What's in a name

Names are fascinating, aren’t they? They can be funny, mysterious, boring and obvious, and, of course, difficult to pronounce if they come from a faraway place — or not even a faraway place but a place with very different pronunciation rules as Jeremy Clarkson learned when he had to review the Swedish Koenigsegg.

Names always mean something. My name, for instance, means peace in Greek. Funnily enough, in Latin, my preferred short version, Ira, means quite the opposite of peace. It means wrath. Another example: a lot of male names in Eastern Europe end in -slav but that’s not a marker for their ethnicity. It comes from the Slavic verb for “praise”. So, for instance, the name Miroslav would mean someone who praises peace, since mir means peace. Svetoslav would mean someone who praises light and so on. Female names could also end in -slava with the same meanings but more commonly describe concepts without the praising element. Svetlana for Light, Zdravka for Health, Nadezhda for Hope and so on. Pretty straightforward as traditional names go.

In my writing I quite often struggle with the names of my characters. That’s not because I want them to necessarily mean something important for the story, no. It’s because I’m often careless and end up, for instance, with two Jennifers, both of them bad characters because I dislike the name the way I dislike certain other words for no rational reason whatsoever. The Jennifer case is a really weird one because the name comes from Welsh and I love Welsh. Go figure. Sometimes, however, fate touches my WRITING folder and names picked quite randomly acquire a meaning as the story progresses.

When I named Fros, I used the name of a classmate of my daughter because I really liked the sound of it. Euphrosyne — beautiful, difficult to pronounce for a non-Slav and hell to spell right on the first try, which I’ve never managed to do. Euphrosyne is another Greek name and it means good-hearted, according to my Bulgarian etymology sources. In English sources, it means cheerful.

Indeed, despite the literal meaning, in Bulgarian, the name is also associated with good cheer and happiness for mythological reasons. Euphrosyne is one of the Three Graces, which I had no idea about when I wrote the character and named her. I think we could perhaps agree that Fros Kirova is good-hearted but cheerful? Not really, no. Life’s little ironies.

The surname of that good-hearted but not particularly cheerful lady I picked much more deliberately. I named her Kirova after the publisher who gave me a chance at translating fiction years ago. Not only that, but she trusted me with a book that was a bestseller already, We Were Liars. To this day, it remains one of the three best books I’ve translated, and I’ve done dozens since that fateful day when I gathered the courage to send my CV to that publishing house plus a sample translation of, I don’t mind saying, a Martin Amis short story. The first name of that lady? Nadezhda.

I’m currently about a couple of chapters from the end of Fang in Fang 4. As usual, the story took a turn I did not foresee, featuring a character I never intended to include but the story turned out to require. Naturally, the character had to have a name so I gave him one, at random, or so I thought.

Only later did I realise there was nothing random about that name. It had the same root as Fros’s surname and, as etymology would have it, that root, also Greek (no wonder), meant all powerful, master of the world, and other things along the lines of omnipotence and supreme deity-city. Which is how I found the missing link that would bring together the whole story and tie it nicely with a ribbon of suffering, despair, and a little hope for the future. In writing, nothing seems to be random at all.