languagehat.com

Margaret E. Boyle reviews Janet Hendrickson’s translation of Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco’s 1611 dictionary, Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language, and Nicholas R. Jones’s study of “Africanized Castilian” language, Staging ‘Habla de Negros’, for Public Books. I found the discussion of Covarrubias particularly interesting:

Over a century after the imperial events of 1492, an enormous monolingual Spanish dictionary was published, which has now been excerpted and translated into English for the first time, by Hendrickson. Covarrubias’s Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language was a new kind of book, one whose function was stunningly unlike Nebrija’s grammar.

Although, on the surface, a dictionary relies on definition and containment, Covarrubias’s volume compels modern readers because of its ongoing contradictions and inconsistencies. Indeed, Hendrickson describes Covarrubias as “profuse,” “digressive,” “funny,” “personable,” and “diaristic.” In fact, Hendrickson explains, “I was distracted from the dictionary’s instrumental function by its seemingly unregulated beauty.” […]

The translation process is unconventional throughout: “This translation erases the greater portion of the Treasure,” explains Hendrickson. “I translated entries, or rather, fragments of entries, that I found of interest, with an eye toward shaping the strange, fabulous histories within the dictionary into a poetic whole. Sometimes I translated stray sentences within entries, sometimes isolated phrases in those sentences, translation and erasure becoming twin procedures. My rule was to follow the order of the original text.” The result of this translation practice is a slim “poetry pamphlet,” which feels all at once historical, ahistorical, and deeply resonant.

Consider Hendrickson’s translation of the entry for estrella (star): “If you find yourself in the depths of a very deep well, where the light does not reach, you will be able to see the stars from that darkness, though it is day, because the sun’s rays there do not hinder them.” This sentence is a nearly direct citation of Covarrubias’s concluding lines from the dictionary entry, and Hendrickson’s version showcases the author’s ability to pull in the reader.

And yet, the full definition from the Spanish original also includes a longer history of astronomy, alternate uses of the word as a verb (estrellarse), as well as colloquial expressions such as this one: “Contar las estrellas: no porque ellas no tenga número, pero es tan grande que no le podemos alcanzar, como las arenas de la mar y las hojas de los árboles.”

I find that kind of abridgment somewhat irritating, but I admit I’d probably enjoy the book. Thanks, jack!

I’ve finished Yury Dombrovsky’s Хранитель древности, translated by Glenny as The Keeper of Antiquities, rendering the name under which Novy mir insisted on publishing it in 1964; I prefer to call it The Keeper of Antiquity, following Dombrovsky’s original title (restored in later book publication). It’s an amazing novel, bearing no resemblance whatever to the vague idea of it I had from reading references to it as “a key to understanding the terrible Stalinist purges of the late 1930s” and the like — a pox on criticism that’s obsessed with politics! The purges are there, yes, and they become more present and frightening in the latter part of the book, but it’s a novel, not a tract, and the focus is on the protagonist, an archeologist trying to focus on his work and the distant past while the present, the terrible year 1937, intrudes more and more. (One of the saddest moments comes in the last few pages, when the narrator says “В этих людях еще жило, продолжалось и волновалось прошлое, то, что для меня вообще не существовало” [For these people the past was still alive, it continued to agitate them, while for me it just didn’t exist].) The complete review does a decent job in its brief account of the book, but it is too smug and dismissive (“Dombrovsky is perhaps too obvious in his choice of symbols… The episodes Dombrovsky relates are interesting and amusing, an unusual picture of a part and a time of the Soviet Union still too unfamiliar in the West”), treating it as an aperitif rather than the hard liquor it manifestly is (“Dilute it!” cries an appalled drunk when the narrator mischievously offers him pure alcohol).

I’d rather approach it from a different direction. At the start of the novel the narrator describes how he came to Alma Ata in 1933 and had to walk from the outskirts to the center of town, frequently losing his way because the ubiquitous gardens, orchards, and poplars made all the blocks look alike. Finally he finds an old watchman dozing in a park next to a strange building that reminds him of St. Basil’s in Moscow; he awakens the man, who immediately starts telling him about the local architect Andrei Zenkov, who built the cathedral next to them as well as many other buildings in the center of town. Dombrovsky then goes into an excursus on Zenkov, complete with footnotes, praising him as a little-known local genius with his own way of approaching his art. Later he does the same with the collector Castagnier, who scoured the world looking for objects that might relate to the history of the region, and the local artist Nikolai Khludov, who had no artistic training and was dismissed by sophisticates but was a master of drawing and loved everything he painted — Dombrovsky devotes an entire chapter to him. All these people are dismissed by the Soviet bureaucrats who are interested only in what can provide socialist education to the people, but the narrator loves them for their love of the region (he quotes a description of Zenkov that says “Он любил город и край” [He loved the city and the region]) — at one point his colleague says “Надо же знать край!” [You have to know the region!], which sums up one of the core truths of the book.
[Read more…]

I knew that epidemic was from Greek ἐπιδήμιος (ἐπί- + δῆμος ‘people’), but I wasn’t aware of the details of its development in Greek, well laid out by Marcel Detienne in Dionysos at Large (tr. Arthur Goldhammer), via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti:

In Greek, however, the word “epidemic” belonged to the vocabulary of theophany. Emile Littré, the nineteenth-century French lexicographer, was aware of this when he introduced the word into the French language.⁶ It was a technical term used in talking about the gods. “Epidemics” were sacrifices offered to the divine powers when they came to visit a region or a temple or attended a feast or were present at a sacrifice.⁷ Symmetrically, “apodemics” were sacrifices offered upon the gods’ departure. For there was a traffic of the gods, a traffic that became particularly heavy during Theoxenia, occasions when a city, individual, or god offered hospitality to some or all of the deities.⁸ The gods came to the place and lived there for a time; they were actually present,⁹ or “epidemized.” Being resident but not sedentary, they resembled the Hippocratic physicians, itinerant practitioners who composed what were called Epidemics: sheafs of notes, brief protocols or, rather, minutes relating the course of the disease—a careful record of the symptoms, the crisis, the care administered, and the patient’s reactions.¹⁰ The technique was that of a reporter, practiced by Ion of Chios, an intellectual of the fifth century B.C., in his work entitled Epidemics: a series of sketches, portraits, interviews with artists like Sophocles and politicians like Pericles and Kimon of Athens.¹¹

The footnotes are at the link, along with relevant entries from Liddell-Scott-Jones and a correction from Robert Renehan’s Greek Lexicographical Notes. (The relevant OED entries haven’t been updated since 1891.)

Facundo Corradini has an impassioned LogRocket post (from 2018) about HTML and semantics:

In the dark ages of HTML, <em> was barely used at all, despite being part of the specs since really early on (HTML 2.0 standard, 1995). But at that point in time and for some years to come, (almost) no one was thinking of semantics or even separation of concerns. Italics were simply marked up with <i> tags, and we wouldn’t give it a second thought.

Then somewhere along the way, someone shouted “Semantics!” and everybody started to hate the poor little <i> tag like a bad neighbor. A really, really bad neighbor.

<em> was all the rage, with supposed benefits for accessibility and SEO, which got us all using it everywhere. By HTML 4, everybody knew <em> was for emphasis and styled as italics, <strong> was for stronger emphasis and styled as bold text. If you ever dared to use <i>, you would be instantly tagged as a bad developer. […]

But when HTML5 rolled out, they made sure to draw a clearer line on what they intended <em> to be, while redefining the <i> from a text-italicising tag into a semantic tag that pretty much wraps most other use cases for italics.

He gives examples, then:

Why it matters

Accessibility, of course. Every time we use the wrong tag to italicise a word, most of our users won’t even notice. As long as we are doing so according to our language conventions, the word will be read with the intended emphasis.

But we are making things so much more complicated for screen readers, especially when nesting. If we were doing our job right, speech synthesizers would be able to easily make the right pitch corrections. But we’re so far gone in this that all of them (as far as I know) have it disabled by default, and that’s a big part of what makes them feel so unnatural.

He ends with a series of takeaways (“Whenever you’re throwing italics at a word/phrase, think about why are you doing so and choose the right tag for the task if possible”); it all makes me feel bad for knowing so little about it and just using the “i” tag my software supplies, but obviously I’m one of a vast multitude. I expect my readers will have thoughts about all this.

I don’t think I’d ever given a moment’s thought to North Korean literature, so I was fascinated to read Esther Kim’s conversation at LitHub with Immanuel Kim, translator of Paek Namnyong’s Friend, “the first state-sanctioned North Korean novel to be published in English”:

Immanuel Kim: When I started my PhD at UC Riverside in 2000, I was reading South Korean literature minus the colonial period [1910-1945]. All of my colleagues were doing the same, and I wondered, What more can I add to this field? What about North Korea? It was a crazy jump. All my friends were like You’re crazy, man. During my first eight months of actually reading the stories, I felt completely discouraged and disheartened. That was until I came across the 1960s novels, which were excellent.

I started making a personal database of authors that moved me. Paek Namnyong was one of them. I read every single one of his short stories and novels. It wasn’t a coincidence. There’s a reason these writers are respected by the Writers Union. Then I started looking for stories that were more relatable to the English-speaking world. I read almost a thousand.

EK: How did you come across Friend?

IK: I first came across Friend while I was doing research in 2009. I went to the North Korean collection at the National Library in Seoul and started reading their number one literary journal. I started from the very beginning and read through the 1960s to the ’90s. They were difficult. All my preconceived notions of North Korean lit were coming true, and I was bored out of my mind. I thought, I can’t say anything significant about North Korean literature! It’s all propaganda and terrible.

The stories were really didactic, but my advisor told me to be patient, and he recommended Friend. As soon as I opened it up, the novel was very different from your usual North Korean literature. Typically, the story focuses on setting, and the action begins halfway through the book. But because of the main character [Sunhee, a celebrity singer], there’s drama from the beginning and I was hooked.
[…]

EK: One thing that really surprised me about Friend, and which I found refreshing, was the reversal of gender roles. The father characters are the ones staying at home, taking care of the children and doing the housework while the women pursue a career outside the home. It’s almost more progressive than South Korean society, which is so patriarchal…

IK: Paek’s other novels don’t have pronounced gender roles and dynamics like this one. But something that’s common in all his writing is strong women. His father passed away when he was young, so he lived with a single mother. He grew up with the idea that women are strong, if not stronger than men, and very capable of raising a family with no issues. He has two older sisters who are equally strong, and he’s father to two daughters. So that was a source of inspiration.

In Friend, the women are extremely independent. They question the role of the men. This characterization of women isn’t unique to Paek. In the 1980s, there were a lot of North Korean novels that brought out the strength of women. I won’t say they’re feminist, but they were challenging patriarchy.

E. Tammy Kim reviewed the novel for the NY Times:

“Friend” is, at times, didactic and propagandistic, but for every unctuous sentence, there’s another that points to blemishes behind North Korea’s facade. Paek’s characters acknowledge the scarcity of electricity, corruption among government officials and a societal need for “becoming intellectualized in scientific technology and the arts.” The translation, by the scholar Immanuel Kim, can feel stilted, but usefully so, connoting the formality of the North Korean vernacular.

If only life were long enough to learn all the languages and investigate all the literatures! (Though I certainly wouldn’t have had the patience and fortitude to wade through as much dreck as Immanuel Kim did while looking for the good stuff.)

I’m surprised I’ve never posted about Daniil Kharms on LH, considering how much I love him, so I’m happy to find Alex Cigale’s The Absolute Nonsense of Daniil Kharms (Numéro Cinq IV:1, 2013), which presents translations of his poetry and prose with a preface, which I will excerpt:

The artlessness of Daniil Kharms, in accord with his age (in the wake of Satie, and Duchamp and Ernst, Kokoschka and the German Expressionists, yet almost certainly unaware of them and without precedent other than say Gogol in Russian) is Anti-art. […] Thumb-twiddling boredom, repetition, hoaxes, and other violations of expectations in evidence here are dissonant and discomfiting in themselves. Elsewhere, Kharms strikes a more distasteful, even offensive pose, an epatage that practically wallows in degradation and self-degradation. Explaining his “program” he wrote: “I am interested only in absolute nonsense, only in that which has no practical meaning. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. I find abhorrent heroics, pathos, moralizing, all that is hygienic and tasteful … both as words and as feelings.” In his other work we may find a precedent, for example, for The Theater of Cruelty, but also in its minutia of daily life for the post-modernist, documentary yet ironic and paradoxical approach of the Moscow Conceptualist artists and poets of the 1970s who acknowledged Kharms as an essential influence.

One of them, Ilya Kabakov, wrote: “…Contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of Russian conceptualism….” Kharms was similarly central for the non-conformist poets of the 1950s and 60s (Yevgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Jan Satunovsky, Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, Alexei Khvostenko) and the Minimalist poets of the 1970s and 80s. Just to enumerate some of the aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) values: plain speech, written as it is spoken, folksy simplicity, daily life or byt, but also the spiritual values of Absurdism: the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an Absurd age.

As I believe is true of all minimalist practice, the above not only doesn’t preclude a spiritual dimension, but makes it necessary. This particularly (also Kharms’s silly rhyming) is what is likely most incomprehensible to Anglophone readers of Kharms, and of the work of his colleague and friend, the proto-existentialist poet Alexander Vvedensky. How may their seeming nihilism (I would argue they were not) be made coherent with and even motivated by their conceptions of God?

Cigale ends by noting that Kharms “falls squarely within the Russian tradition of the yurodivy, the ‘holy fool’”; here are a couple of his translations:

Olga Forsh approached Alexei Tolstoy and did something.

Alexei Tolstoy did something too.

Then Konstantin Fedin and Valentin Stenich ran out into the yard and began searching for an appropriate stone. They didn’t find a stone, but they did find a shovel. With this shovel, Konstantin Fedin smacked Olga Forsh across her mug.

Then Alexei Tolstoy stripped off all his clothes and completely naked walked out onto the Fontanka and began to neigh like a horse. Everybody was saying: “There neighing is a major contemporary writer.” And no one even lay a hand on Alexei Tolstoy.

(1931)

A Northern Fable

An old man, for no particular reason, went off into the forest. Then he returned and said: Old woman, hey, old woman!

And the old woman dropped dead. Ever since then, all rabbits are white in winter.

(undated)

You can make comparisons, but there’s really nobody else like him.

I was leafing through my beloved old copy of Daniel Jones’s Everymans English Pronouncing Dictionary (13th ed., 1967) when my eye lit on the following entry:

Churchdown (near Gloucester) ˈtʃəːtʃdaun
  Note. — There was until recently a local
    pronunciation ˈtjəuzn, which is
    now probably obsolete as far as the
    village is concerned. It is preserved
    as the name of a hill near by, which
    is now written Chosen.

That is one of the most remarkable deformations I have seen, far better than Beauchamp “Beecham” or Cholmondeley “Chumley.” I’m not surprised it’s gone out of use, but I’m glad it got recorded.

And in trying to find somewhere to copy the text from (being a lazy fellow), I found what is apparently the first edition of the dictionary online at Internet Archive; if you want up-to-date info, you’d do better to look elsewhere, but for old-fashioned ways of speech Jones is your huckleberry. Bookmark and enjoy. [As mollymooly points out in the comments, it appears to be the second reprint of the eleventh edition (1958) — bad metadata!]

Back in 2006 I had occasion to quote Simon Karlinsky’s “wonderfully splenetic blast at poor Michael Glenny, the translator”; now that I’m reading Dombrovsky’s Хранитель древностей (see this post), I’m occasionally checking Glenny’s 1968 translation, The Keeper of Antiquities, when I run into difficulties, but I quickly realized he wasn’t going to be much help. I can forgive him rendering Усуни ‘Wusun‘ as “Usuni” — there probably wasn’t an easy way to check on such things in 1968 — but not his leaving out entire chunks of text (a practice depressingly common among translators). This passage, on the other hand, gave me as much true pleasure as Isidor Schneider’s manglings of Gorky (see here, here, and here). The narrator has gone to his office in the museum where he works, the former cathedral of Alma Ata, and found the old carpenter, a notorious drunk, sitting there; he accuses him of smoking up the place:

– Нет, я сейчас много курить не могу, – ответил дед печально. – Сейчас у меня задышка и грудь ломит. Скажи, что это вот тут, под лопатками, колет? Вот тут, тут, смотри.
Дед опять похозяйничал, привел монтера Петьку и они дулись в козла. Деревянный ящичек с костями торчал из лошадиного черепа (Усуньское погребение), и я сразу его заметил, как только вошел. И пили они тут, конечно. […]
– […] Нет, ты вот скажи, отчего у меня задышка. Иногда будто ничего, а иногда так подопрет, вот тут, – он ткнул себя пальцем под лопатку, – ой-ой-ой!

Here’s my translation (and of course I welcome corrections);

“No, I can’t smoke much these days,” answered the old fellow sadly. “I can’t breathe, and there’s a pain in my chest. Tell me, what is it that’s hurting here, under my shoulders? Here, right here, take a look.”

Once again, the old man was acting like he owned the place, he’d brought the electrician Petya and they’d been playing dominoes. A little wooden box with tiles was sticking out from a horse’s skull (Wusun burial), and I had noticed it as soon as I came in. And of course they’d been drinking. […]

“[…] No, you tell me why I’m so short of breath. Sometimes it seems like nothing, but sometimes I can feel it really pressing, right here” — he poked his finger under his shoulder blade — “oy oy oy!”

And here’s Glenny’s:

“No, I can’t smoke much nowadays,” he replied sadly. “I have asthma and it’s bad for my chest. Say, what’s that leaking over there, under those spades? Look, over there.”

The old man had brought Petka the plumber with him and they had been blowing through the heating pipes. A little wooden box of bones was sticking out from inside a horse’s skull (Usuni burial), and I noticed as soon as I walked in that some liquid was dripping from it. They had been drinking, of course. […]

“[…] But I wish you could tell me why I get asthma. Sometimes it seems to go, then it comes back here,” and he tapped himself under the shoulder-blade.”

(I’ve omitted a funny passage where the narrator tells the old man the alcohol he’s been drinking had been used to preserve a rattlesnake.) Now, задышка isn’t “asthma,” but shortness of breath is a symptom of asthma, so fine, I won’t quibble. A монтер is not a plumber (it can mean a fitter or mechanic, but usually means an electrician), but never mind — what’s all that about leaking and “blowing through the heating pipes” and “some liquid was dripping from it”? There’s not a hint of any of that in the Russian. Glenny seems not to have understood колет (literally ‘[it] pricks,’ but used impersonally, as here, it refers to bodily pain), and he couldn’t make head nor tail of дулись в козла (colloquial for ‘played dominoes’), so in desperation he created this tale of dripping liquid leaking from the “spades” (he’s also mistaken the word for ‘shoulder-blade’). The odd thing is that the second time the word comes around, after only a few paragraphs, he renders it correctly (“he tapped himself under the shoulder-blade”). I can only shake my head and wonder how these guys keep getting work.

In 2012, I wrote:

For those of you who might be wondering about the progress of my march through Russian literature, it has taken a sudden swerve. I had gotten up through the year 1968 […] when I suddenly decided to reverse course and go back to the beginning of modern Russian literature […]. There were several motives coalescing in this decision, but probably the most basic was a desire to get to Dostoevsky sooner rather than later.

Eight years later, I am reversing course again. Having finished The Brothers Karamazov last November, I spent some time reading early-20th-century novels (Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Bryusov) interspersed with Chekhov stories, but it was starting to feel like homework, and reading the Strugatskys reminded me of the different joys of more recent literature, so I’ve returned to the 1960s and have started on Yury Dombrovsky’s Хранитель древностей (The Keeper of Antiquities), first published in Novy mir in 1964. I love the opening passage, in which the narrator describes arriving in the garden- and poplar-filled streets of Alma Ata in 1933, suddenly changing from the spring thaw of Moscow to the southern summer. Of course, being the kind of reader who insists on knowing the geography involved, I wanted historical maps of the city, and I was thrilled to discover Dennis Keen’s Walking Almaty site (“It’s a project about learning to read a city’s visual landscape”), which has exactly what I wanted, 13 Historic Maps of Verny, Alma-Ata, and Almaty, starting with “Project for a Fort on the Ili River in the Almaty Valley in the Big Kirgiz Horde”, 1854, and ending with “Alma-Ata. Map of Public Transportation” from “some time before 1983”; the “Schematic Plan of Alma-Ata”, 1935-1936 should give me what I need for the novel. Bless you, Dennis, and I wish there were obsessives like you for every city! (A question for Russian-speakers: is the dialect word ростепель, which he uses for that Moscow thaw, an exact synonym of оттепель, or is there some shade of difference?)

After the Dombrovsky, I’ll probably move on to Valentin Kataev’s dream-memoir Святой колодец (The Holy Well, 1966) and its sequel Трава забвенья (The Grass of Oblivion, 1967), and then finally get to the 1970s: Trifonov’s “city novels” (all nice and short), Sinyavsky-Tertz’s Прогулки с Пушкиным [Strolls with Pushkin] and В тени Гоголя [In the Shadow of Gogol] (both 1975), and (from 1976) Rasputin’s Прощание с Матёрой [Farewell to Matyora] and Sokolov’s Школа для дураков [A School for Fools]. But we shall see. I take it one book at a time.

Arika Okrent (a perennial LH favorite) has a list of “11 Little-Known Words for Specific Family Members” that’s worth a look; I personally consider straight-up Old English words cheating, which lets out four of them (fadu, modrige, fœdra, eam), but the rest could be pressed into service ad libitum (note that Yiddish words are far more susceptible to borrowing than Old English ones). I particularly like the first and last:

1. Patruel

This one means “child of your paternal uncle.” Also, a child of your own brother. It hasn’t gotten a lot of use in the past few centuries, but it was once convenient to have a term for this relationship because it factored into royal succession considerations. The first citation for it in the OED, from 1538, reads, “Efter his patruell deid withoutin contradictioun he wes king.”

11. Machetonim

The parents of your child’s spouse. Your child’s in-laws. Ok, this is a Yiddish word, but one that, like a lot of Yiddish words, has poked its way into English because it fills a gap. When it comes to marriage, this can be a very important relationship, so it’s good to have a word for it. If your parents get along with their machetonim, the family—the whole mishpocheh—will be happier.

Thanks, Trevor!