C. E. Whitehead

I translate some and also write science fiction on occasion.

I grew up beside the Banana River in Merritt Island, Florida, one of four children, 'rescuing' jellyfish before they beached. This inspired an early science fiction story of mine -- a fragment of that early story about mythical planet "Trafalgar" and its beaches and seas is reused as an 'epilogue' to my science fiction collection (the "Echoing Plains" collection is discussed farther down).

In my science fiction collection ("The Echoing Plains"), the opportunity to "design" -- well not quite design but envision -- features (magshield, neutron shield/insulation, stopping mechanisms) of a futuristic space ship in one of my stories was fun for me. (Perhaps though 'aliens' use a toroidal design instead of a torpedo design -- the toroid is shielded [such a shield is described by Shepherd & Shepherd; Dartmouth]; it has a sail at its hollow center -- and on the 'under-side of the toroid lasers shoot at the magnetic flux spiraling around the toroid's magshield -- that is, shoot these away from the ship -- maybe that explains the flashing UFO lights -- I am kidding but admit I don't really know.)

I also enjoyed 'designing' an alien life form (two forms, really, in symbiosis, which makes I guess love, alien-style).

My mother had before her marriage been an astronomer, but during my childhood Mom worked as a door-to-door salesperson, then telephone salesperson, then substitute teacher, then department store clerk. As a teacher, she ran an astronomy club, sometimes out our back yard.

My dad meanwhile worked as a technician, troubleshooting computers. At home one of his hobbies involved researching lightning bolts as they struck the Banana River. This enabled him to make recommendations for protecting missiles from lightning on the launch pad.

I had Cuban friends in first grade. From them I learned my first Spanish.

Trobador Translations

Right after I entered junior high, I read a book on the Crusades. I was hooked, and convinced that women had served as soldiers and had been trobadors ("troubadours" is the French spelling). I determined to translate trobadors, especially women. To test my translating skills, in junior high I translated into English a Spanish fragment ("Llora, llora, Uratu"), and also started a translation of Alfonsina Storni which I later finished and revised (reflectionsonlandusetranslationsmorebycew.com/ENGLISH_LANG_POETRY/TRANSLATIONS/cuadradosyangulos.html).

One woman composer, the Comtessa de Dia, was fairly well-known and was translated into English; several others -- Maria de Ventadorn and "Alamanda" – both of whom debated with male trobadors in verse, had also been published (together with their male debate partners). But it was Meg Bogin's thesis, which had not yet come out, that was the first to try to really sort out the voices of the ladies. With Bogin's thesis out in 1975-76, I set out to translate both women and men instead of focusing on women only.

At the end of freshman year in college, armed with Bogin's "The Women Troubadours", I took a job waiting tables evenings and nights at "Woody's Round the Clock", in Eugene, Oregon, a 5- or 6-mile walk from where I lived for the summer with my aunt and uncle. In the days I read Bogin and took notes.

A year later I took a year's leave of absence to travel the roads of the trobadors in France and Spain, and to work full-time some too so as to save more money for school. During my six months in France, I cycled down the Rhone to Arles, and from there followed advice to Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and from there to Coursin, France, where I picked grapes for two different patrons and lived in a campground. My neighbors at the campground included Scottish working class youth and a gypsy family. From Coursin I cycled past Castelnaudry, to Carcassonne on the hilltop, to tour the old city, the wall, steps, and dungeon, and on to Toulouse, where I met a Mt Holyoke alum who invited me to join her on a trip to the Basque country.

During a short stay in Rabat, Morocco, I made friends with a French woman named "Catherine". I later dog sat for her back in Montpelier. It was while in Montpelier that I saw in the countryside outside of Montpelier one night a figure clad in a white tunic and mantle that faded raggedly below the waist and hips to just night air. The apparition, for it had appeared suddenly, had almost-neck-length dark brown hair, and maybe brown eyes, was probably the figure of a male, in any case a young adult, maybe carrying a broken sword. I took it to be the ghost of a trobador or a soldier or a heretic burned at the stake or put to the sword.

On my return to Mount Holyoke I worked with poet Sarah Youngblood on verse forms, and then with the poets John Peck (www.amazon.com/John-Peck/e/B001HNZ1E4/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1490129418&sr=1-1 ; Dr. Peck now works as a Jungian analyst) and Richard Pevear (author of the collection "Night Talk" and a translator of Russian literature, including Samuel Marshak's children's classic "Hail to Mail" www.amazon.com/Hail-Mail-Vladimir-Radunsky/dp/0370317335/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490128356

and -- with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky -- works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Chekhov). I met the musicologist Hendrik Van der Werf when he came to lecture (www.amazon.com/Hendrik-Van-der-Werf/e/B001JXJ3MI). I later took a course in literary translation (with Donald Justice) and still later in life a script writing class (with Robert Butler at Florida State).

My translations of Giraut de Bornelh including his tenso (verse debate) with Alamanda are published in Pusteblume Issue 6. I don't feel comfortable singing, but have tried reciting a Peire Cardenal's sirventes, "Las amairitz" (at my Flickr page www.flickr.com/photos/147597914@N06/31488539614/in/dateposted-public/). I won't dare try to imagine the tune but perhaps it went something like an early version of a cowboy lament.

So how might trobador compositions be performed? There can after all be several beats to one note, and, whether there is one beat or several, a note can be of either long or short duration. Mensural notation survives only for the work of Giraut Riquier who arranged his own work. But musicians might draw on related forms (ballads, romances, folk songs) composed since, and also might compare verses of Riquier's predecessors to those of Riquier -- and especially compare compositions with similar or identical musical scores. Alas, for compositions whose musical scores neither have mensural notation nor match scores that do, later performances of similar verse forms provide the main clues for determining the notes' durations. I note here that not all troubadour verse was stress-timed, but I argue that some was, particularly verse by the eleventh-century troubadour Guilhem de Peitieus. Some verse was of course syllable-timed. And some I argue was a 'marriage' of the two. Either way, where there are more beats -- or stressed metrical feet -- or simply syllables -- linked to a single note, this may make the note's duration longer, but does not guarantee it to be so. One of my favorite renditions of trobador song is Thomas Binkley's rendition of Giraut de Bornelh's "Leu chansonet'e vil" ('Light and lively song').

The paperback version of my trobador translations, 'Thirty-two Trobador Translations' (with notes plus a list of 'courtly vocabulary'), is now available!

One of my newest translations is Bertran de Born's "Miei-sirventes" or 'half sirventes', composed in the 1190s. Based on my reading of the history of the period, I believe that the verse dates to the rebellion in the Aquitaine in 1193 during Richard Lionheart's imprisonment and subsequent ransom, at which point Richard returned to secure the Aquitaine where many barons had supported Toulouse (although Richard's rival Phillipe Auguste may not have had a direct hand in the rebellion, it occurred prior to the marriage of Richard's sister Joan into the House of Toulouse).

Science Fiction

My first fiction story was not sci-fi: with other literary magazine editors I co-taught a writers' workshop one January while in college. I and the other editors read our students' work which the students also shared with one another. The editors also wrote stories of their own -- mine was about an elderly woman in a nursing home -- called "Letter from Borgave". I later -- inspired in part by my childhood chasing down jellyfish and in part by my parents' work in astronomy and space -- decided to try science fiction.

Sailing Seas of Stars

My Dad's other hobby (besides lightning bolts) was sailing. Sailing solar photon winds (with lightsails) or proton winds (with magsails) works much like sailing the sea -- you can tack and -- if you can get 'lift' from varying you sail's angle -- I presume outrun solar winds, as my characters do in the final story of my science fiction collection, "The Echoing Plains". Can the solar proton or photon winds accelerate a vessel too fast? It turns out that accelerations of more than say 3G can only be tolerated for a very short while. To avoid an excess of wild gusts of proton winds near Venus, which would accelerate my characters at higher than 3G, the ship in my story must tack.

My undergraduate job in the five-college astronomy department was also an inspiration.

I first came up with the idea for "The Echoing Plains" collection while living in Pennsylvania. The water was so bad that initially I thought of writing a story about the future of water, but found the "Vampires of Hoi-An" more interesting material -- that thus was the first story I wrote and appears near the start of my collection. The whole is imagined as having been narrated by a character in the future. Characters include Nancy, her grandpa K.P., her mom Rita, and her grandpa's business associates Mr. Park and Mr. Lee. Other characters people some of the stories. The collection deals in part with "dystopia" -- the semi-coercing of California residents off the freeway and onto the magtrain, microbes, drought in the Sahel, and other 'catastrophes' underway as Grandpa K.P. 'cooks the books' in his business dealings -- but such is hardly unheard of in the present. The bits of dystopia in my collection are mixed with humor and a sense of 'keeping on' as the dusty Sahel is echoed in the dusty Milky Way, and in the vastness of life beyond.

The theme of the scifi novel, "The Atlantis Gene" weirdly coincides with that of one of my stories ("The Year of the Vulture" -- the fourth story in the collection). However I had neither read "The Atlantis Gene" nor even previewed it when I came up with my own story. For my story, I had researched Scholz's Star 70000 years ago, and that time period is also covered in part of "The Atlantis Gene" -- the Red Sea really did dry to a trickle then. "Scholz's Star" is not the standard explanation for that drying though -- the star was far enough not to normally affect Earth that much, but periodically might it have? Could the star's magnetic and x-ray fluctuations (coming from the direction of Draco in the night sky and from just below Draco) have at least allowed some cosmic radiation in? "The Atlantis Gene" takes its readers to polar ice -- my own story does not take readers to polar ice but to valleys and birds in Earth's ancient cattle country (wild cattle bones dominate at some sites in ancient Kush dating to 70000 or so years back; after that deep sea fish remains often replace those of cattle -- but evidence of wild cattle hunting is found again at 20000-plus-year-old sites there -- actual cattle herding started in the Sahara perhaps 10000 years back or more).

The collection has two illustrations including a sketch by my sister. A third illustration is in the works.

Read the 'introductory note' -- added to the collection when it was finally 'received by Earth's radio stations' -- at: reflectionsonlandusetranslationsmorebycew.com/EchoingPlainsSciFiWriting/introtoechoingplains.html -- or preview a story at: reflectionsonlandusetranslationsmorebycew.com/EchoingPlainsSciFiWriting/ -- or another at reflectionsonlandusetranslationsmorebycew.com/EchoingPlainsSciFiWriting/previewlasthole.pdf -- The whole is at Kindle of course (story #4 is to be revised soon, however, and there will be a sixth story someday soon I hope!).

Other

I have written some verse of too. Together my sister and I edited a collection of verse by three generations of our family, 'Verses Penned While Down from the Stars' -- also available at Kindle.

I enjoy reading about space, aviation, and technology and internet security. I am fluent in both Spanish and French. I have studied as well a little Arabic and Latin, but I am hardly fluent. Besides science and troubadours, I've loved spending time with my several cats over the years (I lost the last -- a real inspiration to me -- in 2018).