Archives for January 2003

In the 3 October issue of the London Review of Books, Daniel Soar reviews Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel Middlesex. The novel’s protagonist comes from a village near the city of Bursa in Asia Minor, and this village is “on the slopes of Mount Olympus.” The reviewer gets a good deal of mileage out of this mythologically rich name: “Olympus is a reasonable location for a view of the beginnings of a disaster that is the story’s catalyst… the reflective parts of the narration that follows deal in Odysseus, the Minotaur, and Zeus creating the world from an egg…. One advantage of Olympus for the storyteller is its mythical altitude… ” and, bringing it back for an encore at the end, “It’s a great pity that this type of very un-Olympian compression… has to be so resolutely disguised in the book.” The only problem is that the Olympus with the gods is in Thessaly, in mainland Greece. This one is in Mysia, in what’s now Turkey; its modern name is Ulu Dagh.

Just as I was saying to myself “What can you expect from those slackers at the LRB, you have to go to the TLS for real expertise,” I picked up the September 27 issue of the latter and began reading Stephen Abell’s review of Ben Okri’s latest novel, In Arcadia. He mentions the famous Poussin painting that “shows three shepherds and a shepherdess standing before a tomb marked with the inscription ‘Et in Arcadia ego’: ‘I too lived in Arcadia’.” This is a common misunderstanding, but the Latin will not bear the interpretation; it means rather ‘Even in Arcadia am I [ie, death].’

I’d say “O tempora, o mores,” but the good people at LRB and TLS would probably think “Right, eels fried in batter.”

Via Plep comes this wonderful site presenting the classic Chinese poetry anthology in bilingual versions. The translations are mostly by Witter Bynner, who isn’t my favorite but will do; I can’t actually get the characters (I see gibberish on my screen), but I will bookmark the site in the expectation that someday I will be able to see the originals, and I assume that some of my readers can do so already. Give it a try.

Update (Oct. 2022). You can now see the poems and translations in book form at Internet Archive.

Languagehat is the #2 hit for a Google search on Gangs of New York Gaelic language. This did not surprise me; what did surprise me, and very much please me, was that the page with the search results was in Irish! “Cuardaíodh an gréasán le haghaidh Gangs of New York Gaelic language. Torthaí 1 – 10 as timpeall 319. Mhair an cuardach 0.24 soicind.” Love that Google… (And may I take this opportunity to express my relief that people seem to have finally stopped looking for “nvde R0manian g&mnasts,” which looked like it might one day replace “Charlie Ravioli” as my all-time referral king.)

Last June there was a ruckus when an eagle-eyed parent named Jeanne Heifetz noticed that literary excerpts on the Regents’ exam her stepdaughter brought home had been altered, apparently with the intention of removing anything that might possibly give offense to anyone (including all references to religion), in the process seriously altering the meaning of the passages. After prolonged and well-deserved ridicule, the Department of Education caved and promised that changes would be made. The story faded from view.

Now Michael Winerip reveals in today’s NY Times that (as might have been expected by anyone with a healthy degree of cynicism) nothing has in fact changed.

Ms. Heifetz, bless her, recently got a look at August’s English exam. In new guidelines, the state promised complete paragraphs with no deletions, but an excerpt from Kafka (on the importance of literature) changes his words and removes the middle of a paragraph without using ellipses, in the process deleting mentions of God and suicide.

The new state guidelines promised not to sanitize, but a passage on people’s conception of time from Aldous Huxley (a product of England’s colonial era) deletes the paragraphs on how unpunctual “the Oriental” is.

But the saddest example of how standardized testing is lowering academic standards (as a recent national study by Arizona State University reports) can be seen in the way New York officials butchered an excerpt from a PBS documentary on the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Like any good historical work, the documentary on this epidemic, which killed half a million Americans, included numerous interviews with historians, novelists, medical experts and survivors, and quoted primary sources of the era. But the three-page passage read out loud to students on the state exam is edited to make it appear that there is only one speaker.

Though the new guidelines promised to identify the authors of any excerpts, the state does not identify the documentary’s author, Ken Chowder. It does identify the narrator, although — oops! — incorrectly: the narrator was Linda Hunt, not David McCullough. As Ms. Heifetz says, any student who melded the words of a dozen people into one and then misidentified the narrator would surely be flunked.

The state version cuts out the passages with the most harrowing and moving accounts of the epidemic, as when children played on piles of coffins stacked outside an undertaker’s home. It removes virtually all references to government officials’ mishandling the epidemic. It deletes the references to religious leaders like Billy Sunday, who promised that God would protect the virtuous, even as worshipers dropped dead at his services.

Furthermore, “Ms. Heifetz believes that one test question based on the influenza reading has three correct answers”—and the professor featured in the documentary agrees:

To get a second opinion on Question 2, I tracked down Dr. Alfred Crosby, a retired University of Texas professor who was featured in the PBS documentary and has written the book “America’s Forgotten Pandemic.” I sent him a copy of the state’s sanitized excerpt and the multiple-choice questions. Dr. Crosby loves history’s complexity and was offended by the state’s single-speaker vision of the past.

He believes all three answers to Question 2 were implied in the state excerpt and said that if he were marked wrong for responding with Answers 2 or 3, he’d be angry. “That’s the problem,” he said, “with a multiple-choice test.”

Visit the National Coalition Against Censorship site for more information on this and other stories, and suggestions on What You Can Do.

Wood’s Lot has directed my attention to The Literary Encyclopedia, a work in progress that aims to “provide profiles of the lives and works of literary authors whose works are valued in the English language, and to do so within an electronic publication which will enable readers to explore literary history as never before.” A noble goal, and I wish them every success; having found the entry on Ezra Pound (a useful test case in several respects) properly appreciative and occasionally severe (“Guide to Kulchur (1938) is a less controlled prose diatribe, more of a political and cultural rant”), with a link to a useful Pound page from Kobe University, I have already bookmarked the site and will be following its progress.

There is, however, a caveat. The writing, while acceptable from academics (and mercifully free of Judith Butler–style jargon), is not of a particularly high order (as can be seen from the above quote: “…works of literary authors whose works are valued in the English language…”). This would not be especially significant except that they have chosen to write and include a style book, a “Guide to the Writing of Scholarly English” (I can’t take you to it, thanks to their use of frames, but the link is in the left-hand column below “Make a Timeline”). Not only is this not required, or even expected, of such a site, it seems a pointless superfluity in a world where style guides are in plentiful supply online, from good old Strunk & White to the alt-usage-english FAQ. The bad writing, however, renders it not only otiose but obnoxious; what is the point of a style guide written in a manner that violates the very rules it wishes to inculcate? Here is the first paragraph of the Introduction:

I have written this guide to help explain why a feature of written English is incorrect. As many colleagues and students have found this guide useful, I have posted it in a public place, but I am anxious neither to set up as expert nor pedant. Like many teachers of English, I learned my grammar through foreign languages, and then through encountering problems in my teaching, rather than being properly taught. No one who takes language seriously can want to impose a procrustean idea of ‘right language’. Language grows and changes, but it does have to make sense. My aim has been to provide a reasoned check-list of good practice, and to do this in numbered paragraphs so that I (and others) can use it rapidly and effectively to help students when correcting essays. The reference numbers by each section point to an explanation of a common fault and provide examples of good and bad practice. If you find this guide useful, I will be very pleased. I will also welcome suggestions of improvement. If The English Style Book reduces the time spent puzzling about what someone might have been trying to say, and gives us more time to discuss the complexities of writing and experience, I will be very pleased.

To the first sentence I respond “which feature would that be?” I leave as an exercise for the reader the faults of grammar, style, or logic that pervade the rest. And if the good people at the Encyclopedia ultimately decide to junk the section (referring their students, perhaps, to the better-written and infinitely livelier Guide to Grammar and Style by fellow member of the professoriat Jack Lynch)… well, in their favorite locution, I will be very pleased.

I reproduce below a letter from yesterday’s NY Times (“The City” section, p. 11) with which I wholly agree:

To the Editor:

How could your F.Y.I. column give the answer it did to a reader plaintively asking for the proper way to pronounce “Kosciusko,” stipulating “as in the Kosciusko Bridge”?

The column tamely chose the Polish way (“ka-SHUSH-ko”).

I grew up in the Bronx in the 1930’s, have lived in Brooklyn since the 60’s, and have spent hours of my life stuck in traffic over fragrant Newtown Creek: we locals have always called it the “kos-kee-OSS-ko” bridge, even if we knew, as 30’s kids did, the Polish pronunciation from high school history.

So, quaintly, which is “the proper way”? The Thames River is “Tems” in London, “Thaymes” in New London, Conn. If you mean the general, go Polish; the bridge, go local.

PAUL BRODTKORB

Brooklyn Heights

To which I can only add: I’ve lived in NYC over twenty years and never heard anyone pronounce the bridge’s name [properly spelled Kosciuszko] à la polonaise, always either Brodtkorb’s way or koss-ee-USS-ko. Does Mr. F.Y.I. also say HUE-ston Street and BROOK-ner Expressway? Faugh.

Query. The comments inspire me to ask the readership at large: Are there local pronunciations of place names in your area that outsiders are unlikely to get right?

Update (Oct. 2025). I regret to report that the Times, over two decades on, has still not mended its ways; in the otherwise enjoyable quiz “Are You a True New Yorker?” (archived), question 18 is “How do you correctly pronounce ‘Houston Street’ in Manhattan?” (not like Texas, duh) and 19 is “How about ‘Kosciuszko Bridge’?” The two answers they give are KAW-see-OSS-ko and ko-SHCH-OO-SH-ko, and just like in 2003, they insist on the latter. Geddoudaheah, ya bums! Go live in Warsaw if you want to hear people say that!

I imagine that those of my readers who are, like me, inveterate buyers of foreign-language dictionaries have run across the products of Hippocrene Books. First off, I would like to inform you that the good people at Hippocrene pronounce the name in the classical fashion, which is to say in four syllables (rhyming with “meanie”). How do I know this? I know because some years ago I was so put out by the poor quality of their concise Georgian dictionary (no longer, thankfully, in print) that I wrote them a scathing letter on the subject. Imagine my surprise when instead of a frigid dismissal (or, more likely, a resounding silence) I received an invitation to do better, and a suggestion to visit the Hippocrene offices if I was interested. I did so, and learned that they will basically publish any dictionary you submit, subject only to your acceptance of their derisory financial arrangements. (This means that the quality ranges from excellent to abysmal; caveat emptor.) As it happens, I had been putting together an English-Georgian word list for my own use (since no such thing was available), and I thought about taking them up on their offer. Eventually I decided against it—not so much because I didn’t actually know Georgian (I knew I could do better than the existing book, and looked forward to creating a practical and compendious system of presenting the basic verb forms) as because it would be too damn much work.
But I digress. The point is that Hippocrene publishes an incredible array of dictionaries, from Afrikaans to Yoeme (a language I had never heard of), and increasing at a manic pace (surely Zulu can’t be far behind), though occasionally retrogressing (apparently my tiny Yoruba dictionary is no longer available). This means that every time I go to a bookstore I risk being presented with an offer I can’t refuse, no matter how fervently I wish to limit further encroachments on my absurdly overstrained bookshelves. Today I found no fewer than four dictionaries of whose existence I had no inkling. I managed to resist the Galician and Highlander Polish (though the latter was so recondite as to be tempting)—they looked a little too slapdash for my taste, and the languages are close enough to Portuguese and Polish respectively that I thought I could do without them. I could not, however, say no to the Kyrgyz and the Sorbian. Yes, Sorbian; my multiple posts on the subject put me in a position where I could hardly pass up a dictionary. And to think that when I was growing up you were lucky to find materials on anything beyond French, Spanish, and German…

I would like to bring to your attention an essay by Timothy Garton Ash, who argues that although witnesses and memory are unreliable and objectivity is impossible, it is still important to respect “the frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction” and to refuse to embellish reporting with telling details that didn’t actually happen. He makes the point that this respect, this determination to stick to what one knows to be real, makes itself felt in the prose itself; he contrasts Paul Theroux’s unconvincing claim that every word in The Great Railway Bazaar was written down at the time exactly as it happened with George Orwell’s more modest, and therefore more believable, insistence in Homage to Catalonia that the reader “beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.” He also contrasts two books published as Holocaust memoirs:

Take a now notorious example: the book published in 1995 as Bruchstücke (in English, Fragments) by Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purported to be the memories of a man who survived the Nazi death camps as a Polish Jewish child. It is now established beyond reasonable doubt that the author was a Swiss musician of troubled past and disturbed mind, originally called Bruno Grosjean, who had never been near a Nazi death camp—but had imagined himself into that past, that other self. Reading Fragments now, one is amazed that it could ever have been hailed as it was. The wooden irony (“Majdanek is no playground”), the hackneyed images[…], the crude, hectoring melodrama […]. Material which, once you know it is fraudulent, is truly obscene. But even before one knew that, all the aesthetic alarms should have sounded. For every page has the authentic ring of falsehood.

Compare this with the great books of true witness. Of course there are large variations in tone and style between these works. Many nonetheless have a certain voice in common: one of pained, sober, yet often ironical or even sarcastic veracity, which speaks from the very first line. Take, for example, and contrast with Wilkomirski, the first line of Levi’s If This Is a Man: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average life-span of the prisoners destined for elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals.” How could we not believe this?

I have to admit that the impulse to make a Languagehat entry of the essay arose from an utterly trivial source, the irritation I experienced as a result of the following passage:

“You who harmed an ordinary man . . .” writes Czeslaw Milosz, in one of his most famous poems, “do not feel safe. The poet remembers./You may kill him—another will be born./Deeds and words shall be recorded.” The poet remembers: Poeta pami, eta !

I was happy to see a bit of what I presumed was the original Polish quoted, but what was that “eta”? Some kind of Polish exclamation parallel to Greek opa? I don’t know the language, so it took a while before I realized that it was not a separate word at all but part of the verb pamieta ‘remembers’—except that the e should have an ogonek (like a right-pointing cedilla) underneath (making it nasal, so that the word is pronounced “pamyenta”), and there appears to be no way to achieve this either in HTML or in the online Guardian. I don’t know how it wound up as a comma followed by an e, but surely someone at the paper might have noticed; of course, what they could have done about it is another question. It is presumably beyond the ambit of a Guardian copyeditor to know the details of Polish orthography and to realize that it would make more sense to print a simple e. I blame Ash, who’s been in the business a long time and should know that asking a newspaper to reproduce a Polish nasal vowel is a losing proposition. (Via You Got Style.)

Incidentally, there is an interesting parallel to Ash’s comparison of Wilkomirski and Levy in Matt Zoller Seitz’s review of the new movie The Pianist, which he compares favorably to both Schindler’s List and (especially) Max; he says:

While the director crafts some moments of nearly unbearable suspense and dares to see the humor in Szpilman’s plight, there’s nothing cheap, hustling or fashionable about this movie. It’s done in a rigorously classical style that inattentive Polanski fans might mistakenly deem “conventional.” They shouldn’t. Polanski is a Polish Jew and longtime U.S. exile whose mother was killed at Auschwitz and whose wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family. The Pianist’s precise, even meticulous approach suggests a deep respect for the brutalizing power of violence that can only have come from personal experience.

Avva points out a phenomenon I had no inkling of: there is apparently a trend among young Russian-speaking women to refer to themselves (both in conversation and in blogs) using male verb and adjective forms. He speculates that this may be the beginning of the end of Russian gender, but reassures a concerned reader that even if this is the case it will take at least a couple of centuries.

From Saint-John Perse‘s Exil (Neiges IV):

…voici que j’ai dessein d’errer parmi les plus vieilles couches du langage, parmi les plus hautes tranches phonétiques : jusqu’à des langues très lointaines, jusqu’à des langues très entières et très parcimonieuses,
      comme ces langues dravidiennes qui n’eurent pas de mots distincts pour «hier» et pour «demain». Venez et nous suivez, qui n’avons mots à dire : nous remontons ce pur délice sans graphie où court l’antique phrase humaine; nous nous mouvons parmi de claires élisions, des résidus d’anciens préfixes ayant perdu leur initiale, et devançant les beaux travaux de linguistique, nous nous frayons nos voies nouvelles jusqu’à ces locutions inouïes, où l’aspiration recule au-delà des voyelles et la modulation du souffle se propage, au gré de telles labiales mi-sonores en quête de pures finales vocaliques.