Archives for July 2003

Olympia Morata (1526-55) was a remarkable woman who was educated in the ducal court of Ferrara, fell out of favor, and left with her husband for his home town of Schweinfurt in 1550; they were forced by the wars of religion to flee in 1554 to Heidelberg, where she died the following year. In her short life she became known as a great scholar and writer, admired all across Europe (by those who did not revile her as a “Calvinist Amazon”) and an inspiration to all women scholars. A new book, The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic, edited and translated by Holt N. Parker, presents all of her writings that survive (most were lost in the siege of Schweinfurt) along with an introduction that is, amazingly, both erudite and compellingly readable. On her marriage:

Thus far, Morata’s life follows a pattern common to many of the learned women of early modern Europe: a brief burst of erudition, which enjoyed masculine encouragement only as long as the scholar remained a young girl. Once she became older, no longer merely a curiosity for display but a potential disturbance to the order of things, she was married off, and her talents absorbed in child rearing and domesticity.

Two things made Morata’s story different. One is the extraordinary nature of her talents and her determination to pursue her study of “divine letters” despite circumstances far more horrific than mere disfavor at court. The other was the nature of her marriage and her husband. It was at this bleak period of her life, when she had lost her father, her childhood friend, and her position at court, that she found a partner in a marriage that seemed to both husband and wife to be literally made in heaven: “He has also given me as a bride to a man who greatly enjoys my studies”… Andreas Grunthler was a relative of Johannes Sinapius’s and a brilliant medical student, deeply learned in Greek… In him Morata found what the “silly women” and men of the first Dialogue had declared impossible, “a man who would prefer you to be educated than to be rich.”

Morata and Grunthler were married sometime in late 1549 or early 1550, and Olympia composed a Greek poem for the occasion… The letters and all the testimony of their friends paint a picture of a remarkable marriage. It was clearly a love match… Her letters to him are deeply moving and remind us (if we need reminding) that in the Renaissance, Latin was a living language, so much so that a learned German married to a learned Italian might well conduct their loves and lives in it. Their marriage was conceived by the couple themselves as a match between equals, and looked upon by their friends as such…

And on her Latinity:

Her Latin is simply splendid. She ranks as one of the great stylists in an age of talent. Her prose is a flexible instrument, always correct but capable of ranging from the most formal (for example, in her letters to Vergerio) to the most conversational (for example, in her dialogues and her letters to her husband). Her writing is deep-dyed in classical literature. She lightly tossed off allusions, which she expected her equally learned readers to catch. I have attempted to note in passing only the more obvious ones. I have doubtless missed many others.

I will take the word of Prof. Parker (whom I have known for many years) for her Latin, not one of my favorite languages, but I can vouch for her excellent Greek. I will limit myself to quoting one poem, her defiant “To Eutychus Pontanus Gallus,” followed by Parker’s translation (I have transliterated the Greek, silently emending one typo):

oupote men xumpâsin eni phresin hêndane tauto
   koupote pâsin ison Zeus paredôke noon.
hippodamos Kastôr, pux d’ ên agathos Polydeukês,
   ekgonos ex tautês ornithos amphoteros.
kagô men thêlus gegauia ta thêluka leipon
   nêmata, kerkidion, stêmona, kai kalathous.
Mousaôn d’ agamai leimôna ton anthemoenta
   Parnassou th’ hilarous tou dilophoio khorous.
allai terpontai men isos alloisi gunaikes.
   tauta de moi kudos. tauta de kharmosunê.

Never did the same thing please the hearts of all,
   and never did Zeus grant the same mind to all.
Castor is a horse-tamer, but Polydeuces is good with his fist,
   both the offspring of the same bird.
And I, though born female, have left feminine things,
   yarn, shuttle, loom-threads, and work-baskets.
I admire the flowery meadow of the Muses,
   and the pleasant choruses of twin-peaked Parnassus.
Other women perhaps delight in other things.
   These are my glory, these my delight.

The original can be seen here (poem at top left), along with all her original texts, at Boris Körkel’s Morata website (in German).

The dubbed versions of Hollywood films created by Dmitry Puchkov—known as Senior Police Detective Goblin, or Goblin for short—are much sought after by connoisseurs of Russian swearing, according to this story by Carl Schreck in the Moscow Times.

Damn, shoot, darn, hell.
Watch the standard Russian translation of Guy Ritchie’s 2001 crime caper “Snatch” and you’d think that these are the foulest words known to gangsters in London’s criminal underworld.
But watch Dmitry Puchkov’s Russian translation of the same film and you’ll hear an array of expletives that would make a sailor blush. Puchkov even changed the Russian title—”Bolshoi Kush,” or “Big Score”—to an extremely crude, if justifiably accurate, variant: “Spizdili.”
While sex and violence are accepted components of Russian movies, profanity is still a major taboo. Puchkov’s unique obscenity-laden translations of English-language movies have made him one of the hottest commodities on Russia’s gigantic pirate movie market.

But he doesn’t limit himself to translation in the strict sense:

By far, the Goblin films most in demand are Puchkov’s farcical translations of the first two “Lord of the Rings” films. He has translated the first film, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” as “Bratva i Koltso,” or “The Posse and the Ring,” and the second film, “Two Towers,” as “Dve Sorvanniye Bashni,” or “Two Toppled Towers,” a play on a Russian expression meaning to go crazy.
Puchkov sets J.R.R. Tolkien’s tale in Russia and re-christens several characters with comical Russified names. For example, Frodo Baggins is renamed Fyodor Sumkin (from the Russian word sumka, or bag), and Gollum is renamed Goly, the Russian word for “naked.”
The films feature some obscene banter, conversations about newly built McDonald’s restaurants and a soundtrack including songs from Tatu and Zemfira, among others.

He is, needless to say, likely to be sued, and he admits his activities “may come to an end soon, assuming a studio doesn’t decide to hire him to translate the movies for which it has legal distribution rights.” I just hope I get a chance to experience the fruits of his genius. (Thanks to Taccuino di traduzione, the new translation blog of Isabella Massardo, for the link.)

Update. See this digenis.org post for further developments (as of May 2005):

So, now that Puchkov has been snatched up by the studios to create legitimate translations of their films, will he stop altogether creating spoofs like the ones that built up his popularity? It doesn’t look like it. In fact, Puchkov announced that he will continue to make these hilarious translations under the project called Bozhya Iskra (The Divine Spark), a side project of his main company Polny P.

For the most part, the public loves him. Even Leonid Volodarsky, arguably the most famous translator of modern films into Russian, thinks well of Goblin. My guess is that we’ll see Puchkov doing a lot more official dubbings of films – perhaps he’ll even expand into some different genres.

That’s the name of a new blog by Brian Lennon, a Ph.D candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University [in 2021 a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State]. So far he’s written caustically literate posts about the idea that Americans should be learning English as a second language, the “abysmal linguistic incompetence of U.S. intelligence services,” the QWERTYUIOP keyboard, Scots slang, and other topics. Welcome to Upper Blogovia, sir!

Addendum. UJG has delivered a further smackdown to the ESL story.

Margaret Marks, of the excellent legal translation blog Transblawg, has posted an appeal on behalf of Peter Griffin‘s bilingual edition of the Catalan novel Tocats pel foc (Touched by Fire) by Manuel de Pedrolo. Apparently the novel has received practically no advertising, and the remaining 500 or so copies may be pulped unless it starts selling. It’s a little pricey ($29.95), but if you know anyone interested in Catalan literature and/or bilingual editions you’d be doing a mitzvah to tell them about it.

[Read more…]

Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
Have the staff without the banner.
Like a fire in a dry thicket
Rising within women’s eyes
Is the love men must return.
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
What a marvel to be wise,
To love never in this manner!
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still,
Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible, dissembling
Music in the granite hill.

[Read more…]

Marjorie Perloff devotes a long essay in Jacket 14 to teasing out the implications of what is on its face a strange statement of Wittgenstein’s:

Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten. Daraus muß sich, scheint mir, ergeben, wie weit mein Denken der Gegenwart, Zukunft, oder der Vergangenheit angehört. Denn ich habe mich damit auch als einen bekannt, der nicht ganz kann, was er zu können wünscht.

I think I summed up my position on philosophy when I said that philosophy really should be written only as a form of poetry. From this it should be clear to what extent my thinking belongs to the present, the future, or the past. For with this assertion, I have also revealed myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to do.

–Culture and Value, 1933-34

(Another analysis of this passage occurs in the final section, “The End of Philosophy,” of a Doro Franck essay on style; Franck translates the last sentence more accurately as “For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do [my emphasis].”) Perloff begins with a fascinating discussion of the problems involved in translating a line of Rilke:

We usually think of the ‘poetic’ as that which cannot fully translate, that which is uniquely embedded in its particular language. The poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke is a case in point. The opening line of the Duino Elegies —

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus den Engel Ordnungen? —

has been translated into English literally dozens of times, but, as William Gass points out in his recent Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, none of the translations seem satisfactory. Here are a few examples:

J. B. Leishman (1930) —
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the
angelic orders?

A. J. Poulin (1977) —
And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?

Stephen Cohn (1989) —
Who, if I cried out, would hear me — among the ranked Angels?

Gass is very critical of these, but his own is, to my ear, no better:
Who if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?

The difficulty, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that English syntax does not allow for the dramatic suspension of Wer, wenn ich schriee… and that the noun phrase Engel Ordnungen, which in German puts the stress, both phonically and semantically, on the angels themselves rather than their orders or hierarchies or dominions, defies effective translation. Moreover, Rilke’s line contains the crucial and heavily stressed word denn (literally ‘then’), which here has the force of ‘Well, then’ or, in contemporary idiom, ‘So,’ as in ‘So, who would hear me if I cried out…?’ But the translators cited above seem not to know what to do with denn and hence lose the immediacy of the question. Then, too, denn rhymes with wenn as well as the first two syllables of den Engel, creating a dense sonic network inevitably lost in translation.

She follows this with a discussion of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s translation of William Carlos Williams’s “Between Walls”; only then does she begin considering Wittgenstein. She finishes with two highly unliteral versions of the Rilke poem, the second of which begins: “I hate this place. If I were to throw a fit, who/ among the seven thousand starlets in Hollywood/ would give a flying fuck?” Much food for thought throughout.

The Eudaemonist has a downright TDW-like investigation of the variant spelling “flippertigibbet” (found by her first in the “rotten poetaster” Joyce Kilmer). And while you’re visiting, don’t miss her commentary on Seth Lerer’s Error and the Academic Self (downright Housman-like in its irritable insistence on accuracy) and her succinct demolition of an idiot reviewer (“Uh, Mr. Reviewer, sir? Socrates drinking the poison? Uh, that was submission to the mob…”).

Via Avva (who adds a Russian translation), this comparison (at Mike Snider’s Formal Blog) of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” (“La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers…”) with English versions by Bly, Howard, and Wilbur. I must say I’m disappointed in Richard Wilbur, who’s one of my favorite formalist poets but who I think does a terrible job here (“fresh as a child’s caress”??).

Today I went to Brighton Beach for the first time in months to pick up a copy of Dmitrii Bykov’s new novel Orfografiya (publisher’s page, in Russian). As soon as I read the review by Nikita Eliseev, I knew I had to have it; not only is it a historical novel about a period I’m fascinated by (the Russian Revolution and civil war), it focuses on the orthographic reform of 1918! (In the alternative history of the novel, the Bolsheviks abolish orthography rather than reforming it.) Indeed, the main character’s name is Yat’, the name of a prerevolutionary letter that was eliminated by the reform (and replaced by e). Other main characters are writers of the time, like Gorkii and Khodasevich. OK, it’s almost 700 pages long and the author calls it an “opera in three acts,” which in other circumstances would put me off, but this I can’t resist.

Ray’s comment on this post led me to this entry at snarkout, which in turn led me to first the Scél Mucci Mic Dathó (Story of Mac Dathó’s Pig), which was our main text in Old Irish class many years ago, and then the entire Táin Bó Cúalnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley), both of them in parallel Irish and English. The stories are great, and for anyone interested in the Irish language having the bilingual edition online is absolutely wonderful.