THE QUESTION BEGS.

I'm fine with the normal use of "begging the question" (see this recent post), and I regularly mock those who insist on the petitio principii sense. But a line from a baseball story in my local paper this morning made me shake my head. It's an AP story; here's the (somewhat longer) version carried in the Louisville Courier-Journal. I was reading along, agreeing with my wife (and many of those quoted) that these celebrations at home plate have gotten out of hand, when I hit the sentence "The question begs: Why go crazy celebrating a victory in late May like it was October?" How do you get from "begging the question" to "the question begs"? My first thought was that it was an invention of the writer, but then I realized that was unlikely, and sure enough, when I googled I found others. Most of the hits are for longer versions, presumably precursors: "the question begs to be asked" and "the question begs to ask" (sic). But a few seem to show this use; in particular, there's an interesting line from "Late for Your Life," a Mary Chapin Carpenter song from an album released in 2001: "Still the question begs why would you wait And be late for your life." This could be taken as a tortured equivalent of "Still there is the question of why...," but it seems more straighforward to take it as "Still the question begs [i.e., must be asked]: why..."

Is anyone familiar with this usage? (I think we can take it as a given that those who don't use it themselves will object strenuously to it, but let's face it, it's just more language change coming over the horizon.)

CHUKOVSKY ON TYNYANOV.

I'm progressing through Chukovsky's Diary, 1901-1969 pari passu with my reading of Russian fiction, and on October 11, 1927 he had some interesting things to say about Tynyanov (see my Kije gripe):

He read his Lieutenant Kizhe. The opening sounds like Leskov, the middle like Gogol, and the end is Dostoevsky. He doesn't quite convey the horror of Kizhe's nonbeing, but his Meletsky and Emperor Paul are marvelous, the language is magnificent, and the work as a whole is a good deal more airy than the Griboedov novel he's slaving away at now. He read me an excerpt from the latter — about how Griboedov was plagued by his own Wit Works Woe — the emptiness, the soullessness, the absence of a knack for fertile foolishness. As I see it, the two subjects — Kizhe and Griboedov — are one, and both are about Tynyanov. To some extent he himself is a Kizhe, as is evidenced by his Heine translation: it lacks the “fluid,” “lyric,” “melodic” qualities that come only to fools. He's got everything else in spades: he is charming in his tiny book-lined flat at his bazaar-stand of a desk amidst pads covered with notes of plans for future works such as novellas about Maiboroda and the dying Heine (Maiboroda is to some extent a Kizhe too); he is charged with creative energy; he's got thousands of themes in his head; he goes on about Sapir and Nekrasov's influence on Polonsky and the film version of Poet and Tsar.

(The Russian is below the cut; Arkady Máiboroda — an odd surname, primarily borne by Ukrainians, whose etymology is not explained by Unbegaun, my usual source for surnames — was an infantry commander who died in 1844.)

I'm just starting the second chapter of his Griboedov novel (which he wound up calling Smert' Vazir-mukhtara, "The death of the vazir-mukhtar [ambassador plenipotentiary]," just one example of the many exoticisms he lards the novel with), so I can't make any judgments yet, but I do feel the force of what Chukovsky says: it is definitely less airy, more clogged, than Kizhe. Which is not to say that I'm not enjoying it.

Читал свою повесть о поручике Киже. Вначале писано по Лескову, в середине по Гоголю, в конце — Достоевский. Ужас от небытия Киже не вытанцевался, но характеристики Павла и Мелецкого — отличные, язык превосходный, и вообще вещь куда воздушнее Грибоедова. Он сейчас мучается над грибоедовским романом. Прочитал мне кусок — о том, как томит Грибоедова собственное Горе от Ума — пустота, бездушие, неспособность к плодородящей глупости, и мне показалось, что обе эти темы — о Киже и о Грибоедове — одинаковы, и обе — о Тынянове. В известном смысле он и сам Киже, это показал его перевод Гейне: в нем нет «влаги», нет «лирики», нет той «песни», которая дается лишь глупому. Но все остальное у него есть в избытке — он очарователен в своей маленькой комнатке, заставленной книгами, за маленьким базарным письменным столом, среди исписанных блокнотов, где намечены планы его будущих вещей: повести о Майбороде и об умирающем Гейне (причем Майборода — в известном смысле тот же Киже), он полон творческого электричества, он откликается на тысячи тем, он говорит о Сапире, о влиянии Некрасова на Полонского, о кинопостановке «Поэта и Царя»

Майборода Аркадий Иванович (ум. 1844), командир Апшеронского пехотного полка
Полонский Яков Петрович (1819-1898), поэт
Сапир Михаил Григорьевич, сотрудник изд-ва «Кубуч»

REGIONAL ACCENTS IN RUSSIAN.

Over at the Log, Mark Liberman has an interesting post about a performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters he saw; as linguistic notes, he mentions Kulygin's ut consecutivum and brings up the issue of accents, saying "a provincial town in the Russia of 1900 — especially one far enough away from the capital that the three sisters would not have gone back for a visit in eleven years — would have had a distinctive regional accent, I think, one that everyone involved would have been quite aware of." I responded:

This is both true and irrelevant. Russian does have regional accents — broadly, northern (in which unstressed o's are clearly pronounced, among other features), southern (in which unstressed o's are pronounced as /a/ or schwa, and g is frequently a pharyngeal fricative, as in Ukrainian), and central (Moscow), which blends the two (basically, southern vowels and northern consonants) — but these accents are not culturally significant. What is significant, in fact essential, is that the speech be "educated": accents in the right places, "correct" grammatical forms, etc. If your speech is educated, you will be accepted as a member of cultured society, and any provincial accent will simply be a clue to one's origin (unless, of course, it is so strong as to seem peasant/uneducated, as with Khrushchev and Gorbachev, among others).

What this means for Chekhov (and Russian literature in general) is that regional accent is pretty much not an issue. There are only three kinds of speech: educated, peasant, and foreign (Germans and people from the Caucasus are frequent targets of mockery in this regard). All of the main characters in this play are educated, even if Natasha is just hanging on by her fingernails, and to give any of them a noticeable accent would (I believe) misrepresent the situation. I've seen a couple of productions in Russian, and I don't remember any such thing.

Does this seem right to the Russians in the house? (I also link to this article by Anne Lounsbery, which is well worth reading if you're interested in "the provinces" in Russian literature.)

SAY IT IN SHANGHAI.

I wrote about Shanghainese here; alas, the site I built that post around seems to have bit the dust long ago (it was truly excellent—I wonder what happened?), but you can get a start on learning the language with a charming set of little video lessons available from China Daily here. Having learned the hard lessons of internet mortality, I expect this won't be around indefinitely, so enjoy it while it's there! (Via jiawen at MetaFilter.)

Note that in the sixth video, we not only learn how to say "the Bund" (the riverfront stretch of the old city) in Shanghainese (na te), we get reinforcement for the fact that the name in English is pronounced as an English word: /bʌnd/, not (as I have heard clueless radio announcers say it) /bund/ (BOOND), as if it were an exotic transliteration. This is because it is from Hindi band (from Persian, ultimately from Avestan *banda-), where we have the Hindi/Urdu "short a" that is pronounced as the central vowel /ʌ/ (as in but). The announcers' error is the same one that makes "Poonjab" out of Punjab (Urdu Panjāb < Persian panj 'five' + āb 'water'), in which the first syllable should be pronounced just like pun.

EXCHANGES: HACKWORK.

eXchanges, "the University of Iowa’s online literary magazine devoted to translation," has a new issue called "Hackwork," featuring Mémoires of Translation by Lawrence Venuti as well as translations from Latin (the Aeneid), Romanian (Dan Sociu), Chamorro (translating Chamorro translations of the Psalms!), and Spanish. I got this, as I get so many interesting links, from wood s lot, whose proprietor is going on a well-deserved vacation for a couple of weeks—bon voyage, Mark, and come back refreshed!

TWO PHANTOM WORDS AND A KIJE GRIPE.

Anatoly has two recent posts about Russian words that have somehow eluded the dictionaries, one a couple of centuries old and the other... newish, but it's impossible to know how new because, well, the dictionaries ignore it. In this post he quotes Vyazemsky as saying of a woman that she had "an excellent mind, was well read and inclined to literature, had an excellent gift for words and a lovely organ [organ]." Anatoly couldn't find the word organ in this sense (apparently meaning 'voice,' to judge by the many other nineteenth-century uses he dug up) in any dictionary, and he's not even sure whether the stress should be on the first syllable (implying a more abstract use parallel to "organ of government" or "organs of the press") or on the second (implying a musical instrument). Remarkably, his commenters turned up printed examples with the accent explicitly marked each way!

In the other post, he remarks on the fact that by far the most common way to say "to censor" in modern Russian, цензурировать [tsenzurirovat'], is not in any dictionary; they give цензуровать [tsenzurovat'], which is hardly used these days by actual speakers, and цензировать [tsenzirovat'] as an archaic variant. He ends with a fully justified complaint that "the tradition of Russian lexicographers is not to track what people actually say and write but rather the artificial and emasculated 'literary norm' that they themselves have made into a law."

Incidentally, I have a complaint of my own; I've already dealt with it, but I'll mention it to get it off my chest. I finished reading Tynyanov's marvelously sly novella Подпоручик Киже ("Second Lieutenant Kizhe," 1927), about identity, power, and language (and its relation to "reality"), and I was horrified on checking the Wikipedia entry (the link is to the old version) to see that not only was it incoherent and misleading but the story it described was that of the wretched 1934 movie, in which all the subtlety and secondary plotlines are ditched in favor of bottom-pinching and other sight gags (and the ending is completely changed). So I sighed and spent a good while revising it; here's the version I created, and here's the basic article link (though hopefully the current version it links to won't diverge too far too fast). I'm not sure why the movie, and thus the Wikipedia article, has him as a first lieutenant (poruchik) instead of Tynyanov's second lieutenant (podporuchik), but such is life in this unstable world.

MADAPOLLAM.

I ran across the odd Russian word мадаполам, looked it up, and found it defined by the equally odd English word madapollam. That wasn't in my smaller dictionaries, but it was in the OED, which revised the entry just last year:

[< Madapollam (Telugu Mādhavayya-pāḷemu encampment, fortified village of Mādhava), the name of a suburb of Narsapur in Andhra Pradesh, India, and formerly the location of one of the commercial agencies of the East India Company. Compare French madapolame (1823).]

More fully Madapollam cloth, Madapollam muslin, etc. A kind of plain-weave calico or cotton cloth, originally manufactured at Madapollam (see above). Cf. LONG CLOTH n.

[1610 S. BRADSHAW Let. Sept. in W. Foster Lett. received by E. India Co. (1896) I. 74 Madafunum is chequered, somewhat fine and well requested.] 1685 in A. T. Pringle Diary Fort St. George 9 Mar. (1895) IV. 49 Mr. Benj^a Northey having brought up Musters of the Madapoll^m Cloth, Itt is thought convenient that the same be taken of him. 1826 Brit. Consular Rep. Lat. Amer. (1940) 189 The British articles best suited to the markets are prints, muslins, madalaporams [sic], and shirtings. 1827 J. B. PENTLAND Rep. Bolivia iv, in Camden Misc. (1974) XXV. 214 British and Indian cotton goods, especially of that kind of glazed calico called Madopolams. 1829 in M. Russell View Anc. & Mod. Egypt (1831) viii. 366 He intends.. to send long-cloths, maddapollans, &c. 1858 P. L. SIMMONDS Dict. Trade Products, Madapollam, a kind of fine long cloth, shipped to the Eastern markets. 1882 S. F. A. CAULFEILD & B. C. SAWARD Dict. Needlework 339/1 Madapolams. A coarse description of calico cloth, of a stiff heavy make, originally of Indian manufacture, where it was employed for Quilts. 1885 Manch. Examiner 31 Dec. 4/4 Buff-end madapollams. 1923 J. CONRAD Rover iii. 46 A remnant piece of Madapolam muslin. 1969 New Scientist 25 Sept. 647/3 They used standard 15x12 inch flags, made of a special cotton cloth called ‘Madapollam’.

The Wikipedia article spells it madapolam, and judging from the OED cites, it's spelled with either one or two l's, according to taste. (If anyone's browser is having trouble with the Telugu name Mādhavayya-pāḷemu, it's Madhavayya-palemu, but the first and last a's have macrons and the l has a dot underneath.)

MARK TWAIN: THE TIME HAS COME.

The time for his autobiography to be published, that is. Twain left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, and the century is finally up; you can read all about it at Guy Adams's story in The Independent. Of course, most of the juicy stuff has been skimmed by biographers and others who have had access to the material over the years, but it will still be good to have the master's "extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography" available in full (in several volumes—the whole thing runs to half a million words!). Apparently it's pretty bitter, but he certainly had a right to be after what he'd seen of the world and of the direction his country was headed, and I like my coffee black, unsweetened, and strong.

Incidentally, the Mark Twain Project Online is worth bookmarking; it "offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents" and its "ultimate purpose is to produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote." Another fine use of the internet.

EGYPTIAN STAMP.

I’ve just finished Mandelstam's novella "Egipetskaya marka" (see this post), and it probably took me longer than any other thirty pages of Russian prose I’ve read—not because the vocabulary was especially difficult (though some of it was) but because it’s very much a poet's prose, and a particularly knotty poet's at that, and it has to be nibbled at rather than gulped, and thought about in between bites. What little plot it has revolves around a Petrograd nebbish named Parnok (one of whose boyhood nicknames was "the Egyptian stamp"), who fails at both the goals he sets himself on a summer day in 1917: to get his morning coat and shirts back from the tailor who had repossessed them for lack of payment, and to save a man from being lynched by a mob. The first story line goes straight back to Gogol and "The Overcoat"; the second is ripped from the headlines of that revolutionary year (see examples in Russian here) but doubtless was intended to carry implications extending into the period of Bolshevik rule. But as always with Mandelstam, it's more about the language and the network of images than the plot.

Clarence Brown, in the introduction to his translation, gives several examples of how words and images beget each other, like the bit in the fifth chapter that begins "The January calendar with its ballet goats, its model dairy of myriad worlds, its crackle of a deck of cards being unwrapped. . . ." He says, "The word 'ballet' appears because this is in the context of talk about Giselle, but it is applied to goats because it refers to the saltant image of a goat which is the tenth [...] sign of the zodiac, Capricorn, covering the period from December 21 to January 20, and represented on the calendar." A few lines later we get "The Petersburg cabby is a myth, a Capricorn. He should be put in the zodiac." If you don't follow his train of thought, the images appear to come out of nowhere. I'll quote (in my own translation) a more extended passage from near the end, in which fear and railroads and prose are all intertwined; among many other things, it's Mandelstam's apologia for the complicated way he writes:

Fear takes me by the hand and leads me. White cotton glove. [Fingerless] mitten. I love, I respect fear. I almost said, "with it nothing frightens me!" Mathematicians should build a tent for fear, because it is the coordinate of time and space; they participate in it, like rolled-up felt in a Kirghiz tent. Fear unharnesses the horses when we have to drive, and sends us dreams with pointlessly low ceilings.

At the beck and call of my consciousness are two or three little words: i vot ['and here'], uzhé ['already'], vdrug ['suddenly']; they rush around on the half-lit Sevastopol train from car to car, lingering on the buffer areas [platforms between cars?], where two thundering frying pans rush at each other and crawl apart.

The railroad has changed the whole course, the whole construction, the whole tempo of our prose, handing it over into the power of the senseless muttering of the French peasant from Anna Karenina. Railroad prose, like the woman's purse of that death-foretelling peasant, is full of coupler's tools, delirious particles, hardware prepositions, which have their place on the table of legal evidence, set loose from any concern for beauty or roundedness.

Yes, there, where hot oil is poured over the meaty levers of locomotives, there she breathes, my darling prose, all set down lengthwise, falsely measuring, the shameless wench, winding on her own predatory yardstick all six hundred and nine Nikolaevsky versts, with little carafes of sweating vodka.

"Six hundred and nine Nikolaevsky versts" represents the railroad line (called Nikolaevsky, for Nikolai I, before the October Revolution and Oktyabrsky, for October, after it) between Moscow and Saint Petersburg (proverbially a distance of 609 versts). As Brown says, "[Mandelstam's] prose could never be submitted as legal evidence in any imaginable court, for its aim is beauty and to be beautifully rounded. Its only testimony is to that ineffable satisfaction that comes when sentences wave like flags and strut like peacocks and roll trippingly off the tongue."

The original Russian:

Страх берет меня за руку и ведет. Белая нитяная перчатка. Митенка. Я люблю, я уважаю страх. Чуть не сказал: «с ним мне не страшно!» Математики должны были построить для страха шатер, потому что он координата времени и пространства: они, как скатанный войлок в киргизской кибитке, участвуют в нем. Страх распрягает лошадей, когда нужно ехать, и посылает нам сны с беспричинно низкими потолками.

На побегушках у моего сознания два-три словечка: «и вот», «уже», «вдруг»; они мотаются полуосвещенным севастопольским поездом из вагона в вагон, задерживаясь на буферных площадках, где наскакивают друг на друга и расползаются две гремящие сковороды.

Железная дорога изменила все течение, все построение, весь такт нашей прозы. Она отдала ее во власть бессмысленному лопотанью французского мужичка из Анны Карениной. Железнодорожная проза, как дамская сумочка этого предсмертного мужичка, полна инструментами сцепщика, бредовыми частичками, скобяными предлогами, которым место на столе судебных улик, развязана от всякой заботы о красоте и округленности.

Да, там, где обливаются горячим маслом мясистые рычаги паровозов, — там дышит она, голубушка проза, — вся пущенная в длину, — обмеривающая, бесстыдная, наматывающая на свой живоглотский аршин все шестьсот девять николаевских верст, с графинчиками запотевшей водки.

ARTAMENE.

Via the latest entry at Pepys' Diary ("then home to my wife, who is not well with her cold, and sat and read a piece of Grand Cyrus in English by her") I learned about what is alleged to be the longest novel ever written ("with the possible exception of Henry Darger's unpublished The Story of the Vivian Girls"), Artamène, or Cyrus the Great, and from the Wikipedia article I got to Artamène.org, which has put the entire novel online. The thought of reading over two million words is daunting, but Artamène.org does it very cleverly; they point out that consecutive solitary reading, such as we are used to, was not the norm in Madeleine de Scudéry's day, and the novel was expected to be read aloud in company, "a piece" at a time (as Sam is doing with his wife), and they present the text thus:

L'accès au texte du roman, ainsi qu'aux illustrations d'époque, est possible à tout moment par le biais de la rubrique "Texte" dans la barre de menu de gauche. Il suffit de sélectionner la subdivision désirée (Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus est divisé en dix parties contenant chacune trois livres). Apparaît alors, « par défaut », un résumé de premier niveau. Un clic sur l’un des paragraphes de ce texte permet d’accéder à un résumé de second niveau. Un nouveau clic sur l’un des paragraphes de cette seconde série donne ensuite accès au texte du roman, présenté dans une version respectant la graphie et la pagination de l'édition de 1656, mais renumérotée en continu par nos soins.

In other words, you go to the Synopsis page, where you get a first-level summary; you click on whichever section interests you and get a more detailed second-level summary; then, when you click on a section of that, you get the actual text of the novel. It's a brilliant solution, if you ask me.

COMPARING ONLINE TRANSLATORS.

Ethan Shen has done a research project comparing the three major free translation engines available online; here are his results to date:

This paper evaluates the relative quality of three popular online translation tools: Google Translate, Bing (Microsoft) Translator, and Yahoo Babelfish. The results published below are based on a 6 week survey open to the general internet population which allowed survey takers to choose any language, enter any free-form text, and vote on the best of all translation results side-by-side (www.gabble-on.com/compare-translators). The final data reveals that while Google Translate is widely preferred when translating long passages, Microsoft Bing Translator and Yahoo Babelfish often produce better translations for phrases below 140 characters. Also, in general Babelfish performs well in East Asian Languages such as Chinese and Korean and Bing Translator performs well in Spanish, German, and Italian.

Below Figure 1, showing the comparisons in detail, come some interesting results like this:

The extent of Google’s lead varies dramatically from language to language. In some languages such as French, the strength of Google Translate’s engine is overwhelming. However, in several others like German, Italian, and Portuguese, Google holds only a very slim lead when compared to its biggest competitors....

One possible explanation is that large additional bodies of parallel English-French text are available from the government of Canada for which are official documents are translated into both.

Interesting stuff, and I'll have to give Bing a try.

ANDERMANIR SHTUK.

That odd phrase is the title of a new novel by Evgeny Klyuev (Russian Wikipedia) mentioned in Lisa Hayden Espenschade's latest post at Lizok's Bookshelf, a typically informative list of the 2010 Big Book award finalists, with commentary. The one that is most immediately appealing to me is Oleg Zaionchkovsky's Счастье возможно: Роман нашего времени (Happiness is possible: a novel of our time), but unquestionably the most intriguing title is carried by the book Lisa lists as "Evgenii Kliuev – Андерманир штук (Something Else for You – (?) I found a translation of the Russian title phrase in this article by Catriona Kelly)." The Kelly article is behind a paywall, so I tried Google Books on the phrase and got hits like "А вот, извольте посмотреть, андерманир штук — другой вид" [And here, if you'll be so kind as to look, andermanir shtuk — another view]; "А вот, извольте видеть, господа, андерманир штук хороший вид, город Кострома горит, у забора мужик стоит" [And here, see, if you would, andermanir shtuk, a good view, the city of Kostroma is burning, a peasant is standing by the fence]; "А вот андерманир-штук — Бонапарт на тулуп меняет сюртук со стужи да кушак подтянул потуже" [And here's andermanir shtuk — Bonaparte is exchanging his frock coat for a sheepskin coat because it's cold, and pulling the belt tighter]. As I wrote in Lisa's comment section, I presume it's from German, something like anderer Manier Stück "another sort of thing" (which is not actual German, but some Russian must have invented it on the basis of whatever the real German phrase is).

From the same Lizok post I learn that Jamie Olson, who translates Russian poetry into English and teaches in the English Department at Saint Martin’s University, has started a blog about Russian poetry, The Flaxen Wave. It looks promising, and I expect to be checking in on it regularly.

CHUKOVSKY VI.

I'm still reading Chukovsky's Diary, 1901-1969 (see this post), and I've come across a couple of short, striking passages I wanted to share. (Russian below the cut.) On endings:

Amazing! English writers don't know how to end their works. The best of them turn to the most shameful commonplaces. They start off brilliantly, all fresh energy and muscles, but the ending is trivial, cobbled together from cliches. I've just finished Far from the Madding Crowd. Who would have expected Thomas Hardy to turn into such a vulgarian! Everything is perfectly predictable: one villain ends up in prison, another in the grave, and the third, the hero, after the requisite anxieties and impediments ends up in the arms of Bathsheba, the woman he was meant to marry.

And on plagiarism:

[Sologub] had a playful way of talking about his plagiarisms. "[Aleksandr] Redko found a passage I'd plagiarized from a trashy French novel and printed it en regard. All that proves is that he reads trashy French novels. What he didn't notice was that at nearly the same spot I'd cribbed five or so pages from George Eliot. Which proves that he doesn't read serious literature."

I disapprove of plagiarism, but that's pretty funny.

Изумительно: английские писатели не умеют кончать. Лучшие из них — к концу сбиваются на позорную пошлость. Начинают они превосходно — энергично, свежо, мускулисто, а конец у них тривиальный, сфабрикованный по готовому штампу. Я только что закончил «Far from the Madding Crowd»,— кто мог ожидать, что даже Томас Гарди окажется таким пошляком! Все как по-писаному: один неподходящий мужчина в тюрьме, другой — в могиле, а третий, самый лучший, после всех препон и треволнений женится, наконец, на уготованной ему Батшибе.

* * *

Очень игриво говорил он о своих плагиатах. «Редько,— говорил он,— отыскал у меня плагиат из дрянного французского романа и напечатал en regard*. Это только показывает, что он читает плохие французские романы. А между тем у меня чуть ли не на той же странице плагиат из Джордж Элиот, я так и скатал страниц пять,— и он не заметил. Это показывает, что серьезной литературы он не знает».

EGIPETSKAYA MARKA COMMENTARY.

I'm now reading Mandelstam's dense 1927 novella "Egipetskaya marka" ("The Egyptian stamp"), and in trying to look up the odd word финолинка [finolinka], evidently a sort of night light (which turns out to occur only here in all of Russian literature), I ran across this LJ site, dedicated to a line-by-line analysis of the story. (It began in April 2009 with a post about the title and is now nearing the end of section 5; here's the archive for 2009, and you can click on the link at the top to get to 2010.) In the post relevant to my search, it is suggested that финолинка is a distortion of филаменка [filamenka] 'filament lamp.' The site is going to be very useful to me, as it would be to anyone engaging with the story in Russian, and I thank Alik Manov for maintaining it.

Incidentally, the story is available in English in the excellent collection The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, edited and translated by Clarence Brown; "The Noise of Time" (Shum vremeni), Mandelstam's quasi-autobiography (comparable to Nabokov's Speak, Memory), is one of the classics of Russian literature.

FANBOY.

Those of you who spend any time on sites where technology is discussed will doubtless be familiar with the term fanboy, meaning 'someone so emotionally attached to a tech product or company that any perceived attack will send them into a defensive frenzy.' (The company involved is frequently Apple, for doubtless complicated historical reasons that I'm happy to say I'm ignorant of.) Harry McCracken of Technologizer has done some digging and come up with Fanboy! The Strange True Story of the Tech World's Favorite Put-Down, and since I always enjoy a good etymological investigation, I'm sharing it here. The gist of it is that although the OED has a cite from 1919 (Decatur Rev. 2 Oct. 6/2 "It was a shock to the fan boys when Cincinnati.. beat the Chicago White Sox"), its current use dates from a 1973 fanzine created by "two fans who took Marvel Comics, the work of Frank Frazetta, and other matters a wee bit too seriously," called Fanboy. McCracken also points out that the Merriam-Webster definition, "a boy who is an enthusiastic devotee (as of comics or movies)," is incorrect, since a fanboy is not necessarily a boy (the OED has it right: "a male fan (in later use chiefly of comics, film, music, or science fiction), esp. an obsessive one"). Don't miss the comment by Jack, who points out that McCracken has overemphasized the priority of the fanzine and has other sensible things to say ("All language is spoken. The written word is the extremely temporary capturing of language"). Hat tip to Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org.

MASTDAIT.

The Macmillan Dictionary Blog has a guest post by Yuliya Melnyk called "The influence of English on the Russian language"; it's short and pretty superficial, but this struck me: "Many words are produced in Russian slang every day; they have English roots and Russian affixes, e.g.: mastdait, which means ‘criticize’, comes from English must die..." I'm sure glad she told me, because I don't think I'd ever have figured that out if I saw мастдаить in the wild. It seems it can be used intransitively as well, because one Google hit has "Ну как, рулит или мастдаит?" which seems to mean "So, does it rule or suck?" Are my Russian-speaking readers familiar with this oddly formed loan word? (Thanks for the link, Stan!)

GOAT SONG.

I wrote briefly about Konstantin Vaginov here, and since I'm currently engaged in reading Soviet works from 1927, I've finally gotten around to his magnum opus, the novel Goat Song (Козлиная песнь). I must say, I'm disappointed. Among other things, it's apparently a roman à clef about the circle around Bakhtin in mid-1920s Leningrad, and I'm sure if you were part of that circle or knew people who were (which in the incestuous intellectual world of early Soviet Leningrad was everybody who was anybody), it was a lot of fun to read, just as I enjoy reading a short story written by a friend of mine a quarter century ago about the circle I hung out with in NYC. But for me, much of it was a fairly tedious dip into what I suppose must be called early postmodernism, with a lot of ostentatious intertextuality and toying with the puppets the author has created as characters. Of course, I may simply not have been in the mood for it, and I'll probably give it another try someday. At the moment, however, I'm very much looking forward to the next items on the agenda, Mandelstam's "Египетская марка" ("The Egyptian Stamp") and Tynyanov's "Подпоручик Киже" ("Lieutenant Kizhe"). Then some Zoshchenko, and on to 1928: Vremya, vperyod!

PALE FIRE: A GRIPE.

This Ask MetaFilter thread has made me grumpy, and I trust you'll forgive me if I vent a bit here. Before I do, I will state for the record that Pale Fire is a wonderful book and I'm glad Nabokov wrote it. But, as with Pachelbel's Canon, I'm starting to want never to hear of it again.

The thread starts with the perfectly good question "What's the next Nabokov book for my book group? Not Pnin, Lolita, or Ada." The first half dozen responses are an interestingly varied lot: people suggest Bend Sinister, Laughter in the Dark, Invitation to a Beheading, Lectures on Don Quixote, and Despair. Then comes the fateful suggestion of Pale Fire, and suddenly everybody and his brother is chiming in: "Pale Fire ++. My all time number one," "I'm nthing Pale Fire. It's really fantastic," "Pale Fire is my favorite book in the world," "Pale Fire for sure," "Pale Fire is excellent and fun," "I'm all about the Pale Fire"....

Now, the gimmick of the novel is that it consists of a series of extended annotations to a longish poem, and if you put the annotations together with the chatty index you can work out the actual story, as opposed to the nutty and self-serving one the annotator is trying to tell. It's loads of fun, and I have no objection to anyone enjoying it; I certainly did. But it's essentially a gimmick, and to mistake the enjoyment of working out a gimmick for the enjoyment of reading a great novel irritates me.

Furthermore, I have read too many blorts of enthusiasm about the poem that is at the heart of the novel; it's true nobody in the MeFi thread has mentioned it, but I'm getting all my gripes off my chest here, so I'm going to announce that I don't think it's a very good poem. It's clever, of course, and well phrased—this is Nabokov we're talking about—but Nabokov was not essentially a poet; he wrote a few genuinely good poems in Russian (and a couple of excellent translations into English before he decided readable translations were a bad thing), but here he is simply providing a plausible MacGuffin for his crazed-annotator plot. (I hope and trust he would agree with me.) To mistake a MacGuffin for a real poem, let alone a great one, irritates me even more.

So there you have it. Pale Fire: enjoyable, but in my opinion second-rank Nabokov. Which is better than 95% of everything else, of course, but I still don't like seeing it waved onto the victor's podium by popular acclamation. If this be elitism, call me Cincinnatus C. and sentence me to death for gnostical turpitude.

I'M(N)A GET.

Several years ago Mark Liberman had a Log post investigating the contraction I'ma for I'm going to; today he has an update in which he reproduces a snippet of Art Blakey introducing his musicians from the famous "Night at Birdland" recording of February 1954 with a quintet that was a forerunner of the Jazz Messengers he was to lead for over three decades, one of the most influential groups in the history of American music. Here's how Mark transcribes it: "Yes, sir, I'ma stay with the youngsters. When these get too old, I'ma get some younger ones." What I (like others in the comment thread) hear in the second sentence, however, is "I'mna"—i.e., a reduced "I'm gonna," a different form. Listen to the clips at the Log and see what you think; theoretical issues hang on it!

On a non-linguistic note, I will add that the "youngsters" were Horace Silver on piano, Curly Russell on bass, Lou Donaldson on alto sax, and the immortal (though dead too young) Clifford Brown on trumpet. It doesn't get much better than that, and I urge anyone with any interest in jazz to get this wonderful two-disc set (Vol. 1, Vol. 2).

BEDSIDE LANGUAGE BOOKS.

Nothing earthshaking in this Economist column by Robert Lane Greene, but it's nice to see Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage getting some love in such a respected venue. Thanks, Kattullus!

ENVY.

For the last couple of weeks I've been reading Yuri Olesha's masterpiece Zavist' (Russian text), translated into English as Envy (Wikipedia, plot summary), and I understand why Nabokov called it the greatest novel produced in the Soviet Union—not only because it is in fact great, but because it's Nabokovian in a way hardly any Soviet writing is, with a focus on language and imagery that is sometimes amazingly reminiscent of Olesha's coeval (both men were born in 1899, less than two months apart). There has been much written about other aspects of the novel (for a well-written analysis of Olesha's man-centered artistic world, along with those of Babel and Platonov, I recommend Eliot Borenstein's Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929), but I want to limit myself to some bits of prose that made me sit up straight and reread them, and that I'm sure Nabokov loved as well. The (inadequate) translations are mine; the Russian is below the cut, along with a couple of perhaps enlightening quotes. Here I'll just mention that according to Irina Ozyornaya, the Olesha archive contains more than two thousand pages of drafts for Envy; Olesha had worked on the novel for five years, and he said there had been 300 versions of the first page.

Transparent and quivering, like the elytra of an insect, the name of Lilienthal from my childhood years had a marvelous sound to me... That name, flying as if stretched on light bamboo laths, was linked in my memory with the beginning of aviation. The fluttering, gliding Otto Lilienthal was killed. Flying machines no longer resembled birds. Light wings with yellow shining through were exchanged for flippers. You could believe that they beat against the ground on takeoff. At any rate, on takeoff the dust springs up. The flying machine now resembles a heavy fish. How quickly aviation has become industry.

* * *

On the corner a little group of people were listening to the peal of the church bells. They were ringing the bells of a church invisible from the balcony. This church is renowned for its bell-ringer. The gawkers craned their necks. To them the work of the well-known bell-ringer was visible. [...]

I listened from the balcony.

— Tom-vir-lir-li! Tom-vir-lir-li! Tom-vir-lir-li!

Tom Virlirli. Some Tom Virlirli was hovering in the air.

Tom Virlirli,
Tom with a knapsack,
Tom Virlirli, young Tom!

The disheveled bell-ringer set many of my mornings to music. Tom was the toll of the big bell, the big cauldron. Virlirli was the little plates, the cymbals.

Tom Virlirli penetrated me on one of those fine mornings I met with under that roof. A musical phrase turned itself into a verbal one. I pictured vividly to myself this Tom.

A youth, viewing the city. Unknown to all, the youth had come already, is already near, already sees the city that sleeps, suspecting nothing. The morning mist is just dispersing. The city swirls in its valley like a green, glimmering cloud. Tom Virlirli, smiling and pressing his hand to his heart, looks at the city, seeking people he knows in the childish pictures formed by their outlines.

The youth has a pack on his back.

He can do everything.

He is the very arrogance of youth, the very secretness of proud dreams.

Days pass—and soon (not many times will the sun's reflection leap from the doorjamb into the other room) the boys, themselves dreaming of passing in just such a way, with a pack on their back, along the suburbs of the city, the suburbs of glory, will sing a little song of the man who did whatever he wanted to do:

Tom Virlirli,
Tom with a knapsack,
Tom Virlirli, young Tom!

* * *

A huge cloud with the outlines of South America stood over the city. It shone, but its shadow was menacing. The shadow with astronomical slowness approached Babichev's street.

Everyone who had already set foot in the mouth of that street and walked against the current saw the movement of the shadow; their eyes were darkened; it took the ground from under their feet. They walked as if on a turning sphere.

That's just a tiny sample, all from the first part of the book; I may translate more in another post. Here are a couple of facts and a couple of scholarly quotes, followed by the original Russian:

In the 1920s, Olesha wrote for Gudok (The Whistle), a newspaper for railway workers, which also published Bulgakov, Isaak Babel, and Ilf & Petrov.

In the third chaper, Olesha quotes (or rather slightly misquotes) a stanza by Nikolai Gumilyov, who had been shot for alleged counterrevolutionary activities only a few years before.

"Olesha explains that he did not write according to a plan but constructed the novel like a bridge laid on the piers of remembered images and phrases: 'Someone's extended arm. The appearance of a tall figure in the bright rectangle of a door.'" Rimgaila Salys, Olesha's Envy: A Critical Companion, p. 7.

"Olesha takes what is usually conceived of as ornamental and makes it central." Victor Peppard, The Poetics of Yury Olesha (University Press of Florida, 1989), p. 36.

Сквозное, трепещущее, как надкрылья насекомого, имя Лилиенталя с детских лет звучит для меня чудесно... Летательное, точно растянутое на легкие бамбуковые планки, имя это связано в моей памяти с началом авиации. Порхающий человек Отто Лилиенталь убился. Летательные машины перестали быть похожими на птиц. Легкие, просвечивающие желтизной крылья заменились ластами. Можно поверить, что они бьются по земле при подъеме. Во всяком случае, при подъеме вздымается пыль. Летательная машина похожа теперь на тяжелую рыбу. Как быстро авиация стала промышленностью.

* * *

На углу кучка людей слушала церковный звон. Звонили в
невидимой с балкона церкви. Эта церковь славится звонарем.
Зеваки задирали головы. Им была видна работа знаменитого
звонаря. [...]

Я слушал с балкона.

- Том-вир-лир-ли! Том-вир-лир-ли! Том-вир-лир-ли! Том
Вирлирли. Некий Том Вирлирли реял в воздухе.

Том Вирлирли,
Том с котомкой,
Том Вирлирли молодой!

Всклоченный звонарь переложил на музыку многие мои утра. Том
- удар большого колокола, большого котла. Вирлирли - мелкие
тарелочки.

Том Вирлирли проник в меня в одно из прекрасных утр,
встреченных мною под этим кровом. Музыкальная фраза
превратилась в словесную. Я живоH представлял себе этого Тома.

Юноша, озирающий город. Никому не известный юноша уже пришел,
уже близок, уже видит город, который спит, ничего не
подозревает. Утренний туман только рассеивается. Город
клубится в долине зеленым мерцающим облаком. Том Вирлирли,
улыбаясь и прижимая руку к сердцу, смотрит на город, ища
знакомых по детским картинкам очертаний.

Котомка за спиной юноши.

Он сделает все.

Он - это само высокомерие юности, сама затаенность гордых
мечтаний.

Пройдут дни - и скоро (не много раз перескочит солнечный
зайчик с косяка в другую комнату) мальчики, сами мечтающие о
том, чтоб так же, с котомкой за спиной, пройти в майское утро
по предместьям города, по предместьям славы, будут распевать
песенку о человеке, который сделал то, что хотел сделать:

Том Вирлирли,
Том с котомкой,
Том Вирлирли молодой!

* * *

Огромное облако с очертаниями Южной Америки стояло над
городом. Оно блистало, но тень от него была грозной. Тень
астрономически медленно надвигалась на бабичевскую улицу.

Все, которые вступили уже в устье той улицы и шли против
течения, видели движения тени, у них темнело в глазах, она
отнимала у них почву из-под ног. Они шли как бы по
вращающемуся шару.

ALEXANDER VELTMAN.

Having spent the better part of two days creating this Wikipedia article, and having worked harder on it than on most of my college papers, I'm damn well going to post it here. This guy was pretty much forgotten by the time he died and has never had a revival, only a few lonely voices raised in his defense (the usually reliable D.S. Mirsky gave him the wrong first name, rendered his last name as "Weltmann," and was off by ten years in his death date), but he was extremely popular in his heyday, he was one of the pioneers of Russian science fiction and wrote what may have been the first time travel novel anywhere, Predki Kalimerosa [The forebears of Kalimeros] (1836), both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky praised him (his Serdtse i dumka [Heart and head, 1838] was one of Dostoevsky's favorite novels), and I say he deserves to be better known. As far as I know, the only translation into English is A. F. Veltman, Selected Stories, ed. and trans. James J. Gebhard (Northwestern University Press, 1998), which I've just ordered; somebody should translate Strannik or Koshchei bessmertny. And if anybody knows how to upload the image from the Russian article into mine, that would be great, and I thank you in advance.

For those who read Russian, here's the original of the Bukhshtab quote I open the Reputation section with: "В истории русской литературы нет другого писателя, который, обладая в свое время такой популярностью, как Вельтман, так быстро достиг бы полного забвенья."

SEARCHING STYLEBOOKS ONLINE.

I was going to post about Yury Olesha's great novel Envy, which I just finished reading in Russian, but I got distracted by creating a long Wikipedia article about an unjustly forgotten Russian writer and didn't finish that either, so I'm just going to refer you to Mark Liberman's Log post about a site where you can search 43 different stylebooks at once, OnlineStylebooks.com, and totter off to bed.

Addendum. While I'm at it, I trust everyone knows about OneLook Dictionary Search?

SAVING JUHURI.

I know, I get tired of the "saving dying languages" trope too, it's a worthy activity but the stories all run together after a while. And yet I found Shany Littman's Haaretz article on Juhuri (Judeo-Tat, spoken by the so-called Mountain Jews) in Israel interesting enough to want to pass it on; I guess I'm a sucker for the minority languages of the Caucasus. The article focuses on the Theater of the Eastern Caucasus, "the only theater in the world that stages plays in the Juhuri language," which was founded in 1923 in Derbent and has been operating in Israel since 2001, but it has a good discussion of the history of the language:

According to a tradition prevalent in the community, the Jews of the Caucasus are descendants of tribes exiled from the Kingdom of Judea after the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple. They settled in Persia, where they acquired one of the dialects of Persian, at the same time preserving a considerable vocabulary of Hebrew words. When the Persian rulers wished to strengthen the northern borders of the empire, they resettled these Jewish tribes in the Caucasus.

Until the 20th century, Juhuri was used mainly as the everyday spoken language.... When the members of the community began using Juhuri as a written language, they used Hebrew letters similar to Rashi script (a semi-cursive typeface for Hebrew used by early typographers). The first two books printed in Juhuri in Hebrew script - a prayer book and a book about Zionism - were published in 1908 and 1909, respectively.... In the mid-19th century, Russia annexed the region, and the Russian language began to spread in the Caucasus.... But only after the communist revolution did the mass transition from Juhuri to Russian begin....

[Poet Boris] Hanukayev says that during his childhood there was a very rich cultural life in Derbent conducted in Juhuri, even under the communist regime."There were kolkhozes [collective farms] where almost the entire population was Jewish. They had theaters and musical troupes that performed in Juhuri," he explains. "These plays were usually related to Persian folklore, because for the Jews, the high culture was Persian and Azeri, not Hebrew. We were not familiar with [Hebrew poets Haim Nahman] Bialik and [Shaul] Tchernikovsky. The authors we read were Yono (Yona) Semyonov, whose language was very rich and peppered with Hebrew words and expressions borrowed from the holy tongue, Mishi (Moshe) Bakhshiyev, who wrote prose and poetry, Hizghil (Yehezkel) Avshalumov, who wrote prose and satirical and humorous plays, Sergei Yezgayev, a poet and a philosopher, and Danil Atnilov, who was a poet with a surprising and subversive vision."

There's a lot more fascinating material in the article, and someone should write a book about these people if there isn't one already. Thanks for the link, A S!

ROBIN HOOD IN SOVIET RUSSIA.

I'm reading an excellent history of Soviet culture in (primarily) the 1920s, Katerina Clark's Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, and I just got to this discussion of a feature of mid-'20s Soviet life hitherto unknown to me:

The masses were not going to the very cultural institutions which, in theory, the Revolution had freed them to enjoy. The highbrow theater was perilously underattended and, as surveys at the time established, people weren't even going to the workers' theaters or reading proletarian literature (Cement's popularity, anomalous in those days, was undoubtedly a factor in its official endorsement). The bogeyman of intellectuals, proletarian culture, really represented a small fraction of cultural production at this point, and an even smaller percentage of cultural consumption. Everyone was watching American films.

Nineteen twenty-five was not only the year of Cement and Potemkin, but also the year when such films by Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood, The Thief of Baghdad, and other Hollywood versions of the exotic adventure movie absolutely dominated the Soviet screen. The overwhelming majority of the new films shown at this time were from the United States, outnumbering even Soviet productions four to one. Fairbanks and his actress wife Mary Pickford — the king and queen of the Western public — were the heartthrobs of the Russian populace, and when they visited Moscow in 1926 they were virtually mauled by frenzied mobs of fans.

Such Western films represented to many of those in authority the filthiest of that muck in the "Augean stable" which an enlightened Soviet government had to clean out. Reviewers of Fairbanks' films were generally quick to point out the misguided representation of class relations in his historical romances. Yet Soviet movie houses continued to show Western films....

Such ambiguous actions on the part of the state in regard to the "Augean stable" are patent in perusing any issue of the journal the Life of Art from 1925. Frequently, on the front cover of a given issue would be a photo of Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, or some other Hollywood star, usually from his or her latest movie. Then, immediately inside the cover, the editorial would rail against this kind of art, and call for cleaning up the cinemas and producing healthy, proletarian art. The ensuing pages would more or less continue the theme, but the supplement at the end frequently carried movie chitchat about the latest exploits of the exotic Hollywood stars, and possibly of emigre figures such as Anna Pavlova and Chaliapin as well. Clearly, the journal had to sell, and material about the Hollywood stars would ensure that they did just that.

Life of Art (Zhizn' iskusstva) was the leading Leningrad cultural and theatrical journal, in this incarnation running from 1923 to 1929.

PEH-OE-JI.

I had occasion a while back to consult the Wikipedia article for Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), a system of orthography used to write Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien, and was disappointed: it was sloppy and incomplete. I just revisited it and found it had been thoroughly overhauled by user Taiwantaffy, and is now as thorough a treatment as one could hope to find. A brief overview:

Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified latin alphabet together with some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan, and in the mid-twentieth century there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the Taiwan Church News.

The orthography was suppressed during the Japanese era in Taiwan, and faced further countermeasures during the Kuomintang martial law period. In Fujian use declined after the establishment of the People's Republic of China and today the system is not in general use there. Use of Pe̍h-ōe-jī is now restricted to some Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of the language, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan. Full native computer support arrived in 2004, and users can now call on fonts, input methods, and extensive online dictionaries.

As for the name, "Pe̍h-ōe-jī ... literally means vernacular writing, i.e. written characters (Chinese: 字; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: jī) representing everyday spoken language (simplified Chinese: 白话; traditional Chinese: 白話; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: pe̍h-ōe)." You can even hear it pronounced (click on "listen" in the first line). A splendid job.

SORTING BOOKS BY COLOR.

A few years ago, in the course of a post on how to sort books, I said, "There are in fact people who arrange books by color" (alas, the link is now dead); I discover from a comment by Doctor Science in this Log thread (for a post in which Pullum answers the eternal question "What does Kreisoppa Tebberley mean?") that the New England Law Library has a search function called "Well, Its Red" that actually allows you to look for a book based on its color. I could have used that back in my bookstore-worker days.

READING IN A DIGITAL AGE.

Sven Birkerts has an article in The American Scholar that's long but well worth reading. It starts off as if it's going to be a typical kids-today rant ("In class they sit with their laptops open on the table in front of them...."), but once he gets onto the idea of narrative it picks up steam:

The idea of “narrative creation” carries a great deal in its train. For narrative—story—is not the same thing as simple sequentiality. To say “I went here and then here and then did this and then did that” is not narrative, at least not in the sense that I’m sure [David] Linden intends. No, narration is sequence that claims significance. Animals, for example, do not narrate, even though they are well aware of sequence and of the consequences of actions. “My master has picked up my bowl and has gone with it into that room; he will return with my food.” This is a chain of events linked by a causal expectation, but it stops there. Human narratives are events and descriptions selected and arranged for meaning.

The question, as always, is one of origins. Did man invent narrative or, owing to whatever predispositions in his makeup, inherit it? Is coming into human consciousness also a coming into narrative—is it part of the nature of human consciousness to seek and create narrative, which is to say meaning? What would it mean then that chemicals in combination created meaning, or the idea of meaning, or the tools with which meaning is sought—created that by which their own structure and operation was theorized and questioned? If that were true, then “mere matter” would have to be defined as having as one of its possibilities that of regarding itself.

We assume that logical thought, syllogistic analytical reason, is the necessary, right thought—and we do so because this same thought leads us to think this way. No exit, it seems. Except that logical thought will allow that there may be other logics, though it cannot explicate them. Another quote from the Harper’s article, this from Greenberg: “As a neuroscientist will no doubt someday discover, metaphor is something that the brain does when complexity renders it incapable of thinking straight.”

He goes on to "the idea that contemplative thought is endangered" and the thought that "the novel is the vital antidote to the mentality that the Internet promotes" and discusses Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, proceeding to a meditation on "aesthetic bliss":

What thou lovest well remains—and for me it is language in this condition of alert, sensuous precision, language that does not forget the world of nouns. I’m thinking that one part of this project will need to be a close reading of and reflection upon certain passages that are for me certifiably great. I have to find occasion to ask—and examine closely—what happens when a string of words gets something exactly right.

I'm sure everyone who reads it will find things to disagree with, but I found it stimulating and I wanted to share it.

THE LITTLE GRASS IS SLEEPING.

I confess that my inner twelve-year-old never gets tired of stories about Chinglish that mention "such delectables as 'fried enema,' 'monolithic tree mushroom stem squid' and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as 'The Jew’s Ear Juice," but I probably wouldn't post the Andrew Jacobs story "Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish" in the NY Times if it were just the usual superficial collection of laugh lines. However, Jacobs has taken the trouble to interview actual experts like Victor H. Mair, whose occasional essays at the Log are always readable and enlightening. And I very much like the examples in this passage:

Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation at Shanghai International Studies University who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”

He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”

Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.

Ah well, such are the casualties of progress. Thanks for the link, Bonnie and Jill!

GOOGLE TRANSLATE.

I've been reluctantly impressed with the results Google Translate (Wikipedia) gives me (reluctantly because my default assumption has long been that automatic translation is No Damn Good), and I was interested to read a couple of pieces about it online. Here is Mark Phillips at NPR's All Tech Considered, and here is a longer piece by Philip Bethge at Der Spiegel (translated from the German by Christopher Sultan, an actual human). Thanks, Sven!

MY LETTER TO THE TIMES.

The first letter I've ever written to the NY Times Book Review was published today, exactly as I wrote it (except that they added a paragraph break and a hyperlink); the link goes to the published version, and here's what I sent them:

To the Editor:

I enjoy Elif Batuman's writing and her take on Russian literature, but
I have a couple of bones to pick with her review of Olga Grushin's
"The Line" (April 18) She mentions its "resonance with earlier
literary works," but ignores the work most likely to occur to a
Russian reader, Vladimir Sorokin's first novel, whose title Sally
Laird translated as "The Queue" but which could equally well be
rendered "The Line." Elaine Blair wrote that it "is set in an
enormous line that forms one summer afternoon in the 1980s in Moscow,
a line that about 2,000 people eventually join, over the course of two
days, in order to have a chance to buy--something. It's never entirely
clear what they're so eager to buy." I'm pretty sure Sorokin is more
relevant here than Platonov.

And Batuman ends her review by saying the book reminds the reader of
Nabokov: "maybe still the early, Russian Nabokov, not quite the one we
love yet, but nonetheless a writer of tremendous talent and promise."
Speak for yourself! I have read Nabokov in both Russian and English,
and I assure those who can't do so that his best Russian work,
especially "Dar" ("The Gift"), which I, like others, consider one of
the great novels of the twentieth century, is at least the equal of
"Lolita" or "Pale Fire," and I personally love it more -- the wordplay
is less obtrusive in his native language, the characters are utterly
real, and the author poured into it all his deep understanding of the
history of Russian literature. Nabokov's early poems have "promise";
his stories and novels of the 1930s are full-fledged masterpieces.

Stephen Dodson
Hadley, Mass.

I hope Ms. Batuman isn't too annoyed; I really do like her writing, as I've said here, but I couldn't let the slight to Nabokov's Russian work go unanswered.

ARE YOU FALLING?

I'm reading Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" in the latest New Yorker (abstract here), about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova for murder (she allegedly paid Mikhail Mallayev to kill her husband), and this passage struck me for obvious reasons:

The fourth week of the trial had produced an arresting illustration of the malleability of trial evidence. During a police search of Borukhova's apartment, an audiotape had been found and seized. It was a garbled, fragmentary, almost inaudible recording of a conversation between Borukhova and Mallayev, speaking in Bukhori and Russian. The conversation had taken place in May of 2007—five months before the murder. The prosecution had asked an F.B.I. translator named Mansur Alyadinov to make an English translation and called him to the courtroom to read from his text as the tape was played. The conversation had been secretly recorded by Borukhova during a ride in a car. But what was being discussed was not a murder plot. The tape recorded one of those irritatingly banal conversations which we helplessly overhear on trains and in restaurants from people talking on cell phones. The fragments of boring dialogue that came through had no relevance to the case. Why, then, was Leventhal [the lead prosecutor] playing the tape to the jury? The reason became apparent in the final two lines. The courtroom suddenly awakened from its torpor as it heard Mallayev say to Borukhova, "Are you going to make me happy?" And Borukhova replied, "Yes."

One can imagine the translator's own happiness when he heard those lines—and Leventhal's when he read them in the transcript. Two interpretations immediately present themselves—both damning. The first is that Mallayev was sleeping with Borukhova and asking about a future encounter. The second is that Mallayev was talking about money—was she going to make him happy by giving him money to murder her husband? In either case, it looked bad for Borukhova. However, when Scaring [Borukhova's attorney] cross-examined Alyadinov it began to look less bad. This is the idea and the beauty of the cross-examination. A successful cross-examination is like a turn of the roulette wheel that restores a lost fortune. First, citing a translation that Borukhova had made for him, Scaring got the F.B.I. translator to concede that, among other blunders, he had omitted the English words "Mother's Day" from his text, and that a mystifying discussion of a "crazy house" was actually a discussion of the madhouse that the airport was on the day—Mother's Day—that Mallayev travelled to New York from his home, in Chamblee, Georgia. Then Scaring took care of "Are you going to make me happy?" In Borukhova's translation, what Mallayev had said was "Are you getting off?" The car had reached its destination. He had used the word padayesh [падаешь]—literally meaning "Are you falling?"—in an idiomatic sense to ask if she was getting out of the car. The translator had heard padayesh as obraduyesh [обрадуешь] ("Are you going to make me happy?"). The mistake was understandable: on a very hard-to-hear tape the word could easily be misheard. But that the mishearing so favored the prosecution, that it so well advanced the narrative of an unsavory association, suggests that this was a mishearing by design—unconscious design, perhaps, but design nonetheless. We go through life mishearing and misseeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

Malcolm is an excellent writer, and I recommend the whole article if you can find a copy of the magazine.

Addendum. If you read Russian, there's an interesting discussion at Avva; Anatoly says that both phrases, "ты обрадуешь?" and "ты падаешь?," are very odd, but adds that he doesn't know anything about the dialect of Bukharan Jews in New York ["кто знает, как там у них все наслайсено в диалекте нью-йорских бухарско-русских евреев"].