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ArchivesRe: Russian origin for Yesenia?
in reply to a message by Dorchadas
Thanks very much for your response and the time you took to look this up!
Since the name was probably rare in Russia even in the Soviet era, I highly doubt it. How would a Soviet Russian name even become popular in Latin America? For example: it doesn't seem like there was a hugely popular Russian film with that name, in the same way that the Mexican film was hugely popular in the Soviet Union and popularised the name Yesenia/Yeseniya.
My theory of this would have to do with why Yolanda Vargas Dulche chose the name for the character. In her famous story, Yesenia is a gypsy girl.
There certainly were connections between Russia and Mexico back in the 1940s when Vargas Dulche began her career. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was living in Mexico City when he was assassinated, after all. People involved in the arts like Vargas Dulche have usually been more attracted to both foreign influences and left-leaning politics than the average person.
It just seems more likely to me that Vargas Dulche would have thought Yesenia was a good name for a gypsy girl if she had run across it as an exotic Russian name than taking it from a genus of palm trees.
Of course we will never know unless someone runs across a statement from Yolanda Vargas Dulche explaining why she chose the name for her character.
Since the name was probably rare in Russia even in the Soviet era, I highly doubt it. How would a Soviet Russian name even become popular in Latin America? For example: it doesn't seem like there was a hugely popular Russian film with that name, in the same way that the Mexican film was hugely popular in the Soviet Union and popularised the name Yesenia/Yeseniya.
My theory of this would have to do with why Yolanda Vargas Dulche chose the name for the character. In her famous story, Yesenia is a gypsy girl.
There certainly were connections between Russia and Mexico back in the 1940s when Vargas Dulche began her career. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was living in Mexico City when he was assassinated, after all. People involved in the arts like Vargas Dulche have usually been more attracted to both foreign influences and left-leaning politics than the average person.
It just seems more likely to me that Vargas Dulche would have thought Yesenia was a good name for a gypsy girl if she had run across it as an exotic Russian name than taking it from a genus of palm trees.
Of course we will never know unless someone runs across a statement from Yolanda Vargas Dulche explaining why she chose the name for her character.
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Replies
You'd also need to find out where Karsten got the Genus name. Unlike the earlier and thus current name Oenocarpus, Jessenia has no Graeco-Latin meaning - it would seem to have been chosen in honor of someone known to Karsten. Besides, these palms have common names throughout Latin America - they seem not to be known as Jessenia except in certain scientific literature.
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Well Karl Jessen was a well-known botanist, too, and he has the official shorthand Jess. in botanical names, therefore he wasn't just an acquaintance of H. Karsten. But the major argument is still true: The palm have trivial names, but none of them is known popularly as "Jessenia" or "Yessenia". So probably the name was just made up by Yolanda Vargas Dulche maybe inspired by botany, I don't know the graphic novel nor any statements of the author where she got the name from.
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the Danish surname Jessen is probably the origin, although there's also at least one town named Jessen in Germany. There is a botanist Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Jessen (1821-1889) who describes a number of species in Deutschlands Graser und Getreidearten 1863. Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten (4 years older than Jessen) describes the palm as Jessenia in 1857 in the journal Linnaea; Ein Journal für die Botanik in ihrem ganzen Umfange. Jessen published 45 names to Karstens 701
This message was edited 2/18/2020, 2:04 PM
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