Archives for July 2015

A nice little piece by Elisa Gabbert for The Smart Set about paragraphs; I like it because it pushes back against the terminally boring essay style they teach you in school (“first I’ll tell you what I’m going to say, then I’ll say it, then I’ll tell you what I said”) and it has some tasty examples:

What most people follow is a variation of the rule established for “five-paragraph essays” in grade school, where each paragraph is built around a “topic sentence.” As such, if the essay is an argument, each paragraph represents a subargument, with the first and last paragraphs reserved for introductory and closing remarks. (This seems like a big waste of two-fifths of the allotted paragraphs; in school I learned to save one of my best points for the end, to avoid having to rephrase my intro all over again.) […]

In nonfiction, I’m obsessed with what I’ve come to think of as the invisible transition, where there is no clear, necessary connection between two paragraphs, and yet – something happens. The juxtaposition isn’t as jarring as a non sequitur, but it could have been otherwise. In fact I’d argue that what’s mostly “lyric” about a so-called lyric essay are these transitions, these leaps, more so than some inherently “poetic” quality of the language. Invisible transitions make a text feel more open, and inside these openings, essays gesture toward poetry. […]

I love the way inter-paragraph gaps fight against the idea of essay as argument, and make it an act of discovery. Or rather a document of discovery, like an explorer’s journal, written in pencil and gone back through – to add color more than accuracy; even at the expense of accuracy. The essay needn’t be faithful to the path of the thinking, but the form can reveal how thinking happens, like when a song gets stuck in your head and only later do you realize why you thought of it, that you had read or heard a word from the third verse. There’s magic there – the mind doesn’t always show its work. Why should prose?

It occurred to me to wonder where the name Pamela came from, so I went to my Dictionary of First Names (by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges), where I found this entry:

Pamela (f.) English: invented by the Elizabethan pastoral poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), in whose verse it is stressed on the second syllable. There is no clue to the sources that influenced Sidney in this coinage. It was later taken up by Samuel Richardson for the name of the heroine of his novel Pamela (1740). In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), which started out as a parody of Pamela, Fielding comments that the name is ‘very strange’.

So now, in addition to pronouncing Byron’s hero “Don JOO-ən,” I have to remember to say “Pa-MEE-lə” for Richardson’s. I note that the Wikipedia article on the name says “It is widely thought that Sidney intended the name to mean ‘all sweetness’ having in mind the Greek words pan (‘all’) and meli (‘honey’),” but had that been the case he would surely not have stressed it on the second syllable, because meli has a short e, and they cared about these things in the sixteenth century. The Wikipedia article also says “The name’s popularity may have been hindered by the tendency to pronounce it /pəˈmiːlə/ pə-MEE-lə which was not fully superseded by the now-standard /ˈpæmələ/ PAM-ə-lə until the start of the 20th century,” but their source for the dating is A World of Baby Names, and I’d like to see a more scholarly source.

Another interesting passage from Kotkin’s Stalin (see this post):

In 1879, the year after Jugashvili had been born, two Georgian noblemen writers, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze (b. 1837) and Prince Akaki Tsereteli (b. 1840), had founded the Society for the Spread of Literacy Among Georgians. Georgians comprised many different groups—Kakhetis, Kartlians, Imeretians, Mingrelians—with a shared language, and Chavchavadze and Tsereteli hoped to spark an integrated Georgian cultural rebirth through schools, libraries, and bookshops. Their conservative populist cultural program intended no disloyalty to the empire. But in the Russian empire, administratively, there was no “Georgia,” just the two provinces (gubernias) of Tiflis and Kutaisi, and such was the hardline stance of the imperial authorities that the censors forbade any publication of the term “Georgia” (Gruziya) in Russian. Partly because many censors did not know the Georgian language—which was written neither in Cyrillic nor Latin letters—the censors proved more lenient with Georgian publications, which opened a lot of space for Georgian periodicals. But at the Tiflis seminary, to compel Russification, Georgian language instruction had been abolished in favor of Russian in 1872. (Orthodox services in Georgia were conducted in Church Slavonic and thus were largely unintelligible to the faithful, as they were even in the predominantly ethnic Russian provinces of the empire.) From 1875, the seminary in the Georgian capital ceased teaching Georgian history. Of the seminary’s two dozen teachers, all of whom were formally appointed by the Russian viceroy, a few were Georgian but most were Russian monks, and the latter had been expressly assigned to Georgia because of their strong Russian nationalist views.

The stupidity of tsarist policy on nationalities and nationalism never ceases to amaze me. (Quibble: Mingrelian, though related to Georgian, is actually a separate language.)

As someone who makes his living editing, I am interested in foreign terms for my profession, and I always vaguely wondered about the French situation, because éditeur means ‘publisher.’ Now I learn from this Victor Mair post at the Log that there is no word for it; one commenter sums the situation up well:

The puzzle is that “éditeur” in French mainly means “publisher”, though it can also be a person who prepares, selects or annotates a text (an edition of Shakespeare). The editor of a multi-author volume is the “directeur (de la publication)”, the editor of a newspaper is a “rédacteur”, etc. But for some reason there doesn’t seem to be a word for the person who helps an author to get his text together, corrects spelling, suggests changes, and hand-holds generally, distinct from the publisher.

I still find it hard to believe. What do they put in the ads when they’re looking to hire an editor? What do editors put on their business cards?

1) Benjamin Moser discusses the importance of remedying the lack of enough translations into English in Found in Translation:

In college in the 1990s, I happened upon a Brazilian writer so sensational that I was sure she must be a household name. And she was — in Curitiba or Maranhão. Outside Brazil, it seemed, nobody knew of Clarice Lispector. […]

As I later learned, Lispector’s first name was enough to identify her to most Brazilians. But two decades after her death in 1977, she remained virtually untranslated; among English speakers, she was unknown outside some academic circles. One pleasure of discovering a great writer is the ability to share her work, and I was stymied. Lispector’s obscurity reinforced itself. People couldn’t care about someone they couldn’t read. And if they couldn’t read her, they couldn’t become interested.

It took me years to realize that this vicious cycle would not magically be broken. I started writing Lispector’s biography, a project that took five years. The result, “Why This World,” generated interest in a series of English translations of her novels. […]

It shouldn’t be assumed, as I long did, that all great foreign writers will eventually reach English-language bookstores. As publication in English becomes more important, even editors open to translations are overwhelmed. (And few read Norwegian.) For every Karl Ove Knausgaard or Elena Ferrante, who are translated almost as soon as they appear in Norwegian or Italian, there are many Lispectors.

2) And Andrew Roth reports on an attempt to do something about it in Columbia University Press to Publish New Translations of Russian Literature:

Russian and American academics, publishers and Russian government officials announced on Saturday that they would collaborate on an ambitious new series of Russian literature in translation to be published by Columbia University Press.

The idea, tentatively named the Russian Library, envisions dozens, and perhaps more than 100, new translations of Russian modern literature and classics, selected by the publisher with support from a committee of Russian and American academics. […]

Jennifer Crewe, the director of Columbia University Press, said that the book list should include a “smattering of classics” that needed new translations, as well as post-Soviet and current Russian literature. With time still needed to select the first series of titles and translate them, the soonest they would be published is 2017.

Needless to say, I welcome this project. (Thanks, Eric!)

I’ve started reading Kotkin’s Stalin (thanks, jamessal!), and was struck by this passage on his linguistic accomplishments as a youth:

At the same time, Georgia was a diverse land and the future Stalin picked up colloquial Armenian. He also dabbled in Esperanto (the constructed internationalist language), studied but never mastered German (the native tongue of the left), and tackled Plato in Greek. Above all, he became fluent in the imperial language: Russian. The result was a young man who delighted in the aphorisms of the Georgian national poet Shota Rustaveli (“A close friend turned out to be an enemy more dangerous than a foe”) but also in the ineffable, melancholy works of Anton Chekhov[…].

Of course, in later years Stalin would execute Esperantists en masse, as we discussed here.

Addendum. Another linguistic tidbit:

Many of Russia’s Muslims spoke a dialect of Persian, but most spoke Turkic languages, giving Russia several million more Turkic speakers than the “Turkish” Ottoman empire.

We discussed the Mountain Jews and their language, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat), back in 2010; now you can see glorious photos of the place where they speak it and read an account of meeting its speakers at Poemas del río Wang:

I met Mountain Jews for for the first time seven years ago, in a café of the Tabriz bazaar, where I was listening to the conversation of the waiters. The language was particularly familiar, some Iranian language, but not Persian, and not even Kurdish. “In what language do you speak?” I asked. “Be Juhuri, in Jewish”, they answered. “Come on”, I said, “I know two Jewish languages, but neither of them sounds like this.” “Well, this is then the third one. We, Mountain Jews speak in this language.” And they said that thousands of them live in the mountains of the “other”, northern, Azerbaijan, and farther north, in Dagestan, many more still.

Take the stuff about the Babylonian captivity with several spoonfuls of salt; as Etienne says in that 2010 post, “the notion that Judeo-Tat goes back to Persian acquired by Jews in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar is utter nonsense. From what little I know of Tat, it is clearly so similar to Modern Persian that it cannot have broken off from Persian at such an early date.” Otherwise, it’s an amazing account:

The most unusual fact about this shtetl is that it works. Anyone who has seen the deserted houses of the Galician shtetls and the Jewish streets of the Eastern European villages, the closed down synagogues or their empty places, and brought them to life again in the imagination with the characters of Sholem Aleichem, can see here how that world would look, had its inhabitants not disappeared. The traditional Jewish world of the Red Shtetl has only gradually modernized. The town center has been renovated, but they have also built a new mikve, a kosher butcher’s shop, and a community house called “The House of Happiness”, and the facades of the ostentatious palaces built in the places of the old wooden houses are still decorated with the motifs of traditional Jewish iconography.

And don’t miss this recent río Wang post on the same topic, with equally glorious photos of Lahıc (or Lahij).

It’s easy enough to find movie quotes via Google, but it’s even easier via QuoDB, which tells you exactly where in the movie it’s from. Via Paul Ogden, who says “Amazing. I gave it one line from a movie I was watching and it instantly found the book it came from, with details.”

I’m halfway through Annihilation (thanks, bulbul!), and one of the pleasures of the book is discovering phrases hitherto unknown to me that are attractive as linguistic items and interesting as real-world phenomena; so far they’re all biological, because the narrator of the book is a biologist:

velvet ants

sea oats

cypress knees

Interestingly, a velvet ant is not an ant, a sea oat is not an oat, and a cypress knee is not a knee. Natural language is not transparent!

Addendum. sugar glider

As is traditional at LH, I hereby list the books I received for my birthday yesterday (I’ll create an Addendum for any late arrivals):

Jabotinsky: A Life, by Hillel Halkin (review)

St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past, by Catriona Kelly (review)

Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin (review)

Shadow & Claw: The First Half of ‘The Book of the New Sun’, by Gene Wolfe

Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, by Richard Brody (review)

(My brother gave me a DVD of Godard’s Goodbye to Language, which goes nicely with the Brody book.) My thanks to all the generous givers, and I’m excited about all of these books!