Archives for June 2016

A Poet of the Outskirts.

Boris Dralyuk has a fine World Literature Today piece on a forgotten figure, “A Poet of the Outskirts: Yevgeny Kropivnitsky (1893–1979).” Here’s a sample:

Toward the end of his life, in 1975, Kropivnitsky described the task he had set for himself as a poet and the reaction his work aroused: “When the poet begins to read his poems, the people listening expect to hear about him. Imagine their confusion when, instead of hearing the author read about himself, they suddenly hear poems about them. They start to fidget in their chairs, their faces grow puzzled, dark . . .” The poet, Kropivnitsky goes on, is interested in the “flesh and blood of existence. He shows you to yourselves, laymen, to the best of his ability.”

So how do we appear in Kropivnitsky’s looking glass? As denizens of an unsympathetic universe, subject to the arbitrary cruelty of our fellow man, ourselves capable of great cruelty, awaiting death and, beyond it, a “Half-erased Epitaph” (1947):

Here lies . . . (for a while –
the cemetery’s being razed).
He left us in his prime . . .
(Then, I imagine, dates.)
(And then, in capitals, an) OV
(Likely another Ivanóv.)

This devastating verse is as cool to the touch and devoid of particulars as the object it describes, which is, in turn, as impersonal—or rather, as depersonalized—as what lies beneath it. The speaker’s insertions only underscore the lacunae. The name “Ivanov”—the Russian equivalent of “Smith,” say—not only fails to narrow down the possibilities but accomplishes the very opposite: it reduces the hope of recovering the deceased’s identity to an absurd joke. Who is this “OV,” this Russian John Doe? Dear reader, find the nearest mirror. In fact, you need look no farther than the poem itself: a verbal headstone polished to a reflective sheen. The poet “shows you to yourselves . . . to the best of his ability.” Nettlesome indeed.

(The poet’s surname is from a word meaning “nettle.”) I’m going to have to investigate Kropivnitsky further, and I encourage all such attempts to resurrect long-gone writers.

Janet Malcolm vs. P&V.

I usually add new issues of the NYRB to the large pile on the shelf to my left and let them ripen as I continue reading issues from last summer, but an e-mail from LH reader Rick alerted me to the lead piece in the latest (June 23) issue, Janet Malcolm’s evisceration of my least-favorite world-conquering translating team, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. As readers (like Rick) who know my feelings about the ubiquitous P&V will guess, I was thrilled by Malcolm’s piece. Mind you, it’s over the top; P&V’s translations aren’t as bad as she makes out [I may be bending over backwards here, as Anatoly thinks — see Update below], and her (laudable) fondness for Constance Garnett leads her to lash out at Marian Schwartz as well, and Schwartz, one of the best living translators of Russian, certainly doesn’t deserve it (though the bit Malcolm quotes is indeed a blunder). But in a culture war, as in any other war, one must occasionally go over the top, and this stuff is glorious — after recalling the halcyon days when everyone read Garnett, she continues:

Since that time a sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations. When you go to a bookstore to buy a work by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Chekhov, most of what you find is in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

In an article in the July/August 2010 issue of Commentary entitled “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature,” Morson used the word “tragedy” to express his sense of the disaster that has befallen Russian literature in English translation since the P&V translations began to appear. To Morson “these are Potemkin translations—apparently definitive but actually flat and fake on closer inspection.” Morson fears that “if students and more-general readers choose P&V…[they] are likely to presume that whatever made so many regard Russian literature with awe has gone stale with time or is lost to them.”

She quotes other people appalled by the new rulers of the roost (Anna Shapiro on the P&V Anna Karenina: “It leaves such a bad taste; it’s so wrong, and so oddly wrong, turning nourishment into wood”) and provides several passages translated by Garnett and P&V, with acerbic commentary; read the whole thing, and then read the excellent discussion at XIX век, where Erik McDonald is more bothered than I am by Malcolm’s unfairness to P&V (though we are equally bothered by her unfairness to Schwartz) and there are good comments by kaggsy (“I’m happy with archaisms, I don’t want a book that old brought ‘up to date’”), Alex K. (“‘Образуется’ was not a neologism Tolstoy thought up. The word itself was legit”), Julia (who is “not a fan of Pevear/Volokhonsky” but finds the article “too harsh and narrow”), and especially Russian Dinosaur, whose long comment I won’t try to summarize.

Unrelated, but I have to pass along the news that the Paris Review‘s series of video interviews with authors talking about their first book, and the latest is Helen DeWitt on The Last Samurai! (On behalf of my profession, I would like to apologize for the copyeditor who defiled the proofs of her brilliant book. We’re not all like that, I swear.)

Update. Anatoly Vorobey has posted (in Russian) about the Malcolm piece and the reaction to it, and has some very interesting things to say. He starts out by savaging P&V, calling them “ужасные переводчики, уродующие каждый текст, которого касаются” [awful translators, mutilating every text they touch], which pleased me; then he turns to the specific example of Tolstoy’s “образуется,” and his long discussion is well worth reading if you know Russian. In brief, he says that as far as he can tell this sense “it’ll work out, it’ll be all right” was introduced by Tolstoy to the literary language and was not (as some XIX век commenters claimed) already common, though it may have been used dialectically, and therefore the various published translations “she’ll come round,” “it’ll work out,” and “things will shape up” are inadequate (because not innovative). He dislikes Schwartz’s “it’ll shapify” not because it’s (in Malcolm’s word) “weird,” but because the learned suffix –ify is implausible in the mouth of the peasant Matvei. Anatoly proposes “it’ll set down,” which seems satisfactory to me.

The Slang of Prigs.

Rebecca Gowers has a delightful Guardian piece attacking the attackers of “horrible words,” a pastime always dear to my heart. Here’s her paragraph on prigs:

In Middlemarch, George Eliot has Fred Vincy make the splendid observation that “correct English is the slang of prigs”. The word slang started as a low term for low terms – an example of what it named. But by the 1870s, when Middlemarch was published, its meaning had widened so that it could now suggest the special vocabulary of a particular group. How the prigs managed to nab the labels “correct” and “proper” for their particular form of slang is another matter. But the fact is, they did. And it is in a spirit of dauntless righteousness that they continue to dismiss the English of lesser mortals as “uncivilised”, “vile”, “fatuous”, “abominable” and so on.

And here she is on transitivity:

Transitivity gets our senior advisers going. Heffer [Simon Heffer, author of Strictly English] declares that “one cannot” use collapse transitively (as in: “The search party that located the bodies […] simply collapsed the tent over them”, Telegraph). And Humphrys [John Humphrys, Beyond Words] confides that he is unmoved by the “sweet smile” of a waitress who says “Enjoy!” to him, wanting to ask her, “Don’t you know that ‘enjoy’ is a transitive not an intransitive verb?” A linguist would explain that, in this instance, there is an “unexpressed object”. The waitress herself, compelled to serve Humphrys, might like to reply that the OED cites intransitive uses of enjoy from 1380 on. Or she could just recite the example given from 1549: “Yet he neuer enioied after, but in conclusyon pitifully wasted his painful lyfe.”

Go get ’em, Rebecca! I myself will never write “miniscule” (it is for that very reason that I long ago adopted the donnish pronunciation “mi-NUS-cule,” so that I would never be tempted in the wrong direction), and I will always wince at singular “kudo,” but she is absolutely right to mock those who pretend that such usages are the downfall of English. Read, and enjoy, the whole thing. (Thanks, Paul!)

Gerasim Lebedev (or Herasim Lebedeff).

Anu Kumar reports for Scroll.in on a remarkable Russian:

In 1795, Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev (or Herasim Lebedeff), a Russian musician and newly turned linguistic translator did something unique in Calcutta. For the first time, a play written in English, Richard Paul Jodrell’s The Disguise, a comedy in three acts, was translated into Bengali and performed on a proscenium stage – a new innovation that came with scene settings and arches, as seen in European theatres of the time.

The music that served as accompaniment, and played on western instruments, was composed by Lebedev himself. The verses were written by Bharatchandra Ray, who had also written Annadamangal in the early 1750s. The stage was decorated in traditional ways and not the least unusual thing was the presence of female actors.

Sherry Simon’s Cities in Translation describes Calcutta as a renaissance city of the nineteenth century, which brought together different languages, and cultures, with mediators or go-betweens to facilitate interaction, all in a creative amalgam. But Lebedev’s attitudes as a linguist and translator were interesting. He had a keen ear for language, and was particularly interested in “contact forms” – mediation in language and performance that brought people together. […]

[Lebedev] ambitiously envisaged his plays (The Disguise was followed by Moliere’s Love is the Best Doctor) as containing in them all the languages then spoken in Calcutta, to make for a truly people’s theatre. The first act in The Disguise was written in Bengali and the first scene in the second act was in bazaar Hindustani. Lebedev wrote later that his intention was to write scenes of the third act in English to truly reflect the multi-lingual city Calcutta was then.

You can read about his adventurous life at the link (he went from St. Petersburg to England to Madras to Calcutta); when he got back to Russia, Tsar Alexander appointed him professor of eastern languages and a member of the Academy of Sciences. And they’re still discovering more about him:

In 2005, a research project conducted under the aegis of a group of St Petersburg Indologists unearthed a number of manuscripts; some of these believed to be written by Lebedev himself. These include his draft for a grammar of the Bengali language and also his attempts to translate texts from the Old Testament into some Indian languages. Some of his attempted translations from the Bhagavad Gita into Russian also appeared in his Mathematical Manuscript. Lebedev apparently also wrote a short work, Arithmetic Tables, to familiarise future Russian businessmen and travellers with rules of Indian counting and the monetary systems then in vogue.

Quite a guy!

Addendum. I took that link from Greg Afinogenov’s Facebook feed, and he’s since posted a follow-up reference to Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, a Hungarian (Szekler) philologist and Orientalist, author of the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book, who “is considered as the founder of Tibetology” and “was said to have been able to read in seventeen languages.” I love these multiculti characters from bygone days of yore.

Autodescriptive Linguistic Terms.

“Loanword” is a calque of German “Lehnwort”; “calque” is a loanword from French. Via Speculative Grammarian.

How Language Influences Emotion.

Gracie Lofthouse interviews cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith in the Atlantic about her new book, The Book of Human Emotions; it’s pretty hand-wavey stuff, but worth reading if only for the concept of “homefulness” and the fact that “The last person who was diagnosed with nostalgia as a cause of death died in 1918.” Thanks, Trevor!

Chremsel.

One of the words in the Scripps National Spelling Bee 2016 (Guardian liveblog) was chremslach, the plural of chremsel; your curiosity about what the word represents can be satisfied by this lively Haaretz column by Liz Steinberg (thanks, Paul!): “Admittedly not the most common of Jewish foods, chremslach are flat, fried fritters made by some Ashkenazi Jews for Passover or Hanukkah.” But what if you’re curious about where the word is from? It’s not in the OED, NOAD, or M-W Collegiate; Webster’s Third New International has it (which is why it was eligible for the spelling bee), but the etymology given there is just “Yiddish chremzel.” Well, yes, it practically screams “Yiddish,” but where is the Yiddish word from? So I did a little digging in Google Books and found this on p. 393 of Alexander Beider‘s Origins of Yiddish Dialects: “Influence of French is also quite likely in AlsY frimzl and SwY fremzl ‘noodle’/EY khremzl ‘Passover pancake.'” The relevant footnote reads:

[…] This word is related in some way to Italian vermicelli though the immediate etymon for the WY word is uncertain. Starting with Kosover (1958:63), several authors wrote about the link between the WY frimzl and the Old French word that in turn was loaned from Italian. However, no linguistic argument corroborating this hypothesis was ever suggested, while the proposed French etymon is actually anachronistic. In French, the earliest reference to a word derived from vermicelli dates from the sixteenth century only (Wexler 1992:54). Looking into the early Jewish references collected by Kosover (1958:61–5), one can observe the existence of two series: (1) with the initial gimel […], the oldest date from the twelfth century; (2) with the initial vav or double-vav […], mainly present in sources from western Germany of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, but also known in Normandy in the thirteenth century. The first series is clearly of French origin. It was in certain Romance dialects in the territory of France that Germanic (Frankish) initial /w/ gave rise to /gw/ that later turned into /g/. The last process ended in Old French during the twelfth century. […] The second series (to which WY frimzl is related) may also be of French origin. Indeed, Frankish /w/ remained unchanged in northern (Wallony, Picardy) and eastern (Lorraine) dialects. […] Both series have two idiosyncrasies in common: (a) the letter zayen /z/ for what was “c” in Italian; (b) the introduction of a vowel between /r/ and /m/, most likely as a result of the metathesis between the first vowel and the second (liquid) consonant. Such characteristics could not appear independently. Either both series had the same ancestor that already possessed these features, or one of these series influenced another. The feature (a) is typical for France only. It is regularly found in French and Occitan: compare modern French plaisir “pleasure’ < Latin placere, oiseau ‘bird’ < aucellus (Bourciez 1921:153–4). For the feature (b), a close parallel can be found in French fromage ‘cheese’ whose initial sounds underwent in Old French the change from /furm-/ to /frum-/ (Pope 1934:178).

So there you have it: chremslach is related in some way to vermicelli, though the details are frustratingly unclear. Me, I’ll stick to latkes.

Pho.

I haven’t had a lot of pho, the Vietnamese noodle-and-meat soup, but what I’ve had I’ve liked. The name is a notorious problem (for English-speakers): it looks like it should be pronounced like the word “foe,” and lots of people say it that way, but the Vietnamese word phở actually has a mid-vowel that sounds like the vowel of “fun” (you can hear it said at that Wikipedia article by clicking the “listen” symbol), and those English-speakers who know that can sound a little silly trying to reproduce it in English (and, worse, can sound supercilious if they feel impelled to “correct” those who say it like “foe”). But never mind that; where is the word from, what is its etymology? The OED (entry created 2006) says “< Vietnamese phở, perhaps < French feu (in pot au feu),” and AHD says the same, but it seems odd that such a basic Vietnamese dish should have a name of foreign origin. Not absurd, mind you, or even unlikely (cf. “hamburger”), but odd. So I was interested to see an entirely different origin proposed in Andrea Nguyen’s The History of Pho; it’s well worth reading if you have any interest in the soup itself, but here I’m focusing on etymology. She says it began (around the turn of the 20th century) as a beef noodle soup called nguu nhuc phan:

So how did nguu nhuc phan become pho? It is likely that as the dish caught on, the street hawkers became more competitive and abbreviated their distinctive calls as a means to attract customers. “Nguu nhuc phan day” (“beef and rice noodles here”) was shortened to “nguu phan a,” then “phan a,” or “phon o,” and finally settled into one word, pho. In a Vietnamese dictionary published around 1930, the entry for pho defined it as a dish of thinly sliced noodles and beef, its name having been derived from phan, the Cantonese word for flat rice noodle. It’s been suggested that pho arose because when phan is mispronounced or misheard, it can mean “excrement.”

The term pho is not French in origin, despite claims that the pronunciation bears resemblance to feu (fire in French, as in pot au feu).

Intriguing, but Nguyen is a food writer, not an etymologist, and I don’t know enough about Vietnamese to have an informed opinion. As always, I welcome all thoughts from the Varied Reader.

On Honesty in Argument.

Ryan Ruby has a 3 Quarks Daily piece called The Prescriptivist’s Progress that begins as follows:

This month, two minor controversies revived the specter of the “language wars” and reintroduced the literary internet to the distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism. One began when Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker Prize and readers took to their search engines en masse to look up the word “Kafkaesque,” which had been used by the book’s publishers and reviewers to describe it. Remarking upon the trend, Merriam-Webster noted sourly: “some argue that ‘Kafkaesque’ is so overused that it’s begun to lose its meaning.” A few weeks before, Slate‘s Laura Miller had lodged a similar complaint about the abuse of the word “allegory.” “An entire literary tradition is being forgotten,” she warned, “because writers use the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.”

When it comes to semantics, prescriptivists insist that precise rules ought to govern linguistic usage. Without such rules there would be no criteria by which to judge whether a word was being used correctly or incorrectly, and thus no way to fix its meaning. Descriptivists, by contrast, argue that a quick glance at the history of any natural language will show that, whether we like it or not, words are vague and usage changes over time. The meaning of a word is whatever a community of language users understands it to mean at any given moment. In both of the above cases, Merriam-Webster and Miller were flying the flag of prescriptivism, protesting the kind of semantic drift that results from the indiscriminate, over-frequent usages of a word, a drift that has no doubt been exacerbated thanks to the internet itself, which has increased the recorded usages of words and accelerated their circulation.

Ruby goes on to set “Kafkaesque” aside (because it’s “already received ample coverage”) and chase after “allegory”; I’ll let those who care about such things follow him there and, if they like, quibble over metaphor and rhetorical modes. My concern is elsewhere, with the idiotic and near-libelous statement that “Merriam-Webster” is “flying the flag of prescriptivism” and protesting semantic drift. This is idiotic on several counts. In the first place, “Merriam-Webster” is not doing anything at all. One person, presumably an employee of M-W, who writes the Trend Watch column wrote:

Lookups for Kafkaesque spiked dramatically on May 17th after the Man Booker prize for 2016 was awarded to Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian. This work, translated from Korean into English by Debbie Smith, has been described by its British publishers (and by a number of reviewers) as Kafka-esque.

The word derives from the famed Czech novelist Franz Kafka (1883-1924), whose prose became so synonymous with the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16 years after his death. […]

The word joined a number of other literary eponyms, including Dickensian and Byronic. However, Kafkaesque has seen quite a bit more use than most such words, leading to occasional charges that the word has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to its overuse.

In the nearly 70 years since his death, we’ve promoted Franz Kafka from a merely great writer to an all-purpose adjective, and that word – Kafkaesque – now gets tossed around with cavalier imprecision, applied to everything from an annoying encounter with a petty bureaucrat to the genocidal horrors of the Third Reich.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario), 31 January 1992

That is everything the anonymous M-W employee wrote, plus the final quotation illustrating the “occasional charges that the word has been watered down.” Do you see anything there that smacks of prescriptivism? In the quotation, sure, but the Trend Watch writer is simply reporting on that prescriptivism — saying that some people complain that “the word has been watered down.” To call the Trend Watch piece prescriptivist is like saying a newspaper story reporting on a KKK rally is ipso facto racist; it is not only wrong but insulting, and shows the person who says such a thing to be at best light-minded and at worst someone with no regard for the truth. Furthermore, the quoted passage “some argue that ‘Kafkaesque’ is so overused that it’s begun to lose its meaning” is not Merriam-Webster noting anything, “sourly” or otherwise (seriously, does that sound sour to you?), it is an italicized caption for a picture of Kafka and is the caption-writer’s summary of one of the things the Trend Watch piece is saying (and the main point it’s making, to emphasize what should be obvious, is that a lot of people are looking up the word — that’s why it’s called “Trend Watch”).

This particular case, of course, gets under my skin because Merriam-Webster, one of the great lexicographical firms, is anti-prescriptivist by its very nature, and in fact suffered from the attacks of foolish prescriptivists when its great Third New International Dictionary came out in 1961. Shame on you, Ryan Ruby. Learn to read more carefully, think more clearly, and write more accurately.

A’ghailleann.

Iona Sharma’s “A’ghailleann”: On Language-Learning and the Decolonisation of the Mind is an essay about her attempt to learn Scottish Gaelic after failure to relearn what should in theory be her mother tongue, Hindi; it’s the kind of story I always find moving and inspiring:

Here are the things you need to know first. I am thirty years old. I am Indian. My parents arrived in Scotland as newly minted immigrants in the eighties, thinking they’d go home after I was born. Decades later, we’re still here.

My parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, their friends and their community, speak Hindi as a first or joint first language. I do not. I stopped being a fluent Hindi speaker at the age of six, perhaps earlier. The school didn’t like it. Too confusing to educate a bilingual child. If you don’t speak to her in English at home, she’ll never learn. […]

Just try! It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect.

But when it’s your own language, it does matter. It matters when it’s your own people who are laughing behind their hands at you. It matters when you’re seventeen, painstakingly reading a road sign, and passing strangers sympathise with your parents. And it matters in adult language classes, when you can’t relax and laugh at your own mistakes like the other learners, because of the constant, drumbeat internal litany: you should know this. You should be better than this.

And, as ever, it matters because the personal is political. It matters because Hindi, like Gaelic, is a colonised space. It is a language complete in itself, with its own history, literature, poetry and tradition. But more than sixty-five years after Indian independence, it has been surrounded and absorbed by English, so among the Indian middle classes it is no longer a prestige language. It is the vernacular, the language one speaks at home; one does not use it to write to the tax office, nor take one’s degree.

So if it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect – if it doesn’t matter if a noun is masculine or feminine; if a verb falls to be transitive in the past perfect; if you just use the English word, because who can remember the Hindi for mathematics or apartment or transubstantiation – then for all I wage my small battle, we’re losing the war. To speak our language perfectly – to choose to do so, despite decades of colonial influence – is another political act. […]

After a few days of listening and learning, I find I can order elevenses at the campus café, and understand that the sign in the bathroom is telling me not to flush tampons down the toilet. Looking out over the harbour, I suddenly grasp the meaning of the Gaelic word glas, not grey or green but in-between, the colour of the sea beneath a turbulent sky. Gaelic holds the Highland landscape in the weft of it, the sound of running water in its flow and fall. It demands time and hard work, but that denotation of beauty will become a part of me.

I’ve never been in her situation, but I’ve studied many languages under many different conditions, and what she says rings true to me.