Decoding "Tracking Song"

Jim Jordan · 30 Oct 1997, 01:29 · from urth-v0005.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Decoding "Tracking Song"
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 01:29:27
Message-ID: <urth-v0005-0363 at digest.urth.net>
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[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

>  Here's the Cim name quote (p 199 of the 1980 Timescape
>  pb edition of IODDAOSAOS):
>
>      When I was born my father wished to name me
>      Seven Snows, which is a common name for girls
>      amoung our people.  But I was born while he
>      was away in his boat; and before he returned,
>      my mother had left her bed and seen the Cim
>      blowing from tree to tree like a soft star in
>      the air, and completed the naming.

	I have nothing to go on except the passage itself, but I figured that cim
is snow. Notice that the naming is "completed," which implies (possibly)
that the mother did not completely change the father's desires.=20

Nutria

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