Archives for May 2004

The Brown Italian Studies department has created a bilingual online version of Boccaccio’s Decamerone that has been expanding since its beginnings ten years ago and particularly since it was awarded a two-year grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999.

Since the project’s inception, it has made substantial progress. There are now well over 300 documents and dozens of images, all designed to provide our visitors with an easily navigable site and abundant information related to the study of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. Though the project was originally produced as a multimedia resource for students here at Brown, it soon became apparent that teachers and students around the world were benefiting from its materials . In response to this demand, we began a series of improvements and additions which, we hope, will make it even more useful to a wide range of users. This expansion is of course an endless endeavor and we depend upon the feedback of our visitors to guide us in the project’s growth.

The basic element is the text (whether you choose the original Italian or the century-old English translation, you can click on the paragraph number to get the corresponding section in the other language); alongside it, they have created a cast of characters (the “brigata”); sections on history, society, religion, and other background areas; a collection of maps (hyperlinked so that if you click on, say, Paris you get not only maps from the medieval and later periods but links to related portions of the text); a section of links to relevant resources (including similar projects such as the Canterbury Tales, the Confessions of Augustine, and others, including the mysterious Zifar or Libro del cauallero de Dios, “generally held to be Castile’s earliest original work of prose fiction,” of which I had never heard), and much else. A remarkable site, whose discovery I owe to a MetaFilter thread by conservative controversialist hama7.

Geoff Pullum at Language Log is encouraged, and so am I, by the news that “based on Fall 2002 enrollments in courses as compared to Fall 1998 all languages shot up, especially the less commonly taught ones, and some are up by very substantial factors indeed.” He gives percentages ranging from American Sign Language (432%) to Spanish (14%) and adds “It’s true that Russian was hardly up at all (half a percent); but every language was up, and the aggregate percentage enrollment increase was 17%.” Good news indeed.

A 2001 interview with W. G. Sebald (put online by the New Yorker) makes me want to read his work (which I have still not gotten around to); this paragraph, in particular, resonates strongly with my own feelings about how to navigate life:

But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way—in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. So you then have a small amount of material and you accumulate things, and it grows, and one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they’ll connect up. But they’ll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn’t, in terms of writing something new, very productive. You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before. That’s how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you.

His thoughts on coincidence are also right up my alley:

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Jim at Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey is doing a wonderful thing: he’s transliterating and translating a famous poem by the Yiddish poet H. Leivick called Der volf (The Wolf). In his introductory post he provides this quote from Sol Liptzin’s A History of Yiddish Literature to describe it:

In another long poem, The Wolf (Der Volf, 1920), Leivick has a rabbi arise from a mound of ashes as the sole survivor of a masacred Jewish community. Looking about him the rabbi sees neither victims nor victors. The victims have perished and the victors have moved on. Only ashes, smoldering chimneys, and uncanny silence surround him. He burrows in the mound to find the limbs of the perished Jews so that he could bury them in the Jewish cemetery. In vain! Nought is left of them but coal and ashes. When night descends upon the ravished, deserted town, the Rabbi creeps away to the forest and is gradually transformed into a werewolf. Later on, when Jews expelled from other communities, find their way to this town and seek to rebuild the devastated houses and the synagogue of which only bare walls remain standing, they ask the rabbi, when he reappears, to resume religious services. But he insists that the ruins be retained as a memorial for his dead generation and that the synagogue be not rebuilt. He himself does not want to live on. He howls as a wolf through the nights and terrorizes the new inhabitants. On Yom Kippur he invades the synagogue as a werewolf and finds release from his suffering when he is beaten to death. Then the newcomers need no longer fear this last survivor whose existence was bound up with murdered generation. They can resume the reconstruction of a new communal life. This poem was regarded, after the Hitler catastrophe, not as Leivick’s reaction to Petlura’s pogroms but as a prophetic vision of the later and greater extermination of Jews by their Christian neighbors.

He has now put online Part 1 of his translation, which begins:

… and it was on the third morning,
when the sun arose in the East
there remained in the whole town not a trace.

And the sun climbed higher and higher,
until it had come to the middle of the sky,
and its rays met with the rabbi’s eyes.

And the rabbi was lying on a mountain of ash and stones
with a ravenous mouth and staring pupils,
and in his soul there was silence and darkness and nothing more.

Go read it, and roll the original around in your mouth even if you don’t know Yiddish (“… un es iz geven oyfn dritn frimorgn,/ ven di zun iz oyfgegangen in mizreykh-zayt”)—it’s amazing stuff, and I’m eagerly awaiting further installments of Jim’s excellent version.

Leivick had quite a life, according to this biography; the following bit particularly struck me:

During the years when he achieved worldwide fame as a poet and his works were translated into many languages, Leyvik worked as a wallpaper hanger in New York. As a contemporary poet observed: “Many of us saw him striding in New York’s streets with rolls of wallpaper in one hand and with a brush and a bucket of paste in the other.” In 1932 Leyvik was forced to stop work and spend four years in the Spivak sanatorium for tuberculosis in Denver, Colorado. There he created some of his best, almost untranslatable poems, achieving a certain lucid serenity and writing, among other things, a beautiful sequel of “Songs of Abelard to Heloise” and a cycle of poems on Spinoza (the idol of Yiddish intellectuals).

Makes me wish I could read Yiddish. (Technically, I can, with a great deal of effort, but in practice I’m not going to without the kind of crutches Jim is so generously providing.)

According to Michele A. Berdy in a Moscow Times article, Putin “owes his great popularity with the Russian public to the way he speaks. He’s the first Russian president who sounds like the guy next door.”

His are not the folksy inaccuracies of Mikhail Gorbachev (ложьте for положите), the verbal tics of Boris Yeltsin (Понимаешь? You know?) or the malapropisms of Viktor Chernomyrdin (Мы всегда можем уметь—We can always be able). And it’s not that Putin’s speech is crude (though it can be salty), street-tough (though cop-talk sneaks in) or inappropriate (though it comes close). But it is plain-talking, straight, down-to-earth Russian. He calls it like he sees it.

She gives many examples, well worth reading if you know any Russian. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)

Will Baude at Crescat Sententia introduces a post on Bolling v Sharpe, “a school segregation case that—like Brown—turns 50 today,” with a wonderful quote from a Stoppard play, Professional Foul. The scene “takes place during a presentation at a conference of philosophers in Prague. An English gentleman is speaking about the philosophy of language, and interpreters are gamely translating his remarks into French, German, and Czech for the benefit of the non-English-speaking philosophers present.”

Stone: ‘You eat well,’ says Mary to John. ‘You cook well,’ says John to Mary. We know that when Mary says, ‘You eat well’, she does not mean that John eats skilfully. Just as we know that when John says, ‘You cook well’, he does not mean Mary cooks abundantly. . . No problems there. But I ask you to imagine a competition when what is being judged is table manners. (Insert French interpreter’s box—interior.)
Interpreter: … bonne tenue à table …
Stone: John enters this competition and afterwards Mary says, ‘Well, you certainly ate well!’ Now Mary seems to be saying that John ate skilfully—with refinement. And again, I ask you to imagine a competition where the amount of food eaten is taken into account along with refinement of table manners. Now Mary says to John, ‘Well, you didn’t eat very well, but at least you ate well.’
Interpreter: Alors, vous n’avez pas bien mangé … mais … (All Interpreters baffled by this.)

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I came across a reference to the Nawab of Oudh, wondered what exactly a nawab was, and thought “this is exactly the sort of thing Hobson-Jobson specializes in.” So I looked it up, and it wasn’t there. “It has to be there,” thought I, and tried possible alternate spellings: newab? nuwab? Nothing. Flipping through the book, I found it—under NABOB. Well, of course! In theory, I knew nabob was from nawab, but they occur in such different contexts and are pronounced so differently it’s hard to keep it in my head. Anyway, let Hobson-Jobson tell the story:

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I’m going to make an entry of a comment by the Queen Bee, whose wide knowledge of things African is always a welcome contribution to this site, on an earlier post, because it’s so interesting it deserves the spotlight:

Another example [of poetry based on a technique of double meaning] is the Malawian poet Jack Mapanje. It was only when the second edition of his book of poems Of Chameleons and Gods appeared that he was arrested. It is thought that it took that long for the authorities to unpick the layers of meaning for which his poems were so popular in Malawi, but which were hidden beneath a relatively innocuous facade. There is an interesting discussion of it here.

I was particularly struck by this case because Mapanje is not only a poet but a linguist:

He was co-founder of the Linguistics Association for SADC Universities (LASU), a forum for sharing and exchanging knowledge and research in linguistics amongst the staff and students in the ten universities of Africa south of the Sahara. He was imprisoned for three and a half years by dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, essentially for his poetry, and now lives in the city of York, England, with his family.

Jack has published three books of poetry: Of Chameleons and Gods (H.E.B, 1981), The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (H.E.B, 1993) and Skipping Without Ropes (Bloodaxe Books, 1998). He has co-edited Oral Poetry from Africa: an anthology (Longmans, 1983), Summer Fires: New Poetry of Modern Africa (H.E.B, 1983), The African Writers’ Handbook (African Book Collective, 1999). He has recently edited Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (H.E.B, 2002). The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems, is to be published by Bloodaxe Books by Spring 2004. His prison memoir tentatively titled ‘The Whispers We Shared’ will appear by 2005.

I would like to read his poetry, not least because I love his book titles; how can you resist The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison or The Last of the Sweet Bananas?

Ludwig Kabanow from Berlin was so upset by a visit to a concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland, that he threw away his passport and said he did not want to speak German again. This story comes to us courtesy of kaleboel, who says “I haven’t yet encountered a language so permeated by hate that I couldn’t contemplate using it (with the possible exception of Visual Basic).”

I’ve been cleaning up infestations of comment spam, and I’ve started simply closing comments on the infected threads as the simplest prophylactic. I regret this, because I do like seeing fresh comments pop up on old posts, but such is life. However, should you wish to post a comment on a closed thread, you can simply put it on the latest one with a note saying “intended for such-and-such post” and I’ll be glad to transfer it there. (Insert scathing comment about spammers here; I’m too tired to think of a good one. I’m off to bed.)