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I’ve been rereading Evgenii Onegin and appreciating more than ever the line-by-line brilliance of the poetry. When I was young and foolish and first studying Russian, I thought of Pushkin as a romantic; the first poem of his I read, the anthology piece “Я вас любил” (“I loved you [once]; perhaps love has not entirely been extinguished in my heart…”), seemed to me (a hormone-soaked adolescent) a passionate declaration, and it sank instantly into my long-term memory. I still love the poem, but I realize now that it’s not romantic at all. Pushkin, despite being born into a generation that was besotted with Anne Radcliffe, August Lafontaine, and other conjurers of dank vaults, far-off lands, and improbably chaste romances, was at heart as much a classicist as Walter Savage Landor, and “I loved you” is quite comparable to Landor’s own anthology piece “Rose Aylmer.” Both take a powerful human emotion and distill it into eight perfectly balanced lines, unforgettable compounds of vowels, consonants, and rhythms. Note that the point is not to “express” the emotion (which is what we’re all desperate to do as hormone-soaked adolescents writing terrible poetry) but to distill it, to extract from it an essence that will power the engine of a great poem. Pushkin, of course, is a far greater poet than Landor, and he is not only a classicist; his Mozartean combination of classical expression and frequently romantic sensibility can be found in English poetry only in Coleridge. What Nabokov calls “the extraordinary lines, among his greatest, that Pushkin added in 1824, four years after its publication, to the beginning of Ruslan i Lyudmila” (‘By a sea-cove [stands] a green oak,/ on that oak a golden chain,/ and day and night a learned tomcat/ walks on the chain around [the oak]…’) is the only thing in any language I know that can be set beside Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

What I would like to do is to take a stanza from Chapter 2 of Evgenii Onegin (I will provide Cyrillic, transliteration, and literal translation) and try to explain how it works in terms that would not offend the easily offended Nabokov, and then to take a bit of Nabokov (in Russian) and show that it works in a similar fashion; hopefully we’ll all learn something in the process. Here is the stanza (II.28):

Она любила на балконе
Предупреждать зари восход,
Когда на бледном небосклоне
Звезд исчезает хоровод,
И тихо край земли светлеет,
И вестник утра, ветер веет,
И всходит постепенно день.
Зимой, когда ночная тень
Полмиром доле обладает
И доле в праздной тишине,
При отуманенной луне,
Восток ленивый почивает,
В привычный час пробуждена,
Вставала при свечах она.

Here’s a transliteration; stress is on the penult unless marked:

Oná lyubila na balkone
Preduprezhdát’ zarí voskhód,
Kogdá na blednom nebosklone
Zvyózd ischezaet khorovód,
I tikho krai zemlí svetleet,
I vestnik utra, veter veet,
I vskhodit postepenno den’.
Zimói, kogdá nochnaya ten’
Polmirom dole obladaet
I dole v prazdnoi tishiné,
Pri otumánnenoi luné,
Vostók lenivyi pochivaet,
V privychnyi chas probuzhdená,
Vstavala pri svechákh oná.

And a literal translation:

She loved on the balcony
to anticipate the rising of the dawn,
when on the pale (sky above the) horizon
the stars’ ring-dance disappears,
and quietly the edge of the earth brightens,
and the herald of morning, the wind, blows,
and gradually rises the day.
In winter, when the night’s shadow
possesses half the world longer,
and longer in idle silence
by (the light of) the misted moon
the lazy East sleeps,
awakened at the accustomed hour
she would get up by (the light of) candles.

The first thing to note is that the wonderfully flexible “Onegin stanza” of fourteen lines (ababccddeffegg) is here, unusually, divided in half, with a strong break after line 7 (the more common break is after line 8, so that rhymes are kept together). In fact, when you get to line 8 it almost seems that a separate poem is beginning; after the stately description of the sunrise in the first seven lines (oddly reminiscent of the mood and rhythm of MacLeish’s “You, Andrew Marvell“: “To feel the always coming on/ The always rising of the night… And strange at Ecbatan the trees…”) comes the abrupt “Zimói…” [‘In winter…’], which turns out to introduce another perspective on her early rising. The whole thing is as circular as the khorovód (which Nabokov uncharacteristically mistranslates “choral dance”); it starts and ends with the word oná ‘she,’ and she gets up in the last line to go out to the balcony of the first (“A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun”).

But it’s the complicated machine made of words nestled within this framework that kept me going back to the stanza until I had it memorized. The first line is almost ostentatiously bland: “She loved upon the balcony” could perfectly well be followed by a description of having tea and looking at the garden, or reading the kind of romantic novels mentioned in the following stanza. (Side note: there’s a funny story here about a teacher who wanted to declaim the opening of this stanza to his tenth-grade class, got as far as “Oná lyubila na balkone”—and couldn’t come up with the second line, leaving an image that aroused the hilarity of his students.) But then we hit the mouth-filling and unexpected verb preduprezhdát’, which now usually means ‘warn’ or ‘notify’—Nabokov translates it “prevene,” saying “I chose to use this obsolete verb in order to stress that the Russian word (a translation of the French prévenir or devancer) is obsolete, too”—and the phrase ‘rising of the dawn,’ which seems to have religious connotations in Russian as it does in English (Genesis 32:24 “And Jacob remained alone; and a man wrestled with him until the rising of the dawn” = “И остался Яаков один, и боролся человек с ним до восхода зари”), and we realize something special is going on.

Notice the pattern of consonants in the first line: n-l-b-l-n-b-l-k-n; without the interruption of the voiceless k (a crunchy crouton), there would be an exact repetition of the b-l-n sequence. Now look at the end of the third line: na blednom nebosklone, n-b–l-d-n-m-n-b-sk-l–n. This is the kind of detail you don’t intellectually notice without the kind of close analysis I’m doing here, but the ear (if you have an ear for poetry) notices, and it makes you want to say the lines over and over. Meanwhile, the third and fourth lines each end with similarly constructed, unusual, resonant words, nebosklón (‘sky-slope’) and khorovód, which produce a sort of quasi-rhyme.

Next come the three lines that remind me of MacLeish:

I tikho krai zemlí svetleet,
I vestnik utra, veter veet,
I vskhodit postepenno den’.

Notice, surrounding the showy alliteration of the middle line (vest- ut- vet- veet), the subtler interweaving of t’s, kh’s, v’s, and s’s in the outer lines, all bound together with the repeated initial I… I… I ‘and… and… and’; the rhythm of the third line, with the “scud” (Nabokov’s term for a stressless foot, with its “expressive delaying note”) in the third foot adding to the impression of finality I mentioned above.

I will mention also the judicious sprinkling of obsolete meanings (preduprezhdát’), words (pochivaet), and forms (dole ‘longer,’ now dol’she); the leisurely, delaying syntax of lines 8-12; and the irresistible sonic puzzle of line 13, which sounds almost like two long words, fprivychnyichás probuzhdená, with a repetition of pr…á and a matching up of the teasingly similar sounds v/b, y/u, ch/zh that make the whole thing into a verbal worry bead you can mutter as a kind of mantra.

Now notice that the entire stanza, to the kind of person who reads for plot, reduces to “She liked to get up early.” This is not the kind of reader Pushkin is writing for, and that goes double for Nabokov, who probably never wrote a sentence he did not roll around in his mouth several times to make sure it produced the effect he wanted. I take, pretty much at random, a fragment of a long sentence from the fourth paragraph of Drugie berega (the Russian equivalent of Speak, Memory): “судя по густоте солнечного света, тотчас заливающего мою память, по лапчатому его очерку, явно зависящему от переслоений и колебаний лопастных дубовых листьев, промеж которых он падает на песок” [‘judging by the thickness of the sunlight, immediately flooding my memory, by its palmate outline, manifestly dependent on the interlayings and vibrations of the laciniate oak leaves between which it falls onto the sand’]. Here’s a transliteration (again, penultimate stresses are unmarked, and I’ve added a few y’s to aid pronunciation):
sudyá po gustoté sólnechnovo sveta, totchas zaliváyushchevo moyú pamyat’, po lápchatomu yevó ócherku, yavno zavísyashchemu ot peresloyénii i kolebánii lópastnykh dubóvykh list’yev, promézh kotorykh on pádayet na pesók…

Very similar things are going on here, though of course without the framework of rhyme and meter. The fragment starts and ends with simple, everyday language (“judging by the thickness of the sunlight … between which it falls onto the sand”); in between, it takes detours through the poetic (zaliváyushchevo moyú pamyat’ ‘flooding my memory’), the archaic (ócherk in the sense ‘outline’ rather than today’s ‘sketch, study’), and the scientific (lápchaty ‘palmate,’ peresloyénie ‘interlaying, interstratification,’ kolebánie ‘vibration, oscillation,’ lópastnyi ‘laciniate’ [OED: “Cut into deep and narrow irregular segments; jagged, slashed”]), all of which are hallmarks of Nabokov’s style in English as well. Note the interplay of sounds: the s’s in sudyá po gustoté sólnechnovo sveta, totchas, the z-shch- in zaliváyushchevo and zavísyashchemu, the l’s in lápchatomu … peresloyénii i kolebánii lópastnykh … list’yev,, the p’s in promézh kotorykh on pádayet na pesók… I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. If you find this kind of verbal play enjoyable, you will get much more out of Nabokov than if you don’t.

For comparison, here is the same fragment in Speak, Memory: “Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery…”

My wife and I unexpectedly finished Proust last night (I’d thought it would last another day) and sat up talking about it for a while, and now I’m going to try to organize my thoughts about the year-and-a-half-long experience and inflict them on you. My lengthy ramblings will be below the cut; up front I want to say that they will, as you might expect, contain spoilers, so if you’re planning to get around to reading the book someday and don’t want to know in advance who dies and who comes to sudden realizations about Life and Time, don’t click on the “Continue reading.” And since I will be mainly engaged in complaining, I should state for the record that Proust is a great writer, A la Recherche is a great book even if it could stand to lose a few pounds, and I don’t regret a moment of the time I’ve devoted to it. Furthermore, I accept in advance all charges of philistinism and ignorance; I am but a humble ruminant grazing the vast fields of literature, and what I don’t know about great writing would fill Borges’s Library of Babel. But I have my opinions nonetheless, and you’re welcome to join me in my ruminations if you accept the above Terms of Service.

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My wife has been baking bread lately (and very good it is too), and this morning as I was gazing fondly at the latest loaf the phrase “staff of life” popped into my head and I wondered about it. The metaphor seemed clear—a staple food is something you lean on—but still somewhat odd, and I wondered if there were a backstory. I went, of course, to the OED, where I found the phrase as definition 4c (first cite: 1638 PENKETHMAN Artach. Ajb, “Bread is worth all, being the Staffe of life,” where Artach. = Artachthos; or a new booke declaring the assise or weight of bread); definition 4b, which gave rise to it, is:

In the Biblical phr. to break the staff of bread (literally from Heb. maṭṭēh ‘leχem, Vulg. baculum panis), to diminish or cut off the supply of food.
1382, 1388 WYCLIF Lev. xxvi. 26. 1560 BIBLE (Geneva) Lev. xxvi. 26. Ps. cv. 16. Ezek. iv. 16. [And so 1611]. c1586 C’TESS PEMBROKE Ps. CV. iv, Scarse had he spoken, When famine came, the staff of bread was broken. 1596 BARLOW Three Serm. i. 121 God in his lawe threatneth that he will breake the staffe of bread, that is, bread shall not nourish them that eate it.

So it’s a metaphor specific to the Hebrew Bible that managed to get solidly rooted in the English language; a quick look through my dictionaries suggests English is unique in that respect—staff of life is defined by phrases that translate to ‘most important foodstuff,’ ‘support of life,’ and the like. (The Hebrew word mateh, incidentally, now [also] means ‘military staff’: mateh ha-klali ‘General Staff.’)

I close with a quote from a letter by the 14-year-old Emily Dickinson (Thursday, September 26. 1845, to her friend Abiah Root):

I am going to learn to make bread tomorrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up mixing Flour, Milk, Saleratus &c with a deal of grace. I advise you if you dont know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.

Saleratus (sal aeratus ‘aerated salt’) was a nineteenth-century form of baking powder; the stress is on the penult (sal-uh-RATE-us).

I note that the Italian translation appended to the letter at the linked site renders the final sentence, with “the staff of life,” as follows: “Se non sai come fare l’alimento primario ti raccomando di imparare in fretta.”

A couple of years ago I mentioned “teju cole, a temporary blog reporting on a visit home by a Nigerian long resident in the U.S.; it’s full of beauty, sadness, and keen observations on life in Nigeria and in general,” adding “I recommend it to your attention before it vanishes away at the end of the month.” Towards the end of the month I provided a few extended quotes in this post, and I figured that would be the end of it—anyone who didn’t catch it during its brief run was out of luck.
But Cassava Republic Press, based in Abuja, Nigeria, and aiming “to make quality contemporary literature available to the West African market at an affordable price,” has published Every Day is for the Thief, a novel based on the contents of the blog, and I’m here to report that it holds up excellently well in permanent form (with lovely photographs presumably by the author). The publisher says “His subtle and nuanced prose explores themes as diverse as the minor joys of daily Lagosian existence to the crudities of contemporary forms of corruption”; the Author’s Note says “What could possibly be said about this most complex of cities that could compete with the reality?… I have sought to capture a contemporary moment in the life of the city in which I grew up.” I love cities and descriptions of them, and I love good prose, and I relished this small, intense book more than I can say. (And it has an epigraph from the wonderful poet Maria Benet, whose book Mapmaker of Absences I celebrated here and whose poem “A Dish of Peaches in Cluj” was the occasion for what is still perhaps my favorite LH thread ever.) I don’t know if you can come by a copy of the novel outside of West Africa, but if you make the effort It’s available at Amazon.com; if you give it a try, you won’t regret it.

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On a day already full of shocks, like Mark Liberman’s leaving Language Log for the Science News section of the BBC and Anatoly Vorobei (actually Warraughby) turning to English-only blogging, I have an announcement of my own to make. I have decided that fighting spammers—I mean, online entrepreneurs—is taking too much of my time and energy, so I have decided to join them. Enough boring language trivia! Look for future posts to feature pharmaceutical enhancements, mortgage possibilities, and ways to make good money from your own home with only a modest investment. Tomorrow: a guest post by Mrs. Mariam Abacha, the widow of the late Gen. Sani Abacha, former Nigeria military head of state who died mysteriously as a result of cardiac arrest. Her family has been going through immense harassment including undue police restriction and molestation, and the family accounts have been frozen by the government for reasons that are rather vindictive. I know you’ll want to hear her story, and find out what you can do about it!

National Grammar Day, that is; this is a month late, but I thought I’d share with you Z. D. Smith’s response to the idiotic celebration of prescriptivism I barked at here:

…people have better things to do with their language than simply convey facts. In the imaginations of the dryest of grammarians, perhaps, language—not speech, though; written language—is simply or reductively the tool that we use to transmit and record factual information. Everybody else, though, and I mean everybody, is answering to a series of more pressing concerns. Even when speaking prose, we are participating in aesthetic creation. Every utterance obeys rules of meter and rhythm as fundamental to language as its grammatical structure….
Sometimes it makes a body really want to rap these critics on the head; don’t you see that people are speaking here? Do you really imagine that people who say ‘between you and I’ don’t have anything better to do with their words than see that they conform to some superficial notion of grammar? Can you allow in your worldview the possibility that the greengrocer or urban youth has his own sense of language, and is actively wielding it, rather than simply trying and failing to follow all the rules?

Indeed.

Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, gave a talk in 2005 on “How Johnson’s Dictionary Became the First Dictionary,” going into the amusing and instructive history of the mistaken notion, doggedly repeated for centuries now, that Johnson’s was the “first English dictionary.” He says “If we adjust our criteria and allow ‘the first dictionary’ to mean ‘the first standard dictionary’ — the first one widely perceived as an authoritative standard — then Johnson’s does seem to become number one. In fact there are hints that Johnson’s was the first authoritative dictionary in writings published even before Johnson was born…” and decides “in this sense it may be true, for Johnson’s was the first dictionary about which such grand pronouncements were made.”

All this is very interesting, but apparently he kept mulling over the issues, and last year produced an even richer article, “Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence” (abstract, pdf). He starts with the same observation about Johnson’s elusive primacy, but quickly goes in a different direction:

I suspect the very category of “a good dictionary” means nothing to many people.

But it has meant an awful lot to the people who write those dictionaries. One might think lexicographers are a meek and retiring lot, but history shows that they can be surprisingly truculent. Today I would like to describe some of the quarrels that have made the history of English dictionaries so fascinating for almost half a millennium. During that time lexicographers have engaged in countless altercations, and they’ve been known to get nasty—their debates are sometimes little more dignified than knife fights. Johnson himself noted, “Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach,” and few even manage that; the usual lot of the dictionary writer is “to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect.” …

It may seem funny today, but seventeenth-century tempers often flared. One of the more bloodthirsty lexicographical rivalries began in 1656, when Thomas Blount published the biggest English dictionary to date, Glossographia. Two years later there appeared A New World of English Words, compiled by Edward Phillips, nephew of the poet John Milton. Phillips’s title picks up on some of the excitement of the discovery of the real New World, which was still a comparatively novel subject in 1658—this is before there was a permanent European settlement in New Jersey, when New Brunswick was still an unsettled region known by the unappealing name of Prigmore’s Swamp. Phillips, however, soon found himself in an ethical swamp of his own making, because his New World of English Words was not as new as he made it out to be—many of the entries were lifted straight out of Blount’s Glossographia. Blount, unamused, responded with a peevish pamphlet, A World of Errors Discovered in the New World of Words. …

Dictionaries, in other words, have been stealing from one another for a long time, and it continues even now. Today it is considered bad form to lift whole entries out of a rival’s dictionary, but everyone looks to the competition for guidance. This approach does have some risks, though—for one, it tends to perpetuate errors. Sometimes they are intentional, part of a long tradition of clever frauds in reference books.

And he goes on to discuss the kind of copyright traps (sometimes known as “Mountweazels”) I discussed here.

He mentions the fact that the earliest dictionaries concerned themselves exclusively with “hard words”:

Of course, Johnson’s Dictionary contains many of these hard words, and for word lovers they can be delightful. There you’ll find nidification, meaning “the act of building nests,” and gemelliparous, “bearing twins.” Scrabble players will delight in words like ophiophagous (“Serpent-eating”), galericulate (“Covered as with a hat”), or decacuminated (“Having the top cut off”). But Johnson was not entirely comfortable with them: “I am not always certain,” he said, “that they are read in any book but the works of lexicographers” (preface, pp. 87–88). He was right. Consider the word naulage, which appears in nearly a hundred books in the eighteenth century alone. The problem is that every one of those books is a dictionary. They all tell us that naulage means the fee paid to carry freight by sea, but there’s no indication the word was ever used even by those paid to carry freight by sea.

(I suspect he’s not a Scrabble player, or he’d know those words are too long for the game.) He proceeds to discuss the difficulty of defining “easy” words, the impact of American nationalism on Webster’s dictionaries and U.S. spelling, and the “lexicographical firestorm” over Webster’s Third, but I’ll let you read all that for yourself. Thanks go to aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org for the link.

A fascinating thread at postumia (Russian LJ, found via Avva) investigates the origin of the Russian fake-Italian phrase Финита ля комедия! [finita la com(m)edia!]; the blogger describes her shock on discovering, upon hearing a classmate corrected in an Italian class, that the actual Italian phrase is “La commedia è finita” (well known from the end of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci). She first suspects it’s a misremembering of the line from the opera that somehow got established in Russian culture, but a commenter traces it back to Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (written in 1839, over a half-century before the opera): “-Finita la comedia! – сказал я доктору” [‘”Finita la comedia!” I said to the doctor’; note the misspelled “comedia”]. It’s not clear whether Lermontov simply mangled the phrase or misunderstood the context it can be used in (as a dependent clause, e.g. “finita la commedia, gli spetattori sono andati dal teatro”). And another commenter makes reference to the supposed dying words of Augustus Caesar, “Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.”
It’s all most interesting, but the best thing that came out of it for me was the discovery of the Corpus of the Russian Language. The internet gets better and better.

Still reading Ostler, I’ve come to a nice quote from Plutarch about Cleopatra:

There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.*

The footnote reads:

Plutarch, Antony, xxvii.4-5. All these languages must have been heard on the streets of Alexandria in Cleopatra’s day. Ethiopian would be the language of Kush, and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. Trogodyte would have been spoken along the Red Sea coast, and is perhaps the ancestor of modern Beja. The Medjay, supposed to be the same, had been an eastern desert people employed in Egypt as police in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries (Gardiner 1957 [Egyptian Grammar]: 183, n. 2). There is no mention here of Libyan—or of Latin, although Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek.

“Trogodyte” should, of course according to Plutarch, be Troglodyte; if it had just occurred once, I’d have corrected it as an isolated typo, but twice deserves a slap on the wrist. Proofreading! Do it! [“Troglodyte” apparently is a folk etymology, but one already established by Plutarch’s time—see comments.]

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Geoff Pullum, Language Log‘s resident curmudgeon (no offense meant, I’m one myself), believes there are lots more prepositions in English than most people realize; he recently discovered outwith, which I was familiar with, and today he’s happened on furth, which is new to me as well. He found it at a University of Glasgow Faculty of Arts page concerning transfer of credit whose headline reads “Grades received furth of Glasgow.” As he says, furth of Glasgow means ‘away from or outside of Glasgow’; this Scots usage is paralleled by English forth of (furth and forth are historically the same word), but the latter had its heyday half a millennium ago (Whan your mayster is forth of towne ‘when your master is out of town’). Here‘s the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue entry and here‘s the Scottish National Dictionary one (first supplement, second supplement). From the fifteenth century (Gilbert of the Haye’s Prose Manuscript): “The Romaynes put thame furth of the toune”; from February 2000: “At least 90% of all Presbyterians in Scotland still adhere to the national Kirk, which despite its woes and stumblings has still a bigger part in the nation’s life than the Church of England can claim furth of Hadrian’s Wall.”

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