Austin Allen - Ode to the Hartford Whalers [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

1979–97, Hartford, CT (“Insurance City”)

I

I sing for the Hartford Whalers:
I mourn for a hockey team
that never, like Ahab’s sailors,
dreamed the implausible dream,
or went down as hopeless flailers,
failing in the extreme.
They skated around their rink
and couldn’t exactly sink.

II

In homeroom at age eight,
I studied, with fascination,
facts about my home state.
I worried: our population,
with its glacially slow growth rate,
was the tiniest in the nation
ever to try to support
a team in a big-league sport.

Yet there, in a vision of green,
they were and seemed to belong—
Shanahan, Burke, Dineen
(I number them all in my song)—
till, as I neared thirteen,
the facts proved all of them wrong.
The team would keep playing, but
not in Connecticut.

III

My own youth hockey days
had ended two years prior.
I’d set no ice ablaze
as a “Northern Connecticut Flyer”;
nor, in my first growth phase,
had I shot all that much higher.
Still I stood tall and roared
whenever my Whalers scored…

The victory jingle, “Brass Bonanza,”
fills the stadium, gives the fans a
thrill. To this extravaganza
I devote a special stanza.

Suddenly hockey hurt:
the Whalers bowed, withdrew;
sports, in a final spurt,
outgrew me. Shortly I grew
out of my Whalers shirt,
my state—my family, too
(the fabric had started shrinking
and our population sinking).

IV

These days I live down south,
but I’m getting a chill again—
the draft I felt in youth,
joining the league of men.
Though all the teeth in my mouth
are accounted for, now as then,
in dreams they are missing, falling.
My team is my family, brawling.

And Hartford runs a correction
in small print in the Courant’s
editorial section:
“There’s no such thing as insurance.
We lied for your protection.
Innocence builds endurance.
But lost is lost is lost:
now wake up and eat the cost.”

Connecticut seems to remain.
My family has mostly gone.
I squint from a homebound train
at the capitol’s snowbound lawn,
count each quaint weathervane,
assess what the weather’s done…
But the place disclaims all claims.
I’ve stopped watching hockey games:

how can a grown man root
when the home team may just duck
out of its stadium, scoot
out of reach like a puck—
and home is no absolute,
either? With any luck,
love learns to improvise
on thin blades, on thin ice.

V

The town once threw a parade
when the Whalers survived the first
round of the playoffs. They played
decently—not their worst—
then lost as soon as they’d made
the point that they weren’t cursed.
This happened when I was one;
then the glory days were done.

But what is athletic grace?
And who are sports’ true heroes?
I watch a Zamboni trace
its Zen, concentric zeroes
on pure white mental space.
Within that zone of clear O’s,
one small black speck will go on
eluding me like a koan.

I sing for the team I loved
in a key that is cheerfully minor.
I mourn for the year they moved,
left my state with a shiner
(though the blow was politely gloved),
and settled in Carolina,
a market not quite as small.
The next year, they won it all.