The inimitable Poemas del río Wang continues to astonish: the latest post rescues from the dustbin of history a person—nay, a phenomenon—ubiquitous a century ago, the Hungaro-Moravian Queen of Hirsutism, Anna Csillag (pronounced CHILL-log; csillag is the Hungarian word for 'star' and is derived from csillog 'shine,' from Finno-Ugric *ćɜlk-). The redoubtable Ms. Csillag had ads in every periodical in Europe, in Russian, German, Hungarian, Polish, and who knows what else, all featuring a drawing of her holding a sprig of flowers and displaying a floor-length, luxuriant head of hair and beginning "I, Anna Csillag..." They talked of how she had once had such scanty hair that her entire town pitied her (she claimed to be from "Karlovice in Moravia"—there are several towns of that name in Moravia, as well as Velké Karlovice 'Great Karlovice'), but God had favored her with an infallible remedy that not only produced her staggering mane but allowed the men of her town to grow awe-inspiring beards and mustaches. These ads were as well known and commonly referenced in their day as Avis's "We Try Harder" was in the 1960s, and Studiolum of río Wang has gathered a florilegium of ad reproductions and literary quotes in various languages: Bruno Schulz, Józef Wittlin, Czesław Miłosz, Karl Kraus, Leonid Dobychin, and a bunch of Hungarians. (Incidentally, I just spent much of the morning creating the Dobychin Wikipedia entry, since I was distressed they didn't have one on this tragic, too little remembered figure.) The post ends with an actual photo of the lady in question a photo of an "anonymous double of Anna Csillag" [thanks, Studiolum!]; while her hair is impressive, it is not as long as in the drawings. You can't trust advertising.
It's time for another extract from The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century
From the beginning of the century onwards the suffix -ка has been extremely productive, forming nouns from both verbs and adjectives, e.g. маёвка 'pre-Revolutionary illegal May Day celebration', майка 'sleeveless shirt', буденовка 'Red Army helmet', семилетка 'seven-year school', пятилетка 'five-year plan', обезличка 'lack of personal responsibility', уравниловка 'wage-levelling', неувязка 'lack of coordination', скрепка 'paper clip', авоська 'mesh shopping bag' (from авось 'perhaps'), похоронка 'notification of death in the battlefield' (in the Second World War), and the more recent кофеварка 'coffee-maker', стыковка 'space docking'. Though it had been in use long before the twentieth century, the suffix -ка appears to have been at its most active in non-standard varieties, especially the speech of students (Seliščev 1928: 175) and in educated spoken language (Zemskaja 1992: 50, 154). Its extended representation in the standard language stems from the general readjustment of social and functional varieties resulting from changes in the structure of social control (Janko-Trinickaja 1964b: 27–9). Many -ка formations now recorded in dictionaries are still qualified as 'colloquial' or prostorečno....They go on to say that the borrowed suffix -изм became popular during the twentieth century; before that, it was only supposed to be used with Romance roots—"Russian roots and stems were supposed to attach the suffixes -ость and -ство (this meant, for example, that the normatively acceptable name of Bolshevism had to be большевичество, not the current большевизм)." Nowadays you can get words like жестокизм 'cruel attitude' and селявизм (from c'est la vie).During the first years of Soviet power there was a remarkable burst of activity by the previously unproductive suffix -ия to designate various social groups and areas—regional, political, or professional. In 1918 the area held by the Bolsheviks was called Совдепия by their opponents, but later this name was used by the Bolsheviks themselves (Pavlovskaja 1967: 16). At about the same time Скоропадия (from the name of Hetman Skoropadskij) and Красновия (after General Krasnov) came into existence (Seliščev 1928: 184). The Soviet state or system was called коммуния. To the Komsomol and Pioneers the names комсомолия and пионерия were given. Worker, peasant, and military correspondents (as groups) were referred to as рабкория, селькория, рабселькория, военкория. So quickly did most of these words fall out of use, however, that they were never recorded in dictionaries. The only exceptions are комсомолия, пионерия, инженерия 'engineers', which continue in rare use to the present day but with a very specific literary stylistic colouring. The suffix is now once again unproductive...
Incidentally, I've run across one forgotten form in -ка in Chukovsky's diary: чрезвычайка (chrezvychaika, 'the extraordinary thing') for what quickly became standardized as ЧК or Чека (Cheka = Чрезвычайная Комиссия 'Extraordinary Commission').
A remarkable report (by Mark Liberman at the Log) on the appearance in a New South Wales court of a soi-disant "plenipotentiary judge" on behalf of an applicant; after much dispute over his right to appear, he provides his "pertinent information," which follows:
The paperwork in this case goes back twelve years, as you well know, and I saw the file brought in, it's about four inches thick. The syntax, and I am the judge in 1988 who wrote the mathematical interface on all 5,000 languages proving that language is a linear equation in algebra certifying that all words have 900 definitions through this mathematical algebraic formula and over the course of the past 21 years have developed an accuracy level in the syntaxing of language sentence structure to prove the correct sentence structure communication syntax language is required in a court system.Now, the seal behind you which advertises the Crown's seal and jurisdiction of this court uses the correct syntax. That is why you have the dots. Now, the dots between the words are prepositional phrases. There's only two places where dots as allowed as a syntax prepositional phrase to certify the value of each word and that is on money, coinage and on seals. When you created, when your Government created the seal they used the correct sentence structure, they used the correct syntax and they are advertising that you have the correct syntax and knowledge of it.
I have looked at the paperwork for the past twelve years and both the doctor and the State in one hundred percent of every single sentence you have got in that folder is modified with adverbs and adjectives and there is not one legal sentence or a prepositional phrase to certify the value of any word so, therefore, the facts of the case have been have been muddled since this case started twelve years ago. The necessity of having the accuracy of a fact in a court, if you are not in a fact you have not committed perjury. And Bernie Madhoff, who you would know has just walked away from Wall Street with $69 billion, was prosecuted under the fictitious conveyance of language of title 18.1001.The seal with its prepositional dots is reproduced at Mark's Log post, as are the exciting preliminaries to the testimony. As for the babble of information: in Mark's words, you're on your own.Now, this law, title 18.1001, is required on all 250 countries' passports. In other words, fraudulent conveyance. The title 15 chapter 2(b) section 78FF carries a $25 million fine to modify language to extort money from a private citizen from a corporation. This gentleman represents corporation and every single document he has filed has been modified with adverbs and adjectives. So if you are going to modify a fact and change it to something that is not what the true definition of that word is you have got a babble of information in front of you. Now, I know that when we communicate, you and I – you've got a mess.
I've finished reading Bely's Peterburg (see here and here), and I'm even more willing than before to join Nabokov in calling it one of the great novels of its century. It moves slowly, concentrating on building up musical and incantatory effects by means of the repetitions he (unwisely) pruned heavily for the later revision, and as it reaches its end all the themes come together satisfyingly, with what might have been sentimentality in a lesser writer carefully cushioned by a wide variety of distancing mechanisms. I won't try to sum it all up, I'll just mention one example of the kind of build-up and payoff I'm talking about, and one radiant moment that must have impaled the book firmly in Nabokov's soul when he read it as an impressionable teenager.
In this post I quoted this sentence: "Apollon Apollonovich thought: just let these seemingly innocent dances go on here, and, well, of course these dances will continue in the street; and the dances will end, of course—there, there." That final "там, там" [tam, tam] had been prepared for by a cluster of a half-dozen previous instances of the percussive phrase within a few pages of the third chapter (and once again I must thank the internet for providing the entire text of the novel on one page, making it trivially easy to locate every occurrence of a word or phrase; I'm lazily quoting McDuff's translations rather than doing my own):
Но Софья Петровна не слушала больше: неожиданно для себя она повернулась и увидела, что там, там, на дворцовом выступе в светло-багровом ударе последних невских лучей, как-то странно повернутый к ней, выгибаясь и уйдя лицом в воротник, отчего скатывалась с него студенческая фуражка, стоял Николай Аполлонович: ей казалось, что он неприятнейшим образом улыбался...The "dances" quote I began with is immediately followed by two more in the same section:"But Sofya Petrovna [Likhutina, faithless wife of the long-suffering but stubbornly loving Lieutenant Likhutin] was not listening any more: unexpectedly to herself, she turned and saw that there, there, on the front square of the palace in the light purple thrust of the Neva's last rays, somehow strangely turned towards her, stooping, and hiding his face in his collar, which caused his student's peaked cap to slip down, stood Nikolai Apollonovich [Ableukhov, the protagonist, who had had a brief fling with Sofya Petrovna]; it seemed to her that he was smiling in a most unpleasant manner..."
Оба встали: оба стали расхаживать по комнатной анфиладе; встали в тень белые Архимеды: там, там; вот и там; анфилада комнат чернела...
"Both [Nikolai Apollonovich and his aged father] stood up: both began to walk about the enfilade of rooms; white Archimedes rose into the shadow: there, there; and also there; the enfilade of rooms lay black..."
В глазах ее еще багрянели закатные пятна; и -- там, там: как-то странно повернутый к ней на дворцовом выступе в светло-багровом ударе последних невских лучей, выгибаясь и уйдя лицом в воротник, стоял Николай Аполлонович с пренеприятной улыбкой.
"In her [Sofya Petrovna's] eyes the stains of the sunset still shone crimson; and there, there: somehow strangely turned towards her on the front square of the palace in the light crimson glow of the last rays of the Neva, stooping, hiding his face in his collar, stood Nikolai Apollonovich with a most unpleasant smile."
Софья Петровна Лихутина останавливалась в этом месте и прежде; останавливалась когда-то и с ним; и вздыхала о Лизе, рассуждала серьезно об ужасах "Пиковой Дамы", -- о божественных, очаровательных, дивных созвучиях одной оперы, и потом напевала вполголоса, дирижируя пальчиком:
— "Татам: там, там!.. Тататам: там, там!"
Вот опять она здесь стояла; губки раскрылись, и маленький пальчик поднялся:
—"Татам: там, там!.. Тататам: там, там!""Sofya Petrovna Likhutina had stopped at this spot before; had stopped with him [Nikolai Apollonovich] here, once upon a time; and sighed about Liza, arguing earnestly about the horrors of The Queen of Spades—about the divine, charming, wonderful harmonies of a certain opera, and had then sung in a low voice, conducting with her finger:
'Tatam: tam, tam! . . . Tatatam: tam, tam!'
Now again she stood here; her lips opened, and a small finger was raised:
'Tatam: tam, tam! . . . Tatatam: tam, tam!'"...и сама она туда убегала в глубину, зеленоватую муть; и там, там — из фонтана вещей и кисейно-кружевной пены выходила теперь красавица с пышно взбитыми волосами и мушкою на щеке: мадам Помпадур!
"[Sofya Petrovna looks in her mirror] and she herself disappeared down there, into the depth, the greenish dimness; and there, there—out of the fountain of objects and the muslin-lace foam there was now emerging a beautiful woman with luxuriantly fluffed hair and a beauty-spot on her cheek: Madame Pompadour!"
Это смятение танцевального зала передалось инстинктивно через две проходные комнаты и в гостиную: и там, там — где горел лазоревый шар электрической люстры, где в лазоревом трепетном свете грузно как-то стояли гостинные посетители, выясняясь туманно из виснущих хлопьев табачного синеватого дыма, — посетители эти с тревогой смотрели туда — в танцевальный зал.
"This commotion in the ballroom [caused by the tormented Nikolai Apollonovich, hiding his identity beneath a red domino] was instinctively transmitted through the two intermediate rooms and into the drawing room; and there, there, where the azure globe of the electric chandelier burned, where in the shimmering azure light the drawing-room visitors somehow heavily stood, showing mistily through the suspended flocks of bluish tobacco smoke—these visitors looked with alarm in there—to the ballroom."
Аполлон Аполлонович Аблеухов повернулся всем корпусом; и — там, там, он увидел конвульсии уродливых ног, принадлежащих компании государственных преступников: виноват: танцующей молодежи; среди этих дьявольских танцев внимание его поразило то же все домино, развернувшее в танце кровавый атлас.There are two more instances in the body of the novel:"Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov turned right round; and there [, there,] he saw the convulsions of the ugly legs that belonged to this company of state criminals: no, sorry, of dancing young people; among this devilish dancing his attention was still struck by the domino, who had unfolded his bloody satin in the dance."
Аполлон Аполлонович переменил положение тела, повернув спину зеркалу; и — там, там: в комнате, промежуточной меж гостиной и залой, Аполлон Аполлонович вновь увидел подлое домино (ублюдка), погруженное в чтение какой-то (вероятно, подлой) записки (вероятно, порнографического содержания). И Аполлон Аполлонович не имел достаточно мужества, чтоб уличить сына.
"Apollon Apollonovich altered the position of his body, turning his back to the mirror; and—there, there: in the room between the drawing-room and the ballroom, Apollon Apollonovich again saw the foul domino (the mongrel), absorbed in the reading of some (probably foul) note (probably of pornographic content). And Apollon Apollonovich did not have sufficient courage to catch his son in the act."
И простерлись проспекты — там, там: простерлись проспекты; пасмурный пешеход не торопил шагов: пасмурный пешеход озирался томительно: бесконечности зданий! Пасмурный пешеход был Николай Аполлонович.Note the repeated accompaniment of Nikolai Apollonovich, the Neva, enfilades of rooms, mirrors; there's a lot going on here. And in the Epilogue, the payoff. In this post I mentioned that the Russian phrase "carries the sound of тамтам 'tomtom,'" but I felt a little abashed about it—maybe that was an anachronistic reference? I felt pleasantly vindicated when I hit this:"And the prospects stretched—over there, over there: the prospects stretched; the gloomy pedestrian did not hurry his step: the gloomy pedestrian looked painfully around him: those infinities of buildings! The gloomy pedestrian was Nikolai Apollonovich."
Итак, в обещании, возникшем у моста — там, там: в сквозняке приневского ветра, когда за плечами увидел он котелок, трость, усы (петербургские обитатели отличаются — гм-гм — свойствами!..)
"And so, it was the promise that had emerged by the bridge—there, there: in a gust of Neva wind, when over his shoulder he had caught sight of a bowler hat, a cane, a moustache (the inhabitants of Petersburg are distinguished by—hm-hm—qualities! . . .)"
...под ним — деревенская площадь и звуки "там-там"'а: ударяются в уши глухим тяготящим оттенком.And the radiant moment? Near the end of the book, Nikolai Apollonovich is trying to locate the source of a ticking sound that bothers him:
[...]
Николай Аполлонович не слушает звуков "тамтам"'а..."...beneath him [Nikolai Apollonovich] are the village square and the sounds of a tom-tom: they strike the ears with a hollow, oppressive quality.
[...]
Nikolai Apollonovich does not hear the sounds of the tom-tom..."
Николай Аполлонович запыхался, метаясь с протянутой свечкой среди пляски теней; все ловил порхающий звук (так гоняются дети с сачками за желтеньким мотылечком).As any reader of Speak, Memory will recognize, Vladimir Vladimirovich was one of those children."Nikolai Apollonovich began to pant, rushing about with candle outstretched amidst the dance of the shadows; he kept trying to detect the fluttering sound (thus do children pursue a little yellow butterfly with nets)."
Frequent commenter Sashura sent me a link to this episode of the BBC's Open Book program, which features Mariella Frostrup talking to the Swedish thriller writer Henning Mankell, Alex Clark on "the most compelling private diaries of the last two 200 years" (finishing up with a discussion of the struggle over Kafka's papers now winding its way through the Israeli courts), and German scholar Michael Maar on Nabokov (whose name, irritatingly, the presenter insists on pronouncing with the stress on the first syllable). The Nabokov section starts at 19:20 (of the half-hour show) and covers, among other things, the author's homophobia (which he had the grace to feel guilty about after learning of his gay brother Sergei's death in a concentration camp) and his dislike of authors who had won the Nobel Prize, especially if they were German (Maar, who's done studies of Thomas Mann as well as Nabokov, has found hitherto unsuspected digs at Mann in N's work); Maar points out that N's claim of not having learned any German during his years in Berlin is clearly untrue. An interesting listen.
Ofer Aderet has an interview in Haaretz with pianist Alice Herz-Sommer, who recently turned 106:
Sommer was born into a secular and educated Jewish family. Besides her twin sister, Mariana, she had another sister and two brothers. She discovered a love for music at the age of 3, and it has remained with her to this day. Her family home in Prague was also a cultural salon where writers, scientists, musicians and actors congregated. One of these, author Franz Kafka, she remembers well: He was the best friend of the journalist, author and philosopher Felix Weltsch, who married her sister Irma.Her story is quite dramatic; you can read more about her in a Guardian interview from 2006. (Via MetaFilter; also on MetaFilter: semicolons.)"Kafka was a slightly strange man," Sommer recalls. "He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly," she says, and then grows silent. "And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him."
She says she knows about the ongoing trial in Israel, at the center of which is the question of who owns the rights to Kafka's estate. "Kafka would have been against this. Don't forget that he asked his friend Max Brod not to publish his writings. That much I know," says Sommer - she is the last person alive who knew Kafka personally.
This is something I've been wondering about for many years, and even in this age of instantly available information I can't get a real answer, so I thought I'd turn to the Varied Reader for informed suggestions (plus the usual japery). As every schoolboy knows, when Archimedes noticed that the water level in his bath rose when he stepped into it and realized the volume of irregular objects could be calculated with precision, he exclaimed "Eureka!" Well, actually he exclaimed "Εὕρηκα," Greek for "I have found [sc. it]!" But the Greek is, transliterated, heúrēka (the perfect of heurískō 'I find, discover'); where has the h- gone?
Russian has Эврика (évrika), but that makes sense because it took its Greek from the Byzantines, who used essentially Modern Greek pronunciation; by the same token, it has эвристический (evristícheskii) for 'heuristic.' English, absurdly, has the h- in the latter case but not in the former, and it doesn't have the Byzantine excuse: Ancient Greek words in English came via scholars with no interest in either Byzantium or the modern language. The most extended discussion of the word I've found is in The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories
Matt Treyvaud of No-sword regularly writes for Néojaponisme, where he has a new translation of Mori Ōgai's 1914 essay Honyaku ni tsuite 「翻譯に就いて」 ("On translation"), a lively response to his detractors ("The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind"). The first comment in the thread links to the first in a series of five YouTube videos by Paul "Otaking" Johnson, a considerably livelier full-scale assault on the practices of the "fansubbers" who create their own amateur subtitles for anime films. He says the first such amateurs tried to imitate the self-effacing nature of professional subtitlers, but the newer crop is more and more intent on showing off their detailed knowledge of the language and customs (and their ability to produce eye-popping visual effects), placing distracting footnotes at the top of the screen and inserting obtrusive translations into the film itself, to the detriment of enjoying the movie they're supposedly putting themselves at the service of. I, a certified old fossil, am entirely in agreement with him (and greatly enjoyed his reductio ad absurdum at the end of the fifth and final video), but many of the (presumably hip, young) commenters on Matt's thread think he's in the thrall of an elitist hegemony that contradicts the essentially postmodern and multitasking nature of today's reality. Or something. Anyway, a couple of tidbits; his response to the subtitle "What is this fast thing?" is "Seriously, if that's the best English you can come up with, you may as well go and drown in a pool of your own making." And: "Because so many fansubbers believe that the Japanese must not be changed, you often see lines like 'I... I... you!'" Enjoy. Or disdain, if you prefer. This is Liberty Hall, you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.
Addendum. Exactly the same debate is going on with respect to manga (comics). Thanks, David!
John McWhorter is a favorite here at LH and has come up repeatedly in my posts (most recently here); I was happy just now to run across an online course guide (pdf) of his lectures on "The Story of Human Language" for the Teaching Company (you can access the three parts separately here). The most interesting aspect to me was his take on the idea that we can use surviving languages, and the proto-languages we can reconstruct from them, to see back 100,000 or more years to find bits and pieces of the very first human language, conventionally called Proto-World. I personally consider this notion (associated with the names of Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen) ludicrous on the face of it, appealing to those who are so enthusiastic about piercing the veil of time that they are willing to overlook the glaring problems (the prevalence of coincidence and the inevitability of sound change rendering forms unrecognizable after thousands of years, for two), but then I'm one of those stodgy Indo-Europeanists the partisans of the theory love to mock. McWhorter has a more nuanced take on it; while rejecting the theory in its strong form, he emphasizes the likelihood that there are regional groupings that can't be strictly reconstructed but are nevertheless real:
IV. Final verdict.He gives some great examples; to illustrate the point about sound change, for instance, he says: "Proto-Algonquian words have been recovered through comparative reconstruction; the word for winter, for example, was peponwi. But the word in Cheyenne that has developed from this root is aa’—because of gradual changes over just 1,500 years." (He gives all the intermediate stages as well.) And he has very useful bibliographies after each section, with brief descriptions of each item, for instance:
A. Ruhlen’s point that comparative reconstruction is not the only way to show that languages have a common ancestor is valid in itself. He observes that linguists posited the Indo-European group long before Proto-Indo-European itself had been worked out by working backward from the languages. The similarities between language families are close enough that his point is likely valid for mega-groups, such as Amerind and Eurasiatic.
B. A question still remains, however, as to how realistic even this approach is for Proto-World. The issues could be resolved as more proto-languages are reconstructed, although work of this kind is done increasingly less by modern linguists, and for reasons we will see in later lectures, it may be entirely impossible to reconstruct protolanguages for many families.
Chafe, Wallace, and Jane Danielewicz. “Properties of Spoken and Written Language,” in Comprehending Oral and Written Language, ed. by Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels, pp. 83–112. New York: Academic Press, 1987. This article illuminates in clear language the differences—often shocking—between how we actually talk and how language is artificially spruced up in even casual writing, showing that spoken language, despite its raggedness, has structure of its own.His otherwise admirable populism leads him to give too much credence to people like Bill Bryson, but that's a minor problem. This is a good resource to have.
Such is a typographers' term for the symbol :— according to Nick Martens in his hilarious The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary:
Citing usage from 1949, the OED calls this mark the dog’s bollocks, which it defines as, “typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.” This is why I love scrounging around the linguistic scrap heap that is the OED. I always come across a little gold. And by “gold,” I mean, “vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons.” ...He closes with a wonderful definition for "To beat fat," which I will let you discover for yourselves. (Yes, it's a superficial and somewhat childish piece, but surely we all have our superficial and childish side, and I figure we deserve a respite after all those scholarly exegeses of foreign vocabulary.)Browsing the OED is a tantalizing experience because it provides windows into so many obscure corners of history. But since the citations are small and fragmentary, they invite the imagination to fill in the blank spaces. Take this 1688 quote for bake: “when Letters stick together in distributing… This is called the Letter is Baked.” So we learn that, when printing, the physical pieces of type occasionally stuck together, but we’re left to wonder why this happened, how severe it was, and how printers corrected it. Did baking ruin the type? Did each printer have his own method to prevent baking, a trade secret he passed down only to his apprentice? Did some Elizabethan Edison develop a method for casting type that eliminated baked letters altogether?
I know I blog about Russian stuff a lot, doubtless too much for some readers, and I apologize in advance for the nature of this post, since unless you actually know Russian it won't be of interest, but it's such a surprising and satisfying etymology to me I can't resist passing it on. I'm getting toward the end of the penultimate chapter of Bely's Peterburg (the novel known in English as Petersburg), and I just got around to checking out a word I'd noted earlier in the chapter—it looked like a misprint (my copy is riddled with them), but I wasn't sure. Well, it turns out it wasn't a misprint, just an unusual word. In the course of one of the lyrical passages sprinkled throughout the book, the свистопляска (svistoplyaska 'pandemonium,' literally 'whistle-dance') sweeping over Russia is said to "надмеваться оскаленной цифрою," 'nadmevat'sya like a numeral baring its teeth.' Now, nadmevat'sya looks like it should consist of the prefix nad- plus a verb mevat'sya, but there is no such verb (in fact, no word in Russian starts with the letters mev). I finally looked up nadmevat'sya in Dahl, where I found that the prefix was not nad- but na-, and the root verb was дмить (dmit') 'to blow,' first person дму (dmu); furthermore, it was from this verb that the common adjective надменный (nadmenny) 'haughty, arrogant' is derived! Again, I'd always assumed the adjective contained the nad- prefix, meaning 'over,' but no, the obsolete na-dmit', like the related and still common na-dut', means 'to blow up, puff up,' and nadmenny is etymologically 'puffed up,' which makes perfect sense. And the phrase from Bely that started me off means 'to be puffed up like a numeral baring its teeth,' or (in the here overinterpreted and misleading but generally serviceable translation of David McDuff) "to lord it like a grinning cipher."
Another in the "live and learn" series: I ran across the phase sola topee today and vaguely thought "Shouldn't that be solar topee?" After all, it's a pith helmet worn for protection from the sun. But when I looked it up, I discovered that it is in fact sola, a word for an Indian plant, Aeschynomene aspera, whose pith is used for such helmets and whose Hindi name is śolā.
Here's an enthusiastic description of the hat from Thomas W. Knox in "The English in India" (Harper's, 1879, p. 570):
The rarest of these things is the sola topee, or ventilating hat — an excellent device to protect the head from the effect of the tropical sun. It is worn almost exclusively by Europeans, is made of pith, covered with white cloth, and is so contrived that the air may freely circulate around the cranium of the wearer. Many of these hats have found their way to America, and it would be well if they should come into fashion for summer use. With the sola topee a sun-stroke is next to impossible — at least so say the sojourners in the East.
I'm always interested in finding words that can't be succinctly translated, and I ran across one such today. Georg von der Gabelentz, in his Die Sprachwissenschaft (1891), uses metaphors to express semantic change. First he says that when new words were created from old, "frischere neue Farben deckten die verblichenen alten" ('fresher new colors covered the faded old ones'). Then he writes: "Nun ist bei alledem zweierlei möglich: entweder das Alte wird durch das Neue bis zur Spurlosigkeit verdrängt, oder es führt daneben noch ein mehr oder minder verkümmertes Dasein, — rückt auf den Altentheil." The part before the dash is easy to translate: "Now there are two possibilities here: either the old is displaced by the new without a trace, or it continues to lead a more or less atrophied existence alongside it." But then he brings in a new image: "shoved off to the Altenteil" (to use the modern spelling). An Altenteil is (or was) a cottage or part of a farm reserved for the farmer when he hands over the estate to his son. Because that custom did not exist in England, there is no English word for it, but since sich aufs Altenteil setzen is used to mean “to retire from public life,” I guess "—rückt auf den Altentheil" could be rendered "—hustled off into retirement."
In the southern part of Moscow, in a district known as Tsaritsyno, "the tsarina's," after its centerpiece, Tsaritsino park (formerly owned by Catherine the Great), there is a former resort settlement in the form of two concentric circular streets with a dozen or so "spokes." On one of these, Pyataya Radialnaya ('Fifth Radial'), was a house with quite a past. Sergei Muromtsev, president of the first Duma in 1906, owned it in the early years of the last century, and Ivan Bunin met his future wife Vera, Muromtsev's niece, there. After the Revolution it became a school and then a house for teachers; in the '60s it became a research institute and in the '70s an unofficial cultural center. In this period one of my favorite modern Russian writers, Venedikt Erofeev, spent time there and wrote two of his lamentably few works, and eventually the house became a Yerofeev Memorial Museum.
After 1989 the house passed to a new and mysterious owner that was apparently determined to do away with it; after years of legal maneuvers, the building burned down at the start of this month, and demolition was only staved off by the determined action of ordinary people who flocked there to stand in the way of the bulldozers. I don't have the heart to detail this sad recent history; you can read all about it, and see stunning photographs, at the Río Wang post where I learned about it. I hope the house can survive and eventually be restored, but considering the state of things in Russia, I would be surprised if it turned out that way.
The Czech Literature Portal "is intended mainly for the promotion of Czech literature abroad." You can read more about it at a Prague Post story by Stephan Delbos:
Started by the Culture Ministry in 2005, the site was recently handed over to the Arts and Theatre Institute (Institut umění-Divadelní ústav) and two young institute experts, Viktor Debnár and Jaroslav Balvín, who were responsible for translating and launching an English-language version of the site in recent weeks...Thanks for the link, peacay!The portal reads as a virtual survey of Czech literature, with an illustrated database of literary links and bibliographies. Perhaps more importantly, however, the site offers English-language readers an introduction to many contemporary Czech writers, whose work might otherwise be lost in translation. A lack of this type of cultural and linguistic cross-pollination is one of the largest shortcomings of the relatively diverse literary scene in Prague, where translators of Czech literature into English are still relatively rare, Balvín said.
I knew the symbol properly used for a foot (measurement of length), as in 5′, was called a "prime," and I occasionally vaguely wondered why, but it's one of those things I never got around to investigating. Now I have, and here's what Wikipedia has to say:
The name "prime" is something of a misnomer. Through the early part of the 20th century, the notation x′ was read as "x prime" not because it was an x followed by a "prime symbol", but because it was the first in the series that continued with x″ ("x second") and x‴ ("x third"). It was only later, in the 1950s and 1960s, that the term "prime" began to be applied to the apostrophe-like symbol itself. Although it is now more common to pronounce x″ and x‴ as "x double prime" and "x triple prime", these are still sometimes pronounced in the old manner as "x second" and "x third".Mind you, this is followed by "[citation needed]," but it's plausible enough I'm willing to accept it provisionally. If anyone knows of a more dependable resource on the subject, by all means speak up. And remember, it's not 5'10" (with apostrophes or end quotes), it's 5′10″!
A section of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is called "Colon" (pages 91 to 103 of my Ballantine paperback); here is a small segment from near the end:
This is all one colon:I confess I've never really warmed to Agee's overheated style, which strives for Faulknerian High Modernism but too often achieves merely bombast, but he is certainly worth a close reading, and Ashley Makar ("a writer who wanders genres while deep in Yale Divinity School, where she studies religion, literature and whatever metaphorical theology she can get her hands on") gives him a colonocentric one in "This Is All One Colon," which begins: "It is that clarity of mystery, that precision of blank—gesturing to certain immensities—that astounds me about James Agee’s peculiar use of colons." She reawakens my interest in him, but I still can't get through more than a few pages of Famous Men at a go. (Thanks, Paul!)
Here at the center is a creature: it would be our business to show how through every instant of every day of every year of his existence alive he is from all sides streamed inward upon … by that enormous sleeting of all objects forms and ghosts how great how small no matter, which surround and whom his senses take: in as great and perfect and exact particularity as we can name them:
Christopher Culver has a post exploring the relationship between the words for 'kopek' and 'squirrel' in languages of the Volga region: "As Ähmät’jänov’s etymological dictionary explains, ‘борынгы заманнарда тиен тиресе вак акча функциясен үтәгән [in ancient times squirrel hides functioned as a low-value monetary unit]’." Culver adds, "Chuvash doesn’t connect its term for the kopek to ‘squirrel’. However, Cv. pus ‘kopek’ is, according to Fedotov’s etymological dictionary, derived from Persian پوست post ‘animal skin’, though used purely in the sense of currency." He concludes with what sound to me like convincing deductions about historical sequence, and a commenter points out that "Russian belka 'squirrel' also had a meaning 'kopek, monetary unit' in the northern dialects." I love the fact that someone is out there who can use Turkic sources to investigate these fairly obscure languages and is posting the results for all the rest of us.
While I'm at it, his previous post, "Turkic-Slavic bilingualism in Kyiv Rus," is also interesting, though I suspect that Olzhas Suleymenov's arguments will turn out to be based more on nationalistic fervor than convincing evidence. Of course, I may be influenced by my intense dislike for his idea (quoted here) that "some censorship... is not an entirely bad thing as it eliminates from public discussion some things that should not be discussed and forces writers to search for new ways of expressing themselves, a process that can be useful."
The farther I read in Chukovsky's diary, the more at a loss I am to understand on what basis they abridged the English version. They entirely omit the Nov. 20, 1919, entry, which describes the opening and setup of the House of Arts (Дом искусств), one of the most important Russian cultural institutions of the early 1920s, which fed and housed Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexander Grin, and Vladislav Khodasevich, among many others, during a period of war and deprivation that they might not otherwise have survived. I will translate the entry here; the Russian is below.
So yesterday we opened the House of Arts. A huge cold apartment, in which by some miracle they've heated two rooms — a table with a wonderful supply of writing equipment; everything goes like clockwork: a servant, in the bathroom/lavatory a decanter and glass, guests. Gorky wasn't there, he's sick. Everyone was so dumbfounded when they were given little caramels, glasses of hot tea, and buns that they immediately chose [Pyotr Vladimirovich] Sazonov as deputy chairman [or "vice president"]! Before, Sazonov — in his capacity as steward/manager [?: I'm not sure what ekonom means here –LH] — would never have been admitted to a board meeting! Now the steward is the leading figure in scientific and literary gatherings. People were looking at him prayerfully: maybe he'll give us a candle. And he didn't disappoint: knowing that there weren't enough glasses, he brought his own from the Fontanka [the canal where, presumably, he lived] to the Moika [the House of Arts was at the intersection of Nevsky Prospect with the Moika] — in a suitcase! I won't describe the meeting, since Blok described it for me in Chukokkala [Chukovsky's album of drawings and autographs; the name is a pun on the village of Kuokkala, now Repino]. I made a suggestion to him (about Annenkov). [Vasily Ivanovich] Nemirovich[-Danchenko, older brother of the famous director] presided but was quite helpless: he had to be prompted at every word. "Is it cold where you live?" I asked him. "Yes, three degrees, but I'm writing about Africa and Spain, so I warm up!" answered the gallant old fellow. We went to examine the Eliseev apartment (which we'd rented for the House of Arts). Stunning lack of taste. Mme Eliseeva's bathroom was covered with painted scenes: ocean waves, shipwrecks. A large quantity of gymnastic equipment reminiscent of torture devices. Blok walked in and asked in a puzzled way, "What's this for?" (...)Blok is very impressionable and imitative. Not long ago at a board meeting I gave a talk about how in the 1840s they wrote аплодисманы [aplodismany 'applause,' in a French form], мебели [mebeli 'furniture'] (in the plural), and so on. Today in his article on Andreev was the word mebeli (plural), and in his account of the meeting — aplodismany.
Fyodor Sologub, Merezhkovsky, and Petrov-Vodkin didn't show up at the opening. Merezhkovsky at this time was at my place, arguing with Shatunovsky. I very, very much want to help Annenkov; he's in appalling need. He's doing a portrait of Tikhonov for a pood [16.4 kg, 36 lb] of flour, but Tikhonov still hasn't given him that pood. At the end of the meeting he called me aside, took me into the other room and showed me an unfinished watercolor portrait of Shklovsky (bigger than life-size — the complicated expression of his eyes and lips is captured amazingly and could only belong to Shklovsky). I suddenly wanted terribly for him to finish my portrait. I started to rework my "Principles of Artistic Translation," but suddenly got bored and tossed it aside.
Итак, вчера мы открывали «Дом Искусства». Огромная холодная квартира, в к-рой каким-то чудом натопили две комнаты — стол с дивными письменными принадлежностями, всё — как по маслу: прислуга, в уборной графин и стакан, гости. Горького не было, он болен. Все были так изумлены, когда им подали карамельки, стаканы горячего чаю и булочки, что немедленно избрали Сазонова товарищем председателя! Прежде Сазонов — в качестве эконома — и доступа не имел бы в зал заседаний коллегии! Теперь эконом — первая фигура в ученых и литературных собраниях. На него смотрели молитвенно: авось даст свечку. Он тоже не ударил в грязь лицом: узнав, что не хватает стаканов, он собственноручно принес свои собственные с Фонтанки на Мойку — в чемодане. Заседания не описываю, ибо Блок описал его для меня в Чукоккале. Кое-что подсказывал ему я (об Анненкове). Немирович председательствовал — беспомощно: ему приходилось суфлировать каждое слово. — Холодно у вас? — спросил я его. — Да, три градуса, но я пишу об Африке, об Испании, — и согреваюсь! — отвечал бравый старикан. Мы ходили осматривать елисеевскую квартиру (нанятую нами для Дома Искусств). Безвкусица оглушительная. Уборная m-me Е[лисеев]ой вся расписана: морские волны, кораблекрушение. Множество каких-то гимнастических приборов, напоминающих орудия пытки. Блок ходил и с недоумением спрашивал: — А это для чего? (...)Блок очень впечатлителен и переимчив. Я недавно читал в коллегии докладец о том, что в 40-х гг. писали: аплодисманы, мебели (множественное] ч[исло]) и т. д. Теперь в его статейке об Андрееве встретилось слово мебели (мн. ч.) и в отчете о заседании — «аплодисманы».
Не явились на открытие Дома Искусств: Федор Сологуб, Мережковский, Петров-Водкин. Мережковский в это время был у меня и спорил с Шатуновским. Очень, очень хочется мне помочь Анненкову, он ужасно нуждается. Он пишет портрет Тихонова за пуд белой муки, но Тихонов еще не дал ему этого пуда. По окончании заседания он подозвал меня к себе, увел в другую комнату — и показал неоконченный акварельный портрет Шкловского (больше натуры — изумительно схвачено сложное выражение глаз и губ присущее одному только Шкловскому). Мне страшно вдруг захотелось, чтобы он докончил мой портрет. Я начал переделывать "Принципы худ. перевода", но вдруг заскучал и бросил.
The latest post at Slawkenbergius' Tales is a thoughtful take on John Cheever that sent me back to his 1962 story "A Vision of the World"; I'll let slawk handle Cheever's worldview while I focus on a linguistically interesting element of the story he doesn't mention. As the story draws to its end, the narrator has a dream in which a priest or bishop, walking on the beach, raises his hand and calls to the narrator at his window: "Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego." This mysterious sentence recurs twice more in the final page of the story, once in a dream and once in the reality of the story. My question is: how did he come up with it? It looks very much like Polish, so I mentally pronounce it as if it were Polish ("por-PO-zets TSYEH-byeh..."), but it's not even close to being actual Polish; did he ask a Polish speaker he knew to come up with a nonsense sentence he could use? Surely he didn't actually dream it...
Something I learned when googling is that Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán reused it in his 2003 novel Jardines de Kensington (Kensington Gardens): on page 110 of the translated version, there is the sentence "I saw all the bishops jumping with wind parachutes, floating in the airy landscape, bestowing blessings in a new or a very ancient language — Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego, their speaking staffs repeated over and over again, vibrating like tuning forks — as the control towers were toppled by lightning, like the tower in my favorite deck of tarot cards." I know nothing else about the novel, but I like that bit.
I know this is petty and I should rise above it, but I can't help sharing a couple more examples of malfeasance from the Gorky translation discussed here. In Chapter 7, discussing his childhood pleasure in correcting his grandfather's errors while praying, Gorky quotes himself as saying "А ты сегодня 'довлеет' пропустил! [...] Надо: 'Но та вера моя да довлеет вместо всех', а ты и не сказал 'довлеет'." This means, "Today you left out dovleet ('suffices')! ... You should have said 'But may my faith suffice instead of all [works],' but you didn't say 'suffice.'" But our friend Isidor Schneider has: "where you should have said, 'My faith reigns supreme,' you left out 'reigns.'" In other words, he's reading dovleet with the usual twentieth-century meaning 'dominates, prevails' rather than the earlier meaning, insisted on by Russian prescriptivists to this day and clearly necessary in this context, 'suffices.'
OK, that one's just sloppy and mildly amusing. But on the next page, he renders кулугурские шутки 'schismatic jokes' as "It's a gag that's going the rounds in Kaluga." Fine, Schneider didn't know the word кулугур [kulugur], a pejorative term for Old Believers (Brockhaus and Efron derive it from калогер [kaloger], from Greek καλόγερος, 'monk'), but rather than make a desperate stab connecting it with Kaluga, a minor grain-trading town hundreds of miles from Nizhni Novgorod, he might have noted that Gorky defines it in the next clause, раскольниками придумано, еретиками 'thought up by schismatics, heretics.'
We won't even get into the passage in which young Gorky responds to a question about the "чинов ангельских" [chinov angelskikh, 'orders of angels'] with А кто такие чиновники? [A kto takie chinovniki, 'but who are those officials?']; Schneider's decision to deal with it by changing the untranslatable pun into "Are they incorporated?" and then putting in the grandfather's mouth an explanation about how corporations are "established to get around the laws" is just plain obnoxious.
This isn't a movie review site, but since I posted about the new must-see movie, I thought I'd briefly record my reaction to seeing it last night (in 3D). My reaction was pretty much identical to Anatoly's:
1. It's well worth seeing (and you should definitely see it in 3D).
2. It's amazingly beautiful.
3. The plot, characters, and dialogue are not just stupid but maximally stupid: no cliché has been omitted, and no non-cliché thought has been added.
He has other remarks about what a pity this is, but those three points are the main ones. He also links to an excellent Greg Egan review and a hilarious Filthy Critic rant. And since he doesn't mention this aspect, which is the only one of strictly LH relevance: the alien language is convincing and well done. If only it were in the service of a better movie!
One of the things I love about investigating obscure references in my reading is that it sometimes leads me into nearly forgotten byways of history that I can then bring to light. In reading Chukovsky I got to the Nov. 17, 1919 entry, which includes the mysterious sentence "Merezhkovsky and I went to the Kolos, where Blok was giving his talk on musicality and civilization." That makes it sounds like they were visiting a couple named Kolo, but the Russian reads "мы ходили в «Колос»," which makes it clear that Kolos is the name of some institution or organization (and renders the translation incomprehensible; it should be "Merezhkovsky and I went to Kolos," without an article). Since колос (kolos) is a common Russian word (meaning 'ear [of a cereal plant]'), it took me some creative googling to discover that here it referred to a publishing house that was in existence between 1918 and the mid-1920s. I wanted to know where it was located (which I never did find out), so I kept searching, and learned that it was run by one P. Vityazev (П. Витязев), the pseudonym of Ferapont Ivanovich Sedenko (Ферапонт Иванович Седенко), and it was his story that inspired me to write this post.
Sedenko, described in a Minuvshee footnote as "historian, bibliographer, publisher, and publitsist [political journalist]," was born on May 27 (June 8, New Style), 1886, in the Bessarabian town of Akkerman (now Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi in Ukraine), the son of a sailor (a вольний штурман or 'free navigator,' according to his documents). He spent his first twenty years in Akkerman, in 1905 organizing a student strike; he then went to Novorossiya University in Odessa, but (according to this site) "neglected his studies in order to take part in political struggle as a member of the SR organization and its combat detachments, being active in Akkerman and Odessa during the revolts of 1905-07." In January 1907 he was arrested; in a 1915 letter he described the succeeding period as "two years in Vologda gubernia, three years in Siberia, two years in prison, and a final two years of wandering and university." In 1910 Sedenko entered the law school of Saint Petersburg University, where he was a classmate and friend of Pitirim Sorokin, but his participation in the student unrest of 1910-11 earned him another arrest and exile to the south, where he carried on underground revolutionary work; he was arrested again and exiled to Vologda, where according to Ivanov-Razumnik (on page 298 of his memoirs) "he met and became great friends with MI Ulyanova, Lenin's sister, who was then herself living there. This high-level friendship had, until 1930, saved him from the kind of persecutions to which other prominent SRs had been subjected." He decided to use his time in exile "exclusively for literary work," as he wrote a friend. He published articles on Korolenko, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Chekhov, among others, but it was Pyotr Lavrov to whom he mainly dedicated himself; an article in Sbornik says "Known in literary circles under the pen name of Piotr Vitiazev, he distinguished himself with his study of Lavrov, a Russian revolutionary, anthropologist and philosopher, whose works and letters he published after the revolution."
At the end of 1915 he joined the army, temporarily abandoning his literary activity. After the Revolution, he organized first the cooperative publishing enterprise Revolyutsionnaya mysl (Revolutionary Thought, 1917-18), and then Kolos (1918 to 1925 or 1926, depending on the source; you can see their printer's mark here), which published memoirs, literature, materials on the history of social thought, and books on various fields of knowledge; he also wrote and published books on bibliography and the book business as well as his works on Lavrov. He helped Sorokin get his System of Sociology published in 1920 (page 94 of Sorokin's autobiography); after Sedenko and colleagues secretly printed the two volumes (forging the Communist censorship permission) and ten thousand copies were distributed, the government found out and ordered all copies confiscated and destroyed (though they could find few copies to seize): "Of course the Communist police tried to arrest me and Sedenko, but, expecting the arrest, we 'ducked underground' and remained there until we could safely re-emerge."
At this time there was much discussion of the extent to which the state should control publishing; on Dec. 22, 1920, Gorky published an open letter to the Eighth Congress of Soviets in which he insisted that private publishers should be allowed to exist alongside Gosizdat, the state publishing agency, and Sedenko tried to publish a similar argument but was not given permission to. There remained to him what he called "the old method, already used more than once, of resorting to the assistance of an unofficial printing press,"and his pamphlet Частные издательства в Советской России ("Private publishers in Soviet Russia"), by P. Vityazev, appeared in 1921. In it he recounts the struggle of private presses to survive and argues against Gosizdat's attacks on them. He insists that private presses are essential for the normal development of literature and culture. He writes: "It is extremely harmful to force the scientific and artistic thought of the country to pass through the narrow crucible of a single government organ... The centralization of all scientific literature in the hands of Gosizdat will inevitably lead to every sort of slaying of critical thought [неизбежно поведет ко всякому убиению критической мысли]"; history shows that government regulation is "real death for the development of creativity in all literature and art [подлинная смерть для развития творчества во всей литературе, во всем искусстве]." This argument is much more pleasing to us today than it was to the Soviet rulers, and it did not win out. [There is a long discussion of the pamphlet, with many quotes, at Leo Pasvolsky's "The Soviet Censor at Work in Russia," in the April 1922 issue of McClure's—thanks, MMcM!]
In April 1930 he was arrested and sent to a Gulag camp building the White Sea Canal, but was released after the intervention of Lenin's sister and Vera Figner, who had known him in the old days, and in 1933 he even received permission to live in Moscow. But Stalin was determined to wipe out the SRs, and he was rearrested on April 3, 1938, "tried" on June 14, and shot the same day.
Incidentally, Chukovsky's entry begins with this, which is left untranslated in the Yale edition: "Был у меня Гумилев: принес от Анны Николаевны (своей жены) 1/2 фунта крупы - в подарок - из Бежецка. Говорит, что дров никаких: топили шкафом, но шкаф дал мало жару. Я дал ему взаймы 36 полен. Он увез их на Бобиных санях." [Gumilyov came to see me; he brought 1/2 pound of groats from Bezhetsk as a gift from Anna Nikolaevna (his wife). He says they have no firewood; they burned a wardrobe, but it didn't give much heat. I loaned him 36 logs; he took them home on Boba's sled.] This is the latest in a disturbing pattern of omitting parts of entries that reflect on the hardships of the times; for instance, the Nov. 13 entry omits a passage on the lack of food ("Yesterday I went to bed hungry. All day I had only rusks and soup!"). I myself would have included more of those telling details, if need be cutting a little of the literary gossip to make room for them.
Anatoly has a thought-provoking post today that I thought I'd translate and bring to the attention of those who don't read Russian:
It sometimes happens that a field of study arises and organizes itself around some big problem, standing before it unignorable and demanding to be solved. It seems to me that such a thing happened, say, in linguistics. After European scholars realized the similarity of Sanskrit to Ancient Greek and Latin, it was soon understood that there was a Problem involved with explaining such coincidences, and in general with the systematic working out of the theory of the relationship and development of languages. Almost all the development of linguistics in the 19th century can be understood as an attempt to refine and solve this problem.Anyone have any ideas, or know of any studies on the topic?There is just such a Problem standing before scholars of literature, a large and natural one: to explain the transition of almost all world poetry to free verse during the 20th century. The rare exceptions—Russian poetry being one of them—do not abolish the rule. These developments took place at different times in different languages and cultures, but gradually all of them converged and arrived during the second half of the century at the same destination: what Gasparov called "international free verse."
What was in the air in the 20th century to make free verse so attractive to authors and readers that was not in the air in, for example, the 19th? I have found nothing but generalities on this subject. And yet this Problem has the advantage that everything took place recently, and the articles, letters, manifests, and memoirs are still preserved, as are some of the participants. It may be that a convincing and interesting answer to this question requires the creation of new words and new sorts of explanation. It's certainly better than dancing a ring-dance around the corpse of poststructuralism, or whatever it's currently popular to occupy oneself with.
Incidentally, Anatoly's current blog title, снег мрамор дерево спасибо, is the last line of a wonderful Lev Losev poem about Brodsky that I'd love to translate someday; I'll post it here for those of you who read Russian (мильтон is a slang term for 'policeman, cop,' something of which I had been unaware myself—anyone know the etymology?):
ИОСИФ БРОДСКИЙ, ИЛИ ОДА НА 1957 ГОДХотелось бы поесть борща
и что-то сделать сообща:
пойти на улицу с плакатом,
напиться, подписать протест,
уехать прочь из этих мест
и дверью хлопнуть. Да куда там.Не то что держат взаперти,
а просто некуда идти:
в кино ремонт, а в бане были.
На перекресток — обонять
бензин, болтаться, обгонять
толпу, себя, автомобили.Фонарь трясется на столбе,
двоит, троит друзей в толпе:
тот — лирик в форме заявлений,
тот — мастер петь обиняком,
а тот — гуляет бедняком,
подъяв кулак, что твой Евгений.Родимых улиц шумный крест
венчают храмы этих мест.
Два — в память воинских событий.
Что моряков, что пушкарей,
чугунных пушек, якорей,
мечей, цепей, кровопролитий!А третий, главный, храм, увы,
златой лишился головы,
зато одет в гранитный китель.
Там в окнах никогда не спят,
и тех, кто нынче там распят,
не посещает небожитель.«Голым-гола ночная мгла».
Толпа к собору притекла,
и ночь, с востока начиная,
задёргала колокола,
и от своих свечей зажгла
сердца мистерия ночная.Дохлёбан борщ, а каша не
доедена, но уж кашне
мать поправляет на подростке.
Свистит мильтон. Звонит звонарь.
Но главное — шумит словарь,
словарь шумит на перекрестке.душа крест человек чело
век вещь пространство ничего
сад воздух время море рыба
чернила пыль пол потолок
бумага мышь мысль мотылек
снег мрамор дерево спасибо
Chukovsky talks about Maxim Gorky so much I thought it would be a good time to finally read Gorky's famous autobiography. I happen to have the old Isidor Schneider translation (Citadel Press, 1949) that I picked up somewhere for a dollar, so I've been comparing it with the Russian, and hoo boy, I can't believe some of his goofs. One glaring example of his inadequacy is near the start of Chapter 2, after young Alexei (Gorky's real name was Alexei Peshkov) has been taken to live with his grandparents in Nizhni Novgorod and is witnessing one of the frequent, violent family quarrels. His grandfather views the resulting debris and says to his wife, Gorky's grandmother, "Ты, мать, гляди за ними, а то они Варвару-то изведут, чего доброго...": "Mother, keep an eye on them [Alexei's violent uncles], or else I'm afraid they might hurt/torment/victimize/destroy Barbara [Alexei's newly widowed mother, whom the uncles want cut out of the inheritance]." Now, the phrase that I've translated "I'm afraid they might" (other possible translations are "who knows if" and "for all we know"), чего доброго, literally means 'of which good.' No, I don't know how you get the actual meaning from the literal one; it's an idiom. At any rate, here's what the valiant Mr. Schneider made of the sentence: "Think of them and Barbara's little one that they're so angry about . . . so, who has the better heart?" That left me speechless, and I can't for the life of me figure out how he came up with it.
Another bad patch is in Chapter 4; the author is remembering the tales his grandmother used to tell him, among which were сказки о премудрой Василисе, о Попе-козле и божьем крестнике: "stories about Vasilisa the Wise, about Priest Kozel [or the Goat Priest] and the godson." Except that Schneider turns it into "stories about [...] the sage Basil, the priest Kozha, beloved of god."
According to this brief biography, Schneider was born in Ukraine in 1896, but came to the U.S. in 1902, at the age of five or six, so presumably he had only a patchy acquaintance with Russian. How he convinced a publisher to let him translate a major work of Gorky's is beyond me, but you have to admire his chutzpah in the Translator's Preface, where he makes snide remarks about earlier translations, after Gorky "became immediately a figure of world interest": "Publication of his work was hurried through the presses. The rush, unfortunately, showed itself in most of the translations. This was so with what is generally considered the greatest of his works, the autobiographical trilogy.[...] As it reached its English reading public, it had only a dim resemblance to the original."
Update. But wait, there's more! On the very next page, Gorky describes a fire and says "очень высоко над ними колебалось темноватое облако, не мешая видеть серебряный поток Млечного Пути": "very high above them wavered a dark cloud, not hindering [them] from seeing the silver stream of the Milky Way." Schneider ends the sentence: "...but not low enough to blot out the silvery furrow of the Mlechna road."
There's a long and fascinating entry (April 18, 1919) featuring Gorky talking about Tolstoy; with any luck you'll be able to read it, or at least part of it, at Google Books. I'm just going to quote the striking final paragraph about Gorky's [thanks, read!] memory for names (translation by Michael Henry Heim, except for the bit he omitted, which I've translated and added in brackets; the Russian, as usual, is below the cut):
As we talked, I noticed a special trait of his: he kept hundreds of names—first names, patronymics, and surnames, names of cities, titles of books—in his head. The stories he told had to go like this: "[This was when the governor was Leonid Evgenevich von Kruse, and Amvrosy was metropolitan then;] at the factory belonging to the Kudashin brothers, Stepan Stepanovich and Mitrofan Stepanovich, there was a bookkeeper by the name of Alexander Ivanovich Korenev. It was at his house that I saw Mikhailovsky's book On Shchedrin, published in 1889." I suspect that all his vast and amazing erudition can be summed up in this ability of his to name. He believes in appellations, in proper names, in titles, in lists and catalogues.
Во время беседы с Горьким я заметил его особенность: он отлично помнит сотни имен, отчеств, фамилий, названий городов, заглавий книг. Ему необходимо рассказывать так: это было при губернаторе Леониде Евгеньевиче фон Крузе, а митрополитом был тогда Амвросий, в это время на фабрике у братьев Кудашиных — Степана Степановича и Митрофана Степановича был бухгалтер Коренев, Александр Иванович. У него-то я и увидел книгу Михайловского "О Щедрине" издания 1889 года. Думаю, что вся его огромная и поражающая эрудиция сводится именно к этому — к номенклатуре. Он верит в названия, в собственные имена, в заглавия, в реестр и каталог.
A nice little paragraph from the Nov. 12, 1918 entry featuring an argument with Nikolai Gumilyov (who would be shot by the Bolsheviks less than three years later) about translation; Gumilyov was a fine poet, but I'm on Chukovsky's side here:
I had a run-in with Gumilyov at the meeting [with Gorky]. A gifted craftsman, he came up with the idea of creating a "Rules for Translators." To my mind, no rules exist. How can you have rules in literature when one translator ad-libs and the result is top-notch and another conveys the rhythm and everything and it doesn't go anywhere? Where are the rules? Well, he lost his temper and started shouting. Still, he's amusing and I like him.(Russian original below the cut.)
На заседании была у меня жаркая схватка с Гумилевым. Этот даровитый ремесленник — вздумал составлять Правила для переводчиков. По-моему, таких правил нет. Какие в литературе правила — один переводчик сочиняет, и выходит отлично, а другой и ритм дает и все, — а нет, не шевелит. Какие же правила? А он — рассердился и стал кричать. Впрочем, он занятный, и я его люблю.
I wrote about the death of poet and publisher Jonathan Williams here; now Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens have put together a wonderful tribute at Jacket Magazine, with contributions from the quick and the dead. Among the latter, the equally irreplaceable Basil Bunting ("There is always some disc humming at Corn Close, with the typewriter tapping out a descant, unless Jonathan is tramping the fells, treading out tracks on the Howgills, where you must watch your step in a fog because of the crags. Half the farmers know him and all the barmaids"); among the former, poet Ann McGarrell, with "Àmon cher Stodge" ("Bloodroot and grosbeaks/ starry blooms,/ shy lipstick lumage/ so tame one comes to your hand..."). I recommend it to you with the greatest enthusiasm, and suggest you begin with the introductory essay by Beam and Owens. Well done, lads.
Orin Hargraves has a good post in the Language Lounge section of Visual Thesaurus on the decay of that good old modal shall, using Fowler's entry on it as a jumping-off point ("There is never a reason not to consult Fowler about usage: whether you find what you were looking for or not, you'll walk away from his text amused and edified in a way that you weren't when you went to it"). Hargraves points out that "Though very few speakers today use it in a prescribed way, shall leaves an indelible impression on the minds of developing native speakers of English in many forms, starting early in life," citing nursery rhymes, prayers and hymns, and historical documents like the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. Here is the end of his post:
The upshot today is that shall — besides its fixed modal use in soliciting input for actions — has a special status and is used, not altogether consistently, to impart an air of authority, formality, of loftiness that will would lack in the same context. This usage isn't lost on Hollywood, which sprinkles dialog with shalls for effect — an effect that Fowler calls "decorative and prophetic" in his original article. Thus,If you have trouble parsing that final quote from Fowler, good for you; it's been wrongly truncated and is unintelligible as it stands. For an explanation of what went wrong, see my comment on Hargraves's post.Greta Garbo in "Grand Hotel":You can find scores of other examples with the search "you shall" on script-o-rama.com, where it is obvious that Hollywood is the true master of the "decorative and prophetic" shall. Alternatively, there's a pretty good case to be made that what Fowler said in 1926 still holds true today: "there are people to whom the English distinctions mean nothing than the discovery that shall & will, should & would, are sometimes regarded as good raw material for elegant variation."
I shall dance and you'll be with me and then — listen — After that you will come with me to Lake Como, I have a villa there. The sun will be shining. I will take a vacation — six weeks — eight weeks. We'll be happy and lazy. And then you will go with me to South America — oh!Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce":
I shall prevent this marriage in any way that I can.
Of course I wanted to find the original Russian of the diary online, and I was pleased to turn up this site: it's full of scanning errors and only goes up to the end of 1929, but it will be a welcome companion up to that point. It also allows me to see how much has been cut from the English version, which can be distressing; I have no idea on what basis they made the abridgment, but some of the stuff they left out is at least as interesting as some of what they kept. Here are two brief entries that do not appear in the English version; translations are mine, obviously, and the Russian is below the cut. (I note also, for the benefit of readers of the English version, that a note has inexplicably been omitted at the end of the Feb. 10, 1914, entry: the book of which he says "They have confiscated my book, arrested it" is his Poeziya gryadushchei demokratii, a collection of translations from Whitman; it was in fact published later that year, by Sytin.) First, an entry from 1912 that involves acquisition of correct gender forms; I guess I can understand why it was left out, since it deals with Russian grammar, but it sure is interesting. Does anyone know if it's typical for little girls to use masculine forms for themselves for several years?
June 14. Today Lidochka [his daughter Lydia, then five] said "я сама" [ya samá, 'I myself (fem.)] for the first time. Until now she's talked about herself in the masculine: я пошел, я сказал, я сам [ya poshól 'I went,' ya skazál 'I said,' ya sam 'I myself,' (all masc.)]. But today I'm sitting and writing about [Lydia] Charskaya [writer of popular fiction], and L. is picking bluebells under the window, and suddenly I hear her say to her girlfriend: я сам, я сама сосчитаю [ya sam, ya samá soschitayu, ''I myself (masc.), I myself (fem.) will count (them)].The omission of the next one I find strange, since it's a valuable witness to the character of Viktor Shklovsky, a major figure in Russian literature, from the summer of 1917 (the ellipsis at the start is in the Russian edition, which itself is heavily abridged):
[...]
24 [June](...) We went to the Intimate Theater [on the Kryukov Canal embankment] and there we saw Viktor Shklovsky, who was a commissar in the 8th army. He tells us of horrors. He behaved heroically and received a new George cross. It's remarkable that his cousin Zhorzhik was wounded on the Western front on the very same day. When Shkl. talks about something terrible, he smiles and even laughs. This is a particularly attractive trait. "It's lucky for me that I was wounded, otherwise I would have shot myself!" He was wounded in the belly—the bullet went right through him—but he acts like it was nothing.
14 июня [1912]. Сегодня Лидочка первый раз сказала: я сама. До сих пор она говорила о себе в мужск. р[оде]: я пошел, я сказал, я сам. А сегодня я сижу и пишу о Чарской, Л[ида] под окном собирает колокольчики, и вдруг я слышу, она говорит девочке подруге: я сам, я сама сосчитаю. [...]
24 [июня 1917]. (...) мы пошли в Интимный театр и видели там Виктора Шкловского, к-рый был комиссаром 8-й армии. Он рассказывает ужасы. Он вел себя к[а]к герой и получил новенький Георгиевский крестик. Замечательно, что его дв[оюродный] брат Жоржик ранен на западном фронте - в тот же день. Когда Шкл. рассказывает о чем-ниб. страшном, он улыбается и даже смеется. Это выходит особенно привлекательно. - "Счастье мое, что я б[ыл] ранен, не то застрелился бы!" Он ранен в живот - пуля навылет - а он к[а]к ни в чем не бывало.
My wife asked me why "refrain" means such different things as a noun and as a verb, and the answer turns out to be interesting: the two have completely different histories. The verb refrain is (via French) from Latin refrenare, which is derived from frenum 'bridle'; when you refrain from doing something, you are (etymologically) reining yourself in. The noun refrain is from a French alteration of Old French refrait, the past participle of refraindre 'to break up,' from Vulgar Latin *refrangere, an alteration of Latin refringere, derived from frangere 'to break'; the refrain of a poem or song breaks it up into stanzas. You learn something every day!
DARK WATERS of the beginning.
Rays, violet and short
piercing the gloom,
Foreshadow the rain that is dreamed of.
On far side a rainbow
arched like boa bent to kill
foreshadows the rain that is dreamed of.
Me to the orangery
solitude invites,
a wagtail, to tell
the tangled-wood-tale;
a sunbird, to mourn
a mother on a spray.
Rain and sun in single combat;
on one leg standing
in silence at the passage
the young bird at the passage.
(The version in Labyrinths, available here, is slightly different.)
