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A comment by Arthur Crown in this post led me to an excellent lecture by Dr. John B. Corbett preserved, with all its hesitations and fillers, at the SCOTS Project (which I blogged about here and here), about Thomas Urquhart and his place in the history of Scottish literature. It’s so full of tidbits and insights I’m tempted to reproduce the whole thing; instead, I’ll quote and mention enough to give you a taste for it.

He starts by placing him in context (I’m normalizing the text by deleting the “erm”s and [inhale]s and superfluous commas):

Urquhart is a mid-seventeenth century writer, writing around about 1650. So I want to try to put him into context. Last week if you remember, we looked at the way Scots prose evolved in the sixteenth century, developing out of a native tradition of loosely connected Old English sentences in a kind of spoken style. And we contrasted that with the continental style, based on Latin, of long, elaborate sentences. … In the sixteenth century you don’t really have literary prose; you have administrative prose, you have historiographical prose; the writers of the histories are probably getting closest to a literary style, of the prose writers of that period. And the writers of histories tended to move towards the elaborate, continental style, which became … associated with the Catholic cause in Scotland, whereas the Protestant writers gravitated more towards the kind of loose colloquial style based on speech. The native style. Some writers, and I was arguing like John Knox at his best, modulated between the two styles and used the expressive range in a very rhetorical and purposeful way.

But today, in concentrating on one writer from the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, we look at somebody who basically took the continental style to its mad, absurd extreme. He was the last of the great … baroque writers in the Scottish tradition. He writes in, if you like, the Latin-based, the continental style. Urquhart is often dismissed as one of the great but … difficult eccentrics of the Scottish literary tradition. Now what I’m going to argue today is that he’s in some ways a transitional figure. He’s the end of an era, in one respect. He’s the last great exponent of the continental style in Scottish prose. But, in other respects, he’s a foretaste of Scottish prose, fictional prose, to come. He does things for the first time that are taken up by later Scottish writers, and in some respects you could argue that wittingly or unwittingly, all modern Scottish prose fictional writers are his children…

He goes on to describe Urquhart’s book on trigonometry, “which if anything established his reputation as someone who was barking mad”:

Urquhart is taking a reasonably simple, reasonably straightforward, geometrical theorem, and he’s elaborating it to the point of absurdity, and … either he’s mad, and that has been put forward as a proposition, … or he’s doing it on purpose as a joke. It’s a joke with a very limited audience. And he has a whole book like this. … You can see the Trissotetras, the joke trigonometry book …, as a parody of the continental style of prose writing. … You have the long periodic sentences, built up of subordinate clauses, parentheses, embedded phrases, almost to infinity. So he’s parodying the style of trigonometry books. Or he seems to be parodying the style of trigonometry books; with Urquhart you’re never quite sure. Certainly, as with many parodies, Urquhart seems in love with the object of his parody. There’s an infectious energy to the willful obscurity of this joke geometry treatise. The obscure Greek terms, the technical neologisms, the new words, give the treatise the attraction, to me at least, of nonsense poetry; it’s like reading “Jabberwocky” or something.

Urquhart was locked up by Cromwell as a Royalist, and “was told that his lands in Scotland would be forfeited if he could not demonstrate that he deserved to keep possession of them. So Urquhart decided that the best way to demonstrate his worth, his value, was to set about writing and publishing four books, between 1652 and 1653, to prove that he is an important writer and intellectual.” These books are the Pantochronochanon, which “constructs a family tree for the Urquhart family, that ends with Urquhart and begins with Adam,” which “kind of proves he’s noble”; the Ekskybalauron (‘gold out of dung’), better known as The Jewel, in which he starts by “drawing up the principles for a universal language… and then it goes into this amazing story about a character called ‘The Admirable Crichton’, and this is the first appearance of this character, ‘The Admirable Crichton'”; Logopandecteision, which “is largely a reprint of The Jewel” (“He basically writes it again because he’s running out of time”) but includes “the first prose sex scene in Scottish literature…. it combines Urquhart’s passionate interests in sex, astronomy, the construction of sundials, Greek and Latin vocabulary, and of course, syntax”; and the translation of Rabelais.

Corbett focuses on two places in the translation where Urquhart uses Scots.

So the giant Pantagruel comes upon another giant called Panurge. And the problem is, they begin to talk and they speak in different languages, so they’ve got to attempt to communicate. So, they try different languages out. Some of the languages are real, some of the languages Rabelais invents, some of the languages Urquhart, in his translation, invents too. So they try German – doesn’t work; Italian – doesn’t work; Spanish – doesn’t work; Dutch – nope; Basque – nope; Danish – no; Hebrew – no; Greek – no; Latin – no. So they try Puzzlatory – that doesn’t work. They try Buffoonish – that doesn’t work. And then, in this sequence of strange, obscure, weird and fictional languages, you get … “Then said Panurge, ‘Lard, gest all be sir birches th’intelligence as thy body shall be natural, ruleth, them should be, there should of me pity have. For nature has us equally made, but fortune some exalted has, in use depravit. None the less, vice nor virtue is depravit, and virtue is men discrives for an en ye lad en is not good.” That doesn’t work either. Nobody can understand what that means. Yet less, said Pantagruel. So again you get another failure of communication, and as you can see, it’s kind of nonsensical. The interesting thing about this nonsense is that it’s Scots. It’s Scots nonsense. It’s Older Scots nonsense.

The second passage is the one in which Pantagruel confronts “a pretentious student from Limoges.”

And Limoges is like, well Aberdeen, let’s face it, I apologise to anybody from Aberdeen who’s in the room, but you know, in French terms, it’s a little bit out in the sticks … and this pretentious student makes the mistake, when speaking to Pantagruel, of affecting to be a[n] intellectual student from Paris, and he uses a highly Latinised, high-style vocabulary to begin to talk to the giant. And the giant decides to take him down a peg. …”By God,” said Pantagruel, “I will teach you to speak. But first come hither and tell me whence thou art”. To this the scholar answered, “The primeval origin of my aves and ataves was indigenerie of the Lemovick regions, where requiesceth the corpor of the hagiotat St Martial”. “I understand thee very well,” said Pantagruel, “when all comes to all, thou art a Limousin, and thou wilt here, by thy affected speech, counterfeit the Parisiens. Well now, come hither, I must shew thee a new trick, and handsomely give thou combfeat.” With this he took him by the throat, saying to him, “Thou flayest the Latine? By St John I will make thee flay the foxe, for I will now flay thee alive”. Then began the poor Limousin to cry, “Haw, gwid Maaster, haw Laord ma halp and St Marshaw, haw, I’m worried; haw, ma thrapple, the bean of ma cragg is bruck! Haw, for gauad’s seck, lawt ma lean Mawster, waw, waw, waw!” “Now,” said Pantagruel, “thou speaks naturally,” and so let him go, for the poor Limousin had totally be[w]rayed, and thoroughly conshit his breeches.”

Corbett sums up by saying that “when he’s affecting the pretentious Latinised style, Urquhart seems to be parodying himself. The Limousin begins by speaking the way that Urquhart usually writes. Then, as we’ve said, when he’s shaken by the throat, he reverts into his natural speech, which would be Urquhart’s own spoken idiom.”

Now, I have some questions about the quotation Corbett cites as representing Panurge’s Scots; in the Wikisource text, it runs as follows:

‘Lord, if you be so virtuous of intelligence as you be naturally relieved to the body, you should have pity of me. For nature hath made us equal, but fortune hath some exalted and others deprived; nevertheless is virtue often deprived and the virtuous men despised; for before the last end none is good.’ (The following is the passage as it stands in the first edition. Urquhart seems to have rendered Rabelais’ indifferent English into worse Scotch, and this, with probably the use of contractions in his MS., or ‘the oddness’ of handwriting which he owns to in his Logopandecteision (p.419, Mait. Club. Edit.), has led to a chaotic jumble, which it is nearly impossible to reduce to order.–Instead of any attempt to do so, it is here given verbatim: ‘Lard gestholb besua virtuisbe intelligence: ass yi body scalbisbe natural reloth cholb suld osme pety have; for natur hass visse equaly maide bot fortune sum exaiti hesse andoyis deprevit: non yeless iviss mou virtiuss deprevit, and virtuiss men decreviss for anen ye ladeniss non quid.’ Here is a morsel for critical ingenuity to fix its teeth in.–M.)

Corbett is presumably emending the “chaotic jumble” somewhat thus: “Lard, gest (h)ol(b) be sua virtuis (be) intelligence as(s) [þ]i body scal(bis) be natural r[u]l[e]th [them] [s]chol[d] b[e, there] suld o[f] me pety have; for natur has(s) v(is)s(e) equaly maide bot fortune sum exa[l]ti[t] h[a]s(se) [i]n(d) oyis deprevit: non [þ]e less (i)vis[e] [n]o[r] virtiu [i]s deprevit, and virtu iss men decreviss for anen [þ]e laden iss no[t] [g]uid.” But 1) that’s a lot of emendation, and 2) it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Still, his general point works.

Another problem I have is with the way the SCOTS site transcribes his quotes; they seem to ignore the actual texts he is citing and attempt to set down what he is saying based on its sound. But that is unhelpful and makes it difficult to follow up his leads. Quoting the sex scene, for instance, the text has him saying “To speak of her herquitelaniency…” Following along with the video (which I would urge everyone with the time to spare to do—it’s the “multimedia’ link at the bottom, the third icon from the right) it didn’t seem like that’s what he was saying, and a little work with the OED showed that the actual word is hirquitalliency (from Latin hirquitallire “(of infants) to acquire a strong voice,” from hircus ‘he-goat’).

But these are quibbles; I am very grateful to the SCOTS Project for making this fine lecture available to all.

Having learned from a correspondent that there is still no complete translation of Proust in Greek, I decided to find out when the full novel became available in Russian, and was surprised to discover it was not until 1999. I learned this from this 2002 article by Andrei Mikhailov, who starts off quoting the critic Georgii Adamovich (discussed here) as saying, in the mid-1920s, that Proust “will probably be loved in Russia” and goes on to explain why it took three-quarters of a century for that prophecy to be realized. It’s a sad story. The first volume was translated at the end of the 1920s by A. A. Frankovskii (1888-1942; biography in Russian), and Mikhailov says “There existed and still exists a fixed opinion that Frankovskii’s translation exactly and deeply renders all the stylistic peculiarities of Proust’s prose” and to compete with him “is to doom yourself to inevitable defeat” (adding that although he was a great translator, he was working from inadequate French editions and much has been understood since his day). Alas, Frankovskii died in the blockade of Leningrad, and by then Proust had been deemed “the height of literary decadence” and “a classic of bourgeois parasitism” by the Soviet literary establishment, so the four volumes that had appeared by the late ’30s (by various hands) were all that were available for decades.

Then, in the 1960s, another experienced and prolific translator, Nikolai Lyubimov (1912-1992), decided to try his hand. He was deeply immersed in both Russian and French literature and had translated Rabelais, Molière, Beaumarchais, Mérimée, Flaubert, Maupassant, de Coster, Anatole France, and Maeterlinck, so he was a good man for the job. One might wish that he had started with the later volumes, returning to the first if and when he had time, but he decided to start from the beginning, and his first volume came out in 1973, followed in fairly rapid succession by the second (1976) and third (1980). But his Sodome et Gomorrhe was held up by the censors until 1987 (even then being published with puritanical cuts); the following volume was published in 1990 and shows signs of haste and carelessness. He spent the rest of his life trying to finish La Captive:

But now he worked slowly and with difficulty, no longer flying through the text as in earlier years but gradually slogging through the intricate prose with indifference and even hostility. He complained of dizziness, headaches, insomnia, fatigue, and blamed Proust for it all. The doctors insisted he stop working. In October of 1992 he did, leaving the end untranslated and large gaps missing elsewhere. Two months later, on December 22, he died.

His widow refused to allow the publisher to emend his text, so it was issued gaps, errors, and all, just as he had left it (though an appendix provided translations of the missing pieces by another translator). Finally, in 1999, the final volume appeared in a translation by Alla Smirnova.

One of the guilty pleasures of reading about translations is the inevitable dissection of the inevitable gaffes; I’ll pass along a few of the more piquant. Towards the end of the “Swann in Love” section of the first volume, Proust says that Swann “était persuadé qu’une «Toilette de Diane» qui avait été achetée par le Mauritshuis à la vente Goldschmidt comme un Nicolas Maes était en réalité de Ver Meer” [“was convinced that a ‘Toilet of Diana’ which had been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer”]. Mikhailov says “the notes explain what the painting was and when the sale took place, but not who this mysterious Морисюи [Morisyui] might be: a collector, a dealer, an incidental person? Lyubimov didn’t know (and neither did Frankovskii); the reference is actually to the well-known Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, which Proust himself visited.”

Lyubimov never went abroad, including Paris (such was our life back then), and there were many local realia unknown to him. So he has Odette walking along “аллеям Булонского леса” [the allées of the Bois de Boulogne] rather than the avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now avenue Foch), a broad street leading from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois, which was a place where fashionable people strolled. The translator was also unfamiliar with the structure of Parisian cafés, not suspecting that several customers unknown to one another cannot sit at the same little table. Lyubimov was capable of taking “Luxembourg” (that is the Luxembourg Palace, where there was a museum) for the name of the tiny European state, and the name of the 18th-century portraitist Nattier for that of a profession (“braider”).

But I disagree with Mikhailov in his censure of Lyubimov’s rendering of the passage in which Charlus seizes on a question by Marcel to savage the Marquise de Sainte-Euverte: “Croyez-vous que cet impertinent jeune homme… vient de me demander, sans le moindre souci qu’on doit avoir de cacher ces sortes de besoins, si j’allais chez Mme de Saint-Euverte, c’est-à-dire, je pense, si j’avais la colique. Je tâcherais en tout cas de m’en soulager dans un endroit plus confortable…” [“Would you believe it, this impertinent young man… asked me just now, without the slightest concern for the proper reticence in regard to such needs, whether I was going to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, in other words, I suppose, whether I was suffering from diarrhoea. I should endeavour in any case to relieve myself in some more comfortable place…”] Lyubimov writes: “Этот неделикатный молодой человек осмелился задать мне вопрос, поеду ли я к маркизе де Сент-Эверт. Нет, слуга покорный, я в ее сент-эвертеп не ходок. Уж больно она сент-эвертлява […] Мне эта сент-эвертунья, сент-эвертушка, сент-эвертихвостка не по нутру…” The passage is full of untranslatable puns on the name Sainte-Euverte, like сент-эвертеп [sent-evertep] “Sainte-Euverte-den,” where вертеп [vertep] is ‘den.’ Mikhailov thinks this is going too far and betraying the text; I say you have to allow great translators their occasional excesses. What would Urquhart‘s Rabelais be without his Urquhartisms?

Reading wood s lot this morning, I was struck by two poems quoted in the same entry, not far apart. The first:

from
Italian Hours
Katherine E. Young

All travel’s exile, the shedding
of self, a losing and finding,
the possessing of new things. Past
is present — in gondola rides
through fetid canals, light, water,
air shared with Campanile loons

proclaiming “Republic!” too late,
or too soon — in encounters with
selves left standing at the crossroads,
with ghosts asking after Dante
in accents unknown to the shades
who frequent the Baptistery….

The second:

The Reckoning
Theodore Roethke

All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.

We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.

What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keeps us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.

Now, leaving aside the quality of the poems, what struck me (especially forcibly because of the similarity of the opening lines: “All travel’s exile, the shedding/ of self, a losing and finding” and “All profits disappear: the gain/Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum”) was that the first simply doesn’t sound like poetry to me. I appreciate the imagery and choice of words, but the lack of any coherent rhythm means that it sounds to me like prose divided into lines. The Roethke, on the other hand, immediately establishes itself as a poem in a formal sense—not a slavish imitation of earlier formulas, but a vigorous exploration of them. It reminds me of the jolt of joy I felt the first time I read a Roethke poem, and it makes me sad that so few contemporary poets seem to feel the urge to work in that tradition. I’m not saying contemporary poetry is no good, just that much of it doesn’t appeal to me on a basic level; I can appreciate it intellectually, but, well, as a great American said, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” I think that’s why I read so much Russian poetry these days: the Russians have never taken to free verse, and the age-old tradition of poetic form is still very much alive.

The other day I ran into a wonderful word I hadn’t been familiar with, chunter: “To mutter, murmur; to grumble, find fault, complain” (OED). It’s been around since the 16th century and has some great 20th-century citations:
1921 D. H. LAWRENCE Sea & Sardinia iv. 135 A thin old woman.. was chuntering her head off because it was her seat.
1949 C. FRY Lady’s not for Burning 27 You.. fog-blathering, Chin-chuntering, liturgical,.. base old man!
1957 ‘N. SHUTE’ On Beach i. 2 The baby stirred, and started chuntering and making little whimpering noises.
1965 Spectator 5 Mar. 295/3 An old man.. chunters a bit of folk tune which the solo horn dreamily perpetuates.
And in Nabokov’s Pushkin commentary I ran into yet another of his annoying archaisms dredged up to delight himself and perplex everyone else: pedee “A serving boy, a groom, a lackey” (sample cite: 1779 B. BENDO Matrimonial Museum 53 And lo! the pedee dare not speak, for fear He should the trollop’s mind displease). What exactly is the problem with serving boy, groom, or lackey, Vladimir Vladimirovich? (I would probably still find it irritating if I encountered it in one of his novels, but in a novel you’re entitled to play with language however you like; in a reference work designed to help the ordinary reader of English appreciate Pushkin, there’s no excuse for it.)

From the preface to May Sarton’s The Fur Person:

Before Judy and I moved to 14 Wright St. in Cambridge,
we lived for a few years in the early 1950s in a
rented house at 9 Maynard Place. When Judy had a
sabbatical leave, we sublet to Vladimir Nabokov and
his beautiful wife, Véra, and they were delighted to
accept Tom Jones as a cherished paying guest during
their stay. What a bonanza for a gentleman cat to be
taken into such a notable family with kind Véra and
Felidae-lover Vladimir! And to hear cat language
translated into Russian.

My study at Maynard Place was at the top of the house;
a small, sunny room, one wall lined with books, and on
the windowed side a long trestle table and a straight
chair. Nabokov removed this austere object and
replaced it with a huge overstuffed armchair where he
could write half lying down. Tom Jones soon learned
that he was welcome to install himself at the very
heart of genius on Nabokov’s chest, there to make
starfish paws, purr ecstatically, and sometimes —
rather painfully for the object of his pleasure —
knead. I like to imagine that Lolita was being dreamed
that year and that Tom Jones’ presence may have had
something to do with the creation of that sensuous
world. At any rate, for him it was a year of grandiose
meals and subtle passions.

According to a BBC News story:

Portugal’s parliament has voted to introduce contentious changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way.

The agreement standardises numerous spellings and adds three letters – k, w and y – to the alphabet…

The agreement will standardise spelling by removing silent consonants in order for words to be spelt more phonetically, turning, for example “optimo” (great) into “otimo”.

Needless to say, petitions of protest are being signed by laudatores temporis acti, but this is a nice example of national pride being set aside in the interests of international understanding and good sense (Brazil has over 180,000,000 speakers, versus Portugal’s 10,000,000). Thanks to peacay for the heads-up!

Jennifer Howard’s discussion in The Chronicle of Higher Education of the new translation of the Aeneid by Sarah Ruden (found via Avva) is thought-provoking on the fact that so few women have tried translating the classic epics; at least from the snippet from Book 2 she chooses for comparison, Ruden’s version is head and shoulders above other recent attempts, with its combination of concision and poetic force. Here is Vergil’s Latin:

        …dextrae se parvus Iulus
implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis;
pone subit coniunx. ferimur per opaca locorum,
et me, quem dudum non ulla iniecta movebant
tela neque adverso glomerati ex agmine Grai,
nunc omnes terrent aurae, sonus excitat omnis
suspensum et pariter comitique onerique timentem.

The translations are below the fold.

[Read more…]

Joel of Far Outliers has a post that begins with his student years:

During my dissertation fieldwork in Papua New Guinea over thirty years ago, I discovered that a bunch of Austronesian languages in Morobe Province mark their relative clauses in a manner that is pretty rare from a typological point of view: they mark both the beginning and the end of the clauses. An English equivalent would go something like, “The language [that they were speaking that] sounded vaguely familiar,” or “The language [which they were speaking such] sounded vaguely familiar.”
The only other place where I could find languages that did the same was in Central Africa, and my dissertation cited a 1976 article by the great French linguist Claude Hagège which mentioned by name two Nilo-Saharan languages, Moru and Mangbetu, and two Niger-Congo languages, Mbum and M’baka. Over the years, I lost track of anything pertaining to those languages except their names.

But recently his interest revived and he thought to ask his brother, who “had spent years working in the (at that time) Central African Empire for the US Peace Corps and USAID while I was writing my dissertation in linguistics,” and his brother asked “his linguist friend Raymond Boyd at CNRS whether he could think of Adamawa-Ubangi languages that used such markers for relative clauses,” and Boyd responded “Right off, I can’t think of one that DOESN’T.” Read Joel’s post for examples of this interesting phenomenon.

The latest post at Joel’s Far Outliers links to interesting posts at Khanya and No-sword about insider/outsider terminology; all of it is worth reading and thinking about, but what particularly caught my Languagehat eye was the South African term makwerekwere, meaning according to one blogger simply ‘foreigners’ and to another “Black immigrants from the rest of Africa, especially Nigerians.” The ubiquity of the human need to have derogatory terms for the Other is endlessly depressing, but like Joel, I have a specific question: which language does makwerekwere come from? Steve of Khanya responded “Sorry, I don’t know the origin. It’s a piece of interlinguistic slang, as far as I am aware.” I’ve looked it up in my Zulu and Xhosa dictionaries, with no result. So: anybody know?

In this post, I mentioned that “V.N. Volóshinov’s seminal books Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) have recently been said to be the work of his mentor Bakhtin”; this controversy (along with the parallel one of The Formal Method in Literary Criticism, attributed to Pavel Medvedev) is thoroughly discussed in Matt Steinglass’s International Man of Mystery: The Battle over Mikhail Bakhtin, written for the late lamented Lingua Franca a decade ago. I first read about the Steinglass article on Philip Dangler’s Mikhail Bakhtin Manuscript Smoking Page, where it is said to be “(no longer online),” and I’d like to apologize to Philip now for calling his Bakhtin page “excitable” in this post—it was meant as friendly ribbing, but seems to have bothered him. (He quotes it twice, in the end saying “Minor changes to this excitable page made in January, 2008. Not intended as an authoritative source; written by a 21-year-old.”) Thanks to frequent commenter Kári for the link!