name = identity?
Some people are lucky with their name: their parents or their clans have given them a name they liked and it was easy for their cultural environment to pronounce it. Just like Epicurus or Pyrrhos or Lucretius or J.D Salinger or Tom Wolfe or John Updike.
Others were given – by themselves or by others – different names for different reasons. The list of the most known cases would be too long to cite here. The list of authors’ pseudonyms alone has today 11,621 entries http://www.trussel.com/books/pseudo.htm
Even a comparatively undereducated person like myself can remember some famous names their owners were not born with, like Plato, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll – or, in another context, Caesar, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler.
Artists, clowns, writers, monks, religious and political leaders often used two or more names, kings and popes in Europe had regnal names. In Japan the era in which an emperor reigns is given the name that emperor will have after he dies!
Sometimes people move from one language community into another one and some of them change their names because in the new language their old name might sound funny. This is probably the reason why the German forefathers of one of my favorite authors had modified the original Funnegut to the less funny Vonnegut.
There are many reasons people change their names: to protect yourself (“illegal” freedom-fighters), to accommodate their audience (artists and other people who want to deliver a message in a definite language environment), out of tradition (kings and popes), to mark a new chapter in their spiritual development (monks), etc.
I chose myself almost a dozen of them over the last forty years depending whom I wanted to say what and where: in a Hungarian language weekly for the youth, in a Romanian language amateur theater group, as a translator of Japanese literature for Hungarian readers, reporting for Radio Free Europe, authoring and publishing a book for a specific German clientele. My original family name sounded even more outlandish than Günther Nakszynski (=Klaus Kinski) or Józef Teodor Nałęcz Konrad Korzeniowski (= Joseph Conrad) in every language. Very few people could pronounce it and even less spell it. Therefore I was given early on about a dozen nicknames by the people I worked or lived with: my classmates, my friends, my co-workers, my customers, the kids I used to teach in schools, the people I trained or coached.
Did this affect my identity? I have never felt so. It helped my audience concentrate on the message instead of fighting with my name. Some people have such a strong message or care so little about this aspect that they do not bother about making any adaptations, like fellow-Hungarian Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, or they just shave the accents, like Nicolas Sarkozy (in correct Hungarian Sárközy)
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
- - or stink just as horrid – after decayed
In my endeavor to guide people towards happiness through stress-FREEDOM I have chosen as messenger-name, or nom de guerre in my war against unhappiness, stress and ignorance, or program name, the Greek word “Galenios” because it means “calm, unruffled”, referring mostly to the state of the waves of the sea.
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