I’ve read several theories regarding the origin of H.H. Munro’s pen name, but no guidance on how to pronounce it – or, more to the point, how he pronounced it. Anybody know?
I’ve never bothered to try to find an official pronunciation and have gone by the way the teacher in high school said it. Same as the drink. Sock-ee.
I’ve never heard anything but “SAH-key.”
I’ve heard Sah-kee as well.
The drink is spelled “sake” and pronounced “sa-keh,” not “sa-key.” “sa-kay” is ok in English.
Heard the author pronounced as above, but wonder if the pronunciation is the same in US and UK.
On British radio I always heard his name pronounced SAH-ki.
Thanks for the replies, particularly those from ye Olde Country side of the pond. I’ve been pronouncing the name as “Say-kee” (rhymes with “shaky”) since I first read The Interlopers in high school, and was surprised to hear it spoken otherwise.
My ignorance on that particular point has been overcome.
Don’t worry, though. There’s a great deal more whence that came.
All I know is that I like the stories he wrote. One of my cats is Tobermory, for the talking cat in his story of the same name.
But didn’t the name come from the drink? Did the drink used to be spelled “saki”?
As an American, I’ve always pronounced the author’s name “sah-kee.” I have an audiobook in which the British narrator (Patrick Horgan) pronounces the name in a way that sounds sort of halfway between “sah-kee” and “sack-ee.”
This guy was pretty nearly the ONLY writer I liked in those ten-pound English lit books at school.
I pretty much always said his name as “sockey”.
I have a collection of all his short stories. Clovis was a favorite character of mine. Did you read “The Unrest Cure”? He was also part of the house party in “Tobermory”
“The Toys of Peace” is still relevant today. One of the scariest was “Shredni Vashtar” The kid buttering the toast at the end, undisturbed by death, is strange.
I knew a Saki Okabayashi from the OC in the late 70’s. I should have married her.
“Sredni Vashtar” was my favorite short story when I was 10. Which probably tells you all you need to know about my childhood…
Maybe your IRL name is Gabriel-Ernest?
The name came from the Persian; specifically from Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat *. Saki is the cup-bearer, instructed to turn the wine-cup over on finding the narrator passed on.
*Yon rising Moon that looks for us again—
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look or us
Through this same Garden — and for one in vain !
And when like her O Sákí, you shall pass
Among the Guests star-scatter’d on the Grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made One — turn down an empty Glass !*
** The Rubáiyát is a Persian form of several quatrains. Its name derives from the Arabic plural of the word for “quatrain,” Rubá’íyah. This, in turn, comes from the Arabic Rubá, meaning “four.”*
Personally I’ve always heard Sak-i, with a short A; but with a faint veering to Sah.
Munro is part of my childhood — not least since I grew up in Devon near to his upbringing. Sans Aunts.
Actually,
A/ one source suggests Omar’s Saki is Death. Doubtful.
B/ this paper from a lecture at Gresham College argues Munro chose the name not from the Persian, but from the Russian town of Saki ( in the Crimea, so at this present time it’s in a Schrödinger event as to whether it was/is/shall be Russian or Ukrainian or both ). Munro was a foreign correspondent at the beginning of the century and was fond of both Russia and the Balkans.
The author suggests the traditional attribution of the name might have been unlikely for one connected to decadent aesthetes who were not unconnected to the love that dare not speak it’s name.
For saki is an Arabic word meaning a water carrier, a bit like the bhisti or Gunga Din figure of Indian literature. In the caravanserai of the East it was customary for the saki to meet incoming travellers to offer comfort and refreshment. It is clear that sexual favours might also be on offer, and that the water bearer was likely to be male rather than female, a topic that Sir Richard Burton dwells on in detail in the commentaries at the end of his translation of The Arabian Nights.
Burton would. Oscar, ‘Fighting Mac’, and Addington Symonds are also referenced.
Professor Tim Connell — The Grinning Shadow That Sat At The Feast: In commemoration of Hector Munro, 'Saki’
For once the footnotes are worth reading:
16 [ re the Cocoa Tree ( club ) in St James’s Street ] Founded in 1698, it was a haven for Jacobites in 1745 and a club with Tory leanings thereafter. Lord Byron was a member.
20 [ Invasion Fantasy ] PG Wodehouse creates a typically lighthearted view of the matter in Clarence Saves the Day, when England is invaded simultaneously by no fewer than nine foreign armies, each blissfully unaware of the others’ presence. (It is also the first time that a Mad Mullah appears in English Literature.)
27 Ally Sloper was a popular cartoon character. In fact he appeared in the first ever strip cartoon and W C Fields based his character on him.
29 [ Battle of Delville Ridge ] 3000 South Africans were sent in and five nights later less than 150 came out.
I have no authoritative ideas here, merely offer as a data point -
I didn’t realize the name was thought to be from The Rubaiyat. However, other translations of those two verses do not use the word “Saki” there. And earlier translation of those verses featured in the mysterious Somerton Man case.
Briefly, a mysterious body of an unidentifiable man was found on Somerton Beach, Australia. In his pocket was a tiny, stitched off corner, which contained the last two words of the Rubaiyat - Tamam Shud - which means, “It is ended” and which had been torn from a copy of the book. The pocket was stitched with a specific type of waxed thread purchased in America. The book from which the last two words were torn was found in the back seat of a car near where the man’s body was found. The book itself is a very rare edition.
There are photos of the book with the torn out section available here -
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/has-part-of-the-mysterious-somerton-man-code-been-cracked/story-fni6uo1m-1226975308014?nk=b8fada3db8b19fd70ab5023005cd6712
The translation from this rare version (A first edition of the 1859 Fitzgerald translation) of the Rubaiyat goes like this:
And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on The Grass,
And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!
(This page at Gutenberg contains both the First and Fifth translations, if you want to compare them:
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by Omar Khayyam )
Smithsonian has an interesting article about the Somerton Man as well -
It contains a photo of the cover of the Fitzgerald edition found in the car.
I mention all this merely to point out that it’s possible that Saki, writing in the Edwardian era, might not have been familiar with the later version of the poem in which the cupbearer is addressed as “Saki”. Or he might have been - we don’t know. But there were other translations available, which suggests to me that it’s not possible to say for sure that this is what Munro was referring to when he chose his pen name.
It’s also been suggested that the name refers to the South American monkies, Saki monkey - Wikipedia
but I really have no idea, personally.
I can’t say exactly when I first learnt of the Khayyam attribution, but am sure it was in the introduction to the Collected Short Stories by Christopher Morley, which I haven’t read since a child and of which I have no copy to hand. This was accepted as definitive ( and to which Professor Connell is arguing against ) as it was the way most British readers would post about 1930 become acquainted with Saki.
There are a number of authors called Morley, this is he.
I discovered Saki at school, some fifty years ago: the library there had a volume of all his collected short stories, which I read with extreme pleasure – though have hardly looked at anything by him, since then. FWIW, I’ve seen it stated – possibly in the introduction to this school-library tome – that his pseudonym was taken from the name of the “Rubaiyat” cup-bearer.
I think my favourite-of-all, of his, has to be The Storyteller: on a tedious train journey, solo guy keeps three fractious kids sharing his compartment – under the ineffective tutelage of their aunt – quiet and happy for a while, by telling them a highly un-moral tale (making it up as he goes along) in which all kinds of interesting things happen, and prim-and-prissy virtue is punished instead of being rewarded.
The concept of the sāqī is very widespread in Persian poetry and can be found all through the major and minor Persian poets, not just Omar, although it was Omar alone whose versions by FitzGerald made the word famous to English speakers.
It derives from Arabic ساقي sāqī and is the agent participle of the verbal root s-q-y, meaning ‘to give someone a drink’, so it means ‘the one who gives you a drink’. The Spanish word for irrigation canal, acequia, derives from the same Arabic source, الساقية al-sāqīyah, in the feminine gender and with the definite article prefixed; when the Arabs ruled Spain and Sicily they introduced more advanced agricultural techniques such as irrigation.
In the original Arabic and Persian, the vowel ā is long (both vowels are long, in fact), so pronouncing it as a short English [æ] could only have come about through ignorance of the original word. The pronunciation [ˈsɑːkiː] SAH-kee cited by several people above is a cromulent approximation for English phonetics. In most Arabic speakers’ pronunciations, the ā phoneme is actually pronounced as a long [æː], but that’s no matter, because as a phoneme, its sound may vary.
In Persian, it’s pronounced [sɒːˈɣiː], approximately saw-GHEE, where the “gh” sound is a velar fricative almost like the French “r” in Paris. Imagine a French-Canadian saying “Sor-RY!” with a strong accent and that would be very nearly it. However, that’s the *modern *Persian pronunciation from Iran.
Classical Persian poets of old, like Omar himself back in the 11th century, used pronunciation similar to the more conservative phonology heard in Afghan Dari, so if you could take a time machine to hear the poet reciting his own verse, he’d pronounce it [ˈsɑːqiː] SAH-qee, where the [q] is a uvular stop articulated farther back than [k].
As I mentioned above, replacing [q] with [k] is a reasonable adaptation using English phonetics, so for the pen name of Mr. Munro, the American English speakers here going “SAH-kee” have it right, IMHO. Referring to the English author, I would say it that way and not like in Persian or Arabic.
Coffey, like the drink, only not spelled the same.