AT LEAST I TRANSLATED.

From an impassioned Poetry Foundation article on translation by Linh Dinh:

One of the defining figures of Vietnamese literature, Phạm Quỳnh helped to modernize the language, encouraged the writing of short stories and novels, and the anthologizing of folk poetry. Admiring the logic and clarity of Western thinking, he felt that Vietnamese needed to learn from it, but that they also needed to identify and protect their distinctiveness. In 1922, he wrote about Vietnamese folk poetry, ca dao: "Even though our oral literature has not been recorded in any book, I will insist that it is a very rich one, richer, perhaps, than any other country. [The more illiterate a population, the richer the oral tradition—L. Dinh.] Although it is not without its crudeness, this oral literature is also profoundly resonant; one can say that the wisdom, morals, and aesthetics of our common folks are all contained within these idioms." In short, don't be half-Westernized and half-Vietnamese, one must become an Uber-Westernized Uber-Vietnamese. Warning Vietnamese writers against composing in French, Phạm Quỳnh wrote: "In borrowing someone's language, you are also borrowing his ideas, literary techniques—even his emotions and customs." After centuries of writing in Chinese, the Vietnamese had produced no Li Po, he pointed out, and writing in French, it is unlikely that they will ever produce a Victor Hugo or a Anatole France. After reading a story in French, Phạm Quỳnh suggested as an exercise, Try retelling it to one's wife in Vietnamese.

Pham Quỳnh translated tirelessly from Maupassant, Pierre Loti, and Alfred de Vigny, among many others. He wanted to have his Trojan Horse and eat it too. He wrote travel pieces, scholarly articles and books about Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes and Confucius... He ridiculed men into cutting their hair short, begged women to not sleep in the kitchen, even if it was the warmest nook in the house. His considerable political engagement brought about his demise, however. Advocating gradual Vietnamese independence within the French union, he worked with Bảo Đại, the figurehead emperor. Quỳnh's compromised stance towards the Colonialists, his lack of militancy, is revealed in this famous saying: "As long as [Nguyễn Du's epic poem] Kim Van Kieu remains, our language remains, our nation remains." He equated great poetry with language, with nationhood, all else is Bushism. On August 23, 1945, he was captured by the Việt Minh, the Communist-dominated guerrilla group supported by the O.S.S. (precursor to the C.I.A.) in W.W.II, along with Ngô Đình Khôi (brother of Ngô Đình Diệm, future president of South Vietnam) and his son. All three were killed on September 6, 1945. Although I wasn't within earshot, I'm convinced Phạm Quỳnh's last words were "At least I translated." His body was only found 11 years later, in Hắc Thú [Black Beast] forest, near Huế.

(Via wood s lot.)

ARABIC BARRIO.

I just discovered an etymology that surprised me: barrio, which the OED takes back only to "Sp. barrio district, suburb," is now considered to be, as AHD puts it, "Spanish, from Arabic barrī, of an open area, from barr, open area. See brr in Appendix II." And from Appendix II we learn that it's related to birr, the unit of currency in Ethiopia. (According to Wikipedia, "Before 1976, dollar was the official English translation of birr. Today, it is officially birr in English as well.")

NABOKOV AS POET.

I would in any case recommend Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971 for its superbly annotated collection of the correspondence of the gifted Wilson with his slightly younger and far greater contemporary Nabokov, but I do so with particular enthusiasm because of its important introduction by Simon Karlinsky. After a useful summary of both writers' careers up to 1940, when Nabokov arrived in the States and the two men met, Karlinsky discusses with admirable clarity and force the mutual misunderstandings that strained their relationship from the beginning and finally destroyed it in the bad feelings over Wilson's pugnacious 1965 review of Nabokov's Eugene Onegin. He goes into Wilson's delusion that Nabokov was ignorant about politics (he wrote to Nabokov in 1947, in the course of expressing his disappointment with Bend Sinister, "You aren’t good at this kind of subject, which involves questions of politics and social change, because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them," and in 1971 made the astonishing statement that Nabokov "does not even understand how [the Communist regime] works or how it ever came to be. His knowledge of Russia, in fact, is very special, extremely limited"), but what I want to focus on here is the literary misunderstanding. Wilson was, of course, one of the first American critics to write about Russian literature in any depth, and certainly one of the few with an ability to read Russian. As Karlinsky says, "His essays on Turgenev and Tolstoy were based on study of sources available only in the original Russian. In his essay on Tyutchev... Wilson ranged into areas of Russian literature most American critics do not even know exist."

Yet, for all this wide scope, Wilson took almost no notice of the remarkable Silver Age of the early twentieth century — just as he had avoided when he wrote To the Finland Station looking too closely at the socialist and Marxist groups that opposed Lenin. Wilson was acquainted with D.S. Mirsky's books on the history of Russian literature, which do that period full justice; but his view of the post-1905 situation had been formed earlier by Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, a book that cleverly discredits and slanders some of the finest Russian writers of the early twentieth century...

It was precisely in the brilliant literary flowering of that age, which Trotsky had concealed from Wilson, that Nabokov's art originated — from the experimental prose of Remizov and Bely, from the more traditionalist, but stylistically exquisite prose of Bunin and, even more importantly, from the great and innovative poetry that was then being written by Annensky, Blok, Bely and, later, Mandelstam and Pasternak, among so many others...

When he warned Nabokov, in the first letter to him we have..., to avoid playing with words and making puns..., Wilson could not have been aware that this was less a personal idiosyncrasy of Nabokov's than an aspect of a widespread trend in the literature of Russian modernism. Interest in paronomasia, in discovering the hitherto unperceived relationships between the semantic and phonetic aspects of speech, pursued not for the purpose of playing with words but for discovering and revealing hidden new meanings, was basic to the prose of Remizov, Bely and other Russian Symbolists. It was even more basic to the poetry of Mayakovsky, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, the three poets whose work had some of the same roots as Nabokov's prose and with whom he shared the bent for verbal experimentation that at first puzzled and then delighted readers of his novels written in English.

Like Joyce, he wrote some good poems but his real poetic gift is expressed in the magical sound-web of his prose. I quoted a nice example at the end of this post, and I'll add a couple more that I've noticed while making my way through Drugie beregá.

In Chapter Five, section 5 of Speak, Memory, describing how he has always hated going to sleep and how he clung to the line of light visible from the room of his tutor Mademoiselle and hated it when she stopped reading and turned out the light, Nabokov talks about "imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle." In English it's a nice image, but look what it becomes in Russian (where it's in section 6): "Рай - это место, где бессонный сосед читает бесконечную книгу при свете вечной свечи!" [Rai - eto mesto, gde bessonnyi soséd chitayet beskonéchnuyu knigu pri svete vechnoi svechí!] The slight assonance of "eto mesto" gives way to the snaky hiss of "bessonnyi soséd" and the k's and n's of "beskonéchnuyu knigu" before the triumphant entanglement of sounds in "svete vechnoi svechí."

And a few pages earlier, in section 3, is this concentrated clause, almost a tongue-twister: "Втроем пройдя по полупротоптанной тропинке..." [Vtroem proidyá po poluprotóptannoi tropinke...] 'The three of us passing along a half-beaten path...' (in Nabokov's English version: "The three of us followed a fairly easy trail..."). Listen to those tr's and pr's—you can hear them tripping proudly along the partly trodden trail, off on a promising trip that will be nipped in the bud by Dmitri.

No wonder it was so hard for him to give up writing in Russian. He wrote to his wife in 1942:

On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me, a terrible desire to write, and write in Russian — but it's impossible. I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced these feelings can properly appreciate them, the torment, the tragedy. English in this case is an illusion, ersatz. In my usual condition — busy with butterflies, translations or academic writing — I myself don't fully register all the grief and bitterness of my situation...

GETTER BETTER.

Arnold Zwicky at the Log has noticed something that I desperately want to be a common typo but that I'm afraid he may be correct in thinking a new construction a-borning:

Yesterday on ADS-L, Doug Harris noted a surprise (boldfaced below) in a piece by TVNewser columnist Gail Shister: [...] [Emily Rooney said] "What’s she waiting for? Will it getter better after the election? After the inauguration? Of course not." [...] Was this just an inadvertent slip, with the -er of the comparative better anticipated on the preceding verb get (perhaps facilitated by the rhyme of get and bet-)? Almost surely not; Harris got 21,300 raw webhits for {"getter better"}, and even granting that there are many duplicates and that some might be slips, there are still many examples remaining that look like people are saying and writing just what they intend to. It looks like a new idiom — new to me and possibly to the usage literature, and possibly recent.

He gives enough examples to convince me it's probably more than just a frequent slip of the typing fingers; there is even "Are animals getter more and more inteligent [sic]?" where there is no question of an anticipation of a later -er. Mind you, I don't dislike this because it's "wrong" (I think we all know where I stand on artificial correctness), but because it doesn't sound to me like something a native speaker of English could conceivably say, which means my ear for English is aging out of service even faster than I had feared.

Anyway, I thought I'd turn to the assembled multitudes: have you ever run across this use of "getter"? Have you used it yourself (or can you imagine using it)?

TELLING LEEBISH FROM GRECIOUS.

A NY Times story by Christine Kenneally, a freelance journalist who has a Ph.D. in linguistics, discusses some interesting new research that takes the stale Sapir-Whorf debate in a new direction:

Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not...

Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.

The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, who is now doing postdoctoral research at Cornell, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.

When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.

The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.

In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?

The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too...

The story goes on to discuss other experiments, including Lera Boroditsky's study of color perception (see her remarks here); it's all very thought-provoking. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

GHOTI.

I imagine most of you are familiar with the old wheeze about fish being spelled ghoti, with gh pronounced as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation. It's regularly attributed to Shaw, but no one has ever found it in his writings, and it turns out, as reported in an invigorating Language Log post by Ben Zimmer (now Executive Producer of VisualThesaurus.com—congratulations!), that that's because it goes back before he was born, being attested in a letter dated December 11, 1855, to Leigh Hunt from his publisher Charles Ollier:

And here an experiment in orthography, which it may amuse some of our readers to carry further at this season of puzzles and charades, and kindred jovial perplexities:—"My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling Fish. As thus:—G.h.o.t.i., Ghoti, fish. Nonsense! say you. By no means, say I. It is perfectly vindicable orthography. You give it up? Well then, here is the proof. Gh is f, as in tough, rough, enough; o is i as in women; and ti is sh, as in mention, attention, &c. So that ghoti is fish."

As Ben says, "it actually makes sense that ghoti made its earliest appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, when English orthographic reform was gaining popularity"; he quotes some far more ponderous examples of the same sort of jovial respellings from the period (showing, incidentally, that as of 1845 postvocalic /r/ was still pronounced in educated usage).

One thing that particularly pleased me was the discovery that the erroneous attribution to Shaw comes from Mario Pei, who Ben calls (with perhaps excessive kindness) "not always the most reliable source when it comes to language-related information." Pei, like Bryson today, is enjoyable to read but not to be taken seriously as a source of facts.

Oh, and the Log now has comments (again)! Well done, chaps.

WALS ONLINE.

The World Atlas of Language Structures is now freely available online:

WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).

WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1110 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.

WALS thus makes information on the structural diversity of the world's languages available to a large audience, including interested nonlinguists as well as linguists who would not normally read grammars of exotic languages or specialized works by comparative linguists.

I've only had a chance to dip into this, but I look forward to exploring it at length. Many thanks to Casey (of Belletra) for the heads-up!

LANGUAGE IS THE PEOPLE'S.

I just ran across Language Is the People's, subtitled "Notes from the copy editor." Dan is "a full-time quality assurance technician (read: proofreader) based in St. Paul, Minnesota" who has also worked as a copy editor, and his Manifesto plants its flag in the very middle ground I try to inhabit:

I've found that even if you're in a position where you have to enforce arbitrary rules like the AP styleguide's preference for adviser over advisor, there's no harm in knowing that language prescriptions like those in your usage guide are neither magic nor objectively "correct."

This knowledge can even help you to be less arrogant. There's no reason to look down on a writer for using which in a way which you wouldn't, especially when you find out that many other people have the same correctness conditions as that writer. You might recast a sentence with that sort of which in order to fit with internal style rules or promote clarity or satisfy the language cranks in your audience, but all that's about making writing better, not about right vs. wrong.

There's also no reason to — as I often did in the past — stop a conversation to enforce a language "rule" when what the speaker said was completely intelligible to you. The latent classism in pointing out that "ain't isn't a word," or the fact that, yes it is, aren't the point. The point is that you are the people, the language is working for you, and if you didn't have some WTF reaction to how the speaker is talking, then there's no reason to bring Strunk and White into this. As they say, or should.

Lest we forget: Language belongs to the people.

Amen, and if people would worry less about whether language is "correct" and more about whether it's used well, the world would be a better place. (Dan has an interesting discussion of "descriptivism" as bogeyman and as reality here.)

STANFORD BOOKS FULLY SEARCHABLE.

Stanford University Press is pleased to announce that you can now search the full text of our books via Google Book Search. We are currently still in the process of uploading and scanning our backlist, but there are already over a thousand Stanford titles in Google Book Search. When the project is completed, all of our books will be searchable electronically.

This is terrific news, and I hope the idea spreads. University presses, despite the problems they face, are vital to the life of the mind, and the more they make their books accessible, the better off we are. (Via wood s lot, itself vital to the life of the mind.)

LEARN LANGUAGES, PEOPLE!

A cautionary Aboriginal tale from Anggargoon:

Two guys meet by chance across a chasm. One of the guys shouts a question in Oowini across the gap. The other doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t speak that language. He yells back something in a different language, which the Oowini guy doesn’t know. Then they both turn into stone.

Your teachers warned you this would happen if you didn't study...

A BALL OF LIGHT IN ONE'S HAND.

The eudæmonist discusses a book that was important to me when I was painfully learning to think for myself (something not easy to do in the coils of the educational system), Ezra Pound's Guide to Kulchur:

Reading Pound’s Guide to Kulcher, I was perplexed; partially because it is an odd book, aimed at those who don’t mind attending the university of the brain of Ezra Pound (which is a strange place, of many prejudices). Mostly, though, I just wasn’t (and ain’t) sure what to make of it, how to reconcile those parts I can (reservedly) agree with and those which strike me as outcroppings of the fashion of the times or mere idiosyncrasies. It jumps here and there, following a logic which I don’t quite see (and am too lazy to look for), and digresses on subjects with a force not quite necessary to the task of guide – as though Virgil cracked wise at every opportunity, and made opportunities to do so where none were before.

When I can agree with him, though, I find that generally agree pretty whole-heartedly....

Interesting commentary follows. Those whom Ez inspires, he inspires well.

JADE VACUITY.

A correspondent writes: "I have come across a reference to a location in Hong Kong called 'Temple of Jade Vacuity' on Cheung Chau island. Googling doesn't explain it,... though one reference refers to ghosts, and I wondered if that was the 'Vacuity' element, and there are other references to Vacuity in Daoist religion (philosophy?)." A little rummaging around Google Books turned up the information that one of the Taoist gods is "Celestial Venerable of Jade Vacuity" (Yü-hsü ming-huang t'ien-tsun/Yuxu minghuang tiancun). I'm guessing the hsü (xu) 'vacuity' is Mathews' character 2821 hsü "False; untrue; unreal. Hollow; empty. Vacant; insubstantial; figurative; abstract." There are a bunch of other hits for "Jade Vacuity," and it's clearly a Taoist thing, but damned if I know what. As I told my correspondent, "I'll post about it—surely one of the Varied Readers will know." So: what's with the odd collocation Jade Vacuity?

OLD IRISH GLOSSARIES.

Long-time readers will be aware of my hopeless love for Old Irish, that maddening tongue that squashes verbs into unrecognizable shapes and forces you to remember the rules of lenition and nasalization in order to interpret initial consonants. I haven't actually done anything with it for decades, but every once in a while I pull down my beat-up and much-annotated copy of Thurneysen and flip reminiscently through the dozen pages of strong and suppletive verbs (té(i)t 'goes,' imperative eirg, future ·rega, preterite luid, passive ethe, present perfective do-s·cuat [where the c is nasalized and thus pronounced g], deuterotonic form of the previous ·dichet...) Anyway, it turns out the internet, among its many other treasures, holds an Early Irish Glossaries Database ("A project by Paul Russell, Pádraic Moran, University of Cambridge"):

An important resource for our understanding of the literary and cultural environment of medieval Ireland is a series of three inter-related early Irish glossaries, known as Sanas Cormaic ‘Cormac’s Glossary’, O’Mulconry’s Glossary, and Dúil Dromma Cetta ‘the Collection of Druim Cett’. They each consist of alphabetically listed (first letter only) headwords followed by an entry which can range from a single word explanation, often an explanation of the headword, to a whole narrative running to several pages.

The Early Irish Glossaries Database (EIGD) is a powerful and flexible tool for searching and analysing the headwords in these glossaries. The database currently contains headwords for each manuscript version of these glossaries, and allows you to list headwords, search for occurrences of words, and generate concordance-tables of different versions.

Thanks for the link, Patricia!

THE MESSICALS OF THE GREAT GOD.

Conrad, who (like Finnegan himself) has risen from the dead, has favored us with a tour-de-farce post that begins with The Plain People of Ireland—I mean to say, Ben Watson—pontificating on how the Wake is not at all the mysterious text bourgeois scholars pretend it is so that they can explicate it with their drafts and their allusions and their hypotheses, not at all, it's as plain as the nose on your face, if only you have an honest proletarian consciousness! When you "read the Wake to the average person,... not necessarily intellectual, academic types, but just ordinary people with life experience, they get it immediately." So Conrad takes him at his word and goes out to read the Wake to the average person, with hilarious results ("Unuchorn! Ungulant! Uvuloid! Uskybeak! I barked at a passing Rastafarian, who gave me such a terrifying look that I decided to stick to gentler passages from then on").

From there he moves to the trope that "the academics have it all wrong, and that we have only to open our eyes to see the truth," exemplifying it with M. J. Harper's The History of Britain Revealed, which he bought and read after being enticed by my post about it. He quotes my conclusion "But equivalent nonsense about language is reviewed respectfully, and it makes me despair," and reassures me as follows: "The fact is, Mr. Hat, nonsense about every subject under the sun has been reviewed respectfully. There's really no need to despair!" And quite right he is, too. I urge anyone interested in populist blowhards and/or crackpot theories to refresh themselves with Conrad's sly and unflappable prose.

TURAN IN WEST AFRICA.

This Language Log post (by Mark Liberman) contains a bit of information in the Update that made me sit up and take notice. David Eddyshaw is quoted as writing: "The actual words for 'white man' [in West Africa] are interesting... In Hausa, it’s Batuure, apparently via a long chain of subtle shifts of meaning from Turan 'not-Iran'." (I've changed his quotes to itals for clarity.) Years ago, when I was delving into African history and culture, I picked up a book called Munyakare: African Civilization Before the Batuuree, by Richard W. Hull. For a long time I wondered what that "Batuuree" was; eventually I learned it was Hausa (singular Batūrē, high pitch on the -tū-; plural Tūrāwā, high pitch on the -wā), but I still wondered about the etymology. Now, assuming Eddyshaw is correct (anybody know anything about this etymology?), I know, and it's quite astonishing.

Turan is an ancient Iranian term that has had various overlapping and occasionally contradictory senses (inhabitants of Central Asia, Turks, enemies of the Iranians, etc.); C. E. Bosworth says, in his section of the Encyclopædia Iranica article on Central Asia, "In early Islamic times Persians tended to identify all the lands to the northeast of Khorasan and lying beyond the Oxus with the region of Turan... The denizens of Turan were held to include the Turks..., and behind them the Chinese... Turan thus became both an ethnic and a geographical term, but always containing ambiguities and contradictions, arising from the fact that all through Islamic times the lands immediately beyond the Oxus and along its lower reaches were the homes not of Turks but of Iranian peoples, such as the Sogdians and Khwarezmians." I don't know how it got to West Africa and Hausa—there can't have been many Persian speakers in the area—but it's an impressive peregrination.

(This post should bring a smile to John Emerson, great aficionado of farflung cultural connections that he is.)

ZILANT.

I was reading a horrifying and depressing discussion (in Russian) of what a great many women have to put up with in the way of male attitudes and behavior when I hit a comment that started off: "Вышла у меня как-то стори. Подходит ко мне на Зиланте один смутно знакомый мэн..." 'Once [this] story happened to me. A guy I vaguely knew came up to me in Zilant...' (Note the borrowings from English: стори [stori—why feminine gender, I wonder?] and мэн [men].) I thought at first "Zilant" must be Zeeland, but as I read on I realized the setting had to be somewhere in Russia (and it turns out Zeeland is Зеландия [Zelandiya] in Russian anyway). So I went to Yandex and after a little searching discovered that Zilant is a dragon from Tatar legend (the Tatar word is yılan 'snake') and has been since 1730 the symbol of Kazan. Clearly, it is in slang use as a way of referring to the city of Kazan, which made perfect sense in context since from a comment earlier in the thread I had learned that Kazan is a major center of male thuggishness. [Update: As commenter Dmitry points out, it actually refers to a role-playing convention in Kazan.]

What struck me forcibly was that if I had encountered this usage before the internet, I would have had no way of finding out what it meant. It's not in any of my dictionaries; a form closer to the Tatar original, зиланъ [zilan], was in Dahl, but I would have had no reason to connect the two. (I wonder when zilan changed to zilant, and why?) Anyway, it gave me yet another occasion to be profoundly grateful to the sea of information made accessible to us by the internet.

Addendum. And after writing that I hit a phrase (in the same comment) that defeated me. Anybody know what is meant by неферский прикид? I know прикид [prikid] is slang for 'clothes,' but although the adjective is used a lot online (modifying 'forum,' 'style,' 'exclamation,' etc.) I can't find a definition. Заранее спасибо!

By the way, from the Wikipedia article on Zilant I got to an interesting one on the İske imlâ alphabet used for the Tatar language before 1920, when it was replaced by the Yaña imlâ (which only lasted until 1927).

THE IMPRINT OF A GETA.

A fascinating 1965 Robert Trumbull interview with Yukio Mishima (for some reason it's odd to see him described as "a humorous and youthful man of 40"):

Mr. Mishima always writes in Japanese and never changes a translation. "The translator asks me thousands of questions," he said, "but I don't mind small mistakes." He was amused, not angry, when the translator of an earlier novel rendered the word "yatsuhashi" as "eighth bridge," which is a perfectly correct alternate reading of the characters that the author intended to mean a kind of cake sold in Kyoto. "The translator really had to struggle with that sentence to have it make sense with a bridge in it," he said, chuckling.

"It is most important that the translator have a gift of expression in English and Japanese shouldn't try it," Mr. Mishima continued. "They read like an English-speaker writing in Japanese. Donald Keene [one of Mr. Mishima's several translators] is the only American I know of who writes well in Japanese." He also thinks that John Nathan, a young American and a student of Japanese literature at Tokyo University, did a superb job of writing English in his translation of "The Sailor." ...

"I use a Japanese dictionary to check the accuracy of my characters. They can be incredibly complex." He dashed off the character for Mount Hiei, a favorite resort near Kyoto, which took 16 separate strokes of the pen. Some have as many as 33 strokes, all conveying nuances of the whole "picture" of the word. "No dictionary contains all the Kanji there are. The first and second proofs often come back with a mark called a geta, because it looks like the imprint of a geta, the Japanese wooden clog, in place of a character that the printer has had to order specially made. He always has it for the third proof," he said.

Via Matt at No-sword, where you can see an actual geta symbol; his Néojaponisme article "Kawabata, Mishima & the Nobel Prize" is also well worth your attention.

FUN WITH THE CHICAGO MANUAL.

(Warning: This entry will be of interest only to that tiny minority of readers who both use the Chicago Manual of Style and enjoy pointless bibliographical research. But having done the research, I'm damned if I'm going to refrain from sharing it.)

So I was trying to find an example of a paragraph-styled bibliography in the Chicago Manual when I had one of those irrelevant thoughts that so often interrupt my work: "I wonder if, using the magic of the internet, I could find out what books these sample pages are from?" By "sample pages" I mean the section of examples of various styles that follow Chapter 16 ("Bibliographies") and occupy pages 625-40. In such a soul as mine the thought was herald to the deed; to things that pleaded for delay I gave but little heed. I started googling, and lo!

625: The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, by Adrian Johns (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
626: Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, by John H. Zammito (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
627: Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism, by Richard Thomas Eldridge (University of Chicago Press, 1997)
628: Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, by Robert M. Polhemus (University of Chicago Press, 1980) [But the page in the Google Books edition is headed SELECT (not SELECTED) BIBLIOGRAPHY, and differently laid out.]
629: Tadpoles: The Biology of Anuran Larvae, by Roy W. McDiarmid and Ronald Altig (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
630: Social Security and Retirement Around the World, ed. Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise (University of Chicago Press, 1999) [Again, the page is differently laid out.]
631: Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, by James A. Brundage (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
632: Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, by K. M. Baker (University of Chicago Press, 1975) [I have not pinned this down definitively, but all circumstantial evidence points to it: the author (who helpfully cites his own work in the first footnote) is K. M. Baker, the works and letters of Condorcet are "frequently cited," and it's a UChic book.]
633: The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Bureaucracy: The Economics and Politics of Institutional change, by Ronald N. Johnson and Gary D. Libecap (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
634: Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, tr. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (University of Chicago Press, 2000) [It's definitely a translation of Tocqueville, and since this one isn't on Google Books and I doubt UChic would have two competing versions, I think it must be this.]
635: Thomas Watson's Latin Amyntas (1585) edited by Walter F. Staton, J. [With:] Abraham Fraunce's translation The Lamentations of Amyntas (1587), edited by Franklin M. Dicky (University of Chicago Press, 1967)
636: Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, by Catherine R. Stimpson, Lawrence Lipking (University of Chicago Press, 1988)
637: The Scientific Revolution, by Steven Shapin (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
638: An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
639: The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor, by Bruce R. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
640: Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, by Paul F. Berliner (University of Chicago Press, 1994)

I'm quite pleased by this useless accomplishment, but my pleasure is marred by my failure to identify the example on page 634 (Fig. 16:10). The text is not googleable and there's just too little information; it's a translated work about Massachusetts political structures (counties and townships are the particular focus of the page), and it has the striking sentence "The county therefore has, to tell the truth, no political existence," but that's not enough to even form hypotheses. If anyone happens to know the book, you can complete this listing and make a goldbricking editor happy. [Thanks to Ben Zimmer in the comments, the book has been identified!]

ASK!

Avva's reference to a joke about MGIMO (the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations) led me to the Wikipedia article on "Runglish," which has not only the joke:

"Excuse me, which watch?"
"Near six."
"Such much?"
"To whom how..."
"MGIMO finished?"
"Ask!..."

...but a detailed explanation following it of each line (for the last: "Спрашиваешь! 'But of course!' This one-word finisher literally means "[You] ask!" i.e., "You don't even have to ask". Also, he could say "Он еще спрашивает!", i.e. "He still asks!"). The "Such much" part will be familiar to aficionados of Casablanca.

YAM YAM.

The Black Country is "a loosely-defined area of the English West Midlands"; its name is apparently a reference to the color of the coal-filled local soil. Aside from coal and pollution, it is "known for its distinctive dialect," which is the subject of a BBC story:

People that live in the Black Country are very proud of the way they speak. They have their own dialect and vocabulary as opposed to just being a different accent.

One of the most famous features is the 'yam yam' sound when saying certain phrases. 'You are' is pronounced yo'am and 'are you' is pronounced 'am ya'.

Vowels are also often changed. When people greet each other they use the phrase 'Yow awight' meaning 'you alright'.

It's a superficial little piece, but it links to a fairly extensive dialect dictionary (there's another one here).

SPEAKING ON OTHER SHORES.

Having finished Proust, my wife and I have started reading Speak, Memory at bedtime, and I am reading the corresponding section of the Russian version, Drugie berega [Other shores], afterwards; I want to make a post about the amazing Russian tradition of literary autobiographies and memoirs (and autobiographical novels), but I don't have time at the moment, so I'll confine myself to noting that the differences between the Russian and English texts are fascinating and illuminating for understanding Nabokov's writerly instincts. Here's a sample from the first section of Chapter Two (he is describing the visions he has before falling asleep, which are not "muscae volitantes—shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humor"):

At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing flou quality, and then I see—projected, as it were, upon the inside of the eyelid—gray figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows, or a mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts.

Here is the Russian:

Но иногда, перед самым забытьем, пухлый пепел падает на краски, и тогда фотизмы мои успокоительно расплываются, кто-то ходит в плаще среди ульев, лиловеют из-за паруса дымчатые острова, валит снег, улетают тяжелые птицы.

Translated:

But sometimes, before I lapse into drowsy oblivion, plump ashes fall on the colors, and then my photisms spread soothingly, someone walks in a cloak among beehives, smoke-colored islands turn violet beyond a sail, snow falls thickly, heavy birds fly away.

What is basically the same set of images is expressed very differently. And in this instance I think I prefer the Russian; as usual with Nabokov, it is more reader-friendly—the use of the French word flou 'blurred, out-of-focus, fuzzy' seems to me ostentatious and self-indulgent (compare his intention of calling the book Speak, Mnemosyne, from which he was dissuaded by his sensible publisher)—and I don't really believe in those parrots. On the other hand, the English version ends with the "mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts," a subtle anticipation of the very end of the book, with its harbor view that includes "a splendid ship's funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture." So, as always, it's good to have them both; binocular vision is preferable to monocular.

Addendum. I just ran across this near the end of II:3 (his mother has been off picking mushrooms in a light rain):

...бисерная морось на зеленовато-бурой шерсти плаща образовывала вокруг нее подобие дымчатого ореола.
[...the beadily-minute drizzle on the greenish-brown wool of her cloak formed around her the likeness of a smoke-colored aureole.]
(English version: "...her small figure cloaked and hooded in greenish-brown wool, on which countless droplets of moisture made a kind of mist all around her.")

Note that the not-all-that-common words плащ [plashch] 'cloak' and дымчатый [dýmchatyi] 'smoke-colored' occur in the same order, separated by a similar number of words, as in the photisms quote. Can this possibly be a coincidence? Even in a writer less careful about his word choice than Nabokov, it would seem unlikely; with VV, if it is not deliberate it surely indicates a psychological connection between the visions he sees before sleep and his beloved mycophilic mother.

Here's an odd comparison from the start of V:5:

"Инеистое дерево и кубовый сугроб убраны безмолвным бутафором." [The berimed tree and the indigo snowdrift have been removed by a silent property man.]

"The berimed tree and the high snowdrift with its xanthic hole have been removed by a silent property man."

How did indigo become "xanthic" ('yellow'), or vice versa?
[The correction of the typo "hold" to "hole"—thanks, J. Del Col!—eliminates the mystery; the yellow is the product of micturation rather than illumination.]

Addendum (May 21, 2008): We've finished Speak, Memory (and begun Middlemarch), and I ran across a phrase in the final section of the Russian version, Drugie berega, that nicely contrasts кубовый [kubovyi] 'indigo' and кубический [kubicheskii] 'cubic': низкая, кубовой окраски, скамья с тисовой, кубической формы, живой изгородью сзади и с боков [nizkaya, kubovoi okraski, skam'ya s tisovoi, kubicheskoi formy, zhivoi izgorod'yu szadi i s bokov] 'a low bench of indigo tint with a hedge of yew, cubic in form, behind and to the sides' ('hedge' in Russian is literally 'living fence,' which I like). The passage reads in Speak, Memory "a low blue bench against a cuboid hedge of yew."

AS A RULE.

For those of you who have been wondering where Language Log went, it's back at a new URL — http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ — and with new content management software (WordPress 2.5). Adjust your blogrolls and bookmarks accordingly (and prepare yourself to get used to the New Look).

Heidi Harley was "the first to post using the swanky new system," and she came up with a doozy: Keep related words, as a rule, together. That's a summary of a self-negating quote from the bible of those who want to sneer at other people's use of language without bothering to actually learn something about it themselves, Strunknwhite: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." As Heidi says:

I was afraid someone was playing a joke on me. But no, that’s really it!

I was so amazed, of course, because the statement of the rule violates itself. In the sentence, the verb be is the ‘principal verb’. The parenthetical as a rule could be transferred to the beginning. The subject of the sentence is the NP The subject of the sentence and the principal verb. So the rule breaks itself; to be true of itself, it should say, As a rule, the subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning.

She goes on to analyze the rest of the section, and concludes: "So out of eleven sentences about keeping related words together, in which one key tip is to keep any parentheticals which can be sentence-initial in sentence-initial position, five of them counterexemplify the point." Delightful!

THAT'S NO NIGHTINGALE!

The Economist's "Correspondent's diary" last week featured a series of columns on language: "My obsession, on which I’ll be expounding this week, is how languages are constructed and the differences in how they express things." For the most part, it's what you'd expect of a foreign correspondent nattering on about foreign languages ("not one of the languages I have studied has a word for 'accountability'"), and you'd be well advised to take everything he says with a grain of salt, but it's enjoyable reading, and I learned a Russian saying that appeals to me: На бесптичье и жопа - соловей [Na besptich'e i zhopa - solovéi], which the reporter translates as "When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale." (In Russian, the first phrase actually reads 'in (a condition of) birdlessness...') I find it very odd that he writes "When a Cuban says 'take the bus', coge la guagua, most of the rest of Latin America hears something quite unprintable" (coger means 'fuck' in the Argentine Spanish I learned; as far as I know guagua is just a Cuban word for 'bus'), but then insouciantly uses the word cunt in his Friday column. I guess U.K. sensibilities are very different than U.S. ones. And judging by the comments, he offended a lot of Russians by using the Russian equivalent of cunt (pizdá); either he didn't realize how "bad" a word it is, or he didn't expect actual foreigners to be reading The Economist.

Thanks for the link, Kári!

THE HEISMAN.

What would you think if you read "Yahoo has been giving them the Heisman for two months now" in a discussion of Microsoft's offer to purchase Yahoo? Even if you're familiar with the Heisman Trophy as an annual award to the most outstanding player in college football, it's completely unclear what the expression might mean. So this AskMetaFilter thread was very enlightening: "it's from the pose of the figure in the Heisman trophy, with his hand extended, palm out, warding-off an oncoming opponent (thusly). So, Yahoo isn't metaphorically giving Microsoft the Heisman trophy, it's metaphorically giving Microsoft the Heisman gesture." Other commenters weighed in with examples ("we would go to the club and of course most of us would try to pick up on girls. when the rejection was particularly embarrassing or decisive, we would say 'oh damn, that chick just gave him the fucking heisman'"). So all is clear, slang shows its versatility once again, and once again I am grateful for the educational power of the internet.

PUSHKIN AND NABOKOV.

I've been rereading Evgenii Onegin and appreciating more than ever the line-by-line brilliance of the poetry. When I was young and foolish and first studying Russian, I thought of Pushkin as a romantic; the first poem of his I read, the anthology piece "Я вас любил" ("I loved you [once]; perhaps love has not entirely been extinguished in my heart..."), seemed to me (a hormone-soaked adolescent) a passionate declaration, and it sank instantly into my long-term memory. I still love the poem, but I realize now that it's not romantic at all. Pushkin, despite being born into a generation that was besotted with Anne Radcliffe, August Lafontaine, and other conjurers of dank vaults, far-off lands, and improbably chaste romances, was at heart as much a classicist as Walter Savage Landor, and "I loved you" is quite comparable to Landor's own anthology piece "Rose Aylmer." Both take a powerful human emotion and distill it into eight perfectly balanced lines, unforgettable compounds of vowels, consonants, and rhythms. Note that the point is not to "express" the emotion (which is what we're all desperate to do as hormone-soaked adolescents writing terrible poetry) but to distill it, to extract from it an essence that will power the engine of a great poem. Pushkin, of course, is a far greater poet than Landor, and he is not only a classicist; his Mozartean combination of classical expression and frequently romantic sensibility can be found in English poetry only in Coleridge. What Nabokov calls "the extraordinary lines, among his greatest, that Pushkin added in 1824, four years after its publication, to the beginning of Ruslan i Lyudmila" ('By a sea-cove [stands] a green oak,/ on that oak a golden chain,/ and day and night a learned tomcat/ walks on the chain around [the oak]...') is the only thing in any language I know that can be set beside Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

What I would like to do is to take a stanza from Chapter 2 of Evgenii Onegin (I will provide Cyrillic, transliteration, and literal translation) and try to explain how it works in terms that would not offend the easily offended Nabokov, and then to take a bit of Nabokov (in Russian) and show that it works in a similar fashion; hopefully we'll all learn something in the process. Here is the stanza (II.28):

Она любила на балконе
Предупреждать зари восход,
Когда на бледном небосклоне
Звезд исчезает хоровод,
И тихо край земли светлеет,
И вестник утра, ветер веет,
И всходит постепенно день.
Зимой, когда ночная тень
Полмиром доле обладает
И доле в праздной тишине,
При отуманенной луне,
Восток ленивый почивает,
В привычный час пробуждена,
Вставала при свечах она.

Here's a transliteration; stress is on the penult unless marked:

Oná lyubila na balkone
Preduprezhdát' zarí voskhód,
Kogdá na blednom nebosklone
Zvyózd ischezaet khorovód,
I tikho krai zemlí svetleet,
I vestnik utra, veter veet,
I vskhodit postepenno den'.
Zimói, kogdá nochnaya ten'
Polmirom dole obladaet
I dole v prazdnoi tishiné,
Pri otumánnenoi luné,
Vostók lenivyi pochivaet,
V privychnyi chas probuzhdená,
Vstavala pri svechákh oná.

And a literal translation:

She loved on the balcony
to anticipate the rising of the dawn,
when on the pale (sky above the) horizon
the stars' ring-dance disappears,
and quietly the edge of the earth brightens,
and the herald of morning, the wind, blows,
and gradually rises the day.
In winter, when the night's shadow
possesses half the world longer,
and longer in idle silence
by (the light of) the misted moon
the lazy East sleeps,
awakened at the accustomed hour
she would get up by (the light of) candles.

The first thing to note is that the wonderfully flexible "Onegin stanza" of fourteen lines (ababccddeffegg) is here, unusually, divided in half, with a strong break after line 7 (the more common break is after line 8, so that rhymes are kept together). In fact, when you get to line 8 it almost seems that a separate poem is beginning; after the stately description of the sunrise in the first seven lines (oddly reminiscent of the mood and rhythm of MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell": "To feel the always coming on/ The always rising of the night... And strange at Ecbatan the trees...") comes the abrupt "Zimói..." ['In winter...'], which turns out to introduce another perspective on her early rising. The whole thing is as circular as the khorovód (which Nabokov uncharacteristically mistranslates "choral dance"); it starts and ends with the word oná 'she,' and she gets up in the last line to go out to the balcony of the first ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun").

But it's the complicated machine made of words nestled within this framework that kept me going back to the stanza until I had it memorized. The first line is almost ostentatiously bland: "She loved upon the balcony" could perfectly well be followed by a description of having tea and looking at the garden, or reading the kind of romantic novels mentioned in the following stanza. (Side note: there's a funny story here about a teacher who wanted to declaim the opening of this stanza to his tenth-grade class, got as far as "Oná lyubila na balkone"—and couldn't come up with the second line, leaving an image that aroused the hilarity of his students.) But then we hit the mouth-filling and unexpected verb preduprezhdát', which now usually means 'warn' or 'notify'—Nabokov translates it "prevene," saying "I chose to use this obsolete verb in order to stress that the Russian word (a translation of the French prévenir or devancer) is obsolete, too"—and the phrase 'rising of the dawn,' which seems to have religious connotations in Russian as it does in English (Genesis 32:24 "And Jacob remained alone; and a man wrestled with him until the rising of the dawn" = "И остался Яаков один, и боролся человек с ним до восхода зари"), and we realize something special is going on.

Notice the pattern of consonants in the first line: n-l-b-l-n-b-l-k-n; without the interruption of the voiceless k (a crunchy crouton), there would be an exact repetition of the b-l-n sequence. Now look at the end of the third line: na blednom nebosklone, n-b-l-d-n-m-n-b-sk-l-n. This is the kind of detail you don't intellectually notice without the kind of close analysis I'm doing here, but the ear (if you have an ear for poetry) notices, and it makes you want to say the lines over and over. Meanwhile, the third and fourth lines each end with similarly constructed, unusual, resonant words, nebosklón ('sky-slope') and khorovód, which produce a sort of quasi-rhyme.

Next come the three lines that remind me of MacLeish:
I tikho krai zemlí svetleet,
I vestnik utra, veter veet,
I vskhodit postepenno den'.
Notice, surrounding the showy alliteration of the middle line (vest- ut- vet- veet), the subtler interweaving of t's, kh's, v's, and s's in the outer lines, all bound together with the repeated initial I... I... I 'and... and... and'; the rhythm of the third line, with the "scud" (Nabokov's term for a stressless foot, with its "expressive delaying note") in the third foot adding to the impression of finality I mentioned above.

I will mention also the judicious sprinkling of obsolete meanings (preduprezhdát'), words (pochivaet), and forms (dole 'longer,' now dol'she); the leisurely, delaying syntax of lines 8-12; and the irresistible sonic puzzle of line 13, which sounds almost like two long words, fprivychnyichás probuzhdená, with a repetition of pr...á and a matching up of the teasingly similar sounds v/b, y/u, ch/zh that make the whole thing into a verbal worry bead you can mutter as a kind of mantra.

Now notice that the entire stanza, to the kind of person who reads for plot, reduces to "She liked to get up early." This is not the kind of reader Pushkin is writing for, and that goes double for Nabokov, who probably never wrote a sentence he did not roll around in his mouth several times to make sure it produced the effect he wanted. I take, pretty much at random, a fragment of a long sentence from the fourth paragraph of Drugie berega (the Russian equivalent of Speak, Memory): "судя по густоте солнечного света, тотчас заливающего мою память, по лапчатому его очерку, явно зависящему от переслоений и колебаний лопастных дубовых листьев, промеж которых он падает на песок" ['judging by the thickness of the sunlight, immediately flooding my memory, by its palmate outline, manifestly dependent on the interlayings and vibrations of the laciniate oak leaves between which it falls onto the sand']. Here's a transliteration (again, penultimate stresses are unmarked, and I've added a few y's to aid pronunciation):

sudyá po gustoté sólnechnovo sveta, totchas zaliváyushchevo moyú pamyat', po lápchatomu yevó ócherku, yavno zavísyashchemu ot peresloyénii i kolebánii lópastnykh dubóvykh list'yev, promézh kotorykh on pádayet na pesók...

Very similar things are going on here, though of course without the framework of rhyme and meter. The fragment starts and ends with simple, everyday language ("judging by the thickness of the sunlight ... between which it falls onto the sand"); in between, it takes detours through the poetic (zaliváyushchevo moyú pamyat' 'flooding my memory'), the archaic (ócherk in the sense 'outline' rather than today's 'sketch, study'), and the scientific (lápchaty 'palmate,' peresloyénie 'interlaying, interstratification,' kolebánie 'vibration, oscillation,' lópastnyi 'laciniate' [OED: "Cut into deep and narrow irregular segments; jagged, slashed"]), all of which are hallmarks of Nabokov's style in English as well. Note the interplay of sounds: the s's in sudyá po gustoté sólnechnovo sveta, totchas, the z-shch- in zaliváyushchevo and zavísyashchemu, the l's in lápchatomu ... peresloyénii i kolebánii lópastnykh ... list'yev,, the p's in promézh kotorykh on pádayet na pesók... I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. If you find this kind of verbal play enjoyable, you will get much more out of Nabokov than if you don't.

For comparison, here is the same fragment in Speak, Memory: "Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery..."

PROUST: THE SUMMING-UP.

My wife and I unexpectedly finished Proust last night (I'd thought it would last another day) and sat up talking about it for a while, and now I'm going to try to organize my thoughts about the year-and-a-half-long experience and inflict them on you. My lengthy ramblings will be below the cut; up front I want to say that they will, as you might expect, contain spoilers, so if you're planning to get around to reading the book someday and don't want to know in advance who dies and who comes to sudden realizations about Life and Time, don't click on the "Continue reading." And since I will be mainly engaged in complaining, I should state for the record that Proust is a great writer, A la Recherche is a great book even if it could stand to lose a few pounds, and I don't regret a moment of the time I've devoted to it. Furthermore, I accept in advance all charges of philistinism and ignorance; I am but a humble ruminant grazing the vast fields of literature, and what I don't know about great writing would fill Borges's Library of Babel. But I have my opinions nonetheless, and you're welcome to join me in my ruminations if you accept the above Terms of Service.

First off, the book is too damn long. Proust originally intended it to fill three volumes, and I can't help but think he should have stuck to that intention. Obviously there are those who revel in every new restatement of whatever point he's trying to drive home at the moment (you can't love anyone who loves you, gays are weird, etc.), but my wife and I kept saying "Yes, yes, we get it, move along please." I complained about this in my post on the endless etymologies, and the problem only got worse. My apologies to devoted Proustians, but the man needed a Maxwell Perkins ("After a tremendous struggle, Perkins induced Wolfe to cut 90,000 words from his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel... His next, Of Time and the River..., was the result of a two-year battle during which Wolfe kept writing more and more pages in the face of an ultimately victorious effort by Perkins to hold the line on size").

Another problem that became more and more evident as the book progressed is that the central character is repellent—probably the most unlikable protagonist of any major novel I've read (other than Humbert Humbert, of course, with whom he shares remarkable similarities). He starts out being nasty to the grandmother who loves him, moves on to ditching friends in order to stalk whatever "little girl" he's obsessed with, keeps poor Albertine in his thrall for months (though he doesn't love her, wishes she weren't there so he could go to Venice, and goes out in search of urchin girls to debauch) before driving her out to her death (whereupon, after a decent period of crazed obsession, he forgets all about her), and ends up by deciding that, having decided to dedicate himself to his Great Novel, he can no longer afford to waste time on friends ("our powers of exaltation are being given a false direction when we expend them in friendship, because they are then diverted from those truths towards which they might have guided us to aim at a particular friendship which can lead to nothing") but thinks "a little amorous dalliance with young girls in bloom would be the choice nutriment with which, if with anything, I might indulge my imagination." Mind you, he's not interested in the particular girls he's already been "in love" with, since "the action of the years" has transformed them "into women too sadly different from what I remembered." So in response to his former love Gilberte's offer of "little intimate gatherings... with just a few intelligent and sympathetic people," after noting to himself that he doesn't particularly want to see her again he says "that I should always enjoy being invited to meet young girls, poor girls if possible, to whom I could give pleasure by quite small gifts, without expecting anything of them in return save that they should serve to renew within me the dreams and the sadness of my youth and perhaps, one improbable day, a single chaste kiss." Uh-huh. And after many pages of other matters, he returns to the conversation with Gilberte in this appalling passage:

For Gilberte, who had no doubt inherited certain family characteristics from her mother (and I had perhaps unconsciously anticipated some such laxness of principle in her when I had asked her to introduce me to young girls), had now had time to reflect upon my request and, anxious no doubt that the profit should stay in the family, had reached a decision bolder than any that I would have thought possible. "Let me fetch my daughter for you," she said. "I should so like to introduce her to you. She is over there, talking to young Mortemart and other babes in arms who can be of no possible interest. I am sure that she will be a charming little friend to you."

The combination of smug contempt for a woman he claimed to have loved and drooling anticipation of becoming closely acquainted with her young daughter (and this is now a middle-aged man speaking, who presents himself as infirm, decrepit, and on the brink of the grave)... well, it's hard to take, as is his constant use of the first person plural to implicate the reader in his nasty worldview ("we may say that, at the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility...").

You will say, as Gilbert Wesley Purdy said in an excellent comment in the etymology thread I linked to above, that Proust "is teaching the reader what obsession feels like from the inside: alternately fascinating, tedious and oppressive," and that we are not meant to like or identify with the narrator. All well and good, but spending thousands of pages in his company does become quite oppressive; furthermore, I am not at all convinced that the narrator is as clearly separable from the author as one would like to believe. The justification for all the narrator's bad behavior, after all, is that his duty is to his masterwork, and what is that but (some form or equivalent of) the novel we are reading? The whole arc of the novel leads to the revelation of how childhood memories can be recovered and how they can be used to recreate life within the pages of a book. We are meant to say (and many readers do say) "Ah! What a glorious denouement! All is justified, the dross of everyday life is turned into an immortal work of art!" And yet I resist.

I mentioned Humbert above, and the comparison with Nabokov is instructive. Nabokov said in a 1965 television interview: "My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Biely’s Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time." (I note with approval the "first half" and with disapproval the smirking pun of "fairy tale," and speaking of television interviews, a post on MetaFilter brought to my attention a nice joint one with Nabokov and Lionel Trilling from circa 1958: 1, 2.) He obviously learned a great deal from Proust, and as the anonymous praxisblog says (in the course of an enthusiastic recommendation of Petersburg, which I heartily endorse) "Where, for that matter, is ‘Lolita’ without ‘The Captive’ and ‘The Fugitive’?" Clearly Lolita is the lineal descendant of Marcel's "little girls," and (as I said above) Humbert is every bit as nasty a piece of work as the narrator. But my reaction is very different. Why? Well, for one thing, Humbert is placed at several removes: his story is presented as the manuscript of a man who has died while awaiting trial for murder, and it is told in a gleeful prose that mocks its ostensible creator. And Humbert's sins are at least those of a lover; his love (as "he" "himself" acknowledges) is wrong and its object completely inappropriate, but it is so authentic that in the end, when he sees his escaped prisoner "with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits," the wife of another man by whom she is pregnant, his response is to say "I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else." As Cynthia M. Daffron writes, "He is now attached to a person, not an age group... Finally, he sees that he has erred, that he has taken something away from Lolita, and in so doing, taken something away from himself." Proust's narrator remains attached to an age group, caring nothing for persons, and never makes an attempt to see himself or his behavior from outside. He is the ultimate solipsist.

Which brings me to my next objection. Proust and Joyce are the twin pillars of the modernist novel, and both wrote long, difficult books that try the patience of their readers; one big difference is that Joyce (like most of my favorite writers) is endlessly interested in the outside world, inserting real people in real pubs, and he famously boasted that if Dublin were destroyed it could be recreated from the pages of Ulysses. Proust (or his narrator) does not appear to be interested in anything outside his own skull; other people exist only as objects of obsession or as irritating distractions, and the greater world is of so little interest that vast chunks of the novel are impossible to date with any confidence. (The great exception, of course, is the Dreyfus Affair, which serves as a convenient chisel with which to reveal the cracks in his aristocratic set.) In Proust's world, places exist either as objects of obsession (Balbec, Venice) or as signifiers of aristocracy (Guermantes, Parma). Even Paris, that inexhaustible world of urban chaos and wonderment, is reduced to the Bois, the Champs-Elysées, and the Faubourg St-Germain, and those are merely places for his aristos and wannabes to pass each other, bowing or failing to bow. Again, there's nothing "wrong" with writing about the inside of a narrator's skull, and Gogol's Russia is just as phantasmagoric and impossible to pin down as Proust's France, but Gogol is a lot funnier, and (again) Proust is very, very long.

A distressing effect of the narrator's solipsism is that there are almost no actual characters. We spend a thousand pages with Albertine, but hardly get a sense of her; she is merely the little girl the narrator is temporarily obsessed with. We hear a great deal about his worries that she may be having sex with other women (another creepy obsession that makes the book hard to take as seriously as it wants to be taken), but almost nothing that would enable us to recognize her if we ran into her on the street. There are a few exceptions—the grandmother, Françoise—and most especially Baron Charlus, who comes close to redeeming the entire book with his crazed haughtiness and self-regard. You couldn't miss him if you ran into him, and every time he appears the narrative takes on an intensity and momentum the reader had practically forgotten existed. The scene in which he is so senile he forgetfully bows to a woman he used to despise is far more affecting (to me) than all the narrator's overwrought meditations on Time and Death.

Well, I guess I'll wrap it up here. I emphasize once more that I'm very glad to have read it, that there are images and scenes I'll never forget, that it's beautifully written and its architecture is brilliant. But it sure could use editing.

STAFF OF LIFE.

My wife has been baking bread lately (and very good it is too), and this morning as I was gazing fondly at the latest loaf the phrase "staff of life" popped into my head and I wondered about it. The metaphor seemed clear—a staple food is something you lean on—but still somewhat odd, and I wondered if there were a backstory. I went, of course, to the OED, where I found the phrase as definition 4c (first cite: 1638 PENKETHMAN Artach. Ajb, "Bread is worth all, being the Staffe of life," where Artach. = Artachthos; or a new booke declaring the assise or weight of bread); definition 4b, which gave rise to it, is:

In the Biblical phr. to break the staff of bread (literally from Heb. maṭṭēh 'leχem, Vulg. baculum panis), to diminish or cut off the supply of food.
1382, 1388 WYCLIF Lev. xxvi. 26. 1560 BIBLE (Geneva) Lev. xxvi. 26. Ps. cv. 16. Ezek. iv. 16. [And so 1611]. c1586 C'TESS PEMBROKE Ps. CV. iv, Scarse had he spoken, When famine came, the staff of bread was broken. 1596 BARLOW Three Serm. i. 121 God in his lawe threatneth that he will breake the staffe of bread, that is, bread shall not nourish them that eate it.

So it's a metaphor specific to the Hebrew Bible that managed to get solidly rooted in the English language; a quick look through my dictionaries suggests English is unique in that respect—staff of life is defined by phrases that translate to 'most important foodstuff,' 'support of life,' and the like. (The Hebrew word mateh, incidentally, now means 'military staff': mateh ha-klali 'General Staff.')

I close with a quote from a letter by the 14-year-old Emily Dickinson (Thursday, September 26. 1845, to her friend Abiah Root):

I am going to learn to make bread tomorrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up mixing Flour, Milk, Saleratus &c with a deal of grace. I advise you if you dont know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.

Saleratus (sal aeratus 'aerated salt') was a nineteenth-century form of baking powder; the stress is on the penult (sal-uh-RATE-us).

I note that the Italian translation appended to the letter at the linked site renders the final sentence, with "the staff of life," as follows: "Se non sai come fare l'alimento primario ti raccomando di imparare in fretta."

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF.

A couple of years ago I mentioned "teju cole, a temporary blog reporting on a visit home by a Nigerian long resident in the U.S.; it's full of beauty, sadness, and keen observations on life in Nigeria and in general," adding "I recommend it to your attention before it vanishes away at the end of the month." Towards the end of the month I provided a few extended quotes in this post, and I figured that would be the end of it—anyone who didn't catch it during its brief run was out of luck.

But Cassava Republic Press, based in Abuja, Nigeria, and aiming "to make quality contemporary literature available to the West African market at an affordable price," has published Every Day is for the Thief, a novel based on the contents of the blog, and I'm here to report that it holds up excellently well in permanent form (with lovely photographs presumably by the author). The publisher says "His subtle and nuanced prose explores themes as diverse as the minor joys of daily Lagosian existence to the crudities of contemporary forms of corruption"; the Author's Note says "What could possibly be said about this most complex of cities that could compete with the reality?... I have sought to capture a contemporary moment in the life of the city in which I grew up." I love cities and descriptions of them, and I love good prose, and I relished this small, intense book more than I can say. (And it has an epigraph from the wonderful poet Maria Benet, whose book Mapmaker of Absences I celebrated here and whose poem "A Dish of Peaches in Cluj" was the occasion for what is still perhaps my favorite LH thread ever.) I don't know if you can come by a copy of the novel outside of West Africa, but if you make the effort It's available at Amazon.com; if you give it a try, you won't regret it.

By the way, the book is written in perfectly standard English, but there are a few local terms, one of which gave me a fair amount of trouble, so I'll share the results of my research with you in case you wind up reading it. On p. 14, as the author arrives in Lagos and has to deal with "passport control and baggage claim," he notes that "One janded man argues with a listless customs official about the inefficiency." At first I thought "janded" might be a typo, but I couldn't think what was intended and the book is remarkably well proofread, so I did some intensive internet work and determined that Jandon is Nigerian slang for London and "janded" refers to Nigerians who have gone to study or live in England. (If my tentative definition is incorrect, I trust those who know will correct me.)

CHANGES.

On a day already full of shocks, like Mark Liberman's leaving Language Log for the Science News section of the BBC and Anatoly Vorobei (actually Warraughby) turning to English-only blogging, I have an announcement of my own to make. I have decided that fighting spammers—I mean, online entrepreneurs—is taking too much of my time and energy, so I have decided to join them. Enough boring language trivia! Look for future posts to feature pharmaceutical enhancements, mortgage possibilities, and ways to make good money from your own home with only a modest investment. Tomorrow: a guest post by Mrs. Mariam Abacha, the widow of the late Gen. Sani Abacha, former Nigeria military head of state who died mysteriously as a result of cardiac arrest. Her family has been going through immense harassment including undue police restriction and molestation, and the family accounts have been frozen by the government for reasons that are rather vindictive. I know you'll want to hear her story, and find out what you can do about it!