Archives for April 2003

Although entirely irrelegious myself, I often buy a bible or portion thereof in the languages I study, since the story and much of the wording is familiar, making it an easy read (and of course English translations are readily available if I need a trot). Thanks to Avva, I now have a fantastic resource: online audio bibles in Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Polish, Urdu, Hindi, Slovak, and Tagalog, and for lagniappe the Psalms in Arabic! They are mp3 files, broken into chunks for easy downloading; I just spent twenty minutes listening to the first few chapters of Shmot (Exodus) while following along in the New English Bible, and I was astonished at how different the experience was from comparing printed versions. I didn’t have to deal with the alphabet, vowel points, &c., I just let the language surround me, depending on the words I knew to serve as mileposts and keep me oriented. And to hear the Lord say to Moses the exact same phrase I hear from Israelis every day on the streets of New York (Ma zeh? ‘What’s that?’) was not only a kick, it gave me a real feel for the continuity of the Hebrew language. Thanks, Avva!

[Read more…]

If you’re engaged in an internet Easter egg hunt, you need look no further. Thanks to the endlessly creative taz, you are looking at the gorgeous Languagehat Egg. Enjoy!

[Read more…]

wood s lot celebrates the 45th anniversary of Ezra Pound’s release from confinement (“A US Federal Court decides since Ezra Pound is incurably, permanently insane, he can no longer be held for treason & can be set free”) by posting one of my favorite Pound poems, “The Return” (“See, they return; ah, see the tentative/ Movements, and the slow feet…”); it’s at the top of today’s entry [scroll down to 04.18.2003], just below the photo. Go, read it, and wonder at the perfect match of sound and sense, rhythm and riddle. Myself, I am going to post another of my favorites, “The Spring,” which is seasonally appropriate and does not seem to exist on the internet yet:

The Spring

ἦρι μὲν αἵ τε Κυδώνιαι—Ibycus

Cydonian spring with her attendant train,
Maelids and water-girls,
Stepping beneath a boisterous wind from Thrace,
Throughout this sylvan place
Spreads the bright tips,
And every vine-stock is
Clad in new brilliancies.
                And wild desire
Falls like black lightning.
O bewildered heart,
Though every branch have back what last year lost,
She, who moved here amid the cyclamen,
Moves only now a clinging tenuous ghost.

The epigraph (êri men hai te kydôniai ‘in the spring the Cydonian’) is from a famous poem by the Greek poet Ibycus (6th c. BC), and Pound’s poem begins as a loose translation but soon veers off into its own region of anguished longing, “though every branch have back what last year lost” a perfect line in a tradition going back through Landor to the Greek Anthology.

A couple of details. “Maelid” is not a word, but Pound liked it enough to use it again in Canto III (“Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,/ And from the apple, maelid”); he obviously derived it from Ibycus’s unusual word for ‘apple-tree,’ mêlis (for normal Greek mêlea), which is used in the second line of this poem (“Cydonian apples” was the Greek term for quinces, and the word “quince,” originally the plural of earlier “qu(o)yn,” is derived, via Middle French and Latin, from Greek kydônios ‘Cydonian’). And Cydonian means ‘from Cydonia,’ Cydonia being the ancient name for a town on the northwest coast of Crete that is now called Khaniá, where I spent several idly delighted days fifteen years ago. So let us welcome spring with Pound and his Cydonian maelids.

Jonathan Edelstein over at The Head Heeb has a great post about a trial in the Bronx County Supreme Court, where a witness—one of a pair of Sierra Leonian brothers who were victims of attempted murder—spoke only Krio, and the court had to decide whether it was an actual language (requiring an interpreter) or just “English with a bad accent.” Go to his blog and scroll down to April 14 and the heading “Krio and the courts”; I’d give a permalink, but it would just take you to a 404. (Jonathan, I too was once a hapless sufferer in the world of Blogger; come on over to Movable Type! Oh, and thanks to Barry at Amptoons for the tip.)

Christopher Logue is not exactly unknown, but neither is he at the forefront of many people’s consciousness. Too American-influenced for the Brits, too British for the Yanks, unfashionably concerned with form and antiquity, he is respectfully reviewed but not widely loved—not widely enough for my taste, anyway. He is one of the great translators of our time, and one of the great war poets; his life’s work is a series of “accounts” (as he calls them) of Homer’s Iliad. It began in 1959 when David Carne-Ross asked him to write a script for the BBC based on some Homeric excerpts; not knowing Greek, Logue worked from existing translations, absorbing the story, the ideas, the similes, and reworking them into language that is as fresh and vivid as anything written in my lifetime. I will never forget the moment when I first picked up “War Music” (the ongoing title of the series) and read:

  Rat.
  Pearl.
  Onion.
  Honey:
These colours came before the Sun
  Lifted above the ocean,
Bringing light
  Alike to mortals and Immortals.

  And through this falling brightness,
Through the by now:
  Mosque,
  Eucalyptus,
  Utter blue,
Came Thetis,
Gliding across the azimuth,
With armour the colour of moonlight laid on her forearms;
Her palms upturned;
Her hovering above the fleet;
Her skyish face towards her son.

  Achilles,
Gripping the body of Patroclus
Naked and dead against his own,
While Thetis spoke:
  “Son…”
His soldiers looking on;
Looking away from it; remembering their own;
  “Grieving will not amend what Heaven has done.
Suppose you throw your hate after Patroclus’ soul.
Who besides Troy will gain?
  See what I’ve brought…”

  And as she laid the moonlit armour on the sand
It chimed;
  And the sound that came from it
Followed the light that came from it,
Like sighing,
Saying,
  Made in Heaven.

That’s the start of “Pax,” his version of Book 19. When I read those lines, I don’t care that Homer could not possibly be talking about mosques (at another point “bronze flak” is mentioned, and Aeneas taunts: “Crapulous mammoth!”), I just know that something glorious and true is being said, and (amazingly) something true to Homer. Garry Wills, in his 1992 NYRB review of the first edition of War Music, said:

It is this care in re-creating literary effects that makes Logue’s work the very thing he refuses to say it is: the best translation of Homer since Pope’s. In fact, on its own partial scale, it is as good as the very best English version, Chapman’s, to which it owes a great deal.

The latest installment is All Day Permanent Red; there are excerpts here and here. There was recently a staged version that I’m very sorry I missed, and there is a set of recordings that I’d love to hear. Finally, totally unrelated to Homer, there’s a mordant little squib called “London Airport.” Enjoy.

During the recent unpleasantness in Iraq, bloggers have been quoting from all manner of poets, but unless I’ve missed something, they’ve all ignored two of the great English-language war poets of the last century, and I’m here to remedy the omission. I’ll start with the virtually forgotten David Jones, who fought in World War One with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and never got over the experience, using it as the backbone for his two great book-length poems, In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952). I shouldn’t call In Parenthesis a poem, actually; it’s a unique melding of poem and novel, with some passages in prose:

[Read more…]

There’s an absolutely fascinating interblog discussion going on about the issue of whether, or to what extent, it’s acceptable to fictionalize one’s life and experiences in one’s blog. It doesn’t apply to Languagehat, because this is not that kind of blog, but anyone with any interest in the subject (which touches on literature, psychology, elitism, and all manner of meaty topics) should hie them to Burningbird, follow the comments there and at the other sites she links to (especially Dorothea, who is passionately pro-honesty), think about it, and perhaps add their own comments. I mention this also because Burningbird may go dark at the end of April, which is a horrible thought to those of us who love Shelley’s writing and the discussions she prompts, and I’m hoping someone reading this will have a hosting opportunity for her (she can’t afford the one she’s using).
Addendum. An interesting and relevant pro-fiction post from Baldur (via wood s lot):

[Read more…]

Potawatomi is a member of the widespread Algonquian (or Algonkian) family; the Potawatomi people started out around Lake Michigan but were forced into reservations elsewhere. I recently ran across the potawatomilang.org website, well worth the while of anyone interested in Amerind languages.

Update (May 2018): URL now redirects to an obnoxious commercial site, so I’ve removed the link.

For some time I’ve been noticing a new slang word, “hella,” used as an intensive in all sorts of circumstances: “It cost hella money,” “That was hella cool,” &c &c. Now, thanks to thatweirdguy2 (posting in a MetaFilter thread), I’ve seen this paper by Rachelle Waksler and I know a lot more about it. I don’t plan on trying to use it myself; I’d just sound stupid. But keep right on reinventing the language, kids!

Addendum. A MetaFilter thread from last year traces the word back to the ’70s (!). It’s also a very funny thread.

Not only a history of the street names in the tiny, beautifully preserved old Czech town of Český Krumlov, this site has pictures of each street, often side-by-side old and new photos taken from the same vantage point. I wish all old towns and cities had such websites, but it’s a good thing they don’t, because I’d spend all my time immersed in them. Thanks for this wonderful site go to wood s lot.

(Incidentally, the town is next to České Budějovice, original home of Budweiser beer—Budejovice=Budweis in German.)