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The eudæmonist has a fine post called Diabolo, l’emigrette & la dame de pique that begins fetchingly as follows:

It’s always the way of things, you are merrily reading a newly acquired translation of Pushkin’s ‘Queen of Spades’ instead of starting your workday, and as you are waiting for the Countess to return from the ball in section three and encounter the not particularly pleasant Hermann (not quite Germain), you observe, with Pushkin, with Hermann, the decorations in the Countess’s room – the porcelain shepherdesses, the trinket boxes, the fans, the bandalores.² The bandalores? The bandalores – ah, yes, the yo-yos.³ This seems like an odd addition to a lady’s tchotchkes, so you consult a second translation (because of course you have more than one to hand), which translates the word in question as ‘tops’.⁴ This seems less objectionable as bric-à-brac, but now that you’re looking into the matter you simply must know: what on earth was Pushkin talking about? In consulting with a learned colleague, you learn that Pushkin used the word рулетки (note the plural), which despite its similarity to roulette (which would keep up the gambling theme) the ever (over) helpful lexicographer Dahl defines as a ‘French toy’ on a cord that sounds very much like a yo-yo.⁵ […]

The matter could end there – you know what Pushkin meant, after all – but you feel that you should add that the OED is not particularly helpful on the bandalore, hazarding no speculation on its origins and taking a limited view of its history. The entry does include a reference to an 1864 issue of The Athenæum which mentions Thomas Moore’s gossip about the Duke of Wellington toying with a bandalore (originally published in Blackwood’s), as well as another quotation indicating that even in 1824 a bandalore was a sadly ‘gone-by’ toy, such as an old bachelor’s servant might use to divert an irruption of children. This incidentally makes it plausible for a countess to have a few lying around circa 1833/4 – which would be of a piece with the rest of her out-of-date style.

This does not, however, give you much of a sense of when or or where or why the bandalore was a fashion, and the word keeps running through your head, spinning away only to whirl back again, so you delay the beginning of your work still further to find some seven or more references, including a letter from Horace Walpole to Miss Mary Berry dated 12 October 1790, in which the toy/game is mentioned: ‘I have dined to-day at Bushy with the Guilfords, where were only the two daughters, Mr. Storer, and Sir Harry Englefield, who performed en professeur at the game I thought Turkish, but which sounds Moorish; he calls it Bandalore.’ [N.b.: I have added the italics for Bandalore based on the printed version at the link — LH.] There is also the deeply dull Dramatic dialogues for the use of young persons (1792) by Elizabeth Sibthorpe Pinchard, in which bandalores are called ‘Prince of Wales’s toys’ because ‘They are all the faſhion. The Prince of Wales brought them in’ (pp. 10–11).⁶ Sixteen-year-old Mary Spilsbury exhibited a painting of ‘The bandalore, or fashionable toy’ at the Royal Academy, also in 1792.⁷

There is much more, including the French term l’emigrette and “the diabolo, another string-and-bobbin based toy which, according to the 1911 Britannica, originated in China and was popular in France around 1812 as le diable” (not to mention the footnotes and some colorful images); the only one of the terms I was familiar with was yo-yo, and I am struck by the fact that neither it nor bandalore has a known etymology, though for the former the OED says, rather irritatingly, “probably from one of the Philippines languages.” (As for the latter, I beg leave to doubt the statement at the M-W entry that its Look-up Popularity is “Top 26% of words.”)

Joe Moran is generally a good and thought-provoking read; I’ve quoted him here more than once. I just came across an essay he published last year called “Good Sentences Are Why We Read” (an excerpt from his book First You Write a Sentence); it’s something of a jumble, beginning in a fairly rote way (“No one can agree on what a sentence is. The safest definition is typographic”) and going on to more interesting material that involves quoting lots of other writers:

A sentence can be a single word, or it can stretch into infinity, because more words can be piled on to a main clause for ever. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal wrote a whole novel (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) containing just one sentence. But he said that his comic sensibility was shaped by a short one he once read on a dry cleaner’s receipt: Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.

Marcel Proust, who in The Captive wrote a 447-word sentence about a sofa, said that he wanted to “weave these long silks as I spin them” and to “encircle the truth with a single—even if long and sinuous—stroke.” For Proust, a sentence traced an unbroken line of thought. Cutting it in two broke the line. Depending on its line of thought, a sentence can be a tiny shard of sense or a Proustian demi-world, brought to life and lit up with words.

This next bit is intriguing, but I’m not sure how much to take seriously and how much is the Higher Thumb-Sucking:

Scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków analyzed more than a hundred classic works by authors such as Dickens, Joyce and Beckett, and found that the sentences behaved like a mathematical multifractal: a structure whose smallest part resembles its whole. The best writing is self-consistent. It sounds as if it comes from the same breathing body standing in the same place, rather as wine from a certain terroir is said to have, from its climate and soil, a taste irreplicable anywhere else. What special terroir makes a piece of writing irreplicable? Its sentences.

(I’m not fond of “irreplicable” — it gets a few other Google Books hits, but I fail to see how it’s in any way preferable to irreplaceable, which is actually in dictionaries. [N.b.: There is a difference in meaning, as commenters explain below. I still don’t like it.]) There’s some more good stuff in there, along with filler (“Rhythm holds meaning”) and utter tosh (“Bad grammar is usually a sign of something deeper amiss with the rhythm”), but I want to focus on that “447-word sentence about a sofa.” You can see the sentence about halfway down Nathan Brixius’s page (“A sofa that had risen up from dreamland…”) and the original French here (“Canapé surgi du rêve…”), but why pick on that one? It’s only Proust’s third longest! The longest, 958 words according to Brixius, is from Cities of the Plain I and begins “Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional…”; you can see the French here (“Sans honneur que précaire, sans liberté que provisoire…”), and I note that it’s only 858 mots in French, that succinct tongue. (We discussed long sentences back in 2016.)

Andrea Moro, Professor of General Linguistics at the University School for Advanced Study in Pavia, writes for the MIT Press Reader about an interesting experiment:

At least since the pioneering work of Nobel Prize-winning electrophysiologist Lord Edgar Adrian we have known that no physical signal is ever completely lost when it reaches the brain. What we’ve more recently discovered is surprising: Apparently electric waves preserve the shape of their corresponding sound waves in non-acoustic areas of the brain, such as in the Broca’s area, the part of the brain responsible for speech production.

These findings shed important light on the relationship between sound waves and electric waves in the brain, but almost all of them rely on one aspect of the neuropsychological processes related to language: namely, sound emission decoding. Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read (as what we are most probably experiencing at this very moment) or when we use words while thinking — in technical terms, when we engage in endophasic activity.

This simple fact immediately raises the following crucial question: What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound? […]

Remarkably, we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air that would have been produced if those words had actually been uttered. The two families of waves where language lives physically are then closely related — so closely in fact that the two overlap independently of the presence of sound. The acoustic information is not implanted later, when a person needs to communicate with someone else; it is part of the code from the beginning, or at least before the production of sound takes place. It also excludes that the sensation of exploiting sound representation while reading or thinking with words is just an illusory artifact based on a remembrance of the overt speech.

The discovery that these two independent families of waves of which language is physically made strictly correlate with each other — even in non-acoustic areas and whether or not the linguistic structures are actually uttered or remain within the mind of an individual — indicates that sound plays a much more central role in language processing than was previously thought. It is as if this unexpected correlation provided us with the missing piece of a “Rosetta stone” in which two known codes — the sound waves and the electric waves generated by sound — could be exploited to decipher a third one: the electric code generated in the absence of sound, which in turn could hopefully lead to the discovery of the “fingerprint” of human language.

Intriguing, certainly, but the MIT imprint inspires a certain skepticism, and I don’t know enough about this stuff to have a sensible opinion. All thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and once again my contribution is the first in the series, a tradition which I am honored by and enjoy shamelessly. This year I discuss David Graeber’s Debt, Charles Portis’s Norwood, Yuri Trifonov and Vladimir Tendryakov, and the two Trevor Joyce collections I wrote about here. I could have added Tessa Hadley and George Eliot, both of whom I’ve been reading to my wife at night (we’re almost finished with Daniel Deronda), but the piece was long enough already, and neither author is in particular need of my publicity. Dum spiro, lego!

1) Shocking Blunders:

Mark Thakkar, “Duces caecorum: On Two Recent Translations of Wyclif,” Vivarium 58 (2020) 357-383, is a review of Stephen Penn, John Wyclif: Selected Latin Works in Translation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), and Stephen Lahey, Wyclif, Trialogus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Some of the errors Thakkar exposes are quite shocking. I select two (both from Penn’s translation) as exhibits for my gallery of howlers.

Thakkar, p. 367:

Jesus’s famous aphorism that “many are called, but few are chosen” (multi sunt vocati, pauci vero electi) is jaw-droppingly mistranslated as “many of the elect are called poor” (p. 292).

Id., p. 368:

… both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed contain professions of belief in the Catholic church (‘credo ecclesiam catholicam’ dicit utrumque simbolum), which Penn translates as: “the words ‘I believe in the Catholic church’ represent a symbol everywhere!” (p. 173).

Thakkar concludes his review with this observation (pp. 382-383, footnotes omitted):

[I]n countries like the UK and the US, where secondary-school Latin has collapsed outside the private sector, where few medievalists have an undergraduate background in Classics, and where lecturers would be embarrassed to sit in on language classes, most medievalists are only ever taught Latin while they are graduate students. What’s more, we have already reached the stage where, in some universities, medieval Latin is taught from scratch to graduate students by people who were taught it from scratch when they were graduate students. This is not necessarily unsustainable, but it can only be sustainable if the language is taught seriously and intensively as a major component of graduate study, which it almost never is. And of course the problems we are storing up here are not confined to Wyclif: they will affect almost all areas of medieval studies. If, therefore, we do not drastically improve the level of graduate training in medieval Latin, hopeless misunderstandings of medieval sources will increasingly come to scar the scholarly landscape. In the meantime, it is evidently worth reminding translators and reviewers alike, as Wyclif used to remind his contemporaries, that “if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit.”

The post title is part of the Latin version of the final quote, from Matthew 15:14.

2) Soiled Undergarments:
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When I started reading this passage from Jason Farago’s NYRB review of two books by Édouard Louis, History of Violence and Who Killed My Father, I thought I’d add it as a comment to my previous post, but as I read on I thought it was too much for a comment and would make a good post on its own. History of Violence is about Louis’ rape by a man he picked up late on Christmas Eve, 2012, and his ambivalence about his decision to report it to the police:

What elevates History of Violence beyond the limits of its social determinism is the marvelous structure of its narration. It is style, much more than characterization, that gives the novel its moral and political force. “Tell it in the order that it happened,” one police officer tells Édouard, but Louis does nothing of the sort. The novel begins after the crime, back in Picardy, where Édouard is staying with his sister Clara. We jump from there back to the morning after the rape, then forward to the police station, then months into the future. Édouard and Reda meet on page 45 but don’t get to the apartment until page 80. The novel’s climax is not the rape, which occurs about halfway through, but rather the argument over whether to go to the police. Fracturing the account this way does more than a hundred Bourdieu-parroting apothegms to establish the social stakes of the novel, and to demonstrate how violence stretches past the personal.

Much of this comes to us not through Édouard’s first-person narration but through quotations from Clara, whom Édouard eavesdrops on back in Picardy, “hidden on the other side of the door” while she recounts the crime to her husband, “her voice compounded, as always, of fury, resentment, irony too, and resignation.” It is not only that: Clara speaks in a demotic, regional French that flouts grammatical rules and brims with class markers. Far more than The End of Eddy, this book uses popular speech as a compositional tool; Édouard’s Christmas nightmare returns to him, and comes to us for the first time, in the French he abandoned along with his given name. Indeed, Louis often interrupts Clara’s working-class French with italicized asides in Édouard’s more formal language, the better to underscore their social distance.

This grinding between registers of French is the crucial trick of History of Violence. Hundreds of Clara’s sentences use a common colloquial form in which the subject of the sentence is followed by a redundant pronoun—for example, Reda il criait, literally “Reda he was shouting.” (This grammatical tic is called, in a coincidence some of Louis’s political opponents might appreciate, dislocation à gauche.) She uses nonstandard contractions like t’es or t’aurais, she uses the highly conversational quoi for emphasis, and she uses regional, lower-class pronunciations that Louis renders with misspellings (pis instead of puis, “then”). Multiple sentences are run together with commas or with no punctuation at all. As for Édouard’s own speech, more polished, more Parisian, Clara describes it as sounding “like some kind of politician” (“son vocabulaire de ministre”). Their father, in The End of Eddy, thought of such correct French as the language of “faggots.”

I found Louis’s rendering of Clara’s French winning in many places, hammy and overdrawn in a few. But the distinct linguistic registers disappear in Lorin Stein’s English translation, which makes almost no effort to reproduce them. A sentence of Clara’s like “L’usine elle embauche plus,” with both a redundant pronoun and a nonstandard negative, appears in English as the stiffly correct “They’ve stopped hiring at the factory.” “J’ai rien dit moi” becomes “I just kept my mouth shut.” Clara’s tumbling, unpunctuated run-on sentences get chopped up into bite-size morsels; conversational repetitions are omitted; colloquial ça’s and quoi’s get vaporized. All this makes the dozens of pages in which Clara, not Édouard, recounts what happened that Christmas Eve—at a personal, social, and linguistic remove—tonally indistinguishable from Édouard’s narration.

We discussed pis = puis earlier this year; I agree with Farago that the translator should have made some effort to bring across the difference in translation.

Kim Willsher reports for the Guardian on a new French law:

In France, it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. When the prime minister, Jean Castex, opens his mouth, he is often accused of being “a bit rugby” – he comes from the south-west, where the sport is popular. Others with regional accents sound like “they should be reading the weather”.

Now the French have not only come up with a word for this kind of prejudice – glottophobie – but a new law banning it. The Assemblée Nationale has adopted legislation making linguistic discrimination an offence along with racism, sexism and other outlawed bigotry.

The legislation, approved by 98 votes to three, was the subject of acute debate in the house. Among those who voted against was Jean Lassalle, a former presidential candidate, the head of the Libertés et Territoires (Freedom and Land) party and a well-known orator.

“I’m not asking for charity. I’m not asking to be protected. I am who I am,” he said in a south-west accent with knife-blunting properties.

An earlier piece by Hugh Schofield for BBC News was written before the law was passed but has further details; it begins:

Imagine a well-known Westminster MP – a party leader – caught in a press scrum and being asked a question which is delivered in a thick Scottish accent.

He looks at the journalist in mocking incomprehension, and says: “Sorry I didn’t understand a word of that. Can someone ask me a question in proper English?” Unthinkable, right?

And yet in France more or less exactly that exchange was caught on camera between left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon and a hapless woman reporter from French regional TV. Her offence: having a strong southern twang.

And The Local.fr has more material on the topic. Thanks, Lars and Bathrobe!

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim (great name) has a NY Times review of Martin Puchner’s The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate, which begins:

When Martin Puchner was growing up in a rowhouse in Nuremberg in the early 1970s, strangers would show up at the door asking for food. His mother served them water and sandwiches, standing in the doorway while the visitors made conversation in a language the boy could not understand, even though the words were mostly German. Later, his uncle pointed out to him what it was that drew these strangers to the house: Carved into the foundation stone was the sign of a cross inside a circle. To those in the know, it signified that the house’s occupants would give you food.

Those in the know were all manner of vagrants: tinkers, knife grinders, peddlers, journeymen — people without a fixed abode. The pictograms they carved into fence posts or chalked on houses were called zinken, after the Latin signum, for sign. The language they spoke was Rotwelsch, a mix of Yiddish, Hebrew and repurposed German that had been used for centuries by members of the itinerant underground. Puchner’s father called them “people eternally on the road, escaping to nowhere.” […]

Both Puchner’s father and uncle were drawn to Rotwelsch and sprinkled words from it into their speech. As a boy, Puchner delighted in zesty phrases like “making a rabbit,” which meant making a quick escape. On hikes, his father taught him to spot zinken on roadsides and farmhouses. Though his parents were solidly middle class, Puchner writes, “I grew up feeling that I had a special connection to the road and the itinerant underground.” In his family, he felt, “Rotwelsch became our special possession, our secret.”

Puchner became a professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard and decided to investigate this icon of his childhood:
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My wife and I have been watching TCM’s Women Make Film series (schedule) for the last few months; I haven’t posted about it because this isn’t Moviehat, but we’ve seen a lot of good movies we’d never have gotten the chance to see (as well as some not-so-good ones, but that’s life in this imperfect world), and if you like movies I suggest investigating that schedule. I’m here, though, to tell you about the one we saw last night, 27 Missing Kisses (Georgian: 27 დაკარგული კოცნა); as I wrote my brother just now, it’s one of the weirdest movies we’ve ever seen (of course, Georgian movies tend to be weird). It’s full of stunning images (here’s a brief clip — without subtitles, but the TCM version had them), and has one of the funniest (and simultaneously most shocking) scenes in any movie I know. And it’s mostly in Russian and Georgian, though Captain Nemo speaks French; how often do you get to see movies in Georgian?

To my American readers: happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy it as best you can in this strange year, and we’ll hope for less social distancing in 2021.

We have a fairly capacious mailbox, and the mail usually fits with little problem, so I was surprised when I saw the mailman walking up the driveway to the garage, where he deposited a hefty stack that included several packages. Two were Russian books I had ordered, but the largest and heaviest was completely unexpected, and came complete with a customs declaration; it turned out to be from Trevor Joyce, and contained two of his collections of poetry, With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold: A Body of Work 1966/2000 and What’s in Store (Poems 2000-2007). I was bowled over — I’d been wanting to read more of Joyce since I got his Fastness in 2017 (see this post). His ear for English and his ability to deploy it in unexpected ways excited me, and now I can dive in to a much wider range of his work. The very first piece in the first collection, a version of Buile Suibne he did in his young youth, starts out with an easy confidence that puts most modern retellings to shame: “It’s no secret how Sweeny, king of Dal Araidhe and scion of noble though disputed stock, wandered deranged from battle.” After that come “The Moon as Other Than a Green Cheese” (“Tonight/ a phosphorescence is toddling along the night/ having the form/ of a silver apple, walking pome”), “River Tolka and Botanical Gardens” (“Eggshells of white hoar crackled underfoot”), and other exagminations of the world around him; I particularly like the title “Surd Blab.” Naturally I turned to “Tocharian Music” as soon as I saw the title; here’s the end of the finely restrained little poem:

Eleven thousand
died in the reprisal
and the city laid waste
the airs dispersed
only the names survive

Time slipped out of their tablature
and without stopping
fled
fugitive amongst those sands

“Time slipped out of their tablature”: that has the same kind of phonetic/rhythmic authority that captured me in early Pasternak; I don’t care what the lines mean as long as they sound that good, and it’s a quality sadly missing from most poetry these days. And Joyce has kept it up for decades; the recent poems in What’s in Store are just as convincing. Here’s the start of one of “the thirty-six word poems scattered throughout this volume”:

the sheets
of wheat
are rolled
back

gone
that blonde
hay
your pillow

I’ll quote another of them in full; how can I not, given that it leads with a fedora?
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