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The French writer and scholar Chloé Thomas has a remarkable essay in Arts of War and Peace called A Wilderness of Mirrors: Eliot, Max Frisch and the C.I.A. that starts:

In 1964, Swiss author Max Frisch published the novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein, commonly regarded as one of his greatest achievements. The title, using a form of subjunctive associated with reported speech, which knows no strict English or French equivalent, translates literally as Let’s pretend my name is Gantenbein. Although difficult to summarize, the novel revolves around an unnamed narrator who, after having been left by his wife, invents a number of fictitious characters to help him account for his experience, “trying out stories as if they were clothes” […]

The 1966 French translation of the book was published as Le Désert des miroirs […], a title that, at first glance, seems to be meant as an echo to the “mirroring” theme of the novel, with its interplay of identities, at least one explicit mirror scene (when Gantenbein actually tries out clothes in a shop), and an experiment with mirroring names in an Oriental tale made up by Gantenbein for Lila, with characters named Ali and Alil. Gantenbein’s French translator was André Coeuroy. […] The French title, however, stems directly, it seems, from the one that had been chosen for the English translation by Michael Bullock, which appeared in 1965, a year before the French version: The Wilderness of Mirrors […]. It was T. S. Eliot, obviously, who provided Frisch’s novel with both its English and, indirectly, French titles. Here is the passage from “Gerontion” from which it was taken, towards the end of the poem:

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? […] (Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 38)

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I was rereading one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Зеркало (Mirror) (that webpage has the original Russian alongside an abridged translation by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy), when I stuck on an unusual word I had hurried over before in my attempt to make sense of the whole thing: саднят [sádnyat]. I had scribbled ‘smart, burn’ above it in my copy, which was all I really needed in context, but what kind of verb was it, and where was it from? Before proceeding with those issues, though, I’ll quote the relevant section from Jean Marie Schultz, “Pasternak’s ‘Zerkalo’” (Russian Literature XIII [1983]: 81-100), as a sample of how much work it is to figure out what’s going on in his early poetry:

Here the verb “sadnit'” compacts two distinct sensations, one tactile and one olfactory. First, with its meaning of “to smart” or “to burn”, “sadnit'” indicates the feeling that an abrasion might produce; thus, the verb conveys the sensation the trees (if personified) might be expected to have as their sap flows out over the broken limbs. Second, that the trees burn the air with their sap relates possibly to the very pungent odor that pine resin from newly broken limbs has as it fills the air, particularly after a rain (VIII:iii) when all smells are intensified.⁴

fn 4: Sap is a tree’s natural antiseptic, and the burning sensation produced by the application of an antiseptic to a wound is well known. However, it must be remembered that this is a humanly perceived feeling so that we have here, as throughout the poem, the human experience imposed upon a seemingly impersonal description. Furthermore, the allusion to the “medicinal” function of sap prefigures the medicine, “lekarstvo”, introduced in the next stanza. Likewise, the underlying evocation of the sap’s odor here also works toward the development of a sub-motif revolving around scent (V:iii).

OK, so what’s the story with the verb? Well, Wiktionary provides help with its usage;
it occurs in collocations like но́гу са́днит [nógu sádnit] ‘my leg is sore’ and на се́рдце са́днит [na sérdce sádnit] ‘my heart hurts.’ But what’s really interesting is the etymology, given in Russian Wiktionary: it’s derived from Old Russian садьно ‘wound,’ which in turn goes back to Proto-Slavic *saditi, from Proto-Indo-European *sodéyeti, causative of *sed- ‘to sit.’ The English verb sit is from that root, but cast your eyes down that page and see how much else is! The thematic root present *séd-e-ti gives Proto-Celtic *sedeti, which with a couple of prefixes gives us Welsh eistedd and hence eisteddfod; the -ye- present *sédyeti gives Greek ἕζομαι (as well as sit); *séd-os ~ *séd-es gives Welsh hedd ‘peace’; *sod-ó- gives Proto-Slavic *xodъ and Greek ὁδός; *sōd-o- gives Proto-Germanic *sōtą ‘soot’ (“reflecting the nature of soot as accumulated particles that sit on surfaces”); *sōd-u-s gives Proto-Slavic *sadъ ‘grove; garden’ (hence Russian сад, which also features in the poem); *sod-yo-m ‘seat’ gives Old Irish suide and Latin solium; *sed-lo- ‘seat’ gives Proto-Germanic *setlaz; *ni-sd-ós ‘nest’ (with zero grade) gives Proto-Balto-Slavic *nísda (leading to Russian гнездо) and Proto-Germanic *nestą (leading to nest)… well, I could spend all day lost in the web of connections. In Russian alone, the root is the ultimate source of посадить/сажать ‘to seat, plant,’ сиделка ‘(sick-)nurse,’ седло ‘saddle,’ село ‘village,’ сажа ‘soot,’ досадный ‘annoying,’ наседка ‘brood-hen,’ население ‘population,’ осадки ‘precipitation,’ осада ‘siege,’ председатель ‘chairman, president,’ расселина ‘crevice, fissure,’ сосед ‘neighbor,’ ссадина ‘scratch,’ усадьба ‘farmstead, country estate,’ and всадник ‘rider, horseman’ (as well as many others). This is the kind of thing that made me want to be a historical linguist.

Louis Menand’s recent NYkr review essay (archived; ostensibly a review of Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary) has some good things to say, but on the whole it irritated me, so (as is my wont) I will share my irritation here. Mind you, this is the same Menand who so sharply took Lynne Truss to task for her idiocy about language, so it’s not that he’s ignorant, in this essay he just doesn’t pay attention to what he’s writing beyond making sure it sounds clever. At any rate, I’m going to go through and pick out idiocies to flog, much as I did with Simon Winchester back in 2004; I do not regard Menand as a terrible writer tout court, like the egregious Winchester, but that’s all the more reason he shouldn’t have perpetrated this stuff.

There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it’s almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It’s hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it.

What? Words are misspelled and commas misplaced all the time; I guess what he means is that if you care about such things and pay attention to the squiggly red lines, you can avoid many mistakes, but if you care about such things you weren’t going to make many mistakes in the first place. Has he ever looked at internet sites other than carefully curated ones like newyorker.com?

As Fatsis tells the story of his lexicographical Bildung, he makes genial and informed digressions into controversies in the dictionary racket, some possibly overfamiliar, like how to label ethnic slurs and whether to include “fuck,” others more current, like the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun (after many failed launches, we appear to be stuck on “they,” which seems kind of lame) and whether or not large language models can create a dictionary (so far, not). He has a section on our contemporary speech wars, showing that many of the most radioactive words—“woke,” “safe space,” “microaggression,” “anti-racism”—are much older than we might assume.

We’ll let the pointlessly exotic Bildung slide, but what on earth does he mean by “which seems kind of lame”? Does he mean it seems like a normal word? Yeah, that’s the point. And what does he mean by “radioactive”? Is it just a fancy would-be synonym for, say, “contentious”? Frankly, the only thing that unites those words is that they were created by progressives, which, well, I will be charitable and not be mean about. But I wrinkle my brow.
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You know how sometimes you look at a word or phrase you’ve known all your life and suddenly wonder about it? That happened to me with by and large, and it turns out to have such an unexpected background I thought I’d post it. OED (entry from 1933):

1. Nautical. To the wind (within six points; cf. by prep. A.I.ii.7) and off it.

1669 Thus you see the ship handled in fair weather and foul, by and learge.
S. Sturmy, Mariners Magazine 17
[…]

2. In one direction and another, all ways; now esp., in a general aspect, without entering into details, on the whole.

1707 Tho’ he trys every way, both by and large, to keep up with his Leader.
E. Ward, Wooden World Dissected 35

1769 Miss Betsey, a charming frigate, that will do honour to our country, if you take her by and large.
in Southern Lit. Mess. vol. XVII. 183/2
[…]

The relevant senses are by 1.d. “Nautical. Close to the wind. Chiefly and earliest in full and by” (c1500 “What worde to sey, he [sc. the loodsman] is in doute, Eyther warae the lof, or ells full and by”; 2001 “With a foul wind, the boat was sailed full and by, and estimates made of the deviation from the direct track”) and large III.18. “Nautical. Of a wind: crossing the line of the ship’s course in a favourable direction, esp. on the beam or quarter” (1578 “Hauing a large winde, we kept our course vppon our saide voyage”; 1984 “With the wind large, and the yard braced in a little, it [sc. the tack] lay directly under the yard”). I expect AntC already knew this, but nautical terms are mare incognitum to me.

Another of Nick Nicholas’s Facebook reports from Greece (cf. A Melancholy Visit) points out (typos silently corrected):

Greece is a less secular country than those of the Anglosphere, so today is Epiphany and tomorrow is St John’s Day, not merely the sixth and the seventh of January. Feast days still mark the calendar here, like they used to in England. Candlemas and Michaelmas weren’t just made up to make university calendars sound like something out of Harry Potter, they correspond to της Υπαπαντής και του Άη Μιχάλη.

I had heard of Candlemas but could never remember what it was and why it was called that; per OED (entry published 1888, not fully revised) it’s “The feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary (or presentation of Christ in the Temple) celebrated with a great display of candles,” it’s celebrated on February 2nd, and the word goes back to Old English (“Her on þissum geare Swegen geendode his dagas to candel mæssan iii nonas Febr,” Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). But I especially wondered about the Greek name, Υπαπαντή; Wiktionary says:

Derived from Ancient Greek ὑπαπάντησις (hupapántēsis) “encounter”, variant of ὑπάντησις (hupántēsis), from the verb ἀπαντάω (apantáō), ἀντάω (antáō) “to meet”.

And this variant is in LSJ as ὑπαπάντ-ησις , εως, ἡ ; its only occurrence as listed there is in an inscription from ii/i B.C. But what an odd word! I understand haplo(lo)gy, but why add in a syllable? What happened to efficiency in communication?

Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the greatest Italian directors; everybody loves his The Conformist (Il conformista), but nobody seems to care about The Spider’s Stratagem (Strategia del ragno), which he made immediately afterwards and which blew me away when I saw it in New York decades ago. Last October, irritated by its unavailability on DVD/Blu-ray, I finally gave in and rented it from Prime Video and was as impressed as before. It’s about a guy who returns to the fictional town of Tara, where his father was killed in 1936, and tries to untangle what happened; what’s important for our purposes is that there’s a scene almost a minute long in which two townspeople have an animated discussion in Emilian (the subtitle says “Emilian dialect”), which of course excited me. I haven’t posted about it because I recorded the passage on my phone and kept hoping I’d be able to decipher enough to quote at least a phrase or two, but it’s defeated me, so I mention it in the hope that someone out there will have access to a screenplay in Italian or some other source that reproduces what the guys are saying.

The Italian Wikipedia article Lingua emiliana says:

L’unico film interamente girato in una varietà emiliana è L’uomo che verrà (2009) di Giorgio Diritti, che fa ricorso al dialetto bolognese nella sua versione originale. L’amministrazione comunale di Piacenza, con un finanziamento della Regione Emilia-Romagna, ha invece prodotto I strass e la seda (2020), la prima serie web in emiliano, i cui attori si esprimono in diversi dialetti del Piacentino.

(Note the almost meaningless “invece,” which Italians toss into sentences as if adding salt to pasta water; I complained about Ann Goldstein’s translating it as “instead” here.) I think they should at least mention the Bertolucci, surely the most prominent showcase that form of Italian has had. And it may be worth mentioning that The Spider’s Stratagem is based on “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” [Tema del traidor y del héroe] by Borges.

I’ve long been a fan of Roger Ebert’s film criticism, so how could I resist “The Thinking Molecules of Titan”? Chaz Ebert (his widow) introduces it thus:

In honor of World UFO Day we are reprinting Roger’s unfinished science fiction story about a phenomenon on Saturn’s moon, Titan. In 2013, I invited readers to write an ending to Roger’s tale and we got so many good ones that I asked our Far Flung Correspondent Krishna Shenoi to illustrate all of the finalists. They are also being reprinted today in a separate Table of Contents on this website. Please note that the version of Roger’s short story printed below is slightly altered in that it contains a couple of sentences added from a second version he wrote.

I know lots of Hatters are sf fans and will appreciate both the story and the artist’s rendering of the “cover of Amazing Stories from the Gernsback era” mentioned therein; furthermore, the central question of what kind of pattern might be coming from Titan resonates with the themes used by Peter Watts in his novels Blindsight (see this post) and Echopraxia (which bulbul gave me and which I am reading with great enjoyment now). What is communication, anyway? Something to ponder.

Oh, and here’s an amusing bit:

“An act of God,” said Alex, needling Regan. He knew Regan was a Unitarian and so would both reject God and maintain an open mind in the subject.

I thought I’d quote a bit from the chapter on Russian (pp. 281-98) in How Literatures Begin (see this post), by Michael Wachtel:

Histories of Russian literature invariably begin with the medieval period. However, this period can be understood as the beginning of the Russian literary tradition only if literature is defined in the narrowest sense, as any word that is committed to paper—or, more precisely, to parchment. Even within this limited definition, it would be difficult to argue for the medieval period as the beginning of Russian literature because the language used was not Russian, but rather what is now called “Old Church Slavonic” or—depending on one’s linguistics and politics—even “Old Bulgarian.” The creation of an alphabet can be dated to the ninth century. It was the work of Cyril (hence the word “Cyrillic”) and Methodius, two monks who sought to translate holy texts from Byzantine Greek into a language that could be understood by the Slavs in Moravia. Whether Cyril and Methodius were of Greek or Slavic origin is disputed, but to call them Russian would be anachronistic, since the concept of Russia as a distinct location or even ethnicity did not exist at the time. […]

The existence of a written language was essential for disseminating holy writ. Over the next few hundred years, numerous texts were produced in this “church” language, almost all of which were translations of the Gospels and the liturgy, the only texts familiar to most believers in the early centuries of Slavic Christianity. Precise numbers are revealing: only twenty of the fifteen hundred surviving parchment manuscripts from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries are not concerned with religion. Once again, there is a thorny issue of nomenclature in regard to the language used in these texts. As Alexander Schenker notes: “Depending on the local political situation the terms Old Russian, Old Ukrainian, and Old Belarussian have been applied to essentially the same body of texts.” Regardless of what we call this language, it must be emphasized that the range of texts it produced was extremely limited. While Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium (much like Christian culture in the West) was steeped in the traditions of antiquity, Kiev’s approach to Orthodoxy was narrow and pragmatic. In the words of D. S. Mirsky: “The study of rhetoric, dialectics and poetry, of the Trivium and Quadrivium, of all the ‘humaniora,’ never penetrated into South Slavia, Georgia or Russia, and only those forms of literary art were adopted which were considered necessary for the working of the national Church.”

The few literate people in the Slavic lands were primarily engaged in copying religious texts. There was no tradition of exegesis, nor was it encouraged. To the extent it was deemed necessary, interpretation of the holy texts was borrowed from preexisting Byzantine sermons. In this regard, it is worth noting that well into the eighteenth century, literacy in Russia was acquired by painstakingly working through sacred texts and committing them to memory. As Victor Zhivov writes: “The basic means of learning language was reading ‘po skladam’ (‘by syllables’). The procedure was strictly regimented and considered sacred. It began and ended with prayer and was seen as a kind of introduction to Christian life. The special importance of correct and comprehensible reading was conditioned by the fact that the failure to follow the rules of reading could, from the point of view of Eastern Slavic bookmen, lead to heretical error.” […]

Perhaps the most Hattically interesting passage is this (pp. 292 ff.):
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Nick Nicholas has been reporting at Facebook on his latest visit to his ancestral haunts in Crete (he lives in Australia and has been featured at LH many times, first in 2005), and this post expresses a particular form of linguistic distress I don’t recall seeing mentioned before:

There’s a melancholy in this visit, that wasn’t there the last couple of times. I had bits of it in Athens, and it’s been crystallised with a different trigger here in Sitia.

Through my thirties and forties, I’d come here and try to fit in, and be saddened when I realised that I wasn’t embraced as fully as I’d expect, that I didn’t fit in. People were not arseholes about it: this isn’t Italy or Ireland, where those who stayed behind have come to sneer at their diaspora. But there was always that recognition, five or ten minutes into a chat, that I wasn’t from these parts; or people that already knew me from online, addressing me as Nick and not Nikos. That hurt, the hurt of being left outside.

A couple of years ago, I made the decision not to try and fit it in. That turned out to work in my favour, because this country in the meantime has globalised enough, that I had more points of contact with Zoomer Greeks if I did not try so ha[r]d to be Greek the way I recalled and constructed, from Boomer Greeks.

It’s worked all too well. This time around in Athens, I didn’t feel reassured by all the English code-switching and American trends: I felt alienated. My construct of Greekness was itself now out of place in my environment. I had that feeling I increasingly have back home, to my persistent surprise, of being a fossil.

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I’ll start the new year off with one of my favorite things (e.g.), writing in praise of books — to wit, Ed Simon’s Literary Hub essay Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania:

Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.

In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.

Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus. From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.

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