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Daniel Evans Pritchard writes:

The Critical Flame is thrilled to present the first English publication of Melih Cevdet Anday, Oktay Rifat, and Orhan Veli’s revolutionary poetry manifesto, Garip, which appeared in Turkish in 1941. The manifesto outlines a radical break from the traditional prosody of the Turkish-Ottoman tradition, and also—perhaps because its authors were part of the second generation of global modernists—offers a reflexive meta-commentary on manifestos themselves. We are extremely grateful to Sidney Wade and Efe Murad for their translation from the Turkish and for their thoughtful introduction.

Here’s an excerpt from the Translator’s Introduction:

The classical tradition had relied heavily on the lavish use of language as well as high forms of Ottoman poetry such as aruz (an historically Arabic meter that depends on the arrangement of open and closed syllables) and the traditional Persian literary forms of the ghazal, the beyit (a couplet form), and the mesnevi (an epic form in couplets, used most often to recite romantic and panegyric tales).

In rejecting the elitism of court poetry, the Garip poets wrote simple poems in the vernacular about the ordinary details of the lives of common people, subjects not considered of interest in the classical tradition. With their use of simple imagery and pared-down language, taking as their subjects the objects and events of daily life, and eschewing meter and formal rhyme schemes, the Garip Movement poets directly opposed the unities of traditional Ottoman couplets in bringing everyday lightness and randomness into their verse.

And here’s the end of the manifesto itself:

The idea that the line should be taken as the basis of a poem makes us pay attention to each word and analyze it as the unit of a line. This practice encourages us to think of words as abstract entities in a poem and to assign beauty or ugliness to the words. However, words, like bricks in a building, are never beautiful. Plaster is never beautiful. It is only an architecture composed of these elements that is beautiful. If we beheld a building made of agate, heliotrope, and silver but which had no overarching aesthetic beauty, it could not be considered a work of art. If the words of a poem simply sound good but do not add anything of beauty to the poem itself, the poem is not a work of art.

Certain words, by long usage and convention, are considered “poetic” (şairane). We are engaged in a struggle to bring a new vocabulary to poetry and hope to rise above the old conventional use of “poetical” words. We do not confine ourselves to the old order but hope to bring fresh meaning and energy to poetry. If the reader cannot accept the use of words such as “corns,” or “Süleyman Efendi,” he or she is only interested in the passé and should confine his reading to poetry that abides by old and stale conventions. We will work against everything that belongs to the past and all outdated notions of “poeticality” in poetry.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing; even though I don’t know Turkish and have no grounding in Turkish poetry, I recognize the voice of poets who know their business and understand what modern poetry is (was?) about. Thanks, Trevor!

Catherine Soanes asks: Is ‘themself’ a real word? She says, “Judging by the debate on the Net, themself stirs up much passion, with several pundits confidently declaring that ‘themself is not a word’. Well, much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, themself is a word and it has a long history to boot.” That history is quite interesting:

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records themself from the 14th century. It doesn’t have a separate entry of its own, but a note at the entry for themselves informs us:

in standard English themself was the normal form to c1540, but disappeared c1570. Themselfs, themselves appears c1500, and became the standard form c1540.

So for around 150 years, themself (though ending with the singular suffix –self) was considered to be correct when used to refer to a plural subject. A little more OED-delving shows that a similar situation existed when it came to first person plural reflexive pronouns. The form ourself is first recorded in the 14th century, when it was an accepted usage. There must have been a move towards pluralizing the singular suffix –self to –selfs or –selves for plural reflexive pronouns in the early to mid 16th century, when the forms ourselves and themselves first appeared.

Returning to the OED note, themselfs (with only 26 examples on the OEC) is no longer acceptable and has largely dropped out of use, meaning that for almost 500 years the main standard reflexive pronoun which corresponds to the plural forms they and them is the plural form themselves […].

She winds up with this sensible recommendation:

Given that it’s now largely acceptable to use they, them, or their instead of the more long-winded ‘he or she’, ‘him or her’, or ‘his or her’ (especially in conjunction with indefinite pronouns such as anyone or somebody) it might be argued that, logically, it should also be OK to use themself, it being viewed as the corresponding singular form of themselves. However, this isn’t yet the case, so beware of themself for now!

I myself occasionally use themself; it sounds a little strange, but I feel I’m helping advance the shining future.

I’m reading Kevin Barry’s novel Beatlebone, which jamessal gave me for Christmas, and enjoying it greatly — it’s one of those books whose language is so lively and irrepressible you want to read whole chunks aloud (which I do, to my wife, the cats, or failing an audience myself). It’s about John Lennon (though he is referred to only as “John”), and the passage I’m now reading describes his life in the Dakota in the late ’70s:

The yeast and warmth of the kitchen on a cold winter day with the city under its heaps of dirty snow outside — he’s cosy as a bastard in the womb. He is that happy he gurns and sings.

Naturally, I looked up the unfamiliar verb “gurn,” only to discover its sense isn’t as easy to pin down as I might have hoped. The OED (entry from 1899) says “To show the teeth in rage, pain, disappointment, etc.; to snarl as a dog; to complain persistently; to be fretful or peevish. Also to girn at. Now only north. and Sc.” (The etymology says it’s a variant of grin.) My Concise Oxford (12th ed., 2011) says: “1 Brit. pull a grotesque face. 2 (usu girn) chiefly Scottish & Irish complain peevishly.” M-W and AHD don’t have it, since it’s not American. So I turn to the Varied Reader: are you familiar with this word, and if so, how do you understand it in this passage? Is he making a face, complaining peevishly, or what? It’s reasonably clear that “that happy he gurns” is ironic, especially since later we get “He is that happy he wants to Scream.”

Frank Jacobs has a Big Think post called The Many Ways to Map Your Meat; most of it is taken from a 2013 post by Daniel Brownstein called How Do You Map Your Meat?, and if you’re interested in the subject you should definitely visit that one as well, but I’m linking first to Jacobs because he has the paragraph:

“Pride of place in the complexity of meatcuts may go to the Austrians, whose division of the carcass into 65 pieces suggests the survival of local ingenuity and refined taste, even if it is also informed by a unique whole-animal ethos”, writes Brownstein. This map shows less than half of that total, but it already distinguishes between your Hüferscherzel and your Hüferschwanzel, not to mention the Kruspelspitz and the Kavalierspitz.

There are French, Spanish, and Austrian meat maps, and (in Brownstein’s post) a Greek meat map, so even if you’re not a carnivore you can enjoy the linguistic aspect. Thanks, Y!

Boris Dralyuk has a fine World Literature Today piece on a forgotten figure, “A Poet of the Outskirts: Yevgeny Kropivnitsky (1893–1979)” [archived]. Here’s a sample:

Toward the end of his life, in 1975, Kropivnitsky described the task he had set for himself as a poet and the reaction his work aroused: “When the poet begins to read his poems, the people listening expect to hear about him. Imagine their confusion when, instead of hearing the author read about himself, they suddenly hear poems about them. They start to fidget in their chairs, their faces grow puzzled, dark . . .” The poet, Kropivnitsky goes on, is interested in the “flesh and blood of existence. He shows you to yourselves, laymen, to the best of his ability.”

So how do we appear in Kropivnitsky’s looking glass? As denizens of an unsympathetic universe, subject to the arbitrary cruelty of our fellow man, ourselves capable of great cruelty, awaiting death and, beyond it, a “Half-erased Epitaph” (1947):

Here lies . . . (for a while –
the cemetery’s being razed).
He left us in his prime . . .
(Then, I imagine, dates.)
(And then, in capitals, an) OV
(Likely another Ivanóv.)

This devastating verse is as cool to the touch and devoid of particulars as the object it describes, which is, in turn, as impersonal—or rather, as depersonalized—as what lies beneath it. The speaker’s insertions only underscore the lacunae. The name “Ivanov”—the Russian equivalent of “Smith,” say—not only fails to narrow down the possibilities but accomplishes the very opposite: it reduces the hope of recovering the deceased’s identity to an absurd joke. Who is this “OV,” this Russian John Doe? Dear reader, find the nearest mirror. In fact, you need look no farther than the poem itself: a verbal headstone polished to a reflective sheen. The poet “shows you to yourselves . . . to the best of his ability.” Nettlesome indeed.

(The poet’s surname is from a word meaning “nettle.”) I’m going to have to investigate Kropivnitsky further, and I encourage all such attempts to resurrect long-gone writers.

I usually add new issues of the NYRB to the large pile on the shelf to my left and let them ripen as I continue reading issues from last summer, but an e-mail from LH reader Rick alerted me to the lead piece in the latest (June 23) issue, Janet Malcolm’s evisceration [archived] of my least-favorite world-conquering translating team, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. As readers (like Rick) who know my feelings about the ubiquitous P&V will guess, I was thrilled by Malcolm’s piece. Mind you, it’s over the top; P&V’s translations aren’t as bad as she makes out [I may be bending over backwards here, as Anatoly thinks — see Update below], and her (laudable) fondness for Constance Garnett leads her to lash out at Marian Schwartz as well, and Schwartz, one of the best living translators of Russian, certainly doesn’t deserve it (though the bit Malcolm quotes is indeed a blunder). But in a culture war, as in any other war, one must occasionally go over the top, and this stuff is glorious — after recalling the halcyon days when everyone read Garnett, she continues:

Since that time a sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations. When you go to a bookstore to buy a work by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Chekhov, most of what you find is in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

In an article in the July/August 2010 issue of Commentary entitled “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature,” Morson used the word “tragedy” to express his sense of the disaster that has befallen Russian literature in English translation since the P&V translations began to appear. To Morson “these are Potemkin translations—apparently definitive but actually flat and fake on closer inspection.” Morson fears that “if students and more-general readers choose P&V…[they] are likely to presume that whatever made so many regard Russian literature with awe has gone stale with time or is lost to them.”

She quotes other people appalled by the new rulers of the roost (Anna Shapiro on the P&V Anna Karenina: “It leaves such a bad taste; it’s so wrong, and so oddly wrong, turning nourishment into wood”) and provides several passages translated by Garnett and P&V, with acerbic commentary; read the whole thing, and then read the excellent discussion at XIX век, where Erik McDonald is more bothered than I am by Malcolm’s unfairness to P&V (though we are equally bothered by her unfairness to Schwartz) and there are good comments by kaggsy (“I’m happy with archaisms, I don’t want a book that old brought ‘up to date’”), Alex K. (“‘Образуется’ was not a neologism Tolstoy thought up. The word itself was legit”), Julia (who is “not a fan of Pevear/Volokhonsky” but finds the article “too harsh and narrow”), and especially Russian Dinosaur, whose long comment I won’t try to summarize.

Unrelated, but I have to pass along the news that the Paris Review‘s series of video interviews with authors talking about their first book, and the latest is Helen DeWitt on The Last Samurai! (On behalf of my profession, I would like to apologize for the copyeditor who defiled the proofs of her brilliant book. We’re not all like that, I swear.)

Update. Anatoly Vorobey has posted (in Russian) about the Malcolm piece and the reaction to it, and has some very interesting things to say. He starts out by savaging P&V, calling them “ужасные переводчики, уродующие каждый текст, которого касаются” [awful translators, mutilating every text they touch], which pleased me; then he turns to the specific example of Tolstoy’s “образуется,” and his long discussion is well worth reading if you know Russian. In brief, he says that as far as he can tell this sense “it’ll work out, it’ll be all right” was introduced by Tolstoy to the literary language and was not (as some XIX век commenters claimed) already common, though it may have been used dialectically, and therefore the various published translations “she’ll come round,” “it’ll work out,” and “things will shape up” are inadequate (because not innovative). He dislikes Schwartz’s “it’ll shapify” not because it’s (in Malcolm’s word) “weird,” but because the learned suffix –ify is implausible in the mouth of the peasant Matvei. Anatoly proposes “it’ll set down,” which seems satisfactory to me.

Rebecca Gowers has a delightful Guardian piece attacking the attackers of “horrible words,” a pastime always dear to my heart. Here’s her paragraph on prigs:

In Middlemarch, George Eliot has Fred Vincy make the splendid observation that “correct English is the slang of prigs”. The word slang started as a low term for low terms – an example of what it named. But by the 1870s, when Middlemarch was published, its meaning had widened so that it could now suggest the special vocabulary of a particular group. How the prigs managed to nab the labels “correct” and “proper” for their particular form of slang is another matter. But the fact is, they did. And it is in a spirit of dauntless righteousness that they continue to dismiss the English of lesser mortals as “uncivilised”, “vile”, “fatuous”, “abominable” and so on.

And here she is on transitivity:

Transitivity gets our senior advisers going. Heffer [Simon Heffer, author of Strictly English] declares that “one cannot” use collapse transitively (as in: “The search party that located the bodies […] simply collapsed the tent over them”, Telegraph). And Humphrys [John Humphrys, Beyond Words] confides that he is unmoved by the “sweet smile” of a waitress who says “Enjoy!” to him, wanting to ask her, “Don’t you know that ‘enjoy’ is a transitive not an intransitive verb?” A linguist would explain that, in this instance, there is an “unexpressed object”. The waitress herself, compelled to serve Humphrys, might like to reply that the OED cites intransitive uses of enjoy from 1380 on. Or she could just recite the example given from 1549: “Yet he neuer enioied after, but in conclusyon pitifully wasted his painful lyfe.”

Go get ’em, Rebecca! I myself will never write “miniscule” (it is for that very reason that I long ago adopted the donnish pronunciation “mi-NUS-cule,” so that I would never be tempted in the wrong direction), and I will always wince at singular “kudo,” but she is absolutely right to mock those who pretend that such usages are the downfall of English. Read, and enjoy, the whole thing. (Thanks, Paul!)

Anu Kumar reports for Scroll.in on a remarkable Russian:

In 1795, Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev (or Herasim Lebedeff), a Russian musician and newly turned linguistic translator did something unique in Calcutta. For the first time, a play written in English, Richard Paul Jodrell’s The Disguise, a comedy in three acts, was translated into Bengali and performed on a proscenium stage – a new innovation that came with scene settings and arches, as seen in European theatres of the time.

The music that served as accompaniment, and played on western instruments, was composed by Lebedev himself. The verses were written by Bharatchandra Ray, who had also written Annadamangal in the early 1750s. The stage was decorated in traditional ways and not the least unusual thing was the presence of female actors.

Sherry Simon’s Cities in Translation describes Calcutta as a renaissance city of the nineteenth century, which brought together different languages, and cultures, with mediators or go-betweens to facilitate interaction, all in a creative amalgam. But Lebedev’s attitudes as a linguist and translator were interesting. He had a keen ear for language, and was particularly interested in “contact forms” – mediation in language and performance that brought people together. […]

[Lebedev] ambitiously envisaged his plays (The Disguise was followed by Moliere’s Love is the Best Doctor) as containing in them all the languages then spoken in Calcutta, to make for a truly people’s theatre. The first act in The Disguise was written in Bengali and the first scene in the second act was in bazaar Hindustani. Lebedev wrote later that his intention was to write scenes of the third act in English to truly reflect the multi-lingual city Calcutta was then.

You can read about his adventurous life at the link (he went from St. Petersburg to England to Madras to Calcutta); when he got back to Russia, Tsar Alexander appointed him professor of eastern languages and a member of the Academy of Sciences. And they’re still discovering more about him:

In 2005, a research project conducted under the aegis of a group of St Petersburg Indologists unearthed a number of manuscripts; some of these believed to be written by Lebedev himself. These include his draft for a grammar of the Bengali language and also his attempts to translate texts from the Old Testament into some Indian languages. Some of his attempted translations from the Bhagavad Gita into Russian also appeared in his Mathematical Manuscript. Lebedev apparently also wrote a short work, Arithmetic Tables, to familiarise future Russian businessmen and travellers with rules of Indian counting and the monetary systems then in vogue.

Quite a guy!

Addendum. I took that link from Greg Afinogenov’s Facebook feed, and he’s since posted a follow-up reference to Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, a Hungarian (Szekler) philologist and Orientalist, author of the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book, who “is considered as the founder of Tibetology” and “was said to have been able to read in seventeen languages.” I love these multiculti characters from bygone days of yore.

“Loanword” is a calque of German “Lehnwort”; “calque” is a loanword from French. Via Speculative Grammarian.

Gracie Lofthouse interviews cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith in the Atlantic [archived] about her new book, The Book of Human Emotions; it’s pretty hand-wavey stuff, but worth reading if only for the concept of “homefulness” and the fact that “The last person who was diagnosed with nostalgia as a cause of death died in 1918.” Thanks, Trevor!