A RETURN TO ITHACA.

Anatoly Vorobey recently had a post on his renewed love for his native Russian that I liked enough to translate (clumsily) and share it; the original is below the cut.

It's so strange, reading a book in Russian again after reading only a lot of books in English for a long time. Again that feeling of something simultaneously my own and remote. A return to Ithaca. Words somehow not right, and at the same time absolutely right. They force their way into the very inmost part of my brain and whisper there; they pass through, like owners, into places where foreign words can't squeeze themselves or make their way by shouting.

My own, forever my own. Quiet and clamorous. Ravines and hills, tranquil grandeur and petty malice. So poor and so rich. Clumsy and concise, weighty and quick-witted. I can't get away from you.

Так странно это, читать снова книгу по-русски после того, как долго и много читал книги только по-английски. Опять это ощущение родного и далекого одновременно. Возвращение на Итаку. Слова какие-то не те, и одновременно самые те. Пробираются в самую нутрь мозга и шушукаются там; проходят, как хозяева, туда, куда иностранным словам не продраться, не всегда и докричаться.

Родной, навсегда родной. Тихий и крикливый. Ущелья и горы, спокойное величие и мелкая злоба. Такой бедный, такой богатый. Неповоротливый и краткий, вальяжный и быстроумный. Никуда мне от тебя не деться.

THE LINGUISTS ONLINE.

A while back I posted about the movie The Linguists, which "follows David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction." If, like me, you missed it when it was shown on TV (my taping skills somehow failed me), you will be glad to know it's online, for the time being, at Babelgum. It's an hour long and quite enjoyable, though I wished they had spent less time on local color and more on the actual documentation of the languages. But when they finally turn on the cameras and tapes and start eliciting, it's a blast, and if (like me) you were particularly interested in Chulym, don't worry—they get back to it towards the end and even transcribe some onscreen. (I just wish they'd clarified whether it's closer to Tatar—i.e., Western Turkic—or Khakas—i.e., Northern Turkic; accounts differ.) Anyway, catch it while you can!

BECKWITH ON INDO-EUROPEAN.

As I said in my first post on his new book Empires of the Silk Road, Beckwith has an appendix on "The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Diaspora," and I was probably one of the only readers to turn to it first and devour it eagerly. I was, of course, interested in what he had to say about Scythians, Turks, and so on, but I had no expertise in those areas and would have to take his word for a lot of things. I spent the better part of the 1970s immersed in the study of Proto-Indo-European (I was at one point the world's leading expert on zero-grade thematic present-tense formations in the early IE languages—the topic of my unfinished dissertation, which would surely have been one of the more boring dissertations ever), and I figured if he could convince me he knew what he was talking about in that area, I'd be willing to trust him on the other stuff.

Now, the problem with the study of Indo-European is that the groundwork was done over a century ago, and although exciting discoveries have been made since (notably Hittite and Tocharian), the basic story is still what it was then. You can tinker with the decorations, but the framework was set firmly in place by Bopp, Rask, Grimm, and the other punchily named nineteenth-century forefathers. Don't get me wrong, there's no shortage of people who want to tear everything up and connect it all differently (usually to Caucasian or Semitic or Ural-Altaic), but those people tend to have either an insufficient knowledge of the linguistic facts or an excessive willingness to throw the rules of historical linguistics overboard. Actual Indo-Europeanists tend to be commendably but boringly conservative.

Now, this guy is not an Indo-Europeanist by trade, but he's published on the PIE obstruent system in Historische Sprachforschung (which was known in my day as Kuhns Zeitschrift and has been in business since 1852), and he has an admirable respect for the regularity of sound laws that sets him apart from the wild-eyed theorists. Nevertheless, he's willing to make sweeping changes to the accepted picture. First, he takes on the notorious problem of the PIE stop system ("a typologically unlikely, if not impossible, phonological system"), saying PIE had "only a two-way phonemic opposition of stops":

It is a fairly simple matter to show that, as a result, all known Indo-European languages belong to one of three Sprachbund-like groups... Group A, the first-wave languages (with only unvoiced stop phonemes, though there is evidence of the former existence of both unvoiced and voiced stops), consists of Anatolian and Tocharian. Group B, the second-wave languages (with unvoiced, voiced, and voiced aspirate phonemes), consists of Germanic, Italic, Greek, Indic, and Armenian. Group C, the third-wave languages (with unvoiced and voiced stop phonemes), consists of Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Albanian, and Iranian.

This made sense to me. He then goes on to the issue of Avestan, which causes all kinds of problems in trying to establish chronology and interrelationships, and brings up a point that bothered me back when I studied the language: "it has been remarked, 'The Avestan speech is very closely related to Sanskrit,' so astonishingly close, in fact, that 'we are able to transpose any word from one language into the other by the application of special phonetic laws.' Avestan's extensive case system and verbal conjugation system is not just similar to that of Vedic Sanskrit, it is almost identical to it. That is extremely odd." He gives an example of an Avestan sentence rendered mechanically into Sanskrit: təm becomes tam, yazatəm becomes yajatam, and so on. This "astounding closeness" is what makes people reconstruct a separate branch descending from a Proto-Indo-Iranian language. Beckwith has a different solution, one that I found immediately convincing: "Avestan looks less like an Iranian language than like a phonologically Iranized Indic language. The many inexplicable problems of Avestan... can be accounted for as an artifact of Iranians having adopted an oral religious text... from an Old Indic dialect. As required of Indic religious practitioners, they memorized it exactly, but... it underwent specifically Iranian sound shifts in the mouths of the Iranian-speaking oral reciters." This allows us to get rid of the separate Indo-Iranian branch entirely and makes the overall picture more plausible.

He ends the appendix with an explanation of why the early IE languages should be regarded as creoles and how this affects the historical picture; I won't try to summarize it, but again, I found it thoroughly plausible, and I decided I was willing to give credence to his approach to subjects I wasn't as well acquainted with.

JUGHEAD'S HAT.

The time has come once again to justify the "hat" portion of Languagehat's name. Any kid growing up in America during the last two-thirds of a century has surely encountered Archie Comics, and has probably wondered what the deal was with that strange jagged object Jughead wears on his head. Now, thanks to dogged sleuthing by "the in crowd" at I'm Learning To Share!, we learn from this copiously illustrated post that it was an actual style of headgear, developed after World War I by "mechanics, welders and other workmen who found they could get the same 'safety' function of a factory worker's beanie by altering an old worn-out fedora. The method was to turn a fedora upside-down, push the hat's crown inside-out, then turn up the brim and trim away its excess with a scalloped cut." It was quickly imitated by kids who wanted to look cool. After WWII the style began to die out, leaving Jughead's lid as an increasingly incomprehensible remnant. (Jeff Goldblum, however, wore one as "'Freak #1" in the 1974 revenge flick Death Wish; there's a deceptively goofy image at the I'm Learning To Share! page.) This may be the single best piece of information I've ever gotten from MetaFilter.

Totally unrelated, but I thought I'd pass it along: did you know that the given name Elmer was originally a surname (derived from Old English æðel 'noble' and mær 'famous')? It "has been used as a given name in America since the 19th century, in honor of the popularity of the brothers Ebenezer and Jonathan Elmer, leading supporters of the American Revolution" (in the words of Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names, p. 101).

EMPIRES OF THE SILK ROAD.

We all see the world and its history through blinders. As children we care only about our immediate family; as we grow up, our scope broadens, but for the most part we remain in thrall to the preconceptions and perspectives of our country, our class, our religion—take your pick of the many ways we slice the cake of humanity. Perhaps the main intellectual task of the modern period of cultural history is the dismantling of such barriers, the increasing refusal to privilege one version of the world over another, from Einstein's theory of relativity (the usual resort of those who want a scientific metaphor for these things) to the various attempts to present history from different angles. But it's a maddeningly slow and incomplete process. Americans still think of history as leading up to the glorious Founding Moment of 1776, and the world since then as focused on the fortunes and interests of the U.S.; the worldview of the Chinese is heavily Sinocentric; every nation and ethnic group has its grudge-filled version of history, with its own moments of glory.

Even when we try to counteract such narrow views, we only go so far. In college I took a mandatory two-year History of Civilization course, which did an admirable job of introducing us young and ignorant Americans to the world at large; we spent entire semesters on non-European regions most of us hadn't given much thought to. But though we read Sources of Chinese Tradition and Sources of Indian Tradition, what we were getting were simply alternative blinders: the world as focused on China, India, and so on. We could triangulate, so to speak, but there was no really broad view that dispensed with the time-honored borders and categories.

That's why it was such a thrill to encounter Marshall Hodgson. Hodgson thought both Eurocentrism and the traditional Islamic categorizations were impeding useful thought, and he created his own categories and terminology and did his best to rethink the way we conceived of the world's past. (It's a tragedy he died so young, in his mid-forties.) Reading The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam was one of the formative experiences of my intellectual life, giving me not only a continuing interest in what he called the Islamicate world but an appreciation for the interconnections between what we think of as separate civilizations. (In a less academic way, Amin Maalouf does similar things, and I recommend his The Crusades Through Arab Eyes to anyone who wants a lively recounting that will shake up the way they think of the Crusades.)

Over a decade ago I read a book that impressed me in a similar way: The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power Among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese During the Early Middle Ages. I know it sounds like a recondite topic, but at the time the book deals with—roughly the seventh through the mid-ninth centuries—Tibet was a power in the world, capable of defeating any of the surrounding nations and central to the complex web of overland trade and other contacts of the period. Not only was his approach refreshingly new but his command of the relevant languages and materials was awe-inspiring, and in an epilogue called "Tibet and Early Medieval Eurasia Today" he took my breath away with his sweeping but carefully grounded pronouncements on the rise of the Turks, the cities of the Roman Empire ("one must ask if these ancient cities were really centers of commercial life. In fact, most were creations of the Roman government, just like the military camps and the military roads that connected them all to Rome. It would thus appear to be no coincidence that many of them disappeared when the Roman government collapsed and the subsidies ended"), medieval coinage ("the entire civilized world of the Early Middle Ages was in fact on a silver standard. Gold was a valuable commodity, but unimportant as coinage"), and the alleged devastation of Western Europe by the "barbarian invasions" ("The supposedly highly cultured northern regions of the Roman Empire... were almost totally devoid of important literary figures during the classical and late classical periods. From the seventh century onward, however, there were — suddenly, it seems — many writers in those places... In other words, literate civilization expanded into what had been essentially preliterate territory"). The author was Christopher I. Beckwith, and I wanted very much to see what he could do on a broader canvas.

Now he has published Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (kindly sent to me by Princeton University Press), and it is even better than I might have hoped. Essentially, he's applying the same combination of dogged detail work and sweeping reevaluation to the entire history of Eurasia, focusing on that often neglected portion called Central Asia. You can read the Introduction online, and it will give you an idea of the approach, but it's the details that make the book. As a minor but telling example, each chapter starts off with an epigraph: the prologue with an excerpt from the Kalmyk national epic, the first chapter with one from the Rig Veda, the epilogue with a bit of Cavafy, and so on. Perfectly normal, but he also includes the originals, in the original script: the first thing you see in the prologue is Эртиин экн цагт һаргсн [Born in a bygone age long ago]. This isn't just a nod to multiculturalism (and a demonstration of the ease of setting multilingual texts in the computer age), it's a refusal to privilege the easy-to-read translation over the normally effaced original, an insistence on the fact that the Kalmyks see and express the world through their Mongolic language and we have to bear that constantly in mind even if we don't actually learn Kalmyk.

This is by no means an easy read. Each page has its full complement of footnotes, there are forty pages of more substantial endnotes at the back, there are two appendices (one on "The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Diaspora," which was of course of particular interest to me and which I will report on next, and one on "Ancient Central Eurasian Ethnonyms"), and there is frequent discussion of minute details of historical reconstruction. But if it has the impact I hope it will, its findings and approaches will have a ripple effect, and before too long more popular histories will appear that treat the world from a similarly all-encompassing point of view, and the average reader will start to become aware that history is a much more multifarious thing than it had seemed, and that there is no such thing as a "barbarian." In the meantime, anyone with an interest in the crucial but too often ignored part of the world between Europe and Asia owes it to themselves to read this groundbreaking work, on which I will be reporting in future posts as I make my way through it.

MYSTERY MAN PODCAST.

In this post, I mentioned an O. Henry story called "The Green Door"; a gentleman who enjoys reading aloud (as do I) has chosen it for the first of his offerings at Mystery Man Podcast: " A brand-new podcast, recorded monthly, dedicated to reviving deliciously rare yet neglected masterpieces of mystery, adventure, suspense, and horror ~ from centuries past." He adds: "Who am I? For now ~ that must remain a mystery." Well, we all like a good mystery, so if you've got 21 minutes, 33 seconds to spare, give a listen.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, S&W!

If you go to the New York Times front page today and scroll down, you will see a row of boxes labeled "Inside NYTimes.com," one of which is "Happy Birthday, Strunk and White!" If you click on it, you will be taken to their "Room for Debate" forum page, which now features a colloquium on the fiftieth anniversary of what I once called a "malign little compendium of bad advice"; the five participants are Geoffrey K. Pullum, professor of linguistics; Patricia T. O’Conner, grammarphobia.com; Ben Yagoda, professor of English; Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl; and—ahem—me. (I'd like to thank Picky for his final comment in this thread, around which I built my contribution.) I'll be curious to see what Times readers have to say, and I hereby extend a hearty welcome to any who venture over here; all sorts of things related to language and languages get discussed here, and people of all levels of knowledge and experience have a good time. Take a look around and feel free to join in!

Update. The comments are up! I've read all 215 so far posted, and not surprisingly, most are defensive about their beloved icon (though a pleasing number of them admit that it may be out of date and not all the rules are dependable). Popular line of attack: so why don't you losers write a better style guide yourselves? Popular form of exculpation: "The experienced writer has learned the rules and therefore can break or ignore them." (This assumes, of course, that S&W are indeed providing "the rules.") A charmingly inane variant: "I hear a subtle chorus of the postmodern view that all forms of language are equally valid and that rules impose some sort of oppression on those that won’t follow them or have their own rules."

KCinCan (127. April 25, 2009 1:46 pm) n:icely sums up vox populi:

Stuffy and arcane doesn’t mean it is wrong or bad. I am a stickler on grammar and this book gives great guidance. I happen to believe that “None of us are perfect” is absolutely wrong; I don’t care if I don’t have a Phd in linguistics.

Where is Lynne Truss? She is the person whom I trust to give me the straight answer. Long Live Lynn!

Few of the responses were as forthrightly idiotic and self-refuting as Austin's (65. April 25, 2009 10:18 am):

Those are the voices of the sore losers who wish they had written a book as concise and successful as the Elements of Style. Who are they to suggest that “The advice on “data” and “media” is outdated” when data and media has [sic –LH] been plural since the birth of the Latin language?

My favorite defense was by Palmer Ward (131. April 25, 2009 2:18 pm):

I love S&W simply because it was always sitting on my father’s desks - both at home and at his newspaper. It still sits on my desk in my office, as I lie on my bed downstairs writing into my laptop. I still find myself drawn to it when a thorny question arises. This shouldn’t infer I actually open it, however. I’m just drawn to it like a guilty Grandchild.

Who can argue with that? I cherish an 1855 edition of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, not one of my favorite poets and not a book I'll ever actually read, because it belonged to my father's father, Daddy Joe (as we called him). Long live familial sentiment!

One comment did prick my conscience; Joe (169. April 25, 2009 9:32 pm) wrote: "Well now, I noticed that these supposed experts offered not a single alternative to the classic Strunk & White. ... It’d be nice if these pundits offered some constructive advice instead of simply ripping an old and somewhat outdated standard to shreds." Guilty as charged (speaking for the pundits collectively), and I wish one of us had put in a plug for (in my case) MWDEU.

BABACHIT.

In one sense, this post will be of limited interest, since it discusses a Russian word (or non-word) used only in a single poem. However, even those who don't know Russian may find it interesting to contemplate the issue of a poet using a word nobody else understands.

Probably Mandelstam's most famous poem is the "Stalin epigram" that got him in serious trouble and contributed to his arrest and eventual murder by the state. You can see a translation of the whole thing at that Wikipedia link (here's the original Russian); what I want to focus on is this couplet:

Кто свистит, кто мяучит, кто хнычет,
Он один лишь бабачит и тычет

One [of the "thin-necked chiefs" around him] whistles, another mews, a third whimpers;
He [Stalin] alone babáchit and prods.

You'll note that Kline, in the translation at Wikipedia, renders the line "He alone pushes and prods"; that's a copout, but an understandable one, because nobody knows what babachit means. When I first read this poem, there was so much in Mandelstam I didn't understand, and my vocabulary was so limited, that I didn't bother worrying about it—it was just one more puzzle I'd deal with later. Well, now it's later, and both my vocabulary (and my range of resources to supplement it) and my acquaintance with the poet have expanded tremendously, and I figured it was time to deal with it.

So I looked in my three-volume bilingual dictionary, and I looked in Dahl, and I looked in the Dictionary of Russian dialects: nothing. There is a word бабатя [babátya] that Dahl defines as "womanish man; hermaphrodite," and the verb could theoretically be derived from this, but as far as I know Stalin has never been accused of hermaphroditism, and it's just too far-fetched. So I turned to Google, and discovered that Russians have been wondering too. In this forum discussion, for example, Vladimir asks what it means; someone cites an irrelevant verb meaning 'strike,' someone else suggests it might be related to бабай [babái] 'bogeyman,' but it's hard to see how, and the discussion trails off. I found a story, "Как они бабачили в 1934" [How they babached in 1934] by Vitaly Rapoport (first published in Vremya i my in 1998) which features this very issue; Stalin calls a meeting to ask about the word, Alexander Poskryobyshev (Stalin's personal assistant) says he couldn't find it in the dictionary, Aleksei Tolstoy (after making the faux pas of addressing the dictator as "Iosif Vissarionovich" rather than the mandatory "Comrade Stalin") babbles that "this word, like others coming from the popular lexicon, doesn't have any definite sense... I think it means having a jolly time, probably playing babki [a children's game]. Well, I'm not really sure. You could look it up in Dahl." Poskryobyshev acerbically says that Dahl "gives no instructions on this point"; Tolstoi retreats in confusion. Later, Stalin reads the poem over by himself and thinks "Only Stalin is a Person, the poet got that right. "Whimpers": of course that's Bukharin and others like him. Babachit? You can't figure it out, even if you turn to the Academy of Sciences."

Now, writers have the right to invent words, but it seems odd to do so in such an opaque way, especially in a political epigram that is intended to skewer a villain unforgettably. Did Mandelstam just like the sound so much he couldn't resist throwing it in? Did it have some private meaning for him? I guess we'll never know, but it's one of the more interesting hapaxes I've come across.

THE EDGE OF THE WOODS.

Yves Bonnefoy is one of my favorite French poets, and (as I said here) I would never dare try to translate his gorgeously opaque off-classical poems myself. But at wood s lot I found a link to this fine version:

The Edge of the Woods

I

Thorn: you tell me that you love the word,
And there I might have much to say,
Sensing a fervor come alive in you
Without your knowing, that was all my life.

But I have no response: for words
Have something cruel about them, they refuse
Themselves to those who love and honor them
For what they might be, not for what they are.

And nothing stays with me but images,
Almost enigmas, which would turn
Your gaze away and leave it suddenly sad,
Your gaze, that takes in only what is clear.

You see, it's like a morning in the rain,
One goes to lift the water's hem
In order to risk plunging deeper than color
Into the unknown of pools and shadows.

II

And yet it's certainly daybreak, in this country
That staggered me, that you love now.
The house of those few days is still asleep,
And you and I have slipped outside of time.

The water hidden in the grass is dark,
And yet the dew reanimates the sky.
Last night's storm is calm, the cloud
Has put its fiery hand in the hand of ash.

But who translated it? Mark didn't say, and the linked page didn't say, and even the most dogged googling failed to turn up the translator's name. I finally went to the Hudson Review site; I didn't find any obvious way to search the site, but I did find the note "Every issue of The Hudson Review is available in its entirety on JStor," and having access to JSTOR through my Massachusetts library card, I went there and found the appropriate page, and under the reproduction of the magazine page was the line "The Edge of the Woods, by Yves Bonnefoy and Emily Grosholz The Hudson Review © 2001 The Hudson Review, Inc." (This also allowed me to reproduce the stanza breaks and italics lost in the linked version.)

So I can finally credit Emily Grosholz for her work, but if I were her, I'd be annoyed that it took that much effort to find her name. Shame on findarticles.com and other such content borrowers for not providing credit where due. (And why is it © The Hudson Review, Inc. rather than the translator?)

FEMICIDE.

I was reading the excellent and harrowing Nation article "Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolano's '2666'" by Marcela Valdes, which I found via a MetaFilter post, and all the while part of me was annoyed at the use of what seemed to me the badly formed word femicide, a product (as I thought) of our politically correct era, like "herstory" to counter history. Then I checked with the OED and found that it's been around at least since 1801 ("This species of delinquency may be denominated femicide"). It's still ill formed, and it still irritates me, but at least it's got pedigree.

SCARER.

In the comments to this post, linguist and frequent commenter marie-lucie quoted an OED etymology that mentioned "Mongolian manūl, formerly ‘watchman’, now ‘bird-scarer’" and said "I had never seen or heard 'bird-scarer'. Wouldn't "scarecrow" be the idiomatic word?" That seemed like an excellent question, so I checked (what else?) the OED, and found:

scarer

  One who or something which scares; spec. (usu. as bird-scarer) a person or thing (other than a traditional scarecrow) for frightening birds away from crops.
  1740 RICHARDSON Pamela I. Introd. 30 Till the Ghost of Lady Davers, drawing open the Curtains, scares the Scarer. 1820 Examiner No. 621. 154/1 Like a scarer away of birds from the grapes. 1865 DICKENS Mut. Fr. I. v, To a old bird like myself these are scarers. 1879 ESCOTT England I. 299 When he commences life as an agricultural labourer, it will probably be, not in the capacity of scarer—bird-scaring is now generally done by inanimate scarecrows. 1930 H. H. THOMAS Pop. Gardening Ann. 24 A good cheap scarer on the market is obtainable in the shape of a black cat's head. 1953 R. GODDEN Kingfishers catch Fire xiii. 157 The bird-scarers had come to watch over the cherry crop. 1961 Times 7 Jan. 8/6, I could not make out whether the contents were a bird-scarer or a child's rattle. 1971 Country Life 16 Sept. 682/1 We were much troubled by an explosive bird-scarer in a field of barley adjoining our house.

So a "bird-scarer" is anything that scares birds other than a scarecrow. (I hope that the "black cat's head" in the 1930 quote was artificial!) I can see how that could be a useful word; are you familiar with it?

MANDELSTEIN.

Having finished the Ronen book, I'm trying to get through Nancy Pollak's Mandelstam the Reader before Wednesday, when I have to return them both; it's hard, because I keep investigating the detours she sends me off on (she studied with Ronen and has the same densely packed style of investigating webs of lexical reminiscences). I just ran across a coincidence that pleases me, and must have pleased Mandelstam much more; Pollak has been talking about the importance of the eighteenth-century German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, who did his most important work in Russia, for Mandelstam's writing of the 1930s (I'm quoting from pp. 20-21):

In the "autobiographical confession" of Conversation about Dante, where he admits to having "consulted" with stones in conceiving that prose, Mandelstam identifies the conjunction of spheres, taking stone, which chronicles atmospheric change, as an analogue to Dante's revolutionary construction of time. The mineral form he calls a "diary of the weather," disclosing the "synchronism of events sundered by the ages," is another version of the layers of time turned up by the plow of poetry. Mandelstam represents Dante's "union of what cannot be united" in terms of quartz: "The interior of quartz, the Aladdin's space [prostranstvo] concealed in it, the luminescence, the incandescence, the chandelier's suspension of the fish rooms heaped in it — is the best of keys to the comprehension of the Comedy's coloration."...

The stone discovered is substantially like the subject who finds it. In his Russian Travels, Pallas refers to mineral formations resembling the one Mandelstam describes as the traveler's find in "Around the Naturalists" and consults in Conversation about Dante: he observes "globular pieces [of sandstone] of various sizes, which, on breaking them, were partly hollow, and contained sand not unlike regular geodites"; elsewhere he mentions "amygdalite" formations. The mineralogist A. E. Fersman, another source Mandelstam would have consulted, identifies similar formations in his comprehensive catalogue of stones found in Russia, calling them by various names: zheoda, mindal'nye porody, mindal'nyi kamen', mindalina, mandel'stein. Brokgauz-Efron has an entry for mindal'nyi kamen', alternatively mandel'shtein:

Porous varieties of ancient rocks in which the pores are filled with new mineral formations. These fillings of pores and empty places often have the form of almonds [mindalin] (and also of spheres, cylinders), whence their name. They appear especially often in the family of agate porphyries and melaphyres.

The geode, like the eye that discovers it, functions metonymically, its unprepossessing shell containing a crystalline treasure. It is one of Mandelstam's "oxymoronic images of inner wealth and outer poverty." As mindalina, which has the second meaning "almond," the geode is linked to a fruit of which the antithetical varieties (bitter and sweet, hard-shelled and soft-shelled) originate in a single species (cf. Mandelstam's treatment of the oxymoronic almond in the drafts to the fifth chapter of Journey to Armenia). Discovered by Mandelstam, who takes Pallas's cat's eye (the eye of Felis manul) as the prototypical organ of vision, mandel'shtein is the poet's name, his first word, and thus, as Mandelstam suggests in discussing the naturalist's eye, itself an organ of vision: the poet's way of cognizing and describing the universe.

For a poet named Mandelstam, 'almond tree,' who since the beginning of his career has used the stone as an important image for his poetry (his first collection was called Kamen', 'stone') and who has lately been immersed in natural history and the geological record as an encoding of time, to have discovered that one of the "varieties of ancient rocks in which the pores are filled with new mineral formations" (an analogue of what he thought literary creation should be like) was called mandel'shtein 'almond stone' must have been tremendous.

Incidentally, the word almond has a twisty etymology: the OED summarizes it as "Gr. ἀμυγδάλη, L. amygdala = ă'migdălă, ă'mingdălă; early Rom. ă'mendǝlă (thence Pg. ă'mendŏă); splitting up into 'mendǝlă (thence It. 'mandŏla), al-'mend(ǝ)lă (thence Sp. al'mendră), and al-ă'mendǝlă, al-ă'mandǝla, whence OFr. alĕ'mandlĕ, alĕ'mandrĕ; OFr. and E. alĕ'mandĕ, al'mandĕ; E. al'maund, 'almaund, 'almŏnd, 'āmǝnd."

And if you're wondering about the etymology of manul, the first edition of the OED simply had "Said by Pallas to be a Kirghiz word": fortunately, the entry was revised just last September, and the new etymology is more enlightening (and will please commenter read, involving as it does her native Mongolian):

[< scientific Latin Manul (1776, in P. S. Pallas, Reise durch Verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs III. Anhang. 692) < Mongolian manūl (Pallas notes: ‘Tataris et Mongolis Manul’; distinct from Mongolian manūl, formerly ‘watchman’, now ‘bird-scarer’) probably < a form in a Turkic language, e.g. Tuvan manɪ wild cat, Uigur manu (in a list of predatory animals).]

POINTED RHYMES.

We all know the mean-spirited children's rhyme about Adam and Eve and PinchMe; well, I just discovered (via one of the many detours in Omry Ronen's An Approach to Mandelstam, which I hope to finish today) that there's a Russian equivalent, or at least was back in the days when Trotsky was still a non-unperson in the Soviet Union and Chapaev was at the height of his fame (some time in the '20s?): Ленин, Троцкий и Чапай/ Ехали на лодке./ Ленин, Троцкий утонул,/ Кто остался в лодке? [Lenin, Trotsky, and Chapai/ went out in a boat./ Lenin and Trotsky drowned;/ who was left in the boat?] When the victim says "Chapai," he gets pinched, because чапай [chapái] (besides being a dialectal form meaning 'grab!') sounds very like щипай [shchipái] 'pinch!' (Grammatically, I think the verb in the third line should be the plural утонули, which is what Ronen has, but both versions I found in a Google search have the singular утонул.)

Another children's rhyme Ronen cites (in connection with this poem by Mandelstam, which refers to tram lines "А" and "Б," the Russian equivalents of A and B) is А и Б сидели на трубе, А упало, Б пропало, что осталось на трубе? [A and B sat on the chimney; A fell off, B disappeared, who was left on the chimney?], the answer to the riddle being и [i] 'and'—which seems innocuous enough, especially compared with Mandelstam's grim 1931 poem ("You and I will take the A and B/ to see who will die first"), but googling turned up a variant from 1955 (cited in this book): «А и Б сидели на трубе. А упало, Б пропало, И работал в КГБ» [A and B sat on the chimney; A fell off, B disappeared, I ('and') worked for the KGB].

SHANGHAI PRIDE.

Don't miss Victor Mair's latest post at the Log, which reproduces and translates a poster that "is circulating among students from Shanghai, both inside and outside of China"; it encourages the use of Shanghainese among those who speak it natively. An innocuous idea, you might think, but it goes against the policy of the Communist Party, which encourages everyone to use Standard Mandarin. Good for the students, say I, and down with imposed uniformity!

GIRAFFE.

In the comments to this post, I referred to "my favorite Nikolai Gumilev poem, one of those rare foreign works that modifies your sense of a word in your own language—I can never think of giraffes without smiling because of that poem," and the good AJP took me (gently) to task for linking to a poem unintelligible to the Slavonically challenged and asked me to provide a translation. So I've tossed one together; warning: it was a quick job and I am in the throes of a bad cold that fills my head more with mucus than inspiration, so please do Gumilev the courtesy of assuming that all infelicities, banalities, and other wrongnesses are exclusively the fault of the translator. (Those who can read the original will realize that I have bent the sense here and there; I can only respond that English has lamentably few rhymes for "giraffe.")

        Giraffe

Today I can see that your look is especially sad
And your arms are especially fragile, as if made of chaff.
Listen, my dear: far away, by the shores of Lake Chad,
Roams the exquisite giraffe.

It was granted the gift of proportion, voluptuous grace,
And its skin is adorned with a pattern remarkably fine:
Only the moon, smashed to pieces, descended from space
To rock in lake water, could dare try to match its design.

From afar it resembles a caravel's colorful sail,
And its gait is as smooth as the frigatebird's radiant flight.
I know the world sees many wonders in all their detail
When it takes to a grotto of marble for refuge at night.

I know all those stories of maidens who've never been kissed
And of passionate princes who rule a mysterious plain,
But you have inhaled for too long the lugubrious mist,
You no longer desire to believe anything but the rain.

And how can I tell you of faraway creatures that pad
Among tropical palms, among flowers too fragrant by half...
You're crying? But listen: far off, by the shores of Lake Chad,
Roams the exquisite giraffe.

    —Nikolai Gumilev (tr. Stephen Dodson)

WRONG MACAULAY.

David Liss, like many authors who feel themselves wronged by a review, has written a letter to complain about it; the whole thing is pretty convincing (I remember reading the review and thinking it was tendentious), but the last paragraph is especially devastating:

Though I do my best to keep my language true to the period, like any historical novelist, I will make some concessions to current style. Nowhere do I claim to be a historian, and all novelists, historical or otherwise, take liberties with their material to serve their own ends. Olson's ''gotcha'' criticism of what he claims are historical inaccuracies is petty in the extreme. This pettiness is evident when he writes that he knows that people in the 1790s ''didn't boast of reading Macaulay, as does the heroine, since that historian wasn't born until 1800.'' If the character in question were referring to T. B. Macaulay, as the reviewer presumes, then surely this would be an anachronism, but she is speaking of Catharine Macaulay. Born in 1731, she published her celebrated eight-volume history of England between 1763 and 1783. Anyone conversant with the history of ideas in the 18th-century Anglo-American world will be familiar with Catharine Macaulay, even if Olson is not.

ANTANACLASIS.

I've finished the longest section of Ronen's An Approach to Mandelstam (discussed here), about Mandelstam's "A Slate Ode," and am starting the section on "January 1, 1924"; the discussion of line 6, "Два сонных яблока больших" ['two large sleepy yablokos'] begins: "The prominent antanaclasis based on the multiple meaning of the word jabloko, which is repeated in the poem five times, involves gradual semantic shifting." (Russian яблоко can mean 'apple,' 'eyeball,' and 'regal orb.') I looked up antanaclasis in Webster's Third New International and came up empty, but the OED didn't disappoint: "A figure of speech, ‘when the same word is repeated in a different, if not in a contrary signification; as In thy youth learn some craft, that in thy old age thou mayest get thy living without craft.’ J[ohnson]." However, they classified it as "? Obs[olete]" and their latest citation was from 1711, so I thought I'd google it and find out if it was still in use (other than by the sesquipedalian Ronen). Apparently it is, because there were almost 20,000 hits, the first of which is this entry from The Forest of Rhetoric. The definition there is "The repetition of a word or phrase whose meaning changes in the second instance," and a splendid example is provided in which "antanaclasis occurs with an entire phrase whose meaning alters upon repetition": "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm." —Vince Lombardi

NYRB PODCASTS.

Another contribution from jamessal: the NYRB has a podcast page, featuring interviews with some of their authors. Now, I'm not a huge podcast fan—I prefer getting my information visually—but the first one on the page was with Orlando Figes, author of Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, and I was fascinated by his discussion of the process of gathering information for his latest book (NYRB review)—and appalled by the description of the government raid on Memorial, seizing the digital archive they had spent two decades collecting. But what really shocked me was the pronunciation of his name. I'm not even going to tell you how I've been pronouncing it all these years, because I don't want to put the mistake in your head as well, but it turns out it's [faɪdʒiz] (FYE-jeez).

NO GRAMMAR, NO FURNITURE!

Frequent commenter jamessal sent me this poem, which I liked so much I thought I'd pass it along; it's from Mark Ford's book Soft Sift (if you click "Features" you get the texts of a bunch of the poems):

Jack Rabbit

Will I ever catch up, or will I be easily
Caught first? It was assumed I’d branch out
With the heretics, commit a few crimes, then
Suffer the decreed punishment: instead, I paused
Near the knoll where the vociferous and well-
Groomed gather to consider their options. I yearned
To wade through buttercups and clover towards
The sinister squadron of an embattled
Bourgeoisie. Vivid mottoes – One Size Fits
Nearly All!, No Grammar, No Furniture!, Le Temps
Viendra! – still adorn the half-built walls. Prodigal
Sons and daughters stream forth in search
Of business, clutching their coats, bewildered by doubts
And strange aches; a thin layer of soot powders the buildings
They pass, and the cracked bark of the peeling plane-trees.

*

So I reckoned to get quicker, leaner, braver, more
Self-effacing; I’d pick my way between
The mounds of junk cast off by warring factions, cleverly
Disguised and idly humming. I swam mid-stream
With the freshwater boys, and lounged on rocks
At evening. Meanwhile the air slowly thickened
With intrigue. Blueprints and memoranda
Began to circulate like the seasons, melting
The obdurate, blossoming where least expected:
We were to police ourselves, produce
Solemn recommendations, fall on our own
Swords. Wishes were transfigured into parables
And omens. Neither threats nor Chinese burns
Demolished my cloudy strategies, though a tow-haired
Bullyboy still slouches at the edge of sight, killing time.

TYPO OF THE MONTH.

I was just reading Carol Palmer's translation (pdf, Google cache) of Vladimir Lakshin's courageous 1968 Novy Mir article "Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita" (which not only treated the novel, banned until only a year earlier, as a masterpiece, but mocked the "professors of literature" who resisted its reinstatement), and I hit the following description of the book's wild variety of characters:

People in contemporary jackets and ancient tunics, in caps and in golden helmets with plumes, people with briefcases under their arms and with lances atilt, people of various epochs and ages, professions and circumstances: a writer, a bookkeeper, a house manager, the Procurator of Judea, a high priest, a centurion, the Variety Theater's barman, a master of ceremonies, a railway conductor, a literary critic, Roman soldiers, robbers, martyrs, civil servants, actors, administrators, doctors, waiters, housewives, detectives, cab drivers, ticket takers, policemen, vendors of carbonated water, members of the management of a housing cooperative, editors, nurses, firemen—it is hardly possible to name them all. And yet the main characters have not been mentioned here, nor those whom one hesitates to call dramatis personae—the Devil and his retinue, witches, corpses, water nymphs, demons of all aspects and of every stripe, and finally an enormous talking car with a cavalry mustache.

If you haven't read the novel, I imagine you'd hardly raise your eyebrows at the final item in the list; if the devil and witches and water nymphs, why not a talking, mustachioed car? But if you have, you know "car" is a mistake for "cat." (Astonishingly, the mistake has not been fixed in the online version; has no one noticed it in the last 30-odd years? The original of the section following the final em dash is "дьявол и его свита, ведьмы, покойники, русалки, демоны и черти всех видов и мастей и, наконец, огромный говорящий кот с кавалерийскими усами.")

READING EARLY AMERICAN BOOKS.

The latest issue of Common-place is called "Who Reads an Early American Book?" and it's full of good stuff. Bryan Waterman discusses "a Revolutionary-era poet named Elizabeth Whitman, the prototype for the heroine of one of the new nation's bestselling novels, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797)"; Edward Cahill links Washington Irving's career to the Panic of 1819 and the travails of the early American bookselling business, uncannily reminiscent of more recent, and more widespread, troubles:

Although booksellers discovered various forms of cooperation to manage such risk in the short term, some of these had the long-term effect of merely disguising it. For example, they exchanged books with one another in order to diversify their offering and achieve better distribution. But because exchanges gave the false impression of actual sales, this practice quickly led to over-production and, despite rising sales, the inevitable devaluation of too many unsold books. Moreover, in order to raise capital and extend their credit over the long, unpredictable term of a book's market life, they often endorsed or guaranteed each other's promissory notes, in this way creating elaborate networks of mutual dependence. As a result, when one firm became insolvent, it often took several others down with it. But to make things even worse, many booksellers estimated their net worth based on unsold (and devalued) inventory rather than on a more realistic accounting of their assets. This meant that, at any given time, it was difficult for a bookseller to know either his own true financial position or that of the firms whose notes he'd endorsed. Thus, by 1819, with many thousands of worthless books circulating as inflated currency, the bankruptcy of a bookseller was a frequent occurrence.

Max Cavitch writes about publishers; Michael Drexler investigates a remarkable-sounding "recently rediscovered novel of Caribbean intrigue, Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)," which involves Toussaint L'Ouverture, Aaron Burr, the feud between Democratic-Republicans and Federalists, and "those repressed desires and practices that we pretend not to know about although they underlie or even undermine the values Americans consciously held dear"; Alison L. LaCroix speculates about "The Founders’ Fiction: Reading eighteenth-century novels in company with the American revolutionaries"; and Hilary E. Wyss describes Native American literacy in colonial New England, among other essays. Highly recommended. (Via wood s lot.)

IT'S STRUNK-BASHIN' TIME AGAIN.

Geoff Pullum, of Language Log (and Eskimo-snow-words) fame, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style with a Chronicle Review column even more vitriolic, if that's possible, than his earlier attacks on the excessively loved Strunk-'n'-White combo. Needless to say, I applaud; with regard to their notorious strictures against the passive (which, as Geoff points out, they seem unable to identify in the first place), I will quote my comment in the related MetaFilter thread:

I just came across this in an excellent piece on Chekhov by the long-forgotten (probably because he emigrated to Bulgaria instead of Paris or New York) Russian émigré critic Petr Bitsilli (whom Nabokov praised as the most intelligent critic of his writings in a 1943 letter):

A Chekhov character is ... an object of external influence rather than a subject, and his residual humanity consists in responding to the outside pressures with his mind and heart. This is attested to by Chekhov's language. Significantly enough, one often encounters in his works passive, third-person constructions such as "it appeared to him," "it occurred to him," and the like, instead of sentences in which a human being plays an active role, in which he or she thinks, recalls, desires, and so on.

Of course, the Strunkonians will say that great writers get to break the "rules." I will respond that Professor Pullum wrote The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, so if anyone is qualified to say what the rules are, it's him, and not a couple of amateurs like Whunk and Strite.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER.

My wife and I heard an NPR report featuring Lera Boroditsky and her work on the effects of grammatical gender on word associations; it sounded more solid than the usual pop-psych stuff that gets breathlessly touted by the media, and Language Log concurs (from that brief post you can get to their earlier, fuller discussion and a pdf file of her paper). I just ran across this interesting Tolstoy quote, from a draft of War and Peace (original Russian below the cut):

Moskvá [the feminine Russian word for 'Moscow'] is "she," and everyone appreciates that who appreciates her. Paris, Berlin, London, especially Petersburg [all masculine nouns] are "he." Even though la ville (French) and die Stadt (German) are feminine, and górod [Russian for 'city'] is masculine, Moscow is a woman, she is a mother, she is a sufferer [fem.] and a martyr [fem.]. She suffered and will suffer, she is ungraceful, not well built, not maidenly, she has given birth; she is a mother, and therefore she is gentle and majestic. Every Russian feels that she is a mother, every foreigner feels (and Napoleon felt this) that she is a woman and that she can be offended.

I'm glad this tosh didn't make it into the final text, but it shows you how powerful the effect of a feminine ending can be.

«Москва — она, это чувствует всякий человек, который чувствует ее. Париж, Берлин, Лондон, в особенности Петербург — он. Несмотря на то, что la ville (франц.), die Stadt (нем.) — женского рода, а город — мужеского рода, Москва — женщина, она — мать, она страдалица и мученица. Она страдала и будет страдать, она — неграциозна, нескладна, не девственна, она рожала, она — мать, и потому она кротка и величественна. Всякий русский человек чувствует, что она — мать, всякий иностранец (и Наполеон чувствовал это) чувствует, что она — женщина и что можно оскорбить ее.»

COMMA FAILURE.

Over at the Log, Geoff Pullum provides an excellent example, from The Economist (April 4, p. 11), of why the "comma-heavy" style (with the "Oxford comma" before and and commas after introductory phrases) is preferable:

Traders and fund managers got huge rewards for speculating with other people's money, but when they failed the parent company, the client and ultimately the taxpayer had to pay the bill.

To me, that unambiguously means that when they failed the parent company (i.e., let it down), the client and the taxpayer had to pay the bill. Unfortunately, that's not what the author meant to say. When the intended meaning is pointed out, I can force myself to read the sentence that way, but it's a strain. As Geoff says, the sentence should be rewritten as follows:

Traders and fund managers got huge rewards for speculating with other people's money, but when they failed, the parent company, the client, and ultimately the taxpayer had to pay the bill.

Nobody could possibly misunderstand that.

BUNGALOW.

In this Wordorigins thread, aldiboronti writes of the word bungalow: "I’d assumed that this was confined to the British side of the pond and the countries of the Commonwealth. I’ve just come across it however in one of those 50s American comics I’m still ploughing through. Is it common in the US?" (He adds: "knowing as I did that the term came from India it should have come as no surprise to find that the root word meant simply ‘belonging to Bengal’, but it did.") Faldage responded "I think it’s less common now than it used to be but it was common enough USn usage when I was but a tad (mid-20th). I associate it with a small single family house." As I wrote there, I too remember it from my youth (’50s-’60s) but haven’t heard it in a while, and I thought I'd ask the assembled multitudes about it. If you are American and under, shall we say, middle age, are you familiar with this word, and what does it mean to you? (Others are, of course, welcome to weigh in with bungalow-related thoughts.)

MEMORIZING POETRY II.

Back in the early days of LH, I had a post on the value of memorizing poetry; once again, a NY Times essay, this time by Jim Holt, spurs me to post on the same subject. Holt writes:

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics....

The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.

That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure. Between the covers of any decent anthology you have an entire sea to swim in...

I second all of that; as I said here, I couldn't really get a handle on Mandelstam's "The Horseshoe Finder" until I'd memorized it, and it really is a deep pleasure to be able to hold a poem in your head and repeat it whenever you want.

THE TEMPLE OF LINGUISTICS.

Some of you may have wondered what my wife and I are reading in the evenings now that we've finished Life: A User's Manual. We felt the need for something shorter and lighter, a sort of palate cleanser, so we decided to read Nabokov's Pnin, about the travails of a bumbling but good-hearted Russian émigré teaching his native language at "Waindell College" (a stand-in for Cornell, where Nabokov himself taught). I last read it around four decades ago, so it's practically new to me, and I get much more of a kick out of the Russian material than I could possibly have back then (I immediately recognized the pastiche of Akhmatova in the poem by Pnin's appalling ex-wife, for example). I was vastly amused by the unfair but hilarious portrayal of linguistics in the book's fifth paragraph, which I will pass on to you:

...nor did Pnin, as a teacher, ever presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach that method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects—Basic Basque and so forth—spoken only by certain elaborate machines.

TOLSTOY'S PROSE.

It's just as well I've finished Book III of War and Peace, because I need to put it aside for a few weeks to read Ronen (see this post); I'll take the occasion to pass along some things I've run across in my quest for an explanation of the strange variability of Tolstoy's prose style, sometimes brilliantly effective (see my discussion here), sometimes so clunky you wonder how the same guy could have written it. Well, it turns out there's a whole book on the subject, Creating and Recovering Experience: Repetition in Tolstoy by Natasha Sankovitch; her thesis "is that repetition is central to Tolstoy’s art," and he "uses this device—or rather, complex of devices—to represent and examine the processes by which people structure and give meaning to their experience." I may or may not get around to reading the whole book, but dipping into it via Google Books turns up some interesting stuff, like this great quote from the unjustly forgotten (at least in English-speaking circles) Yuri Olesha (from his notebooks of the 1950s; it's on pp. 492-93 of my 1965 Povesti i rasskazy, which I owe to the generosity of jamessal):

It's strange that, existing in plain view, so to speak, of everyone, Tolstoy's style with its piling up of coordinating subordinate clauses (several "thats" ensuing from a single "that"; several subsequent "whiches" from a single "which") is, in essence, the only style in Russian literature characterized by freedom and by a distinctive incorrectness, and up to the present time, despite the demand that young writers write in a so-called correct way, no one has yet given an explanation of just why Tolstoy wrote incorrectly. It would be necessary (and it's odd that up to the present time it hasn't been done) to write a dissertation about the distinctive "ungrammaticalness of Tolstoy." Someone observed that Tolstoy knew about his violation of syntactic rules (he spoke constantly of having a "bad style") but that he felt no need whatsoever to avoid these violations — he wrote, it's said in this observation, as if no one had ever written before him, as if he were writing for the first time. Thus, even Tolstoy's style is an expression of his rebellion against all norms and conventions.

And the formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, in his 1923 article "Problemy poetiki Pushkina" (translated in the collection Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism as "Pushkin's Path to Prose"), says this about the turn from poetry to prose in Russia in the 1830s:

In Lermontov's work both elements are somehow balanced, but there is a telling difference between his poetic style and the style of his mature prose. His prose, initially rich in metaphors, in rhythmic-syntactical parallelisms, and in long sentences ("Vadim") — a legacy of verse — later becomes simple and clear. A kinship with verse is still felt in the prose of Gogol and Turgenev, who actually began with poetry. On the other hand, the prose of Tolstoy, Leskov, and Dostoevsky developed without any relation to verse; in fact, their prose is essentially hostile to it. This is not a special case but a general pattern. In French literature a good case in point is the relation between the prose of Chateaubriand and Hugo on the one hand and that of Stendhal and Mérimée on the other. The difference between poetry and prose is not an external matter of layout; it is basic, organic, no less essential, perhaps, than that between abstract and representational painting. There is a permanent, never-ceasing tension between the two modes. Prose can don the plumage shed by poetry and become in this attire musical, stylistically intricate, and rich in alliteration and rhythmic cadence. (Such is the prose of Marlinskij and Andrej Belyj.) The boundary between prose and poetry is thus practically obliterated until, having won the battle, prose casts off those luxuriant robes and appears again in its natural guise.

It's natural that if one comes straight from, say, Nabokov, whose own "poetic prose" comes out of Bely's, Tolstoy's feels rough-hewn and awkward. But he gets exactly the effects he wants. (Incidentally, Lisa of Lizok's Bookshelf has finished her reading of W&P; her summing-up is here.)

While I'm at it, I have a question for those of you who know the novel in Russian: what the devil is meant by the crowd's exclamation in III:3:25, "он тебе всю дистанцию развяжет!" [literally 'he will unbind the whole distance for you']? This comes after Count Rostopchin says he'll hand over to them the villain who caused Moscow's ruin (the French are about to take the city), and they're saying approving things about Rostopchin, but this is utterly incomprehensible to me, and apparently to previous translators, because it's rendered in wildly varying ways: "He'll show you what law is!" (Maude), "He'll bring things to order!" (Dole), "He'll clear up the whole prospect for you!" (Dunnigan), and the admirably exact but lamentably meaningless "He'll undo the whole distance for you!" (Pevear/Volokhonsky). If anyone can clear this up, I'll be exceedingly grateful.

WORDS WEIGH MORE.

OTHERS NARRATE WITH LYRES OR HARPS

Others narrate with lyres or harps;
  I tell with my thought.
For he finds nothing, who through music
  Finds only what he feels.
Words weigh more which, carefully measured,
  Say that the world exists.

   - Ricardo Reis (the sad epicurean) aka Fernando Pessoa
   Selected Poems, translated by Richard Zenith (original Portuguese below)
(Via wood s lot)

Outros com liras ou com harpas narram,
  Eu com meu pensamento.
Que, por meio de música, acham nada
  Se acham só o que sentem.
Mais pesam as palavras que, medidas,
  Dizem que o mundo existe.

  Poemas de Ricardo Reis (Edição Crítica de Luiz Fagundes Duarte) Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 1994.

AN APPROACH TO MANDELSTAM.

I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a long time, and had my local library get a copy of Omry Ronen's An Approach to Mandelstam for me. (I stupidly ordered another book at the same time, which I'll probably have to return unread, because they're both due on the 22nd, and I'll be lucky to have finished the Ronen by then.) Ronen is one of the world's main Mandelstam scholars, and this book is cited in just about everything I've read on the poet; I am at a loss to understand why it was published so obscurely (the cover says BIBLIOTHECA SLAVICA HIEROSOLYMITANA, the copyright page credits the Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, and adds "Printed in Israel at the Graph Press, Jerusalem"; Google has only a couple of hundred hits, the third of which is an earlier LH mention). At any rate, it's the perfect time for me to read it, because it turns out it's basically a line-by-line analysis of two long Mandelstam poems, "A Slate Ode" and "January 1, 1924"—187 pages on the former and 105 pages on the latter—and I've just reached "A Slate Ode" in my long march through the Collected Poems and gotten thoroughly bogged down. I thought once I'd worked my way through M's longest poem, "The Horseshoe Finder" (or "He Who Found a Horseshoe" or "Whoever Finds a Horseshoe"), which involved memorizing it and reading a long article by Diana Myers (which I will be glad to send to any interested parties who can read Russian), I had gotten over the hump and it would be all downhill, but the "Slate Ode" threw me. I anticipate weeks of pleasurable immersion in the dense intertextual web that is the essence of Ronen's method (learned at the feet of his great teachers, Roman Jakobson and Kiril Taranovsky); I will be getting a handle on not only the poems but on all of Russian literature. Just in the Preface, Ronen traces one short early poem back to Pushkin, Batyushkov, and Yazykov, and places "Concert at the Railway Station" in the context of passages in Gogol and Blok. This is my favorite kind of criticism; I'd far rather read an analysis of textual echoes than an exploration of psychology or imagery. Poetry is made of words.

Incidentally, the acknowledgments at the end of the Preface gave me a start; Ronen writes that his work on the first draft of the book was carried on at Yale between 1971 and 1978, almost exactly the years when I was there studying linguistics, and he thanks "the participants of my Yale seminars on Mandel'štam and on acmeism for challenging discussions and stimulating papers." Had I gone into Russian rather than historical linguistics, I could have been at those seminars, and maybe I'd have written my own books on Mandelstam and acmeism by now. (And why the hell wasn't Ronen's book published by Yale?)

POIGNANT.

A correspondent wrote that he had come across the following in an aviation newsletter:

The tipping point seemed to be the geared turbofan, which may improve efficiency by as much as 15 percent, a major consideration for any airliner but especially poignant on the short- and medium-haul routes that its chief competitors, the Boeing 737 and Airbus A319 and A320, serve. [Emphasis added.]

He said he was about to send an e-mail to the editor telling him he had got the wrong word when he looked it up in Merriam-Webster Online and "was totally discombobulated by the M-W definitions":

1: pungently pervasive <a poignant perfume>
2 a (1): painfully affecting the feelings : piercing (2): deeply affecting : touching b: designed to make an impression : cutting <poignant satire>
3 a: pleasurably stimulating b: being to the point : apt

He wrote: "So def. 3, 'apt', would be right in the sentence, by M-W's standards. But I have never heard such as usage. Is it US-E?" I responded: "I too am puzzled; I have never (to my knowledge) seen or heard it so used, but if M-W includes it, it must be another example of the language passing me by." So I turn to you, Varied Reader: are you familiar with the use of poignant to mean 'to the point, apt'?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ABUNAS GONE?

My wife and I have just finished reading Life: A User's Manual, and we're still reeling and wondering what just happened. (Why were there all those detailed descriptions of paintings and tabletops?) Wonderful book, but we need to let it settle and maybe do some research.

Anyway, from a Languagehat point of view, the standout chapter was undoubtedly 60: Cinoc, 1. First there's a discussion of his name:

He provided the inhabitants of the building, and especially Madame Claveau, with an immediate, difficult problem: how was his name to be pronounced? ... As a result of which, a delegation went to ask the principal person concerned, who replied that he didn't know himself which was the most proper way of pronouncing his name. His family's original surname, the one which his great-grandfather, a saddler from Szczyrk, had purchased officially from the Registry Office of the County of Krakow, was Kleinhof: but from generation to generation, from passport renewal to passport renewal, either because the Austrian or German officials weren't bribed sufficiently, or because they were dealing with staff of Hungarian or Poldavian or Moravian or Polish origin who read "v" and wrote it as "ff" or who saw "c" and heard it as "tz," or because they came up against people who never needed to try very hard to become somewhat illiterate and hard of hearing when having to give identity papers to Jews, the name had retained nothing of its original pronunciation and spelling...

Then we move on to the really good stuff:

Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a "word-killer": he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nicknames, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.

Who would know ever again what a vigigraphe was, "a type of telegraph consisting of watchtowers communicating with each other"? ... Where had all the abunas gone, patriarchs of the Abyssinian Church, and the palatines, fur tippets worn by women in winter, so named after the Princess Palatine who introduced their use into France in the minority of Louis XIV, and the chandernagors, those gold- spangled NCOs who marched at the head of Second Empire processions?

Eventually "he decided to compile a great dictionary of forgotten words, ... simple words which still appealed to him. In ten years he gathered more than eight thousand of them..." And the chapter ends with thirty such words, e.g. BEAUCEANT "Name of the Knights Templars' standard" and VIGNON "Prickly gorse." Wonderful stuff! (Incidentally, "Poldavian" is an inside joke: Poldavia is the putative homeland of the imaginary Nicolas Bourbaki, the tutelary spirit of the Bourbaki group after which Perec's Oulipo was modeled.)

Addendum. I knew there must be a site that detailed all the constraints on each chapter and (most importantly from my point of view) identified the numerous quotations within the novel, and here it is. It's in French, but it shouldn't be too hard to use even if your French is fairly minimal. [Rats, a little further investigation has shown that in fact hardly any of the quotes are identified; I just happened to hit first on the Borges page, which did identify some. Ah well, I will continue to search; if anyone knows of a good resource, please share.]