Archives for June 2003

The learned and daedal Eudaemonist, in a comment to a previous entry, has linked to a funny and saddening Letter from Yale (printable version here), in which novelist Helena Echlin eviscerates the Yale graduate program in English. She begins:

I am sitting in a windowless conference room. The walls are lined with sets of leather-bound books with gold-lettered spines. ‘The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism,’ a young man is saying. He pauses for a long time. Underneath the table, one leg is twisted around the other. A stretch of gaunt white ankle shows between trouser and sock. ‘In order to approach participating in.’ He pauses again, his body knotted like a balloon creature made by a children’s entertainer. Finally, in one rush: ‘The unity which is no longer accessible.’ My fellow students utter a long soft gasp, as if at a particularly beautiful firework.
‘Brilliant,’ says the professor. ‘Very finely put. But I didn’t quite understand it. Could you repeat it?’ I write the sentence down in my notebook, like everyone else in the seminar. The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible. When I have pieced it together, I realise he is talking nonsense. I am struck by the thought that literary criticism – at least as it is practised here – is a hoax.

[Read more…]

You can hear one of the great German poems of the last century, “Todesfuge” (bilingual text here), read by the author himself here and (in RealAudio, along with his recordings of other poems) here (thanks, Baloney!). It’s quite an experience. Link via Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who also has an amusing riff on the alleged difference between Romanian and its Soviet offshoot Moldavian (Thursday, June 12, 2003, ROMANIAN AND MOLDAVIAN AGAIN; permalinks are, of course, bloggered).

I just ran across an article by Shashi Tharoor lambasting the 1996 change of Madras’s name to the allegedly more Tamil Chennai. As long-time readers know, I am skeptical of such changes in general (tradition being more appealing to me than nationalism), and the absurd details of this one delight me:

[Read more…]

I have finally gotten most of the way through the March 7 TLS (yes, I know, why do you think I don’t subscribe? it’s bad enough when I just pick up the occasional issue) and found a very interesting essay by Emily Wilson about the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. She focuses on the venom with which so many BMCR reviewers attack the books under discussion, and her suggested explanations resonate strongly (for me, at any rate) with the discussion of the sorrows of the toilers in academic vineyards that’s been taking place at Baraita (here and here, inter alia), Caveat Lector (go to her grad school category, start with “What he said” on 26 Februarii 2003, and work your way down towards the present), Wealth Bondage (here, with many forceful comments), Frogs and Ravens, and the Invisible Adjunct (passim, and thank goodness she’s back online!). Here’s the heart of it:

There are two possible explanations for the large numbers of hatchet-jobs. First, too many academic books are being published, not all of which are first-rate. The pressures of Research Assessment Exercises and Tenure Review encourage aspiring academics to churn out too many words, too fast, without enough time for real research and, even more importantly, real contemplation. This is a problem which affects all humanities departments at the moment, not just classical studies. If anything, the number of utterly pointless books published in Classics seems lower than in some other disciplines; but that may be my own prejudice. If one accepts this explanation, one may be grateful to BMCR for working so relentlessly to purge the academic body of error and to reassure the readers that most of the books they do not read are not worth reading.

But the proportion of negative reviews in BMCR seems significantly higher than in comparable publications, such as Classical Review. This suggests a second explanation: that the dismissive tone of BMCR may have as much to do with editorial policy as with the state of the classical studies. The majority of reviews seem to be written, not by big-name senior scholars, but by graduate students, junior professors and adjuncts, who hope to boost their publication records. I say “seem”, because there are no contributors’ notes and it is difficult to trace many of the names. A publication in which people of all academic ranks can find a voice may sound more egalitarian than the journals where one sees the same names over and over again. But less senior people are likely to write harsh reviews, not only because of the idealistic brutality of youth, but also because the structure of contemporary academia tempts those at the bottom to trample on their peers and to suck up to their more advanced colleagues. A junior academic or graduate student writing for BMCR can show off his or her scholarly credentials by pointing out the errors in someone else’s first book; books by well-known figures are much more likely to be treated with respect.

So… any thoughts?

Incidentally, the current issue of the TLS features a number of language-related pieces, including Susan Sontag’s “Babel Now” [available here as of Sept. 2022] (“I shall argue that a proper consideration of the art of literary translation is essentially a claim for the value of literature itself”), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky’s “The EU – all in the translation” (“EU officials and parliamentarians are shielded from the trials of Babel because they have bevies of translators. Anyone able to translate from Latvian into Greek or from Slovenian into Finnish is assured of a prosperous livelihood in the Brussels bureaucracy. For ordinary folk, the absence of any agreement to use one or two common languages will prove a high barrier”), and Mary Beard on Roman bilingualism (not, alas, online). Take a look before they’re taken down and replaced by the next issue.

A useful site that allows you to look up words in the (excellent) Collins bilingual dictionaries for Spanish, German, Italian, and French. Thanks to Songdog for the link!

One of the many forgotten figures featured in Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs is Yehuda al-Harizi, whose Tahkemoni, a translation of al-Hariri’s Maqamat (The Assemblies), became (according to Alcalay) “the first object of al-Harizi’s often boundless pride,” a pride fully evident in this excerpt:

Now many of those that slept in the soil of folly awoke and they made the chariots of their tongues race through the road of song. They planned to translate the book of this Arab Hariri from the Arabic tongue into the Sacred Tongue, Hebrew, and they came in prosaic garments to serve in the sanctuary of the muse. And when they came forth equipped for the battle of poetry, they could only take as spoils one out of the fifty [sections]. For by the power of the metaphors of the book they were dismayed and terrified, and at the sound of its thunders and hailstones they perished and were exterminated, and the hail came down upon them and they died…

Until I arose and wrought its armor. I translated the whole book with fitting prose and poems like pearls, pure and salty.

He tempers his pride at being the first complete translator of the masterwork with this lament:

Now when I had fulfilled their desire and had translated the book, I forsook my home and I wandered on roads, I sailed on ships, I crossed seas. I fled from the West and I shone in the East. And I saw that I had done foolishly and my iniquity was greater than I could bear in having neglected to compose a book of our own poetry, as though the word of the living God were not among us. I had hastened to keep the vineyard of strangers, but mine own vineyard I had not kept.

I imagine most translators know the feeling. I endeared myself to Robert Fitzgerald once by asking him to sign not a copy of his famous Odyssey translation but rather a selection of his own poetry. He said grumpily “I didn’t know anybody read this stuff” as he scribbled, but he couldn’t suppress the smile.

Thanks to a MetaFilter thread of dhartung‘s, I’ve discovered the online version of Zoëga’s Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Not a classic work of lexicography like Platts, but a useful one, and I’ve been wanting a copy for quite a while. Chalk another one up for the internet.

Update (Dec. 2019). That link is dead, but thanks to juha here are working ones: Zoega, Cleasby-Vigfusson.

An amazing collection of links related to Hindi and Urdu; I’ve just scraped the surface and have already found a pearl beyond price: an online version of Platts’s great Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English. It’s one of the classic works of lexicography, and I waited for years before finding an affordable copy at the Strand; now you can access it at no cost, and you don’t even need to download fonts—it provides transliterated entries as well. And the language-and-literature page is just part of Prof. Frances Pritchett‘s website, which has pages for maps (check out this map of Ottoman Constantinople, which gives alternate Greek names for everything and identifies Topkapi Palace as the “New Seraglio”), South Asian Islam, art and architecture, and much more, including her mother’s page on the Igbo (Ibo) language! A deep bow in the direction of Nancy Gandhi, from whom comes this cornucopia.

[Read more…]

I wanted to alert everyone that today is International Plep Day. If you haven’t already, go visit plep and enjoy the pleply links! (Via MetaFilter.)

I was curious about the origin of the name Chenoweth, and a quick Googling turned up the information that it was Cornish for ‘new house.’ I looked it up in my copy of T.F.G. Dexter’s Cornish Names and there it was, Chynoweth (stressed on the -no-), from ti (chy) ‘house’ (cf. Irish ti(gh)) and nowyth ‘new’ (cf. Irish nua). But I am rarely content with a quick Googling, and a little further investigation turned up the website Cornish Surnames. It’s an amateur effort and carries the charming caveat:

The etymology of surnames is not an exact science, there may be errors on these pages, the definitions come from books by Richard Stephen Charnock, G. Pawley White, T. F. G. Dexter, J. Bannister, Henry Jenner, Nicholas Williams, R. Morton Nance and many more. Some names may have multiple meanings, and I would love to hear from you if you have others I have missed.

But it’s well worth browsing through, and a lot easier to access than the obscure books it draws on.