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Copy Editing at The New Yorker with Mary Norris. As I said here, “That was interesting, although I rapidly tired of the interviewer’s snarky-twelve-year-old style (apparently mandatory these days). But from her description of the painstaking process of editing and fact-checking, you’d never guess how error-ridden the magazine is these days.”
What It’s Really Like To Be A Copy Editor, by Lori Fradkin. As I said here:

That was amusing, and I certainly identified with some of her stories, though starting off with the “douche bag” business can only reinforce the standard image of copy editors as humorless pedants who wield dictionaries as bludgeons. I agree with the commenter who said “I enforce Chicago and Webster’s 11th with shock and awe, though I am flexible and respectful of variance and alternatives, as long as they are consistent.” To my mind, a slang term like douchebag is a prime candidate for flexibility, especially at a popular magazine like New York. Me, I would have issued a memo the first time the subject came up, saying “Look, guys, Webster’s says it’s two words; if it’s important to you to spell it as one, I understand and will abide by it, but I want it on record that I provided the dictionary spelling.” And then I would have let it go.

And a response to the previous one, What it’s really like to be copy-edited, by R.L.G. As I said here:

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I linked to an interview with the excellent translator Robert Chandler here; now I’d like to present a short essay he wrote on translating Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. It begins like this:

Five years ago, a Russian friend, hearing I was intending to translate ‘The Queen of Spades’, said, ‘That will be very difficult, harder even than translating Andrey Platonov. You’ll find you can’t afford to change a single comma.’ My friend proved only too right; every slightest liberty I had allowed myself in the first draft came to seem unacceptable. I imagined, however, that The Captain’s Daughter would prove easier. I remembered it as being less deliberate, less precise in both style and structure, than ‘The Queen of Spades’. I could not have been more wrong. Like the novel’s young hero, Pyotr Grinyov, Pushkin is a trickster. The Captain’s Daughter, apparently a mere historical yarn, is the most subtly constructed of all nineteenth-century Russian novels. It took me some time, however, to realize this.

He describes the complex structure of the novel and goes on to discuss in detail some examples of Pushkin’s sound play (“Pyotr’s French tutor, Beaupré, carries with him his own sound world, centred on two of the consonants from his own name. Pushkin’s first description of him begins as follows: Beaupré v otechestve svoem byl parikmakherom, potom v Prussii soldatom, potom priekhal v Rossiyu pour être outchitel.“) Now I want to read the novel again.
(Thanks for the link, Giri!)
Addendum. G.L. at Johnson discusses Chandler’s piece.

Stan Carey of Sentence first has an occasional feature he calls “Link love” in which he presents his readers with a bouquet of intriguing links; I hereby pass on to you Link love: language (20), which starts with “Emailing while sleeping” and concludes with a couple of rude bits from the Log. In between, one of my favorites was “Do you have a book with a title that was written by an author?”—a link to a 1978 cartoon by the wonderful Mark Alan Stamaty. I was working in bookstores in those days, and I can assure you that’s just what it was like.

As lagniappe: “L’Office du Jèrriais est l’office tchi fait la promotion d’la langue Jèrriaise.” Mèrci bein des fais, Geraint!

As I wrote here, I’ve been reading Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, and now that I’ve finished I thought I’d try to sum up my feelings. It’s not easy, though, because they changed considerably as I progressed through the book—which is not surprising, because the book is not a consistent piece of writing but a mishmosh of articles (almost all previously published) strung together on the thread of Batuman’s sensibility. The last chapter, which gives the book its title, is the weakest (and the only previously unpublished one) and left me feeling irritated, so I’ll get that off my chest before proceeding.

The chapter starts with a potted history of the circumstances surrounding the composition of Dostoevsky’s novel Besy, variously translated The Possessed and The Devils; proceeds to a plot summary and a discussion of whether it is a “flawed novel” (bringing in Joseph Frank for the prosecution and René Girard for the defense); and finally gets to what she really wants to talk about, the group of people she knew in grad school, which she compares unconvincingly to the circle of young Stavrogin-worshippers in the novel. This part reads like a higher-toned version of a True Confessions story (…so this incredibly charismatic guy hadn’t slept with a woman in seven years, and then we got drunk and went to bed, and then he started acting weird towards me…). She finishes up, for unclear reasons, with a summary of Chekhov’s story “The Black Monk.” It’s more like a series of blog posts than a coherent part of a book, and I think it would have been better omitted.

But that’s a small part of the book, given undue prominence by being the last. The rest, while not necessarily more coherent, is better written and more interesting. As I said here, she has excellent taste in Russian literature, and I’m perfectly happy to listen to her talk about it, even if it’s not part of a consistent narrative or argument. Indeed, the main narrative of the book is an account (broken into three parts—it was originally published in n+1) of a summer she spent in Samarkand studying Uzbek. Around this are interspersed “Babel in California” (also published in n+1 and focusing on an international Babel conference held at Stanford which included the translator Peter Constantine, whose translations she criticizes and whom, possibly for that reason, she renames “Michael”—indeed, she’s curiously reticent about names throughout, for some reason disguising a “well-known twentieth-centuryist” as “Boris Zalevsky” on p. 61 and leaving the director He Ping unnamed on page 74), “Who Killed Tolstoy?” (originally published in Harper’s; you can read it here), and “The House of Ice” (about the ice palace built for Empress Anna; this was published in the New Yorker in somewhat different form, which you can read here). Like I said, a mishmosh; it’s a combination of My Thoughts about Russian Lit with My Cultural Adventures Abroad, both things I tend to enjoy.

I guess what bothers me about her, even as I enjoy her lively writing and keen eye, is her focus on the exotic, a category I think should be eliminated as far as possible, since we are not exotic to ourselves, only to those who do not care to get to know us well enough to get past the surface strangeness. In this, of course, she does not differ from most travel writers; there is an inexhaustible appetite for the odd, the fantastic, the unexpected, and it’s quixotic to wish away such a basic part of human nature. But both Russia and Central Asia have suffered unduly from the exoticizing regard of foreigners, and her account of Uzbekistan makes the place too bizarre and inexplicable. If you’re interested in an account by someone who grew up in the region and describes it with affection and understanding, I cannot recommend too strongly Marat Akchurin’s Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics. You’ll learn a lot about both the places he visits and the last days of the Soviet Union, from a clear-eyed and believable traveler.

I’ve quoted John Derbyshire a number of times; here‘s a nice piece he wrote about his experience having one of his books translated by Alexei Semikhatov, an unusually scrupulous, thoughtful, and literate man. Derbyshire asked “an erudite Russian friend” to explain to him one of Semikhatov’s Russian footnotes, which turned out to mean:

NOTE. The Russian language as spoken by educated people at the beginning of the 20th century clearly demonstrated the same effect, using tretievo dnia, “the third day,” to indicate the day before yesterday. Nowadays this term has been almost completely supplanted by the word pozavchera, “day before yesterday.” The word pozavchera was formerly considered as belonging to the speech of the common people.

The erudite friend added “I have probably heard this expression tretievo dnia, but never used it myself. I always use pozavchera. In my opinion, this shows that your translator loves the Russian language.” What better tribute could a translator ask?

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I learned about Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them back in February (see this post, whose thread devolved into the usual inexplicable mix of topics, this time including skis, Jenny Lind, and hunting bears), and having gotten it for my birthday (thanks, Brooke & Elias!) I’m finally reading it, and enjoying it thoroughly. Herewith a passage on what Batuman was told by her Uzbek teacher in Samarkand (where she went to study the language, not knowing that the majority of the population spoke the unrelated Tajik, as did her host family):

Timur was the opposite of Genghis Khan. The Mongols destroyed eleven centuries in 130 years; but Timur rebuilt it all in seventy years. This “Second Uzbek Renaissance” reached its fullest expression in the lifetime of Alisher Navoi. …

Navoi lived for four years in Samarkand: a city so deeply imbued with poetry that even the doctors wrote their medical treatises in verse. But before Navoi himself transformed the Old Uzbek vernacular into a literary language, all of this poetry was written in Persian. In his Muhakamat al-lughatayn, or Judgment of Two Languages (1499), Navoi mathematically proved the superiority to Persian of Old Uzbek, a language so rich that it had words for seventy different species of duck. Persian just had duck. Impoverished Persian writers had no words with which to differentiate between a burr and a thorn; older and younger sisters; male, female, and infant boars; hunting and fowling; a beauty mark on a woman’s face and a beauty mark somewhere else; deer and elands; being adorned and being really adorned; drinking something down all at once in a refined way, and drinking slowly while savoring each drop.

Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.

All of this is ludicrous (as Batuman puts it, “It was all just like a Borges story”), but I’m afraid this kind of thing no longer activates the ludic centers of my brain. As Jim Bisso said in the first comment to my first post, “The sad thing about Goropism is that within it lie the seeds of the evil nexus of nationalism, racism, and linguistic chauvinism.” (A few pages earlier she tells the story of how the Soviets invented both Uzbek and “Old Uzbek,” which is actually Chagatai, as part of their divide-and-conquer strategy in Central Asia. Alas, the Soviets are gone but the fruits of their strategy live on.)

In a discussion of French chapeau ‘hat’ that developed in the meandering course of this thread, our caprine constituent AJP asked “m-l, is there a connection between chapeau and chapel (its current English meaning) based on physical resemblance?” And the learned marie-lucie replied:

AJP, an interesting question! I had to go check in the Trésor de la langue française informatisé … Yes, there is a connection, but it is rather roundabout and has nothing to do with the physical appearance.
In French chapeau (Latin cappellus) and chapelle (Latin cappella) are related to the old word chape which originally meant a kind of cape (Latin cappa), a wraparound garment. There is a well-known story about Saint Martin (the most popular saint in France), who was a Roman officer, cutting his cape in half with his sword and giving one half to a beggar. His own half (or what passed for it) became a relic preserved in a small addition to the palace of Charlemagne, which was named cappella from the cappa that was preserved in it (in French, Charlemagne’s capital Aachen is called Aix-la-Chapelle for this reason). Later the word was applied to such additions to churches (often recesses off the nave), or to small churches dependent on larger ones or built for private use (ie not parish churches).

You would think that, as a noted hat person, I would have known that, but I didn’t. For comparison, here’s the OED’s etymology:

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I recently got Brief Lives: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, by Andrew Piper, as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I thought I’d add my review here in case anyone wants to talk about Goethe, Felicia Hemans (pronounced HEMM-unz), or anything else.

This book satisfies the basic requirement of a hundred-page “Brief Life”: it gives you the facts of the author’s life and mentions his most important works, with a few quotes thrown in as flavoring. I regret to say it’s not very well written or proofread (“ex-patriot artists”!). On a two-page spread (50-51), we get this unintelligible line from a translation (Piper apparently did them himself): “As though I enter for the first”; he says “Iphigenia was an exploration of what the romantic poet Felicia Hemans … said was the experience of ‘the bitter taste of another’s bread, the weary steps by which the stairs of another’s house are ascended'” when Hemans is simply rendering in her flat prose some of Dante’s most famous lines (“Tu proverai si come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle Lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale”); and he refers to Iphigenia’s ill-fated family, the House of Atreus, as “one of the most gruesome genealogies in human history” (history??). Furthermore, Piper has the bad habit of characterizing everything he writes about as “the greatest” this or that, as if he were trying to sell us a car rather than describe a writer’s life. Still, if you want a quick introduction to Goethe, this is a perfectly serviceable one that could give you the impetus to seek out a longer, weightier biography or critical study.

John Wells, at his phonetic blog, has a post offering a professional analysis of just how an American voice teacher went wrong in a video clip in which she tries to teach the British “short o” vowel. I particularly like this paragraph:

Her happY vowel (at the end of coffee) is much too open. It approaches ɛ or perhaps more precisely [ɛ̝̈], which in England is highly marked both socially and regionally. Socially, it belongs in a variety of U-RP which is probably now entirely obsolete, a subvariety of what Cruttenden calls “Refined RP”. Alternatively, geographically it is associated with (the working-class accent of) central Northern places such as Leeds. No actor should use this kind of happY vowel for “British” unless playing an upper-class character in a play set a hundred years ago or more.

His conclusion: “Tracy’s version of BrE represents an impossible mixture of different social classes and different geographical locations. Bits … of it are Scottish, bits of it are northern English, bits are RP/southern. Some of it is caricature-upper-class, some of it is working-class. Nobody, but nobody, talks like that in real life.” You can see the video at that link; here‘s a hilarious parody by a Brit explaining how to pronounce the American short o. (Both links courtesy of Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org.)

Kyoto University of Foreign Studies has an exhibition on “Crepe-Paper Books and Woodblock Prints”; there’s lots of interesting stuff there, but I’ll call your attention to the Preface, which discusses the phenomenon of “crepe-paper books,” called chirimen-bon in Japanese (縮緬紙 chirimen is ‘crepe paper’):

The term “chirimen-bon” refers to books that were made by crinkling “washi” (i.e., Japanese paper) printed with the contents (i.e., text and/or pictures) before binding them Japanese-style as pages. They are called “Crepe-paper books” in English. They arose in the Meiji period, with the publication of translations, made by Westerners residing in Japan, of old legends and tales. Typically, the text was illustrated by a Japanese illustrator in accordance with the plot, and hand-carved woodblocks were used for manual printing on high-grade “washi,” which was crinkled before binding. Besides those relating legends and tales, there were some “chirimen-bon” written about Japanese culture. They come in a diversity of languages, mainly including English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Their success led to the publication of some stories, albeit few, set in other countries. With the help of sales contracts concluded with overseas bookstores, “chirimen-bon” found increasing favor in Europe, North America, and other Asian countries.

I have a few such books around somewhere, relics of my early life in postwar Japan, and I’m glad to know something about their history. (Via No-sword.)