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I would guess that among English-speaking readers, Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli [translated as The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants] is the least-known of Dostoevsky’s novels — certainly far less known than his works of the 1860s, but also less so than his early novellas, Poor Folk and The Double and so on. (It seems to be well known among Russians, judging from the number of dramatizations available on YouTube.) In a way, this is understandable, since it’s unquestionably a slighter work than the ones to follow, but Dostoevsky was very pleased with it, considering it the best thing he’d done up till then (“I put into it my soul, my flesh and blood”), and I found it well worth reading. It is, though, a very odd novel, and I kept changing my mind about it as I read.

At first, it seems to be structured like a mystery. The narrator, Sergei, an orphan fresh out of college, is urgently invited by his kindly uncle Egor Rostanev to his country estate at Stepanchikovo, where he is told he is to marry a wonderful young woman. He puts off the visit for a while, but finally grits his teeth and goes; on the way, he meets an irascible fellow, Bakhcheev, who has just come from Stepanchikovo and tells him a former hanger-on and fool, Foma Fomich Opiskin, has taken despotic control of the entire family — he himself has quarreled with Opiskin and left in a huff, though he admits he’ll probably be back the next day.

So we are immediately faced with two enigmas: why has Rostanev summoned him to marry some woman he’s never met, and why is he putting up with this Opiskin fellow? When Sergei gets there he tries to investigate, but his uncle keeps telling him “I’ll explain it all later” and running off on one pretext or another. Eventually we learn that his mother and Opiskin are trying to force the poor but beautiful young governess Nastenka out of the house because they’re afraid Rostanev will marry her, so he’s decided if Sergei marries her instead she’ll be able to stay. None of this makes any sense, of course, but it’s told in a highly comic way, through young Sergei’s disillusioned eyes (he sees through Opiskin as soon as he meets him), and it’s a lot of fun to read.

The problem is that Opiskin is too strong a character for the book he finds himself in. He’s a magnificent creation, proud and tortured and humiliating everyone else to make up for the humiliations he’s suffered; to some extent he’s based on Gogol in his late crazed-moralizer phase, and he serves as an exorcism of both Gogol — who had been a strong influence on Dostoevsky, as on all Russian writers of the 1840s — and the high-minded intelligentsia of which Dostoevsky had been a part before he was sent to prison and Siberia. I suspect he is based on people Dostoevsky knew during that time, fellow prisoners who took out their sufferings on those weaker than themselves. He’s unforgettable, but the other characters seem pale next to him, and he’s so vicious it was hard for me to stay in the requisite comic mood. (This may be in part because I’m not Russian.) It’s fine for him to humiliate Rostanev and various fools and hangers-on, but when he is brutal to the faithful old servant Gavrila and the beautiful and somewhat simple-minded boy Falalei, this reader’s smile freezes. Opiskin gets a very satisfying comeuppance, but it doesn’t last long, and he winds up staying on as the evil deity of the household.

Frankly, I found it unbelievable that Rostanev, a former hussar, would put up with endless humiliations from this nasty fellow and continue to regard him as wise and benevolent; in fact, once the plot settled in I didn’t actually believe anything that happened — it has the air of a Moliere play in which you’re supposed to accept all the silliness and laugh at the folly of humanity. But this is Dostoevsky, not Moliere, and he’s thinking not of folly but of good and evil. Before long he’ll figure out how to create plots worthy of his characters and obsessions, but it’s very interesting to watch him working it out as he goes. If you have any interest in Dostoevsky, I recommend giving this book a try; just don’t expect Crime and Punishment.

I’ve just discovered one of those literary allusions that were common currency in the 19th century but that have largely been forgotten since. In his once well-known novella Atala (1801), Chateaubriand has his hero say:

Le cœur le plus serein en apparence ressemble au puits naturel de la savane Alachua: la surface en paroît calme et pure, mais quand vous regardez au fond du bassin, vous apercevez un large crocodile, que le puits nourrit dans ses eaux.

The apparently most serene heart resembles a natural well in the Alachua savannah; its surface seems clear and calm, but when you look down at the bottom of the pool, you see a large crocodile, which the well nourishes in its waters.

That’s a great image, and it’s based on fact; in What is the Alachua Savannah? we read: “Upon visiting Alachua Sink, Bartram was amazed by the number and size of the alligators, ‘so abundant that, if permitted by them, I could walk over any part of the basin and the river upon their heads.’” (By the way, although it’s irrelevant to Chateaubriand I can’t resist noting that the modern Florida place name Alachua is pronounced /əˈlætʃu.eɪ/ [ə-LATCH-oo-ay]; according to Wikipedia it’s from a “Native American word meaning ‘sinkhole’ in either the Muskogee or Timucua languages.”) It was more or less translated by Batyushkov in his 1810 poem Счастливец [The lucky man]:

Сердце наше кладезь мрачной:
Тих, покоен сверху вид;
Но спустись ко дну… ужасно!
Крокодил на нём лежит!

Our heart is a dark well:
Its surface appearance is quiet and peaceful,
But if you go down to the bottom… horrible!
A crocodile lies on it!

And it was well enough known in 1859 that Dostoevsky could get a laugh in his Selo Stepanchikovo [The Village of Stepanchikovo] by having Foma Opiskin attribute it to Shakespeare. But does it survive at all? Have any of you heard of it?

The University of Cambridge has produced an English Dialects App that is allowing them to track how dialects are doing:

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the south-east, according to the first results from a free app developed by Cambridge researchers.

The English Dialects App (free for Android and iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. A new, updated version of the app – which attempts to guess where you’re from at the end of the quiz – is available for download from this week.

Based on the huge new dataset of results, researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s. […]

Dialect words are even more likely to have disappeared than regional accents, according to this research. Once, the word ‘backend’ instead of ‘autumn’ was common in much of England, but today very few people report using this word (see map slideshow).

However, the research has shown some areas of resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from those areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For example, many people in the North-East still use a traditional dialect word for ‘a small piece of wood stuck under the skin’, ‘spelk’ instead of Standard English ‘splinter’.

On the controversial word “scone”:

Adrian Leemann said: “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where. Our data shows that for the North and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.”

Fascinating stuff; thanks, Pat!

For ages I’ve been saving this American Scholar link, in which Stephanie Bastek compares two versions of the same passage from “Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s modernist masterpiece, Cré na Cille,” Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson’s translation, called Graveyard Clay, and Alan Titley’s, called The Dirty Dust. The first begins “. . . Nóra Filthy-Feet standing for election! Good God above, they’ve lost all respect for themselves in this cemetery if the best they can offer is Nóra of the Fleas from Mangy Field,” the second “. . . Toejam Nora standing for election! Jesus Christ Almighty, they have no respect left for themselves in this cemetery, especially if they can’t put up anyone else only Fleabag Nora from Gort Ribbuck.” I love that sort of comparison, and if you do too, hie thee to the link.

And now Trevor sends me this interview with John Donatich, Director at Yale University Press, about the two versions:

“The book was so difficult to translate in the first place. The stakes were made higher as this would most likely be the first exposure many global readers might have to this purported classic. We had to make sure to get it right. That said, we felt the book could stand two different kinds of interpretations, much like a great musical piece might stand several interpretations: a rigorous, elegant and faithful version and one that took more expressive risks.”

I have two books by Ó Cadhain, but alas, not Cré na Cille; one of these days I’ll have to remedy that. I love modernist masterpieces!

Update (April 2020). Athel Cornish-Bowden linked to another comparison, which also has thoughts on translation in general (and translation of humor in particular). Some interesting tidbits:

• [John Donatich] first heard about this book decades ago when he was working for a corporate publisher who wanted to get the rights to Cré na Cille. Although the book had the reputation of being an “untranslatable masterpiece,” the real stumbling block to producing an English version was that the Irish publisher was a hardcore nationalist and didn’t want it to be translated. If you wanted to experience this great piece of literature, you had to learn Irish.3 [fn3: Even as a translation advocate, there’s something about this viewpoint that inherently appeals to me. Admittedly, it’s rare for me to come across a “fuck you” that I don’t like.]

• Yale hosted a couple events featuring the three translators—and let them argue it out. That’s admirable and sounds so much more interesting that a normal reading. If recordings of these exist, I’ll post them as soon as I find them.

• He was only willing to publish both translations of the book because they were so different. Had they not taken such different approaches—with such different results—it’s highly unlikely Yale would’ve gone ahead with this experiment.

• The two editions of this book are the second and third best-selling titles in the Margellos series behind Patrick Modiano’s Suspended Sentences.4 [fn: Open Letter has yet to have a book sell as many copies as either version of Cré na Cille. In fact, our total sales for all our books combined, is just barely more than the number of copies Yale sold of the Modiano. Hearing other publisher’s sales can really put one’s life into perspective. To be completely honest, I don’t know of a single press our size/reputation that doesn’t have at least one book that far outpaces our top selling books. This is why I drink and write rambling essays about humor. Because if you can’t laugh, right?]

• The Titley version was published first to introduce readers to the energy and voice of the novel, whereas the Iomaire and Robinson is more intended for academics.

Joonas Vakkilainen provides some very interesting information about Finnish on Quora:

Written standard Finnish is an artificial construction which is based on a mixture of dialects, not on any specific dialect. There is no prestige language that would be the norm of formal written Finnish. Because of the constructed nature of the written language, there is an organisation that gives the norms for it. The board of Finnish language (suomen kielen lautakunta) consists of specialists of Finnish language, and they ponder the norms of written Finnish and can change them. These norms are followed in formal writing, such as newspapers and scientific writing. This is called language maintenance (kielenhuolto).

The norms of written formal English are called prescriptive grammar because they are man-made rules that are prescribed to be used in official English. Even though written Finnish is more man-made and artificial than written English, its norms are not actually prescriptions. They are called suggestions: the board of Finnish language suggests how official language be used. English-speakers think that their norms are meant to be used both in writing and speech, but in Finland, the prescribed norms are just meant for one register of language. Nobody speaks according to them (except for very formal situations such as TV news or public speeches) and nobody thinks that they even should be spoken. This is why I don’t want to call them prescriptions even though they actually are that; the linguistic culture just is different from the English-speaking world.

Furthermore, the “prescriptive” rules of written Finnish are more akin to spelling in English. Because Finnish is spelled phonemically, words look different when spelled according to different dialects. That’s why there are official forms of words. In English you can’t change the spelling according to your accent but in Finnish you can. The phonemic spelling of Finnish thus enables the use of dialects in writing. In English, it is not easy to write accents because you don’t have means to do it, but in Finnish you can do it easily. When Finns write on social media, text messages or chats, they often use dialectical language. In Finnish the spelling just change the pronunciation of the particular word if you read it aloud but it of course doesn’t affect how people normally speak. This is again why we should not see the standard Finnish as a prescriptive construction similarly as the norms of formal English.

Formal written English is like the language of the upper class and educated people. That’s why English-speakers try to speak according to its rules when they want to appear sophisticated. Formal written Finnish on the contrary is thought to be a tool for an equal society. The Nordic model wants to eliminate social classes. That’s why the language is not wanted to be the language of a certain group of people but a common form that nobody speaks natively, and this kind of form of language requires an organisation that does language maintenance.

Most of that is new to me. Thanks, Bathrobe!

I’m reading Dostoevsky’s Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli [The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants, also translated The Friend of the Family] and enjoying it a great deal, though it’s an odd mixture of sitcom and existential drama (like The Man Who Came to Dinner, but with a genuinely evil Sheridan Whiteside). One of the minor characters is a foppish serf who wants to change his surname from the odd-sounding Vidoplyasov; after trying out a couple of others, he’s settled on Эссбукетов [Essbuketov], and the much-put-upon head of the household, the narrator’s uncle Egor Rostanev, responds “И не стыдно, и не стыдно тебе, Григорий? фамилия с помадной банки!” [Aren’t you ashamed, Grigorii? a family name taken from a pomade jar!]. It cost me some effort, but I finally discovered the source: Ess Bouquet, described in a post at the perfume blog The Scented Salamander as “one of those perfumes steeped in history and antique exotic tastes that require further investigation and elucidation to fully appreciate”:

First we have to address the meaning of the name, which sounds a bit puzzling to the modern ear: “Ess Bouquet” we learn from Septimus Piesse writing in 1857 is the contraction of the word “essence of bouquet”. The original recipe for the scent by an anonymous London perfumer is recorded as early as 1711. By the time Piesse writes his The Art of Perfumery in the mid-19th century this original date has been forgotten and the much imitated perfume formula is attributed to, not its rightful creators whoever they may be, but rather to its famous developers, Bayley and Co., established 1739. […]

Ess Bouquet was immensely popular, the bestseller of Bayley and Co. who advertised their perfume shop with the name of this fragrance in capital letters in full view.

The perfumery was also well known for its surviving signboard and painting inside the store, some of the last ones in London to bear the representation of a civet cat at the turn of the 20th century – an allusion to the much sought-after perfumery raw material. Perfume shops with civet cat signs were common throughout Europe before such signboards were considered too dangerous to be left hanging over the streets and so they were prohibited. […]

There was not just one Ess. Bouquet fragrance but rather a type, an original recipe which came to undergo many variations while being sold under the same name. It became somewhat of a generic designation like “eau de Cologne” is and so there were “Ess. Bouquet Perfumes” mentioned in the plural.

There’s more information at the link, along with some nice images; the brand has been forgotten to the point that the Michael Glenny translation of Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 renders “И Лондонские духи клик-клик, эсс-букет” (from Chapter 7) as “‘Click-Click’ — the fragrant London perfume — ‘S’ brand,” so I thought it was worth bringing here.

From Circassian World:

The Last Ubykh

Tevfik Esenç (1904 – October 7, 1992) was a Circassian exile in Turkey and the last known speaker of the Ubykh language.

Esenç was raised by his Ubykh-speaking grandparents for a time in the village of Haci Osman in Turkey, and he served a term as the muhtar (mayor) of that village, before receiving a post in the civil service of Istanbul. There, he was able to do a great deal of work with the French linguist Georges Dumézil to help record his language.

Blessed with an excellent memory, and understanding quickly the goals of Dumézil and the other linguists who came to visit him, he was the primary source of not only the Ubykh language, but also of the mythology, culture and customs of the Ubykh people. He spoke not only Ubykh but Turkish and the Hakuchi dialect of Adyghe, allowing some comparative work to be done between the two languages. He was a purist, and his idiolect of Ubykh is considered by some as the closest thing to a standard “literary” Ubykh language that existed.

There’s a photo and a link to a sound file. Thanks, Trevor!

Anne Rothwell, Press Officer at Lancaster University, reports on a new study by linguists Panos Athanasopoulos and Emanuel Bylund, who “have discovered that people who speak two languages fluently think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.” The paper is “The Whorfian Time Warp: Representing Duration Through the Language Hourglass,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Apr 27, 2017; unfortunately, it’s beyond a paywall, but the abstract is available here. The crucial bit:

Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference in a duration reproduction task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth. When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. These patterns conform to preferred expressions of duration magnitude in these languages (Swedish: long/short time; Spanish: much/small time). Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context.

Very interesting, if it holds up; thanks, Ariel!

This was posted on Facebook, and I thought I might as well put it here, since I often complain about bad proofreading/editing in books and since non-editors tend not to know these distinctions:

Different communities of editors use different terms for similar concepts. I’m in Canada — and Canadian editors tend to use the terminology in Editors Canada’s Professional Editorial Standards, which spell out what is included in each type of editing:

1. Structural Editing (also called substantive editing, developmental editing, and content editing): reworking the content of a document to get rid of repetitions and gaps, put the ideas into a logical progression, make sure the narrative flows smoothly, and so on. It’s the big-picture stuff.
2. Stylistic editing tries to make the document a better read. For example, a stylistic editor reworks educational materials so that the reading level match the students’ reading ability, or edits humor to make it funnier.
3. Copy editing fixes problems with spelling, grammar and consistency of language use. (Line editing is a vague term that can mean many things, but usually means stylistic editing and copy editing combined.)
4. Proofreading is checking the formatted document. The proofreader carefully reviews the work of the formatter and also checks the editing that has been done on the document. Proofreading is not editing — it is checking the work of editors.

Greg Ioannou, Freelance editor since 1977. Honorary life member of Editors’ Ass’n of Canada

I started out as a proofreader in the early ’80s and was eventually promoted to copyeditor (though I resisted the promotion for a bit, because I wasn’t sure I wanted the added responsibility — I’m fundamentally lazy and unambitious); as a freelancer, I guess I would call what I do line editing according to the above classification, except that I would never say that because nobody would know what it meant, so I always say “copyediting.” I take care of all the basic copyediting stuff (spelling, grammar, following the appropriate style manual), but I also point out problems in logic, errors in fact, misquotes, and the like. And if you noticed the inconsistency above (Greg writes “copy editing,” I write “copyediting”), yep, that’s one of those things (like the serial comma, or “Oxford comma”) that can go either way; I like it closed up. Also, if you noticed that — and if you don’t care greatly about money — you may have a future in editing!

Birgit Ricquier’s “The History of Porridge in Bantuphone Africa, with Words as Main Ingredients” (from Afriques 5 [2014], “Manger et boire en Afrique avant le XXe siècle”) is the kind of word-centric historical investigation I love; I’ll quote a few bits to whet your appetite. From the introduction:

Porridge as a mash is mostly prepared in West and Central Africa. The Éotilé of Ivory Coast, for instance, have a mash of boiled plantains and cassava called akoende. The most widespread name for this dish in West Africa is fufu, found in, for example, the Ghanaian language Ewe and in Liberian Grebo. An example from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is a mash made of boiled pieces of sweet cassava and ripe banana, named litúmá in Lokele and mokóké in Songola.

Porridge is not an exclusively ‘African’ dish. Different types of porridge are found all over the world, even where bread is on the menu. McCann mentions the Venetian polenta, Serbian mamalinga, and Alabaman hominy grits, the latter being of Native American origin. And even some Asian types of porridge are reminiscent of this kind of preparation—for example, Himalayan tsampa, made with flour of toasted barley mixed with butter tea to form a sort of dough, and the dense paste called pa ba in Ladakh, made with flour of toasted barley and legumes.

Written documents reveal that porridge has a long-standing tradition in Europe. The ancient Greeks, for instance, prepared mâza and kóllix, ‘mashes’ of barley and wheatmeal; and the Romans prepared porridge both from barley and emmer (a type of wheat, Triticum dicoccum), the first named polenta, the second puls. What about the porridge of sub-Saharan Africa? Is it also several millennia old?

This paper will tell the history of porridge as prepared by Bantu speech communities. The focus on Bantuphone Africa is a consequence of the method of this study, namely historical-comparative linguistics. Few, if any, written documents are available predating the arrival of Europeans in Central and Southern Africa. Moreover, archaeology and archaeobotany mostly provide information on the history of tools and ingredients. As will be demonstrated, to study the history of preparations, historical-comparative linguistics—more specifically the Words-and-Things approach—is a welcome tool.

And from the conclusion:

But not everything could be revealed. The comparative method suffers from several drawbacks. First of all, the available lexical evidence could not indicate if and from whom the technique of stirring porridge was borrowed. Most of the vocabulary referring to new techniques, tools, and products were inherited Bantu words that underwent a semantic shift. Only one word, namely *NP14-gàdɩ̀, could be identified as a loan, and it appeared to be more recent than the change in cooking techniques. A second problem is semantic vagueness. No research could be done on nouns for ‘grinding stones’ since these objects are most often simply referred to as ‘stones’ or ‘stones for grinding’. The same is true for ‘stirring stick’ and ‘pestle’ in several West Bantu languages, both being called ‘stick’. However, the research also benefited from highly specialized vocabulary such as the verbs for ‘stirring flour in boiling water’ and the different ‘pounding’ verbs. Finally, more research is necessary on the historical background. Since many of the extra-linguistic referents discussed in this paper are not found in the archaeological record, the results of the linguistic analysis can be integrated into a historical framework based only on linguistic methods, namely the Bantu Expansion. Many aspects of the Bantu Expansion are still under discussion. Changes in the sub-classification of the Bantu languages and/or its historical interpretation may alter the presented historical narrative substantially.

Deeply satisfying stuff, and I thank infini for posting it at MetaFilter.