Archives for June 2003

From Enslin‘s 1978 book-length poem Ranger (Volume I), the start of section XIII:

How difficult it is!
How strange to break in
on the self    on those sections
of self that lie buried
but so vulnerable
that a footstep above them,
on loose-packed detritus,
hurts to the quick,
and makes life of
pain—that it lives—
at all lives.
So I have heard of one more—
perhaps the first woman
I knew as a woman—
gone away, and now dead.
We speak briefly
of the dead,
as if we no longer wanted
to think of them,
but their presence is
none the less—
living in some other place.
We stay with them.

Some short Enslin poems here.

Addendum. wood s lot has posted much more Enslin, all excellent. Go and enjoy.

A trilingual journal called Trans went in search of some triple romance… No, no, no, this isn’t Limerickhat. Let’s start over. Trans is an “Internet journal for cultural sciences” that’s published simultaneously in German, English, and French. A lot of the material is outside my sphere of interest, but there are enough special issues like “Nation, Language and Literature” and “Multilingualism, Transnationality, Cultural Sciences” that I’m going to bookmark it. (Courtesy of wood s lot.)

Via this MetaFilter thread, the latest quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary is now available. First comes the range of entries must-necessity; if you scroll down below that list, you get the new subordinate entries, the out-of-sequence new entries “from across the alphabet” (includes 0800 number, Amandebele, bazillion, bitch-slap, Brigadoon, and everybody’s favorite buggeration, just to sample the first two letters; it ends wonga, yapunyah, Zorb, zorbing), out-of-sequence subordinate entries, and finally new meanings for old words. I’d just like to express my abject worship of the OED, in case I haven’t yet. It goes from strength to strength. (Of course, in the beginning Oxford was reluctant to spend a shilling on it, but we’ll let bygones be bygones until the next time they do something to seriously annoy me.)

This book looks like it would be of interest to a lot of Languagehat readers (including me):

Though it is difficult enough to write well in one’s native tongue, an extraordinary group of authors has written enduring poetry and prose in a second, third, or even fourth language. Switching Languages is the first anthology in which translingual authors from throughout the world examine their experiences writing in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. Driven by factors as varied as migration, imperialism, a quest for verisimilitude, and a desire to assert artistic autonomy, translingualism has a long and brilliant history.
In Switching Languages, Steven G. Kellman brings together several notable authors from the past one hundred years who discuss their personal translingual experiences and their take on a general phenomenon that has not received the attention it deserves. Contributors to the book include Chinua Achebe, Julia Alvarez, Mary Antin, Elias Canetti, Rosario Ferré, Ha Jin, Salman Rushdie, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Ilan Stavans. They offer vivid testimony to the challenges and achievements of literary translingualism.

If anybody has seen the actual book, please give an appraisal!

Over at this Public Address there’s an entry investigating the history of words beginning “porno-,” in the course of which the following nugget is unearthed from the OED:

[pornial
(in Cent. Dict. and Funk’s Standard Dict.), a spurious word, due to a misreading or misprint of primal.

It’s amusing not only that the august Century (1889-91) inserted this Freudian slip, but also that the Funk & Wagnalls (1893-95) swiped it and got caught. Crime doesn’t pay!

An online grammar of Algerian Darja by Lameen Souag: “Darja is the term most commonly used in North Africa to refer to the local dialect of Arabic/language developed from Arabic (depending on your political viewpoint).” A well-done site for a fascinating dialect (or language); the section on Evolution from Classical to Darja begins with a list of specific changes (“Daad becomes Daa’,” “Final and initial short vowels disappear,” &c.) and ends:

A lot of the sound changes can be summarized as: pronounce Fusha in a Berber accent (or at least a non-Kabyle Berber accent), which is presumably how Darja originated. The phonological inventories of Darja and many Berber dialects are practically identical, in particular the vowel system and the labialization, although the spirantization typical of Berber does not appear.

He also has a useful User’s Guide to Algeria’s Languages. Thanks to Lameen for the information, and to Jackson Ninly at The Melon Colonie for the link.

An impressive gallery of the many and varied ways Japanese give typographical expression to emotions (“Looking uncomfotable and he wants to leave”), personalities (“Am I pretty?”), actions (“Two people holding glasses and saying ‘Cherrs’ Giving a toast”), and existential states (“Someone wearing sunglasses and with a scar on his face, so he is…who?”). Via Anita Rowland [Friday, June 13, 2003; Anita died in 2007].

Sometimes I am (not to put too fine a point upon it) an idiot. I recently expressed wild enthusiasm for the online version of Platts without ever noticing that at the top of the Platts page was the rubric Digital Dictionaries of South Asia. Today, in order to make a point in a comment, I Googled “Hobson-Jobson” and was directed to this page; this time I did notice the rubric, clicked on it, and was taken here. I boggled. My friends, I’m here to tell you that the good people at The South Asia Language and Area Center at University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the Triangle South Asia Consortium in North Carolina are putting online every major dictionary available for their area of focus.

The first name that caught my eye was Steingass. Once I had found Platts online, I began wishing that someone would publish Steingass the same way; it’s the classic Persian-English dictionary, full of obscure words and usages often tossed together in a blender (“par, Past, elapsed; heretofore; last year; a bit, a piece; a skin, a tanned hide; flight”) and, as my beloved Gaffarov (Persidsko-russkii slovar’, 1914-28) says, not based reliably on either authentic Persian texts or actual conversational usage, but indispensable all the same. I’ve often looked longingly at it in libraries and the Librairie de France in Rockefeller Center (ridiculously overpriced—I never buy anything there—but a great place to gawk at dictionaries), but could never afford it (it’ll set you back over a hundred dollars). Suddenly, there it was, the whole thing online for free. I should point out that it can be maddening to use, especially online; for instance, if you’re looking for pur ‘full’ you will come up empty—there is no such listing, even though there are plenty of compounds, e.g., pur-a-pur, ‘Filled to the brim, quite full.’ You have to go to par ‘A wing; a feather; a leaf; the arm from the collar-bone to the tip of the finger; the sails or paddles of a mill; a side, skirt, or margin; leaf of a tree; light, ray; (imp. of paridan, in comp.) flying’ and look down past all the compounds of that word until you get to “pur, Full; laden, charged; complete; much, very; too much, too.” It’s written the same in Perso-Arabic script, you see, so it’s part of the same entry. Which is particularly ridiculous since, as they demurely admit at the bottom of the seach page, “Perso-Arabic script is not yet displaying.” (Speaking of which, in case you’re wondering at the two different citations for par quoted above, the first has long a and is thus written differently, with an alif. This points up another problem with using the online transliteration: you can’t tell the length of vowels. They really should be using a more informative transliteration, like the one explained here.) But details, details… the important thing is that all that information is right there at my fingertips, and at yours.

And beyond the books already online, they’re working on still more: for you Sanskrit fans, for instance, they’re encoding Macdonell and Monier-Williams and negotiating license agreements for Apte. Here’s their statement of purpose:

For each of the twenty-six modern literary languages of South Asia, a panel of language experts identified key dictionaries currently in print and selected at least one multilingual dictionary for each language. For the more frequently taught languages, a monolingual dictionary also has been chosen. After identifying the best available resources, the chosen dictionaries have been converted to digital formats. The results of this conversion are available to readers through this site on the World Wide Web, by means of standard file transfer protocol, or by compact disc. There is no charge for access via the Internet and the compact discs are available for the cost of duplication and mailing.

Bless their little hearts!

And now, as a reward for those who have slogged through this long and technical post, a pair of tidbits:

1) From my battered old 1970 edition of Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, the following magnificent name (discovered in a vain search for Steingass): “Alidius Warmoldus Lambertus Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, 1888– . Dutch diplomat and administrator.” Alidius has since passed on, but his many-barreled name survives to awe future generations.

2) No-sword has been on a roll. Read his latest (06-14) entry “The shirt” and then scroll down to “Awesome baboon article” (06-12). You’ll laugh till you cry.

Who said that famous saying? (Via Avva.)

2007 update. Since I just had trouble getting to the site, I think I’ll quote some excerpts here in case it becomes unreachable:

– To cut to the chase, there is no author to whom the exact phrase cited above can be attributed with confidence. It is apparently post-classical,
but it has classical antecedents, as we shall see. […]

ROBERT KNAPP (a early modernist at Reed, not the Berkeley expert on Rmn. Spain) wrote on the FICINO list: “Chadwyck-Healy’s PL turns up one hit on the proverb, in Joannes Murmellius and Rodulphus Agricola’s commentary on Boethius, Book III, Prose VII: ‘Tristes vero esse] Voluptati moerorem succedere cum norunt omnes, tum maxime libidinosi: nam, teste philosopho, omne animal a coitu triste est. Seneca Lucilio: Voluptates praecipue exstirpa, inter res vilisimas habe, quae latronum more in hoc nos amplectuntur, ut strangulent. Aristotelis, teste Valerio Maximo, utilissimum est praeceptum, ut voluptates abeuntes consideremus, quas quidem sic ostendendo [Co.. 1014B] minuit; fessas enim poenitentiaeque plenas animis nostris subjicit, quominus cupide repetantur.’ But this only takes us to the late 15th century.” [True, but the passage does explicitly attribute the key phrase to Aristotle—“teste philosopho.”]

– EDWIN RABBIE on the FICINO list made the shortest contribution to the twin threads, but perhaps it is the closest to hitting the bull’s-eye: “Latin translation of Ps.-Aristotle, Problems 955 a 23.” [In English the translation of this passage would be: “After sexual intercourse most men are rather depressed, but those who emit much waste product with the semen are more cheerful.” I don’t have the med. Latin trans. of Aristotle within reach. Also, it will be noted that “Aristotle” was talking specifically about men, not “omnia animalia.” But I humbly suspect that this is about as close as we’re going to get.]

2016 update. The Classics-L archive is gone, but Anatoly found this post at archive.org and reproduced it here.

On my way to see The Last Bolshevik at Anthology Film Archives, which is having a Chris Marker retrospective, I stopped off at St. Mark’s Bookshop, where I ran into jonmc (who’s been in the throes of moving—he may wind up in my neighborhood—and is looking at the possibility of root canal, so he hasn’t been at his most jovial lately, but was in good spirits when I met him, possibly because he was buying this book, which is absolutely gorgeous) and found two items I absolutely had to buy: a nice Chatto & Windus edition of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (a kid who learns Greek at four and Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese at five, grows up with The Seven Samurai as a source of role models, and carries around a copy of Njal’s Saga—how could I resist?) and the May issue of Magazine littéraire, devoted to “écrivains de Saint-Pétersbourg.”

The movie was brilliant, with interviews of people who’d known the Soviet director Aleksandr Medvedkin and clips from his movies (many of which had been thought lost); the central conundrum was how Medvedkin, a true believer in Communism but a determinedly independent artist, had managed to get through the ’30s without losing either his faith or his life. (One opinion, expressed with a loving smile, was that he simply wasn’t that bright.) There was amazing, chilling footage of Soviet labor camps and of the vile Vishinsky presiding over the show trials, spitting out the names of alleged spies and saboteurs. No matter how much I read about that time and place, I don’t think I can have any real sense of what it was like to live through; whatever the defects of contemporary America, I’m grateful to be here.

After the movie I walked up Second Avenue towards the subway, passing Ukrainian signs that recalled the Ukrainian titles I’d just seen in one of Medvedkin’s “train films”; in the subway station I saw a woman who could have stepped out of one of his kolkhoz dramas, full-featured, rosy-cheeked, waving her arm in a passionate gesture as she pointed towards the shining future; on the train home a girl reminded me strongly of someone I was in love with before she was born, the same combination of eager laughter and a firm-set jaw that implied deep reserves of willfulness and determination. I feared a little for the young man she was with.