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Anatoly quoted my post from yesterday, singling out the quote beginning “It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton…”; he finished his post by linking to this poem (in Russian), which the story reminded him of. I liked the poem so well I thought I’d try my hand at translating it, but I was stymied at the very beginning because I wasn’t sure how to render the title, Ментелли. It transliterates as Mentelli, but the problem was that the name in question was that of a Hungarian, and of course I wanted to know the original Hungarian spelling, so I started googling.

That sent me down one of those endless rabbit holes the internet is so full of, and I have just come up for air. When I googled Ментелли, I got his Russian Wikipedia article. Excellent! (I thought): it will link to a Hungarian Wikipedia article, and my problems will be over. Alas for premature rejoicing—there was no link to any other Wikipedia articles on him. Further, the next-to-last sentence of the article said that he was “described in the story ‘The Hungarian Diogenes from Paris’ by the Hungarian lawyer and writer István Ráth-Végh.” I immediately began to suspect that Ráth-Végh had invented him. I found the story in Russian translation (here; scroll down to ВЕНГЕРСКИЙ ДИОГЕН ИЗ ПАРИЖА, the last section), which did nothing to dispel my suspicion that it was an elaborate hoax (nor, of course, did it help me with the spelling issue). After much googling, I managed to find the original Hungarian in Google Books (A könyv komédiája, p. 83: “A párizsi magyar Diogenes”); unfortunately, not only was it the thrice-damned snippet view, but OCR rendered the crucial name as “Menteili.” More googling made it clear it was actually Mentelli, however, and I found what seems at the moment to be the original source of the story, Descuret’s La Médecine des passions, ou les passions considérées dans leurs rapports avec les maladies, les lois et la religion (Paris, [1841] 2nd ed. 1844). The story begins on page 717; by clicking on this clipped bit, you will be taken to the book, where you can read the whole thing, if you read French:

And if you don’t read French, there is a brief retelling in English in Théodule Ribot, The psychology of the emotions (New York, 1897), beginning:

and ending “Mentelli left no work behind him, in fact there remains no trace of his long researches.” There is also “Mentelli, the Hungarian Diogenes,” Notes and Queries (1913) s11-VIII: 350 (available here if you have a subscription, which I don’t). And Victor Hugo wrote this in his notebooks:

Mentelli était un grand savant. Il mourut.
On me demanda une épitaphe pour lui.
J’écrivis sur sa tombe cette ligne:
    – Il est allé savoir le reste.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to translating the poem, but now you know about Mentelli. If he existed at all, with his hundred languages and his ill-paid library work, he died in 1836; I still harbor a faint suspicion that Descuret made him up.

The historian Keith Thomas has an essay in the LRB [archived] that exemplifies the working method an “anonymous reader” describes as involving “a great many references to and citations of a generous selection of (mostly printed) texts and documents, which account for a high percentage of the text.” I could follow the same path, quoting (for instance) Thomas quoting C.G. Crump of the Public Record Office (“‘Never make a note for future use in such a form … that even you yourself will not know what it means, when you come across it some months later.’”) or Thomas quoting G.M. Young (“my aim is to go on reading until I can hear the people talking”) or Thomas quoting a Scottish friend of David Hume’s (“‘Why, mon, David read a vast deal before he set about a piece of his book; but his usual seat was the sofa, and he often wrote with his legs up; and it would have been unco’ fashious to have moved across the room when any little doubt occurred.’”), but I’ll content myself with quoting a terrifying passage quoted by Helen DeWitt, from whose paperpools post I was sent to the LRB:

It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with pencilled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’

For the rest (including the “omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less everywhere”), I refer you to Thomas’s well-larded and thought-provoking essay.

The other day my wife asked me about the history of brook in phrases like “brook no opposition.” What an excellent question, said I, and repaired to the OED, where I found the following story. The Old English strong verb brúcan (past tense bréac, brucon, past participle ȝebrocen) is historically the same as the German brauchen (which, however, has become a weak verb) and has the same meaning: ‘to make use of, have the enjoyment of, enjoy’ (as does their Latin cognate frui). How do we get from there to ‘put up with’? Easy as pie: a specialized usage was the OED’s sense 2, “To make use of (food); in later usage, to digest, retain, or bear on the stomach.” And from citations like 1540 Thomas Raynalde, Roesslin’s Byrth of mankynde II. ix. 142 “If she refuse or cannot brooke meat” and 1598 William Phillip, Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his discours of voyages into ye Easte and West Indies in Arber’s ‘Garner,’ III. 26 “So fat that men can hardly brook them,” we can clearly see the development to the modern sense (for which the first OED cite is 1530 Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue françoyse 471/2 “He can nat brooke me of all men”).

And for the musty word bartizan “A battlemented parapet at the top of a castle or church,” the OED offers this censorious etymology:

[In no dictionary before 1800; not in Todd 1818, nor Craig 1847. Apparently first used by Sir Walter Scott, and due to a misconception of a 17th c. illiterate Sc. spelling, bertisene, for bertising, i.e. bretising, BRATTICING, f. bretasce (BRATTICE), a. OF. bretesche, ‘battlemented parapet, originally of wood and temporary.’ Bartizan is thus merely a spurious ‘modern antique,’ which had no existence in the times to which it is attributed.]

The irreplaceable AJP sent me a link to Joanna Biggs’s LRB blog post about the live translation event coming up in a couple of weeks at the British Museum. I’m sorry I won’t be able to attend; it sounds like a lot of fun:

The translation, of a short story in French, is done in advance by two translators: the ‘live’ bit comes into play when each of them reveals their version sentence by sentence to the audience, the other translator and the novelist, for discussion and disagreement. The idea is that the sort of close reading you need to do to translate well will bring out aspects of the text that are rarely paid attention to.
The challenge has been set by Alain Mabanckou – born in the Republic of Congo, educated in Paris, now based in LA – who has offered up a very short story about someone getting conned into buying an ill-fitting suit. He’s not much known here, but in France Mabanckou’s style, which loosens corseted French sentences with jokes, puns, slang and references to Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur as well as Tati, the thrift shop in Barbès (‘les plus bas prix!’), has made him one of the most interesting, unpredictable and prize-laden contemporary French novelists. Sarah Ardizzone and Frank Wynne will be the ones perched on the sofa on 19 June, offering sentences that will be new to everyone apart from the chair, Daniel Hahn. The audience will have hand-outs of the French version and the two English versions as well as the panel to talk about ways of getting ‘Walaïïï, camarade!’ or the slightly baffling idiom ‘se mettre sur son trente-et-un’ into English. And there won’t be an exam at the end of it.

I don’t suppose anyone has any context for “Walaïïï”?

I knew little about Clarence Barnhart beyond his name (and that primarily as part of the collocation Thorndike-Barnhart), so I was considerably enlightened by Rulon-Miller Books’ sales catalog page for the Barnhart Dictionary Archive, with its full biography and history of his lexicographical work. My attention was grabbed by the first two paragraphs:

Clarence L. Barnhart was arguably the most talented of all American lexicographers working in the 20th century. Like many brilliant men, he was a figure of contrasts. He could be formidably charming; he could also be arrogant, opinionated, self-interested, a perfectionist, and difficult to work with. That the Barnhart dictionaries did not attain the name recognition granted by the general public to the likes of a Merriam-Webster or a Random House dictionary was due in part to Barnhart’s personality, but even more importantly to his desire to remain independent of corporate structures. Throughout his career he chose to make dictionaries as he conceived them rather than be dictated to, a choice which changed the face of American lexicography, but which denied him, perhaps, the wealth and fame he might otherwise have achieved. Due to the changed nature of dictionary-making in the 21st century (with the new focus on corpus work, and the technologies which allow for that focus), Clarence Barnhart is likely to have been the last independent lexicographer working with the English language as a whole. Interestingly, it was his work, his innovation and foresight, which paved the way for the changes which are now rendering the old ways obsolete.

Barnhart’s enduring friendship with the noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield must be recognized as one of the most important relationships in American education, as it was Barnhart who introduced Bloomfield’s theories to the dictionary world, and who subsequently merged modern linguistic theory with lexicography. The rise of modern linguistics fostered a scientific approach to the study of language in general, which resulted in better observation of both the oral and written language. Consequently, and largely due to Barnhart’s dogged pursuits, lexicography is now recognized as a subject field within linguistics itself.

I’m sure it’s overstated (it is, after all, part of a marketing pitch), but the relationship with Bloomfield by itself would be worth an article—he was, after all, the Great American Linguist before Chomsky came along and usurped the title. The page is well worth the read; thanks for the link, Michael!

I was shocked to look at the NY Times this morning and learn that Andrei Voznesensky has died. I now think of Voznesensky as an enjoyable minor poet, but when I was in college and studying Russian in the late ’60s, he was the first modern Russian poet I came to love, and I retain the affection inspired by that discovery. I still have the copy of Ахиллесово Сердце (1966; cover) I bought at Foyles and carried with me on my trip to the USSR (inspiring envy in young Russians who had no way of getting a copy themselves) and the collection he graciously signed for me when he was in New York in the ’80s, and I will never forget the shock and delight of first reading poems like Гойя, Баллада-диссертация (“Вчера мой доктор произнес…”), Параболическая баллада (“Судьба, как ракета, летит по параболе/ Обычно—во мраке и реже—по радуге”), and Антимиры. Now that I’ve read his major influences (notably Mayakovsky and Pasternak), not to mention a truly great modern poet like Brodsky, I can put my enthusiasm in perspective, but I’m still thrilled by the sonic delight packed into a line like “Смола, шмели” [Smolá, shmelí] (‘resin, bumblebees’) from Велосипеды. You can see a few seconds of him in his prime in 1964 in this clip; if anyone has better links, please share them. Вечная ему память.
Update. The Fortnightly Review has published my obit of Voznesensky, based on this post but longer, with more polish and less Russian.

I’m fine with the normal use of “begging the question” (see this recent post), and I regularly mock those who insist on the petitio principii sense. But a line from a baseball story in my local paper this morning made me shake my head. It’s an AP story; here‘s the (somewhat longer) version carried in the Louisville Courier-Journal. I was reading along, agreeing with my wife (and many of those quoted) that these celebrations at home plate have gotten out of hand, when I hit the sentence “The question begs: Why go crazy celebrating a victory in late May like it was October?” How do you get from “begging the question” to “the question begs”? My first thought was that it was an invention of the writer, but then I realized that was unlikely, and sure enough, when I googled I found others. Most of the hits are for longer versions, presumably precursors: “the question begs to be asked” and “the question begs to ask” (sic). But a few seem to show this use; in particular, there’s an interesting line from “Late for Your Life,” a Mary Chapin Carpenter song from an album released in 2001: “Still the question begs why would you wait And be late for your life.” This could be taken as a tortured equivalent of “Still there is the question of why…,” but it seems more straighforward to take it as “Still the question begs [i.e., must be asked]: why…”
Is anyone familiar with this usage? (I think we can take it as a given that those who don’t use it themselves will object strenuously to it, but let’s face it, it’s just more language change coming over the horizon.)

I’m progressing through Chukovsky’s Diary, 1901-1969 pari passu with my reading of Russian fiction, and on October 11, 1927 he had some interesting things to say about Tynyanov (see my Kije gripe):

He read his Lieutenant Kizhe. The opening sounds like Leskov, the middle like Gogol, and the end is Dostoevsky. He doesn’t quite convey the horror of Kizhe’s nonbeing, but his Meletsky and Emperor Paul are marvelous, the language is magnificent, and the work as a whole is a good deal more airy than the Griboedov novel he’s slaving away at now. He read me an excerpt from the latter — about how Griboedov was plagued by his own Wit Works Woe — the emptiness, the soullessness, the absence of a knack for fertile foolishness. As I see it, the two subjects — Kizhe and Griboedov — are one, and both are about Tynyanov. To some extent he himself is a Kizhe, as is evidenced by his Heine translation: it lacks the “fluid,” “lyric,” “melodic” qualities that come only to fools. He’s got everything else in spades: he is charming in his tiny book-lined flat at his bazaar-stand of a desk amidst pads covered with notes of plans for future works such as novellas about Maiboroda and the dying Heine (Maiboroda is to some extent a Kizhe too); he is charged with creative energy; he’s got thousands of themes in his head; he goes on about Sapir and Nekrasov’s influence on Polonsky and the film version of Poet and Tsar.

(The Russian is below the cut; Arkady Máiboroda — an odd surname, primarily borne by Ukrainians, whose etymology is not explained by Unbegaun, my usual source for surnames — was an infantry commander who died in 1844.)

I’m just starting the second chapter of his Griboedov novel (which he wound up calling Smert’ Vazir-mukhtara, “The death of the vazir-mukhtar [ambassador plenipotentiary],” just one example of the many exoticisms he lards the novel with), so I can’t make any judgments yet, but I do feel the force of what Chukovsky says: it is definitely less airy, more clogged, than Kizhe. Which is not to say that I’m not enjoying it.

[Read more…]

Over at the Log, Mark Liberman has an interesting post about a performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters he saw; as linguistic notes, he mentions Kulygin’s ut consecutivum and brings up the issue of accents, saying “a provincial town in the Russia of 1900 — especially one far enough away from the capital that the three sisters would not have gone back for a visit in eleven years — would have had a distinctive regional accent, I think, one that everyone involved would have been quite aware of.” I responded:

This is both true and irrelevant. Russian does have regional accents — broadly, northern (in which unstressed o’s are clearly pronounced, among other features), southern (in which unstressed o’s are pronounced as /a/ or schwa, and g is frequently a pharyngeal fricative, as in Ukrainian), and central (Moscow), which blends the two (basically, southern vowels and northern consonants) — but these accents are not culturally significant. What is significant, in fact essential, is that the speech be “educated”: accents in the right places, “correct” grammatical forms, etc. If your speech is educated, you will be accepted as a member of cultured society, and any provincial accent will simply be a clue to one’s origin (unless, of course, it is so strong as to seem peasant/uneducated, as with Khrushchev and Gorbachev, among others).

What this means for Chekhov (and Russian literature in general) is that regional accent is pretty much not an issue. There are only three kinds of speech: educated, peasant, and foreign (Germans and people from the Caucasus are frequent targets of mockery in this regard). All of the main characters in this play are educated, even if Natasha is just hanging on by her fingernails, and to give any of them a noticeable accent would (I believe) misrepresent the situation. I’ve seen a couple of productions in Russian, and I don’t remember any such thing.

Does this seem right to the Russians in the house? (I also link to this article by Anne Lounsbery [“To Moscow, I Beg You!”: Chekhov’s Vision of the Russian Provinces], which is well worth reading if you’re interested in “the provinces” in Russian literature.)

I wrote about Shanghainese here; alas, the site I built that post around seems to have bit the dust long ago (it was truly excellent—I wonder what happened?), but you can get a start on learning the language with a charming set of little video lessons available from China Daily here. Having learned the hard lessons of internet mortality, I expect this won’t be around indefinitely, so enjoy it while it’s there! (Via jiawen at MetaFilter.)
Note that in the sixth video, we not only learn how to say “the Bund” (the riverfront stretch of the old city) in Shanghainese (na te), we get reinforcement for the fact that the name in English is pronounced as an English word: /bʌnd/, not (as I have heard clueless radio announcers say it) /bund/ (BOOND), as if it were an exotic transliteration. This is because it is from Hindi band (from Persian, ultimately from Avestan *banda-), where we have the Hindi/Urdu “short a” that is pronounced as the central vowel /ʌ/ (as in but). The announcers’ error is the same one that makes “Poonjab” out of Punjab (Urdu Panjāb < Persian panj ‘five’ + āb ‘water’), in which the first syllable should be pronounced just like pun.