Archives for December 2008

Another amazing resource:

Welcome to the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive. For over half a century, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory has collected recordings of hundreds of languages from around the world, providing source materials for phonetic and phonological research, of value to scholars, speakers of the languages, and language learners alike. The materials on this site comprise audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with phonetic transcriptions, plus scans of original field notes where relevant.

It was a project of the late Peter Ladefoged, a great phonetician and teacher about whom you can read some reminiscences (including a mention of his work as linguistic consultant on the film My Fair Lady) at the MetaFilter post from which I got the link.

From the LA Times blog:

Today, Three Percent announced its long list for the best translated novel of 2008. The 25 titles include works originally published in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, German, Arabic, Greek, Catalan, Icelandic and Hebrew. The Times has reviewed some (the complete list, with links to our reviews, after the jump), but we haven’t reviewed all of them. I asked Three Percent’s editor, Chad Post, a few questions about the focus on works in translation.

It’s an interesting discussion, and the list should be useful for those who like to keep up with world literature. (Here‘s the Three Percent website, which looks worth bookmarking.)

I keep going back to Mandelstam, one of the most important writers to me even though I often find his thought hard to follow, and my latest attempt at his 1922 essay “On the Nature of the Word” (О природе слова) brought to my attention a passage I thought I’d translate and pass along:

As such a criterion of the unity of the literature of a given people, a conventional [or “conditional” or “theoretical”: uslovnoe] unity, only a people’s language can be recognized, for all other signs/indicators [priznaki] are themselves conventional, transient, and arbitrary. But language, even though it changes, does not stiffen into repose even for a minute, [moving] from one point to another, [each] blindingly bright in the consciousness of philologists, and within the bounds of all its changes it remains a fixed quantity, a constant, it remains internally unified. For each philologist such an identity of personality in application to the (self-)consciousness of the language is natural. When the Latin language, having spread throughout the Roman lands, blossomed with a new flower and put forth the shoots of the future Romance languages, a new literature began, childish and poor by comparison with Latin, but already Romance.
When there sounded forth the living speech of the “Lay of the Host of Igor,” full of images, thoroughly secular, worldly, and Russian at each turn, Russian literature began. And when Velimir Khlebnikov, a contemporary Russian writer, plunges into the thick of Russian root words, into an etymological night dear to the heart of an intelligent reader, that same Russian literature, the literature of the “Lay of the Host of Igor,” is alive. Russian literature, exactly like Russian nationality, is compounded of numberless adulterations, interbreedings, graftings, and alien influences, but in one thing it remains true to itself, until our own kitchen Latin sounds forth for us as well, and on the mighty ruins spring up pale young shoots of new life, like the Old French song of the martyr Eulalie:
Buona pulcella fut Eulalia.
Bel auret corps bellezour anima.

(Original below the cut.)

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Anatoly recently posted a Russian translation of Dorothy Parker’s 1925 poem “Resumé” along with the original, a gem long familiar to me:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

But, as he writes me, there’s an argument in the comments section about the exact meaning of “nooses give” in the original: some say that the noose may break off under the weight of a body, while others advocate for the meaning of “stretch, become looser.” As I wrote him in response,

Now that I think about it, I realize that line has never completely made sense to me: how exactly does a noose “give” (OED: “yield, give way”; M-W: “to yield to physical force or strain; to collapse from the application of force or pressure”)? A rope can break, sure, but can a noose, the knotted part around your neck, “yield, give way”? Doesn’t seem likely. My guess is that she knew it was inexact phrasing but went with it because of the rhyme.

But I don’t trust my own judgment on this, so I throw it (like a juicy bone) to the assembled multitudes. Snap, stretch, or poetic license?

From the preface to Remy de Gourmont’s Book of Masks (Le Livre des Masques, 1896):

Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to teachings is the writer’s capital crime. The work of a writer must be not only the reflection, but the larger reflection of his personality. The only excuse that a man has for his writing is to write about himself, to reveal to others the sort of world that is mirrored in his own glass; his only excuse is to be original; he must speak of things not yet spoken of in a form not yet formulated. He must create his own aesthetics – and we must admit as many aesthetics as there are original spirits and judge them for what they are, not for what they aren’t.

Via The Daily Growler; the French is below the cut. (Incidentally, there is no accent on Remy; someone more knowledgeable in the ways of Wikipedia than I should change the title on the entry there.)
Update. Helen DeWitt has some interesting thoughts on this over at paperpools, comparing languages to games and saying “If originality is seen in terms of breaking rules, though, that presupposes that art is still comprehensible only in terms of constraints which already exist – originality is to be embedded in the sort of Oedipal drama at the heart of Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. It’s as if one is actually incapable of understanding a form in which the rules one knows have no purchase.” Read it!

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Joel of Far Outliers tells a fascinating story about the Laz, a people of the Caucasus who have wound up in northeastern Turkey, and the unfortunate situation they find themselves in, quoting from Michael E. Meeker’s “The Black Sea Turks: Some Aspects of Their Ethnic and Cultural Background,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2 (1971):318-345:

It is said that the Laz when conscripted [by the Turkish state] are automatically placed in the navy … because Anatolians associate Black Sea men with the sea, even though many of them have little or no experience as sailors or fishermen. The eastern Black Sea men, realizing that the period of service for the navy is three years, while that for the army is only two, naturally try to hide their origins, but the recruiting officer simply asks each man to pronounce the word ‘hazlenut.’

Follow the link for details.

Earlier this year I wrote briefly about the linguistic situation in War and Peace; now I’m reading Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and finding more material, which I will quote here for those interested. (I suspect Figes is oversimplifying the situation, and as always would welcome responses from those who know more than I.) Talking about the fact that aristocrats were “so immersed in foreign languages that many found it challenging to speak or write their own” (pp. 55-56):

Princess Dashkova, a vocal advocate of Russian culture and the only female president ever of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had the finest European education. ‘We were instructed in four different languages, and spoke French fluently,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘but my Russian was extremely poor.’ Count Karl Nesselrode, a Baltic German and Russia’s foreign minister from 1815 to 1856, could not write or even speak the language of the country he was meant to represent. French was the language of high society, and in high-born families the language of all personal relationships as well. The Volkonskys, for example, a family whose fortunes we shall follow in this book, spoke mainly French among themselves. Mademoiselle Callame, a French governess in the Volkonsky household, recalled that in nearly fifty years of service she never heard the Volkonskys speak a word of Russian, except to give orders to the domestic staff. This was true even of Maria (née Raevskaya), the wife of Prince Sergei Volkonsky, Tsar Alexander’s favourite aide-de-camp in 1812. Despite the fact that she had been brought up in the Ukrainian provinces, where noble families were more inclined to speak their native Russian tongue, Maria could not write in Russian properly. Her letters to her husband were in French. Her spoken Russian, which she had picked up from the servants, was very primitive and full of peasant slang. It was a common paradox that the most refined and cultured Russians could speak only the peasant form of Russian which they had learnt from the servants as children…

This neglect of the Russian language was most pronounced and persistent in the highest echelons of the aristocracy, which had always been the most Europeanized (and in more than a few cases of foreign origin). In some families children were forbidden to speak Russian except on Sundays and religious holidays. During her entire education Princess Ekaterina Golitsyn had only seven lessons in her native tongue. Her mother was contemptuous of Russian literature and thought Gogol was ‘for the coachmen’. The Golitsyn children had a French governess and, if she ever caught them speaking Russian, she would punish them by tying a red cloth in the shape of a devil’s tongue around their necks. Anna Lelong had a similar experience at the Girls’ Gymnasium, the best school for noble daughters in Moscow. Those girls caught speaking Russian were made to wear a red tin bell all day and stand like dunces, stripped of their white aprons, in the corner of the class; they were forced to remain standing even during meals, and received their food last. Other children were even more severely punished if they spoke Russian—sometimes even locked in a room. The attitude seems to have been that Russian, like the Devil, should be beaten out of noble children from an early age, and that even the most childish feelings had to be expressed in a foreign tongue.

Later, talking about the Siberian exiles who had participated in the Decembrist revolt (p. 97):

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Most of us probably have a general sense that U.K. usage favors “the [group] are” where Americans say “the [group] is”; if you’re curious about the details, check out Mark Liberman’s post at the Log. He investigates committee and government, and discovers that the singular is favored overwhelmingly for the former and significantly for the latter; various commenters point out, however, that the plural is used for sports teams (“Arsenal have scored again”) and rock bands and record labels (“U2 are on tour,” “EMI have signed the Sex Pistols”). Interesting stuff; it’s always good to have a look at the facts before sinking into the easy chair of generalizations.

I had an interesting e-mail chat with librarylis, one of MetaFilter’s many excellent librarians, about the problems of libraries, with which she is infinitely more familiar than I, and she recommended “Reality Checks, by Andrew Richard Albanese. Albanese summarizes the discussions at a recent Media Tools of Change (TOC) conference and then provides “ten reality checks—broad observations about the web, libraries, and publishers, where there is value to be found or added, where there is danger, and, of course, where users are going.” I can’t summarize it, so I’ll just give you a snippet to whet your appetite:

Certainly, publishers are right to want their own footprint on the web. Oxford University Press’s Scholarship Online (OSO), essentially an all-inclusive database of its book content, is an example of how that can be done right in-house. There’s no shortage of vendors to help, either. Ebrary, for example, has proven itself a durable, nimble service, with a powerful, easy-to-use platform that integrates digital book content with all digital collections—a key point, librarians say. Ingram’s MyiLibrary and Lightning Source, meanwhile, are surging fulfillment and POD services—virtual warehouses for publishers—that allow publishers to squeeze money forever from their greatest asset: the backlist.

The problem with both Random House and HarperCollins, however, is that they are more interested in driving web users back to physical books than driving a new market. Only now are they “experimenting” with selling chapters online or giving away content—and those experiments seem rigged to fail. Random House, for example, is selling chapters of Chip and Dan Heath’s Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each—a good choice but a curious price point, given the physical book is available online for under $10. HarperCollins is offering free downloads of some titles—including a new novel by Paulo Coelho—but those editions are only available for one month, and readers can’t download them to their computers or print them.

Limiting online activities to the marketing of physical books avoids any real engagement with the future….

Thanks for the thought-provoking read, lis!

C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has gotten into the flattering habit of beginning the series with my contribution; here it is. (If anyone comes over from The Millions and is curious as to my final thoughts about Proust, here they are. More about Tolstoy, doubtless, to come in the months ahead!)