Archives for June 2020

At Gasan Guseinov’s site I found a poem by Fyodor Sologub (see these LH posts from April: 1, 2) that I like very much; it’s not a great poem, but it’s warm and humane, with a sentiment close to my heart. The Russian (“Разрушать гнезда не надо”) is at that Guseinov link, and here’s my hasty and unpoetic translation:

Don’t destroy a nest,
Don’t disperse a herd;
To beat, cut, trample, burn
Is an evil enemy’s deed.
Whoever has glowed with love’s dawn
Tries his hardest to preserve
All that is gladdened by life’s gleam,
All that listens to God’s speech.
Don’t sully with human lies
Anything living by God’s word;
Devote your days to work.
Despite the earth’s vexations
Make a flowering garden
Of naked Golodai Island.
On the humble Russian rye
Create a universal church.
We don’t need destruction.
We are all God’s herd,
Each of us good in ourselves.
What bold person will bind our hands?
Who will tell us with confidence
What is true in us, what’s a lie?
In the tents of the garden we make
We will find the truth in ourselves.

May 20, 1918

The linguistic tidbit is in the name of Golodai Island, a part of Saint Petersburg known since 1926 as Dekabristov Island; as that Wikipedia article says, the old name is “possibly a corruption of a British merchant name Halliday,” changed to sound like the Russian word голод [golod] ‘hunger’ (you can see more details at the Russian article).

The first time Kataev in Трава забвения (The Grass of Oblivion) referred to a flower called бигнония [bignoniya], I vaguely thought it might be a Russian equivalent of begonia, but of course that’s бегония in Russian. The second time I was curious enough to investigate, and it turns out there’s a whole different flower called bignonia — flowers are as bad as fish and card games. Then unexpectedly (ни с того ни с сего, as the Russians say), as a separate paragraph, he says “Цветок бигнония имел еще другое название: текола.” [The bignonia flower had still another name: tekola.”] Naturally I googled this odd-looking “текола,” but got nothing. Then I tried searching on [bignonia tecola], and Google suggested [bignonia tecoma]; sure enough, it turns out that “Tecoma stans is a species of flowering perennial shrub in the trumpet vine family, Bignoniaceae.” As this brief, soothing YouTube clip says in its description: “Текома, кампсис, бигнония – это всё названия одного растения.” [Tecoma, campsis, bignonia — those are all names of a single plant.] So the “текола” in the text is either a typo that slipped past proofreading or Kataev’s own error; I wonder if anyone’s ever noticed it before. It seems to be in all Russian editions, starting with the first version in Novy mir; maybe the next Collected Works will either change it or at least add a footnote correcting it.

Oh, and if you’re curious (as of course I was) about the origin of tecoma, the OED (entry from 1911) says:

Etymology: modern Latin (Jussieu 1789), < Aztec tecomaxochitl, mistakenly supposed by Jussieu to be the name of a species of the genus to which he gave this name (but really the name of Solandra guttata, N.O. Solanaceæ).
The Aztec name is a compound of tecomatl + xochitl ‘rose, flower’; the plant being named from the resemblance of its flower to that of the tecomatl or Calabash-tree (Crescentia Cujete, N.O. Bignoniaceæ), lit. ‘pot-tree’, < tecomatl earthen vessel, pot.

It’s a long if occasional tradition at LH, for some reason, to have posts on obscure card and dice games; examples are Galbik, passe-dix, passage (2005), Tintere(t) (2013), and Klabyasch! (2017). Now I’ve run across another such game, apparently wildly popular but hitherto unknown to me: belote. That Wikipedia article begins:

Belote (French pronunciation: ​[bəlɔt]) is a 32-card, trick-taking, Ace-Ten game played primarily in France and certain European countries, namely Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Moldova, North Macedonia and also in Saudi Arabia. It is one of the most popular card games in those countries, and the national card game of France, both casually and in gambling. It was invented around 1920 in France, and is a close relative of both Klaberjass (also known as bela) and Klaverjas. Closely related games are played throughout the world. Definitive rules of the game were first published in 1921.

Klaberjass is referred to in that Klabyasch! thread, where you will also find Alexei K. mentioning белот [belot]. In the Klaberjass Wikipedia article, it says:

According to David Parlett, this “popular and widespread two-hander has so many names, mostly variations on the same one, that it is hard to know which is best for universal recognition. Klaberjass is probably closest to the original.” He lists the alternative names as “Clob, Clobby, Clobiosh, Klob, Kalabrisasz, Bela, Cinq Cents, Zensa”. Other sources also list “Klabberjass, Senserln, Clobyosh, Kalabrias, Klab, Clabber, Clobber, Clubby”. Another common name is Klabrias. This truly international game originates from the Low Countries and is particularly strong in Jewish communities. […] It can be interpreted as a two-handed variant of Belote, and indeed three-handed Belote can be played in exactly the same way.

And in the (very long) Belote article, we find:

Worldwide variants

Quebec: Bœuf
Bulgaria: Бридж-белот, Bridge-Belote
Greece: Βίδα, Vida; Μπουρλότ, Bourlot
Cyprus: Πιλόττα, Pilotta
Croatia: Bela or Belot
Republic of Macedonia: Бељот, Beljot
Armenia: Բազար բլոտ, Bazaar Belote
Saudi Arabia: بلوت, Baloot
Russia: Белот, Belot
Tunisia: Belote
Moldova: Belote
Madagascar: Tsiroanomandidy or Beloty

Tsiroanomandidy! The names of card games are like the names of fish: there are too damn many, and it’s hard to tell them apart. And even the origin of this one is mysterious; OED:

Etymology: < French belote, (also) belotte (1925 or earlier), of uncertain origin.
The French word is often said to be from the name of a certain F. Belot credited with having developed the French version of the game, but this cannot be substantiated.

Back in 2004 I wrote a couple of posts about the Narts, the mythical race of giants whose tales are told throughout the North Caucasus (here and here), and now Victor Mair has done a Log post about them. There’s a lot of stuff about cattle-raiding, which doesn’t particularly interest me, but I was fascinated by Martin Schwartz’s etymological comments, which I reproduce below (I’ve added italics):

As to the etymology of Oss. nart(æ): While in contemporary Ossetic there is unquestionably a word nar ‘hero’, and in fact Prof. Foltz sent me a picture of the Nar Hotel in Vladikavkaz, where he was married, the word is a recent extraction (by back-formation) from nart(æ), which has the appearance of a plural, interpretable from context as a plurale tantum. In fact the word is not listed in Vsevolod F. Miller’s Ossetic-Russian-German dictionary (1929-1934), which very much quotes from Nart tales and whose learned native assistants included the folklorist Abaev.

This is not surprising, since Old Iranian nar– (nominative nâ, from the PIE nom.(!) which Victor Mair cites) is nowhere reflected in Middle and New Iranian languages, which however do reflect the adj, *narya-, ‘male’, which as expected gives Oss. næl (with the Alan -l- from *-ry- as in the Alan ethnonym < *Arya– and many Ossetic examples).

Recently in my article (in A. Korangy and C. Miller, eds., Trends in Iranian and Persian Linguistics) “On some Iranian secret vocabularies as evidenced by a fourteenth century Persian manuscript” (the whole article is online via googlebooks), in Section (20) at the end I have a long discussion with new evidence for the the verbal root of the PIE noun h2ner– , i.e. √h2ner ‘to be strong, potent’, with various interesting semantic developments. Inter alia, I derive the Oss. Nart word from Proto-Iranian *narθrâ, a deverbal noun.

I should add that Proto-Iranian *rθ regularly gave Ossetic rt, so that *nar-Ørâ ‘strength, viritility’ would give *narrt(æ) > nart(æ) *’the milieu of heroism’, i.e. the Nart (tales). The suffix is cognate with the Skt., Gr., etc. deverbal derivative –trV-.

Elsewhere he says, on Ossetic Ir, “the *æl- of Alan < *arya-…will not give ir, but since attested Scythian, from sufficient examples, shows quite different phonological development vis-a-vis Sarmato-Alanic, it could be that *arya– went to *ir, and this is preserved as the Ossetic auto-ethnonym, as it were.” (In the Log thread, Germanist links to a webcomic based on Nart sagas!)

I’ve gotten to the part in Трава забвения (The Grass of Oblivion) where Kataev describes a funny and awful evening during Bunin’s time in Odessa (1918-20). His friends decided to help him financially by arranging a public reading of his new story «Сны Чанга» (The Dreams of Chang — Chang is a dog remembering the life of his master). Bunin kept refusing, saying nobody would be interested, nobody knew him, nobody would show up, and nobody would want to spend an evening listening to a single story; he finally gave in, but insisted on getting an agreed-on sum no matter what the receipts were, saying he wasn’t rich enough to disgrace himself in public for free [“Я не настолько богат, господа, чтобы публично срамиться, да еще и бесплатно”]. Sure enough, hardly anybody came (Bunin said “It’s a little awkward, there’s only one and a half people here” [Даже как-то неловко, в зале полтора человека]); Kataev says that if Igor Severyanin, Leonid Andreyev, or the popular cabaret singer/actor Vertinsky had been featured, not to mention Gorky, the hall would have been packed, but what can you do — those were rulers of men’s minds [“Ничего не поделаешь – властители дум!”], while only true lovers of literature appreciated Bunin.

There followed an awkward period waiting for more arrivals, during which the following incident occurs:

– Да уж вы меня не утешайте, – решительно сказал Бунин и поднес к глазам афишку, где ему сразу же бросилась в глаза глупейшая, чисто провинциальная опечатка: вместо «Сны Чанга» были жирным шрифтом напечатаны бессмысленные слова «Сны Чашка».

“Don’t try to comfort me,” said Bunin decisively and raised his eyes to a poster [advertising the evening], where a stupid, purely provincial misprint caught the eye: instead of «Сны Чанга» [Sny Changa, Dreams of Chang] were printed in bold lettering the meaningless words «Сны Чашка» [Sny Chashka, Dreams Cup].

Bunin attacked Blok’s wildly popular revolutionary poem Двенадцать (The Twelve), saying “Russian literature has never seen such a falling-off” [До такого падения еще никогда не доходила русская литература], which gives Kataev an opportunity to tell the reader how much he loved the poem and go on an embarrassing paean to the revolution which goes on for pages and was presumably the kind of thing you had to do in 1967 to get a book published featuring a notorious exile and anticommunist like Bunin. Then the reading finally takes place, and what audience there is is mesmerized, only briefly distracted by machine-gun fire in the street outside.

Afterwards, Kataev walks with Bunin through the quiet city, and wanting to distract him, he says “You must have been translated into a lot of languages.” This sets Bunin off:

– Боже мой!… – раздраженно ответил он. – Ну, посудите сами: у меня, например, один рассказ начинается такой фразой: «На Фоминой неделе в ясный, чуть розовый вечер, в ту прелестную пору, когда…» Попробуйте-ка это сказать по-английски или по-французски, сохранить музыку русского языка, тонкость пейзажа… «В ту прелестную пору, когда…» Невозможно! А что я стою без этого? Нет, меня очень мало знают за границей… как, впрочем, и у нас в России, – с горечью прибавил он.

“My God!” he answered in irritation. “Well, judge for yourself. For example, one of my stories starts this way: ‘In Thomas week [the first week after Easter], on a clear, barely pink evening, at that lovely time when…’ Try to say that in English or French, keeping the music of the Russian language, the subtlety of the landscape… ‘At that lovely time when…’ Impossible! And what is my value without that? No, they have very little knowledge of me abroad — and, for that matter, here in Russia,” he added bitterly.

I love that; with most writers, if they started going on about how great their writing was you’d roll your eyes, but Bunin was that great — in my opinion, he’s the all-time master of Russian prose — and it must have been very hard not to be recognized to the extent he knew he deserved (I hope he got appropriate satisfaction from winning the Nobel in 1933). And he is that hard to translate; as I said in presenting my own attempt in 2009, his style “shows a mastery of Russian prose that is impossible to adequately render.”

Erik McDonald of XIX век (which reached its tenth anniversary in January) has gotten back to regular posting, which is a great pleasure to me (and should be to anyone interested in Russian literature and culture), and last week he had a good post, Black boxes, taking off from a quote from Gleb Stashkov’s Интербригада (International Brigade, 2015) that includes the line

— Правильно, — обрадовался Шрухт и неожиданно закричал: — Приз в студию!

“Correct,” Shrukht said, pleased, and unexpectedly shouted, ”Prize to the studio!”

Erik explains that this is a reference (which would have gone right past me) to “the game show Field of Wonders (Поле чудес), the Russian equivalent of Wheel of Fortune,” where a black box contains a mystery prize for a contestant. He follows it up with an even more interesting post, What a game show tells us about the intelligentsia and the shestidesiatniki,” that does what it says on the tin. I should clearly watch more Russian TV. (His latest post is on what appears to be a mistake in translation in the published English edition of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.)

I’ve started Valentin Kataev’s 1967 memoir Трава забвения (translated by Robert Daglish as The Grass of Oblivion) and have already fallen in love with it. He starts off describing a nervous visit to Ivan Bunin sometime in the early 1910s accompanied by a high-school classmate, each of them with poems they want the great man to look at (and hopefully praise). Then he backs up to explain how he came to know about Bunin. He grew up in Odessa as a not particularly literary adolescent, but like every literate person in the Russian Empire around the turn of the century he was obsessed with poetry and filled a journal with verse that he recited to everyone he knew; nevertheless, he felt he was ignorant of some vital secret that would explain what all those rhymes and meters and stanzas meant. He describes making the rounds of the newspaper offices and being told “Poems? Fine. Drop them off and come back in two weeks.” When he returned, he’d usually be told they weren’t needed (“We’re not taking poems any more, we’ve got too many”), but once in a while he’d be told one had been accepted:

“Which one?”
“I don’t remember — something about nature. Eight lines. As filler.”

Eventually one editor takes pity on him and says “Listen, kid, I’ll tell you the truth — nobody here knows a thing about poetry, including me. You should have a real writer read your stuff.” And he says there happens to be a real writer living in Odessa. We’re primed to think “Ah, now he discovers Bunin!” But no, the editor names Aleksandr Mitrofanovich Fyodorov. “You’ve surely heard of him?” “I haven’t.” He quotes a line about a barrel-organ playing outside a window at evening, wipes away a tear, and says “You have to know him. A. Fyodorov! He’s even in the encyclopedic dictionary!” This is marvelous comedy; the doughty Fyodorov was a writer, all right, who had an eight-volume Collected Works published in 1911-13 and even has his own Wikipedia entry, but he was never of more than local significance, and all the time we’re thinking “Bunin! What about Bunin?!”
[Read more…]

I’ve linked to Balashon, the “Hebrew Language Detective,” many times (I greeted its arrival on the scene in 2006), and there’s another post so interesting I have to link to it, yom huledet:

The Hebrew phrase for “birthday” is יום הולדת yom huledet. While it’s certainly a familiar phrase, it’s actually kind of a strange construct. Huledet is the hufal (passive and causative) form. Why not use the simpler יום הלידה yom haleida – “day of birth”? [The Bible and Rashi are quoted.]

In other words, a better translation for yom huledet would be “the day [he] was delivered” instead of “birthday,” even though both phrases refer to the same date. (An alternate suggestion, by Radak and Rabbeinu Bachye, is that this was the day a son was born to Pharaoh.) This can also help us understand why the phrase is yom huledet et paro, where Pharaoh is the object of the phrase, instead of yom huledet paro, which is how we would say it today. Pharaoh was the object – he was delivered on that day. According to this article, the verse describes the historical record of “a ceremony at which the Pharaoh was born again as far as Egyptian protocol was concerned.”

So this usage could explain why yom huledet is the phrase we use for “birthday.” However, there are other phrases used to describe birthdays in the Bible […] So why didn’t any of the above become the standard term for “birthday”?

I couldn’t find an proven answer to this question. However, it seems that birthdays weren’t a big deal in Judaism until recently. And so there wasn’t need for a standard Hebrew phrase for the concept. I didn’t find yom huledet mentioned in Rabbinic sources that weren’t discussing the verses in Bereshit or Yechezkel until relatively recently. […] The usage (of the full spelling) really starts spiking around the 1960s. I assume that most of the earlier occurrences were discussing the biblical examples.

But as we saw, there were other choices – yom hivaldo or yom haleida. Why not them? My guess is that people were very familiar with the yom huledet of Pharaoh, due to the weekly Torah reading. And although Rashi gives it a slightly different explanation than “day of birth,” that wasn’t enough to prevent it from becoming the popular phrase.

Makes sense to me, and I love that kind of historico-semantic investigation.

As a resident of the Much Sass State myself (specifically, of Hey, Lad, between Tampon Thorn and Hamster), how can I resist passing along this brilliant map from Bostonography? It was originally posted on May 17, 2016 by Andy Woodruff and Tim Wallace, who said “Can you believe it’s almost the 400th anniversary of the the Pilgrims arriving at Hot Lumpy?” and added “Anagrams were all generated by the amazing Internet Anagram Server (or I, Rearrangement Servant).” They have other maps as well, for those who enjoy maps.

Also, I keep forgetting to mention that a couple of months ago LibraryThing dropped all membership fees and limits:

Our plan was to go free when we rolled out “LT2,” our upcoming redesign. But the coronavirus has changed our plans, along with everyone else’s. A lot of people are now stranded at home, with nothing to do but read and catalog their books, movies, and music. A lot of kids are at home too—free cataloging help. And with the economy in freefall, many are worried about money. We want everyone to be able to use LibraryThing. This is the right time to go free.

So, starting today, LibraryThing.com, both on the web and using our cataloging app, are free to all, to add as many books as you want. And, no, we’re not going to add ads. (We will keep showing a few Google ads to visitors, but they vanish as soon as you become a member.)

I’ve been a member for almost 15 years — I posted about it right after it opened — and I highly recommend it as an easy way to keep your books catalogued. And you can enter books in all sorts of languages.

Alexander Adams reviews a new anthology:

Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages collects short poems in languages close to disappearing, allowing us to glimpse a little of the poetry of ancient cultures. There is an attempt to anthologise new work by living poets or recent transcriptions of traditional poems. Each poem is presented in its original language, facing an English translation and a short discussion of the language, poet and some aspects of the poem.

Languages include those from cultures close and far. The British languages include Manx, Cornish, Scottish Gaelic and Shetlandic. Some readers will be surprised to encounter the very rare form of Norman – Lé Jérriais – spoken on Jersey. European languages include Occitan (from Provencal), Saami (the language of the indigenous nomads of northern Scandinavia), Sardinian, Faroese and Belarussian. Others include Maori, Navajo, Assyrian and Hawaiian. The selection is not entirely confined to languages in danger of extinction. Welsh, Pashto, Rohingya are not vulnerable, but they are selected because they are minority languages.

But some languages are so rare, as in the case of Gorwaa in Tanzania, that ‘there is no published dictionary, grammar, texts or standardised writing system’. The Gorwaa poem here features some poetic sounds in the singing of the text, and some audience participation, too. Indeed, each language example brings to the fore different values, such as rhythm, assonance, alliteration, rhyme, repetition, call and response and other parts of spoken verse. […]

Translation is, of course, a very inexact process. […] Obviously, sounds, rhymes and rhythms are lost in the translation of verse. What’s more, the very obscurity of these languages leads to problems with translation. One simply cannot find someone to translate directly into English; hence we get descriptions, such as ‘translated from Ainu into Japanese, translated from Japanese into English’. Although we get the original text, this chain translation does make one question the English language version’s fidelity to the original.

Artistically speaking, the poems vary in quality. But there is a beautiful poem in Navajo by Laura Tohe, translated by the poet herself. She is bilingual and able to approximate the original in her own translation, which aids fluency and the power of her imagery of cranes migrating. Likewise, Joy Harjo’s bilingual poem in Mvskoke (of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations) is rich and evocative.

The review starts by quoting a brief poem by John Elvis Smelcer in both Ahtna and English. Thanks, Trevor!

Not really LH material except that I’ve long loved both the legend of the sunken city of Kitezh and the fantastic wooden structures of Kizhi, so I’m smuggling this in here: Studiolum’s Kizhi and the submerged Karelia at Poemas del río Wang. He quotes Polish journalist Mariusz Wilk as writing “The most important event in Russia in the twentieth century was the destruction of the village,” and adds:

In this sense, Kizhi is really Kitezh. A submerged city in the middle of the lake, where the beauty and civilization of the former Karelia retreated from the advancement of barbarism.

It’s long and filled with gorgeous photographs and forgotten history. Highly recommended.