Heidegger

Dear Jud;
Rothsmen notwithstanding qua Svenska you are tracking me down. At the close
of WWII I was assigned by the US Martime Training Service to Serve aboard the
Swedish M/S Gripsholm, a ship painted all white except for blue and yellow
stripes on her hull and in large capitals Svenska-Sverige. I led four other boots
with our cute American sailor suits to Hoboken and I was shocked to see our
first ship had a large blue and yellow flag at her jackstaff. The fact was that
the neutral Gripsholm was used as a prisoner of war exchange ship and sailed
the ocean lit up like a great white lady by spotlights so that no submarine of
either side would sink her. At the close of the war she was chartered by the
US State Department to repatriate people stranded by the war and thus
available to sign on us US sailor boys. As we left NY harbour I was terrified to watch
the Coney Island parachute jump, near where I lived as a boy, disappear in
the late afternoon mist and after dropping off the pilor nothing but an angry
north Atlantic Ahead. I thought this was the end for me. The Swedes laughed when
they learned we expected to serve as deckhands and assigned us to the galley
instead. We took the Southern route over and crossing the Gulf Stream I baked
my sides on the wooden decks and finally rid myself of my recent bout with
pleurisy at the US Coast Guard hospital. I got along well with the Swedish crew
of the Steward’s Dept, most of whom were both gay and artists. They were
enthralled to find an American who painted and wrote poetry and nicknamed me “The
Saragasso kid because it rhymed with Bovasso but which was a ships graveyard in
the middle of the Caribbean because it had no current or wind and was filled
with dead seaweed. A sailing ship once entered would never get out. The chief
pantryman was an opera singer and used to practice at night in the cavernous
galley. Because I was not happy that the crew had to take salt water showers he
invited me down to the galley while he sung his head off so I could fresh
water bathe in the sink of the silver washing room. Passing through the Straits
of Gibralter the ship cracked one of its diesel motor heads and we drifted
toward a minefield. It was by then night and pitch black but the 500 passengers
and the entire crew kept a silence that was terrifying, all expecting at any
moment to hear an explosion. By dawn the diesels were jerry rigged and we got
under way and made the port of Naples where I was astounded to see Vesivius
periodically belching black smoke and rumbling. We moored near the USS Brooklyn
that the year before was caught in a full eruption and which had to put to sea
because the volcanic ash was an inch deep on deck and clogging her ventilators.
During the allied forces movement up the boot the light cruiser with its six
inch guns was shelling German positions. As we passed Capri six army airforce
thunderbolts circled the belching Vesuivius and buzzed us at masthead height..
Crazy Americans said the Swedes. The pier at which we docked was before the
war used to birth the beautiful Italian liner Roma, and now a bombed out ruin
of jaggered concrete and steel with German prisoners of war serving as
stevadors under the watchful eyes of GIs with carbines. All this was very exciting for
the Saragasso kid but the great disappointment was when we arrived in Piraeus
and the Americans were not allowed to go ashore because the British and the
forces of the Greek crown were mopping up the Greek communist partisans. But I
could see the parthenon, which I so much wanted to visit in Athens, with
binoculars. By then I had lost my virginity in Naples in a flat just off the Via
Roma with a lady of the ripe old age of thirty years whose husband was a POW in
England. I also learned to smoke cigarettes. In Alexandria I used to hang out
at the British army canteen and was told I must get a swivel stick and wear
it smartly under my shoulder to beat off the kids out to pick your pockets. I
was getting hardened fast and no longer wept when I saw starving kids in Naples
with bloated stomachs and malnutrition sores on the their heads. But, hey,
where am i going with this reverie. The last time I saw the great vapore bianca,
as the Sicilians called my ship, was recently in an early Ingrid Bergman
movies shot in Goteberg. And so, mins schol, vins schol alla vacca minska schol,
heres health to me, heres health to you and all the ladies. The crew had a
recreation room up foward fitted out in timbers to look like an old Scandic Inn.
We were rationed two glasses of snaps and two bottles of beer, something
unheard of aboard American ships. Through its center was the mainmast. It had a
little door on it and a ladder inside and by which I could climb to the crows
nest. One day while In a stormy Aegean Sea I stood up foward by the bow plate
with the seaman watching for floating mines. Suddenly he disappeared. He had
ducked beneath the bow plate as a great sea swell crashed over the bow and washed
me up the deck and with one leg hanging out the scupper. I was unnerved and I
am sure the bridge saw it all. I wondered if they would heave to and lower a
boat for an American man overboard. Then and there I learned to be seasick,
complements of the wild Aegean as we headed for Salonica. Well, Jud, you got me
started writting my next book and about the Med., the sky so blue you couldn’t
tell were it touched the sea.
Sincerely;
Bernard

In a message dated 9/1/2006 8:58:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
GEVANS613 at aol.com writes:
In a message dated 01/09/2006 23:51:26 GMT Standard Time, Bernx at aol.com
writes:

Russia was founded by a relative of Erick the Red and named Russ who sailed
down the Danube in his viking-like double-ender shallow draft boats and rowed
by the *rothsmen,* (meaning both the red men and the rowers),

Jud:
Hi Bernard,
As a young student of the Swedish language 51-years ago - I spent some months
in Uppsala university.

The first words I learned by heart in Swedish were:

“Gubben Noach, Gubben Noach
Var en hedersman
När han gick ur arken
Plantera han på marken
Mycket vin, ja mycket vin, ja
Detta gjorede han.”

(Old Man Noah, Old Man Noah / Was a gentleman.etc..) I sang this following
song by my beloved Swedish poet-musician Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795) in the
den Gylene Freden bar of Stockholm’s Gamla Stan [old town] where I drank
akvavit. I drank mőjd [mead] with my student friends from the silver-banded
Viking horns at Gamla Uppsala http://www.raa.se/gamlauppsala/ *Gubben Noach*
remained my *party piece
for many years, until I heard a young women called Alice Babs sing * Ekorren*
[the squirrel] [*oak* in Swedish is *ek*] and that instantly became my
favourite song to sing in Swedish for evermore and my kids still call upon me to
sing it at our family get-togethers.
However even this was superseded by another song that won my heart:
*Begravningsvagn* [The funeral car* ]
Then - in my dotage ANOTHER song swept all aside the famous *’Dansen på
Sunnanö’ * [The Dance on Sunnan Isle] which I translated into English and shoved
on my website. It gets at least 50-hits every day from Swedish speakers seeking
an English translation and a Stockholm group contacted me recently to ask
permission to use my lyrics. You can see this at:
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

Fattig, försupen,
i denna strupen
finns min rikedom.
I alla öden,
i bleka döden
läskar jag min gom
och i min sista stund
glaset för min mun.
(from Fredmans epistel no. 23)

I was deeply into Scandinavian history and myth. Later, when married I named
five of my 9-children: Sven, Leif, Bjőrn, KIrsti and Freja. The version I
learned from Swedish friends of the Rős [rus] the word it is said from which the
Viking explorers passed on the name of * Ryssland* [Russia] originated not in
the dentalised root for *red* in Swedish which is *rőd* [and in all my
lifetime reading of Swedish I have never come across any reference to the Vikings as
*redmen* in the North American Indian sense] but as you imply above the
frontal vowel base root *rő* [row] rőr in the present cont. I was told that in
those days all young men of a certain age were automatically conscripted to take
their place in the boats as oarsmen. These laws of conscription were called
the *rőslags* [rowing laws] and that in the same way that modern rookie
soldiers and sailors are referred to as *conscripts* the young oarsmen.

In fact I has a ravishing svensk blonde girlfriend who lived in the village
of Rőslags Näsby which was at the heart of the east coast area where most of
the conscripts came from on the east coast. The girl friend once said [in front
of her parents:] *would you like to come and have a bath with me?*
I was astounded and readily agreed, only to have my hopes rudely dashed when
the father enquired if I had a swimming costume with me - and added that if
not I was welcome to borrow one of his. She meant *bathe* of course.

Many years later in the Santa Sofia Mosque in Istanbul - my guide to me to an
upstairs gallery and showed me a runic inscription carved by one of the
Swedish Varangers - Swedish mercenary Vikings or *Varangers* who acted as guards in
the palace of Constantinople - a small world isn’t it.

If you can read any Swedish you can visit this page of the Svensk etymologisk
ordbok [Swedish Etymological Dictionary] http://runeberg.org/svetym/0756.html

regards,

Jud Evans. Personal Website:
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

Posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 3:15 am
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback