one about Ivan Ivanovich’s quar- rel with Ivan Nikiforovich, where he is describing Agafia Fedoseyevna: “She used to gossip, eat boiled beets of a morning; and swear like a trooper; and whichever of these various occupations she was. engaged in, the expression on her face never altered for a moment. That is something, gen- erally speaking, of which only women are capable.” “We didn’t trust ourselves to do the translation,” Nedelya ex- plains. “We enlisted the aid of professional translators and language teachers and students at the University and _ else- where.” ' The first translation was into English, and it wasn’t at all bad. In the next, German version, the translator gave Agafia a face “completely without expres- sion.” The Japanese translator seem- ed to think a touch of traditional Japanese politeness was called for: for he softened “gossip” into “chatter’ and “swear like a trooper” into “talk scandal.” The Arab translator reversed the process, so that his version had an Arabian Nights flavor. Agafia’s “tongue wagged inces- santly” and she “disgorged ter- rible curses.” By the time it got to the French translator the text fitted the ori- PAX AMERICANA _ beet bouillon. ginal where it touched, and he produced the following: “She had the habit of scratch- ing with her tongue as she ate From her lips flowed a’stream of choice words . and all this without the slightest expression on her face. That is how all;women act.” The time—morning—has, you will notice, completely disap- peared. The next to have a go put it into Indonesian. Now, Indone- sian pronouns have no gender, and it is easy to mix up “he” and “she.” So this version read: “While the woman, imbibing liquid beet essence gave vent to abuse, the man engaged in chatter. They did this without showing their feelings, as wo- men usually do.” A Spanish version was faith- ful — to the Indonesian! But a Sudanese who rendered the Spa- nish into Yoruba let his imagi- nation run riot: the “beet es- sense” became “broth of the fruits of the soil” and “engaged in chatter” turned into “boasted of his imaginary exploits.” The next Yoruba expert had only English as a second lan- guage, so he translated into that, rendering “abuse” as “bad Army on tour in Europe. Song and dance ensemble of the South Vietna™ of imogl) “peat | jokes” and “boasted ary exploits” as drum.” sized hey He should have 14! f x I} pitfalls of a misundersto taphor! si By the time the latest had passed through Amn Italian it read like this “She ate fruit salad an ; unwanted articles 0 house. The man, ™ beat the tom-tom womanly delight.” In Czech “unwante turned into “old junk. pose it was the influen® tom-toms, for “themlm came “the hut,” and lator, for reasons to himself, jettisoné ly” altogether: : rT pat's Ags a few mn sions and tell you howe is narrative got back ine gl “Having drunk the 7 # she threw the old ju” he the hovel while he beat tom with rapture. Well, there you are. pod Even if the two Ivan’ ig nothing to quarrel 4 first place, they mig come to blows abou ‘al cisely Agafia was up a, —Soviet Weekly, June inetd J PAX AMERICANA 384 pages McMillian of Canada $8.75 NCE upon a time, there was a young giant of a country which accidently blunder- ed upon the world, trying only to do good. With all its good intentions, the benevolent giant loused things up and should really now pull in his horns be- fore everything goes haywire. This appears to be the mes- sage in Ronald Steel’s book, Pax Americana, which has been des- cribed by Senator William Ful- bright as an “excellent and ex- tremely interesting book.” -Aside from the evident re- search and study that Mr. Steel put into the book, it is pretty flimsy stuff. In the first place Steel ap- proaches the United States as if it was a unanimous society, that is that the global aims of the U.S. arise out of an enthus- iastic zeal among all sections of the American population to spread the “American way of life’ to the dark corners of the world. _ Thus he can speak, presum- ably with a straight face, that Prett with the advent of American military power, “the nation had the ability to seek its idealistic ~ goals ‘by active intervention rather than by merely pious pro- clamation.” Mr. Steel’s next flight into fancy is to seek to justify the so-called postwar policy of “con- tainment”. He implies that this policy was in fact a defensive scheme that came as an answer to Soviet expansionism. It really matters little that he later says that this “containment policy” became the rationale for the military involvement of the United States everywhere. This presents a dilemma: “how American ideals can be recon- ciled with American military actions.” With the unity of American power and idealism comes what Mr. Steel terms the ‘accidental empire.” “We saw this as a special res- ponsibility fate had thrust upon us...” And “unlike Rome we have not exploited our empire. On the contrary our empire has exploited us.” Mr. Steel is natu- rally quite evasive as to how this empire has exploited the poor old USA, but that doesn’t stop him from coining -the phrase y flimsy stuff period as being > Mr. Steel then Feri paint a picture of po? y alist, | “Benevolent imperial uP ® I tentions in the early : ee p ing colonialism. HF g su? wt that the Unit nationalists like 77.4 no and Ho Chi ue nce efforts to win in rub, according 10. (oti! a “with very few © im ind g were untraine as the dence.” Steel 1e4 Ai it sentence unsaid» — we | well be . . - Therel? Ff the hell out of the pie gl The, essential at! ¢ Pax Americana !8 wards al the essential ©? vies tdi cold war and still a As cate a more’ ee foreign policy: "nal Ame honest dilemma ae , Liberals find ee tiem yo it is not helped a ste? falsify history as ; In Pax American? isi is compounde sent reality. It is a har seriously. ‘i i impression that P poll a may be a satire, ah can policy a? rals.