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Recently Stan Carey wrote me: “This thread by Emily Wilson is a treat, if you haven’t seen it.” When I said I wished there were a threadreader version, he kindly provided me with one, and here it is; it starts:

A classic translator’s dilemma, which presumably applies for any language pair: what to do about the fact that languages individuate the world differently. One language makes a distinction where another makes none.

One area where this often happens is family relationships. Many languages distinguish between different types of cousin (father’s side/ mother’s side) or different types of in-law (a sister’s husband, versus a wife’s brother). Others, like English, don’t.

Often, these distinctions matter, in the context of the original culture or text — but there is no way to convey both register or degree of marked-ness (“this is the normal term”) as well as referent (“husband’s brother’s wife” is generally not idiomatic English).

A small instance of this vast area that I wrestle with all the time in the Iliad is the clear, common distinction between striking an enemy with a projectile missile (βάλλω) or striking with weapon still held in the attacker’s hand (τύπτω). Homer frequently uses phrases that express both distinct possibilities, as alternatives: these are the two ways you can kill or be killed in battle. But there is no pair of English verbs (let alone, two syllable English verbs) that expresses precisely this distinction.

She goes on to describe various ways of trying to handle the distinction; this is the kind of thing I love to read. Thanks, Stan!

Fabian, an Australian living in Berlin, writes about the difficulties of not knowing the culinary code in a foreign land:

Ordering a bagel in NYC is like cracking a code. What kinds of bagel are there? Do you call it a bagel or a sandwich? Is it wrong to put egg and cheese on a Cinnamon-Raisin bagel (I hope so)? You’re somehow expected to just know, and if you don’t, then you’re clearly new to the city. And that’s not a terrible thing – people are mostly tolerant – but it’s a little embarrassing, so you’re motivated to overcome it pretty quickly.

I remember experiencing this when I moved to Berlin, and was completely unsure of how Döner worked, but now it just kinda mumbles out of my mouth automatically and it has such a rhythm and inertia to it that I don’t think I could change the order even if I wanted to:

“Ein Döner bitte, Soße Scharf Kräuter, Salat komplett mit allem“

(One Döner please, sauce spicy / herbs, salad complete / with everything)

There’s a Döner shop in the DeKalb food court in Brooklyn, and aside from the obvious heresy that a Döner is $12.75 (plus tax!!), I think if I tried ordering like this I’d just get a lot of confused looks. I don’t even know what they call their sauces; I’m sure it’s not a literal translation from the German.

Back home, in Berlin, tourists turn up at Döner stalls and get everyone confused because they don’t know the system. The Dönermann asks “Sauce?” and the tourists don’t know the Three Blessèd Options (Chili / Garlic / Herb Yoghurt), and the people running the Döner shops are often first-generation Turkish migrants who haven’t always learned enough English to make it work. Nor should they; they all paid their penance when they arrived by learning German.

The whole thing is excellent (and don’t skip the footnotes); I love the guy who says sympathetically “Ich hasse Englisch.” I think the “Bagel code” angst is overblown (there are labels right next to the different kinds of bagels, you don’t have to guess, and in what context would you call it a sandwich?), but as a New Yorker (in spirit if no longer in body), I would, wouldn’t I?

Having finished Tatyana Tolstaya’s Кысь (The Slynx; see this post) and been underwhelmed, I thought I’d take a break from chronology and read a Strugatsky novel I’d been saving, Град обреченный (translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Doomed City). Sadly, I was again underwhelmed, and as I wrote to Lisa Hayden, it didn’t even seem like that much of a change: “It has remarkable similarities to Кысь — a thoroughly nasty, stupid, amoral protagonist rises from (literally) the muck to become chief assistant to a fascist dictator after a coup.” In this case, the action is set in what Dmitry Glukhovsky, who wrote the introduction to the translation (and says it’s his favorite Strugatsky novel), calls “a hermetic world that is located outside time and space” — though Glukhovsky also thinks the city of the novel is basically a warped-mirror version of Leningrad, where the authors were from. Marat Grinberg, in his LARB review of the translation, provides a useful summary:

The plot takes place in a city with “infinite Void to the West and infinite Solidity to the east,” where the sun is extinguished and reignited at will. Some unknown power is conducting an experiment, importing people from all over the post–World War II globe. The city constitutes a matrix, an explicit parallel mirror dimension to the Soviet Union. It also functions as a Tower of Babel: Russians, Germans, Chinese, Americans, and others labor there together, each speaking their own language yet somehow understanding each other. This linguistic miracle, however, does not at all translate into other spheres of the city’s life, which is gray, restrictive, secretive, and operating under empty slogans. This speculative setting allows the Strugatskys to condense different Soviet epochs — the Stalinist period, the liberal Thaw period, and the stagnation period of the 1970s — into one place and time. Throughout the novel these periods do not follow each other chronologically but are jumbled up and interwoven, symbolizing the unchanging vicious circle of Soviet history.

The city’s residents are assigned jobs and professions, which they must change on a regular basis. One resident, Andrei Voronin, acts as the protagonist of the novel, a young astronomer (like Boris Strugatsky) plucked from Leningrad in 1951, six years after the end of the war and two years before Stalin’s death. A janitor in the first part, he moves up the social ladder throughout the text: from a prosecutor, to chief editor of the city newspaper, to senior counselor in the new regime, installed by Nazi Officer Fritz Heiger. In his memoirs, Boris Strugatsky masterfully sums up the essence of Andrei’s journey as “a Komsomol Leninist-Stalinist, a thoroughgoing communist true believer, a champion of the happiness of the common people, who evolves with such spontaneous ease into a top-ranking bureaucrat, a smooth, lordly, self-indulgent, petty chieftain and arbiter of human destiny” as well as “the comrade-in-arms of an inveterate Hitlerite Nazi,” indicating “how much these apparent ideological antagonists turn out to have in common.”

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From Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich. LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, tr. Martin Brady (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

The variations in speech dependent on class are by no means merely of aesthetic significance. Rather, I am convinced that the unfortunate mistrust between intellectuals and proletarians is largely a result of their different linguistic habits. There were so many occasions during these years when I said to myself: how on earth shall I put it? Workers like to use fruity expressions relating to digestion in every sentence. If I did the same he would notice it didn’t come naturally and regard me as a hypocrite trying to ingratiate myself; however, if I talk naturally, or as I was taught in the nursery and at school, he will think me arrogant or a jumped-up so-and-so.

Die Verschiedenartigkeit des Sprechens je nach der Sozialschicht ist ja keineswegs nur von ästhetischer Bedeutsamkeit. Vielmehr bin ich überzeugt davon, daß das unselige Mißtrauen zwischen den Gebildeten und den Proletariern zu einem sehr großen Teil gerade auf den Unterschieden der Sprachgewohnheit beruht. Wie oft in diesen Jahren habe ich mir gesagt : Wie soll ich’s nur anstellen? Der Arbeiter liebt es, in jedem Satz die saftigen Ausdrücke der Verdauung zu verwenden. Tu ich desgleichen, so merkt er, daß mir das nicht vom Herzen kommt, und hält mich für einen Heuchler, der sich anschmieren will; red’ ich aber, wie mir der Schnabel gewachsen oder in Kinderstube und Schule geformt worden ist, dann hält er mich für hochmütig, für einen feinen Pinsel.

Pinsel is ‘(paint)brush,’ but it has a slang sense ‘simpleton, dope.’ I would never have guessed that Verdauung means ‘digestion’; apparently it’s from an obsolete verb dauen, of unclear etymology. It is, of course, notable that the common folk of Germany use “expressions relating to digestion” (I presume that’s his delicate way of suggesting shit); in English and Russian, similar expressions involve, uh, reproduction.

Rivka Galchen’s New Yorker essay on the famous mathematical genius and dropout Alexander Grothendieck (May 9, 2022; archived) is absolutely fascinating and makes me wish I could retrieve my math-major mind of a half-century back so I could understand more about his contributions. But what makes me bring it here is this sentence:

Grothendieck’s discoveries opened up mathematics in a way that was analogous to how Wittgenstein (and Saussure) changed our views of language.

I just… I mean, it’s like writing “how Bergson (and Einstein) changed our views of physics.” For certain values of “our” it may make sense, but those values do not include actual mathematicians and physicists. It continually astonishes me how vanishingly small is the amount people who have not studied linguistics know about language and the science that deals with it.

EastWest Literary Forum has posted Osip Mandelstam. Translations by Alistair Noon in a pleasing format, with the Russian originals directly beneath Noon’s translations — a confrontation that requires a certain amount of self-confidence on the part of the translator. On the whole, I think Noon does well; he doesn’t try to match the meters and rhyme schemes of the originals, but replaces them with his own rather than soggy free verse (as is sadly common these days). He has a nice sense of sound patterns: “Prometheus, propping the rock”; “a curve that the steely camber connives in”; “A wave sprints in and cleaves the crest of a wave.” I would have liked to see him try harder with the echoing repetitions of “Он эхо и привет, он веха – нет, лемех” [on ekho i privet, on vekha – net, lemekh]; his “An echo and hailing? A guide-pole? No, he’s a ploughshare” ignores them entirely and settles for a (fairly pointless) literal version. But Mandelstam is hard, and I don’t fault him too much. Here’s one of his versions (for the original, click the link):

Twitching my lips, I lie underground,
but my words will be words that pupils recite.

Red Square: no ground on this earth is as round,
a curve that the steely camber connives in.

Red Square: no ground on this earth is as round.
No plan said the camber must spread out that wide

as it tilts to the rice fields, all the way down,
for as long as the planet’s last slave stays alive.

May 1935

(We talked about “camber” in 2018.) Thanks, Trevor!

It’s time once again to don the headgear-related half of the Languagehat brand, with Hannah Seidlitz’s New Yorker Talk of the Town squib “Jeff Tweedy Gets His Hat Back” (May 16, 2022; archived):

Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, retired his trademark off-white Stetson about five years ago after he looked out from the stage one night and saw that a number of fans were wearing the same hat. “I felt like Madonna,” he said the other day, in Chicago. He’s played largely hatless ever since. But for Wilco’s twelfth studio album the band is returning to its roots (roots music), and the fifty-four-year-old front man is feeling ready to reinstate the image repertoire. The band will première all twenty-one tracks of “Cruel Country”––“I love my country, stupid and cruel”—at Solid Sound, the music-and-arts festival that it throws every two years at MASS MOCA: lawn chairs, vintage Luccheses, craft I.P.A. Tweedy had to complete the costume.

In search of a new hat, Tweedy wandered the leather-fragrant aisles at Alcala’s Western Wear, a vaquero haberdashery in Chicago, which has been his home since the nineties. He passed hats that, he said, were suitable for a villainous Mountie, R. L. Stine, Lemmy from Motörhead, and the photo booth at his cousin’s bar mitzvah. But he struggled to find something that felt like him. A lot was riding on this purchase. “My first live review comes out where I’m wearing a stupid hat,” he prophesied gravely. “ ‘Ruined by a Stupid Hat: It was a great show—can’t believe he wore that hat.’ ”

And if you don’t care about hats, here’s an xkcd featuring a linguist.

Lisa Hilton’s TLS essay ‘Il trend’ for finglese (January 1, 2021; archived) is pretty much a standard-issue thumbsucker on alleged flooding of a language, in this case Italian, by the all-devouring colossus English, with the usual mix of nonsense (“eventually leaves native speakers unable to express certain concepts without recourse to the Anglo imports”), dubious statistics (“A study by Tullio de Mauro in the 1980s claimed that 2 per cent of words in the press derived from English, a figure which is now estimated to have risen to 10 per cent”), and interesting-if-true facts; here’s the start:

One festive tradition that my daughter and I were able to continue this year was our annual viewing of Carlo Vanzina’s classic Italian comedy Vacanza di Natale (1983), shot on the sparkling slopes of Cortina d’Ampezzo and as essential a part of an Italian family Christmas as the Queen’s speech in Britain. Usually, we dress up in salopettes and bobble hats and make use of a wedding-present raclette set, but this year we were isolating in a glorified garden shed in Sussex, so we had to content ourselves with curling up on a small sofa like a pair of inverted commas. Still, it was nice to be reminded that there are still mountains somewhere.

Months of shrunken horizons seemed to bring a new focus. The film’s stiletto-stab at the Italian class system remains as sharp as ever, I noted, but its satire on the linguistic pretensions of the upwardly mobile has proved less an observation than a prediction. Guido Nicheli plays Donato, a pushy, status-obsessed Milanese industrialist who shows himself up with his attempts to speak English. Think Betjeman’s “How To Get On in Society” on skis. Donato’s attempts to appear sophisticated and cosmopolitan consist in mispronounced, inapt English idioms, which Italian audiences greet with glee. His catchphrase, “See you later”, even became the title of the actor’s biography. The incursion of “itanglese” or “finglese” (fake English) is getting beyond a joke, however.

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Merriam-Webster’s Words At Play features one of my favorite words in Some Notes On ‘Asshat’:

One of the difficulties in the creation and upkeep of a dictionary is the issue of how to treat nonstandard language. English is constantly being refreshed with new slang words, some of which quickly wither and disappear, while others assimilate into the language and become standardized (our 1916 Collegiate listed awful, jinx, and measly as slang). Should the lexicographer enter every new slang term that comes along the dictionary would quickly become overloaded with words which have little current applicability; if too long passes before entering some of these words the dictionary is obsolete before it is published.

The compromise is to enter words after they have demonstrated a certain breadth and consistency of use, typically in printed form. A fine example of the kind of word that merits inclusion is asshat (“a stupid, annoying, or detestable person”), a word recently added to our dictionary. It occupies the space between assez and asshead.

Asshat is a new addition to the English language. Recent research has found evidence of use from the late 1990s, in Usenet groups. (Note: the first citation below may be a pun on the misspelling of musical group Hatebreed)

who are hatbreed? maybe it’s part of that ass hat crew selena hangs out with
— alt.music.hardcore, 14 Apr. 1998

1977 CHiPs 3 3/4″ action figures (5 different: Ponch, Jon, Sarge, Jimmy
Squeaks, Stupid F***ing Asshat Erik Mouse, and Wheels Willie) $10-15 each
— _alt.fan.erik_, 23 Jul. 1999

The use of this word has, over the past two decades, spread considerably, and it may now be found even among the most urbane and sophisticated speakers of English […]

See the link for much information on further development; I like their last paragraph:
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I just got to the end of the TLS letters section featured in yesterday’s post, and found another gem:

Stepneys

It seems odd that a child born at sea should have a birthplace “Stepney” because of a Welsh street where a car’s attachable spare tyre design originated, as Bernard Richards suggests (Letters, December 11). A quick delve into historical commentary shows that the link is likely to be traceable to an old rhyme in London’s East End, taken to mean that children born on British ships can claim to belong to Stepney parish: “He who sails on the wide sea / Is a parishioner of Stepney”. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Stepney borough was formed and its official seal highlighted a sailing ship, at least partly in acknowledgement of the legend. Shipping had been the area’s major industry from its medieval maritime origins.

Alex Faulkner
Lewes, East Sussex

The “spare wheel” sense of the word was mentioned here in 2006, and our favorite Martian, Siganus Sutor, said:

Re: stepney. The word is (still) used in another language in which it also means “spare wheel”, and it is in Mauritian French.

The OED has an entry (not updated since 1933 except to add citations):
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