Archives for October 2005

Back to the September issue of Poetry; this time I want to praise a poem by Mike Chasar called “Conches on Christmas,” which happily for all of us is online (happily for you because you can read the whole thing, for me because it makes it a lot easier to quote). I love rhyme and meter and the whole kitbag of traditional poetic technique, but I’m aware that English poetry can no longer be constrained within those bounds (it requires a tremedous effort of will and imagination to write a good sonnet these days), so I’m especially happy when a poet is able to dance comfortably to the new music in an old pattern. I read the first stanza:

Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss

and relaxed into pleasurable anticipation when I realized the rhymes were unobtrusive and exact, the meter irregular but confident, and the syntax complex enough to make reading further a compelling adventure:

except that there
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological affair,

and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—

and at that I simultaneously cracked up at the transition from the solemn “silently, sans the heraldry of bells” to the bathetic “swiftly, sans a multitude of feet” (which instantly brought to mind “And this was odd, because, you know,/ They hadn’t any feet“) and marveled at the sonic sculpture of the line “and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived”—and I gobbled up the rest of the poem with undiminished pleasure, which I now urge you to do. When you get back, you can hit the Extended Entry for a few linguistic observations.

[Read more…]

While I was at the bookstore, I picked up the September issue of Poetry magazine on the strength of several poems (like “On the Metro“) by C.K. Williams, with his wonderful long lines, and a long essay about Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite living poets, by Phyllis Rose. But at the moment I’m going to quote one of the sections of Michael Hofmann‘s “Sing Softer: A Notebook”:

I think I’ve probably always been drawn to the foreign in English. When I first came across the strange and lovely word “macaronics,” I wanted to use it for a title. There’s a kind of joyful hopscotch, a cavalierism, a dandyishness, an enrichment, about alien presences in English, which otherwise remains for me a chewed, utilitarian, mercantile language. These importations are the making of Shakespeare. They are there in Walt Whitman, that quintessentially American poet, even if Henry James (of all people!), complained about his predilection for “the other languages.” They are there in Stevens, who claimed English and French were one language, and in Pound, who wrote Chinese in English, and Provençal in English, and Latin in English. I sometimes think the only Eliot I really like are the two French poems. These importations are in Lowell, even though he’s as heavily monoglot as a linebacker; in one of his Montale versions in Imitations it says: “The scirocco gunned the dead stucco with sand”—neither Italianate noun in Montale’s original! (Imitations was a huge act of will on the part of Lowell to internationalize and modernize himself by his bootstraps.)

I don’t understand the “chewed, utilitarian, mercantile” bit (what, Beowulf? after that it’s all alien presences) or “monoglot as a linebacker,” but I like the bit about Lowell and Montale. Anybody know which Montale poem Lowell was reworking? I don’t have Imitations.

I was in Lenox this morning, happily browsing Matt Tannenbaum’s The Bookstore (so old-school they don’t have a website, but probably the best literary bookstore in the Berkshires), when I found a new book about the Jewish community in New York a century ago, A Fire in Their Hearts by Tony Michels (you can read part of the introduction and first chapter here in a pdf file). The introduction explained something I hadn’t known about the linguistic world of the immigrants from Russia:

The origin of the Jewish labor movement can be traced to the convergence of two disparate immigrant groups in a single section of lower Manhattan. When large numbers of eastern European Jews started arriving on New York’s Lower East Side, they discovered a thriving socialist labor movement among German (mostly non-Jewish) immigrants, who constituted the majority of the area’s population into the 1880s. A number of Jews, mainly Russian-speaking intellectuals, started learning the German language so they could mix with their neighbors and read their publications. German socialists welcomed the “Russians” and encouraged them to organize Jewish workers into unions and socialist groups of their own. They provided financial assistance, publicity, organizational models, and ideological guidance. With their help, Russian Jews created their labor movement in a German image. They experienced an unusual kind of Americanization, one guided not by native-born elites but by a larger, already established immigrant group. Through socialism, Russian Jews did not become so much Americanized as German-Americanized.

[Read more…]

I was just asked about the origin of the phrase “can’t hold a candle to,” and now that I’ve looked it up I’m going to share it with you all. In the words of the OED:

to hold a candle to another: lit. to assist him by holding the candle while he works; hence, to help in a subordinate position. not to be able or fit to hold a candle to: not fit to hold even a subordinate position to, nothing to be compared to.

My favorite of the citations: 1773 BYROM Poems, Others aver that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.

I’ve been meaning to write about this ever since Glyn sent me the link some days ago: John Simmons, the Oxford librarian who built their Slavic collection, died Sept. 22 at the age of 90. I hadn’t known of him, but the Times obituary makes him sound well worth knowing:

After war service and three more years at Birmingham, Simmons was invited to Oxford to fill the post of librarian-lecturer in charge of Slavonic books, created for him by Konovalov. His buccaneering spirit showed itself in August 1953 when he flabbergasted the director of the Lenin Library, Moscow, by turning up unannounced, armed with a list of desiderata and the catalogues of Oxford University Press, to propose a book exchange. In return for OUP publications, scientific material and two runs of Punch, Oxford received thousands of valuable, out-of-print Russian publications.

Simmons’s proudest achievements were his part in building up the retrospective collections of Russian books in the Taylorian and Bodleian libraries and the creation in Bodley of the only specialised Slavonic reading room in the country. He considered, with justification, that it was these library collections, together with the remarkable group of Russian academic teachers recruited by Konovalov, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin, that led to the establishment of Oxford as a unique centre for Slavonic studies…

At All Souls, which became his second home, he was a genial host, an inspiring guide, and a fount of knowledge on college history, Oxford’s libraries, and a host of other subjects which he gladly put at the disposal of resident and visiting Fellows. He was a regular visitor to the Codrington Library; he sometimes came in to read The Times, and would inquire of former colleagues: “Has anybody interesting died recently?” His hundreds of publications are listed in his Autobibliography (1975, with two later supplements), one of several samizdat publications composed on his typewriter and reproduced in limited editions.

Margaret Marks of Transblawg has an interesting post on “Pseudoenglisch,” elements of the German vocabulary that look like English words but would not be recognized by an actual English-speaker, like Talkmaster ‘moderator’; she links to the Fruchtbringendes Wörterbuch, a Wiki site that defines such terms in standard German, or tries to—as she says, far too many of the entries are actual English: “Perhaps this is the topic where the Wikipedia concept won’t work, because the more confused Germans add to it, the more useless it will become!” Unfortunately, the definitions aren’t always reliable, either; “Arm candy” is defined as schmückendes Beiwerk ’embellishment, accessory’ when it actually means (in the words of the New Oxford American Dictionary) ‘a sexually attractive companion accompanying a person, esp. a celebrity, at social events.’ I think a reference site like this should definitely be maintained by people who know what they’re talking about rather than by all comers. Still, a nice idea and an enjoyable site to browse despite the problems.

A strange, choppy essay by Murray Bail that’s ostensibly a review of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (and if you’re going to call yourself Volokhonsky instead of Volokhonskaya, why Karenina rather than the Karenin Nabokov was so keen on? but I digress) but is really a series of thoughts on literature and translation. It’s tricked out with a nutty false dichotomy between “Europe” and “English or American culture,” and it comes to a stop without actually ending, but there are enough nice bits along the way it’s worth a read:

It is only a matter of time in a Russian novel before a sturgeon arrives on a plate, a “fine sturgeon” or a “large sturgeon”. It is like the appearance of bicycles in Irish novels, or the dog wagging its tail in every other Tom Roberts painting. The sturgeon makes its entrance on a plate held by an old footman in a greasy shirt. At other times a landlord of an inn brings the fish half cold to a filthy table. At a rundown estate a traveller is ushered into the presence of the impoverished landowner, tucking into a local sturgeon (Gogol). Russian characters have healthy appetites. They’ve been travelling on bad roads, in badly sprung carriages. In the 1950s, in Adelaide, reading about “black bread” sounded not tasty at all, but peasant-poor, positively wretched; in a Russian novel it coloured the domestic scene – made it extra-foreign. Where else in literature do you find a languid landowner pondering a pleasantly wasted life, while at the same time reaching out, as if for another slice of sturgeon, for some essential, life-saving truth?

(Via wood s lot.)

Bill Poser at Language Log has an excellent post on an important topic, the shortage of interpreters in all branches of the government. Knowledge of foreign languages has always been in short supply in America, but it used to be encouraged; as Bill says:

The military seems to have taken language skills much more seriously during the Second World War. My father went directly from being a buck private in basic training to Master Sergeant in an intelligence position because he could speak French, Flemish, and German. The Army recognized that the ability to speak these languages was useful for interviewing civilians and interrogating enemy soldiers.

Now… well, we all know the problems lack of knowledge of Arabic has been causing, and there doesn’t seem to be much official interest in remedying it. Strange.

Three years ago Michelle Woods reviewed a couple of translations of The Good Soldier Švejk; it’s the kind of detailed critique and comparison that isn’t easily summarized, so I’ll just quote a representative bit and send you over to Jacket:

In some cases, indeed, interesting avenues are opened up in their use of American slang. For instance, when Švejk is arrested for sedition and sits with other imprisoned innocents, Sadlon and Joyce use the phrase ‘how they had gotten into this mess’ (Sadlon and Joyce, 11) which may suggest to many English-language speakers connotations of Laurel and Hardy, thereby contextualizing Švejk in a domestic comic tradition:

[Read more…]

I have written a number of times—probably more than on any other nonlinguistic topic—about the appalling results of the search for purity in the human world, the consequences of the lust for classifying things and people, and my deep affection for the mongrel and the creole. Some of the posts that evince this are Purifying Iraq (the results of classifying Iraqis), the Purity vs. History series (on Greece and the Greeks), How the Balkans Got Balkanized (“The process of ethnic cleansing begins when cultural and especially religious homogeneity is required”), American Babel (America’s native “prodigious multilingualism”), Braw and Witty with its comment thread that wound up discussing Bonnie Prince Charlie (Annie: “Yes, there were Jacobite protestants, although simplified histories paint all Jacobi[te]s as Roman Catholic. Politics was just as complicated and messy in those days as it is now”), and perhaps my all-time favorite LH thread, Peaches in Cluj (with Germans in Siebenbürgen, Dacia Porolissensis, the Klausenburger Hasidim of Brooklyn, putative Illyro-Thracian substrates, Sesut, Crimean Goths, Zipsers, Flemings, Armenians, and Székelys, not to mention Maria Benet’s wonderful poetry).

Now I want to direct your attention to Indonesia. Everybody “knows” that Indonesia is Islamic except for the island of Bali, which has stubborly preserved Hindu court culture and thereby isolated itself from the surrounding culture. Well, yesterday I ran across Adrian Vickers’ article “Hinduism and Islam in Indonesia: Bali and the Pasisir World” (the linked page links to a pdf of the article, and may I add that I wish all journals would adopt the policy of Indonesia: “All articles and reviews published in Indonesia published more than five years ago are available at no cost”), which says “Most writers on Bali have used religious difference to characterize the essential distinction between Bali and the rest of Indonesia,” and goes on to show why that’s a misleading oversimplification that distorts both history and the current situation. He begins with the history:

In the nineteenth-century Orientalist perceptions of Bali…, Balinese religious identity, formed through opposition to Islam, led to the development of a “Museum” of Hindu Java. One of the first to articulate this view in any depth was Raffles, who was particularly interested in the literature of the Kawi or “Old-Javanese” language: “For Raffles, Old Javanese was an Asian Latin, banished to Bali by invading, Goth-like Muslims.”…

Most twentieth-century Dutch administrators still maintained the idea that Balinese Hinduism was something to be “preserved” from Islam, which they associated with a lack of art or the destruction of a noble culture. This aim of preserving native culture was not unique to Dutch colonialists in Bali, but was generally the avowed goal of most imperial powers. In the case of Bali, however, the perception had a long genealogy. In 1633, for example, when the VOC sent a mission to Bali to promote an alliance between Batavia and Bali against the Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram, the premise the Dutch worked from was that “[the king] and all his folk are heathens, and therefore certain enemies of the people of Mataram, who are Moors.” The Dutch were surprised when Gèlgèl, the principal kingdom on Bali, procrastinated and subsequently expressed a desire to establish friendly relations with Mataram. The Dutch could not comprehend this change, since their system of religious classification did not accord with the political practices of the Balinese ruler.

Vickers goes on to discuss how the Balinese saw things:

In this Balinese categorization, religious differences function like clothing styles. They are signs used to differentiate groups which have basic similarities. The signs of distinction can be translated as “cultural” differences — culture, however, not in the sense of an underlying structure of ideas or complex of meaning, but of observable behavior, especially artistic behavior. The many “cultures” are manifestations of a common “civilization.” It is impossible to conceive of a different system of social organization, and so there is no absolute category of the “alien,” only a distinction between people of the same island and people from overseas (sabrang). The nature of this model can be gauged from the way it accommodated the Dutch. They were seen as a group belonging with Chinese and other traders, since they were not led by kings and princes; they partook in maritime trading and lived in coastal regions; and they did not manifest the signs of belonging to a “kingdom” which the Balinese knew from their immediate neighbors and their own Majapahit background. Therefore the Dutch were fitted into the Balinese social order, at the bottom.

He finishes up with a description of the cosmopolitan nature of the region:

The weight of historical research makes the picture of a cosmopolitan milieu undeniable. From early times there was a great circulation of trade goods, people, and cultural forms and objects throughout the area, which was only exacerbated by later events, such as the fall of Malaka which led to the movement of Malay princes, or the fall of Makassar with the consequent migrations of groups from South Sulawesi to as far away as Thailand. History has shown that political events in one state of this polyglot, cosmopolitan world had implications for many others. Thus it is possible to talk in terms of historical developments which characterize the region as a whole. Denys Lombard has proposed that the culture of the region, if we take culture in its narrower sense of literary and artistic forms, could be termed a “Pasisir” (Coastal) culture, utilizing the name hitherto given to the literary culture of Java’s north coast.

and, particularly pleasing to me, an emphasis on the importance of texts:

The major barrier to locating Bali within a “Pasisir” civilization is to think of the Pasisir world as essentially Islamic, and Bali as essentially Hindu. The picture changes dramatically when viewed from the standpoint of texts instead of religion. The texts are products of historical interaction within a civilization, and they are produced in order to pattern participation in that culture. Panji narratives like the Malat are the most widespread manifestation of Pasisir culture. By following the trail which leads from studies of individual Panji texts and related artistic forms, it is possible to use positive aspects of earlier textual scholarship to displace an Orientalist tendency to separate Bali from the rest of the archipelago.

A little more googling led me to a paper by Riwanto Tirtosudarmo, “The Orang Melayu and Orang Jawa in the ‘Lands Below the Winds’” (pdf), which widens the net:

In the Java-Malaya nexus, Houben [in V.J.H. Houben, H.M.J. Maier and W. van der Molen (eds.), Looking in Odd Mirrors: The Java Sea]… outlined the important concept of ‘borrowing’, meaning that some specific elements of Javanese culture were borrowed to be implemented and play a role in local societies elsewhere. It should be noted, however, that the pasisir as a place of origin for influences in the tanah sabrang (outer islands, the land beyond) was far from homogenously Javanese in the period under consideration. Reid, for example, made a strong case for the ‘Chineseness’ of the Islamic ports on the north coast of Java. Other groups (Indian, Arabs, Malays) had settled there, bringing their ideas and values with them. In this respect it is striking that the Portuguese were the first to make a sharp distinction between Malays and Javanese (Jaos in Portugese), whereas the Arabs before that (and the Malays in their wake) called all the inhabitants of the Archipelago ‘Orang Jawi’, making no distinction between the Malays and the Javanese.

Finally, there’s the parallel case of a Hindu enclave in Java itself, as described by Robert W. Hefner in his book Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton, 1985): the Tengger society of a handful of villages on the north slopes of Mount Bromo near the eastern end of the island. Hefner had been told that the Tengger were “backward,” “primitive,” and generally exotic (they “throw live animals into the volcano’s smoldering crater”). Intrigued, he made his way to the villages only to find they looked “much like the Javanese community from which I had set out several hours earlier” except that it was more compact and had no mosque. He briefly describes the historical background (the fall of Majapahit and the consequent Islamicization of the rest of the island) and the villagers’ attitude towards it, concluding: “According to their own notions, in other words, Tengger are not an ethnic enclave of non-Javanese ways, but heirs to a tradition with deep roots in Javanese history.” He adds:

The “ethnic isolation” explanation of Tengger tradition… fails to take seriously Tengger claims that their tradition is Javanese, and ignores historical evidence that clearly indicates that Tengger have long been affected by developments in larger Java. Under closer scrutiny, the ritual tradition can provide insight into the social organization of at least one popular tradition in pre-Islamic Java… Investigation of the same tradition, however, reveals how profoundly it has been affected by the challenge of Javanese Islam. Although the ritual tradition Tengger preserves is now restricted to this mountain region, the cultural conditions to which it has responded are similar to those in many areas of rural Java… From this perspective, the Tengger story is not that of an isolated ethnic group unaffected by developments in larger Java. It speaks to developments that have transformed all of Javanese society, and are reworking it still today.

Or, in older words, “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated… No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”