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Back in 2000, James Wood reviewed Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language for the Grauniad, and very appreciatively too:

You might say that this is Kermode treading his customary middle way between high theory and unmediated amateurism, but Shakespeare’s Language is a magnificent book, the honey of a lifetime’s visits to the Shakespearean garden, and makes great virtues of reasonable in-betweenness.

But this passage made me raise my eyebrows:

In the speech by Bushy, for instance, is Shakespeare trying to say something about shadows and tears and himself getting “muddled”? Or is he perfectly capable of greater clarity, but deliberately muddling things a little in order to give us the most direct sense possible of a mind struggling to express itself?

This is an inevitable tension in dramatic poetry. For instance, when Cornwall shouts out that his servants should bind fast Gloucester’s “corky arms”, listeners get a characteristically Shakespearean thrill of pleasure at the delicious justice of the word – the old man’s arms, white and crumbly, like cork. But it is hardly likely that a vicious aristocrat would have expressed himself as beautifully as this, and most listeners decide for them selves that this is Shakespeare the poet having his say – inserting into a character’s mouth a line of unlikely but lovely poetry.

I don’t understand how anyone literate, let alone such a fine critic as Wood, can seriously say “it is hardly likely that a vicious aristocrat would have expressed himself as beautifully as this.” It is hardly likely that he would have expressed himself in iambic pentameter, either. This seems to me on a level with complaining that opera is dumb because people don’t sing at each other. Am I missing something?

I’ve finished Mikhail Shishkin’s 1999 novel Взятие Измаила [The taking of Izmail] — see this post for previous Shishkin — and I find I don’t have anything coherent to say about it except that it’s long and difficult and I’ll doubtless need to reread it to get anything useful from it (as advised by The Untranslated in this post, which you should consult if you want to get an idea of what the novel is like, not to mention what the title means). Here I’ll just quote a brief passage from the end of the first part with some thoughts on translatability:

The human lifespan is a dot. Nature is fluid. Feelings are dark. The linking of the whole body is corruptible. The soul is a top. Fate is incomprehensible. The teacher is orphaned. The soldier is barefoot. The plowman is naked. The veteran is inconsolable. The sickly person is fierce. Pindar is unwashed. The moaning is musical. The roads are hopeless. The far-off is befouled. Weekdays are humiliating. The festivities are drunken. The neighbor is very bitter. The publican is negligent. The huntsman is venal. Power is stinking. The law is good-for-nothing. The verb is all-powerful. Prison is all-devouring. The cop on duty is selfless. The corpse is unidentified. The war is daily. The Chechen is quick to forgive. The Sami is swaggering. Geography is jumpy. History is whorish. The tsarevitch is murdered. The past is a shame. Love for the paternal graves is captivating. The bush is burning. The sky is snowy. The future is entrancing.

Срок человеческой жизни — точка. Естество текуче. Ощущения темны. Соединение целого тела тленно. Душа юла. Судьба непостижима. Учитель сир. Солдат бос. Пахарь наг. Ветеран безутешен. Немощный лют. Пиндар немыт. Стон музыкален. Дороги безнадежны. Даль загажена. Будни унизительны. Торжества пьяны. Ближний прегорек. Мытарь нерадив. Псарь продажен. Власть смердяща. Закон никчемен. Глагол всевластен. Тюрьма всеядна. Постовой самозабвенен. Труп неопознан. Война ежедневна. Чечен отходчив. Лопарь чванлив. География прыгуча. История блудлива. Царевич умерщвлен. Прошлое срамно. Любовь к отеческим гробам пленяюща. Купина неопалима. Небо снежно. Будущее восхитительно.

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I have volunteered to serve as a Russian consultant for a reading group that is working its way through War and Peace in translation, and today I got a question that wound up teaching me a bit of specialized Russian and is worth bringing to the attention of the Hattery:

OK, Steve, here’s another translation question, perhaps disguised as a physics question. It concerns a passage in P&V [Book 4 part 3 chapter 2] where partisan warfare is described as contrary to conventional military theory:

Military science says that the bigger the army, the stronger it is. Les gros bataillons ont toujours raison.

In saying that, military science is like a mechanics which, considering forces only in relation to their masses, would say that forces are equal or not equal to each other because their masses are or are not equal.

Force (the quantity of motion) is the product of mass time velocity.

In military action, the force of an army is also a product of mass times something, some unknown x.

I read this (with a lifelong immersion in the physical sciences) and am befuddled. It is momentum, not force, that is the product of mass and velocity, and if you have Force = mass times some unknown x, the x is acceleration, as Newton explained in the 1670s. Is Tolstoy treating us to this analogy to demonstrate willful ignorance of The First Law or is he attempting a re-definition of the terms used? His credentials for pulling off some kind of scientific treatment of the mechanics of history are devalued immediately thereby. Clearly words like energy, force, momentum and mass were in common use prior to Newton (who likely wrote in Latin anyway), and continue to have common usage distinct from their precise technical definitions. Taking offense at a common usage in opposition to their technical meaning may merely be the arrogance of the scientist, and not a reflection on the author or the translator. But when posed as such blatant blasphemy as “Force = mass x velocity,” it is as if I were to misquote several of the Ten Commandments in an argument relating Judaism and psychoanalysis, assuming no one would know or care.

My correspondent went on to quote the Maude translation, “Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity,” which “makes total sense to me,” and added “Briggs renders this passage similarly to the Maude translation, with the misjudgement of momentum by ignoring velocity set up as the mechanical equivalent to ignoring the spirit of an army. […] But Garnett uses ‘force’ in the same way P&V do.” Here’s my response:
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Y wrote to me “I think you’ll enjoy this mini-memoir by Sally Thomason” from the Annual Review of Linguistics, and I very much did, so I’m sharing it with you; it’s full of good things about studying and teaching linguistics, with much description of working in the field. Here’s the Abstract:

My career falls into two distinct periods. The first two decades featured insecurity combined with the luck of wandering into situations that ultimately helped me become a better linguist and a better teacher. I had the insecurity mostly under control by the watershed year of 1988, when I published a favorably reviewed coauthored book on language contact and also became editor of Language. Language contact has occupied most of my research time since then, but my first encounter with Séliš-Ql’ispé (a.k.a. Montana Salish), in 1981, led to a 40-year dedication to finding out more about the language and its history.

Some excerpts:

I was born in late 1939 in Evanston, Illinois, on the northern outskirts of Chicago, and I grew up 20 miles farther north, in Highland Park. English was the only language taught at my elementary school, but in high school I discovered the joy of learning languages, taking three years each of Latin and French. In college (Stanford University, class of 1961) I took German, Russian, and Ancient Greek. But the animal kingdom was my enduring passion, so my first choice of a college major was biology. I had to give up on that plan: A toxic high-school chemistry teacher had left me with a powerful aversion to chemistry, which was required for biology majors. And fear of math (justified in my case) ruled out a geology major, my second choice. I settled for German, an undemanding major that left me plenty of time for elective courses in exciting topics like evolution, invertebrate paleontology, comparative vertebrate anatomy, and plant ecology. […]

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I’m still making my way (in the leisurely fashion appropriate to a literary flâneur) through Lucy Sante’s The Other Paris (see this post), and I’ve gotten to a passage on the famous cours des miracles of old Paris which is so full of strange and wonderful words I have to post it here:

A cour des miracles was a cluster of houses that by some mix of tradition, common accord, and benign neglect was deemed off-limits to the law and, as lore has it, where a sort of permanent feast of misrule persisted. The name derives from the fact that miracles were a daily occurrence there—the blind could see, the hunchbacked stood straight, the clubfooted ran and danced, leprous skin became clear and unblemished—once their disguises had been put away for the night. The inhabitants were generally known as gueux or argotiers, the latter with reference to the fact that they spoke a secret language known only to them, at least as of the fifteenth century, when François Villon made use of it in his poems; its earliest vocabulary derives from the language of the Roma. The intricate social structure is illustrated by the abundance of names the gueux had for their highly specific professions: rifodés posed as families (they were usually unrelated) and begged in the streets, holding out a certificate that claimed their house had been destroyed by “fire from the sky”; hubains presented a document stating that Saint Hubert had cured them of rabies contracted by a dog bite; coquillards displayed seashells as proof that they had lately returned from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain; sabouleux were fake epileptics; piètres were fake amputees; francs-mitoux were fake lepers; capons were gambling shills; and so on. They were ruled by an elected chief called the King of Thunes, or Grand-Coësre, who carried a cat-o’-nine-tails and whose banner was a dead dog impaled on a pitchfork. Their relationship with the church was hand in glove: fake lepers would claim to have been cured by a certain statue or relic; donations from the devout would pour into the abbey; the monks would share the proceeds with the gueux.

I continue to be grateful to Keith Ivey for his generous gift!

Molly Crabapple has an NYRB article (February 26, 2022; cached) about a bookstore hanging on by its fingernails:

CYCO books is not New York’s last Yiddish bookstore. Yiddish bookstores do a brisk trade in Hassidic Brooklyn, where some 150,000 people still speak the language as a mother tongue. It is, however, the last bookstore to deal in the sort of Yiddish that once dominated New York’s Lower East Side: that of socialist rabble-rousers and sweatshop poets, which their upwardly mobile descendants were glad to leave behind and forget. Suffice to say, CYCO is now the only place in the city to get your Avrom Sutskever or Sholem Aleichem in the original.

The Central Yiddish Cultural Organization was founded in 1938. It was both a renowned publisher of Yiddish books and a nonpartisan cultural space in a fractious literary world, and it had branches as far away as Argentina. CYCO was one of many Yiddish organizations that, like other boosters of minority languages, saw their tongue as deserving of respect and civilizational status as French or any such language of empire; and despite their lack of money, power, or a state, they believed they could will their equivalents of institutions like the Académie Française into being.

That decades-old global heritage has persisted in this corner of Queens. Jam-packed, eccentrically indexed, and run by a wisecracking actor named Hy Wolfe, CYCO is more than an independent bookstore; it is a bohemian survivor from a world that was nearly lost.

Sadly, today’s New York has little place for such survivors. Last fall, the Atran Foundation, CYCO’s main supporter, cut off its annual stipend. After eighty-three years, the store seemed poised to close forever—until a crew of young Yiddish lovers launched a defiant campaign to save it.

Crabapple talks about her own experience with the language (“I first visited CYCO Books in 2019. I had then been studying Yiddish for six months, in order to write a book on the Jewish Labor Bund, and I was on the hunt for the official four-volume history of the political party”) and about the proprietor (“A white-haired, barrel-chested man in an old T-shirt, with a thin face and habitually sardonic expression, Wolfe mixes tough street talk with polyglot literary allusions in a way that’s utterly New York”), then gets to the current crisis:
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I was reading Libby Purves’ lively TLS review (archived) of Siân Evans’ Maiden Voyages: Women and the golden age of transatlantic travel when I found myself baffled by this sentence:

Exercise became fashionable (Nancy Astor caned the rowing machines and ran laps of the deck) and onboard pools needed swimming instructresses.

She did what to the rowing machines? Fortunately the OED (s.v. cane) came to my aid:

transitive. Chiefly British.

a. To punish severely, to subject to rough treatment; to use excessively or carelessly.

1925 E. Fraser & J. Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 46 ‘Smith got properly caned at the Orderly Room this morning’, i.e. got a stiff sentence of C.B. [= confinement to barracks].
1932 R. G. Curtis Edgar Wallace xii. 206 Ruthlessly caning a decrepit car all the way from London.
1968 R. Mann Headliner xxxiv. 222 They really caned him. £250,000. I’d no idea they awarded that kind of money.
1998 R. Newman Manners 137 Next day I discovered there’d been two youths in the kitchen holding his health visitor hostage, while a third was out caning her Mastercard.
2007 Independent 17 Mar. (Save & Spend section) 14/2 We’ve all been caned by the stock markets lately.

b. Chiefly Sport. To defeat heavily; to beat easily.

1961 E. Partridge Dict. Slang (ed. 5) II. 1027/2 Cane, to defeat.
[…]

c. slang. To take or consume (recreational drugs or alcohol), esp. rapidly or to excess. Also to cane it (frequently implying long-term or habitual behaviour of this type).

1991 K. Waterhouse Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell II. 35 Oh, and talking of the law, Norman, I appear to have caned the best part of a bottle of vodka.
1992 R. Graef Living Dangerously iv. 97 My friend’s uncle was a Charlie dealer so my friend used to get ounces on tic. He had an ounce and we all went up his house and we washed out a gram of it and had a bit, and then that progressed into washing out the whole lot and just caning (taking) it all.
[…]
2008 C. Newkey-Burden in J. Burchill & C. Newkey-Burden Not in my Name App. 181 He took drugs for England, he knocked the drugs on the head… Most importantly, he has never hypocritically dissed anyone else who still canes it.

This is a public service message for those Yanks who, like me, had never encountered the term; I guess we’d say “Nancy Astor hit the rowing machines.”

I learn via Jenny Larsson’s Facebook post that there will be a hybrid symposium “Exploring New Methods – Quantitative Approaches to Indo-European Linguistics” on May 11; it’s “an event of the research program LAMP – Languages and Myths of Prehistory and the Centre for Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture at Stockholm University, in collaboration with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.” The Collegium’s Events page says:

11 May, 2:15 p.m. SYMPOSIUM – HYBRID EVENT
Exploring New Methods: Quantitative Approaches to Indo-European Linguistics
Oscar Billing, Erik Elgh, Harald Hammarström, Philipp Rönchen
The symposium will be followed by a reception.
Pre-registration is required for the physical event. Please sign up via rsvp@swedishcollegium.se by 6 May 2022 at the latest.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/69022550575
This is an event of the research programme LAMP – Languages and Myths of Prehistory and the Centre for Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture at Stockholm University, in collaboration with SCAS.

In recent years, quantitative methods developed in the field of biology have been repurposed and applied to linguistic data. The aim of this symposium is to provide an insight into this ongoing work. At the symposium, we will discuss the scientific advances it promises as well the potential limitations to the method, both specifically in relation to the Indo-European language family and to comparative linguistics in general.

The programme will be available shortly.

I’m inherently skeptical of applying the methods of biology to linguistics, but only because it’s so often done badly; I’ll certainly be interested to see the program when they put it online, and I’ll be curious to know the reactions of anyone who knows more than I do about the people involved and the topics (when they’re available).

Alexandra Alter has an amazingly good NY Times story (archived) about one of the most important contemporary Russian writers, Vladimir Sorokin (see my posts about Roman and Norma and his translator Max Lawton); it actually sounds as if Alter knows what she’s talking about, which is not something I’m used to in American media accounts of Russian literature. Here are some excerpts:

Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most inventive writers, an iconoclast who has chronicled the country’s slide toward authoritarianism, with subversive fables that satirize bleak chapters of Soviet history, and futuristic tales that capture the creeping repression of 21st-century Russia. But despite his reputation as both a gifted postmodern stylist and an unrepentant troublemaker, he remains relatively unknown in the West. Until recently, just a handful of his works had been published in English, in part because his writing can be so challenging to translate, and so hard to stomach. Now, four decades into his scandal-scorched career, publishers are preparing to release eight new English-language translations of his books. […]

Sorokin doesn’t fit the classic mold of a dissident writer. While he’s been critical of Putin’s regime, he’s hard to pinpoint, stylistically or ideologically. He’s been pilloried for violating Russian Orthodox Christian values in his stories, but is a devout Christian. He deploys gorgeous prose to describe horrifying acts. He’s celebrated as a literary heir to giants like Turgenev, Gogol and Nabokov, but at times, he’s questioned the value of literature, dismissing novels as “just paper with typographic signs.” […]

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France Culture has a set of old recordings that have been nicely cleaned up; I present for your listening pleasure Archive exceptionnelle : écoutez l’accent parisien en 1912. In 1912 the linguist Ferdinand Brunot, studying the speech of workmen, recorded Louis Ligabue, an upholsterer in the 14th arrondissement, talking about the neighborhood and then about his voice when it was played back to him: “C’est très drôle, il me semble même que c’est extraordinaire que j’aie une voix si traînarde, jamais je ne l’aurais cru !” [It’s really funny, it even seems to me that it’s extraordinary that I have such a drawling voice, I would never have believed it!] There’s a transcript, and the audio is accompanied by period views of Paris. His voice makes me think of Jean Gabin (though I’m sure their accents would seem quite different to a Parisian). And if you scroll down, you’ll find links to recordings of Émile Durkheim in 1913 and Tolstoy talking about God in 1909. (Thanks, Trevor!)