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eXchanges, “the University of Iowa’s online literary magazine devoted to translation,” has a new issue called “Hackwork,” featuring Mémoires of Translation by Lawrence Venuti as well as translations from Latin (the Aeneid), Romanian (Dan Sociu), Chamorro (translating Chamorro translations of the Psalms!), and Spanish. I got this, as I get so many interesting links, from wood s lot, whose proprietor is going on a well-deserved vacation for a couple of weeks—bon voyage, Mark, and come back refreshed!

Update (Sept. 2025). Time for me to vent about the crappy website maintenance of universities! You would think those repositories of knowledge would be at the cutting edge of electronic preservation, but no, the idea of keeping links working seems to be foreign to them. Whenever I see an .edu link in an old post, I sigh and brace myself for finding an archived version; academics just don’t seem to care that their (presumably) thoughtfully designed websites will vanish into dust the next time some bureaucrat decides to Change Things. If Languagehat can be exported to a new site and maintain all its internal links (thanks to the volunteer work of the invaluable Songdog), why can’t colleges manage it? At any rate, even though eXchanges still exists and is updated, none of my links worked any more. Furthermore, even though I finally found the Issue Archive page (itself an archived one!), when I clicked on the Hackwork – Spring ’10 link I got “This page has not been archived here.” WTF, Iowa? Do better! Of course the thrice-blessed Internet Archive provided the links I needed, but damn, that pisses me off.

Anatoly has two recent posts about Russian words that have somehow eluded the dictionaries, one a couple of centuries old and the other… newish, but it’s impossible to know how new because, well, the dictionaries ignore it. In this post he quotes Vyazemsky as saying of a woman that she had “an excellent mind, was well read and inclined to literature, had an excellent gift for words and a lovely organ [organ].” Anatoly couldn’t find the word organ in this sense (apparently meaning ‘voice,’ to judge by the many other nineteenth-century uses he dug up) in any dictionary, and he’s not even sure whether the stress should be on the first syllable (implying a more abstract use parallel to “organ of government” or “organs of the press”) or on the second (implying a musical instrument). Remarkably, his commenters turned up printed examples with the accent explicitly marked each way!

In the other post, he remarks on the fact that by far the most common way to say “to censor” in modern Russian, цензурировать [tsenzurirovat’], is not in any dictionary; they give цензуровать [tsenzurovat’], which is hardly used these days by actual speakers, and цензировать [tsenzirovat’] as an archaic variant. He ends with a fully justified complaint that “the tradition of Russian lexicographers is not to track what people actually say and write but rather the artificial and emasculated ‘literary norm’ that they themselves have made into a law.”

Incidentally, I have a complaint of my own; I’ve already dealt with it, but I’ll mention it to get it off my chest. I finished reading Tynyanov‘s marvelously sly novella Подпоручик Киже (“Second Lieutenant Kizhe,” 1927), about identity, power, and language (and its relation to “reality”), and I was horrified on checking the Wikipedia entry (the link is to the old version) to see that not only was it incoherent and misleading but the story it described was that of the wretched 1934 movie, in which all the subtlety and secondary plotlines are ditched in favor of bottom-pinching and other sight gags (and the ending is completely changed). So I sighed and spent a good while revising it; here‘s the version I created, and here‘s the basic article link (though hopefully the current version it links to won’t diverge too far too fast). I’m not sure why the movie, and thus the Wikipedia article, has him as a first lieutenant (poruchik) instead of Tynyanov’s second lieutenant (podporuchik), but such is life in this unstable world.

I ran across the odd Russian word мадаполам, looked it up, and found it defined by the equally odd English word madapollam. That wasn’t in my smaller dictionaries, but it was in the OED, which revised the entry just last year:

[< Madapollam (Telugu Mādhavayya-pāḷemu encampment, fortified village of Mādhava), the name of a suburb of Narsapur in Andhra Pradesh, India, and formerly the location of one of the commercial agencies of the East India Company. Compare French madapolame (1823).]
More fully Madapollam cloth, Madapollam muslin, etc. A kind of plain-weave calico or cotton cloth, originally manufactured at Madapollam (see above). Cf. LONG CLOTH n.
[1610 S. BRADSHAW Let. Sept. in W. Foster Lett. received by E. India Co. (1896) I. 74 Madafunum is chequered, somewhat fine and well requested.] 1685 in A. T. Pringle Diary Fort St. George 9 Mar. (1895) IV. 49 Mr. Benj^a Northey having brought up Musters of the Madapoll^m Cloth, Itt is thought convenient that the same be taken of him. 1826 Brit. Consular Rep. Lat. Amer. (1940) 189 The British articles best suited to the markets are prints, muslins, madalaporams [sic], and shirtings. 1827 J. B. PENTLAND Rep. Bolivia iv, in Camden Misc. (1974) XXV. 214 British and Indian cotton goods, especially of that kind of glazed calico called Madopolams. 1829 in M. Russell View Anc. & Mod. Egypt (1831) viii. 366 He intends.. to send long-cloths, maddapollans, &c. 1858 P. L. SIMMONDS Dict. Trade Products, Madapollam, a kind of fine long cloth, shipped to the Eastern markets. 1882 S. F. A. CAULFEILD & B. C. SAWARD Dict. Needlework 339/1 Madapolams. A coarse description of calico cloth, of a stiff heavy make, originally of Indian manufacture, where it was employed for Quilts. 1885 Manch. Examiner 31 Dec. 4/4 Buff-end madapollams. 1923 J. CONRAD Rover iii. 46 A remnant piece of Madapolam muslin. 1969 New Scientist 25 Sept. 647/3 They used standard 15×12 inch flags, made of a special cotton cloth called ‘Madapollam’.

The Wikipedia article spells it madapolam, and judging from the OED cites, it’s spelled with either one or two l’s, according to taste. (If anyone’s browser is having trouble with the Telugu name Mādhavayya-pāḷemu, it’s Madhavayya-palemu, but the first and last a’s have macrons and the l has a dot underneath.)

The time for his autobiography to be published, that is. Twain left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, and the century is finally up; you can read all about it at Guy Adams’s story in The Independent. Of course, most of the juicy stuff has been skimmed by biographers and others who have had access to the material over the years, but it will still be good to have the master’s “extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography” available in full (in several volumes—the whole thing runs to half a million words!). Apparently it’s pretty bitter, but he certainly had a right to be after what he’d seen of the world and of the direction his country was headed, and I like my coffee black, unsweetened, and strong.
Incidentally, the Mark Twain Project Online is worth bookmarking; it “offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents” and its “ultimate purpose is to produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote.” Another fine use of the internet.

I’ve just finished Mandelstam’s novella “Egipetskaya marka” (see this post), and it probably took me longer than any other thirty pages of Russian prose I’ve read—not because the vocabulary was especially difficult (though some of it was) but because it’s very much a poet’s prose, and a particularly knotty poet’s at that, and it has to be nibbled at rather than gulped, and thought about in between bites. What little plot it has revolves around a Petrograd nebbish named Parnok (one of whose boyhood nicknames was “the Egyptian stamp”), who fails at both the goals he sets himself on a summer day in 1917: to get his morning coat and shirts back from the tailor who had repossessed them for lack of payment, and to save a man from being lynched by a mob. The first story line goes straight back to Gogol and “The Overcoat”; the second is ripped from the headlines of that revolutionary year (see examples in Russian here) but doubtless was intended to carry implications extending into the period of Bolshevik rule. But as always with Mandelstam, it’s more about the language and the network of images than the plot.

Clarence Brown, in the introduction to his translation, gives several examples of how words and images beget each other, like the bit in the fifth chapter that begins “The January calendar with its ballet goats, its model dairy of myriad worlds, its crackle of a deck of cards being unwrapped. . . .” He says, “The word ‘ballet’ appears because this is in the context of talk about Giselle, but it is applied to goats because it refers to the saltant image of a goat which is the tenth […] sign of the zodiac, Capricorn, covering the period from December 21 to January 20, and represented on the calendar.” A few lines later we get “The Petersburg cabby is a myth, a Capricorn. He should be put in the zodiac.” If you don’t follow his train of thought, the images appear to come out of nowhere. I’ll quote (in my own translation) a more extended passage from near the end, in which fear and railroads and prose are all intertwined; among many other things, it’s Mandelstam’s apologia for the complicated way he writes:

Fear takes me by the hand and leads me. White cotton glove. [Fingerless] mitten. I love, I respect fear. I almost said, “with it nothing frightens me!” Mathematicians should build a tent for fear, because it is the coordinate of time and space; they participate in it, like rolled-up felt in a Kirghiz tent. Fear unharnesses the horses when we have to drive, and sends us dreams with pointlessly low ceilings.

At the beck and call of my consciousness are two or three little words: i vot [‘and here’], uzhé [‘already’], vdrug [‘suddenly’]; they rush around on the half-lit Sevastopol train from car to car, lingering on the buffer areas [platforms between cars?], where two thundering frying pans rush at each other and crawl apart.

The railroad has changed the whole course, the whole construction, the whole tempo of our prose, handing it over into the power of the senseless muttering of the French peasant from Anna Karenina. Railroad prose, like the woman’s purse of that death-foretelling peasant, is full of coupler’s tools, delirious particles, hardware prepositions, which have their place on the table of legal evidence, set loose from any concern for beauty or roundedness.

Yes, there, where hot oil is poured over the meaty levers of locomotives, there she breathes, my darling prose, all set down lengthwise, falsely measuring, the shameless wench, winding on her own predatory yardstick all six hundred and nine Nikolaevsky versts, with little carafes of sweating vodka.

“Six hundred and nine Nikolaevsky versts” represents the railroad line (called Nikolaevsky, for Nikolai I, before the October Revolution and Oktyabrsky, for October, after it) between Moscow and Saint Petersburg (proverbially a distance of 609 versts). As Brown says, “[Mandelstam’s] prose could never be submitted as legal evidence in any imaginable court, for its aim is beauty and to be beautifully rounded. Its only testimony is to that ineffable satisfaction that comes when sentences wave like flags and strut like peacocks and roll trippingly off the tongue.”

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Via the latest entry at Pepys’ Diary (“then home to my wife, who is not well with her cold, and sat and read a piece of Grand Cyrus in English by her”) I learned about what is alleged to be the longest novel ever written (“with the possible exception of Henry Darger’s unpublished The Story of the Vivian Girls“), Artamène, or Cyrus the Great, and from the Wikipedia article I got to Artamène.org, which has put the entire novel online. The thought of reading over two million words is daunting, but Artamène.org does it very cleverly; they point out that consecutive solitary reading, such as we are used to, was not the norm in Madeleine de Scudéry’s day, and the novel was expected to be read aloud in company, “a piece” at a time (as Sam is doing with his wife), and they present the text thus:

L’accès au texte du roman, ainsi qu’aux illustrations d’époque, est possible à tout moment par le biais de la rubrique “Texte” dans la barre de menu de gauche. Il suffit de sélectionner la subdivision désirée (Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus est divisé en dix parties contenant chacune trois livres). Apparaît alors, « par défaut », un résumé de premier niveau. Un clic sur l’un des paragraphes de ce texte permet d’accéder à un résumé de second niveau. Un nouveau clic sur l’un des paragraphes de cette seconde série donne ensuite accès au texte du roman, présenté dans une version respectant la graphie et la pagination de l’édition de 1656, mais renumérotée en continu par nos soins.

In other words, you go to the Synopsis page, where you get a first-level summary; you click on whichever section interests you and get a more detailed second-level summary; then, when you click on a section of that, you get the actual text of the novel. It’s a brilliant solution, if you ask me.

Ethan Shen has done a research project comparing the three major free translation engines available online; here are his results to date:

This paper evaluates the relative quality of three popular online translation tools: Google Translate, Bing (Microsoft) Translator, and Yahoo Babelfish. The results published below are based on a 6 week survey open to the general internet population which allowed survey takers to choose any language, enter any free-form text, and vote on the best of all translation results side-by-side (www.gabble-on.com/compare-translators). The final data reveals that while Google Translate is widely preferred when translating long passages, Microsoft Bing Translator and Yahoo Babelfish often produce better translations for phrases below 140 characters. Also, in general Babelfish performs well in East Asian Languages such as Chinese and Korean and Bing Translator performs well in Spanish, German, and Italian.

Below Figure 1, showing the comparisons in detail, come some interesting results like this:

The extent of Google’s lead varies dramatically from language to language. In some languages such as French, the strength of Google Translate’s engine is overwhelming. However, in several others like German, Italian, and Portuguese, Google holds only a very slim lead when compared to its biggest competitors….
One possible explanation is that large additional bodies of parallel English-French text are available from the government of Canada for which are official documents are translated into both.

Interesting stuff, and I’ll have to give Bing a try.

That odd phrase is the title of a new novel by Evgeny Klyuev (Russian Wikipedia) mentioned in Lisa Hayden Espenschade’s latest post at Lizok’s Bookshelf, a typically informative list of the 2010 Big Book award finalists, with commentary. The one that is most immediately appealing to me is Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Счастье возможно: Роман нашего времени (Happiness is possible: a novel of our time), but unquestionably the most intriguing title is carried by the book Lisa lists as “Evgenii Kliuev – Андерманир штук (Something Else for You – (?) I found a translation of the Russian title phrase in this article by Catriona Kelly).” The Kelly article is behind a paywall, so I tried Google Books on the phrase and got hits like “А вот, извольте посмотреть, андерманир штук — другой вид” [And here, if you’ll be so kind as to look, andermanir shtuk — another view]; “А вот, извольте видеть, господа, андерманир штук хороший вид, город Кострома горит, у забора мужик стоит” [And here, see, if you would, andermanir shtuk, a good view, the city of Kostroma is burning, a peasant is standing by the fence]; “А вот андерманир-штук — Бонапарт на тулуп меняет сюртук со стужи да кушак подтянул потуже” [And here’s andermanir shtuk — Bonaparte is exchanging his frock coat for a sheepskin coat because it’s cold, and pulling the belt tighter]. As I wrote in Lisa’s comment section, I presume it’s from German, something like anderer Manier Stück “another sort of thing” (which is not actual German, but some Russian must have invented it on the basis of whatever the real German phrase is).

From the same Lizok post I learn that Jamie Olson, who translates Russian poetry into English and teaches in the English Department at Saint Martin’s University, has started a blog about Russian poetry, The Flaxen Wave. It looks promising, and I expect to be checking in on it regularly.

Update (October 2013). I have come across a variant in Alexander Veltman’s 1835 story Эротида, in the context of a game of cards: “Но вот ‘ander Stück manier!’ поносит он свою даму” [“But now he reviles his queen ander Stuck Manier“]. The early date brings it much closer to the 18th century (see comment thread below).

Further update (March 2015). I’ve found another occurrence in Veltman, this time in his novel Salomea (1846-48):

Каждый человек до тех пор ребенок, покуда не насмотрится на все в мире настолько, чтобы понять, что все в мире то же что ein-zwei-drei, ander Stuck Manier, и следовательно почти каждый остается навек ребенком.

Everyone is a child until they have seen enough of the world to understand that everything in the world is the same as ein-zwei-drei, ander Stuck Manier, and consequently almost everyone remains a child forever.

I’m still reading Chukovsky’s Diary, 1901-1969 (see this post), and I’ve come across a couple of short, striking passages I wanted to share. (Russian below the cut.) On endings:

Amazing! English writers don’t know how to end their works. The best of them turn to the most shameful commonplaces. They start off brilliantly, all fresh energy and muscles, but the ending is trivial, cobbled together from cliches. I’ve just finished Far from the Madding Crowd. Who would have expected Thomas Hardy to turn into such a vulgarian! Everything is perfectly predictable: one villain ends up in prison, another in the grave, and the third, the hero, after the requisite anxieties and impediments ends up in the arms of Bathsheba, the woman he was meant to marry.

And on plagiarism:

[Sologub] had a playful way of talking about his plagiarisms. “[Aleksandr] Redko found a passage I’d plagiarized from a trashy French novel and printed it en regard. All that proves is that he reads trashy French novels. What he didn’t notice was that at nearly the same spot I’d cribbed five or so pages from George Eliot. Which proves that he doesn’t read serious literature.”

I disapprove of plagiarism, but that’s pretty funny.

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I’m now reading Mandelstam’s dense 1927 novella “Egipetskaya marka” (“The Egyptian stamp”), and in trying to look up the odd word финолинка [finolinka], evidently a sort of night light (which turns out to occur only here in all of Russian literature), I ran across this LJ site, dedicated to a line-by-line analysis of the story. (It began in April 2009 with a post about the title and is now nearing the end of section 5; here‘s the archive for 2009, and you can click on the link at the top to get to 2010.) In the post relevant to my search, it is suggested that финолинка is a distortion of филаменка [filamenka] ‘filament lamp.’ The site is going to be very useful to me, as it would be to anyone engaging with the story in Russian, and I thank Alik Manov for maintaining it.
Incidentally, the story is available in English in the excellent collection The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, edited and translated by Clarence Brown; “The Noise of Time” (Shum vremeni), Mandelstam’s quasi-autobiography (comparable to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory), is one of the classics of Russian literature.