languagehat.com

Adriana V. Lopez has a nice interview with translator Edith Grossman on bookforum.com; I was hooked right away by the photo of her standing in front of several of the “ubiquitous wooden bookshelves, tall and short” that line the rooms of her Upper West Side apartment. Here’s how she got started:

[Editor Ronald] Christ asked Grossman to translate Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández’s short story “The Surgery of Psychic Removal,” about erasing memory. Grossman was hesitant. “I said ‘Ronald, I’m not a translator, I’m a critic.’ And he said, ‘Call yourself whatever you want. Try this.’” Grossman recalls loving the work. Other projects followed, including a novel by Peruvian writer Manuel Scorza published by Harper & Row in 1977. Then came the García Márquez offer. She recalls that an agent who lived in her building called her and flat out asked, “Edie, you interested in translating García Márquez?” Grossman rolls her eyes and puffs her mouth out reliving the day and says she replied, “What? Of course I’m interested.” Grossman submitted a twenty-page sample translation of Love in the Time of Cholera to Knopf and was chosen. “I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with –mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.”

I like the ending too:

Grossman is a reader’s reader, happy to have gotten cheap paperbacks from neighborhood stores like the old Shakespeare & Co., Labyrinth Books (now Bookculture), and Papyrus (now Morningside Bookshop). It’s about the content, not covers or first editions. “I like to buy books on the street, too, but I’m wary of it now because of bed bugs.” Her collection has also been fed by the places she traveled to in her youth. She grins large: “My clothes used to fit in an overnight bag. But my books took up trunks and trunks.”

Thanks for the link, Paul!

JBooks has an online magazine, Secular Culture and Ideas, which is featuring essays on Sephardic Judaism. Vanessa Hidary writes “My Jewish Grandmother spoke Arabic,” Pamela Dorn Sezgin writes about Dario Moreno and Sephardic Cosmopolitanism (“The Turkish Army served as a springboard to Moreno’s career. He became adept as a polyglot singer in Turkish, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish”), Bernard Horn talks with the great novelist A.B. Yehoshua (“Mr. Mani is saturated with Jerusalem, the real historical and living Jerusalem, not the Jerusalem of nationalist fantasy, nor the Jerusalem of fundamentalist frenzy, but rather a dense, lived-in, fascinating city—like Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague”), and Eyal Ginio has an essay on Jews in the Ottoman Empire:

The most striking cultural change for Ottoman Jewry was the absorption of French culture, especially French language, into everyday life. Interestingly, and in the colonial spirit, it was mainly Jews from Western Europe who enthusiastically took upon themselves the mission of “improving” the situation of the Ottoman Jews. The school system of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was chiefly responsible for this. Established in France in 1860, the Alliance aimed at raising the standing of the “Eastern” Jews by means of secular French culture. They assumed that French “progressive” Jewish education would enable Ottoman Jews to modernize and become contributing citizens.
The intimate knowledge of French language and culture brought about many changes for the Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman state. Rather than totally abandon their traditional Jewish language, Ladino, the Ottoman Jews transformed their language and used it as a vehicle of secularization….

Having been introduced to the fascinating subject of Sephardic culture by Ammiel Alcalay (I, II), I’m glad to have this opportunity to explore it further.

Andrew Malcovsky has started Fables and Understories, in which he’s translating Karel Čapek’s Bajky a podpovídky (1946), “a posthumous collection of the author’s short pieces.” He says:

Please feel free to get in touch with me—mercilessly (if politely!) targeting my weaknesses can only, in fact, make me stronger. I may have tossed some stuff up here without a third or fourth pass, and the more eyes the merrier!

So if you know Czech, help him out; if you don’t, just relax and enjoy the Čapek! (He’s the guy who wrote the play, R.U.R., in which the word robot was first used, though he didn’t invent it.)

Grant Barrett has a column in The Star (of Malaysia) called “Welcome to Slang City” that features terms originating in New York City, that hotbed of linguistic innovation. Some of them are fairly boring, like (taxi) medallion and gridlock (though I was astonished, on looking them up in the OED, to find that the former is not attested before 1960 and the latter before 1980), but others are wonderful:

A term you will still see occasionally is highbinder, which in the early 1800s meant a violent criminal or thug. The word was taken from the name of the High-binders, an Irish gang.

Highbinder was later used to refer to a member of a secret Chinese criminal gang, especially an assassin. By 1890 it referred to a slimy – disreputable or untrustworthy – politician….

A word that thrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s in New York City but now appears to have completely fallen out of the language is lobbygow.

In a well-known murder trial in 1914, one of the witnesses described a lobbygow as “a pal and a friend willing to do almost anything he is told”. Early police literature describes lobbygows as white men who run errands for the powerful Chinese underworld bosses.

By the 1930s, a lobbygow was a person who would lead tourists on slumming tours of Chinatown. The middle and upper classes could get a first-hand look at how the lower class lived. Lobbygows were believed to be as likely to lead someone to a planned mugging as they were to show them opium dens.

(Via Wordorigins.org.)

Michael Ryan’s review of Stuart Bennett’s Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 1660–1800 passes on this tidbit, which I pass on to you: contrary to what has long been thought, people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not routinely buy books in sheets and have them bound afterwards.

“We” had long assumed that those rows of leather bindings, many humble and unadorned, in our stacks were the results of negotiations between book buyers and bookbinders. The more ornate and embellished the binding, the more assured its bespoke creation. We had long assumed that, for a variety of reasons, books were shipped and sold in sheets, especially books headed from Britain to North America in the eighteenth century. Whether overland or by sea, sending books in sheets seemed a better business plan than sending them bound. But all of these were only assumptions, assumptions that had no real evidence to justify them. Bennett has now set the record straight, and in doing so has opened some new portals for curators and historians of the book alike.

When we think of publishers’ bindings or trade bindings, we think of large runs of uniformly bound copies of the same book, the model that came into practice in the earlier nineteenth century and persists to the present. However, that is only one model of trade bindings. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had another, more interesting, more variegated model that could fill booksellers’ shops with arrays of bound volumes designed to appeal to the economic and aesthetic range of their client base. British book buyers may well have customized their bindings, but they did so like Samuel Pepys: after they had bought the volume bound from their local merchant. Often books would be bound by publishers or by syndicates of booksellers with copyrights; sometimes they would be bound or customized by the bookseller functioning only as retailer and responding to local tastes and requirements. Either way, British book buyers in the eighteenth century had long since grown accustomed to acquiring their tomes “ready to use” since the sixteenth, if not the fifteenth, century, according to Bennett. The varieties and generic similarities across these bindings reflect both the economics of publishing and the evolving tastes of the times. Binders were at the bottom of the food chain, and the publishers and booksellers who controlled the ebb and flow of their work made sure that wages remained low throughout the period.

I always enjoy having my preconceptions overturned. (Via Pepys Diary.)

OK, I realize this is obscure even for me, but I have to share it anyway: the Comparative Nenets-Nganasan Dictionary “contains ca. 1.000 most frequent Nenets words with Nganasan parallels and Russian and English translations.” The introduction shows you where the languages are spoken (in northern Siberia, Nenets in a large area to the west, Nganasan on the Taimyr Peninsula to the east) and explains their histories and relations to the other Samoyedic languages. The great thing is that you can hear a recording of each word, a feature that could theoretically make it possible to have an online dictionary better than any print one could possibly be, since even the most accurate phonetic transcription is a poor substitute for actually hearing how the word sounds. (Via Wordorigins.org.)

I realize it’s been too long (as usual) since I’ve posted anything to justify the “hat” portion of the blog’s title, but this should make up for it: Diana Crane’s The Social Meanings of Hats and T-shirts (excerpted from her book Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing). I’ve long wanted this kind of succinct description of the history of various kinds of hats:

The top hat, which appeared in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was worn first by the middle and upper classes. During the century, it spread downward, possibly because it was adopted by coachmen in the 1820s and for policemen’s uniforms in the same period…. In the 1840s and 1850s, unskilled laborers and fishermen were photographed wearing these hats …. At mid-century, they were being worn by all social classes…

The bowler was invented in England in 1850 as an occupational hat for gamekeepers and hunters but was rapidly adopted by the upper class for sports…. Within a decade it had spread to the city, where it was widely adopted by the middle and lower-middle classes … and by members of the working class, particularly in cities. … The working-class man’s attempt to blur class boundaries by wearing the bowler was satirized in the early films of Charlie Chaplin. Eventually, the bowler became an icon of the bourgeoisie, as immortalized in Magritte’s famous painting of a middle-class man wearing a bowler … and, after the Second World War, was worn mainly by middle-class businessmen.

The cap with visor, which, like the top hat, appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was first worn by military officers …. By mid-century, the peaked cap was identified with the working class; it was “the most usual head covering for the working man” …. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cloth caps, without visors, were mainly worn by the working class and particularly by younger workers …, while members of the middle and upper classes wore peaked or cloth caps only for sports or in the countryside …. When worn by politicians, cloth caps were thought to indicate “radical tendencies”….

I love this stuff, and there’s much more of it at the link (including comparisons between France and the U.S.). Oh, and there’s a section on T-shirts, too.

Addendum. The Growling Wolf was inspired by this post to put up a whole gallery of photos of people lookin’ good in hats. Don’t miss it.

Beijing Sounds – 北京的声儿 has been going since last October, but I just found out about it via an e-mail from occasional commenter Xiaolongnu (thanks!). It’s syz’s blog about learning the Beijing dialect of Chinese, and it won my heart immediately with its sidebarred “WARNING: Contains explicit use of singular they, gratuitous passive voice, and shamelessly split infinitives.” A recent post asks “Does the Beijing-R mean anything?” and presents a discussion of the famous -r that gets tacked on to just about everything in the dialect:

The general perception among outsiders is that it’s just a way of speaking. It doesn’t really mean anything. HOWEVER, my two experts for today’s post, one six and one sixty-ish, say it ain’t so. There are words you can say with or without the Beijing-R (commonly called érhuàyīn 儿化音 or érhuàyùn 儿化韵), but often the different pronunciations really mean something different.

His best example is: “tāng 汤 and tāngr 汤儿 simply refer to two different liquids. The former means broth/soup, while the latter is the liquid that comes with your non-soup dishes, something cooked out of the meat or vegetables that you might spoon onto your rice.” This is backed up by a quoted talk with the two “experts,” and best of all, like all material presented on the blog, it’s got an audio link so you can hear for yourself. Excellent idea and presentation!

This Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum has started a fierce debate on MetaFilter and doubtless many other places: “It’s the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.” My own take is that if he felt that strongly about it he should have destroyed it himself, and that once you’re dead you lose the right to determine the fate of your work, but I can sympathize with those who believe Nabokov’s wishes should be respected. Mind you, we’re talking about “fifty hand-written index cards, equivalent to about thirty conventional paper manuscript pages,” so The Original of Laura can hardly be called a novel, and it certainly shouldn’t be published as if it were (much less “completed” by someone else), but I think it should be available at least to scholars. VV would be furious, but he was furious about a lot of things, including nonliteral translations and using the feminine forms of Russian names, so this would just be one more hypothetical annoyance.

Nizo is “a mostly secular Palestinian raised in the Melkite faith”; in his blog he writes about many topics, but the one of interest here is Aramaic, about which he has a couple of posts. He says that although he doesn’t speak the language, he “worshipped at a Maronite church while growing up and the service was in Syriac and Arabic… Learning Hebrew opened the door to understanding even more of this stale old tongue that has been relegated to the bearded priests with funny hats.” In the second post he divides Aramaic speakers in the region into “Ethnic Assyrians in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon who speak Assyrian at home as a first language and Arabic as a second language” (“These people are the main speakers of the language and make the contemporary contributions in music, literature and WWW”) and “NON-Assyrian Maronites In Lebanon whose clergymen are fluent in Syriac and whose church services are partially conducted in that language” (“The general population however does not speak the language except for a handful of individuals who are either uber-religious or interested in reviving the language”). Nizo is refreshingly unsentimental about the language: “I don’t care to listen to some sad song about an Assyrian shepherd in Mosul whose goats were devoured by Kurdish wolves. It doesn’t speak to my daily reality.” I hope he continues his investigations.

I also hope he writes more posts like this one (warning: Not Safe For Work!), which will be of great use to me should I ever do a follow-up to my curses-and-insults book. (Speaking of which, I’m going to be interviewed about it by PRI’s “The World” program Thursday morning; it will be archived on their site.)

Thanks for the link, Kobi!

Update (May 2024). I have discovered what I seem to have intended by “a couple of posts” (stupid, feckless LH-of-2008!): Lishono Suryoyo (Syriac Language) and Lishono Suryoyo (Syriac Language) II. The Wayback Machine has not archived those URLs, but happily you can read the posts at the “blog” link above, which has the archive of all the Jan. 2008 posts — just scroll down.