SOME LINKS.

1) John Emerson sent me Interesting Schtoff from Google Books, a section of Steven K. Baum's virtual cave. It's a collection of links to old dictionaries, catalogs, and other reference books, not to mention unusual and humorous material. Baum says "Feel free to borrow any or all of this, with the understanding that an attribution will keep the karma dogs off your ass"; seems reasonable to me.

2) Laura Miller reviews Elif Batuman's "hilarious and charming" The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them in a way that makes me want to read it; Lizok's Bookshelf links to an equally laudatory NY Times review by Dwight Garner.

3) Ammon Shea reviews the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) being compiled at the University of Toronto in his quirky, occasionally irritating, but infectious way. And here's the online home of the DOE itself. (Thanks, Paul!)

RECORDING LADINO.

An AskMetaFilter question says "My grandmother's first language [Ladino] is nearly extinct. I'd like to record an interview with her for archival purposes; how should I go about it? ... I'm linguistically literate, but far from an expert, so advice from anyone with linguistics experience (particularly field lingustics) is especially appreciated." If you're a MetaFilter member, you can respond in the thread; if you're not but have useful advice, post it here and I'll pass it on. One response there seems important enough I'll repost it here, in case anyone is thinking of doing something similar themselves: "Use No Compression. Can't stress this highly enough. Your recordings must be uncompressed. If you record to MP3 or whatever perceptual encoding scheme, you will lose phonetic information."

MEMORY'S NOBLES.

I had never heard of poet and translator Emery George (and there's essentially nothing about him online except that "He is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor"), but he did a terrific translation (judging by the English—I don't read Hungarian) of "A la recherche," one of Miklós Radnóti's last few poems before he was shot by the SS in 1944. Hexameters don't come naturally in English, and to make them sound this effortless takes a lot of work:

Evenings, gentle and old, you return as memory’s nobles!
Gleaming table, crowned as by laurels with poets and young wives,
where are you sliding on marshes of irretrievable hours?
Where are the nights when exuberant friends were cheerfully drinking
auvergnat gris out of bright-eyed, thin-stemmed, delicate glasses?

Lines of verse swam high round the light of the lamps, with bright green
epithets bobbing up-down foaming crests of the meter;
those now dead were alive and the prisoners, still at home; those
vanished, dear friends, long since fallen, were writing their poems;
on their hearts the Ukraine, the soil of Spain, or of Flanders.

You can read the remaining five stanzas and get much more information on Radnóti's life (and of course the usual gorgeous collection of images) at Poemas del río Wang, where I found this. And while I'm at it, let me also recommend an earlier río Wang post about the Holocaust, May it be bound up: "By reading this text, I feel it dreadfully beautiful that in the wasteland of Nagykónyi there has been standing for a hundred and thirty years a sophisticated poem carved in stone which has not been read by anybody in the past sixty-five years, because there is nobody there who could read it any more. It is like the well of the Little Prince which is hiding in the desert until somebody finds it again."

Incidentally, I discovered in my googling that Emery George edited what looks like a fine anthology, Contemporary East European Poetry. This edition "offers a massive selection of over 500 poems from 160 poets spanning ten countries and 15 languages, including Yiddish and the four languages of the former Yugoslavia. For cultural and artistic reasons, the former Soviet Union is not included..."

TOYOTA/TOYODA.

The company is Toyota, but the family name of the founder is Toyoda. Why the difference? Bill Poser discusses it at the Log; after citing an implausible theory about stroke count, he says:

Another explanation is that Toyota served to dissociate the motor vehicle company from farming, which advanced the company's goal of presenting itself as innovative and high-tech. A third is that voiced sounds like [d] are considered to be "murky" while voiceless sounds like [t] are considered "clear". Finally, it may be that the aesthetics of the logo played a role.

He shows alternate versions of the logo, and I have to agree that the one without the dakuten looks better, which is not to say that I believe that version. A useful comment by Gene Buckley says:

An important fact is discussed in the linked BBC article, and is implied by the link to rendaku on Wikipedia by Dan, but it might be useful to make it explicit on this page. The written form 豊田 can be read Toyo-da, with voicing of the initial consonant in the second morpheme, or as Toyo-ta, without this voicing. (Other family names have similar alternate forms, such as 山崎 as Yama-saki and Yama-zaki.) In fact, the pronunciation Toyota is more common as a family name, according to Japanese, Chinese, and Korean surnames and how to read them (W. Hadamitzky, 1998). It's hard to imagine that the greater currency of this alternate pronunciation of 豊田 played no role in the choice of the company name. The katakana spelling adopted for the company name removes the ambiguity in the pronunciation of the second Chinese character.

(Please ignore the unseemly squabbling about national flapping in the early comments.)

CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN POETRY.

A couple of days ago Anatoly asked his readers for poems they loved by living poets, and as of now at that link there are almost a thousand responses. If you're a fan of Russian poetry, it's a free and nearly inexhaustible anthology of what's going on now.

SLAVONIC BORROWINGS IN EARLY RUSSIAN.

I've been on something of a spending spree at Amazon lately,* and the latest goodie to arrive is a copy of The History of the Russian Literary Language from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth, Lawrence L. Thomas's abridged 1969 translation of V. V. Vinogradov's classic Очерки по истории русского литературного языка XVII—XIX вв. (2nd ed. 1938). It starts with Thomas's introduction summarizing the history of the language up to the seventeenth century, when Vinogradov's story begins, and I've already run across a paragraph that was so enlightening to me I wanted to share it. Thomas is discussing the changes between the Kievan and Muscovite periods that "made possible the importation of new Church Slavonic doublets":

One such development was the loss and vocalization of the jers (ъ, ь), which allowed for new borrowings from Slavonic. In East Slavic, the Common Slavic group *dj had yielded ж; in Church Slavic, the result was жд. In Kievan times, it was not possible to borrow Slavonic words with this consonant cluster because East Slavic had no approximation of it... The East Slavic form жьдати had to become ждати before the assimilation of such Church Slavonicisms as рождение, между, хождение, etc., was possible. Similarly, artificial church pronunciation of a vowel in the prefix въз-, въс-, in places where spoken Russian now had no vowel, led to new Church Slavonicisms. The form возраст was thus doubly a Church Slavonicism; were it not for the influence of Church Slavonic, the Modern Russian form of this word would have been взрост (cf. взрослый). By this time, also, a former е had become [о] under accent before a hard consonant (in modern orthography, it is inconsistently represented by the letter ё). Since church pronunciation tended to be a spelling pronunciation, however, it did not reflect this feature of the spoken language. Consequently, the pronunciation of the genitive plural жён as [žen] rather than [žon] was a Church Slavonicism. Semantic doublets were thus created; cf. Modern Russian небо (sky) as compared to нёбо (palate).

*I'd like to thank whoever bought a Kindle via my Amazon links, as well as everyone who bought enough books and other items to give me a considerably fatter monthly gift certificate than usual; you are helping feed the voracious LH book habit! Remember, when you click on one of my links and buy something, no matter what, on your Amazon visit, I get a much-appreciated cut.

AND CALL HIM GEORGE.

There is a meme running around the internet that takes the form "I'm gonna love him and pet him and squeeze him and call him George" (many variations in wording, but all ending with "...and call him George"). This is ultimately based on Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, where Lenny, George's addled sidekick, has an unfortunate habit of squeezing his pet mice to death, but there is no "name him George" involved; the proximate source of the line is a pair of cartoons, both of which play off of Steinbeck but in neither of which does the line occur as commonly cited. As a public service, I am providing the actual quotes from the cartoons, since it's probably not going to turn up in the Yale Book of Quotations any time soon. The first is Tex Avery's 1946 "Screwy Squirrel" cartoon "Lonesome Lenny," in which the eponymous lonesome dog greets his new pet Screwy Squirrel with: "Hello, George! Glad to know ya, George! You're my new little friend, George, my new little friend! What I'm gonna do is to petcha and play witcha, George." After much wackiness: "Now I gotcha, my little friend. I'm gonna petcha and hold ya and petcha and petcha and petcha." (Warning for the soft of heart: the cartoon does not end happily!) The second is from "The Abominable Snow Rabbit" (1961), in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck find themselves in the Himalayas; Daffy runs into an abominable snowman, who picks him up and says: "I will name him George and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him ... and pat him and pat him ... and love him and caress him..." Daffy escapes his dangerous clutches by offering him Bugs as a substitute; the snowman picks Bugs up and says "I will name him George and I will hug him and... and..." (Here's the video clip if anyone wants to check my transcription.) Both these are significantly different from the current version; there may be an intermediate source that I have not found.

VOLVELLES AND OTHER INDETERMINACIES.

The idea of the indeterminate text is associated with postmodernism (e.g.: "the modernism of Eliot has been identified with the autonomy of the text [...] and the determinacy of its meaning, the postmodern text is 'open' and its meaning is indeterminate"), but there's nothing new about it. To quote the introduction to a very interesting book I recently got, Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally:

The commodification of literature induced a certain anxiety of authorship among Russia's elite, for the printing press threatened to drown the originality they associated with literature in a potentially infinite reproduction of texts. Earlier the German Romantics of the circle had also perceived this threat and conceived in response an ideal modern genre that could hold formally diverse parts together in a state of irresolution. This dynamic structure resisted the ossification of reproduction as its resolution into a whole varied with each individual reader.

With that prologue, I introduce you to Whitney Anne Trettien, a PhD student at Duke who's thinking far more interesting thoughts than I was as a PhD student over 30 years ago (though, to be fair, my department pretty much discouraged interesting thoughts). Her CV starts by giving her research interests as, among other things, the relationship between technology, language and literature; intellectual history; medieval and baroque automata; and digital poetry and literature, and she has combined much of that into her master's thesis, "Computers, Cut-ups and Combinatory Volvelles: An Archaeology of Text-Generating Mechanisms," which exists primarily as a website with a navigation system that forces you to find your own way through it, so that its resolution into a whole varies with each individual reader. (The first thing I learned from her was the word volvelle; it's the kind of word one can enjoy quite apart from its meaning, and I can imagine its being given as a name by the kind of parent who gives kids weird names.) She writes in her introduction:

After spending months researching combinatory reading and writing practices — practices that are radically Other to us, so far from (to return to Chartier) "the genealogy of our own contemporary manner of reading" — I could not, in both theory and reality, write a narrative history. The institutional conventions of scholarly reading, writing and publication seek to familiarize and contain, conceptualizing the production of knowledge and text itself as a process of illumination, literally "bringing to light"; yet, as the combinatory practices I was researching underscore, there is nothing "natural" to these institutions. In fact, their very familiarity is partly a byproduct of the assumptions I hoped to challenge — assumptions that have perpetuated totalizing arguments about "print" and "the book." How could I defamiliarize a history of reading and writing within such a prosaic academic literacy?

Thus instead of a linear text, I've produced a digital mechanism that, like the objects of my study, forces the reader to participate in the process of making meaning. On the one hand, this medium allows me to present a comparative history without compromising specificity or reducing the complexity of one moment to a mere reflection of another; yet it still strives for thematic cohesion by using our digital present quite literally as a map for exploring programmatic epistemologies in our past. Like our current media ecology, this map can be, in the words of many of my test users, "disorienting," a Borgesian textual labyrinth. I sympathize with these frustrations. As students and scholars, we are not primed to participate in reading texts as any more than "critical interpreters" who absorb and repurpose language, and writing is still presented as an act of "originality." In other words, the practice of cutting up and combining texts — that is, manipulating language materially — is almost entirely absent from our current conceptual model of literacy. Yet such forms of reading and writing are one facet to the infinitely complex history of both the book and (if the recent avalanche of literature on new media literacies is any indication) the book-to-come. By both presenting and enacting the very mechanisms I theorize, I hope to put a neglected past in conversation with our present while still waving "goodbye to much that is familiar."

She uses more jargon than I'm usually comfortable with, but hell, that's part of being a grad student, and she has such interesting bits of history and text to present that I can't say I mind. And her blog is worth a look, too; this post, for example, discusses her work on Pepys' Diary, specifically "buried references to the Diary [that] crop up throughout the eighteenth century, indicating the work was not entirely unknown until Smith's transcription." In the course of her work she finds "two facsimiles of a pre-Smith plan to transcribe the Diary" via Google Books:

Here's where the story get sticky, though. Thinking my work was done, I finished up the essay without ever consulting the physical book (don't judge me, we all do it), even took a screenshot of the facsimiles from the biography, now out of print, and dropped them in as figures for the essay. The time for permissions rolls around, and we realize the scans are too low resolution for publication. So I order the dusty 1904 tome be dragged up from Duke's storage facilities; open it up to scan the figures myself; and find this: [image]

What I thought were scratches from the scanner, or -- honestly, I don't know what I thought they were; my intuitive curiosity as a literary historian and digital humanist failed me -- turned out to be full pages. The dunce that scanned the text for Google Books didn't bother to unfold the paper; and, since Google Books doesn't have any mechanism for indicating moving parts and fold-outs on their flattened scans, whatever was tucked between the folds was lost to the database.

I've talked about interactivity in the digital archive here before; this incident brought the issue home for me. Like all media, tools like Google Books inevitably (re-)frame our research, opening exciting new possibilities; but in doing so, other potentials are foreclosed. Beyond the dampening effect on research into the codex as a form, the digital archive's absences produce an image of "print culture" that slides frustratingly toward the very reductive models that many book historians have challenged in recent years. We need to start thinking seriously about what aspects of the book are elided by the screen; how a text's materiality is mediated by scans; and how the structure of databases disallow us from documenting these bookish anomalies.

She's singin' my song. And I was also won over by the last words of her CV: "In my spare time, I collect dictionaries."

(Thanks, peacay!)

MULTILINGUAL MIZ.

Anatoly posts a YouTube clip from the 10th anniversary performance of Les Miserables, with a bunch of international singers taking turns at the mike for Valjean's aria "Do You Hear the People Sing?" (I imagine there are many people so sick of tunes from Les Miz that they will not even want to click on the link, but I, for better or worse, have managed to avoid the whole phenomenon so completely I am unfamiliar with the tunes and was able to enjoy its cheesy Broadway chest-thumping splendor.) Unfortunately, the languages are heavily weighted toward the northern European, though there's a nice chunk in Japanese; as Anatoly says, "А русский где? :(" [But where's Russian? :(]. Of course, as one of his commenters points out, there's no one from Italy, Spain, Greece, Finland, Slovakia, Malta, Malta, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Andorra, Israel, Ukraine, Switzerland, or any of the Baltic or ex-Yugoslav states either. Still, it's fun to hear the range of languages they do include, and they didn't omit all the tiny countries: Icelandic is there!

LANGUAGE VS. GENES.

This thread developed into a discussion of the parallel between the development of evolution theory and historical linguistics. Now Mark Liberman has a post at the Log about "how close we should expect linguistic and biological descent to be, in general. There are too many ways, both wholesale and retail, for people to end up speaking a language different from the language of their ancestors, and similarly many ways for genes to flow from one speech community to another." He links to and discusses the abstract of Hafid Laayouni et al., "A genome-wide survey does not show the genetic distinctiveness of Basques", Human Genetics (published online 1/16/2010), and I urge anyone interested in the topic to check out his post.

CHANDLER ON PLATONOV.

Daniel Kalder in the Guardian has a good interview with Robert Chandler, who has translated Andrei Platonov's novel The Foundation Pit [Russian Kotlovan] twice because "No other work of literature means so much to me" and "Platonov is hard to translate: in the early 1990s we were working in the dark."

You've argued that Russians will eventually come to recognise Platonov as their greatest prose writer. Given that he's up against titans such as Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov this is quite a claim.

Well, it probably sounds less startling to Russians than it does to English and Americans. I've met a huge number of Russian writers and critics who look on Platonov as their greatest prose writer of the last century. In my personal judgment, it was confirmed for me during the last stages of my work on Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, an anthology of short stories I compiled for Penguin Classics. I worked on this for several years, did most of the translations myself and revised them many times. I read through the proofs with enjoyment — I was still happy with the choices I had made — but there were only two writers whom I was still able to read with real wonder: Pushkin and Platonov. Even at this late stage I was still able to find new and surprising perceptions in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and Platonov's The Return. This didn't happen with any other writers.

Chandler is much more modest and sensible about translation than that guy Venuti, but then again, he's just a translator, not a Grand Poobah of Translation Theory. And I really have to read The Foundation Pit sooner rather than later. [Update: I'm now reading it, and it's as great as they say.] (Via Lizok.)

Incidentally, I ran across this great series of history shows presented by Nikolai Svanidze; each 45-minute episode (in Russian) features a year in the 20th century (starting with 1901) and focuses on one person or family. I'm going to be spending a lot of time with it.

SHE LOOKED REAL SWELL.

Kim Fischer, a PR person at Temple University, has a puff piece on Lawrence Venuti, a translator and translation theorist and (not coincidentally) a Temple English professor, which irritates me with its breathless treatment of him as the Hot New Thing in translation:

A leading theorist in his field, Venuti is at the forefront of what might be called a translation renaissance. ... The most prevalent translation strategy has been to adhere to the current standard dialect of the translating language, which is the most familiar and least noticeable to the reader. This kind of translation, according to Venuti, effaces the translator’s presence and erases cultural distinctions.

“Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures,” he said.

You know what? There are a million different ways to translate, and you can perfectly well do a good job at it in your own preferred way without giving in to the temptation to paint everyone who does it differently as a retrograde perpetrator of ethnocentric violence and eraser of cultural distinctions.

But never mind; a sidebar quotes Venuti's translation of one of the poems from Edward Hopper, a collection by Catalan poet Ernest Farrés (and it also irritates me that both Fischer and Venuti keep calling Catalan a "minor language"), and I liked it well enough I don't care about his excuses for translating it the way he likes or his blackguarding of people who do it differently.

[N.b.: the title of my post comes from the line "she looked real swell, sure enough"; you can read the rest of the translation at the first link.]

Thanks for the link, Annie!

ETHNIC JOKES OF DAGESTAN.

John Emerson sent me a link to a NY Times article by Ellen Barry about the complex relationships among the peoples of Dagestan, one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. Barry starts out with Magomedkhan M. Magomedkhanov, an ethnographer from Dagestan (sadly, the M. stands not for Magomedkhanovich but for Magomedovich):

He grew up among the Archi, a 1,200-member ethnic group that speaks a language of unknown origin and, for at least seven centuries, was connected to the outside world only by rugged mountain paths. This is fairly typical of Dagestan, a collection of 14 major and several dozen minor ethnic groups that formed in tide pools and cul-de-sacs off one of humankind’s great migration streams.

All this has proven exceptionally fertile ground for ethnic humor. Dagestanis can tell ethnic jokes for hours, returning to beloved themes like the muscle-bound denseness of the Avars, the naked commercialism of the Dargins, the bookish pusillanimity of the Lezgins, the slyness of Lakhs and so on. And that’s not counting jokes about especially dumb villages.

One example: An Avar is carrying a wounded Dargin off the battlefield. The Dargin entreats his friend to leave him behind, lest they both be killed, and asks the one favor of shooting him so he does not suffer. The Avar, finally convinced, pulls out his firearm but finds he has no ammunition. The Dargin roots in his pockets and pulls out a bullet. “I’ll sell it to you,” he says.

I'm sure the "beloved themes" represent stereotypes as superficial and unhelpful as all such, but I'm grateful to have even superficial stereotypes to go with what to me have always been mere names (Avar, Dargin, etc.). And the jokes are pretty funny. There's some interesting historical material, too, but I'm not sure I trust the Times for that kind of thing.

THE STAINED-GLASS LANGUAGE OF SALMON.

From Richard Hamblyn's LRB review of To Sea and Back: The Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon, by Richard Shelton:

‘Smolt’, ‘grilse’: as Richard Shelton observes, salmon are spoken of in a ‘stained-glass language’ of their own, their life stages marked by an ichthyological lexicon unchanged since Chaucer’s time. Born in a ‘redd’, a shallow, gravel-covered depression dug by the female in the days before spawning, newly hatched salmon begin life as ‘alevins’, tiny, buoyant creatures with their yolk sacs still attached. Once the yolk has been absorbed, the fast-growing fish, now known as ‘fry’, are able to feed for themselves, turning instinctively to face the current in order to graze on drifting insect larvae. Some months later, the juvenile salmon, now known as ‘parr’, move downstream to deeper water, where their markings grow darker and their shapes more distinctively salmonoid. By the following spring, most parr have begun the first of the transformations that will enable them to cross the hydrological boundary from the river to the sea: once their kidneys have been primed to reverse their usual function of taking in salts and excreting dilute river water, their skin colour brightens to reflective silver through a microscopic coating of guanine crystals, and their body shapes fill out in anticipation of the long voyage ahead. It is then that the ‘smolts’, as the fish are now known, are ready to head downriver to the sea.[...]

As soon as it smells fresh water again, an adult salmon will stop feeding, devoting itself solely to the rigours of the voyage, its body beginning its final transformation, as its immune system shuts down to conserve energy, its skin starts to lose its silvery sheen, and (in the case of the male) a rush of hormones prompts the lower jaw to change shape, curving into an aggressive-looking underbite known as a ‘kype’, a jutting scimitar used for fending off other males in the spawning grounds upstream. [...]

Shelton coolly describes the lingering death of a spawned-out male, now known as a ‘kelt’ – the last of its names [...]

I wonder if any other creature has quite so many names for its various stages, and if any other languages have a similar collection of salmon words. (Thanks, Kattullus!)

KAWAGUCHI/KAVAGUTI.

My wife and I have been watching a bit of the Olympics, and I noticed one of the Russian figure skaters was named Yuko Kavaguti. Today there's a NY Times article by Jere Longman about the Russians' loss of dominance in pairs skating (for the first time since 1960, a Russian pair didn't get the gold medal), in the course of which Longman writes: "It has now reached the point that the top Russian women’s pairs skater, Kavaguti, is a native of Japan. She modified her family name of Kawaguchi after gaining Russian citizenship."

No. She did not "modify her family name" any more than she would modify it by calling herself Kawaguchi in an English-speaking country. Her surname is 川口 (which uses nice simple characters and means 'river mouth'); that name is rendered Kawaguchi in English and Кавагути in Russian, and the latter is transliterated into the Latin alphabet as "Kavaguti." But it's the Russian representation of 川口. I don't expect an English-speaking reporter to know that, so I'm not faulting Longman, but I wanted to clarify it.

OROSDI BACK.

I'm reading a lousy Iraqi novel called Papa Sartre (a 2009 translation of the 2001 original); it's only 178 pages long but feels like War and Peace, and I'm skimming more and more as I zip through its repetitive and heavy-handed mockery of schemers, ne'er-do-wells, and fake philosophers. Why do I keep reading, you ask? Because I'm fascinated with Baghdad, as I am with all ancient cities, and it's rare to read fiction set there. Alas, although there are descriptions of Baghdad streets and neighborhoods, it's impossible for me to add them to my mental map of the city because I'm unable to locate them on an actual map: where is al-Saadun Park, where is the Sadriya neighborhood? And why are there no decent maps of Baghdad? It's the only great city I know of for which maps are (as far as I can determine) unavailable. Even my beloved Map Room at the NYPL came up nearly empty; I copied a 1951 Arabic map that is nearly useless even if you can read the Arabic, and have collected various tiny maps in newspapers and magazines over the years, but on the whole I might as well be reading about an imaginary city. (You'd think the publisher could have included at least a sketch map showing where the various settings of the novel are.)

Excuse me, I'm venting. What I came here to say is that I eventually ran across one of those nuggets that keep me reading, a reference to "the Orosdi Back department store." That was such a, well, Levantine-sounding name that I had to investigate it; my preliminary guess was that "Back" was a mangled version of the common Ottoman honorific Beg. But no, it's an Austrian Jewish surname; you can read about it here (scroll down to "A GREAT DEPARTMENT STORE"):

Three years after they opened their first European store in Vienna's 1st district Leon Orosdi and Hermann Back opened their store in Egypt circa 1896. While the Vienna store disappeared the one in Cairo is still with us today albeit under a defunct state run ownership/management.

Some older Cairenes may still remember Orosdi-Back, that famous turn-of-the-century department store which early on added the Turkish-derived a.k.a "Omar Effendi" to its name. The six-story rococo department store designed in 1905-6 by Raoul Brandon (1878-1941) stands at the corner of (Sultan) Abdelaziz and Rushdi Pasha Streets, a powerful architectural testimonial to the Cairo that was. In its better days when it was still a private sector company the globe above the building was seen kilometers away as it shone its powerful beam each night beckoning wide-eyed patrons.

In 1909 Hermann's son Philippe received a minor ennoblement from emperor Franz-Josef, a belated recognition for Back's sponsorship of several archeological excavations in Egypt as late as 1907. By then the Frenchified Orosdis and Backs were more prone to be seen in Bagatelle, Paris then in Leopoldstadt, Vienna. Armed with their wealth eventually the Orosdi-Back descendants made into the old European aristocracy changing their religion in the process.

But the Cairo store was only one of their far-flung chain, as you can see from this summary of a monograph, European Department Stores and Middle Eastern Consumers: The Orosdi-Back Saga by Uri M. Kupferschmidt (İstanbul, 2007):

In "another age of globalization", the Ets. [i.e., Etablissements] Orosdi-Back were a trading company which stepped into the new business opportunities of the Middle East from the mid-19th century on. The Ets. Orosdi-Back became best known for their department stores in Istanbul, Cairo, Beirut, Tunis and Baghdad.

Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer, who had found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, opened a first clothing store in Galata in 1855. With the Back family, equally of Jewish Austro-Hungarian descent, Orosdi and his sons began establishing similar stores elsewhere.

In 1888, when their siège social was registered in Paris, they already had outlets in Philippopoli , Bucharest, Salonica, Izmir, Cairo, Alexandria, Tanta, and Tunis, as well as purchasing missions in industrial and commercial centers in Europe.

Their business gradually evolved from wholesale to retailing, in particular through grands magasins, which differed from the bazaar.

What fascinated me when I unleashed Google Books on "orosdi back" was how omnipresent references to the stores were in descriptions of Near Eastern cities from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Books on Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, Smyrna, Aleppo, and other cities often mention that you can get Western articles at Orosdi-Back, and the Salonica branch is mentioned in the wonderful Mazower history of that city (I wrote about it here and here, and the renamings I ranted about in the latter post still make my blood boil: "How I hate those modern names, the Street of the 37th of Octember, the Avenue of Marshal X, the Boulevard of Our Glorious National Uprising!"). Now it's forgotten. Sic transit...

BRUCE MITCHELL, RIP.

The Telegraph has a good obituary for Bruce Mitchell, whose Guide to Old English I own and consult with pleasure. I had no idea he was Australian, that one of his students was Terry Jones (of Monty Python), or that he'd had such a hard row to hoe early on:

Family circumstances prevented him from taking up the offer of a free place at Melbourne University, and after leaving school aged 15 he began work as a student teacher. At the same time he enrolled as a part-time student at the university, where he took a general Arts degree. Memories of the hard slog of holding down a full-time job while studying for a degree, he confessed, meant that he had little sympathy with Oxford students who failed to write their essays.

And I completely agree with him about anachronistic punctuation:

One of Mitchell's particular concerns was the way in which modern translations add punctuation to Old English texts in ways that distort their meaning. In a seminal article, The Dangers of Disguise: Old English Texts in Modern Punctuation (1980), he drew attention to the way in which punctuation (the semicolon was a particular bugbear) – developed after the advent of printing – tended to destroy the ebb and flow of Old English poetry and prose, denying the reader insights into texts whose syntactical structure developed out of a tradition of oral storytelling.

Thanks for the link, Paul!

AN DIE NACHGEBORENEN.

Today wood s lot features Bertolt Brecht's "An die Nachgeborenen" (1939), which along with Auden's "September 1, 1939" ("I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street/ Uncertain and afraid...") is one of the great poetic distillations of the mood just before World War II broke out. Unfortunately, the version given there is a bad translation that unforgivably omits the first section ("Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!" ['Truly, I live in dark times!']) and goes so far as to renumber the remaining sections to cover up the fact; its English is dubious ("we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness...") and it misunderstands the German (the translator has "without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily" for Brecht's "Aber die Herrschenden/ Saßen ohne mich sicherer," which says exactly the opposite). So I thought I'd link to Scott Horton's considerably superior version, "To Those Who Follow in Our Wake," which is preceded (admirably) by the original German and followed (helpfully) by a discussion that places it in its context.

THE ANTI-BORGES.

A very bad "poem" has apparently been making the rounds for decades now, attributed to Jorge Luis Borges. I learn this via Anatoly, who discovered an article (in Spanish, which Anatoly is studying) by Ivan Almeida, laying out the entire ridiculous story. It starts with a guy named Don Herold, who in 1953 published a short piece in Reader's Digest called "If I Had My Life to Live Over"—typical Reader's Digest material, mildly quirky and touching ("I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip..."). At some point, inevitably, somebody decided it would be even more effective chopped up into lines of varying length and presented as a "poem," and it was occasionally attributed to an octogenarian woman from Kentucky called Nadine Stair. Then it got attributed to Borges and translated into Spanish as "Instantes," which became the presumptive original; the English version was sometimes called by the Spanish name, for extra exoticism points.

Almeida does excellent work with the tangled tale, and I like his conclusion, which I'll translate (original below):

In the same way that in "El Aleph" the divine Beatrice appears revealing pornografic secrets, just as in "The End" [Martín] Fierro is the opposite of Hernández's character, so the Borges of "Instantes" is a Borges brought to be his own adversary.

The Borges of "Instantes" is a Borges whom we would like to see repentant. Repentant for being the most quoted of authors without being understood by the poor people who enjoy television series or teach Cultural Studies. We want him to continue being Borges but to renounce his options and who, in place of his cryptic poems, would come to tell us what would like to hear and what we are told only by those associative (?) magazines we despise. The perfect world would be a book by Rigoberta Menchú signed by Wittgenstein, the Imitation of Christ signed by Joyce, the song "We are the world" signed by Mallarmé. We want to be able to say that the poem we love most is by that Borges whom the intellectuals wanted to appropriate. So says that collective actor we cannot even call "readers."

Should we get angry? I don't believe there's any reason to. We mustn't forget that, despite everything, as shown by an example cited above, there are people who have been brought by the reading of "Instantes" to discover Ficciones. Perhaps the history of literature is the history of various great mistakes in reading.

Luckily, Borges wrote a famous text called "Borges and I." We will never know to which of the two this story is happening. But we can be sure that the other would be enjoying himself tremendously.

Here's the original:

De la misma manera que en "El Aleph" la divina Beatriz aparece revelando pornográficos secretos, al igual que, en "El fin", Fierro es el opuesto al personaje de Hernández, el Borges de "Instantes" es un Borges conducido a ser su propio contrario.

El Borges de "Instantes" es un Borges que quisiéramos ver arrepentido. Arrepentido de ser el más citado de los autores sin ser comprendido por los pobres que gozan de las series televisivas o profesan los Cultural Studies. Queremos que siga siendo Borges, pero que reniegue sus opciones y que, en vez de sus crípticos poemas, venga a decirnos lo que nosotros desearíamos oír y que sólo osan decirnos las revistas asociativas, que despreciamos. El mundo perfecto sería un libro de Rigoberta Menchú firmado por Wittgenstein, la Imitación de Cristo firmada por Joyce, la canción "We are the world" firmada por Mallarmé. Queremos poder decir que el poema que más amamos es de aquel Borges del que quisieron apropiarse los intelectuales. Eso dice ese actor colectivo que ni siquiera podemos calificar de "lector".

¿Indignarse? No creo que haya motivos. No hay que olvidar que, a pesar de todo, como lo muestra un ejemplo citado más arriba, hay personas a quienes la lectura de "Instantes" ha llevado a descubrir Ficciones. Quizá la historia de la literatura sea la historia de algunos grandes errores de lectura.

Por suerte, Borges escribió un texto célebre, llamado "Borges y yo". Nunca sabremos a cuál de los dos le está sucediendo esta historia. Pero podemos estar seguros de que el otro se divierte jubilosamente.

NINE.

I was scanning wood s lot (one of the reliable pleasures of the LH morning) when I was stopped in my tracks by a brief excerpt from a longish poem, "Nine," by Anne Tardos (home page, Wikipedia). It turns out she was born in France and lived in Budapest, Vienna, and Paris before moving to the United States, which explains the multilingual aspect of her work ("Zinguer je je zinguer je, mich dich Villa nicht") but not its irresistible variety and exuberance. The excerpt impelled me to click through to the poem, and I found myself reading the entire thing with growing pleasure. Like all writing worth a damn, it's about love, death, and language, embedded in an unpredictable framework that turns out to be just what was needed. The first line sensibly announces the framework: "Nine words per line and nine lines per stanza." The next nonsensically revels in the arbitrariness of it: "Pink fluffy underwater kangaroo fuzzy free manic rabbity thing." And the third ties together sense and nonsense: "Sense and nonsense similarly writer’s block clogged and unblocked." That excerpt fairly represents the whole poem, in the manner we have learned to call "fractal" ("The fractal pattern of which we are a part"); if you find it frustrating but intriguing, I suggest you take a look at the whole thing. You may find yourself, as I did, reading it all the way to the end, laughing with delight more than once. It's nice to be reminded that good poetry can be fun.

Here, more or less at random, is a pair of lines that struck me enough to want to copy them:

Miles Davis says play what you don’t know.
Everything we seek is guided by what is sought.

And here's another, in a mysterious language:

Yentsia bakoondy eeleck, ta-dee-doo-dah, bentsey la cozy fen-fen.
Bit baloon timi zin zah, timi zin zah, zimbudah.

Sense or nonsense? If you know, please speak up.

WILL AMERICANS LEARN CHINESE?

My grandson is in a mainly Chinese-speaking preschool, which of course thrills me, and there are more and more such schools springing up what with the growing prominence of China. The NY Times says:

While language fads come and go — there was Russian during the cold war, then Japanese in the 1980’s, then Arabic after 9/11 — thousands of public schools have stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade. Is the boom in Chinese language education going to last?

To discuss this, they have contributions from Susan Jacoby, Ingrid Pufahl (Center for Applied Linguistics), Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco, Norman Matloff, Hongyin Tao (professor of Chinese language and linguistics), and Bruce Fuller. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

SOMOVY.

Having finished Alexander Grin's delightful Алые паруса (Scarlet sails), I've moved on to Olga Forsh's 1931 novella à clef Сумасшедший корабль (The crazy ship), about life in the early 1920s in the Saint Petersburg House of Arts, a refuge during those hungry years for writers like Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Grin (who wrote Scarlet Sails there), Korney Chukovsky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Forsh herself. (Anyone know of a source identifying the characters in the story with their real-life counterparts?) A few pages in, a woman called Taisia (after like Anatole France's Thaïs) says all the men adore her, and adds "Мне особо идет сомовый абажур" ['The somovy lampshade especially becomes/suits me']. I didn't know the word somovy, and neither did the first dictionary I checked, but my three-volume Russian-English dictionary had it: it's the adjective for сом [som], which all my dictionaries define as "sheatfish." That did me little good (and my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate didn't have an entry for it), but the internet soon informed me that the sheatfish, apparently more commonly (and certainly more transparently) called the wels catfish (wels being a loan from German, where Mackensen tells me it is "ungeklärter Herkunft" [of unknown origin]), is a large freshwater catfish. In fact, the indispensable Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide to the World's Wildlife says:

This huge, bottom-dwelling catfish is one of the largest freshwater fishes in the world. The biggest specimen on record, caught in the 19th century in the Dnieper River in southern Russia, was over 15ft (4.5 m) long, and weighed over 660lb (300kg). However, it is unlikely that any wels of a similar size exist today since they have been heavily fished in most parts of their range.

With that in mind, you will be able to appreciate this wonderful excursus from the сом entry by the incorrigibly idiosyncratic Dahl, the 19th-century lexicographer still used as a basic source for Russian readers and writers: "акула больших рек; глотает уток и гусей, нередко хватал и купальщиов, поймал за лапу плывшего медведя, который выволок его на берег, и оба были убиты": "[The som is] the shark of large rivers; it swallows ducks and geese, and not uncommonly seizes/bites bathers; it caught by the paw a swimming bear, which pulled it out onto the shore, and they were both killed."

The other thing I wanted to pass on from my researches is that the first hit in Google Books for сомовый is from the 1914 World Almanac and Book of Facts; the snippet on the results page is "... И СОМОВЫЙ. ..." ['and catfish-'], but when you click through, it turns out to be a scanning error for CONGRESS.

(I wonder what the significance of having a lampshade made of catfish skin might have been?)

WORLD LOANWORD DATABASE.

The World Loanword Database (WOLD) is the most amazing thing I've seen in a while, linguistically speaking. Lameen Souag took time off from thesis-writing to share it, and I'm glad I have neither a thesis to write nor (at the moment) work to do, so I can splash around in it to my heart's content. Here's their description:

It provides vocabularies (mini-dictionaries of about 1000-2000 entries) of 41 languages from around the world, with comprehensive information about the loanword status of each word. It allows users to find loanwords, source words and donor languages in each of the 41 languages, but also makes it easy to compare loanwords across languages.

Each vocabulary was contributed by an expert on the language and its history. An accompanying book is being published by Mouton de Gruyter (Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook, edited by Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor)....

The database can be accessed by language, by meaning, by author, or by reference.

Here's the "Languages" page (with a nifty map: recipient languages are shown by a red symbol, donor languages by blue) and here's the "Vocabularies" one, with a percentage of loanwords for each language (ranging from Old High German at 6% to Tarifiyt Berber at 53%). I'll give a random example of the kind of information you get when you dig down. Bezhta (Affiliation: Nakh-Daghestanian, Avar-Andic-Tsezic; the section is by Bernard Comrie and Madzhid Khalilov) has 32% loanwords; one of them is čarx 'whetstone,' the page for which tells us that it is from Avar čarx 'whetstone', from Georgian čarxi 'lathe.' It goes on to say:

Other comments: Georgian may be the ultimate source - cf. also the related verb čarxva ‘to grind (knife)’ - in which case the details of the direction of derivation are unclear

And if you click on "Contact situation: Avar as local lingua franca," you get:

Avar is the single largest immediate source for loans into Bezhta, and contact with Avar has been intense for at least some centuries, with Avar serving as the main means of communication with the outside world, in addition to personal meetings between speakers of Bezhta and Avar. It is difficult to justify the assignment of a particular date to the beginning of this process, but as a rule of thumb we have taken the beginning of the eighteenth century, as it was during the eighteenth century that the Bezhta speaking area was incorporated into a larger, religiously Muslim community under Avar leadership. In addition to loans of indigenous Avar origin, Avar has also provided the major conduit for the introduction into Bezhta of words of ultimate Arabic, Persian, or Turkic origin.

I could spend weeks rooting around in here, and probably will as work and other interests allow. Thanks, Lameen, and good luck with your thesis! (There's already discussion of possible errors at Lameen's post.)

I have to say, I'm not thrilled about "languoid," which they call "a (relatively new) cover term for 'language' and 'language family,'" but I suppose I can get used to it.

ZDANEVICH ONLINE.

A Russian correspondent wrote me to say: "as a reader of your blog I see that you are interested in Russian formalistic prose. Here are two novels by Iliazd available for free download." He had excellent insight into my interests; some time back I was interested enough in Ilia Zdanevich, known as Iliazd (Ильязд), to write most of that Wikipedia article, and I draw your attention to this passage:

In 1923 he began his novel Parizhachi, about four couples who agree to dine together in the Bois de Boulogne; in the course of two and a half hours (each chapter has an exact time for a title, from 11.51 to 14.09) they all manage to betray each other, and the novel itself breaks all manner of orthographic, punctuational, and compositional rules. He continued working on this "hyperformalist" novel (which he described as an opis', or "inventory") until 1926, but it was not published until 1994. His second novel, Voskhishchenie ("Rapture"), was published in a small edition in 1930 and was ignored at the time. Set in a mythical Georgia among mountaineers, on the surface a crime novel, it is actually a fictionalized history of the Russian avant-garde, full of allusions to world literature; it could be said to anticipate magic realism. The language of the novel is innovative and poetic, and the Slavist Milivoje Jovanović called it "undoubtedly the summit toward which the Russian avant-garde was striving."

Don't those novels sound interesting? Well, those are the very novels you can download from the link in the first sentence. They're both quite short, and I look forward to enjoying them in the not too distant future.

(Incidentally, today I created a Wikipedia article for the long-forgotten historical novelist Grigory Danilevsky; if anybody knows how to add the image from the Russian page on him, I wouldn't object if you did so.)

GREEK WORDLE AND TZETZES.

Nick (aka opoudjis) over at Illinistefkondos took such a long break from posting I stopped visiting, and now when I finally get around to checking in I find all manner of goodies, which we can divide into two categories:

1) Wordle applied to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. His first post eliminates more and more stop words from the word cloud until you get a readable cluster (most common remaining word: θεός [theós] 'god'). At the end he says "What'd be useful is to split up the corpus, say BC and AD, and see how they differ," and this is what he does in his next post; here's the word cloud for BC texts, and here's the one for AD texts, which (as you will immediately notice) talk about God a lot more. After showing the clouds he gives fascinating breakdowns by proper nouns, common nominals (including adjectives), verbs, and so on. I eat up sentences like "Language change accounts for βαστάζω and ἀνέρχομαι replacing φέρω and ἄνειμι, and I assume καταδικάζω for 'condemn' replaced what came to look like more generic verbs, in καθαιρέω or καταγιγνώσκω."

2) He delights me with a couple of posts featuring my man Tzetzes. (I really enjoyed writing that post, and was glad he found it.) This one mainly discusses other matters (including country matters, as represented by the etymology of the common, not to say vulgar, Greek noun μουνί), but it finishes up with an excursus on "The curious editorial fate of Tzetzes' Theogony." This is followed up by his latest post, which quotes the Kazhdan translation of the multilingual Tzetzes appendix from my post and annotates it to a fare-thee-well, even unto providing the reconstructed Proto-Ossetic for what Tzetzes calls the language of the Alans. (It turns out that Tzetzes' "Scythian" is Cuman and his "Persian" Turkish.) Wonderful work, and don't go away for so long next time, Nick!

GOODBYE TO BO.

People keep sending me this BBC story, "Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India," so I guess I'd better post it. I've posted enough dead-and-dying-language stories I was going to let this one go, but the fact that you can actually listen to a clip of Boa Sr, the last person who knew the language to any extent, is unusual and worth applauding. (I don't suppose anyone here knows what the deal is with that odd-looking name? On the Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese website, it's given as "Sr." with a period, for example in their brief obituary for her, but I suppose it's probably not short for "Senior.") I will add, as an irritated aside, that Alastair Lawson upholds the sorry tradition of BBC science "reporting" by proclaiming that Bo was "one of the world's oldest languages." Attention journalists: that is a meaningless statement. Please recalibrate your gobbledygook generators.

LANGUAGE UTILITIES.

Richard Ishida, of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has created what he calls "small web-page utilities" to aid in language use online: a Unicode database viewer ("Look up characters, character blocks, paste in and discover unknown characters, store your own info about characters, search on character names, do hex/dec/ncr conversions, highlight character types, etc. etc."), Unicode character pickers ("Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification"), and a Unicode Code Converter. (There's also supposed to be a Language learning test app, but it doesn't seem to be available at the moment.)

On the other hand, if what you need is a keyboard to write any language from Akan or Albanian (Shqip) to Xhosa or Yoruba, try Gate2Home:

This site enables you to write in your language wherever you are in the world, with an online onscreen keyboard emulator. The main purpose of this site is to let everyone who gets stuck without the ability to write/type/search the internet in their own language be able to do just that (usually travelers/tourists or anyone in front of a foreign computer).

(Via MetaFilter.)

THE PEOPLE OF SEMIKA.

I'm still reading the Gorky translation discussed here and here (I'm now on the second volume, V lyudyakh [Among people, tr. as In the World]), and in Chapter 8 there's a nice anecdote about how the young narrator, forced to read dull books to the captain of the Volga steamer in whose galley he was working, was struck by the phrase собственно говоря 'strictly speaking,' which occurred in the context "Собственно говоря, никто не изобрел пороха..." ('Strictly speaking, no one invented gunpowder...'), and back in Nizhny Novgorod with his family, asked to tell more of his shipboard experiences, he responded: "Мне уж нечего рассказывать, собственно говоря..." ('I really don't have anything to tell, strictly speaking...'), causing general laughter and leading him to be nicknamed "Strictly speaking." I'm sure many of us who used to read books above our age level can recall similar experiences.

Right after that comes another absurd goof by the translator, Isidor Schneider. Gorky is describing an area where he went to wash the baby's diapers alongside the city's washerwomen, who mocked and entertained him; he writes: "На этом поле, по семикам, городское мещанство устраивало гулянье"—'On this field, during the seventh week after Easter [po semikám], the city's petty bourgeoisie [meshchanstvo] would organize an outdoor celebration [gulyan'e, which the dictionary translates "fête"].' And here's the result of Schneider's valiant struggle with it: "The people of the neighboring town of Semika had laid out part of the field as a sort of park."

Addendum. Gorky talks about a young woman, a cutter's wife, who was always reading (and scorned for it by the rough neighborhood folks); he mentions that she and her husband "were subscribers to the magazine 'Neva,'" and Schneider has a footnote dutifully explaining that this was "a popular magazine that took its name from the river that flows through Leningrad—then, St. Petersburg." Except that the magazine is actually Нива (Niva), 'field of grain.' Oh Izzy, Izzy: how did you get mixed up in this translation business, for which you were so little suited?

Further addendum. At the start of Chapter 14 Gorky mentions the books he read to his fellow workers at an icon shop, one of them being Ivan Vyzhigin, by the historical novelist (and reactionary hack) Faddey Bulgarin. Izzy renders this "Ivan Vyzhigin, the Bulgarian."

But wait, there's more. In Chapter 16, Gorky says "Читаю «Бурсу» Помяловского и тоже удивлен: это странно похоже на жизнь иконописной мастерской": "I read Pomyalovsky's Bursa [i.e., Очерки бурсы, "Seminary Sketches"] and was amazed: it was strangely similar to the life of the icon shop." Except that Schneider, seeing Bursa and thinking of la Bourse, translates it "I read Pomyalovsky's The Stockmarket, and found the operations it depicted startlingly like those in the icon store." ('Stock market' in Russian is биржа [birzha], which comes from French bourse, probably by way of Dutch beurs; бурса [bursa] 'seminary' is, like the French word, from Latin bursa 'bag for money,' via Polish or German.)

THE ESTONIANS.

I'm afraid this doesn't even have any Estonian in it, so it's kind of hard to justify its presence here, except that I figure we can all use a laugh; as Robert Mackey says in his NY Times "Lede" post, which embeds it, "this note-perfect Estonian television ad for an evening news show, which reimagines the opening of 'The Simpsons' set in rural Estonia, is a cult hit on YouTube." (Thanks, Sven!)

Addendum. Trond Engen reminds me that I seem never to have posted about the wonderful Medieval helpdesk video; it's in Norwegian, with English subtitles, so it actually fits in LH without excessive shoehorning. (And as Trond says, "the comment section, as of today, is evidence that anything can be turned into a discussion for or against Nynorsk.")

HOWARD ZINN, RIP.

One of my heroes, Howard Zinn, died recently, and this moving reminiscence by Alice Walker gives me a hook to post about him here:

Coming back to Spelman, I discovered Howard Zinn was teaching a course on Russian History and Literature and a little of the language. I signed up for it, though I was only a sophomore and the course was for juniors (as I recall). I had loved Russian Literature since I discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevsky back in the school library in Putnam County, Georgia. As for the Russian language, as with any language, I most wanted to learn to say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it also. We did. My mother, who earned $17 a week working 12-hour days as a maid, had somehow managed to buy a typewriter for me and I had learned typing in school. I said hardly a word in class (as Howie would later recall), but inspired by his warm and brilliant ability to communicate ideas and conundrums and passions of the characters and complexities of Russian life in the 19th century, I flew back to my room after class and wrote my response to what I was learning about these writers and their stories that I adored. He was proud of my paper, and, in his enthusiastic fashion, waved it about. I learned later there were those among other professors at the school who thought that I could not possibly have written it. His rejoinder: "Why, there’s nobody else in Atlanta who could have written it!"

Thanks, Bonnie!

WAR STORY.

Anatoly sent me to this post from Shkrobius, and the story told there was striking enough I thought I'd translate it here:

Once my mother and I were riding in an overcrowded train. It was Victory Day. The man sitting opposite us looked like a peasant and was crying bitterly, washing his tears down with vodka. Every once in a while he'd break off to tell the same story. I heard it many times and remembered it. Here it is.

During the war he and his sister lost everyone close to them. Their village was destroyed, and they took shelter in another village, in an empty house. They were very hungry, and went from house to house asking for something to eat. Then the sister got sick, and the boy went by himself. They stopped giving him anything. Just when things were getting really bad, a miracle happened: at one of the houses they gave him a piece of pork. The boy ate his fill for the first time in days, and there was enough left for the sister. They were able to hold out for a couple of days more, and then some distant relatives found them and took them to the town where he lived for many years.

On that day he had gone back to the village where the miracle happened, to find the people who had saved his life and thank them, even though he didn't know their names. He got off the train and found a big feast going on in the village. In the middle of the table was a ham, with bottles around it. He sat next to an old man. They drank. The old man looked thoughtfully at the table, then said: "I don't like this holiday. It's hard on me remembering the war, I have a great sin on my soul.

"During the war my son was sick. The doctor said he had to have meat. I sold everything I could and bought a pig. I slaughtered it, but the pig was sick. What could I do? In the village there was an orphan who went around begging. I decided I'd give him a piece, wait a couple of days and see what happened. If the beggar boy survived, I'd give my son the meat. I invited him to have some of the pork. But he didn't survive, he didn't walk around the village any more. We had to throw the meat away. My son died. It's a heavy weight on me that I killed those children."

The man took a swig from the bottle and started the story again.

Now, in the comments at the Shkrobius thread a couple of people said they remembered this story from an old magazine, and one of them found a link: it's Мелкие неприятности ("Little annoyances"), by Pavel Nilin. The plot is close enough that it would be surprising if the two were unrelated; the main difference is that in the Nilin story there is no sick son—the villager tests out the pork on the boy and sees it doesn't kill him; presumably he and his wife eat the rest. Either the fellow Shkrobius and his mother saw in the train (he says in the comment thread that it was in the early 1970s) had read the story (which is dated 1974) and was telling it as his own, or Nilin heard the same guy and made a literary story out of it. Or, of course, it could be coincidence. But the interesting thing is how much more effective the anecdote told by Shkrobius is; the Nilin story, with its careful scene-setting and description of neighbors and so on, just dissipates the power of it.