Neither fish nor fowl | Review of Daisy Rockwell’s Mixed Metaphors

Just before I laid hands on Daisy Rockwell’s new book, my Swedish husband happened to tell me how the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ became a somewhat different product in his language. The word for ‘geese’ is gäss, pronounced like the English ‘yes’. And the other two syllables of the refrain, ‘ter’ and ‘day’, sound very similar to the Swedish te and dej : ‘to’ and ‘you’, respectively. So that classically gloomy song was sung to mean ‘Geese to you, I want to give some geese to you…’ Not quite a translation but still this parodic transporting by the jazz musician who called himself Helmer Byrd is liable to cause transports of delight.