Archives for December 2018

I’ve started reading Leskov’s 1872 novel Соборяне [The Cathedral Folk], and am enjoying it tremendously — he’s great at creating memorable characters and telling good stories about them. But he also loves using odd bits of language, often dialectal, which means the reading is slow, since I’m constantly looking things up. Well, one of the odd words was взвошу, and while googling it I came across Jack Matlock’s 2013 dissertation, Leskov into English: On Translating Soboryane (Church Folks) (from that link you can download the pdf), which discusses this passage and many others, comparing existing translations and providing his own commentary — what a wonderful gift from the internet! Here’s his passage on взвошу (pp. 193-4):

19 (28) взвошу: Dal’ defines звошить as meaning to lift something, as with a lever, or, dialectically, to anger someone. Neither meaning fits here, and a note to the 1957 Russian edition of the text says simply “здесь: наказать.” It therefore is not clear whether this is an aberrant use of the word by Leskov or a rare or dialectical meaning. In all its meanings the word is unusual and does not appear in most dictionaries. The translator should, therefore, seek something less ordinary than “punish” to translate it.

Hapgood comes up with “pay off,” which is not bad, for a change. Mongault used “frotter les côtes,” and Luther “abrechnen.” I wish I could find something more exotic, but at this writing I have nothing better to suggest than “settle scores with.”

A great resource, which I discovered at the perfect time.

I just got my first Christmas present in the mail; frequent commenter Trond Engen had warned me it was coming, saying that Amazon didn’t carry it so he was having the Norwegian publisher send me a copy, and today it arrived. It turned out to be a copy of the brand-new Norsk banneordbok [Norwegian curse-word dictionary], by Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld, and there’s a nice interview with Ms. Fjeld, with a conveniently subtitled video, here (Google Translate; note that they render the title in one place as “Norwegian Punching Dictionary,” though in the teaser above the title it’s correctly given as “Norwegian Swearword Dictionary” — mysterious!). It’s hard to think of a more appropriate gift; it was over a decade ago that I issued a call for curses for my forthcoming book of international curses and insults, and I specifically asked for Norwegian examples. (My mother was Norwegian-American, so I have a personal interest in the topic.) Per Jørgensen responded:

Faen i helvete as in faen, Satan, and helvete, Hell.
Svarte faen, “black Satan.”
Jævla and jævlig, literally “devilish,” roughly equivalent to English f***ing.
That’s basic Norwegian swearing for you. Want more?

(He added more in this comment.) This dictionary gives me plenty more, and it will inspire me to improve my (presently minimal) skill at reading Norwegian. The entry for faen i helvete starts “Sannsynligvis det mest vanlige og mest direkte banneuttrykk in norsk” [Probably the most usual and most forthright cursing expression in Norwegian], and it has three lightning bolts (a measure of “grad af tabu” [degree of taboo]). One of the expressions quoted in the interview is “i all verdens land o pannekaker” [in(to) all the world’s lands and pancakes; no lightning bolts], which provides a visual chuckle in the video. I was surprised, but on reflection shouldn’t have been, to find so many English words included (fuck gets three bolts and has examples like “Fuck deg, Giske!”]; the worst word is apparently fitte ‘cunt,’ which gets the maximum of four lightning bolts [“Et av de sterkeste banneordene i moderne norsk”]. I’ll be spending a lot of time with this and sharing it with other Norsk-related persons of my acquaintance; mange takk, Trond!

This comparison is going to be superficial and unfair, but I don’t care, it’s in me and it’s got to come out. I finished Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring (see this post) with a certain amount of irritation, though somewhat mollified by the appearance in the text of a NYC street address, 501 Broadway; it took him 150 pages to tell a very simple story — boy meets girl, boy betrays girl, boy feels very bad — and he tells it in an ostentatiously antiquated way, full of exclamation marks and a jovially intrusive narrator (who at one point says “history is silent about what he thought then,” drawing a marginal exclamation point from me). It’s as if he’d regressed instead of progressing from the brilliantly subtle narration of A Sportsman’s Sketches, a quarter of a century earlier; it’s basically a romance novel, written as though the author were being paid by the word and needing every kopeck, and I can see why the critics of the day trashed it while the public ate it up so avidly that Vestnik Evropy had to reprint the January 1872 issue in which it appeared.

So the next item in my chronological reading list was Tolstoy’s Кавказский пленник [The Prisoner of the Caucasus]; I’m pretty sure I read it many years ago, but probably in translation. It’s only twenty pages long and written in a mildly off-putting fake-folk style suitable for children and the illiterate (it starts “Служил на Кавказе офицером один барин. Звали его Жилин. Пришло раз ему письмо из дома,” something like “Once upon a time an officer was serving in the Caucasus. His name was Zhilin. One day he got a letter from home”), and in fact it was published widely in children’s readers (and was extremely popular). It too tells a very simple story — hero is captured, tries to escape, fails, tries again — but damned if it isn’t so gripping I gobbled it up in one go. How does he do it? Whether he’s using the labyrinthine, French-infused sentences of War and Peace or the storybook ones here, he convinces you that what he’s telling you is of vital importance and you have to follow wherever he leads. I know it’s a hackneyed observation, but I’ll say it anyway: Tolstoy was a genius, a master storyteller, and it’s a crying shame he mostly gave it up for religious propaganda.

I’m reading Turgenev’s Veshnie vody, translated The Torrents of Spring or Spring Floods, and occasionally checking my understanding of obscure bits by consulting the 1895 Edward Richter translation; I was amused just now to see this bit of dialogue:

“Well, I will not — I will not go on,” said Maria Nikolaievna, hastily. “You are displeased with this. Forgive me — I will not! Don’t be angry!”

That’s Richter’s ridiculously formal version of this:

— Ну, не буду, не буду, — поспешно проговорила Марья Николаевна. — Вам это неприятно, простите меня, не буду! не сердитесь!

Marya Nikolaevna, to whom poor besotted Sanin is trying to sell his estate so he can marry his beloved Gemma, is a hard-headed businesswoman but presents herself as a flighty, flirtatious girl, and a more situationally appropriate translation might be something like:

“I’ll be good, I promise!” Marya Nikolaevna quickly said. “You didn’t like that, I’m sorry and I won’t do it any more! Don’t be mad!”

But what struck me linguistically is the absence of an equivalent in English for this use of “не буду” (‘I won’t’) as a child’s exclamation. In Russian it can be either negative (“Не буду и все!” [I won’t do what you want, that’s all!]) or a repentant promise (“Прости меня, я больше так не буду” [Forgive me, I won’t do it any more]), and we only have the former (“I won’t!!”), but it’s the latter that’s used here; the scene of a crying child saying “не буду, не буду” when caught in a misdeed and trying to avert punishment is primordial, but in English kids don’t say that, they say “I’m sorry” or “I didn’t mean to” or whatever. So poor Richter has entirely misunderstood the line in Turgenev.

This five-minute clip is a wonderful bit of dialect conversation from Ireland:

This short film is part of a larger collection of folklore recorded by Michael Fortune featuring two men John Murphy and Ned Kavanagh from Kilmuckridge, Co. Wexford. The recordings are based around sites of folkloric importance, and this particular recording relates to Ballyscough Bridge which borders the villages of Oulart and Kilmuckridge in Co. Wexford. The recording was undertaken by Michael Fortune in July 2015 in John’s yard in the townsland of Morriscastle.

The recording session was unplanned, and the only equipment Michael had with him was a small dslr camera without external microphone or tripod. Regardless of this, the camera captures the natural conversation between two neighbours as they re-count stories from the places around which they live.

Both men have distinctive accents. John’s in particular is an old accent found along the East Coast of County Wexford. John’s accent and dialect is sadly disappearing along this stretch of coast and it’s demise is due to a variety of reasons; primarily tourism, educational development and the influx of people from Dublin. John’s yard is surrounded by holiday homes and mobile home parks. Many of the people in which both men speak of have either passed away or the places have been consumed into the tourist bubble which has engulfed the fields and roads of the area.

Kilmuckridge lies to the south of an area called “The Macamores”, an ancient Gaelic controlled territory which ran from Kilmuckridge, County Wexford to Arklow in County Wicklow. Overlooked by many, the area is steeped in a rich folklore and dialect, and contains many intriguing cultural and linguistic links between neighbouring Wales, West Country England, Cornwall and the North of Ireland.

The casual swearing is great; perhaps the most startling linguistic element to me was the two-syllable pronunciation of the verb in “I seen.” I’m not sure of the subtitle in “going study and all”: shouldn’t it be “steady”? (Thanks, Trevor!)

I’ve been reading Victoria Somoff’s The Imperative of Reliability: Russian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820s-1850s but got increasingly annoyed with it and have set it aside for the time being. I was excited about reading it because she’s discussing a period I’m very interested in and nobody talks about much, but it turns out she’s more interested in her theory than in the actual history — for one thing, she pretends there were no Russian novels before the 1850s, which is absurd, there were a bunch of them in the 18th century and some fine ones in the early 19th. And (to take a trivial but telling example) she consistently misdates one of the few texts she discusses in depth, Turgenev’s “Konets Chertopkhanova” [The End of Chertopkhanov], to 1874 rather than 1872. She has some interesting things to say, but she should have done more spadework, and frankly it should have been an article, not a book.

However, I found this bit on Turgenev’s story “Mumu” interesting enough to post here:

Kolotaev’s point that in effect Gerasim [the deaf-mute hero of the story, an illiterate serf] is a child uttering his first word is well taken. But, the possible associations evoked by “Mumu” aside, quite glaring in this situation is that in naming the dog, the otherwise mute Gerasim acquires the ability to pronounce a word; the animal sound he is able to produce becomes a human word. Gerasim’s long-standing “moo-moo,” it turns out, has a real-world application — it is the name of this particular dog; and when calling it, Gerasim, for the first time in his life, makes sense. […] Thus, by naming his dog Mumu, the only name he is capable of giving, Gerasim acquires speech, even if his language consists only of this one word.

With the death of Mumu, this language is lost. Mumu is thus a story not only of a serf’s unjust loss of his pet but also, somewhat paradoxically, of this deaf and mute hero’s loss of speech; which is not the same thing, I would stress, as falling back into muteness — a conclusion that would support the reading of the novella’s end, albeit in a manner other than that usually proposed, as Gerasim’s final defeat. It would be more accurate to suggest that although Gerasim loses his capacity for articulate speech with Mumu’s death, he does not so much relapse into muteness as fall silent. With Mumu gone, Gerasim literally has nothing more to say, is liberated from the very need to speak. Muteness strives to be resolved into words and, therefore, precedes speech, but silence comes after it, standing as the volitional transformation of muteness, the human choice, that is, not to make a sound.

And speaking of falling silent, Victor Hayden died on December 7. That name will be known to almost no one, but fans of Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) will recognize his nom de Beefheart, The Mascara Snake. You can hear his moment in the limelight, from the Captain’s masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, here. Fast and bulbous!

Remember the Rose Jacobs poll about the impact of language change that I posted about three months ago? (Good lord, 435 comments — how did that happen?) Well, she’s produced the results, such as they are: “Looking at the data, evidence supporting my hypothesis — that with age we become less tolerant of novel language — is weak: Only in the case of our 2010s phrase, lowkey as an adverb, was there a direct relationship between a person’s age at the time the usage became relatively widespread and intolerance for the phrase.” But she has pretty graphs, and interesting quotes from some of the respondents; check it out.

Oksana Rosenblum writes about Yevgeniy Fiks’ solo exhibition “Himl un erd: Yiddish Cosmos” at Stanton Street Shul in New York (on view until December 16), which “explores the connections between the twentieth-century experience of Eastern European Jews and the Soviet space program.” Unexpected, eh? But I want to highlight this particular passage:

The revolutionary spirit dictated that the construction of a new society required the creation of a new language, so that inhabitants of all worlds, everywhere, could communicate. Volf Gordin, a prominent anarchist theoretician, accordingly proposed the idea of a universal language, which he called “AO,” in 1920.

It is worth taking a step back to discuss the Gordin brothers, Abba and Volf. Born into the family of a Lithuanian rabbi, they were fluent in both Hebrew and Yiddish. They spent their seemingly boundless energy on organizing the pan-anarchist movement, but their approaches differed. Abba at first attempted to work together with newly inaugurated Soviet power, but, having failed at that, found himself in exile and later escaped to the USA. Volf, on the other hand, remained in the Soviet Union and invented the “AO” language in 1920. The purpose of AO, like the earlier Esperanto, would be to unite the various inhabitants of the Universe, or cosmopolites, under a single linguistic umbrella. A circle of so-called inventists formed around Volf, who later turned to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an early Soviet rocket scientist, to ask for his support in spreading the word about AO.

In April 1927, the First World Exhibit of Models of Interplanetary Mechanisms and Devices took place at the Association of Inventists in Moscow. The largest display at the Exhibit was dedicated to AO and explained how the language worked; it also contained grammar books and numerous related newspaper articles.

“Those who study and speak AO, are cosmopolites — citizens of the Universe”, read caption to one display.

Yevgeniy Fiks’ Stanton Street Shul exhibit draws deeply on this utopian history. His AO prints are visually bold and conceptually complex, unearthing and bringing to life an all-but-forgotten, substantively failed, yet beautiful attempt to create a universal language capable of overcoming national and state boundaries. AO was meant to be simultaneously as precise as a mathematical formula but inspirational enough to motivate its bearers, the cosmopolites, “to set off on an interplanetary voyage,” as one of the prints poetically states.

There’s an “Alphabet of the Language AO” image which looks impressive and explains that the language “derives its justification and existence from the absence in modern languages of any relationship between words and things-concepts and, even more, between sounds and things-concepts.” So it’s another in the endless series of doomed attempts to eliminate l’arbitraire du signe, but it’s a particularly striking one that doubtless ran straight into the Stalinist meat-grinder within a few years.

Anatoly (of Avva) wrote me as follows:

Recently I was discussing a Trump tweet with a friend (hold on, my question is apolitical). The tweet went “He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough.”

During the discussion I realized that my friend (whose native language is Russian, like mine) misunderstands the meaning of this phrase (I think!). The way he understood “couldn’t get rid of him fast enough” was “failed to fire him as quickly as the situation required”, or in Russian “не смог достаточно быстро его уволить”. Whereas I was reading it as “was very impatient to fire him as quickly as possible”, that is “не мог дождаться, когда наконец смогу его уволить”.

Do you think my friend is right, or I am, or is it the case that these two meanings blend in your mind?

To me, they are very distinct and provide an example of what I occasionally see as a single English verb exhibiting distinct meanings that correspond to what Slavic languages embody as aspect, e.g. мог/смог. Do you experience them as such?

With that particular phrase, I feel the meanings are distinct because I can switch from one to the other mentally; that is, my friend’s interpretation, I feel, is not ungrammatical, but simply doesn’t fit the context (in a phrase like “I couldn’t press the trigger fast enough”, it’s just fine). Although come to think of it, I don’t know how to further explain “doesn’t fit the context”.

I responded that it was a very interesting question and that I thought the meanings blend for me, though the more I think about it the less sure I am — I’m starting to feel, like Anatoly, that I can switch from one to the other mentally. So I throw it open for responses by the Varied Reader.

My wife and I are back to watching the BBC adaptation of Trollope’s parliamentary novels, The Pallisers, which is (as I wrote here) absolutely splendid. But I have a bone to pick. In the last episode we watched, a lawyer deploys the fine old Latin adverb anglice, defined accurately by Merriam-Webster at that link as “in English; especially : in readily understood English (the city of Napoli, anglice Naples).” It is traditionally pronounced, as you can see at the M-W link, /ˈæŋgləˌsiː/ (ANG-gli-see), just as one would expect of an old Latin loan. It can also be pronounced (though not by me) as the ostentatiously classicizing /ˈanɡlikeː/ (AHN-gli-kay), as Wiktionary suggests. It cannot, however, be pronounced /aŋˈgliːs/ (ahng-GLEES), as if it were French, which is how the actor playing the lawyer said it. I would wince but not be surprised if I heard that in a current TV show, but from the BBC in 1974 I would have expected better things. (Oddly, anglice does not occur in the text of Phineas Redux, which that episode is based on.)

I am also disappointed with The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s decision to cancel their excellent language blog Lingua Franca. You can read laments at posts by Rose Jacobs (Dec. 10) and Anne Curzan (Dec. 11), and doubtless others as the deadline draws near. It seems there’s an endless demand for discussion of language… as long as it’s not by actual linguists. Bah.