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I just finished Turgenev’s enjoyable 1874 novella Пунин и Бабурин [Punin and Baburin], in which the narrator describes his acquaintance with the odd couple Nikandr Punin and his gloomy “republican” benefactor Paramon Baburin, first having met them when he was twelve on his despotic grandmother’s estate in 1830, then as a student in Moscow seven years later, when Baburin’s ward Muza ran off with the narrator’s friend Tarkhov. At one point he says “Невдалеке от башни, завернутая в альмавиву (альмавивы были тогда в великой моде), виднелась фигура, в которой я тотчас признал Тархова,” which Constance Garnett translates “At no great distance from the tower I discerned, wrapped in an ‘Almaviva’ (‘Almavivas’ were then in the height of fashion), a figure which I recognised at once as Tarhov.” Garnett clearly thinks of “Almaviva” as an English word her reader is likely to recognize, but it meant nothing to me (except the count in Figaro) either in English or Russian. It was in my large Russian dictionary, defined as an obsolete word for a kind of man’s wide cloak, and it has its own Russian Wikipedia article, but it has a more fugitive existence in English; if you google [Almaviva cloak] you get a Wikidata page (apparently translated from Russian) calling it “voluminous cloak of Spanish origin, named after the operatic character Count Almaviva” and an 1857 quote from Bulwer Lytton, “The only thing remarkable in their dress is the so-called Almaviva cloak, in which they all, without any exception, wrap themselves up to the eyes…” Is anyone familiar with it, and does it exist in other languages? You’d think it would have been used in French, but it’s not in the TLFi, so apparently not.

Addendum. Another forgotten cloak name: immensikoff.

It goes without saying that Tolstoy was a great writer, but the more I read about his life the more I realize that, like so many great writers, he was a horrible person, and not the least of it is his appalling snobbery, on view at impressive length here in a passage from the magazine publication of War and Peace, sensibly omitted from the book version (the translation is R. F. Christian’s, from his Tolstoy’s ‘War And Peace’: A Study):

Up to now I have been writing only about princes, counts, ministers, senators and their children, and I am afraid that there will be no other people in my story later on either.

Perhaps this is not a good thing and the public may not like it: perhaps a story of peasants, merchants and theological students would be more interesting and instructive for them; but for all my desire to have as many readers as possible, I cannot satisfy this taste for many reasons. In the first place because the historical monuments of the time I am writing about have survived only in the correspondence and memoirs of people of the highest circle – literate people; the interesting and clever stories which I have managed to hear, I also heard only from people of that circle. In the second place because the lives of merchants, coachmen, theological students, convicts and peasants seem to me boring and monotonous, and all the actions of these people seem to me to stem, for the most part, from one and the same motives: envy of the more fortunate orders, self-interest and the material passions. If all the actions of these people do not in fact stem from these motives, their actions are so obscured by these impulses that it is difficult to understand them and therefore to describe them.

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Nick Ripatrazone describes the fine art of line editing for LitHub (but are those editor’s changes rather than Orwell’s in the image of the MS for 1984?):

Anyone in the business knows books are not solo acts. Toni Morrison, who was also edited by [Robert] Gottlieb, said she never wrote “with Bob in mind; that would be very bad for me. He isn’t the ideal reader for the product, but he is the ideal editor for it.” Line editors are not readers in the public sense; they are private practitioners, whose profession operates on a sense of both trust and authority. Gottlieb calls the receipt of a writer’s manuscript as an action of “emotional transference.” The days and weeks before hearing back are fraught, but writers know line edits are worth the wait—and the emotional weight.

Line editors are often mistaken for copyeditors. Copyeditors tend to polish and perfect work at a later stage, but the confusion is telling. George Witte, editor-in-chief at St. Martin’s Press, has said “many copyeditors do the work that line editors should have done.” Often copyediting is done from a distance, but as with Erskine and Ellison, Gottlieb and Heller, line editors have a direct relationship with the writer. They are a book’s “ideal reader,” according to Witte, and because they have often been the writer’s acquiring editor, are also the writer’s “source of money, the point of contact, the guide through the publishing process, the cheerleader, the writer’s advocate, the person to cry to, or, perhaps, to complain about, the lunch or drinks companion, sometimes the friend, and above all the most attentive and most honest reader of an author’s work.”

Line editors tighten sentences when tension and clarity is missing, but they also give sentences breath when constrained. Beyond removing clichés, they excise a writer’s pet words and mannered constructions. Line editors help sentences build into paragraphs, and paragraphs flow into pages.

There are good stories and quotes in there, and my copyeditor’s heart warmed when I read “many copyeditors do the work that line editors should have done.” Very true. (Thanks, Trevor!)

This brief Guardian story from a couple of years ago reports on yet another annoying result of stupid national laws restricting what parents can name their kids:

A French court has banned a couple from giving their baby a name containing a tilde, ruling that the character ñ was incompatible with national law.

The couple from Brittany wanted to call their newborn boy Fañch, a traditional name in the northwestern region which has its own language. […]

It’s hardly worth posting on its own, but I was curious about the name Fañch; fortunately, in the age of Google and Wikipedia it was the work of a moment to learn that it’s a diminutive of Frañsez, the Breton equivalent of François. What I’m wondering is, how do you get Fañch from Frañsez? Anybody know enough Breton to explain? (Thanks, Kobi!)

A great Sumerian scholar has died; here’s Harrison Smith’s Washington Post obit:

You have to go back 4,000 years, colleagues said, to find someone as fluent in Sumerian as Miguel Civil. A Catalonian-born professor with a purported photographic memory, he spent decades studying ancient cuneiform tablets, examining the last wedge-shaped traces of what is probably the world’s oldest written language.

Dr. Civil, who was 92 when he died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Chicago, was a giant in the field of Sumerology, an expert in the Mesopotamian civilization that is widely credited with developing the first cities, sailboats, irrigation systems and potter’s wheels, as well as the seven-day week and writing itself.

“He was the most knowledgeable authority of Sumerian since 2000 B.C.,” said Christopher Woods, a fellow Sumerian scholar and director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, where Dr. Civil taught from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. […]

“Civil was a brilliant linguist,” said Benjamin Foster, a Yale professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature, “who carried forward the reconstruction of ancient Sumerian language and literature begun by Samuel Noah Kramer, Adam Falkenstein and Thorkild Jacobsen in the mid-20th century.” […]

“He took up many difficult problems, such as Sumerian phonology, grammar and semantics, and pioneered the use of computer technology to place small fragments of Sumerian writing in their original contexts,” Foster added. “We all stood in awe of his breadth and depth of knowledge and his originality of thought.”

And here’s Maureen O’Donnell’s for the Chicago Sun-Times, with an excursus on Sumerian beer-making (“The brewmaster said that when he questioned the professor about whether there was a dictionary to consult about Sumerian, ‘He looked up at me, and he said, “I am the dictionary.”’”) and several good photos, including one of Ninkasi Sumerian Beer. Thanks, Bill and Trevor!

I’ve finished Boleslav Markevich’s 1873 Марина изъ Алаго-Рога (Marina from Aly Rog), which I mentioned recently here, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the linguistic stuff described in this 2014 post — towards the start of the novel, the two heroes, Count Zavalevsky and Prince Puzhbolsky, spend a great deal of time analyzing language and literature and talking about their stay in Italy and the things they saw there. Puzhbolsky, who falls hopelessly in love with Marina, first compares her to Palma Vecchio’s Santa Barbara, then thinks she reminds him more of Allori’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes or Rubens’ Helena Fourment with her son Frans. I can easily imagine a reader feeling that that sort of thing is impossibly recherché, not to say snobbish, but I like it and wish there had been more of it. Alas, as soon as Markevich has established that his heroes are well-traveled, sophisticated, and thoughtful people (and far better than the revolting radicals who had poisoned Marina with their vile ideas), he gets down to the serious business of laying out his absurd plot, borrowed wholesale from the trashiest melodrama (it hinges on the true parentage of his virtuous heroine) with large helpings of Turgenev and Tolstoy (e.g., Zavalevsky’s revival of life force on hearing Marina sing is taken straight from Nikolai Rostov’s similar epiphany on hearing Natasha sing in War and Peace). To be fair, he name-checks both authors and points out that War and Peace is a fine novel! I can’t say I’d recommend this book to anyone else, and had it been longer I might have set it aside before the plot ground to its inevitable happy end, but I’m glad that I set myself the task of trying everything that seemed plausibly worth reading in Russian literature, at least up through the last of Dostoevsky.

Via bulbul’s Facebook feed, this intriguing news item:

A researcher in the field of ancient Iranian culture and languages announced that a hitherto undocumented trilingual inscription has been discovered on the hillside around the tomb of Darius in Naqshe-Rustam. The discovery of the inscription, which had remained hidden under moss and lichen for over two millennia, is of great importance in the field of ancient Iranian studies and ancient linguistics, said French archaeologist Werther Henkelman. The inscription is written in the Persian, Elamite and Babylonian languages, and is of particular importance to linguists as it adds new verbs to all three ancient languages ​​in which it is inscribed. “It is still hoped that in the area of Naqshe-Rustam, which has been explored continuously for decades, other such valuable inscriptions will be discovered”, added Hansklmann.

There are some nice pictures of the site, but I would rather have been told what the verbs are.

Jason Kottke posts about a nicely done chart:

From Matt Baker of UsefulCharts, this chart traces the evolution of our familiar alphabet from its Proto-Sinaitic roots circa 1850-1550 BC. It’s tough to see how the pictographic forms of the original script evolved into our letters; aside from the T and maybe M & O, there’s little resemblance.

Baker has also done a spectacular-looking Writing Systems of the World. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Tim Parks often has interesting things to say about translation, and I’ve linked to his essays before; here’s a recent one from NYRDaily:

Do the beliefs we hold about literature add up to something consistent and coherent? Or are they little more than random pieties? Take two crucial notions I heard repeatedly last year. First, that in a fine work of literature, every word counts, perfection has been achieved, nothing can be moved—a claim I’ve seen made for writers as prolix (and diverse) as Victor Hugo and Jonathan Franzen. Second, that translators are creative artists in their own right, co-authoring the text they translate, a fine translation being as unique and important as the original work. Mark Polizzotti makes this claim in Sympathy for the Traitor (2018), but any number of scholars in the field of Translation Studies would agree.

Can these two positions be reconciled? Doesn’t translating a work of literature inevitably involve moving things around and altering many of the relations between the words in the original? In which case, either the original’s alleged perfection has been overstated, or the translation is indeed, as pessimists have often supposed, a fine but somewhat flawed copy. Unless, that is, we are going to think of a translation as a quite different work with its own inner logic and inspiration, only casually related to that foreign original. In which case, English readers will be obliged to wonder whether they have ever read Tolstoy, Proust, or Mann, and not, rather, Constance Garnett, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, or Helen Lowe-Porter. Or more recently, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, or Lydia Davis or Michael Henry Heim.

How perplexing. One of the problems in this debate is that most readers are only familiar with translated texts in their own languages. They cannot contemplate the supposed perfection of the foreign original, and when the translation delights them, they rightly thank the translator for it and are happy to suppose that the work “stands shoulder to shoulder with the source text,” as Polizzotti puts it. It makes these readers’ own experience seem more important. Alternatively, when they rejoice over the perfection of Jane Austen, Henry James, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, they do not see what foreign translations have done to the work as it travels around the world.

I too have been vaguely bothered by that “every word counts, perfection has been achieved” claim, so often made and so unlikely if you think about it. He continues with just the kind of thing I like, an analysis of two examples, one from English into Italian and one from Italian into English. I’ll let you read them at the link; here I want to foreground the start of his first example, from Henry James’ story “The Altar of the Dead”: “He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.” I understand this to mean that Stransom didn’t like skimpy celebrations of anniversaries, and liked them even less when they were puffed up into an attempt at grandeur. This is the way the Italian translator understood it (“Lui non le poteva soffrire, povero Stransom le celebrazioni scialbe, e ancor più detestava quelle pretenziose”), but it is not how Parks reads it; he says “The story of the fiancée’s death allows us to realize that ‘lean’ has the sense of unhappy (as in the lean and fat cows of Pharaoh’s dream),” and faults the translator for draining it of its Biblical resonance. I think Parks is simply misreading the text. What say you?

Joseph Norwood cherry-picks the “wonderfully strange” names created by early Puritans; I presume many of us have heard of Praise-God Barebone, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg:

A wide variety of Hebrew names came into common usage beginning in 1560, when the first readily accessible English Bible was published. But by the late 16th century many Puritan communities in Southern Britain saw common names as too worldly, and opted instead to name children after virtues or with religious slogans as a way of setting the community apart from non-Puritan neighbors. Often, Puritan parents chose names that served to remind the child about sin and pain.

Many Puritan names started to die out after 1662, when the newly restored monarch, Charles II, introduced new laws that cracked down on nonconformist religions and consolidated the power of the Anglican Church. Despite this, some of the names have remained in common use in Anglophone countries.

I’ve collected some of the best, worst, and strangest names the English Puritans came up with. Most of these are courtesy of the 1888 book by Charles Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (seen here on the Public Domain Review’s website), which includes Parish records with details about some of the people who had these names.

Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar! Continent Walker! Humiliation Hynde! (“Humiliation Hynde had two sons in the 1620s; he called them both Humiliation Hynde.”) NoMerit Vynall! Sorry-for-sin Coupard! Kill-sin Pimple!! There’s plenty more where those came from; go visit the link.