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I’ve finished Veniamin Kaverin’s Скандалист [The troublemaker] (see this post), and I’m very glad I read it, even though it’s by no stretch of the imagination a great novel. It was, after all, an apprentice effort (he’d written a few shorter attempts at fiction), and the circumstances of its writing were not exactly Tostoyan (this is Kaverin’s own account in Richard Sheldon’s translation, from “Šklovskij, Gor’kij, and the Serapion Brothers” [Slavic and East European Journal 12.1 (Spring, 1968), pp. 1-13]; you can see the Russian here — scroll down to “Зимой 1928 года я встретился”):

During the winter of 1928, at Jurij Tynjanov’s place, I often met with a lively and clever writer then at the zenith of his powers and deeply convinced that he knew all the mysteries of the literature business. We spoke about the novel genre, and the writer observed that even Čexov could not cope with this genre, that it was not surprising that it was not succeeding in contemporary literature. I objected, and he, with the irony at which he was always unusually good, expressed doubts about my abilities in this complicated business. Infuriated, I said that I would launch a novel and that it would be a book about him — about a trouble-maker who conducted his whole life with an awareness of his literary role. He derided me — but to no avail. On the very next day, I began to write the novel The Troublemaker, or Evenings on Vasil’ev Island. Obviously, only youth is capable of such decisions, and only in youth could you so openly follow at the heels of your future character with a notebook. He laughed at me: “the utilitarian factory by the name of Kaverin.” I jotted even this down. He spouted jokes, made brilliant witticisms, sometimes unusually well directed and remembered for a lifetime — I blushed, but jotted them down. Probably, he was fully convinced that nothing would come of the novel; otherwise, he would have been more cautious in this unusual duel.

This “lively and clever writer” was Viktor Shklovsky, a fascinating figure whose writings, a blend of memoir and literary analysis, I’ve enjoyed for years; it was tremendously interesting to see him portrayed (very believably) as a character in a literary work. (He was known among the Serapion Brothers as Брат Скандалист [Brother Troublemaker].) He is shown as funny and argumentative, given to causing trouble for its own sake and then having to apologize later; his culminating deed is plucking the young Vera Barabanova away from Leningrad, where she was poised to marry an unsuitable man she didn’t love, and sweeping her off to Moscow with him on the train. (I’m guessing that her surname, ‘Drum,’ was suggested by the first futurist collection, the 1915 pamphlet Взял: Барабан футуристов [Took: Drum of the futurists].) Shklovsky, understandably, wasn’t pleased by the book (few people like seeing themselves from the outside), but it’s an affectionate as well as acerbic portrait (Kaverin was his student and friend), and on the whole he comes off well.

But beyond the overstuffed plot (two aged brothers reconnect after a quarter of a century, there are various academic intrigues, young Nogin — a stand-in for the author — can’t study because he’s desperately in love with Vera, etc. etc.), the novel is of interest as an example of the “documentary” writing so popular between the wars, not only in the Soviet Union (see this post on Mariengof’s Cynics) but elsewhere (Joyce, Dos Passos, Gide, Döblin, Reznikoff): writers felt the need to incorporate chunks of found reality into their work. Kaverin not only quotes and alludes to Shklovsky’s work repeatedly (mostly Zoo and Third Factory), he quotes chunks of a medieval Old Russian text Professor Lozhkin is trying to study between the various distractions of the plot — I actually found a version online, and I will insert the quoted passage as an image here:

Lozhkin decides that the Малкатушка or Малкатошва in the texts he’s comparing (Малкодушка in the one I found) must reflect a Hebrew Malkat-švo ‘Queen of Sheba,’ and he keeps wondering about the mysterious word кражма (here крыжма). Also, there’s a long and funny account of a lecture where the lecturer (Dragomanov) doesn’t show up but sends a flunky to read what turns out to be a deliberately foolish and insulting proposal that arouses indignation in the audience, which doesn’t enjoy being spoofed; this is scavenged from an event in the 1850s, in which Osip Senkovsky (who in the novel is studied by Nogin) pulls the same trick on a distinguished assembly (you can read an account here, beginning “С первых же страниц было видно, что положения”). And there are many bits that made me laugh, like “Сердце у него стучало, как метроном, как сердце” [His heart beat like a metronome, like a heart] and “Он вернулся домой мокрый и с таким лицом, что старуха, которая отворила ему дверь, растерявшись, заговорила с ним по-татарски” [He returned home wet and with such a face that the old lady who opened the door for him lost her head and started talking to him in Tatar].

But what really impressed me was that, even if it’s not a great novel, it’s a real one, with people who feel real struggling with what feels like life, however exaggerated. Shklovsky wrote no novels, and Tynyanov’s were lifeless attempts to exemplify his literary theories (see my review of Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [The death of the ambassador plenipotentiary]), but Kaverin is discovering that he is a real writer of fiction. And the plot element that felt most real to me and most moved me was Vera’s desperate attempts to paint despite the poverty and chaos of her life (she decided to marry the rich jerk in hopes that she might win the freedom to create art); it seemed a foreshadowing of his great 1971 novel Перед зеркалом [Before the mirror], which I wrote about last year. I look forward to reading more Kaverin.

Sophie Hardach has a very interesting piece for BBC Future about the problem of translating languages that don’t have large written corpora:

Imagine you come across a message that could contain life-saving information. But there’s a problem: you don’t understand a word. You’re not even sure which of the world’s thousands of languages it is written in. What do you do?

If the message is in French or Spanish, typing it into an automatic translation engine will instantly solve the mystery and produce a solid answer in English. But many other languages still defy machine translation, including languages spoken by millions of people, such as Wolof, Luganda, Twi and Ewe in Africa. That’s because the algorithms that power these engines learn from human translations – ideally, millions of words of translated text.

There is an abundance of such material for languages like English, French, Spanish and German […] No such data mountain exists, however, for languages that may be widely spoken but not as prolifically translated. They are known as low-resource languages. The fallback machine-training material for these languages consists of religious publications, including the much-translated Bible. But this amounts to a narrow dataset, and is not enough to train accurate, wide-ranging translation robots.

Google Translate currently offers the ability to communicate in around 108 different languages while Microsoft’s Bing Translator offers around 70 languages. Yet there are more than 7,000 spoken languages around the world, and at least 4,000 with a writing system. […] To break that barrier, IARPA is funding research to develop a system that can find, translate and summarise information from any low-resource language, whether it is in text or speech. […] To tackle the problem, each team is divided into smaller specialist groups that solve one aspect of the system. The main components are automatic search, speech recognition, translation and text summarisation technologies, all adapted to low-resource languages. Since the four-year project began in 2017, the teams have worked on eight different languages, including Swahili, Tagalog, Somali and Kazakh.

There are all sorts of fascinating details about how this works, but I’m going to quote the same passage Trevor Joyce quoted when he sent me the link:
[Read more…]

“Proto-Indo-European ‘fox’ and the reconstruction of an athematic ḱ-stem” by Axel I. Palmér et al. (Indo-European Linguistics 2021) is an open-access paper that looks very interesting:

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed etymological analysis of words for ‘fox’ in Indo-European (IE) languages. We argue that most IE ‘fox’-words go back to two distinct PIE stems: *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’. We provide a revised analysis of the etymology and relationship among the various Indo-Iranian ‘fox’-words, and we argue that Baltic preserves remnants of the ḱ-suffix found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. Additionally, we describe how *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- was borrowed from Indo-Iranian into Uralic and we outline the relationship among the reflexes of this word in various Uralic languages. Finally, we reconstruct the paradigm of *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- as a unique type of hysterodynamic stem, which nonetheless has close parallels in PIE. We observe that a similar ḱ-suffix is found in PIE adjectives and animal names.

Introduction

The Indo-European languages attest several words for ‘fox’, e.g., Skt. lopāśá-, Gr. ἀλώπηξ, Arm. ałowēs, Lith. lãpė, Lat. volpēs, Alb. dhelpër, which are similar enough to have justified hypotheses of a common origin, despite the fact that not all of them show regular sound correspondences. Throughout the history of Indo-European etymological research, these words have either been lumped together under a single etymon (e.g., IEW: 1179) or split into several different roots (Schrijver 1998; De Vaan 2000). The aim of this article is to clarify the inner-Indo-European relationships between these stems, as well as their relationship to similar ‘fox’-words in the Uralic languages. After discussing the evidence for PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ in Section 1, in Section 2 we examine potential Uralic, North Germanic, and Iberian borrowings from an Indo-Iranian descendant of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ-. In Section 3, we reconstruct PIE *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’ based on Latin, Lithuanian, Persian, and Albanian evidence. Finally, in Section 4 we discuss the derivational history of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and attempt to explain the ablaut preserved directly or indirectly in the branches of Indo-European.

Piotr Gąsiorowski on FB called it “A wonderful piece of etymological analysis!” and that’s all the recommendation I need.

JSTOR Daily has a post on the British soldier-poet Edward Thomas, killed in action in 1917; it consists mainly of scans of his poetry in MS form, which is interesting in its own right, but I was stopped by this passing observation: “In the army, Thomas wanted to hide from other soldiers the fact that he was writing poetry, so he wrote straight across the page, using commas to signal line breaks.” It reminded me of Dmitry Bykov’s point that when Valentin Kataev quoted poetry in his novelized memoirs, he did so without line breaks in order to partially efface the boundary between poetry and prose. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

I was reading Adam Leith Gollner’s GQ article “The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Jailbreak Artist” (and if you like jailbreak stories, this one’s a corker) when the following passage leaped out at me:

Investigators will later note that the prison staff seem completely stupefied. The descriptor employed by the ministry of justice in its subsequent audit is sidération, an archaic word that refers to the state of being “planet-struck.”

The noun may be archaic (it’s only in my very largest French-English dictionary, the Larousse Unabridged), but the related sidérer ‘to dumbfound, flummox’ and sidérant, which the Larousse defines as ‘staggering, amazing, stunning’ (“C’est sidérant! “it’s mind-blowing!”), are not; the Trésor de la langue française informatisé gives the etymology as “Empr. au lat.sideratio « action funeste des astres; insolation ».”

So much for French, but when I said sidération was in the big Larousse, I didn’t give the English equivalent provided there, which is sideration. I had been unaware of the existence of this word, for which the OED has the following entry (updated March 2016):
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I always assumed burnoose was from Arabic, and so it is: “From French burnous, from Arabic بُرْنُس‎ (burnus).” But where is that from? Aha:

Via some Aramaic form (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic בורס‎, Classical Syriac ܒܢܪܘܢܐ‎) from Byzantine Greek βίρρος (bírrhos), from Latin birrus, from Gaulish, from Proto-Celtic *birros (“short”). Doublet of بِرْنِيطَة‎ (birnīṭa).

(That last transcription should read birrīṭa; someone who can edit Wiktionary should fix it. Also, Proto-Celtic *birros gives Welsh byr ‘short,’ as DE will be the first to tell you.)

Anthony Ossa-Richardson, who sent me the link, said “now that’s a well travelled word,” and I can’t disagree.

Alison Killilea writes:

A number of weeks ago, I got it into my head to start translating Beowulf after my good friend and colleague, Victoria Koivisto-Kokko, mentioned something about editions. I remembered my eternal desire to produce one in Cork slang, and thought, sure jaysus why not, and alas, Boyo-wulf (name courtesy of Ciarán Kavanagh) was conceived.

While this is first and foremost a translation with a humorous intention, as someone who has studied translation theory and translations of Beowulf for four years, there is an element of seriousness to it. I am translating this from the Old English itself (generally using Klaeber’s edition for line numbers), and looking to R.D. Fulk’s and Kevin Kiernan’s editions for backup. […]

I have decided on a prose translation because, in short, it is quite loose in some places in order that it reflect the purity of the daycent Cork slang.

It begins:

C’mere to me! Well we’ve all heard of those pure daycent kings of the Spear-Danes from donkeys’ years, and how the mad yokes of princes did alright for themselves. Sure half the time Scyld Scefing was off among a rake of enemies, pulling the mead-seats out from under their arses, scaring the shit out of the boss-men, ever since he was found skint as a young fella.

He then found joy, good man himself, did just mighty beneath the heavens, lapped up fierce respect ’til all the bais across the whale-road had to obey him and cough up a bit of moola – That was some class king, like.

There’s another paragraph at the link, and more in later posts (ll. 53-85, ll. 371-389a); you can hear it read in genuine Corkonian “by the pure class feen Panda Terry” here. Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve started Kaverin’s 1928 Скандалист [The troublemaker], and I just got to a passage that made reading it worthwhile no matter what else it contains. The novel focuses on the academic world of 1920s Leningrad, and specifically on literary studies; what I hadn’t realized is that it also featured linguistics, and in this passage the character Dragomanov, based on Yevgeny Polivanov (who was eventually shot for opposing Marr) is lecturing on his theories of historical linguistics (the original can be found here — scroll down to “Уставившись на одного из слушателей”):

Fixing his indifferent gaze on one of his listeners, he began talking about the theory of a pan-European parent language. He had expounded it previously. Every “introduction to linguistics” culminated in that theory. From the time of Schlegel and Bopp, countless linguistic works had been built on the basis of that theory.

But he, Dragomanov, announced that day that, in all sincerity, he could not agree with it.

Suddenly starting to pronounce his r’s in the French way, he took chalk in hand and laid out his evidence.

[Read more…]

Just found this in the NYRB letters column (September 26, 2019 issue):

To the Editors:

James Gleick writes, in “Moon Fever” [NYR, August 15], “If it wasn’t for Sputnik, we wouldn’t have had ‘beatniks,’ ‘peaceniks,’ or ‘no-goodniks.’” He is mistaken. The OED shows that S.J. Perelman used “nogoodnick” in The New Yorker in 1936: “A parasite, a leech, a bloodsucker—altogether a five-star nogoodnick!” H.L. Mencken’s American Language (1919) has an entry for the general suffix “-nick”: “The suffix –nick, signifying agency, is…freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an offensive boaster…consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis.”

Ernest Davis
New York City

Now, that’s the kind of correction I like to see. (I find it hard to believe, however, that anyone but Mencken ever used “consumptionick.”)

Viktor Shklovsky said the word is not a shadow.

He wrote:

If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously – automatically. […] By means of this algebraic manner of thinking, objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes us, as if it were prepackaged.

For this reason he wanted enstrangement (остранение), to make the stone feel stony. He wanted fresh images, not ones that had been lying on the greengrocer’s table all day.

His book Третья фабрика [Third Factory] is a sort of autobiography: “The first factory was my family and school. The second was Opoyaz. And the third – is processing me now.” It’s full of fresh images — his book will be “dry as a cough,” enforced speech is a red toy elephant squeaking. One of the ongoing images is that of flax (Shklovsky worked at a flax center after returning to the Soviet Union and criticized Gorky for his inaccurate account of the subject in a novel); he compares writers to flax and says “Flax, if it had a voice, would shriek as it’s being processed.”

The first reference to flax is on p. 24 of the translation: “We are flax in the field.”

This seemed vague to me, limp, as if it had been lying on the table all day. I found the Russian original (pdf), and on p. 39 it said “Мы лен на стлище.” What was a стлище? It wasn’t in my dictionaries. But the internet told me: стлище is “место, где расстилают по траве лен или коноплю для приготовления его к дальнейшей обработке (для мочки под дождем или росой),” a place where flax or hemp is spread on the grass to prepare it for further processing, for being soaked in rain or dew. In other words, for retting. A стлище is a rettery. Both are unusual, not very pretty words that mean something very specific. They wake up the reader. Field is a common and pretty word that puts the reader to sleep.

The translator did a disservice. He sold me limp greens that were not what I wanted.