languagehat.com

As someone who makes his living editing, I am interested in foreign terms for my profession, and I always vaguely wondered about the French situation, because éditeur means ‘publisher.’ Now I learn from this Victor Mair post at the Log that there is no word for it; one commenter sums the situation up well:

The puzzle is that “éditeur” in French mainly means “publisher”, though it can also be a person who prepares, selects or annotates a text (an edition of Shakespeare). The editor of a multi-author volume is the “directeur (de la publication)”, the editor of a newspaper is a “rédacteur”, etc. But for some reason there doesn’t seem to be a word for the person who helps an author to get his text together, corrects spelling, suggests changes, and hand-holds generally, distinct from the publisher.

I still find it hard to believe. What do they put in the ads when they’re looking to hire an editor? What do editors put on their business cards?

1) Benjamin Moser discusses the importance of remedying the lack of enough translations into English in Found in Translation:

In college in the 1990s, I happened upon a Brazilian writer so sensational that I was sure she must be a household name. And she was — in Curitiba or Maranhão. Outside Brazil, it seemed, nobody knew of Clarice Lispector. […]

As I later learned, Lispector’s first name was enough to identify her to most Brazilians. But two decades after her death in 1977, she remained virtually untranslated; among English speakers, she was unknown outside some academic circles. One pleasure of discovering a great writer is the ability to share her work, and I was stymied. Lispector’s obscurity reinforced itself. People couldn’t care about someone they couldn’t read. And if they couldn’t read her, they couldn’t become interested.

It took me years to realize that this vicious cycle would not magically be broken. I started writing Lispector’s biography, a project that took five years. The result, “Why This World,” generated interest in a series of English translations of her novels. […]

It shouldn’t be assumed, as I long did, that all great foreign writers will eventually reach English-language bookstores. As publication in English becomes more important, even editors open to translations are overwhelmed. (And few read Norwegian.) For every Karl Ove Knausgaard or Elena Ferrante, who are translated almost as soon as they appear in Norwegian or Italian, there are many Lispectors.

2) And Andrew Roth reports on an attempt to do something about it in Columbia University Press to Publish New Translations of Russian Literature:

Russian and American academics, publishers and Russian government officials announced on Saturday that they would collaborate on an ambitious new series of Russian literature in translation to be published by Columbia University Press.

The idea, tentatively named the Russian Library, envisions dozens, and perhaps more than 100, new translations of Russian modern literature and classics, selected by the publisher with support from a committee of Russian and American academics. […]

Jennifer Crewe, the director of Columbia University Press, said that the book list should include a “smattering of classics” that needed new translations, as well as post-Soviet and current Russian literature. With time still needed to select the first series of titles and translate them, the soonest they would be published is 2017.

Needless to say, I welcome this project. (Thanks, Eric!)

I’ve started reading Kotkin’s Stalin (thanks, jamessal!), and was struck by this passage on his linguistic accomplishments as a youth:

At the same time, Georgia was a diverse land and the future Stalin picked up colloquial Armenian. He also dabbled in Esperanto (the constructed internationalist language), studied but never mastered German (the native tongue of the left), and tackled Plato in Greek. Above all, he became fluent in the imperial language: Russian. The result was a young man who delighted in the aphorisms of the Georgian national poet Shota Rustaveli (“A close friend turned out to be an enemy more dangerous than a foe”) but also in the ineffable, melancholy works of Anton Chekhov[…].

Of course, in later years Stalin would execute Esperantists en masse, as we discussed here.

Addendum. Another linguistic tidbit:

Many of Russia’s Muslims spoke a dialect of Persian, but most spoke Turkic languages, giving Russia several million more Turkic speakers than the “Turkish” Ottoman empire.

We discussed the Mountain Jews and their language, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat), back in 2010; now you can see glorious photos of the place where they speak it and read an account of meeting its speakers at Poemas del río Wang:

I met Mountain Jews for for the first time seven years ago, in a café of the Tabriz bazaar, where I was listening to the conversation of the waiters. The language was particularly familiar, some Iranian language, but not Persian, and not even Kurdish. “In what language do you speak?” I asked. “Be Juhuri, in Jewish”, they answered. “Come on”, I said, “I know two Jewish languages, but neither of them sounds like this.” “Well, this is then the third one. We, Mountain Jews speak in this language.” And they said that thousands of them live in the mountains of the “other”, northern, Azerbaijan, and farther north, in Dagestan, many more still.

Take the stuff about the Babylonian captivity with several spoonfuls of salt; as Etienne says in that 2010 post, “the notion that Judeo-Tat goes back to Persian acquired by Jews in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar is utter nonsense. From what little I know of Tat, it is clearly so similar to Modern Persian that it cannot have broken off from Persian at such an early date.” Otherwise, it’s an amazing account:

The most unusual fact about this shtetl is that it works. Anyone who has seen the deserted houses of the Galician shtetls and the Jewish streets of the Eastern European villages, the closed down synagogues or their empty places, and brought them to life again in the imagination with the characters of Sholem Aleichem, can see here how that world would look, had its inhabitants not disappeared. The traditional Jewish world of the Red Shtetl has only gradually modernized. The town center has been renovated, but they have also built a new mikve, a kosher butcher’s shop, and a community house called “The House of Happiness”, and the facades of the ostentatious palaces built in the places of the old wooden houses are still decorated with the motifs of traditional Jewish iconography.

And don’t miss this recent río Wang post on the same topic, with equally glorious photos of Lahıc (or Lahij).

It’s easy enough to find movie quotes via Google, but it’s even easier via QuoDB, which tells you exactly where in the movie it’s from. Via Paul Ogden, who says “Amazing. I gave it one line from a movie I was watching and it instantly found the book it came from, with details.”

I’m halfway through Annihilation (thanks, bulbul!), and one of the pleasures of the book is discovering phrases hitherto unknown to me that are attractive as linguistic items and interesting as real-world phenomena; so far they’re all biological, because the narrator of the book is a biologist:

velvet ants

sea oats

cypress knees

Interestingly, a velvet ant is not an ant, a sea oat is not an oat, and a cypress knee is not a knee. Natural language is not transparent!

Addendum. sugar glider

As is traditional at LH, I hereby list the books I received for my birthday yesterday (I’ll create an Addendum for any late arrivals):

Jabotinsky: A Life, by Hillel Halkin (review)

St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past, by Catriona Kelly (review)

Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin (review)

Shadow & Claw: The First Half of ‘The Book of the New Sun’, by Gene Wolfe

Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, by Richard Brody (review)

(My brother gave me a DVD of Godard’s Goodbye to Language, which goes nicely with the Brody book.) My thanks to all the generous givers, and I’m excited about all of these books!

This wonderful essay by Richard Menke explains a great many things about Victorian England and its literature of which I had no conception; I had, of course, heard of the three-volume novel, but I had no idea how it tied into the circulating library system, or of the fact that books were priced so that most individuals couldn’t afford them (like scholarly books now, grr), or of Mudie’s and its primness, or… well, just read it. Here’s the abstract, if it will help whet your appetite:

In 1894, the great private circulating libraries announced that they were changing their terms for purchasing fiction, ultimately leading publishers to abandon the long-standard three-volume format for novels. This essay considers the three-volume novel system as part of an information empire and examines the collapse of that system both through the work of book historians and through the writing of Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Rudyard Kipling, and other writers of the 1890s.

Here‘s more about circulating libraries, and here‘s the MetaFilter post by Miriam Burstein from which I got those links—there are many more in the post. (And I just learned from her blog that some books cannot be searched via GoogleBooks at all; you have to use the regular Google search function. Why, Google, why?)

I saw a reference to Vyacheslav Ivanov‘s first collection of poetry, «Кормчие звезды», which was translated as “Lodestars,” and I had two reactions in quick succession: “Ah yes, кормчий is ‘helmsman’ (Stalin was the Великий кормчий, the Great Helmsman), and a lodestar is what you steer by, that makes sense!” and “Wait a minute, why is a lodestar called that?” So I went to the dictionary and found that (unsurprisingly) lodestar is lode + star, but (surprisingly) lode originally meant ‘way’ (it’s from from Old English lād ‘way’) and is an o-grade nominal form (*loit-ā‑) of the PIE root *leit- ‘to go forth,’ which gives us the verb lead (Old English lǣdan). A load was originally that which leads. Isn’t that neat? How it came to mean ‘a vein of ore’ I don’t know, and the OED doesn’t say.

A couple of items I found while scanning my FB feed this morning (I generally do so once a day, which my younger acquaintances find hilarious):

1) Malta’s own colourful 18th century expletives:

In the 17th and 18th century, people used to report their neighbours to the Inquisitor for any behaviour they deemed went against the Catholic religion. Blasphemy was among them. Witnesses would describe in detail any blasphemy they would have heard.

“It looks like back then blasphemies were not a mere short utterance but rather complex short stories. Even reading them today can make you wince, as they were really harsh,” he noted.

In 1797, there are records of a priest uttering: “laħrac ruħ il Caddis ta’ Liscof li ordnani” (may the soul of the saint of the bishop who ordained me burn in hell).

Blasphemies commonly featured the devil, the Catholic faith – including the Pope, saints, the Virgin Mary and God – as well as parents and relatives.

There are also examples of how people used to resort to euphemisms over the years instead of the actual word to avoid the tribunal. Sagrament (sacrament) became legremew; osjta (host) became ostra; qaddis (saint) became qattus; imniefaħ instead of imniegħel.

Very reminiscent of Quebec.

2) Can you identify these Near Eastern languages? I was more chuffed about my 10/10 score before I saw the brackets:

90-100% 855 people
80-89% 411 people
70-79% 483 people
60-69% 486 people
50-59% 342 people
0-49% 265 people

(Warning: There’s a ringer at the end.)