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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.

In looking for maps of Saint Petersburg, I found the mother lode at Atlas “Sankt-Peterburg 300”. There are all sorts of goodies, but the one of most LH relevance is the map of locations where poets, writers, and other literaturnye deyateli (basically untranslatable, but “littérateurs” comes close) lived; the numbers refer to the “Poetosfera” list of addresses, arranged alphabetically by author and chronologically within each author listing, so you can see at a glance all 18 addresses Dostoevsky lived at, with dates. If you read Russian, that is.

The excellent blog Linguism presents an interesting reminiscence about the BBC Pronunciation Unit, which started out in 1926 as the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (with Robert Bridges as Chairman and George Bernard Shaw as Deputy Chairman!); the whole thing is interesting, but this passage particularly struck me:

The Committee was suspended at the outbreak of the Second World War, and replaced (originally ‘for the duration’, but so far the War has apparently not ended!) by the Pronunciation Unit, staffed by two Scottish maiden ladies: G.M.(‘Elizabeth’) Miller, and Elspeth Anderson (‘Andy’), and a clerk. Despite an increasing workload – more radio and TV networks, more daily hours of broadcasting – this remained the entire staff until 1957, when a third linguist was appointed. I never met either Elizabeth or Andy, but their influence was still felt when I joined the Unit in 1979, when I succeeded yet another Scot, Mrs Hazel Wright, as head of the Unit, with the title Pronunciation Adviser. One of Elizabeth’s last successes was the publication by OUP of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1971), and I was the editor of the second edition which came out in 1983 (paperback 1990). This is now out of print, and neither the BBC nor OUP seems interested in a third edition, which I feel is a shame, as there is no equivalent available.

The 1971 edition of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names is one of my treasured and much-consulted reference works, and I am both delighted to know that “G.M. Miller” was known as Elizabeth and saddened to learn that there will be no new edition.

A Flickr set by Nigel Beale. I love bookstores. (Via wood s lot.)

In response to this post, I received an e-mail from Pete Wells, Dining Editor of The New York Times, in which he quoted what he’d written to Bill Poser:

Several readers have written us about this passage in a recent post of yours on Language Log:

Reader Jim Gordon wondered about this and emailed the author of the article. Her response: she and her consultants and editors were aware of the correct name and etymology but thought that some readers might be put off by the notion of rotten food, so they changed the name a little and made up a fake etymology.

Now I haven’t seen the letter Mr. Gordon received, but I can tell you that the author of the article did not “make up a fake etymology.” The chef in the article gave us the etymology herself and we quickly double-checked it on deadline and found it in the Wikipedia entry on “olla podrida.”
Granted, Wikipedia is not what I’d consider a completely reliable source, but it does at least suggest that the “poderida” etymology is out there somewhere and did not spring to life in Wednesday’s New York Times.
We’re doing some more research into the question to see if we can find an early document referring to “olla poderida” but in the meantime I wanted to let you know that the state of journalism is not quite as far gone as you might have imagined.

As I told Pete Wells, next time they should consult a dictionary rather than Wikipedia, but reliance on unreliable sources is a hell of a lot better than simply making stuff up, so I withdraw my call for tarring and feathering and resume my previous attitude of generalized suspicion. And a tip of the Languagehat hat to Mr. Wells for taking the issue seriously enough to respond.

Walter Benjamin, in an essay on Leskov (pdf, Google cache), makes a point that rings true for me and provides a rationale for my lack of interest in much “psychological” fiction:

When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwords he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning.
From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. Thus Montaigne referred to this Egyptian king and asked himself why he mourned only when he caught sight of his servant. Montaigne answers: “Since he was already overfull of grief, it took only the smallest increase for it to burst through its dams.” Thus Montaigne. But one could also say: The king is not moved by the fate of those of royal blood, for it is his own fate. Or: We are moved by much on the stage that does not move us in real life; to the king, this servant is only an actor. Or: Great grief is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation. Seeing this servant was the relaxation. Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is the driest. That is why this story from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up airtight and have retained their germinative power to this day.
There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later….

A nice sentence from later in the essay: “A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.” (Via wood s lot.)

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In the course of this contentious MetaTalk thread, I was asked “languagehat, I would love to hear your take on how certain words such as ‘cripple’ or ‘midget’ (that were, at one time, acceptable) become offensive.” I wrote a longish answer which I will quote the bulk of here in the hope that LH readers will find it interesting and have their own points of view on the topic:

People “on top” in whatever way (ruling class, bigger and stronger, of a preferred race or religion, etc.) tend to treat the people “beneath” them badly. This can include everything from denial of privileges to physical violence, but it always includes verbal contempt. Since language is very important to people—it’s how we understand the world—the latter weighs far more heavily on its recipients than you might think if you don’t have to deal with it yourself. (Amusingly, the people on top always counter complains with variants on “Hey, I get called an asshole every day, and it doesn’t bother me,” as if that were remotely comparable.) One of the first and most insistent demands of the soldiers who made the February Revolution in 1917 was that their officers not be allowed to curse at them.
Now, obvious insults are an obvious problem. Where it gets interesting is the use of words intended as objective names or descriptions. Because the general attitude of those on top is one of contempt, the language they use becomes tainted with that contempt, and is eventually rejected by those it’s directed at (when and if they are able to protest effectively). Thus (to simplify a complicated story, and ignoring “the n word,” which was never anything but an insult) the people forcibly brought from Africa and their descendants were called “black” in the nineteenth century; they resented this and many preferred “colored,” which was used by well-meaning white folks in the early twentieth century until it too became tainted and “Negro” became preferred, itself giving way (in one of those ironies of history) to “black” in the late ’60s, which was partly superseded by “African American”—current usage seems to be a mix of the last two. Whites who enjoy their privileged status and have no conception of what it’s like to be treated as an Untermensch also enjoy mocking the parade of “political correctness” and ask “What are we going to have to call them next?” as though it were a clever and incisive point. But in fact using PC language is a cheap substitute for actually treating people equally, so they usually go ahead and do it.

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[Update. I’m giving the update its own post because it considerably changes the situation reported below, and it’s only fair to make it prominent considering the hyperbolic outrage of the initial post. I hereby retract the excessive frothing and accusations below, though I continue to regret the low value the Times places on linguistic accuracy as compared to making sure they have the exact words of whatever celebrity they’re quoting.]
Every time I think I’m inured to the idiocies of the press, even what are allegedly its finest representatives, something comes along to get me frothing in rage again. The latest comes via Bill Poser at Language Log, who writes:

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In this post I reported on how I acquired Julie A. Buckler’s Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape; now that I’ve finished it, I’m happy to report it’s as good as I thought it would be. It probably shouldn’t be your only book about the city, since she assumes a basic acquaintance with its history and explicitly presents her study as a counterpoint to the traditional analysis in terms of high and low, “palaces and slums” (as she puts it on the first page), but there is a fine general history, W. Bruce Lincoln’s Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, to give you a basic orientation (as well as the delightfully gossipy St Petersburg: A Cultural History by Solomon Volkov and the scholarly Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution by Katerina Clark—the city has been lucky in its chroniclers).

Butler’s basic approach is to present an alternative both to the abovementioned dichotomies and to what she calls “the myth of Petersburg’s uniqueness”: “Where the Petersburg mythology asserts remarkable unity, I seek pluralism; where this mythology asserts Petersburg’s essential difference, I emphasize the city’s more ordinary qualities.” She gives a quick précis of the book:

This study attempts to remap the Russian imperial capital, but not simply by providing a reverse image of the literary tradition with Pushkin and Dostoevsky at the margins. Instead, I propose a new integration in terms of architectural and literary eclecticism (chapters 1 and 2); literature that travels around the city (chapter 3); spaces of interchange between oral and print literature (chapter 4); the ambiguous relationship between urban center and margins (chapter 5); shared experience as meeting ground in a city to which so many came from elsewhere (chapter 6); and the city as collective textual and memorial repository (chapter 7).

(These quotes are from her introduction, which you can read here; I warn you in advance that it hauls in the usual suspects—Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman, Julia Kristeva, “social materialist Henri Lefebvre,” “neo-Kantian sociologist Georg Simmel”—and in a single paragraph refers to cultural paradigms, cognitive patterns, paradigm shift, and “an autonomous determinant of social relations,” but she pretty much gets the requisite academic obeisances and jargon clusters out of the way there; the rest of the book is blessedly straightforward.)

The first thing that struck me was the maps (from 1700, 1721, 1830, 1853, 1914, and 1950) and illustrations (many photos of the architecture she discusses); the second was how much research she did—not only has she read all the secondary sources, she seems to have worked her way through every memoir, travel guide, and long-forgotten novella that ever described the imperial capital. I kept putting arrows in the end notes and bibliography, reminding myself of things I wanted to look at myself (fortunately I live within a few minutes of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture).

To give an example of how much fun the book can be, Chapter Four is called “Stories in Common: Urban Legends in St. Petersburg,” and she investigates several such legends that are attested in more than one source:

One such cluster exists for a story about dancing chairs that circulated in Petersburg during the 1830s. Pushkin himself recorded the incident in a diary entry for December 17, 1833: “In town people are talking about a strange occurrence. In one of the buildings belonging to the chancellery of the court equerry, the furniture was so bold as to move and jump about; the matter came to the attention of the authorities. Prince Dolgorukii set up an investigation. One of the clerks called a priest, but the chairs and tables did not want to stand submissively during the service. Various rumors are going around about this. N said that it is court furniture and is being requested for the Anichkov Palace.”

She then cites a letter from Viazemskii about the same incident:

“Here people were talking for a long time about a strange phenomenon in the building of the court equerry: in one of the clerk’s rooms, the chairs and tables danced and turned somersaults; glasses filled with wine hurled themselves at the ceiling. Witnesses were summoned, and a priest with holy water, but the ‘ball’ did not abate. I don’t know how the ‘ball’ did end, but the main thing is, these stories are not empty, and something certainly did happen, but whether it was a diabolical or human delusion is unknown.”

And she tops them off with the casual mention in Gogol’s famous story “The Nose”: “And the story of the dancing chairs on Koniushennaia (Stables) Street was still fresh.” This is a great example of how her delving into little-known sources can illuminate famous ones.

Later in the same chapter she cites a 1924 article by Petr Stolpianskii that “dispels several false notions about the city: Peter the Great never actually planned to model his city after Venice or Amsterdam, but only created such a plan on paper to impress European dignitaries; the three main radial arteries of Petersburg do not reflect skillful city planning because the Admiralty was never intended to be the city center; Nevsky Prospect became Petersburg’s main thoroughfare only by happenstance; the site of the Winter Palace was selected wholly accidentally when Count Apraksin died childless and left his palace to Peter.”

In Chapter Seven, “The City’s Memory: Public Graveyards and Textual Repositories,” she discusses a subject close to my heart, street names:

The 1753 Makhaevskii plan from the Academy of Sciences shows 200 named streets, but many more Petersburg place names simply emerged out of the life of the city. Particularly common during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were names that spoke to a street’s function, as in Shestilavochnaia, a street on which there were six shops, or Zverinskaia (from beast, or zver’). the street near the zoo…. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a more official written toponymy established by Senate decrees of the latter 1850s replaced many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century names that were integrally connected with everyday speech and everyday life.

And there’s a surprising little footnote: “In fact, Gorbachevich and Khablo claim that there were no street names at all during the period 1710s-1720s, and that residents simply used… descriptive directions.” Gorbachevich and Khablo are “authors of the popular Petersburg reference work Why Are They So Named? (Pochemu tak nazvany?),” a work I obviously need to get hold of.

Well, I hope these few bits have given you an idea of the riches to be found in this book; I haven’t mentioned the feuilletons, the factories, or the hilariously interchangeable accounts of provincials coming to the big city and being disillusioned, but take my word for it, if you’re interested in the history of cities, you won’t regret reading this book.

One of the gaps in my knowledge of Russian literature has long been Tyutchev, universally considered one of the three great Russian poets of the Romantic generation (alongside Pushkin and Lermontov). Now that I have a collection of his poetry (thanks, Jim!) I’m trying to remedy that, and to get some background I turned to my favorite source for the nineteenth century, D. S. Mirsky’s A History of Russian Literature. There, after a description of his unusual career (joined the foreign service at 18; spent most of the next 22 years in Munich, which he considered his home; married two Bavarian women in succession; returned to Russia and became a reactionary polemicist), I found this astonishing paragraph:

From the linguistic point of view Tyutchev is a curious phenomenon. In private and public life he spoke and wrote nothing but French. All his letters, all his political writings, are in that language, as well as all his reported witticisms. Neither his first nor his second wife spoke Russian. He does not seem to have used Russian except for poetical purposes. His few French poems, on the other hand, though interesting, are for the most part trifles and give no hint of the great poet he was in Russian.

I know of no other case of a great poet who used the language of his poetry only for that purpose.