Babel, by any other name

To all the Krisztian's or Ajtony's in the world, happy name day! I'm late to discover this Hungarian custom, which is like a mini-holiday and which other countries in the region practice, too. Each day of the year is dedicated to a different name (sometimes two) and on your name day, friends wish you a "Boldog nevnapot!" maybe celebrating with flowers or drinks. I found it odd and random at first, until I remembered similar obsessions with Western and Eastern astrology.

Of course the names are generally Hungarian, so the closest I could find for myself was "Lenke" (23 July), not exactly a direct translation. Other names are easier to link - Karolina, Zsuzsanna, Tamas, Pal. For a long time, though, I considered it strange, on the brink of offensive, that people should translate names at all. If your parents gave you the name "Mateo," that is your name, not "Matt." I reasoned that it's one thing to translate a word: clearly when a Briton says "summer" and a Vietnamese says "mua he," they refer to the same season. But it's quite another thing to say that Mateo is the same person as Matt, as there is no universal definition of a person by this name, so what are we referring to?

I've since softened my position on the issue to consider that there are examples like St. Matthew from which we derive names, and that names do have other meanings even if they sound nothing alike (I noticed this with "Smith" and the Hungarian "Kovacs").

But I don't know if I can be as accommodating of country names. Why do we say/spell Germany, Brazil, or Vietnam in place of Deutschland, Brasil or Viet Nam? It only makes sense to me in needing to make a country name pronouncable, e.g., from Chinese or Arabic characters, but in most cases that's not a problem.

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Listening to: Royal Philharmonic plays Queen

Conversation with an Italian

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As mentioned previously, I met Claudio my second afternoon in Venice, where he has worked in the hotel business for 20 years, with spurts of assignments and conferences around the continent. (Not at the hotel where I stayed, though, a bit nicer one along the waterfront near Piazza San Marco.) So the bearded Robin Williams doppelganger is used to the ebbs and flows of tourists, of whom he is very encouraging, even given his distaste for travelers who arrive without doing homework on where to go. It comes from a philosophy that reminds me of the shape of Venice, the shape of two hands grasping each other, because travel, in his mind, is about connecting with new people. He has connected with scores of new people, dined with them and shown them around the city, but I wonder if he gets everything out of this that he would like because (he has come to accept) few remain in contact after they leave.

And travel is about sharing cultures, which I see as a principle benefit of globalization, but Claudio took the opposite view. Rather, globalization forces people to merge into a common identity, in the process sacrificing their uniquely Italian or Malaysian or Uruguayan identity. Understandable, especially when a journalist calls the election of Obama proof of assimilation, not diversity, but I don't buy it. We had just passed the statue of Vittorio Emanuele II, who unified Italy 150 years ago, by the time I asked, "Isn't Italy a form of globalization, writ small?"

"Of course I'm not an anarchist," he said. "Of course Italy should stay unified." But some differences between the cities survived - for instance, time adjusts, because in one city you may arrive five minutes late to an appointment, in another, 25 (I believe the rules grow more lax as latitude decreases). I would say, though, that as a string of more than a hundred islands, Venice embodies globalization, too, writ even smaller.

Ironically, Claudio doesn't even like the noise and density of Venice. He commutes from Mestre to work 20 minutes by bus, and his mother and siblings live even farther, in the countryside where he grew up and which he prefers. "Chirp, chirp, chirp, you hear in the morning," he said. He did this often, saying "Cheap, cheap, cheap," of Americans and "Bluh, bluh, bluh," as filler.

He turned political at times, annoyed with Italian officials he said are so pampered and corrupt that they called it a victory when tax dollars no longer paid for their hair cuts, and so out of touch that their campaigns oversimplify and mean little more than rhetoric. I told him it seems to be true of most countries, but maybe more so now in Italy with PM Silvio Berlusconi's free pass on bribes and tax evasion. But most of the time, Claudio matched the simple life of his pastoral background, his humble ambition being to learn to swim so that he can eventually own a gondola in Venice.