Archives for January 2015

I am continuing to read Turner’s Philology (see this post), and I was struck by this passage about the reaction of Christians to the literature of the pagan past (p. 18):

Early Christians fretted over the dangers of pagan, secular literature; but few wanted to toss out baby and bathwater. Basil of Caesarea opined that pagan literature actually prepared students for Christianity. Augustine wished to pillage the classics of anything useful to Christian teaching and throw away the rest. (So he turned Roman rhetoric to the task of improving Christian preaching.) And yet all through his life Augustine grappled with Vergil, as Sabine MacCormack has shown, “whether by way of imitation, of adaptation, or of contradiction.” One fifth-century Roman aristocrat in Gaul kept his Christian books at one end of the library, where ladies sat, his pagan classics at the other, ‘male’ end. Cassiodorus, who in the sixth century adopted Augustine’s more severe precept, found room in it for Martianus Capella, whose pagan allegory he baptized for centuries of medieval readers. Cautiously, Christianity made itself more or less at home with pagan philology.

This is exactly the bind the newly triumphant Bolsheviks found themselves in in 1917: should they introduce the deprived proletarian masses to the classics (now stigmatized as bourgeois rather than pagan), or raze the whole edifice and start from scratch? There were loud voices in favor of the latter, but Lenin and Stalin were wedded to the art they’d grown up with, and the former view prevailed.

Erik at XIX век writes:

If you like or are curious about Russian science fiction, you might be interested in supporting this translation project. It’s a collection of stories from the 1890s to the 1980s or 1990s, edited by Yvonne Howell and translated by Howell, Anindita Banerjee, Sibelan Forrester, Muireann Maguire, Kevin Reese, and Liv Bliss.

As a longtime fan of both sf and Russian literature, I hope this project succeeds!

A couple of totally unrelated questions for the Russian-speakers in my audience:

1) In reading Samuil Lurie’s Изломанный аршин, I came across this passage:

Худшее, что можно сказать про любого нежелательного: хочет быть (или: думает, что он) умнее всех. Это — волчий билет. (А комсомольский — на стол! И совету отряда поставить на вид: просмотрели, упустили товарища.)

I knew a волчий билет (literally ‘wolf’s ticket/card’) was (in tsarist times) a passport with a note of the holder’s political unreliability, and metaphorically means someone has a black mark against him or is blacklisted, but I had no idea what “комсомольский — на стол!” meant. Was there some ritual in which a Komsomol member had to stand on a table to be yelled at? Sashura explained to me that when you were expelled from the Komsomol you had to hand in your membership card (комсомольский билет) — ‘put it on the table’ — at a Komsomol group or party meeting, or at a bureau session/meeting, and sent me this clip from the musical Стиляги in which a member does just that. But what I want to know is, is на стол one of those prepositional phrases in which the stress is attracted by the preposition (NA stol)? And is there anywhere a full list of such combinations (which I love, as I love all irregularities and unpredictable phenomena)? Terence Wade’s A Comprehensive Russian Grammar has a partial list on pp. 419ff. which I will pass on here as an aid to others who might want it (the ones in brackets I have added from other sources, and Wade explains that “alternative stress is possible in many literal contexts, while idioms retain prepositional stress”):

до дому, до ночи, до смерти, за борт, за волосы, за год, за голову, за город, за гору, за два/две (три, пять, шесть, семь, восемь, девять, десять, сто), за день, за зиму, за косу, за зиму, за лето, за море, за ногу/ноги, за нос, за ночь, за плечи, за полночь, за реку, за руку/руки, за спину, за стену, за угол, за ухо/уши, за щеку, за городом, за морем, за ухом, из виду, из дому, из лесу, из носу, на берег, на бок, на борт, на воду, на год, на голову, на гору, на два (три, пять, шесть, семь, восемь, девять, десять, сто), на день, на дом, на зиму, на лето, на море, на ногу/ноги, на нос, на ночь, на пол, на реку, на руку/руки, на спину, на стену, на ухо, [на землю, на поле], на море, (бок) о бок, об пол, (рука) об руку, [о землю, о стол], по два/две, по двое, по три, по трое, по сто, по лесу, по морю, по полю, [по льду, по берегу, по лугу, по носу], под воду, под гору, под ноги, под руку/руки, под боком, при смерти, [у моря]

But I wish I had a full list to check, so I’d know whether to say NA stol or na STOL. [Update: Sashura says it’s na STOL, with stress on the noun, but I still want to know if there’s a general resource.] [Further update: I just discovered the cavalry command “Mount!” is “На конь!” [NA kon’], with recessed stress.]

[Further update: More forms here, e.g. показываться нá люди; биться, встать, стоять нá смерть; сразить, убить, поразить, ранить нá зло; идти, подниматься нáверх, and here, e.g. пóд полом, нá сердце. I still wish I could find a full list.]

2) I recently learned the word пай ‘good’ (from Finnish and Estonian pai), used for children, as in пай-мальчик ‘good boy.’ What I want to know is whether it is also used for pets; can I call Lyuba “пай-кошка”?

Alexander Beecroft has a post at the Verso blog listing five “important works of world literature unavailable in the English language.” Right off the bat he cheats by including Ruan Ji’s “Poems which sing my emotions” (詠懷詩), which has in fact been translated: “a translation by Graham Hartill was published in China in 1988 and reprinted there in 2006, but it’s available in only a handful of university libraries, and not for sale at Amazon.” I can understand your desire to see his work more widely available, but when you’ve only got five slots, surely you could use them all for untranslated works that are actually untranslated.

But never mind, I forgive him because the others are so enticingly described; I was particularly taken with 3 and 4:

3. Constanzo Beschi (1680-1747) Thembavani, a Tamil-language epic on St. Joseph.

…The Thembavani is said to draw on two rich, but utterly distinct, strands of epic tradition: the Tamil tradition of devotional epic, which in turn derives from both Sanskrit epic and a rich local lyric tradition; and the Renaissance Italian epic tradition of Ariosto and Tasso. As such, it ranks as one of the earliest works (to my knowledge at least) which attempts to integrate European and non-European aesthetics into a single work of imaginative literature. It’s an unbelievably strange and fascinating prologue to colonial and post-colonial literature, but one not accessible to those who don’t know Tamil. Elijah Hoole, a nineteenth-century Methodist missionary who himself translated parts of the Bible into Tamil, offers a glimpse into this strange text, with some selections from the description of Jerusalem in the second canto:

“There were swarms of contending crocodiles, showing teeth sharp as a sword, and curved like the fair new moon, opening their fleshy mouths, and flashing fire from their eyes, as though the moat had formerly been deepened to hell, and the demons lying there had assumed and wandered about in a terrifying form.”

4. Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil (1866-1945). Aşk-ı Memnu (“Forbidden Love”) 1900.

It’s one of the first novels written in Ottoman Turkish, and one of the most highly acclaimed, a sort of Madame Bovary set in turn-of-the-century Istanbul. … I translated a sentence from the opening of the novel (from the review of the German translation in Der Spiegel):

“They were by now so used to these chance encounters with the mahogany boat, which came close to a collision with them each time, that today they barely seemed to notice when, on their return from Kalender, they came within a hair of colliding with it again.”

This sentence seems to give us what we want from a novel – hints of complex and perhaps illicit social interaction among the well-to-do; a whiff of exoticism; the sense of total immersion in a social world – that it’s frustrating not to be able to read more.

Here‘s a post that links to this “Translate This Book!” list, and here‘s my decade-old lament at the absence of a translation of Abdelrahman Munif’s historical novel Ard Al-Sawad (an absence that, I need hardly say, still continues). Thanks for the link, Trevor!

The OED has created an amazing feature:

Each data point shown here represents the first recorded use of a word in English, positioned according to the language from which the word was borrowed. The size of the data point indicates the frequency of the word: larger bubbles for higher-frequency words, smaller bubbles for lower-frequency words. The progress bar at the bottom tracks the growth of English, subdivided into the major language groups from which words are derived.

There’s plenty more information at the link; here‘s the interactive map itself if you just want to get started. Warning: intensely addictive, and each word shown below each map is linked to the OED entry (they seem to have made them all accessible for this purpose); if I didn’t have to get work done I’d pause it at each new year and investigate every word. (If you click the double arrow it zooms forward so you see the whole thing in two minutes, but I prefer the slower, single-arrow route.)

Yugambeh is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the southeast coast of Queensland; according to Wikipedia, “Yugambeh is one of some dozen or two dozen dialects of the Bandjalang language. Among the differences in Yugambeh is that yugambeh (or yugam) is the word for no.” The Yugambeh Museum, Language and Heritage Research Centre “aims to record and promote the traditional knowledge of our region, especially the Yugambeh language, which was spoken throughout south east Queensland.” The State Library of Queensland has a nice page on it with links to various resources, and there’s even a free app (“Includes audio, dictionary and pictionary files”). All this is what I call putting the internet to good use; thanks for the links, Bathrobe!

I was a little hard on Erich Auerbach recently, so I thought I’d right the balance by showcasing him at his best. Here he’s discussing a passage from Saint Augustine about a friend of his youth who was dragged to the gladiator shows and became addicted to them, conveniently available online in Latin (scroll down to CAPUT 8: “Non sane relinquens…”) and English; after describing the content (“And such an about-face from one extreme to the very opposite is also characteristically Christian”), he moves to the style, the reminiscences of classical writers like Cicero. He continues:

The rhetorical element makes a more classical impression than in Ammianus or Jerome; yet it is clear—and unmistakably so even at a single glance—that we are not dealing with a classical text. The tone has something urgently impulsive, something human and dramatic, and the form exhibits a predominance of parataxes. Both of these characteristics, either considered individually or in their joint effect, are manifestly unclassical. If, for example, we examine the sentence, nam quodam pugnae casu [“For, upon the fall of one in the fight”], etc., which contains a whole series of hypotactically introduced members, we find that its climax is a movement which is at once dramatic and paratactic: aperuit oculos, et percussus est [“opened his eyes, and was struck”], etc.; and as we try to trace the impression back, we are reminded of certain Biblical passages, which in the mirror of the Vulgate become: Dixitque Deus: fiat lux, et facta est lux; or: ad te clamaverunt, et salvi facti sunt; in te speraverunt, et non sunt confusi (Ps. 22: 6); or Flavit spiritus tuus, et operuit eos mare (Exod. 15: 10); or: aperuit Dominus os asinae, et locuta est (Num. 22: 28). In all of these instances there is, instead of the causal or at least temporal hypotaxis which we should expect in classical Latin (whether with cum or postquam, whether with an ablative absolute or a participial construction) a parataxis with et; and this procedure, far from weakening the interdependence of the two events, brings it out most emphatically; just as in English it is more dramatically effective to say: He opened his eyes and was struck … than: When he opened his eyes, or: Upon opening his eyes, he was struck …

I found that perceptive and convincing, and I’m glad I studied enough Latin in my youth to be able to follow it. (Parataxis, for those unfamiliar with the term, is “a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors […] the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions.”) And if anyone is interested in what those contests were like, a new book, Jerry Toner’s The Day Commodus Killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games, sounds well worth a look.

No, no, not the guy you’re thinking of — the nickname Mike. Michael Peverett writes me:

I’m reading the opening chapters of Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). This is a historical novel that takes place some time in the second half of the sixteenth-century in England.

One of the characters who turns up at Giles Gosling’s comfortable country inn The Black Bear is his own nephew, a bad penny who has returned in search of the kind of dirty work that can pay for his various vices. His name is Michael Lambourne but his uncle calls him “Mike”.

And that’s my query. Scott used his extensive knowledge of Jacobean drama to create dialogue with a reasonably convincing sixteenth-century flavour, but I don’t remember coming across the familiar name “Mike” in any literature from that time. (Whereas, on the other hand, my impression was that certain other shortened names seem as old as the hills – Jack, Jill, Nell, Nan, Moll, Will, Hal …)

Which makes me wonder, when was “Mike” first attested (as a familiar name)? Since the OED doesn’t include proper names, how would you and your readers advise researching that question? – Or, mutatis mutandis, the earliest appearance of Ted, Ed, Chris, Sue, Fran, Nick, Larry, Steve….?

An excellent question, thought I, so I’m sharing it with the world at large. How do we find out the age of a nickname? Are there reliable references?

I keep a copy of Erich Auerbach‘s Mimesis (see this post) beside my bed; it makes perfect nighttime reading, since it consists largely of bite-sized excerpts of various works in the original and in translation with shortish discussions of each. I am in awe of Auerbach, but one doesn’t like to be too intimidated, so I hugely enjoyed discovering a chink in his armor (comparable to the pleasure I took in Nabokov’s mistaking Khazars for Hazaras). It doesn’t affect the acuity of his scholarship, but it brings him down to earth a bit.

In chapter 3, “The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres,” after discussing a quote from Ammianus Marcellinus (whose name I pronounce in the good old pre-reform way “ammy-EY-nus marse-LYE-nus”) he turns to Apuleius (“apyou-LEY-us”) and a passage from his Metamorphoses (aka The Golden Ass) in which Lucius, the narrator, describes bargaining for some fish for dinner at the market and then running into his old friend Pythias, who has come up in the world; after insisting Lucius tell him how much he paid for the fish, he marches up to the little old man (seniculum) who had sold them, loudly abuses him, and concludes “But this must not pass unpunished. No—I shall show you how evil-doers are punished under my administration.” He dumps the basket on the ground and has his servant step on the fish and grind his heels into them (ac pedibus suis totos obterere). He then turns to Lucius and says “That was quite a disgrace for the old man; I think I shall let it go at that.” Lucius resumes his interrupted journey to the baths, reflecting “Through the energetic intervention of my smart fellow student I had lost both my money and my supper” (prudentis condiscipuli valido consilio et nummis simul privatus et cena).

Now, that’s a genuinely funny story (I never expected this book to make me laugh!); I can see it, transposed a bit, working its magic in either Laurel & Hardy or Ilf & Petrov. But almost as funny is Auerbach’s indignantly bewildered response:

No doubt there have been and are readers who simply laugh over this story and consider it a farce, a mere joke. But I do not believe that is quite enough. The behavior of Lucius’ long-lost friend, of whom we are told nothing except that they had just been reunited, is either wilfully malicious (which he had no reason to be) or insane (but there is no reference to his not being quite right in his mind). We cannot avoid the impression of a half silly, half spectral distortion of ordinary, average occurrences in human life. The friend has been delighted by the unexpected encounter; he has offered his services and actually insisted on being of help. Yet without the slightest concern for the consequences of his action, he robs Lucius of his supper and his money. As for the fishmonger’s punishment, there is no such thing; he still has his money. And if I am not mistaken, Pythias urges Lucius to leave the market place, because the dealers will not sell him anything after such an incident and might actually attempt to wreak vengeance upon him. The whole affair, with all its silliness, is carefully calculated to fool Lucius and play him a mean trick—but for what purpose and to what end? Is it silliness, is it malice, is it insanity? The silliness of it cannot prevent the reader from feeling bewildered and disturbed. And what a strangely unpleasant, foul, and somehow sadistic idea—that of the fish being trodden to pulp on the pavement of the market place by order of the law!

This is exactly the kind of thing that gives rise to the unfortunate stereotype of Germans as having no sense of humor. I imagine a series “Erich Auerbach Explains Jokes”: “Now, in this story we have a priest, a rabbi, and a horse walking into a bar. In the first place, an establishment devoted to the sale of intoxicating beverages is not a seemly venue for men of the cloth, but far worse is the presence of the horse. What is the horse doing there? Has it become addicted to alcohol by some cruel whim of its owner? Is it being forced into a room not suited for it, where its presence will surely be unwelcome, merely for the convenience of one of the men, who prefers to ride home and perhaps likes to keep his horse in sight at all times?” Etc. I tell you, it’ll be as big a hit as Mystery Science Theater 3000!

A nice bit of LH-relevant dialogue from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which is every bit as good as jamessal said:

“So where’s your father’s shop, Nick?” said Pete.

“Oh, it’s in Barwick—in Northamptonshire?”

“Don’t they pronounce that Barrick?”

“Only frightfully grand people.”

Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and then coughed and looked almost sick. “Ah, that’s better,” he said. “Yes, Bar-wick. I know Barwick. It’s what you’d call a funny old place, isn’t it.”

The class and regional/local implications of the pronunciation of place names is one of the things I find most bewildering about UK language and culture. For what it’s worth, my Daniel Jones Pronouncing Dictionary (13th ed., 1967) gives only the “Barrick” pronunciation. Of course, that presumably refers to one or more of the other Barwicks; Wikipedia recognizes places of that name in Devon, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Somerset, West Yorkshire, and North Yorkshire, but none in Northamptonshire.

Wikipedia sez:

Y Gwyll (English: The Dusk), known in English by the name Hinterland, is a police detective drama series broadcast on S4C in Welsh and later in English on BBC One Wales. When it was aired on the BBC in 2014, it was the first BBC television drama with dialogue in both English and Welsh.

I hadn’t heard of it until the wonderful Charlotte Mandell sent me a link to this nine-minute clip, which features Richard Harrington doing, as she says, some interesting code-switching; he’ll be rattling along in Welsh and suddenly say “like a duck to water” in English. Thanks, Charlotte!