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Avva posts the start of an Esquire interview (in Russian) with Alexander Gavrilov about how reading changes from childhood to adulthood; this is my translation:

As a child I had plenty of favorite books, but Urfin Jus and His Wooden Soldiers is particularly engraved in my memory. I was completely under its spell, I roamed the flower beds of Moscow trying to find animating grass — because if Urfin Jus could find it, then I would easily be able to. I don’t even remember what it was I was going to revive, it was just clear that that’s how all of life should change completely.

And I remember my love for that book especially well because later, when I read Volkov’s many, many volumes to my daughters, I suddenly discovered how monstrously, unimaginably poorly they were written. I simply could not physically say with my mouth what I read on paper; I had to edit the text while reading so as not to spit.

It was at that moment that I grasped the difference between the reading of children and adults. Children are generally much more generous readers. I have the fixed idea that a book is created by its reader almost to a greater extent than by its writer. I have often heard adult readers say something like “There are no really good books left, it’s all crap, it was a lot better before.” At that point the reader is admitting that he no longer has the substance that makes all books magical in childhood.

So true! And although I had been curious about Volkov’s Soviet versions of the Oz books (I posted about them at MetaFilter back in 2005), if I had trouble finishing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone I may have to give these a pass. (I’ve translated вещество чтения as “reading substance,” but I’m not happy about it; вещество can be “matter,” “material,” and “agent” as well as “substance,” but those sound even worse. Does вещество чтения sound normal in Russian?)

Unrelated, but check out this interview with Lisa Hayden, who writes the indispensable blog Lizok’s Bookshelf about Russian literature and has translated eight Russian novels.

A couple of days ago the prolific Michael Gilleland posted Algernon Swinburne’s aggrieved letter to the New York Daily Tribune dated January 30, 1874, complaining about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in an interview had called him “a perfect leper and a mere sodomite.” In the course of his missive (which I recommend reading in full if you like eloquent vituperation) Swinburne refers to the “apt reply […] addressed by the servant of Octavia to the satellites of Nero,” and in a follow-up post Gilleland’s correspondent Eric Thomson explained the reference, quoting first Thomas Denman:

While we were calling our witnesses, and I was at Holland House on Sundays and at home in the evenings, anxiously sifting the minutes of evidence, Dr. Parr was my frequent correspondent, pointing out illustrations of many parts of our case from history and classical literature. He earnestly besought me to look into Bayle, and weave into my summing-up allusions to Judith, Julia, and Octavia. The two first seemed to me inapplicable; the third flashed upon me like lightning. In a moment I resolved to make the unhappy wife of Nero my heroine, and indeed, the parallel was perfect. I was deeply smitten, too, with the honest chambermaid’s Greek, but, trembling as to the effect it might produce, I wrote back to ask Parr whether I could venture to bring it forward. He, in reply, at first suggested a method of periphrasis, but, at length, recurring to it in the postscript to a long letter, he burst out, ‘Oh dear, Mr. Denman, I am for the word itself — don’t be squeamish.’

And then Denman’s biographer Joseph Arnould:

Bayle, article ‘Octavia,’ cites the parallel passages from Tacitus and Xiphilin; Tacitus Ann. xiv., c. 60, Xiphilin p. 176; and see also Dion lii. 13. Neither the Latin nor the Greek can be quoted with decency. Tigellinus was presiding at the examination in which the female attendants of Octavia were being tortured to prove their mistress guilty of adultery with a slave. The imputation cast upon Tigellinus by the ‘honest chambermaid’ was of a nameless impurity, which made him peculiar for infamy even in the infamous court of Nero.

Thomson adds, “The word itself in the honest chambermaid’s Greek that could not be quoted with decency was ‘αἰδοῖον’; in the honest chambermaid’s Latin, ‘muliebria’, squeamishly rendered, – or ‘dextrously softened off’ – by translators Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (1876) as ‘person’.” He cites Dio Cassius’s Greek (‘καθαρώτερον, ὦ Τιγελλῖνε, τὸ αἰδοῖον ἡ δέσποινά μου τοῦ σοῦ στόματος ἔχει,’ which he translates “My mistress’s privy parts are cleaner, Tigellinus, than your mouth”) and Tacitus’s Latin (“castiora esse muliebria Octaviae respondit quam os eius,” which Church and Brodribb softly rendered “Octavia’s person was purer than his mouth”). Ah, for the days when Britons (of the better sort, needless to say) could bandy such allusions and be understood by everyone who mattered!

While I’m recommending Gilleland, I’ll also send you to today’s post, which quotes Martin Luther on languages:

Truly, if there were no other use for the languages, this alone ought to rejoice and move us, that they are so fine and noble a gift of God, with which He is now richly visiting and endowing us Germans, more richly indeed than any other land.[…]

And let us be sure of this: we shall not long preserve the Gospel without the languages. The languages are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained; they are the casket in which we carry this jewel; they are the vessel in which we hold this wine; they are the larder in which this food is stored; and as the Gospel itself says, they are the baskets in which we bear these loaves and fishes and fragments. If through our neglect we let the languages go (which may God forbid!), we shall not only lose the Gospel, but come at last to the point where we shall be unable either to speak or write a correct Latin or German.

If we must have peevery, let it be that expansive and eloquent!

Scott McLemee’s review [archived] of Peter Martin’s The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language begins as follows:

The author of a collection of essays “on moral, historical, political and literary subjects” published in Boston in 1790 acknowledged that they were interventions in the American revolutionary process. “Many of them were dictated at the moment, by the impulse of impressions made by important political events, and abound with a correspondent warmth of expression,” he wrote.

“This freedom of language wil be excused by the frends of the revolution and of good guvernment, who wil recollect the sensations they hav experienced, amidst the anarky and distraction which succeeded the cloze of the war. On such occasions a riter wil naturally giv himself up to hiz feelings, and hiz manner of riting wil flow from hiz manner of thinking.”

The plunge here — from the cadence and diction of 18th-century prose into spelling that may look semiliterate even to readers inured to the guesswork orthography of 21st-century social media — is vertiginous. And all the more so for knowing that the author was Noah Webster. At that point, he was not yet working on his dictionary, the first version of which appeared in 1806. But the seeds of it are already there, planted between the lines of his introductory remarks.

“In the essays, ritten within the last year,” he notes, “a considerable change of spelling iz introduced by way of experiment.” That period just so happened to coincide with the adoption of “the Constitution of the American Republic,” to which Webster makes “a Pledge of Attachment.” His phonetic streamlining of the written word is a calculated blow against British cultural authority — a declaration of independence, in effect — while the long decades of work preparing, revising and promoting his American Dictionary of the English Language represented a protracted constitutional convention of sorts.

I had known that Webster promoted simplified spelling, but it’s striking to see an example of it — how silly it looks, and how normal it would seem if he’d won out! The whole review is enjoyable, and it sounds like the book is as well. Thanks, Trevor!

My Kindle announced abruptly that it needed recharging, which will happen when you’re doing all your reading on it, so I plugged it in and wondered what dead-tree material I’d replace it with while it was absorbing its e-nourishment. My eye fell on a review copy of The Grammarians, the new novel by Cathleen Schine that the good people at Farrar, Straus and Giroux were kind enough to send me. All I knew about it was that it featured dictionary-obsessed identical twins, but that was certainly enough to intrigue me, so I decided to give it a try. Now, having spent a couple of days voraciously devouring it, I’m here to urge you to do the same.

Each section is prefaced by an entry from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, the twin sisters are constantly playing language games, there are quotes from English As She Is Spoke, and a major role is played by Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition; if that had been all, dayenu! But there’s also copyediting and alternative newspapers; there’s the East Village and Spain Restaurant; there’s subways and coffee shops and the Mets (there’s even a reference to that bitter parody all Mets fans sing in the bad years: “Meet the Mets, beat the Mets”): dayenu, dayenu, dayenu. And the writing is a sheer delight throughout, with clever allusions tickling your funny bone rather than smiting you about the head and shoulders, e.g.:

Whenever the wind blew outside, Laurel and Daphne could hear it whistling — like a phantom looking for its phantom dog, Laurel said. They named the phantom dog Mariah.

All that would certainly have been enough, but then one of the novel’s heroes turned out to be Charles Fries, that great linguist whom David Foster Wallace treated with such ignorant contempt; when I got to that I was like the horse who saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha! And I was utterly won over.

And there’s so much more. To take one example, there’s a reference to a LRB essay by Richard Rorty (I googled and discovered it’s “The Contingency of Selfhood” from the 8 May 1986 issue); Schine mentions it starts with a Larkin poem, and since you may well be as curious about it as I was, here’s the bit Rorty quotes:

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is as clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

Isn’t that nice? And here’s the start of what Rorty has to say about it:
[Read more…]

Thomas Morris (“Making you grateful for modern medicine”) discusses the history of the famous aphorism “First, do no harm,” or, in its Latin guise, primum non nocere:

In this form you will often see it referred to as the Hippocratic injunction, and many people assume that it has its origins in the Hippocratic Corpus, the body of early medical texts attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and his followers. And there is indeed a similar form of words in the Hippocratic Oath, which affirms that ‘I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm’. Elsewhere in the Hippocratic Corpus (in a work entitled the Epidemics) there is the instruction ‘either help or do not harm the patient’.

But is it really Hippocratic? The attribution is far from clear. Firstly, although the sentiment is very similar, the form of words is rather different. And, more obviously, the Hippocratic Corpus and Oath are both in Greek. Where, then, did the Latin phrase come from?

My gold standard for this sort of thing is Robert K. Merton’s On the Shoulders of Giants (see this ancient post), and Morris’s investigation, though of course shorter and less anfractuous, is worthy of that giant’s vision. I will leave you to discover the delightful details at the link, and just quote the concluding paragraph:

Strangely, we have come full circle. I began by attempting to debunk the old chestnut that primum non nocere is Hippocratic. But the debunker has been debunked, since it seems that the old aphorism is indeed Hippocratic, albeit filtered through the mind of an early Christian writer from North Africa, writing in Latin almost 1700 years ago.

Thanks, hat_eater!

Jonathan Morse has a post featuring a store display card published in 1888 for the Cotton Bale Medicine Company of Helena, Arkansas; he has various things to say about it, but the point of linguistic interest concerns the phrase “free to all,” which he says is no longer immediately intelligible:

When I teach Ulysses in the years that have followed its day in 1904, I have to bracket a word into the text to make sure the class reads Poldy’s throwaway in “Lestrygonians” as a constative, not an imperative: “All [are] heartily welcome.” All used to be understood to mean everybody, but that sense seems to have gone obsolete. Rhetoric has lost something that sounded somehow grander than everybody: not restricted to the mere body or the mere human but universal.

Is it really obsolete? I would have thought of it as a bit formal, but not something that would require bracketed elucidation. But then I am a fossil of the last century.

Back in 2003 I posted about the draznilka, “a short, humorous verse used by children to tease, taunt and play pranks on other children.” I linked there to an article by Halina Weiss which I commend to the attention of non-Russian-speakers, because they won’t get anything out of the new article I’m posting about, “Картография и хронология жадин” [The cartography and chronology of greedy people], the belated but superb followup to a poll N + 1 carried out back in February asking readers to send them their versions of the well-known draznilka whose most common form is:

Жадина-говядина,
солёный огурец,
по полу катается,
никто его не ест.

Greedy person, beef,
pickled cucumber,
lying on the floor,
nobody eats it.

It uses charts, graphs, maps, and other means to provide the detailed results showing who says what where (and the difference it makes what generation you’re part of). If you read Russian, it’s a real delight. Thanks, Alexey!

Bathrobe has a new post at his blog Spicks and Specks that’s full of fascinating reflections on the nitty-gritty of translation work. A couple of excerpts:

It was a point of pride at the time that the press translations produced by the Australian embassy were far superior to those of the U.S. embassy. The U.S. Embassy translations were barely translations at all; they merely transposed words and constructions in a way that closely mimicked the original. But there was a rationale behind the American approach. When reading a translation, an American officer who knew Japanese could gain a fairly accurate idea what the original Japanese said. This is what the U.S. Embassy wanted, not natural-sounding translations that obscured the original. […]

A good portion of modern so-called ‘translation’ means knowing the conventional equivalents for standard vocabulary. A translator working in a major language simply has to plug in ready-made words. For example, the word ‘economy’ or ‘economic’ has routine equivalents in Japanese (経済(的) keizai-teki), Chinese (經濟 / 经济 jīngjì), Mongolian (эдийн засаг ediin zasag in Mongolia, аж ахуй aj akhui in Inner Mongolia), or any other major language.

Just 150 years ago people translating these terms did not have this luxury. Apart from European languages, most languages did not have a single word that corresponded exactly to ‘economy’ or ‘economic’. Translators in the 19th – 20th centuries had to create such vocabulary from scratch as part of Westernisation / modernisation, laying the basis for what we have today. For the translator, this makes the difference between asking “What is the Swahili word for ‘economic’?” and “How should we express the concept of economics in Swahili?” This kind of standardisation now covers vast fields of science, technology, and even sport, making a lot of translation an exercise in memory or dictionary lookup rather than brainstorming.

David Bentley Hart, who has featured at LH before (2012, 2018), back in 2005 wrote a review for First Things of Thomas C. Oden’s The Humor of Kierkegaard that is worth reading if perhaps too long (which is basically his judgment on Oden’s book). He writes:

Thomas Oden’s generous anthology, The Humor of Kierkegaard, is a sequel to his deservedly popular collection of 1978, Parables of Kierkegaard. Unlike its predecessor, though, it is—in Oden’s own words—intended “as entertainment with no noble purpose.” But it is also, in a sense, a compilation of evidences, offered in support of a very large claim. In his introduction, Oden throws down a “gauntlet”: He challenges the reader to assemble a collection of passages from any ten major philosophers as funny as those he has compiled from Kierkegaard’s writings; furthermore, he makes bold provisionally—until this challenge is met—to declare Kierkegaard “as, among philosophers, the most amusing.” Now, as I have intimated already, I am prone to regard this as a distinction rather like that of owning “the finest restaurant in South Bend, Indiana”: The quality of the competition renders the achievement somewhat ambiguous. Despite which, I am not entirely convinced that Oden makes an incontrovertible case. […]

Kierkegaard’s writings—taken in themselves—provide Oden with wonderfully rich sources of plunder, especially the early pseudonymous works, with their thickets of prefaces, interludes, interjections, postscripts, appendices, multiple voices, and preposterous names, not to mention their sinuous coils of indirection. […] Either/Or emerges as the most fertile and delightful of Kierkegaard’s literary achievements in this regard, though almost all the early books abound in comic invention. And, as a whole, this collection can be recommended, for light or serious reading alike. That said, while I enjoyed this anthology thoroughly, I nevertheless came away from it still somewhat unconvinced regarding Oden’s high claims for Kierkegaard; and I find myself still inclined to ask whether Kierkegaard was really the nonpareil humorist that Oden makes him out to be.

There follows an excessively detailed discussion of purported examples of Kierkegaard’s humor, which leave this reader, at least, convinced that Hart’s doubts are well founded. But he saves the best, which has nothing to do with the book under review, for the last; the final chunk of the essay, perhaps a third of it, is devoted to the amazing J. G. Hamann (featured at LH a decade ago):
[Read more…]

This week’s New Yorker has a review of Rezdôra, a new Italian restaurant; of course I was curious about the name, which is explained thus: “rezdôra means ‘grandmother’ in Modenese dialect.” OK, great, but it’s an odd-looking word, and I wanted to know more. Googling quickly revealed that every review mentions the meaning, and the restaurant’s website leads with it: “Rezdôra, the Modenese word for grandmother, is a rustic Italian restaurant highlighting the cuisine of Emilia Romagna in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood.” But I had trouble finding any further discussion of the word. Google Books gave me snippets like “Working alongside the rezdora Lidia Cristoni and applying techniques learned as an apprentice to French chef Georges Coigny,” “He explained how the barnyard and kitchen garden were the family matriarch’s (she is called rezdora in local dialect) domain,” and “Loosely translated, rezdora means ‘housewife,’ but what it really means is queen of the kitchen. It is the word that is used to describe the women, usually older, who are keeping alive the traditions of the recipes of Emilia-Romagna.” Which makes it sound like it doesn’t actually mean ‘grandmother’ after all. And it’s still an odd-looking word, and I still want to know its origin. Any suggestions?