languagehat.com

An e-mail from Nick Jainschigg pointed me to this page (“5 Huge Mistakes Nobody Noticed for a Shockingly Long Time,” by Evan V. Symon for Cracked.com); it was headed “#1,” which sent me down the page to “#1. Scholars Mistake Random Cracks in a Rock for an Epic Poem”:

In the 12th century, a rock bearing what appeared to be slowly fading runic symbols was discovered in Blekinge, Sweden, because ancient Norsemen just wrote shit down wherever they could. The king of Denmark sent a team of skilled translators to figure out what it said, but they were all stumped, claiming that the Runamo Inscription (as it would come to be called) was written in a form of Viking that was just too obscure for them to read. The actual reason they were unable to decipher the inscription is because it isn’t an inscription at all — it’s just a bunch of random fissures in the surface of the rock.

[…] Then, in the early 1800s, an Icelandic scholar named Finnur Magnusson, who would eventually become famous for habitually identifying meaningless naturally occurring bullshit as authentic runic writing, translated the Runamo Inscription as an epic poem about warrior chieftain Harald Wartooth defeating the Swedish king in the eighth century. This was a potentially huge discovery, because at the time little was known about the famous battle, and the rock would serve as a genuine historical record. … Sweden sent its own scientists to verify Magnusson’s story, which they determined to be categorically false, much to the chagrin of hopeful historians and terrible Icelandic rune experts everywhere.

Not only was this amusing for its own sake, it immediately explained where Osip Senkovsky got the inspiration for the long Bear Island section of “The fantastic journeys of Baron Brambeus” that I described here; what I didn’t mention in that post is that the long hieroglyphic cave inscription Brambeus and his pal deciphered turned out to be natural outgrowths on the rock faces that they had mistaken for writing. Ripped from the headlines!

This came up in a comment thread a while back, but I just reread it and decided it was so good it deserved its own post: Richard Lourie, writing in the NY Times a couple of decades ago, reviewed several translations of Crime and Punishment, and it’s probably the best such thing I’ve seen in an American newspaper. He starts out with the astonishing information that the Dostoevsky book “strengthened my resolve to be a writer and inspired me to learn Russian so I could read the novel in the original. Finally, some 30 years later, in order to review these two new translations, I read it in Russian and was back in that world of dark staircases and ax murders.” A reviewer of Russian literature who reads Russian, and read a novel in Russian in order to review translations: be still my beating heart! And in reviewing David McDuff and the Pevear/Volokhonsky team, he favors the former but comes down on the side of the often, and unfairly, despised Constance Garnett, which gave me intense pleasure. Here are a few paragraphs to give you an idea, but the whole thing is well worth your while:

Later on, Raskolnikov is revolted by his crime, though more by its banality than its criminality. In one of those self-lacerating torrents of consciousness that are a Dostoyevsky specialty, Raskolnikov exclaims: “Oh, the vulgarity of it! Oh, the baseness!” — if we are to believe Mr. McDuff — or “Oh, triteness! Oh, meanness!” if we are to credit Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky. I cannot imagine a Russian murderer thinking: “Oh, triteness! Oh, meanness!” I cannot imagine anyone thinking it, for that matter. This sort of rendering betrays a lack of skill, ear and editor.
The word the translators have rendered as either “vulgarity” or “triteness” is “poshlost” in Russian, a word so rich that Vladimir Nabokov devoted 12 pages to it in his 155-page biography of Nikolai Gogol. In essence, “poshlost” denotes spiritual tackiness; it pains Raskolnikov more that he has proved to be mediocre, banal, even vulgar, than that he has taken life. Mr. McDuff’s “Oh, the vulgarity of it! Oh, the baseness!” is certainly better than the Pevear-Volokhonsky version, but the two “Ohs” and the word “baseness” lend the line too antique a coloration.
Oddly enough, Garnett, translating in an era when “Ohs,” one assumes, seemed less dated, chooses a different syntax entirely, one that is itself exclamation without first signaling that it is such. She says: “The vulgarity! The abjectness!” This also has the value of being concise. The other word Dostoyevsky used, engaging in a little alliteration, was “podlost,” a more common word than “abjectness” ever was. This is one instance in which the problem has yet to be excellently resolved.

Thanks go to Sashura for remembering and linking to it.

I tend to groan when I see links with titles like “X Words That…” because they’re usually unfunny invented words, allegedly untranslatable words, or some other category that’s been done to death, but I perked up when I saw that 12 Old Words that Survived by Getting Fossilized in Idioms was by Arika Okrent, one of my favorite popular writers on language (see this LH review), and even more when I realized that it was actually useful: “There are some old words, however, that are nearly obsolete, but we still recognize because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries. Here are 12 lucky words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms.” Here’s the first:

1. WEND
You rarely see a “wend” without a “way.” You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. “Wend” was just another word for “go” in Old English. The past tense of “wend” was “went” and the past tense of “go” was “gaed.” People used both until the 15th century, when “go” became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where “went” hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.

Succinct and satisfying; read ’em all!

Another entrant in the word-list category: 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style, by Carmel Lobello. From snoutfair (“A person with a handsome countenance”) to zafty (“A person very easily imposed upon”), they might give you a chuckle—and groak (“To silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited to join them”) was featured right here at LH a few years ago. (Thanks, Sven!)

Just a quick note to let people know that the deadline for the Compass Translation Award for translations of Maria Petrovykh (see this LH post) has been extended to July 15. If you hadn’t heard about it and enjoy translating Russian poetry, there’s still time to give it your best shot!

Giovanni Bonello, “a recently retired, one-time judge on the European Court of Human Rights and gentleman scholar of all things Maltese, which he writes up for a popular audience with widespread curiosity,” according to the reader who sent me the link (thanks, Bruce!), has a fascinating two-part writeup for the Times of Malta: Pietru Pawl Castagna and his quaint Maltese book (about Castagna and his book), Castagna’s idiosyncratic Maltese of 150 years ago (about the language). Bonello says: “It intends to explore what colloquial Maltese sounded like 150 years ago through the pages of the very first full-length book ever published in our national language. It will show what a lot has changed. It will show that a lot has survived.” The book is Malta bil Gzejer Tahha u li Ghadda Min Ghaliha (1865), “what amounts to an encyclopaedia of Malteseness in Maltese” by a man who had written only “a couple of minor stage pieces” in a language with “negligible printed literature to boast of” and “little support and even less respect from the so-called cultured classes.” It’s quite a story; unfortunately, the examples in Maltese aren’t translated, but even so, it’s well worth reading.

I’ve spent my entire adult life fighting typos—first penciling corrections into books I read, then preemptively eliminating them from books before they get published (which gives me both income and satisfaction)—and it is a source of great displeasure that what were once well-edited periodicals now are increasingly slapdash about such things. I try not to kvetch about it publicly too much because I don’t want to sound like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, and I probably would have gritted my teeth and tried to ignore the two (two!) occurrences of “translatio imperio” for translatio imperii in Peter Frankopan’s review (subscription-only) of Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity, edited by Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly (which sounds like a very interesting book, but of course it costs $85.00, with “26 used & new from $65.00”). But there was a typo that gave me so much pleasure I had to share it, the last word in this sentence: “Later travellers’ accounts from the sixteenth century also give glimpses of how things had once been – such as the enormous statue of the Emperor Justinian that was being demolished, as Peter Gilles visited the city in the sixteenth century, in order to be melted down into Ottoman canons.” In this case, I’m willing to accept a couple of imperios for the image of Ottoman canons made from a melted-down statue of Justinian (as opposed to a melted-down Code of Justinian).

I’m finally reading Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms (see this post), and I’m in the middle of the (necessarily long) chapter “Burgundia: Five, Six, or Seven Kingdoms (c. 411-1795).” I’m fascinated by the extraordinarily complicated history of the various entities that have been known as Burgundy over the centuries (in fact, I have an entire book on it, Phoenix Frustrated: Lost Kingdom of Burgundy by Christopher Cope, which is fun but amateurish), and Davies has plenty of maps and references and I’m enjoying it a lot.

And I’ve just discovered a new language name! When he discusses Franco-Provençal (which was to the medieval Kingdom of Burgundy more or less as Belarusian was to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth—the original Burgundians, who may have come from Bornholm, spoke an East Germanic language closely related to Gothic), Davies refers to it as “Arpitan,” which threw me for a loop. Google sent me to Wikipedia, which explains that “Arpitania and Arpitan Language are … neologisms from the 20th century… initially used for the Alpine regions where Arpitan was spoken. The name was popularised by Mouvement Harpitanya, a left-wing political grouping in Aosta Valley in 1970s.” In fact, he reproduces the “Map of Arpitania” shown on that Wikipedia page; it’s fun to see forms like “Lons” for Lyons and “Grenoblo” for Grenoble. Too bad the language, under whatever name, is dying out.

I was reading Benjamin Moser’s LRB review [archived] of Amsterdam Stories by the Dutch writer Nescio (Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh), translated by Damion Searls, and I was startled by this passage:

The apparently laudable movement to reform Dutch spelling – never particularly complicated, compared to English or French – resulted in chaos that continues to this day. There were official language reforms in 1934, 1947, 1955, 1996 and 2006, along with all kinds of minor alterations: by socialists, by Belgians, by South Africans, by the Association for Scientific Spelling. The reasons for these reforms are complex, but their results have been straightforward. It’s far harder for a Dutch-speaker today to read a book written a hundred years ago than it is for us to read T.S. Eliot or Henry James. This is particularly the case with a writer like Nescio, who was committed to reformed spelling, including reforms that never took root. To take a sentence at random from ‘Little Poet’:

En toen werti zoo kwaad op alle levende en doode dingen, datti z’n eindelooze erotiek onderbrak en een grimmig boek schreef, dat ‘m in eens beroemd maakte.

In Searls’s translation:

And then he got so enraged at everything, living and dead, that he interrupted his endless eroticism and wrote a grim and bitter little book that made him famous right away.

The Dutch presents two problems. The first is to do with words whose then standard spellings have been reformed: zoo, doode and eindelooze. The second is the deliberate misspelling that is a hallmark of Nescio’s style: werti and datti, ‘he became’ and ‘that he’. These would normally be written werd hij and dat hij but pronounced as Nescio writes them. Today, informally, they could be written werd-ie and dat-ie. The sentence is entirely comprehensible, especially when read aloud. But, on the page, the presence of five irregularly spelled words in a single sentence – a typical number – is distracting, and Nescio’s updates, daring in 1909, seem tiresome.

The cumulative effect of a century’s reforms has been to cut the Dutch off from their literature. Outside schools, the most commonly read book is probably Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, published in 1860, the same year as The Woman in White. Beyond that is the realm of specialists. Except for the most hardily aspirational reader, literature begins in the second third of the 20th century.

Does anybody know if that’s a fair statement of the facts, as regards the effect of the spelling reforms in general and the readability of Nescio’s work in particular? Also, how do you say “Nescio” in Dutch: /nesio/?

With I Live I See: Selected Poems, English-speakers finally have access to the work of one of the more remarkable Russian poets of recent decades, Vsevolod Nekrasov (1934–2009). Nekrasov is, in a way, an unfortunate name for a Russian writer, almost as bad as Tolstoy; as the “Word from the Translators” that begins this collection starts off (in a section called “Not That Nekrasov”), “When a Russian hears the name ‘Nekrasov,’ the first person that comes to mind is Nikolai Nekrasov, the great nineteenth-century realist-humanist poet”; there’s also the Soviet/émigré prose writer Viktor Nekrasov, among many others. But this Nekrasov is not like any other; to quote the translators again: “A vehement individualist, Nekrasov spent a lifetime fighting political and aesthetic conformism.[…] At a time when the vast majority of his fellow poets—official and unofficial alike—were writing with rhyme and in traditional syllabo-tonic meters, Nekrasov was writing, quite literally, anti-poems.” He used brevity, repetition, page layout; his mature work consists primarily of “scraps” and “fragments” (to quote the “Notes toward a Poetic Biography” by Mikhail Sukhotin). You can see a sample of the translations here, and I’ll quote a couple more below the cut; I’m sure a lot of people will take one look and decide it’s not for them, which is fine (and he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised). But if it piques your curiosity, if the lingering over phrases and the insistent juxtapositions make you want to read more, he may be for you. The translators have done fine work (and provided very helpful notes at the back), and Ugly Duckling Presse has produced a lovely little brick of a book with a gorgeous black-and-white cover. Let me just quote the end of Sukhotin’s introduction, and then I’ll get to the poems:

In 2007 Nekrasov was awarded the Andrei Bely prize “for the uncompromising revelation of the poetic nature of speech as such, for absolute individuality and absolute naturalness of utterance, for an outstanding contribution to the creation of a new poetics, for half a century of creative self-sufficiency.”

Here’s “Again again / Snow snow” [Опять опять / Метель метель]:

[Read more…]

I’ve written about Mayan a number of times, though not recently (e.g. Pok-ta-pok, Mayan in the News Again, Xoc > Shark?); now I’m pleased to learn of the existence of Maya Decipherment, “a weblog devoted to ideas and developments in ancient Maya epigraphy and related fields, overseen by Dr. David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin.” Another great use of the internet; my only (very mild) gripe is that the URL seems to bite off all of “decipherment” for the Mayan field.