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Yesterday’s wood s lot is even fuller than usual of excellence; busy working against deadline, I can only point to Forrest Gander on “The Power and Politics of Translation,” the announcement that The Atlantic “is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors. Now, in addition to such offerings as blogs, author dispatches, slideshows, interviews, and videos, readers can also browse issues going back to 1995, along with hundreds of articles dating as far back as 1857, the year The Atlantic was founded,” and particularly the selections from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a remarkable poet whose site links to many poems and essays, among which is a long and thoughtful piece on Zukofsky. Thanks for the goodies, Mark, and a belated happy birthday to your mom!

A while back I got a package in the mail that turned out to be a gift from my pal pf (long-time readers may remember his adventures in Siberia): a copy of the NYRB reprint of G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. Edwards was born on Guernsey in 1899 and lived there until 1917, when he joined the army; he lived in England from the 1920s on and never returned to Guernsey, but in his mind he never left, and in his last years he was working on this amazing novel. It has no real plot, it’s just an old man rambling on about his life in an English strongly influenced by the Guernésiais (Guernsey Norman French, or “patois”) he grew up speaking, but the writing is so effective I find myself reading half the sentences aloud, and the stories he tells about his relatives and neighbors add up to a complex and often moving chronicle of island life in the days before modernization (which the narrator, and presumably the author, dislikes intensely). It actually reminds me quite a bit of Proust, except with fewer aristocrats and more farm animals (and if anybody’s wondering, in our bedtime reading—as mentioned in the thread that would not die—my wife and I have gotten to the last volume, and we’ll be looking for new reading material next month). It’s taken me longer to get around to it than it would have because my wife picked it up, started reading it, and refused to give it up. At first she said it was the strangest book she’d ever read, and then she said she didn’t want to finish reading it. But finally she did, and I got my chance at it.

The reason I’m impelled to write about it today is that I just hit a passage that I’m going to incorporate into my anthology of Good Attitudes to Language:

There was one thing [Raymond] was ashamed of his mother for, and that was the way she spoke English. He was everlastingly teasing her for saying ‘tree’ for ‘three’ and ‘true’ for ‘through’ and for not sounding her aitches and all the rest of it. I didn’t like him for that. It was partly Hetty’s own fault, because she had never let him speak in patois, from the days he went to the Misses Cohu’s School. She wanted him to grow up to speak English like the gentry. Well, he did speak good English; but he had a gift for words and I think would have spoken well in any language he set his mind to learn. I didn’t mind him being particular about the words he used himself, but he was fussy about the way other people spoke. I said, ‘It’s what a person say that matter. It isn’t how he say it.’

Of course, it is how he say it as well, but being well said isn’t the same thing as being said “correctly.”

One reason I love words and their histories is that there are too many of them to ever master; no matter how much I know, there’s always plenty more I don’t. You know the phrase truck farming? I always assumed it had something to do with carrying produce in trucks. Not so! There are two different nouns truck, one from French troc ‘barter’ which came to mean “‘Traffic’, intercourse, communication, dealings. Now usu. in negative contexts: to have no truck with (a person or thing), etc.” and “Commodities for barter” (1688 CLAYTON in Phil. Trans. XVII. 792 They must carry all sort of Truck that trade thither, having one Commodity to pass off another), whence U.S. “Market-garden produce; hence as a general term for culinary vegetables” (1784 Maryland Jrnl. 14 Dec., Advt. (Thornton), A large Room.. for his Customers to lodge in, and deposit their Market-truck) and truck farm (1866 N. & Q. 3rd Ser. IX. 323/1 A truck garden, a truck farm, is a market-garden or farm).
Truck “A wheeled vehicle for carrying heavy weights,” on the other hand, first meant “A small solid wooden wheel or roller” and comes either from Latin trochus = Greek τροχός ‘hoop’ or from truckle ‘small wheel,’ ultimately from the same root.

The last of the Six Significant Landscapes by Wallace Stevens:

          VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Early Stevens is irresistible.

Joel at Far Outliers has a post about the German dialect he encountered on his recent visit to Alsace:

My first introduction to Elsässisch (Alsatian German) came in the form of bilingual street signs in Strasbourg, where the main street through Grand Île in the heart of the old city is named both Grand’Rue and Lang Stross. (A street of the same name in Pfalzgrafenweiler on the German side of the border was labeled only in High German, Lange Strasse, even though the locals speak an Alemannic dialect similar to Alsatian.)
Later I found a useful little Werterbüechel Elsässisch–Hochditsch / Wörterbüchlein Hochdeutsch–Elsässisch, by Serge Kornmann (Yoran Embanner, 2005). So I thought I’d share a few gleanings from that tiny source, focusing on how to get from High German to Alsatian, since the former is likely to be more familiar to most readers.

For some reason I tend to like German dialects more than the official language, and this is no exception. How can you not love a word like Schnuffelrutsch (lit. ‘sniff-slide’) ‘mouth organ’?

Antoine Cassar calls these poems “mosaics” (adding a clarifying “multilingual sonnets”). I’ve seen plenty of poems that incorporate material from a second language, but I’ve never seen any with material from five woven together in this fashion:

C’est la vie

Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb,
de cuatro a dos a tres, del río a la mar,
play the fool, suffer school, żunżana ddur iddur,
engage-toi, perds ta foi, le regole imparar,

kul u sum, aħra u bul, chase the moon, meet your doom,
walk on ice, roll your dice, col destino danzar,
métro, boulot, dodo, titla’ x-xemx, terġa’ tqum,
decir siempre mañana y nunca mañanar,

try to fly, touch the sky, hit the stone, break a bone,
sell your soul for a loan to call those bricks your home,
fall in love, rise above, fall apart, stitch your heart,

che sarà? ça ira! plus rien de nous sera,
minn sodda għal sodda niġru tiġrija kontra l-baħħ,
sakemm tinbela’ ruħna mill-ġuf mudlam ta’ l-art.

Cassar explains:

Mużajk is an experiment in multilingual verse, an attempt to combine the sounds of different languages into a single rhythm and a single thought.

Written in a blend of English, French, Italian, Maltese and Spanish (in no particular order or proportion), but occasionally also peppered with phrases from other languages, the mużajki or mosaics endeavour to explore the possibilities of braiding together the sounds and cadences, literary memories and motifs of different tongues. The successful interaction of the various elements will depend on how well the seemingly multiple voices are gelled into one by the rhythm and logic of the poem….

When Dave Bonta sent me the link, he said he wanted “to share the page with the only two people I know who might be able to understand almost all the lines as written (except, I suppose, for the Maltese),” and my ability to read all the languages (except, of course, for the Maltese) was certainly a factor in my enjoyment—I don’t know if a monolingual reader would enjoy them at all. At any rate, it’s a fascinating experiment; thanks, Dave!
Below is Cassar’s English translation of the poem I quoted (he helpfully supplies them for all his poems):

Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb, from four to two to three, from the river to the sea, play the fool, suffer school, the wasp goes round and round*, get involved, lose your faith, learn the rules,
eat and fast, shit and piss, chase the moon, meet your doom, walk on ice, roll your dice, with destiny dance, metro, work, sleep, the sun rises, you get up again, to say always tomorrow and never tomorrow reach,
try to fly, touch the sky, hit the stone, break a bone, sell your soul for a loan to call those bricks your home, fall in love, rise above, fall apart, stitch your heart,
what will be? it will go well, nothing more of us will be, from bed to bed we run a race against the void, until our soul is swallowed by the dark womb of the land.

* the name of a Maltese children’s game

Update (July 2024). I have provided archived versions of the links, and I note with pleasure that the audio clips on Cassar’s page still work.

Llyfrau O’r Gorffennol/Books from the Past is “an on-line collection of books of [Welsh] national cultural interest which have long been out of print.” (You can read much more about it here.) So far it has ten books in Welsh and eight in English; an example of the former is Caniadau by John Morris Jones (1907), “A volume of poetry, including original poems and translations from various languages into Welsh. Includes the famous translation of the verses of Omar Khayyâm,” and one of the latter is The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shon Catti by T. J. Llewelyn Prichard (1828), “A historical novel about Twm Siôn Cati, a legendary Welsh folk-hero from the sixteenth century.” A nicely done site. (Via MetaFilter.)

Update (July 2019). The site appears to be long gone; here‘s an archive link.

Almost five years ago, in this post, I mentioned Alistair Morrison’s 1965 book Let Stalk Strine, written under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder (“alphabetical order”); now it’s online, courtesy of textfiles.com. A sample should give the idea:

Dingo: A word with two separate, unrelated meanings. When intoned with equal emphasis on the syllables it is the negative response to the question ‘Jeggoda?’ As in:
Q: Jeggoda the tennis?
A: Nar, dingo. Sorten TV.
When, however, the emphasis is on the first syllable, dingo becomes a parliamentary term of mild reproof.

Thanks, Dinesh!

In cleaning off my desk just now I found a quote I’d copied down back in 2002, which went as follows:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.

It seemed to be attributed to the bibliophile A. E. Newton (1863-1940), but I thought I’d better google it to be sure. What I found was confusion.

In the first place, many sources had, after the word “acquired,” the phrase “(by passionate devotion to them)”—with or without parentheses—which certainly reads better. But to find what the correct form was, an accurate citation was needed, and there was none to be had. Eventually I turned up page 78 of Newton’s A Magnificent Farce: And Other Diversions of a Book-collector (1921), which has: “…it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read. Who was it who said, ‘I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul’s reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish’? Whoever it was, I agree with him…” So there we have a portion of the original quote (in slightly different form), but attributed to the mysterious “Who was it.” This could, of course, be a coy way of quoting oneself. But what about the rest?

Next the quest brought me to The Anatomy of Bibliomania by Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948), which seems to be a collection of quotes on the pleasures of books and book-collecting, italicized and footnoted (good man!), stitched together with Jackson’s own commentary in roman type. On page 183 (continuing onto page 184) we find:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired by passionate devotion to them produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity, and that this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish,¹ an argument which some have used in defence of the giddy raptures invoked by wine.

The footnote refers us to “A.E. Newton, A Magnificent Farce, 78,” which we have already visited. So far, so good; the italicized bits are from Newton, the rest is from Jackson, and the whole thing at some point got attributed to the former.

But what about the last part, “we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance”? The internet holds hundreds of instances of it, always attached to the previous quote by ellipses, but Google Books can’t find it at all. Is it from some work of Newton’s not yet digitized? Was it tacked on by some anonymous compiler of Meaningful Quotations who thought it would suit the context? Alas, it is not in The Yale Book of Quotations, nor The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, nor Bartlett’s, so I can only speculate, and ponder for the thousandth time the difficulty of pinning down “famous quotations.”

The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti (whom I’ve quoted before) has a new essay in Words Without Borders called “Translations on the Market.” Overall it’s a rather bizarre effort that seems almost a parody of academic lack of interest in what the rest of us call the real world; Venuti thinks publishers are doing a cultural disservice by publishing occasional translations and insisting on their making money before taking on more books by the same author, and suggests they “must take an approach that is much more critically detached, more theoretically astute as well as aesthetically sensitive. They must publish not only translations of foreign texts and authors that conform to their own tastes, but more than one foreign text and more than one foreign author, and they must make strategic choices so as to sketch the cultural situations and traditions that enable a particular text to be significant in its own culture.” I guess they must also go bankrupt for the greater good, eh? But he does address the issue: “The initiative I am recommending cannot be pursued by one publisher alone without a significant outlay of capital and probably not without the funding and advice of a cultural ministry or institute in a foreign country. But publishers can coordinate their efforts, banding together to select a range of texts from a foreign culture and to publish translations of them. This sort of investment cannot insure critical and commercial success. But in the long run chances are that it will pay off…” Uh-huh. You do the theorizing, professor, and let the publishers take care of the publishing.
However, he does have an intriguing paragraph full of actual facts:

The exceptional cases are remarkable because they involve the great works of modern literature. In translation these works were commercial failures initially, according to the standards in place then and now, and it is only because some of the publishers involved were willing to add the titles to their backlists or to sell off reprint rights that the translations achieved canonical status in the US and the UK. In 1922 Chatto and Windus published C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s version of Proust’s Swann’s Way in two volumes, and within a year 3000 copies were in print. Yet five years later volume one had sold only 1773 copies and volume two only 1663. In 1928 Martin Secker published his first translation of a novel by Thomas Mann, Helen Lowe-Porter’s version of The Magic Mountain, but it took seven years to sell 4,641 copies, helped no doubt by the translations of seven other books by Mann that Secker had issued in the interval. In 1929 the Hogarth Press published Beryl de Zoete’s version of Italo Svevo’s novella The Hoax, but after selling 500 copies in the first year the book showed a loss, and publisher Leonard Woolf was soon looking to remainder 300 copies. In 1930 Woolf also published Svevo’s collection of stories, The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl, which met the same fate. He attempted to sell the translation of the stories to Alfred Knopf, who had published Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno in 1930. But the editor at Knopf declined. “I am afraid there is no question,” he replied, “but that he has been a failure, although we made immense efforts to put him across.”

What’s amazing is not that publishers don’t put out more translations, but that they do any at all.