STAMINA.

Another bout of idle wondering led me to look up the etymology of stamina; I suddenly realized it looked like the plural of stamen, but thought "that can't be right." As it turns out, it is, in an unexpected way. Before stamen meant "The male or fertilizing organ of a flowering plant," it meant 'the warp in an upright loom' (the Latin word stāmen is from the Proto-Indo-European root *stā- 'stand'), and from there it came to mean (in the OED's words) "The thread spun by the Fates at a person's birth, on the length of which the duration of his life was suppose[d] to depend. Hence, in popular physiology, the measure of vital impulse or capacity which it was supposed that each person possessed at birth, and on which the length of his life, unless cut short by violence or disease, was supposed to depend." (1709 Tatler No. 15.1 "All, who enter into human life, have a certain date or Stamen given to their being, which they only who die of age may be said to have arrived at"; 1753 L. M. Accompl. Woman I. 246 "Bad example hath not less influence upon education than a bad stamen upon the constitution.") Hence the plural stamina meant "The congenital vital capacities of a person or animal, on which (other things being equal) the duration of life was supposed to depend; natural constitution as affecting the duration of life or the power of resisting debilitating influences" (1701 C. WOLLEY Jrnl. New York 60 "Such as have the natural Stamina of a consumptive propagation in them"; 1823 GILLIES Aristotle's Rhet. I. v. 180 "If the stamina are not sound, disease will soon ensue"), and finally the modern sense "Vigour of bodily constitution; power of sustaining fatigue or privation, of recovery from illness, and of resistance to debilitating influences; staying power" (1726 SWIFT Let. Sheridan 27 July Wks. 1841 II. 588/1, "I indeed think her stamina could not last much longer when I saw she could take no nourishment"). This was originally construed as a plural, but by the nineteenth century careless writers were using it as a singular (1834 M. SCOTT Cruise Midge viii, "Why, Sir Oliver, the man is exceedingly willing,.. but his stamina is gone entirely"), and this rapidly became standard. Heretofore, when encountering people who insist that data should take a plural verb, I have said "I presume, then, you feel the same about agenda"; I will now add stamina to my arsenal.

DENIED ASPIRATES.

My wife and I have finished Speak, Memory and moved on to Middlemarch in our nighttime reading, and the other day I was baffled by this, in a discussion of social mobility in Chapter 11: "Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth..." What on earth does it mean to "deny aspirates"? I looked up aspirate in the OED, thinking it might have some obscure sense that would explain the phrase, but no such luck.

Today it occurred to me to use GoogleBooks, and the fourth hit was page 209 of Our Corner, by Annie Besant:

While we praise concision, it is well to remember that it is sometimes carried to excess, brevity being attained by obscuring the sense. Thus we find George Eliot saying: "Persons denied aspirates, gained wealth;" a phrase which for a moment creates bewilderment by reason of the "denied" appearing to be in the active voice.

A light bulb went on: "denied" is passive! Persons who were denied aspirates [i.e., dropped their aitches, i.e., were lower class] gained wealth! Bless you, Annie Besant, and bless you, internet!

Incidentally, a few pages later in the same chapter occurs this amusing and impressively sensible passage:

'What must Rosy know, mother?' said Mr Fred, who had slid in unobserved through the half-open door while the ladies were bending over their work, and now going up to the fire stood with his back towards it, warming the soles of his slippers.

'Whether it's right to say "superior young men",' said Mrs Vincy ringing the bell.

'Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is getting to be shopkeepers' slang.'

'Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?' said Rosamond, with mild gravity.

'Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.'

'There is correct English: that is not slang.'

'I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.'

CORBETT ON URQUHART.

A comment by Arthur Crown in this post led me to an excellent lecture by Dr. John B. Corbett preserved, with all its hesitations and fillers, at the SCOTS Project (which I blogged about here and here), about Thomas Urquhart and his place in the history of Scottish literature. It's so full of tidbits and insights I'm tempted to reproduce the whole thing; instead, I'll quote and mention enough to give you a taste for it.

He starts by placing him in context (I'm normalizing the text by deleting the "erm"s and [inhale]s and superfluous commas):

Urquhart is a mid-seventeenth century writer, writing around about 1650. So I want to try to put him into context. Last week if you remember, we looked at the way Scots prose evolved in the sixteenth century, developing out of a native tradition of loosely connected Old English sentences in a kind of spoken style. And we contrasted that with the continental style, based on Latin, of long, elaborate sentences. ... In the sixteenth century you don't really have literary prose; you have administrative prose, you have historiographical prose; the writers of the histories are probably getting closest to a literary style, of the prose writers of that period. And the writers of histories tended to move towards the elaborate, continental style, which became ... associated with the Catholic cause in Scotland, whereas the Protestant writers gravitated more towards the kind of loose colloquial style based on speech. The native style. Some writers, and I was arguing like John Knox at his best, modulated between the two styles and used the expressive range in a very rhetorical and purposeful way.

But today, in concentrating on one writer from the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, we look at somebody who basically took the continental style to its mad, absurd extreme. He was the last of the great ... baroque writers in the Scottish tradition. He writes in, if you like, the Latin-based, the continental style. Urquhart is often dismissed as one of the great but ... difficult eccentrics of the Scottish literary tradition. Now what I'm going to argue today is that he's in some ways a transitional figure. He's the end of an era, in one respect. He's the last great exponent of the continental style in Scottish prose. But, in other respects, he's a foretaste of Scottish prose, fictional prose, to come. He does things for the first time that are taken up by later Scottish writers, and in some respects you could argue that wittingly or unwittingly, all modern Scottish prose fictional writers are his children...

He goes on to describe Urquhart's book on trigonometry, "which if anything established his reputation as someone who was barking mad":

Urquhart is taking a reasonably simple, reasonably straightforward, geometrical theorem, and he's elaborating it to the point of absurdity, and ... either he's mad, and that has been put forward as a proposition, ... or he's doing it on purpose as a joke. It's a joke with a very limited audience. And he has a whole book like this. ... You can see the Trissotetras, the joke trigonometry book ..., as a parody of the continental style of prose writing. ... You have the long periodic sentences, built up of subordinate clauses, parentheses, embedded phrases, almost to infinity. So he's parodying the style of trigonometry books. Or he seems to be parodying the style of trigonometry books; with Urquhart you're never quite sure. Certainly, as with many parodies, Urquhart seems in love with the object of his parody. There's an infectious energy to the willful obscurity of this joke geometry treatise. The obscure Greek terms, the technical neologisms, the new words, give the treatise the attraction, to me at least, of nonsense poetry; it's like reading "Jabberwocky" or something.

Urquhart was locked up by Cromwell as a Royalist, and "was told that his lands in Scotland would be forfeited if he could not demonstrate that he deserved to keep possession of them. So Urquhart decided that the best way to demonstrate his worth, his value, was to set about writing and publishing four books, between 1652 and 1653, to prove that he is an important writer and intellectual." These books are the Pantochronochanon, which "constructs a family tree for the Urquhart family, that ends with Urquhart and begins with Adam," which "kind of proves he's noble"; the Ekskybalauron ('gold out of dung'), better known as The Jewel, in which he starts by "drawing up the principles for a universal language... and then it goes into this amazing story about a character called 'The Admirable Crichton', and this is the first appearance of this character, 'The Admirable Crichton'"; Logopandecteision, which "is largely a reprint of The Jewel" ("He basically writes it again because he's running out of time") but includes "the first prose sex scene in Scottish literature.... it combines Urquhart's passionate interests in sex, astronomy, the construction of sundials, Greek and Latin vocabulary, and of course, syntax"; and the translation of Rabelais.

Corbett focuses on two places in the translation where Urquhart uses Scots.

So the giant Pantagruel comes upon another giant called Panurge. And the problem is, they begin to talk and they speak in different languages, so they've got to attempt to communicate. So, they try different languages out. Some of the languages are real, some of the languages Rabelais invents, some of the languages Urquhart, in his translation, invents too. So they try German - doesn't work; Italian - doesn't work; Spanish - doesn't work; Dutch - nope; Basque - nope; Danish - no; Hebrew - no; Greek - no; Latin - no. So they try Puzzlatory - that doesn't work. They try Buffoonish - that doesn't work. And then, in this sequence of strange, obscure, weird and fictional languages, you get ... "Then said Panurge, 'Lard, gest all be sir birches th'intelligence as thy body shall be natural, ruleth, them should be, there should of me pity have. For nature has us equally made, but fortune some exalted has, in use depravit. None the less, vice nor virtue is depravit, and virtue is men discrives for an en ye lad en is not good." That doesn't work either. Nobody can understand what that means. Yet less, said Pantagruel. So again you get another failure of communication, and as you can see, it's kind of nonsensical. The interesting thing about this nonsense is that it's Scots. It's Scots nonsense. It's Older Scots nonsense.

The second passage is the one in which Pantagruel confronts "a pretentious student from Limoges."

And Limoges is like, well Aberdeen, let's face it, I apologise to anybody from Aberdeen who's in the room, but you know, in French terms, it's a little bit out in the sticks ... and this pretentious student makes the mistake, when speaking to Pantagruel, of affecting to be a[n] intellectual student from Paris, and he uses a highly Latinised, high-style vocabulary to begin to talk to the giant. And the giant decides to take him down a peg. ..."By God," said Pantagruel, "I will teach you to speak. But first come hither and tell me whence thou art". To this the scholar answered, "The primeval origin of my aves and ataves was indigenerie of the Lemovick regions, where requiesceth the corpor of the hagiotat St Martial". "I understand thee very well," said Pantagruel, "when all comes to all, thou art a Limousin, and thou wilt here, by thy affected speech, counterfeit the Parisiens. Well now, come hither, I must shew thee a new trick, and handsomely give thou combfeat." With this he took him by the throat, saying to him, "Thou flayest the Latine? By St John I will make thee flay the foxe, for I will now flay thee alive". Then began the poor Limousin to cry, "Haw, gwid Maaster, haw Laord ma halp and St Marshaw, haw, I'm worried; haw, ma thrapple, the bean of ma cragg is bruck! Haw, for gauad's seck, lawt ma lean Mawster, waw, waw, waw!" "Now," said Pantagruel, "thou speaks naturally," and so let him go, for the poor Limousin had totally be[w]rayed, and thoroughly conshit his breeches."

Corbett sums up by saying that "when he's affecting the pretentious Latinised style, Urquhart seems to be parodying himself. The Limousin begins by speaking the way that Urquhart usually writes. Then, as we've said, when he's shaken by the throat, he reverts into his natural speech, which would be Urquhart's own spoken idiom."

Now, I have some questions about the quotation Corbett cites as representing Panurge's Scots; in the Wikisource text, it runs as follows:

'Lord, if you be so virtuous of intelligence as you be naturally relieved to the body, you should have pity of me. For nature hath made us equal, but fortune hath some exalted and others deprived; nevertheless is virtue often deprived and the virtuous men despised; for before the last end none is good.' (The following is the passage as it stands in the first edition. Urquhart seems to have rendered Rabelais' indifferent English into worse Scotch, and this, with probably the use of contractions in his MS., or 'the oddness' of handwriting which he owns to in his Logopandecteision (p.419, Mait. Club. Edit.), has led to a chaotic jumble, which it is nearly impossible to reduce to order.--Instead of any attempt to do so, it is here given verbatim: 'Lard gestholb besua virtuisbe intelligence: ass yi body scalbisbe natural reloth cholb suld osme pety have; for natur hass visse equaly maide bot fortune sum exaiti hesse andoyis deprevit: non yeless iviss mou virtiuss deprevit, and virtuiss men decreviss for anen ye ladeniss non quid.' Here is a morsel for critical ingenuity to fix its teeth in.--M.)

Corbett is presumably emending the "chaotic jumble" somewhat thus: "Lard, gest (h)ol(b) be sua virtuis (be) intelligence as(s) [þ]i body scal(bis) be natural r[u]l[e]th [them] [s]chol[d] b[e, there] suld o[f] me pety have; for natur has(s) v(is)s(e) equaly maide bot fortune sum exa[l]ti[t] h[a]s(se) [i]n(d) oyis deprevit: non [þ]e less (i)vis[e] [n]o[r] virtiu [i]s deprevit, and virtu iss men decreviss for anen [þ]e laden iss no[t] [g]uid." But 1) that's a lot of emendation, and 2) it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Still, his general point works.

Another problem I have is with the way the SCOTS site transcribes his quotes; they seem to ignore the actual texts he is citing and attempt to set down what he is saying based on its sound. But that is unhelpful and makes it difficult to follow up his leads. Quoting the sex scene, for instance, the text has him saying "To speak of her herquitelaniency..." Following along with the video (which I would urge everyone with the time to spare to do—it's the "multimedia' link at the bottom, the third icon from the right) it didn't seem like that's what he was saying, and a little work with the OED showed that the actual word is hirquitalliency (from Latin hirquitallire "(of infants) to acquire a strong voice," from hircus 'he-goat').

But these are quibbles; I am very grateful to the SCOTS Project for making this fine lecture available to all.

PROUST IN RUSSIAN.

Having learned from a correspondent that there is still no complete translation of Proust in Greek, I decided to find out when the full novel became available in Russian, and was surprised to discover it was not until 1999. I learned this from this 2002 article by Andrei Mikhailov, who starts off quoting the critic Georgii Adamovich (discussed here) as saying, in the mid-1920s, that Proust "will probably be loved in Russia" and goes on to explain why it took three-quarters of a century for that prophecy to be realized. It's a sad story. The first volume was translated at the end of the 1920s by A. A. Frankovskii (1888-1942; biography in Russian), and Mikhailov says "There existed and still exists a fixed opinion that Frankovskii's translation exactly and deeply renders all the stylistic peculiarities of Proust's prose" and to compete with him "is to doom yourself to inevitable defeat" (adding that although he was a great translator, he was working from inadequate French editions and much has been understood since his day). Alas, Frankovskii died in the blockade of Leningrad, and by then Proust had been deemed "the height of literary decadence" and "a classic of bourgeois parasitism" by the Soviet literary establishment, so the four volumes that had appeared by the late '30s (by various hands) were all that were available for decades.

Then, in the 1960s, another experienced and prolific translator, Nikolai Lyubimov (1912-1992), decided to try his hand. He was deeply immersed in both Russian and French literature and had translated Rabelais, Molière, Beaumarchais, Mérimée, Flaubert, Maupassant, de Coster, Anatole France, and Maeterlinck, so he was a good man for the job. One might wish that he had started with the later volumes, returning to the first if and when he had time, but he decided to start from the beginning, and his first volume came out in 1973, followed in fairly rapid succession by the second (1976) and third (1980). But his Sodome et Gomorrhe was held up by the censors until 1987 (even then being published with puritanical cuts); the following volume was published in 1990 and shows signs of haste and carelessness. He spent the rest of his life trying to finish La Captive:

But now he worked slowly and with difficulty, no longer flying through the text as in earlier years but gradually slogging through the intricate prose with indifference and even hostility. He complained of dizziness, headaches, insomnia, fatigue, and blamed Proust for it all. The doctors insisted he stop working. In October of 1992 he did, leaving the end untranslated and large gaps missing elsewhere. Two months later, on December 22, he died.

His widow refused to allow the publisher to emend his text, so it was issued gaps, errors, and all, just as he had left it (though an appendix provided translations of the missing pieces by another translator). Finally, in 1999, the final volume appeared in a translation by Alla Smirnova.

One of the guilty pleasures of reading about translations is the inevitable dissection of the inevitable gaffes; I'll pass along a few of the more piquant. Towards the end of the "Swann in Love" section of the first volume, Proust says that Swann "était persuadé qu’une «Toilette de Diane» qui avait été achetée par le Mauritshuis à la vente Goldschmidt comme un Nicolas Maes était en réalité de Ver Meer" ["was convinced that a 'Toilet of Diana' which had been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer"]. Mikhailov says "the notes explain what the painting was and when the sale took place, but not who this mysterious Морисюи [Morisyui] might be: a collector, a dealer, an incidental person? Lyubimov didn't know (and neither did Frankovskii); the reference is actually to the well-known Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, which Proust himself visited."

Lyubimov never went abroad, including Paris (such was our life back then), and there were many local realia unknown to him. So he has Odette walking along "аллеям Булонского леса" [the allées of the Bois de Boulogne] rather than the avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now avenue Foch), a broad street leading from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois, which was a place where fashionable people strolled. The translator was also unfamiliar with the structure of Parisian cafés, not suspecting that several customers unknown to one another cannot sit at the same little table. Lyubimov was capable of taking "Luxembourg" (that is the Luxembourg Palace, where there was a museum) for the name of the tiny European state, and the name of the 18th-century portraitist Nattier for that of a profession ("braider").

But I disagree with Mikhailov in his censure of Lyubimov's rendering of the passage in which Charlus seizes on a question by Marcel to savage the Marquise de Sainte-Euverte: "Croyez-vous que cet impertinent jeune homme... vient de me demander, sans le moindre souci qu'on doit avoir de cacher ces sortes de besoins, si j'allais chez Mme de Saint-Euverte, c'est-à-dire, je pense, si j'avais la colique. Je tâcherais en tout cas de m'en soulager dans un endroit plus confortable..." ["Would you believe it, this impertinent young man... asked me just now, without the slightest concern for the proper reticence in regard to such needs, whether I was going to Mme de Saint-Euverte's, in other words, I suppose, whether I was suffering from diarrhoea. I should endeavour in any case to relieve myself in some more comfortable place..."] Lyubimov writes: "Этот неделикатный молодой человек осмелился задать мне вопрос, поеду ли я к маркизе де Сент-Эверт. Нет, слуга покорный, я в ее сент-эвертеп не ходок. Уж больно она сент-эвертлява [...] Мне эта сент-эвертунья, сент-эвертушка, сент-эвертихвостка не по нутру..." The passage is full of untranslatable puns on the name Sainte-Euverte, like сент-эвертеп [sent-evertep] "Sainte-Euverte-den," where вертеп [vertep] is 'den.' Mikhailov thinks this is going too far and betraying the text; I say you have to allow great translators their occasional excesses. What would Urquhart's Rabelais be without his Urquhartisms?

THE SOUND OF POETRY.

Reading wood s lot this morning, I was struck by two poems quoted in the same entry, not far apart. The first:

from
Italian Hours
Katherine E. Young

All travel’s exile, the shedding
of self, a losing and finding,
the possessing of new things. Past
is present — in gondola rides
through fetid canals, light, water,
air shared with Campanile loons

proclaiming “Republic!” too late,
or too soon — in encounters with
selves left standing at the crossroads,
with ghosts asking after Dante
in accents unknown to the shades
who frequent the Baptistery….

The second:

The Reckoning
Theodore Roethke

All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.

We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.

What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keeps us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.

Now, leaving aside the quality of the poems, what struck me (especially forcibly because of the similarity of the opening lines: "All travel’s exile, the shedding/ of self, a losing and finding" and "All profits disappear: the gain/Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum") was that the first simply doesn't sound like poetry to me. I appreciate the imagery and choice of words, but the lack of any coherent rhythm means that it sounds to me like prose divided into lines. The Roethke, on the other hand, immediately establishes itself as a poem in a formal sense—not a slavish imitation of earlier formulas, but a vigorous exploration of them. It reminds me of the jolt of joy I felt the first time I read a Roethke poem, and it makes me sad that so few contemporary poets seem to feel the urge to work in that tradition. I'm not saying contemporary poetry is no good, just that much of it doesn't appeal to me on a basic level; I can appreciate it intellectually, but, well, as a great American said, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." I think that's why I read so much Russian poetry these days: the Russians have never taken to free verse, and the age-old tradition of poetic form is still very much alive.

CHUNTERING ABOUT PEDEE.

The other day I ran into a wonderful word I hadn't been familiar with, chunter: "To mutter, murmur; to grumble, find fault, complain" (OED). It's been around since the 16th century and has some great 20th-century citations:
1921 D. H. LAWRENCE Sea & Sardinia iv. 135 A thin old woman.. was chuntering her head off because it was her seat.
1949 C. FRY Lady's not for Burning 27 You.. fog-blathering, Chin-chuntering, liturgical,.. base old man!
1957 ‘N. SHUTE’ On Beach i. 2 The baby stirred, and started chuntering and making little whimpering noises.
1965 Spectator 5 Mar. 295/3 An old man.. chunters a bit of folk tune which the solo horn dreamily perpetuates.

And in Nabokov's Pushkin commentary I ran into yet another of his annoying archaisms dredged up to delight himself and perplex everyone else: pedee "A serving boy, a groom, a lackey" (sample cite: 1779 B. BENDO Matrimonial Museum 53 And lo! the pedee dare not speak, for fear He should the trollop's mind displease). What exactly is the problem with serving boy, groom, or lackey, Vladimir Vladimirovich? (I would probably still find it irritating if I encountered it in one of his novels, but in a novel you're entitled to play with language however you like; in a reference work designed to help the ordinary reader of English appreciate Pushkin, there's no excuse for it.)

STARFISH PAWS.

From the preface to May Sarton's The Fur Person:

Before Judy and I moved to 14 Wright St. in Cambridge,
we lived for a few years in the early 1950s in a
rented house at 9 Maynard Place. When Judy had a
sabbatical leave, we sublet to Vladimir Nabokov and
his beautiful wife, Vera, and they were delighted to
accept Tom Jones as a cherished paying guest during
their stay. What a bonanza for a gentleman cat to be
taken into such a notable family with kind Vera and
Felidae-lover Vladimir! And to hear cat language
translated into Russian.

My study at Maynard Place was at the top of the house;
a small, sunny room, one wall lined with books, and on
the windowed side a long trestle table and a straight
chair. Nabokov removed this austere object and
replaced it with a huge overstuffed armchair where he
could write half lying down. Tom Jones soon learned
that he was welcome to install himself at the very
heart of genius on Nabokov's chest, there to make
starfish paws, purr ecstatically, and sometimes —
rather painfully for the object of his pleasure —
knead. I like to imagine that Lolita was being dreamed
that year and that Tom Jones' presence may have had
something to do with the creation of that sensuous
world. At any rate, for him it was a year of grandiose
meals and subtle passions.

PORTUGUESE THE BRAZILIAN WAY.

According to a BBC News story:

Portugal's parliament has voted to introduce contentious changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way.

The agreement standardises numerous spellings and adds three letters - k, w and y - to the alphabet...

The agreement will standardise spelling by removing silent consonants in order for words to be spelt more phonetically, turning, for example "optimo" (great) into "otimo".

Needless to say, petitions of protest are being signed by laudatores temporis acti, but this is a nice example of national pride being set aside in the interests of international understanding and good sense (Brazil has over 180,000,000 speakers, versus Portugal's 10,000,000). Thanks to peacay for the heads-up!

A NEW AENEID.

Jennifer Howard's discussion in The Chronicle of Higher Education of the new translation of the Aeneid by Sarah Ruden (found via Avva) is thought-provoking on the fact that so few women have tried translating the classic epics; at least from the snippet from Book 2 she chooses for comparison, Ruden's version is head and shoulders above other recent attempts, with its combination of concision and poetic force. Here is Vergil's Latin:

        …dextrae se parvus Iulus
implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis;
pone subit coniunx. ferimur per opaca locorum,
et me, quem dudum non ulla iniecta movebant
tela neque adverso glomerati ex agmine Grai,
nunc omnes terrent aurae, sonus excitat omnis
suspensum et pariter comitique onerique timentem.

The translations are below the fold.

Little Iülus held my hand and kept up,
Although his stride could not match his father's,
And my wife followed behind.
                        We kept
To the shadows, and I, undisturbed before
By any number of weapons thrust my way
And whole platoons of Greeks, now was frightened
By every breeze and startled by every sound,
Afraid for my companion and my burden.

— translated by Stanley Lombardo (2005)

Little Iulus, clutching
my right hand, keeps pace with tripping steps.
My wife trails on behind. And so we make our way
along the pitch-dark paths, and I who had never flinched
at the hurtling spears or swarming Greek assaults —
now every stir of wind, every whisper of sound
alarms me, anxious both for the child beside me
and burden on my back.

— translated by Robert Fagles (2006)

Iulus,
Still the small boy, takes my right hand and holds it with intertwined fingers,
And, since his stride's not long, lags behind, trailing after his father.
Further back comes my wife. On we go through the darkest of places.
I, who, just moments ago, didn't flinch at a volley of javelins
Or at contingents of Greeks falling out from their march to attack us,
Cowered whenever a breeze blew now, so tense that the slightest
Sound made me twitch out of equal fear for my comrade and burden.

— translated by Frederick Ahl (2007)

My little Iulus' fingers
Were twined in mine; he trotted by my long steps.
Behind me came my wife. We went our dark way.
Before I hadn't minded the Greeks' spears
Hurled at me, or the Greeks in crowds, attacking.
Now every gust and rustle panicked me
Because of whom I led and whom I carried.

— translated by Sarah Ruden (2008)

RELATIVES, BRACKETED AND FRATERNAL.

Joel of Far Outliers has a post that begins with his student years:

During my dissertation fieldwork in Papua New Guinea over thirty years ago, I discovered that a bunch of Austronesian languages in Morobe Province mark their relative clauses in a manner that is pretty rare from a typological point of view: they mark both the beginning and the end of the clauses. An English equivalent would go something like, "The language [that they were speaking that] sounded vaguely familiar," or "The language [which they were speaking such] sounded vaguely familiar."

The only other place where I could find languages that did the same was in Central Africa, and my dissertation cited a 1976 article by the great French linguist Claude Hagège which mentioned by name two Nilo-Saharan languages, Moru and Mangbetu, and two Niger-Congo languages, Mbum and M'baka. Over the years, I lost track of anything pertaining to those languages except their names.

But recently his interest revived and he thought to ask his brother, who "had spent years working in the (at that time) Central African Empire for the US Peace Corps and USAID while I was writing my dissertation in linguistics," and his brother asked "his linguist friend Raymond Boyd at CNRS whether he could think of Adamawa-Ubangi languages that used such markers for relative clauses," and Boyd responded "Right off, I can't think of one that DOESN'T." Read Joel's post for examples of this interesting phenomenon.

MAKWEREKWERE.

The latest post at Joel's Far Outliers links to interesting posts at Khanya and No-sword about insider/outsider terminology; all of it is worth reading and thinking about, but what particularly caught my Languagehat eye was the South African term makwerekwere, meaning according to one blogger simply 'foreigners' and to another "Black immigrants from the rest of Africa, especially Nigerians." The ubiquity of the human need to have derogatory terms for the Other is endlessly depressing, but like Joel, I have a specific question: which language does makwerekwere come from? Steve of Khanya responded "Sorry, I don’t know the origin. It’s a piece of interlinguistic slang, as far as I am aware." I've looked it up in my Zulu and Xhosa dictionaries, with no result. So: anybody know?

BAKHTIN BY OTHER NAMES.

In this post, I mentioned that "V.N. Volóshinov's seminal books Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) have recently been said to be the work of his mentor Bakhtin"; this controversy (along with the parallel one of The Formal Method in Literary Criticism, attributed to Pavel Medvedev) is thoroughly discussed in Matt Steinglass's International Man of Mystery: The Battle over Mikhail Bakhtin, written for the late lamented Lingua Franca a decade ago. I first read about the Steinglass article on Philip Dangler's Mikhail Bakhtin Manuscript Smoking Page, where it is said to be "(no longer online)," and I'd like to apologize to Philip now for calling his Bakhtin page "excitable" in this post—it was meant as friendly ribbing, but seems to have bothered him. (He quotes it twice, in the end saying "Minor changes to this excitable page made in January, 2008. Not intended as an authoritative source; written by a 21-year-old.") Thanks to frequent commenter Kári for the link!

OLD TAMIL LITERACY.

A Bill Poser post at the Log shows a nice color photograph of "a pot used for collecting toddy (palm sap, modern Tamil கள்ளு) made about 1800 years ago" and links to an article from The Hindu:

The writing on the pot is in Tamil Brahmi, a writing system that only fairly recently has come to be well understood. It says: n̪a:kan uɾal, Old Tamil for "Naakan's (pot with) toddy-sap". In modern Tamil writing this would be: நாகன் உறல். As the article points out, the fact that a poor toddy-tapper would write his name on a pot is indicative of mass literacy at the time.

As Doc Rock points out in the comments, the pot does not prove mass literacy, but it's certainly indicative of it, and it makes me curious to learn more about the society. Other interesting points: the article "is not by reporters; it is right from the horse's mouth. The authors are S. Rajagopal, retired senior archaeologist with the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology and Iravatham Mahadevan, an eminent student of early Indian writing and leading authority on Tamil Brahmi... This is like having a newspaper article on physics written by Stephen Hawking." And one of the commenters in the thread is a native speaker of Tamil; not quite as unusual as the speaker of Circassian/Kabardian who turned up in my Chakobsa thread, but an indication of the worldwide reach of the internet.

FAMILY NAME SITE.

A post at Linguism links to a useful-looking site that "tracks the distribution of family names in Great Britain in 1881 and 1998":

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently.

Graham uses it to show that Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges (whose books on name origins are a pillar of my reference shelf) are mistaken about the origin of the surname Pointon.

DELOPE, ETC.

My wife suggested I take a break from the depressing reading I've been doing (Andrew Meier's excellent but bleak Black Earth), so I pulled Flashman off my shelves. It was recommended to me many years ago by my friend Dave, and it seemed just the sort of rollicking nonsense to lighten my mood. Not only is the plot fun (although larded with the casual misogyny of an earlier day), but the dialogue is full of delightful archaic words. The first that struck me came on page 44: "'Deloped, by God!' roared Forest. 'He's deloped!'" The OED explains that to delope is "Of a duellist: to fire into the air, deliberately missing one's opponent." A very useful word back when duels were a common occurrence. Once the (anti)hero gets to India, there are plenty of words straight out of Hobson-Jobson: rissaldar "A native captain in an Indian cavalry regiment" (from Persian risāla 'troop of horse'), huzoor "An Indian potentate; often used as a title of respect" (from Arabic ḥuḍūr 'presence (employed as a title)'), and the like. And while we're on the subject of loanwords from Arabic, I ran across a surprising one the other day: Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, means 'little horseshoe' and is a diminutive of nal, Turkic 'horseshoe,' itself from Arabic نعل na'l.

CHAKOBSA.

Those of you who have read Frank Herbert's Dune will remember the Fremen language Chakobsa, described by Wikipedia as "a mixture of Roma (or gypsy) language..., one sentence in Serbo-Croat and various Arabic terms." Imagine my surprise when I was reading Lesley Blanch's absorbing if overheated The Sabres of Paradise (1960), about the Russian-Chechen conflicts of the nineteenth century, and hit this on page 21: "They laughed derisively, speaking among themselves in that mysterious tongue, Chakobsa, 'the Hunting Language', which the rulers and Princes used when they wished to converse in secret, and of which no more than a few words have been discovered." I found a further allusion to it in Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus by "Essad Bey" (one of the pseudonyms used by the remarkable Lev Nussimbaum, whom I discussed in this post), first published in 1930 as Zwölf Geheimnisse im Kaukasus (my quote is from page 16 of the first translated edition, Viking 1931, which has been newly republished with a preface by Tom Reiss):

So the princes have a special language of their own, a language that is understood only by the prince and his peers. This is the famous hunting language. It was contrived by the inhabitants of the knights' citadels, the princely palaces, and the robbers' strongholds. The secret of it is strictly guarded, and no outsider has hitherto succeeded in becoming familiar with it though it is current throughout the whole of the mountains and among all the members of the caste. It is said to be the language of an extinct line of knights; but only within the last few decades has it come to be known about at all, so secretive were the princes. All important business is discussed in this language, secrets that no man must hear, and enterprises which affect the fate of the mountain people. Only five words of it are known to science, and they resemble no single word of any other known language. Shapaka—a horse, amafa—blood, ami—water, asaz—a gun, and ashopshka—a coward. The name of the language itself is Chakobsa.

(You will note that Nussimbaum/Essad is even more overheated than Mrs. Blanch, and I have no idea how much of that is to be taken seriously, including the "five words known to science.")

As you can imagine, the Frank Herbert hits swamp the Google results, but I was able to turn up one precious find from Google Books (a damnable "snippet view," but one of those rare ones where you can actually see the bit you need), from page 75 of George Thomas's 1977 The Languages and Literatures of the Non-Russian Peoples of the Soviet Union: "Presumably the Circassian Hunting language, also called Chakobsa or Sikowschir (Reineggs 1796, 248), (Bzhedukh /š^hə-k'^oa-bza/" (the snippet cuts off there). Reineggs is Jacob Reineggs (1744-1793), who went from serving Erekle II of eastern Georgia to being Russian Resident in Tiflis (Tbilisi) and wrote an Allgemeine historisch-topographische Beschreibung des Kaukasus that was published posthumously in 1796. Bzhedukh is a dialect of Adyghe. "Sikowschir" gets only four Google hits, all from nineteenth-century German sources, three of them books by Friedrich von Adelung and one an article by one of the great monosyllabic linguists of that century, A. F. Pott. While Adelung simply reproduces the word as found in Reineggs, Pott writes: "Die beiden [geheime Sprachen] gewöhnlichsten heissen Schakobsché und nicht, wie Reineggs schreibt, Sikowschir, und Farschipsé. Die erste derselben scheint eine ganz besondere zu sein, weil ihre Worte mit der gewöhnlichen Tscherkessischen Sprache keine Aehnlichkeit haben." ('Both [secret languages] are most commonly called Schakobsché and not, as Reineggs writes, Sikowschir, and Farschipsé. The first seems to be quite exceptional, since its words have no resemblance to the common Circassian language.')

I'm guessing Herbert got it from Blanch, since he was working on Dune in the early '60s, when her book was published (and, I gather, popular); I wonder if anyone has noticed before that it wasn't original with him? At any rate, the Circassian secret language should be rechristened something like Shekabza or Shekobza [or, to take into account the labialization, Shekwabza] (my attempts to provide a readable English equivalent of the Bzhedukh form cited by Thomas), since the Reineggs/Nussimbaum/Blanch version has been firmly appropriated by the Fremen.

BUMPY.

A recent Ask MetaFilter question asks "Do you call your grandfather Bumpy?"

I've known a couple people in my time who called their grandfathers by the title Bumpy [lastname]... I assumed that it was Southern (or maybe Texan) and that it was uncommon, but not completely unheard of. A short office conversation now has me wondering if it's just some weird thing that a couple of the people I know have in common.

1. Do/did you call your grandfather Bumpy?
2. If so, where did you grow up?

As a grandfather myself (though one who goes by the boringly standard "Grandpa"), I am curious about this. So: are you familiar with this usage? If so, where are you from (or where is the user from)?

PROCRASTINATION THROUGH THE AGES.

Lexicographer Ben Zimmer (now of Visual Thesaurus) has a new Slate article on procrastination:

The promise of "another day" is the key to the word's origin. It derives from the Latin verb procrastinare, combining the prefix pro- "forward" with crastinus "of tomorrow"—hence, moving something forward from one day until the next. Even in ancient Roman times, procrastination was disparaged: The great statesman Cicero, in one of his Philippics attacking his rival Mark Antony, declaimed that "in the conduct of almost every affair slowness and procrastination are hateful" (in rebus gerendis tarditas et procrastinatio odiosa est).

(Shouldn't that be "tarditas et procrastinatio odiosae sunt"?) He discusses the (to me repugnant) concept "never put off till tomorrow what you can do today" and its analogues in various languages ("'Morgen, Morgen, nur nicht heute,' sagen alle faulen Leute"), pointing out that though the concept is ubiquitous, the word is not. And he mentions this wonderful feature of Egyptian:

Adherents to this view point to the evenhanded approach of the ancient Egyptian language, which had two verbs corresponding to procrastinate. One verb referred to the useful avoidance of unnecessary or impulsive efforts, and the other to the harmful shirking of tasks needed for subsistence, such as tilling the soil at just the right time during the Nile's annual flood cycle.

Anybody know the actual word for "the useful avoidance of unnecessary or impulsive efforts"? Because that is the kind of procrastination I practice. Actually, though, I don't so much procrastinate as perendinate, a wonderful word I learned from Ben's article meaning "to put something off until the day after tomorrow."

SURLY, SIRLY.

A remarkable etymology has been brought to my attention by the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org: "the word surly is no more than an alteration of sirly, which meant lordly, haughty, imperious, acting like a sir in fact." A couple of citations for the original form:
1579 SPENSER Sheph. Cal. July 203 Sike syrlye shepheards han we none, They keepen all the path.
1600 HOLLAND Livy XXXV. xxxviii. 911 Syrly lords (say they) were the Macedonians, and rigorous.

Here's Pope with the old sense of the new form:
1726 POPE Odyss. XXIII. 50 Stern as the surly lion o’er his prey.

And the first cite for the newer, less lordly sense nicely exemplifies the transition, from a lion to a dog:
1670 RAY Prov. 208 As surly as a butchers dog.

CONTEXT.

The Dalkey Archive Press's CONTEXT magazine "was started to create a context for reading modern and contemporary literature and addressing cultural issues," according to an interview with the founder:

It is founded upon the rather perverse idea—perverse in terms of how books are treated in our culture—that books do not grow old. That is, they are forever being read by someone for the first time, or even the second or third time. But our culture tends to treat literature as though it is "timely" and therefore books are usually written about only when first published, or later when—at least some of them—get written about in scholarly ways, or what passes for scholarship. It's also the case these days that individual writers do not get written about by critics. For instance, twenty-five years ago a serious writer who had, let's say, three or four novels out, would already have a body of criticism written about the work, several articles and a book. That doesn't happen any longer, partially as a result of what has gone on in academia. So it is even harder now than it was twenty-five years ago to find criticism about contemporary writers. CONTEXT is also concerned with a certain kind of literature and with establishing the historical context and tradition for this literature. When you read reviews in such places as the New York Times, there is a sense that this is the first novel that the reviewer has ever read, and inevitably the basis for liking the book and recommending it to readers is whether it has a good plot, likable characters, and tells us something that will be useful in our everyday lives. There is no sense that this particular novel has its place among—and should be evaluated against—a whole history of other novels.

The first article I clicked on was Dmitry Golynko-Volfson's Letter from Russia, which gave me an informed discussion of recent novels by Pelevin, Sorokin, Limonov, and some writers I had never heard of, Alexander Goldstein, Mikhail Shishkin, the team of Linor Goralik and Stanislav Lvovskii, Sergei Nosov, the team of Aleksandar Garros and Alexei Evdokimov, and Zakhar Prilepin. I look forward to ransacking the rest of the archives.

WACKADOODLE AND THE OED.

A couple of items of linguistic interest in today's NYT Magazine:

1) William Safire's column investigates the odd but pleasing word wackadoodle, an insult (comparable to kook(y) or nutjob) which he traces back to a 1995 use in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I plan to use it whenever it seems appropriate. He also, impressively, refuses to take the bait offered by a reader who deplores the phrasing "I approve this message" (rather than "approve of"); he writes:

The O.E.D. makes clear that in both the sense of the 1380 “to pronounce to be good” and the 1413 “to confirm authoritatively,” the verb stood alone; no of followed. In the 17th century, the construction approve on appeared, followed by approve of. For reassurance, I turn to Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, who concludes that "for the two most relevant meanings of approve, the verb without preposition is both the earliest form and the one that continues through to the present."

2) Virginia Heffernan passes along the sad news that the OED will not publish a paper version of the new revision. I can understand the decision, but still—what happens when the internet collapses, hey? What price your fancy websites then?

A TOAD ON A STONE.

This passage from Isaac Babel's story "My First Fee" (Мой первый гонорар) nicely captures the dilemma of a young man who wants to write but knows good writing too well to be satisfied with his own efforts:

Nothing was left for me but to search for love. Naturally, I found it. Whether luckily or not, the woman I chose turned out to be a prostitute. Her name was Vera. Every evening I stole along behind her on Golovinsky Avenue [in Tiflis, now Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi], unable to bring myself to start speaking. I didn't have money for her, and as for words—those tireless vulgar and burrowing words of love—I didn't have them either. Since my youth all the powers of my being had been given over to the composition of tales, plays, and thousands of stories. They lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. Possessed by a devilish pride, I didn't want to write them down prematurely. To write worse than Lev Tolstoy seemed to me a pointless pursuit. My stories were destined to outlive oblivion. Fearless thought, exhausting passion, are worth the labor spent on them only when they are arrayed in fine clothes. How to sew such clothes?

A man lassoed by an idea, silenced by its serpentine gaze, finds it hard to foam with the insignificant, burrowing words of love. Such a man is ashamed to weep from sorrow. He lacks the wit to laugh from happiness. A dreamer, I had not mastered the senseless art of happiness. For that reason I had to give Vera ten rubles out of my scanty earnings.

(The story was written in the 1920s but not published until 1963; the translation is mine. The original Russian follows.)

Мне ничего не оставалось кроме как искать любви. Конечно, я нашел ее. На беду или на счастье, женщина, выбранная мною, оказалась проституткой. Ее звали Вера. Каждый вечер я крался за нею по Головинскому проспекту, не решаясь заговорить. Денег для нее у меня не было, да и слов - неутомимых этих пошлых и роющих слов любви - тоже не было. Смолоду все силы моего существа были отданы на сочинение повестей, пьес, тысячи историй. Они лежали у меня на сердце, как жаба на камне. Одержимый бесовской гордостью, - я не хотел писать их до времени. Мне казалось пустым занятием - сочинять хуже, чем это делал Лев Толстой. Мои истории предназначались для того, чтобы пережить забвение. Бесстрашная мысль, изнурительная страсть стоят труда, потраченного на них, только тогда, когда они облачены в прекрасные одежды. Как сшить эти одежды?..

Человеку, взятому на аркан мыслью, присмиревшему под змеиным ее взглядом, трудно изойти пеной незначащих и роющих слов любви. Человек этот стыдится плакать от горя. У него недостает ума, чтобы смеяться от счастья. Мечтатель - я не овладел бессмысленным искусством счастья. Мне пришлось поэтому отдать Вере десять рублей из скудных моих заработков.

KARSHUNI? GERSHUNI?

First off: bulbulovo is back! Those of you who (like me) had started to think of the blogroll link as a sentimental reminder of the good old days can go back to clicking it regularly. And the latest post is a doozy. I didn't even know there was a practice of writing Arabic in Syriac script, let alone that the name for it could be written "Karshuni, carshuni, carchouni, carschouni, karschuni, karšūnī, karshūnī, karschūnī, garshuni, garschuni, garšūnī, gerschuni, gershuni, geršūnī or even akaršūnī and akarschūnī." The intrepid bulbul does his best to disentangle the word's history and usage, and I commend his discussion to all fans of obscure and useless knowledge.

WAMPANOAG REVIVAL.

A few years ago I did a post about the pronunciation of the tribal name Wampanoag that wound up (thanks to reader Martin) discussing revival efforts as well; now Martin sends me a link to a very interesting Technology Review article by Jeffrey Mifflin on the revival, covering the ground from John Eliot's 1663 Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament [Entire Holy his-Bible God both Old Testament and also New Testament], the first Bible published in Ameri­ca, to three-year-old Mae Alice, "the first native speaker of Wôpanâak for seven generations." It's well worth the read, and I hope there are many more such revivals.

PSEUDO-WORD FEAST.

I'm trying, I really am. When I was younger I was an intolerable snoot (to use DFW's silly term), picking apart texts and holding up errors (real or factitious) with repellent glee. Years of linguistics courses, followed by more years of absorbing their descriptive approach, not to mention the tolerance that comes with middle age, have left me readier to roll with the punches, accepting the fact that the language changes faster than I can change with it, amused by my own irritation with usages I happen not to like. Even within the history of this blog, I've grown less eager to seize on linguistic misdeeds found in my endless reading; life is short and one can't expect reporters and editors, increasingly pressed for time, to get everything right. I've even stopped expecting The New Yorker to live up to its former hard-earned reputation for accuracy. But some things are too much to be borne.

In this week's issue, one of the "Talk of the Town" segments, Word Feast by Lauren Collins, is a chatty squib about the practice (imposed by a new general manager) of poetry readings before the "family meals" at the Union Square Café (which was one of my favorite restaurants back when I lived in NYC and could afford to eat at such places). My pleasure at the thought of people sharing poetry is, unfortunately, more than outweighed by my resentment at bosses who force their employees into jolly group activities. But that's neither here nor there; the bone I wish to pick is with the very last sentence, describing the aftermath of the reading:

“Did we order forks, by the way?” someone asked, which could be considered iambic quadrameter.

This is so egregiously stupid a sentence, in two completely different but equally easily avoidable ways, that I am compelled to bring it here for public keelhauling.

In the first place, there is no such word as "quadrameter." I can, alas, believe the twentysomething Ms. Collins was never exposed to even the most basic analysis of poetics in her doubtless expensive education, but could she not have opened a dictionary? And more to the point, did no one at the magazine (once famed, let me repeat, for its eagle-eyed editors and fanatical fact-checkers) read that sentence and say "Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right"? The word is tetrameter, which comes from Greek tetra- 'four-' (combining form of tettara 'four') and metron 'measure'; it has been in standard English use for four hundred years. The fact that "quadrameter" is a bastard, half Latin and half Greek, like television, would be annoying if it were a real word, but it's not—there's not even a nonce usage recorded in the OED (which I certainly hope will ignore this citation).

Secondly, no it could not "be considered iambic quadrameter," or even iambic tetrameter. This would be iambic tetrameter: "The forks! The forks! We must have forks!" The quoted sentence has no meter at all; if you inserted an extra syllable—“Did we order the forks, by the way?”—it would make a nice anapestic trimeter, and if you read it with a slight pause where the inserted word would be you could fit it into such a context ("How delightful a banquet we'll have!/ Did we order forks, by the way?”), but it is neither iambic nor tetrameter, and no amount of strained emphasis will make it so. The last paragraph of that story is so wrong, so bad, that it should shame the once-proud magazine that ran it.

THE EFFECT OF ALTITUDE ON LANGUAGE.

Claire of Anggarrgoon has a post on the Papuan language Diuwe, about which the Ethnologue entry says only "below 100 meters." The code for the language being DIY, Claire thought a fuller description of the language would make a good "DIY effort":

Therefore let me start the ball rolling by claiming that DIY is the only language which supports the hypothesis that altitude affects air stream mechanisms. Its consonant inventory contains 3 stops, four fricatives, 5 laterals, six approximants and seven vowels.

Mark Dingemanse of The Ideophone (who alerted me to this project) picks up the ball and runs with it:

Hidbap is Diuwe’s closest neighbour both geographically and phylogenetically. It is a language spoken above 100m but below 200m in the same area as Diuwe, that is, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Like Diuwe, it has exactly 100 speakers. The languages are quite closely related, though there is no mutual intelligibility due to the presence of a large bundle of isoglosses at the 100m isoline. This bundle of isoglosses is largely due to the fact that speakers of either language avoid crossing into each other’s territories at all cost...

There is much more, ending with a call for other language bloggers to "enlarge our sample of altitude-affected inventories to get a better view of the phenomenon." Alas, I'm up to my ears in actual work at the moment, but I hope others will rush in where Foley¹ fears to tread!

¹Foley, W. A. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

TROJANOW OR TROYANOV?

An interesting discussion of transliteration at the complete review, in the context of a new translation of Der Weltensammler, called The Collector of Worlds, by—well...:

Ilija Trojanow was born in Bulgaria, but his family left the country when he was very young and he has lived all over the world. He writes in German, and has always published his books under the name 'Ilija Trojanow'.

Of course, Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic letters, and were one to transliterate his name from those into English one would do so differently than into German: the German w is the English v-sound, and a y is the obvious choice where the Germans use j. And, apparently seeking to get the pronunciation right, Faber is publishing The Collector of Worlds as by: Ilya Troyanov. Which does give English-speaking readers a better idea of how to pronounce his name.

The problem with this is that Ilya Troyanov is better-known as—indeed, very well known as: Ilija Trojanow. Even in the English-speaking world.

Two of his books have even been published in English translation—Mumbai To Mecca and Along the Ganges (get your copy at Amazon.com)—and they were published under the name: Ilija Trojanow.

When he appeared at the PEN World Voices festival last year it was as: Ilija Trojanow. (See now The Messiness of Now, an adapted version of his conversation at the festival now up at the PEN site, which is where we learned about the forthcoming translation.)

Perhaps most obviously to the point, in this Internet age, consider the Google results for the searches of his name:

* "Ilya Troyanov": "30 results"
* "Ilija Trojanow": "about 46,300"

You think maybe anyone who goes looking for information about this new Faber-author "Ilya Troyanov" on the Internet might wind up missing something?

My first reaction was "of course it should be Ilya Troyanov in English!" but as I read on I realized that, though it would have made sense for his first English publisher to have retransliterated the name, by now it's pretty silly, and if his preferred transliteration makes it difficult for English-speakers to say his name correctly, that's just the way Troy crumbles. (I added the alternate transliteration to his Wikipedia page; we'll see if it stays. Oh, and by now "Ilya Troyanov" gets over 900 hits.)

ENTIRELY FICTIVE.

Conrad's latest post at VUnEx is his usual exhilarating excursion through byways of history that one might have thought dusty until he poured champagne over them; he begins with a delightful passage from Borrow's Lavengro ("'He—he—he! you must know that in Lasan akhades wine is janin.' 'In Armenian, kini,' said I; 'in Welsh, gwin; Latin, vinum. But do you think that Janus and Janin are one?'") and continues, via Abravanel, to Annius of Viterbo's Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium.

Now Annius' big idea was to get lots of fragments from ancient historians—Berosus of Chaldaea, Myrsilos of Methymna, Fabius Pictor, and so on—draw them all up, and weave them into a holistic history of the ancient world... The same basic idea had been done before by writers like Josephus and Eusebius; the only problem with Annius was that all of his fragments had been entirely fabricated, and by him.

Now that's what I call breathtaking chutzpah, and his Wikipedia entry points out that not only his citations were sham: "His expertise in Semitic philology, once celebrated even by otherwise sober ecclesiastical historians, was entirely fictive."

THE SHADED LANES.

OK, I know everybody's sick of Nabokov by now, and I'm trying to post about other things, but I ran across a quote I like so much I have to share it. I'll tack on a couple other Nab-related items at the end for those who still have an appetite for Nabokoviana. This is from one of the lectures he gave at Wellesley in 1946, and it perfectly expresses how I view life and learning:

The more things we know the better equipped we are to understand any one thing and it is a burning pity that our lives are not long enough and not sufficiently free of annoying obstacles, to study all things with the same care and depth as the one we now devote to some favorite subject or period. And yet there is a semblance of consolation within this dismal state of affairs: in the same way as the whole universe may be completely reciprocated in the structure of an atom, . . . an intelligent and assiduous student [may] find a small replica of all knowledge in a subject he has chosen for his special research. . . . and if, upon choosing your subject, you try diligently to find out about it, if you allow yourself to be lured into the shaded lanes that lead from the main road you have chosen to the lovely and little known nooks of special knowledge, if you lovingly finger the links of the many chains that connect your subject to the past and the future and if by luck you hit upon some scrap of knowledge referring to your subject that has not yet become common knowledge, then will you know the true felicity of the great adventure of learning....

(Quoted in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd.)

In other Nabokov news, Dmitri Nabokov, VV's son, after years of dithering and agonizing, has decided to defy his father's dying wish and publish the incomplete manuscript of his last novel, The Original of Laura. I approve of the decision (if you want things burned, burn them yourselves, persnickety creators—once you're dead they belong to the living) but I don't expect to be bowled over by the book.

And here's the Barcelona Review Nabokov Quiz from 1999. It's difficult!

FOR WANT OF A SENTENCE.

An interesting jeu d'esprit at Waggish:

pick a work of literature or philosophy (or poetry, if you can make it work) and a sentence from that work that, if the sentence had been excluded from the work, would have made the greatest difference in the work's interpretation/reception/history in the following years.

As david feil says in the comments:

It seems that there are several different types of sentences that can be turned up by this question. There are sentences which change the way you read the text, whether it is an explicit instruction (like your Wittgenstein) or a cryptic clue. There are sentences that are so eruptive that they anchor the rest of the text (Conrad’s “The horror, the horror” or Faulkner’s “I don’t hate the South, I don’t hate it” [from Absalom, Absalom—LH]). There are sentences where the text reaches its most crystallized coherence and turns into some sort of poetic easiness. There are sentences which for arbitrary reasons have been given a lot of critical attention (“My mother is a fish.” [from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying—LH]) but despite their immediate impression don’t really define the text as a whole at all. And then there are the sentences which an individual latches on to as their personal lens of the text, but might have nothing to do with the general reaction...

I think we can eliminate the last category as irrelevant to the spirit of the game (and with my irritating editorial nitpickiness I must point out that "I don’t hate the South" is as apocryphal as "Play it again, Sam"; after Shreve asks "Why do you hate the South?" Quentin responds "I dont hate it," going on to think "I dont hate it ... I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"—right up there with "yes I said yes I will yes" in the Memorable Endings sweepstakes). In terms of the original formulation of the question, what comes to my mind is "'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'" (Through the Looking Glass, Chap. 6) Interesting thing to consider, no?

TYPESETTING ARABIC.

A very interesting article by Eildert Mulder about the difficulty of setting Arabic script in type:

The technical problem is this: Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words, like a script typeface in English. And though the Arabic alphabet has only 28 letters, most letters have four forms, depending on whether they occur at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or stand alone. Furthermore, each combination of letters is unique, creating a typographic challenge greater than Chinese. Because all letters connect dynamically with the preceding one, and most also with the following one, the number of unique combinations is almost astronomical.

The esthetic problem comes from the dizzying mutability of written Arabic. For example, there are actually three ways the letter ha can be written in the middle of a word, and the calligrapher’s choice is influenced not only by the letter immediately preceding the ha, but also by the letters earlier in the word, and even by letters that follow it—yet, in whatever form, it is still in essence the ha in the beginner’s textbook. A sequence of letters can run along a baseline the way Roman letters do—though Arabic runs from right to left, of course—or they may start above the baseline and descend in a diagonal if the connections from one letter to the next make that an esthetically pleasing choice.

The result is that the individual letters in a well-written piece of text are in constant motion, like dancers in a polonaise: In the course of the dance, they bow to each other, embrace each other, push each other away, hug each other’s necks and fall at each other’s feet—and there are some real acrobats among them. Thus, well-written Arabic texts feel alive to their readers, whereas mechanically typeset ones feel like graveyards: At their best they are only still photographs of the calligrapher’s living, moving polonaise.

Thomas Milo, Mirjam Somers, and Peter Somers have solved this problem:

Using the calligraphy of Mustafa Izzet Effendi and other great calligraphers, the Milo–Somers team took the concept of script analysis further than either Müteferrika or Mühendisyan, making the basic unit they examined not the letter but the penstroke. That made it possible to derive the dancing, shifting letters, the tens of thousands of combinations, and the variable words all from a few hundred individual penstrokes and a clear and limited set of rules—just the sort of fundamental, tabular information that computers like to use. And with modern computers, it became possible finally to resolve the conflict that has blighted the relationship between Arabic script and book-printing technology for most of five centuries.

Fascinating stuff, with some gorgeous illustrations. (Via MetaFilter.)