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Via Matt at No-sword, a wonderful essay by Carl Bielefeldt called “Translating Dōgen: Thoughts on the Soto Zen Text Project” (paper delivered to the conference The Many Faces of Dogen, Mt. Tremper, July 8-11, 2004). As Matt says: “This is not one of those essays about how translation is really hard, man, with a few challenging lexemes thrown in as examples.” Bielefeldt takes a passage from Dōgen‘s 13th-century Shōbōgenzō (which he’s been working on for years — he says charmingly “Frankly, speaking as one of the translators, I don’t think our translations will be better than the best of what we’ve got already”), provides a smooth, easy-reading version (“The ocean seal samādhi is what is actually happening all around us; it is our own expression of what is actually happening…”) and quotes a previously published one he calls “actually more difficult to understand than the original” (“This samādhi is actualization and attainment of the Way. When we are sleeping at night and grope for the pillow there is no thought of discrimination…”), and then gives us the translation he had just sent off to Dharma Eye, “the Sōtō Zen journal that has been including one of our pieces in each issue.” Here’s the paragraph in full:

Samādhi is the actual present; it is a saying. It is “the night” when “the hand gropes for the pillow behind.”(1) The groping for a pillow like this of “the hand groping for the pillow behind” in the night is not merely “hundreds of millions of tens of thousands of kalpas”; it is “in the ocean, I always preached only the Lotus Sūtra of the Wondrous Dharma.”(2) Because “they don’t state, ‘I arise,’” “I am in the ocean.”(3) The former face is the “I always preached” of “the slightest motion of a single wave, and ten thousand waves follow”; the latter face is the Lotus Sūtra of the Wondrous Dharma of “the slightest motion of ten thousand waves, and a single wave follows.”(4) Whether we wind up or let out “a line of a thousand feet” or ten thousand feet, what we regret is that it “goes straight down.” The former face and latter face here are “I am on the face of the ocean.” They are like saying “the former head” and “the latter head.” The former head and the latter head are “putting a head on top on your head.”(5)

And here’s the first footnote:

1. Allusion to a dialogue between Yunyan Tansheng (780?-841) and fellow disciple Daowu Yuanzhi (769-835) regarding the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, who in one form is represented as having a thousand arms with an eye in the palm of each hand. “Yunyan asked Daowu, ‘How does the bodhisattva of great compassion use so many hands and eyes?’ Wu said, ‘Like a person searching behind him for his pillow in the night.’”

The rest of the footnotes and the original Japanese text are at the link, along with much interesting discussion of the problems involved in translating such a difficult and allusive text; he ends:

We tend to treat Dōgen as a wise Zen master, not a wise guy, as a master of Zen, not a Japanese student of Chinese language. But the fact is, Dōgen is also an outsider, an eccentric. His Zen is different from that of both his Chinese and Japanese contemporaries. His Shōbōgenzō is a different kind of book from other texts of his time, a genre almost sui generis. And his use of language in the Shōbōgenzō is different from other authors, very odd and very self-consciously odd. How are we to understand this book and its language? How are we to understand the author’s view of his book and the language in which he chose to write it? How are we to understand the author, his book, and his language as Zen?

Translations like those of the Sōtō Zen Text Project that seek to preserve something of Dōgen’s language may not be the sort you want on your night stand; but, if they can serve not just to help other translators or scholars do their work but to get us thinking about big questions such as these, then I’ll be happy enough with our efforts.

I can understand how people can be put off by this kind of heavily annotated text, but for myself, it is exactly the sort I want on my night stand; I have no interest in somebody’s attempt to assimilate a difficult text to my presumed (low) level of attention and (limited) set of cultural references. I want the whole catastrophe or nothing.

Kamo no Mabuchi, an eighteenth-century Japanese poet and philologist, had some striking ideas about the use of Chinese characters, as reported by Victor Mair at the Log quoting Peter Flueckiger’s translation in “Reflections on the Meaning of Our Country: Kamo no Mabuchi’s Kokuikō” (JSTOR), pp. 247-8:

[An interlocutor said,] “This country, though, has no writing of its own. Instead, we use Chinese characters and through these are able to know about everything.” My response was that first of all, it goes without saying that China is a troublesome and poorly governed country. To give a specific example, there are the characters in the form of pictures. When we look at the characters that someone has put forth as just the ones necessary for ordinary use, they amount to some 38,000. To describe a single flower, for example, one needs to use different characters for blooming, scattering, pistil, plant, stem, and more than ten other things. Moreover, there are characters that are used in the name of a specific country or place, or for a particular type of plant, but are used nowhere else. Could people remember so many characters even if they tried? Sometimes people make mistakes with characters, and sometimes the characters change over time, leading to disputes over their usage; they are burdensome and useless.

In India, though, using fifty characters, they have written and passed down over five thousand volumes of Buddhist texts. Just knowing fifty characters, it is possible to know and transmit a limitless number of words from both past and present. Moreover, it is not only a matter of the characters; the fifty sounds are the voice of Heaven and Earth (ametsuchi no koe [characters omitted]), so what they contain within them is natural (onozukara). In the same way, there seem to have been some kind of characters in our Imperial Land as well, but after the introduction of Chinese characters, this original writing sunk wrongly into obscurity, and now only the ancient words remain. Although these words are not the same as the fifty sounds of India, they are based on the same principle in that fifty sounds suffice to express all things. To repeat the example of the flower discussed above, we can just say “blooming,” “scattering,” “budding,” “fading,” “pistil,” “stem,” and the like; without needing to resort to characters, one can easily express both the good and the bad, and there is nothing troublesome. In Holland they have twenty-five characters, in this country there are fifty, and, in general, characters are like this in all countries. Only China concocted a cumbersome system, so things are disorderly there and everything is troublesome.

Too bad more people didn’t think like him!

Nora-Ide McAuliffe describes for the Irish Times “how ‘Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary’ was born”; it’s quite a story:

It was in Paris in the 1880s that he began work on his dictionary. Dictionaries had been produced in the 18th and 19th centuries, but O’Neill Lane found them to be lacking. His aim was to produce something that would better inform students of Irish. By the time he finally finished, in 1904, he had spent more than £2,500 – more than €325,000 today – to complete it.

O’Neill Lane spent five years travelling around Ireland. He made the most of his time and wrote a series of travel books while visiting Gaeltacht areas, where he collected words and phrases from locals. Words thought to be obsolete in Munster he found alive and well in other parts of the country, so he documented regional variations of Irish words and phrases. …

As soon as his 581-page work was published, however, O’Neill Lane expressed dissatisfaction with it. He had at this stage given up his journalism career and partly blamed his Paris commitments for shortcomings in the first edition.

“When he realised that the first one was inadequate he started work straight away on the second,” says O’Maolcatha. “He had included in his first edition an appeal for corrections and omissions, with a prize of £25 for the person who provided him with the best information.” …

Although he received many subscriptions for the second edition, producing it left O’Neill Lane virtually penniless. The day before he passed away a copy of the dictionary arrived by train at his local station in Limerick. He laid his hands on it on his deathbed and died on May 8th, 1915.

You’ve got to love anything that includes sentences like “O’Neill Lane asked that corrections be sent to Tournafulla, a parish a few kilometres from Templeglantine…” Thanks, Trevor!

Many years ago, when I was going through a Flaubert phase, I read his novel Salammbô; as I was living in New Haven at the time, I used to go up on West Rock and pretend I was looking down on Carthage from the Byrsa hill, imagining where the various areas mentioned would be. I used to wonder where the heroine’s name came from, and now I have a good idea, thanks to this passage at the very end of Stanislav Segert’s “Crossing the Waters: Moses and Hamilcar,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 53, No. 3 (1994), pp. 195-203 (JSTOR):

A final note on the name of the heroine whose name is the title of the novel, Salammbô: according to ancient sources, the name attested in Greek as Salambō and in Latin as Salambo referred to a Babylonian goddess, the equivalent of Aphrodite or Venus. The last part of this form of the name is shortened from the divine name Baal (Phoenician bʿl), as in the feminine name preserved in a Latin inscription, ANNIBONI, corresponding to Punic ḥnbʿʿ, a shortened form of the famous name ḥnbʿl, Hannibal, used for both males and females. The first component /šalam-/ may also refer to the word for “peace” but, more probably, corresponds to the once-attested Punic name šlmbʿl and the name containing the same elements bʿlšlm. It should thus be interpreted as “(the god) Dusk (is) (my?) Lord,” which is analogous to the Phoenician name šḥrbʿl, “(the god) Dawn is (my) Lord.”

A footnote mentions that Flaubert’s original name for the novel was Carthage. (Thanks, Paul!)

At the blog Catching Flies, L. Shyamal has a very interesting post about the impact of orientalism on the study of the fauna and flora of India. There are all sorts of nice linguistic bits (as well as great images); a sampling:

The Dutch East India Company project of Hendrik van Rheede is exceptional in the nature of collaboration in knowledge production that put Indian traditional knowledge on record and gave local knowledge its due. Rheede came from an enlightened upper class background and it is interesting to see how he viewed other cultures. Rheede worked at a time when Linnaeus’ ideas of binomial nomenclature were still in development. The only labels that he could use were what he could find from local usage. He was aware of local variations both regional and linguistic and recorded them quite carefully. He had copperplate engravings made for printing the illustrations and all of them include local names in their original scripts in the corner.

Linnaeus considered words that came from non-classical languages (Greek and Latin) as ‘barbarous’. He is said to have had reservations about using local names except in the Latinized form as species epithets and only rarely for generic names. Joseph Needham accused Linnaeus of being prejudiced about Chinese knowledge although some later workers have pointed out there is little evidence for this claim.(Cook, 2009) It has been pointed out that Linnaeus used nearly 258 names from Malayalam based on Rheede’s work, the Hortus Malabaricus. (See Jain and Singh 2014 for a list)

We have already seen how Brian Hodgson was a big fan of local names in his descriptions as well as binomials. He was however forced by peer-pressure to shift to the use of Greek and Latin roots.

…The French entomologists Amyot and Serville are quite careful in their use of Sanskrit for insects from India. Redescribing a common northeast Indian bug which they called Lohita, they are careful in indicate the etymology and the association, even transcribing the original Sanskrit.

Thanks, Dinesh!

The admirable fisheyed not only revived this old thread (and remember, every time an old thread is revived, an angel gets his wings) but linked to a video and an explication thereof by Fotheringay-Phipps at Ground Views that are so interesting I thought I’d give them their own post. From the latter:

The day before yesterday SJ Stalin released a fascinating response to the song, entitled “Yarlpanathilirunthu Kolaverida”, a rough translation would be “Dude, Bloodlust from Jaffna”. Its essence is a celebration of Tamil language and culture, a deploration of the bastardisation of Tamil and chastisation of those who are ashamed of their Tamilness.

At first glance, the music video appears to be primarily targeted at Dhanush. His mix of English and Tamil in the Kolaveri song has proved immensely popular with over 30 million hits on Youtube. Stalin considers his song a war on the Tamil language and describes his attitude toward it as bloodlust. He wonders why Dhanush chooses to use English – he asks why Tamil is scarce in its heartland, Tamil Nadu. He seems to imply that if Tamil gave sufficient creative freedom for Kamban, Valluvar and Bharathi it should be enough for Dhanush. Stalin thinks that Dhanush doesn’t give Tamil the respect that it deserves. As an ancient language, one which Stalin describes as predating the creation of stones and sand, Tamil has a rich literature and culture and Dhanush appears to ignore this and consider Tamil lacking. This is brought out by the poignant contrast between the focus on the keyboard in Dhanush’s work as opposed to the harmonium, perceived to be a more indigenous instrument, in Stalin’s video.

Once I got over the cognitive dissonance caused by reading “Stalin” and having to remind myself “No, not that Stalin,” I found the whole thing very enjoyable. Warning: fisheyed says there are some errors in the Ground Views translation of the lyrics.

The Trimūrti (sez Wikipedia) “is a concept in Hinduism ‘in which the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction are personified by the forms of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer or transformer.'” I couldn’t have told you that, but my years of Sanskrit study, though mercifully four decades in the past, left me with enough passive knowledge to guess it meant something like ‘triad’ when I ran across it, in Russian guise, in Veltman’s Salomea (which I’m still reading — it’s very long). He’s been describing the unhappy marriage of Maria “Mary” Nilskaya, whose stupid and officious husband cuts her off from her family and treats her badly, and he says that she is unable to fulfill a wife’s duty to love her spouse: to love truly, they say, you have to love with mind, heart, and senses. “Но это тримурти любви, говорят, мечта” [But this trimurti of love, they say, is a dream]. The National Corpus of the Russian Language shows no other instance of a writer using the word metaphorically in this way; all other citations are about Indian religion. It’s quite striking to me that Veltman would presume an awareness of the word on the part of at least a substantial element of his readership, which is a reminder of the fact that the Bhagavad Gita was translated into Russian as early as 1788 (by Nikolay Novikov, working from Charles Wilkins‘ English version — it wasn’t translated from the original until 1956).

Or so they say. I confess that while I accept in theory the idea of computer analysis of word use to determine, or at least provide evidence for, authorship, it makes me uneasy. At any rate, here‘s what Helen Anders writes in The Daily Beast:

Nearly 300 years ago, an editor named Lewis Theobald published a drama called Double Falsehood that he called an adaptation of a lost Shakespeare play. Nobody believed him, primarily because any Shakespeare original was, indeed, lost.

Now, two University of Texas researchers say they have proof that the Bard really did write the play, in collaboration with playwright John Fletcher—not because of the composition of iambic pentameter soliloquies but largely because of how the writers used little words like a, the, of, by, for, thee, and ye. What’s more, the validation in a newly published article in the journal Psychological Science comes not from literary scholars but from social psychologists using a computer program.

Essentially, works by Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Theobald were fed into a computer and examined for each writer’s signature use of what researchers Ryan Boyd and James Pennebaker call “function” words—little words such as articles, prepositions, pronouns, and simple verbs such as will and be—as well as social words such as brother, sister, and mother. The computer determined what the researchers call “psychological fingerprints” for each writer, and then looked for them in Double Falsehood.

I had read about the lost Cardenio, but didn’t realize it was supposed to have been reused for Double Falsehood (as part of a collaboration). At any rate, with regard to the reasons the play no longer exists, “Pennebaker says Shakespeare might have been complicit in its suppression because he wasn’t very proud of it, saying that scholars at the UCLA conference largely felt it was a ‘shitty play.'” So I guess I won’t worry my head too much over it. (Thanks, Paul!)

Guide words are those words in boldface at the tops of dictionary pages telling you what the first and last words on the page are. Sometimes they’re striking and/or hilarious. Here are two that have struck me:

1) From p. 89 of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, right-hand guide word (i.e., last word on the page):

avadavat /’avədəvat/ (also amadavat) n. a red or green South Asian waxbill sometimes kept as a cage bird. [Genus Amandava: two species.]
— ORIGIN C17: named after the city of Ahmadabad in India.

The word itself is amazing, with the same sort of oomph as abracadabra, but the etymology lifts it into the stratosphere. (Best OED citation: 1871 C. Darwin Descent of Man II. xiii. 49 The Bengali baboos make the pretty little males of the amadavat..fight together.)

2) From p. 553 of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, same location:

grutten past part of GREET

“Grutten”? Seriously? Further investigation reveals this is not the usual greet but the Scottish verb meaning ‘weep, lament,’ for which the past tense is grat and the participle grutten. (Best DSL citation: 1728 Ramsay Poems (S.T.S.) II. 123: Dar’st thou of a’ thy Betters slighting speak, That have na grutten sae meikle learning Greek.)

Kathryn Schulz has a nice New Yorker piece, “What part of ‘No, totally’ don’t you understand?,” that focuses on the odd affirmative use of “no” seen in this snippet of conversation:

MARON: They can look at any painting and go, “Eh.” They can look at a Rothko and go, “Hey, three colors.” And then you want to hit them.
DUNHAM: No, totally.

She finds some similar examples (“No, definitely.” “No, exactly.” “No, yes.”) and writes:

At first blush, “no” does not appear to be the kind of word whose meaning you can monkey with. For one thing, there is its length. At just two letters and one syllable, it lacks the pliable properties of longer words. You can’t stuff stuff inside it. (You can say “unfreakingbelievable,” but you cannot say “nfreakingo.”) You can’t mangle it, à la “misunderestimate” or (the finest example I’ve heard lately) “haphazardous.” On the contrary, it is so simple and self-contained that it is a holophrasm, a word that can serve as a complete sentence.

She discusses its odd part-of-speech status and explains the four-form system English used to have (which I learned about from John Cowan), using some excellent examples:

Shoot, there aren’t any open pubs in Canterbury at this hour.
Yes, there are.

Is Chaucer drunk?
Yea, and passed out on the table.

Is the Tabard open?
Nay, it closed at midnight.

Isn’t Chaucer meeting us here?
No, he went home to bed.

When it comes to explaining the affirmative-no phenomenon, however, things get murky. She quotes unnamed “linguists I spoke with” as claiming that “this use of ‘no’ might be a response to an implicit or explicit negative in the preceding statement,” but this strikes me as so clearly wrong I’m surprised any linguist would suggest it. And “the theory I like best”—that “No, totally” is really a contraction of “I know, totally”—is just silly. But the whole thing is enjoyable and worth reading, and there’s more discussion at the Log.