OK, I’m an addict — as much as I tell myself I should branch out and find new authors to explore, whenever I finish a Russian novel and am at a loss as to what to read next I always seem to find myself reaching for my complete Bunin. I’m now most of the way through his last collection, Темные аллеи, translated by Richard Hare in 1949 as Dark Avenues and in 2008 by Hugh Aplin under the same title, and I hate the thought of having no more new Bunin to read, but of course I’ll just go back and reread my favorites. Anyway, I recently finished Генрих [Genrikh] and wanted to share one of his splendid winding sentences that also happens to have a couple of interesting terms I had to look up:
Был Земмеринг и вся заграничная праздничность горного полдня, левое жаркое окно в вагоне-ресторане, букетик цветов, аполлинарис и красное вино «Феслау» на ослепительно-белом столике возле окна и ослепительно-белый полуденный блеск снеговых вершин, восстававших в своем торжественно-радостном облачении в райское индиго неба, рукой подать от поезда, извивавшегося по обрывам над узкой бездной, где холодно синела зимняя, еще утренняя тень.
Hare, who calls the story “Henry,” renders it:
Then came Zemmering and the whole festive air of a foreign mountain resort; he sat by the warm window in the restaurant car with a bunch of flowers, Apollinaris and a bottle of red wine on a dazzling white table, the dazzling white midday glitter of the snow-covered peaks standing out majestically against the indigo blue paradise of the sky, while the train wound along across narrow precipices, wrapped in bluish wintry early morning shadows.
That reads well, but he’s left out the левое (‘left’) and the «Феслау», I don’t think восстававших в can mean ‘standing out against’ but has to be ‘rising up into,’ and he’s gotten the final bit wrong — see Aplin below for a better rendering.
And Aplin:
There was Zemmering and all the foreign festiveness of midday in the mountains, a hot left-hand window in the restaurant car, a little bunch of flowers, Apollinaris water and the red wine Feslau on the blindingly white table beside the window, and the blindingly white midday brilliance of the snowy peaks, rising in their solemnly joyous vestments up into the heavenly indigo of the sky within touching distance of the train, which wound along precipices above a narrow abyss, where the wintry shade, still of the morning, was coldly blue.
(Both translators, oddly, get Земмеринг wrong — it’s Semmering, which shouldn’t have been that difficult.) I had never heard of Apollinaris water, but it was easy to google up (Wikipedia: “Apollinaris is a naturally sparkling mineral water from a spring in Bad Neuenahr, Germany. Discovered in 1852, it was popularised in England and on the Continent and became the leading table-water of its time until about World War II. There are many references to it in high and popular culture.”); «Феслау» gave me more trouble, but I finally figured out it was Vöslauer, an alternate name for Blauer Portugieser — it should really be Фёслау (as here), but of course Russian no longer bothers with ё.
The story itself starts as a sort of romantic comedy: our hero Glebov, leaving Moscow for foreign parts, says farewell to the teenage Nadya in his hotel room and then to the slinky Lee [or, per Hare, inexplicably, Ly] in the train itself — both are jealous of all his other women, and Lee actually tries to open the door to the next compartment to make sure he hasn’t got another woman in there — and then when she leaves, sure enough Glebov unlocks the door and there is in fact another woman in there, his true love Elena Genrikhovna, a journalist who signs her stories Genrikh. It ends tragically, like almost all the stories in the collection. But I have to point out a Russian idiom both translators missed: when Lee tries the door and finds it locked, she says “Ну, счастлив твой бог!” This is literally “Well, your god is happy/lucky,” but it means “lucky for you” or “thank your lucky stars.” Hare went with “Well, God grant you happiness!” and Aplin with “Well, your God’s a lucky one.” Note to translators: learn those idioms!
he’s left out the левое (‘left’) …
“left-hand window” just strikes me as odd/needing more set-up. Is there something significant about the left side vs right? This means left-hand when facing direction of travel? (‘Port” side on a ship.) The “hot” presumably means because it’s the side that catches the sun(?) So we’re travelling roughly westwards(??) Or it’s the side which gets the views(? Port Out Starboard Home). Has the geography/orientation already been explained earlier in the story?
I’m unconvinced Hare was wrong to just leave “left” out. Perhaps “sun-drenched window” rather than “warm”??
If you’re on a train traveling south (as you are if you’re going from Russia to Switzerland), the morning sun is on the left. It is the translator’s job to translate, not to rewrite the story (and eliminate anything that might require the reader to think).
It’s a midday and the sun is in the South. If Semmering didn’t change the train tracks, they turn from southward to westward direction right when the train passes by their magic mountain (Zauberberg). But as LH says, it is not a translator’s job to explain or correct author’s mistakes (if geography didn’t work out, which I am not sure about). It’s not the New Yorker!
Aplin’s translation is clearly better. “…rising in their solemnly joyous vestments up into the heavenly…”, Bunin does use a church-heavy language.
Dark Alleys are usually hailed as a rare Russian book where sex and romance are convincingly united (Ruslit has a bit of a problem with the physical side of love). I do not feel it myself, but I defer to people with more refined literary tastes.
Ruslit has a bit of a problem with the physical side of love
How exactly? Prudish avoidance? Awkward euphemisms?
Somehow, the best Russian authors didn’t apply themselves to the problem of producing convincing sexual scenes at least in the “classical” period (up to early 20c.) Not sure about the reason. Censorship or prudishness, or maybe the missing middle between “high” and “low” literature, which would have created the vocabulary and tropes that the best authors can then improve upon. Pushkin actually wrote some pretty bawdy stuff, but it didn’t take off (and, obviously, wasn’t published for a long time).
(Which reminds me of MAD Magazine’s “sex during the Victorian Era”).
as you are if you’re going from Russia to Switzerland
Switzerland doesn’t come into the story at all. They are traveling through Semmering, a resort town south of Vienna, and they continue south into Italy, apparently via Tarvis and Udine.
Of course your essential point still stands.
I had forgotten there was a “Gare de Vienne” in pre-war Warsaw. Vienna’s status has certainly diminished since then.
Switzerland doesn’t come into the story at all.
Well, it does as a possibility (“Well, if not to Italy, then let’s go somewhere in the Tyrol, to Switzerland, right into the mountains…”), but of course you’re right that they don’t actually go there. I must have been conflating this with another story.
Fair enough, and of course I was also sloppy. He, not “they”, travels south, she (spoiler) does not.
I have questions though. Is this sentence “ Знаешь, в последний раз, когда я уезжала из Вены, мы с ним уже выясняли, как говорится, отношения — ночью, на улице, под газовым фонарем.” meant to evoke Blok? Seems like by 1940 it would be hard to write «ночь, улица, фонарь» in that order without that coming in your head.
I also wonder if the “famous Austrian writer Arthur Spiegler” is supposed to be a play on Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler never murdered anyone but he did have a somewhat scandalous reputation as a ladies’ man.
I see that it is currently possible to get a direct train to Wien Hbf from Warszawa Centralna station, which did not exist until the 1970’s. So the Poles may have been generally consolidating/upgrading their infrastructure more than trying to slight or downgrade Vienna-as-such. (The current route runs via Krakow and thus about 50 miles east of the old route, which looks to have deliberately tried to get to the then-location of the Czarist-Habsburg border very close to where it met the Prussian-Czarist border, with that tripoint being a more salient location for all sorts of reasons 180 years ago than it is today.)
Seems like by 1940 it would be hard to write «ночь, улица, фонарь» in that order without that coming in your head.
Of course you’re right, and I didn’t even notice that.
Of course nobody in Austria outside the Burgtheater pronounces that with [z]… but still, transcribing it with a Z means the translators simply didn’t know what Z stands for in German.
Vöslauer is now a brand of mineral water from the wine town of Bad Vöslau (final stress, BTW).
Wien Hbf didn’t exist either, though it’s mostly on the site of Wien Südbf + Wien Ostbf. And in the other direction, the trains go through all the way to Warszawa Wschodnia, which the recorded announcement in Vienna fails to pronounce.
And yes, Polish infrastructure is still catching up (while German rail infrastructure is breaking down from decades of underinvestment, but I digress).
Bunin actually felt the need to justify his foray into highly artistic eroticism, in this very story, putting it on the lips of his protagonist, Glebov
DeepL:
A human translator would have noticed that the quote is in old-timey (for Bunin) high register and tried to emulate it in English, but the meaning is the same.
Yes, I noticed that arch self-defense and smirked knowingly.
Polish [rail] infrastructure is still catching up
They’d better step on it! The Baltics are coming!
More to the point, the longer-term objective is dismantling Russian gauge track, thus disabling Byelorussian access to Baltic ports, and making the Kaliningrad corridor highly vulnerable.
I think the problem with linguistic eroticism is that it’s a lot harder to do well than in painting or sculpture. As witness the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Review#Bad_Sex_in_Fiction_Award
won (deservedly) by some in other respects perfectly capable writers.
Possibly this is a culture thing, and languages exist in which verbal eroticism does not tend cringeward. But I suspect this may be a linguistic universal.
Wittgenstein does not appear to have addressed this issue (at least, in his published oeuvre.) His insights on this point would surely have been illuminating.
Yes, descriptions of sex are like descriptions of dreams — they very rarely justify the effort expended in writing them.
The better efforts, it seems to me, are those which concentrate more on what the participants are thinking and feeling than what they are actually doing*. Women writers tend to be better at this than men, at least in our current culture.
* https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IKEAErotica
Belatedly, I think that I might have created an impression that Bunin wrote pornography. He most certainly didn’t! He remained a psychological realist in good standing. Just extended it to the areas where previous giants of Russian letters were afraid to go. And my dissatisfaction with Dark Alleys is not because he failed in this task, but because I find most of the stories from the collection boring.
The Warsaw-Vienna railway in Congress Poland was apparently unique as the only European gauge railway in the Russian Empire. Bunin’s narrator actually makes a point of this, noticing when he gets to Warsaw that “after Russia everything seemed very small – the little cars on the tracks, the narrow rails”. A nice detail that suggests either Bunin had made that trip himself or done a fair amount of research.
He also notes the heaps of black coal, which I would have thought ubiquitous in any train station in that period. That made me wonder if Imperial Russian trains burned wood, but apparently no, Russia imported high quality British coal (as everyone knows Welsh coal is considered the best in the world by steam train aficionados).
The Russian gauge for train tracks is sufficiently wider than the standard gauge used further west to make equipment incompatible, but frankly not so much wider that a casual observer who wasn’t carrying around a measuring tape would be likely to notice the difference (seeing each in isolation without a direct side-by-side comparison) unless primed by being told what to expect and then “seeing” what one had been primed to see. The standard size of train cars has historically varied notably even between systems with the same track gauge, so that’s more plausible.
The Russian gauge apparently goes back to the construction of the line between Moscow and St. Petersburg where, unlike the Warsaw-Vienna line started a little bit earlier, no one was really focused on the future possibility of integrating it into a larger network that crossed borders. So they picked what they thought was the best technical solution in a vacuum rather than a suboptimal solution that had the offsetting advantage of being compatible with what others were already using. When the two standards both expanded geographically enough to bump into each other, the Russians decided that the difference was a feature rather than a bug because it would make their rail network harder for invaders to use with imported equipment, but I think that was probably a post hoc rationalization. And indeed the tracks east of Warsaw in the direction of Moscow were initially switched over to standard gauge circa 1915-16 by the occupying German military for their own logistical convenience.
That made me wonder if Imperial Russian trains burned wood, but apparently no, Russia imported high quality British coal (as everyone knows Welsh coal is considered the best in the world by steam train aficionados).
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
I cannot resolve this disagreement or comment on the engineering aspects of the gauge choice, but I’ll note for J.W. that Nabokov doesn’t say he noticed the difference in gauge, let alone that he noticed unprimed.
The border-crossing VN mentions is where the Russians laying track west from Vilnius met up with the Prussians laying track east from Koenigsberg in 1861. It was at least eventually set up for smooth/rapid transfer, unlike in Warsaw where (much like will happen in London and Paris to this day …) your arriving train left you at a station several miles away from the station from which the onward train you were connecting to would be departing.
Due to the vagaries of history the toponym on the then-Russian side of the border has been replaced by a Lithuanian one while the toponym on the then-German side of the border has been replaced by a Russian one.
Verzhbolovo has been replaced by Virbalis (Polish: Wierzbołów, Yiddish: ווירבאַלן, romanized: Virbaln, German: Wirballen) — I note Wikipedia conspicuously omits the old Russian name (which has penultimate stress, if anyone cares) — and Eydtkuhnen is now Chernyshevskoye per the Kybartai article:
coal succeeded birch logs.
I suspect Nabokov was being more romantic than accurate. Logs are far less efficient than coal for creating steam, and apparently more dangerous as there is greater danger of sparks. Russia was already one of the largest coal producers in the world in 1900 as well. During the Civil War Russians probably had to fall back on wood, but the steam enthusiast sites I found suggest that pre-revolutionary passenger trains heading West would have burned coal.
It’s interesting that both Nabokov and Bunin use coal as a stood passing from Russia to Europe, but both writers were writing in exile decades after leaving Russia. Possibly metaphor became memory.
Apropos Verzhbolovo, the opening episode of Babylon Berlin centers around a commandeered train heading from Novorzhev in Soviet Russia to Berlin with no gauge change and just one border crossing, which isn’t Verzhbolovo either
Kind of destroys the vibe of historical accuracy too early in the series…
AFAIK, you notice immediately when you’re inside a train car because the Russian gauge allows one more seat in the same width.
I have not experienced life with coal (and am not nostalgic about it). Does it have a particular smell when it burns? Is particulate smoke inevitable in household use or in trains, and so a factor in keeping windows closed, etc.?
Reminded me my confusion over the quotation from Lawrence Durrell in Veiled Sentiments.
As I told, I was translating this book for fun. My passive English is not good enough for Durrell, and the normal practice is to quote the known Russian translation of Durrell anyway….but my English when assissted by the Internet is better than the translator’s English assisted by paper dictionaries:(
Correction: you notice just by looking at it. This is a photo of Russian tracks, and it immediately looks quite a bit wider than what I’m used to.
@Vanya, the fact about the gauge is widely known here. (There is a joke: they asked the emperor “should we make it same as in Europe or larger?” and the emperor responded “а на хуй больше?” They misunderstood him and made it one penis length wider…)
The border-crossing VN mentions is where the Russians laying track west from Vilnius met up with the Prussians laying track east from Koenigsberg in 1861. It was at least eventually set up for smooth/rapid transfer,
Did people switch trains there?
When I traveled by train from Berlin to Vilnius in 1992, it crossed the border to Belarus at Białystok, went North-East to Grodno and then turned back West to Vilnius. We didn’t change trains at Białystok, but the train cars were lifted from their chassis and put on a wide-gauge one. It took a while, can’t remember how long exactly. But I don’t know whether they did that already in the early 20th century.
To vanya’s earlier point about the prominence of Vienna in the 1840’s, it does maybe seem relevant that there wasn’t really a roughly-straight-line way to get by train from Warsaw to Berlin until circa 1902, when the Russians finally laid tracks west to the then-border just past Kalisz, where passengers could transfer to German standard-gauge tracks running further west though then-Posen and Frankfurt a.d. Oder usw. Back circa 1840/1850 Berlin was not a notably less populous city than Vienna although not notably more so either, so what motivated the perception that a convenient rail connection to Vienna was a higher priority than one to Berlin? Of course there was a direct route from St. Petersburg to Berlin once the 1861 border crossing referenced above was complete that didn’t go through Warsaw, and maybe that was good enough for the Russian gov’t, although if you wanted to go from Moscow to Berlin, a route via Warsaw (connected to Moscow by rail by around 1870 w/o even needing to take a ferry across the Bug) would have made more sense.
NB that in the 1840’s and thereafter there were plenty of railroads in the U.S. with various gauges broader than standard, with nationwide standardization not really happening until the 1870s and 1880’s. The equivalent of Russian gauge was locally dominant in much of the American south until a mass changeover in 1886.
Now I’m curious about how Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe in the 1860’s, with casual googling revealing only a cryptic reference to some supposed discussion of train schedules in an article I would be unable to read, viz. M. I. Brusovani and P. G. Gal’perina, “Zagranichnye puteshestviia F. M. Dostoevskogo 1862 i 1863 gg.,” in Bazanov, V. G, ed., Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia (Leningrad, 1988).
The two nearly-identical trains were positioned side-by-side, with a border and customs check in between.
Very few emigrants from Russia used this station on the way West, because passports for the able-bodied men wishing to leave were typically held up by military draft offices, and because both Germany and Austria accepted other forms of identification (most typically, steamship contracts) for those crossing illegally. So illegal crossing to the West has become a cottage industry along the border. The few people who could get passports (typically elderly men or women traveling without their men) mostly used steamboats rather than trains anyway.
But returnees from the West often used rail. Say, my great grand uncle was detained after crossing at Radzivillov with someone else’s id, while foolishly having his own papers almost in plain sight in his suitcase. And one group of women (distant relatives) traveling West actually crossed at Verzhbolovo, because one of them was too weak to attempt the usual illegal crossing, which required walking a few kilometers…
@Hans: wikipedia asserts that one of the earliest versions of such a system (changing the wheels/axles on the cars so the car could run on the differently-gauged rails across the border) was put into use at the then Russo-German border as early as 1901 – that one using an approach invented by “Emil Breidsprecher, a director of the Marienburg–Mława railway and a future professor at the Königliche Technische Hochschule zu Danzig.” But I have no sense of how widely it was used and frankly for passenger traffic it may well have been cheaper for a long time to just have the passengers disembark and walk over to a new train on different rails across the platform. There were greater financial incentives to switch the wheels/axles on cars full of freight, because non-human cargo can’t change to a new car on its own so the labor cost of the unloading/reloading to change cars is substantially greater.
I have no sense of how widely it was used
Changing axles was still in use in the mid-1970’s, even for bipedal ‘traffic’. Yes you could walk across a platform to a different train; no it wouldn’t be easy to take all your luggage; nor to wake everybody up in the middle of the night.
The operation was still enough of a military secret passengers were forbidden to raise the window blinds or look out as it went on.
This was a little before flying became commonplace for the public-at-large. The particular journey I know of was from Britain (via ferry to Netherlands) to Minsk.
@J.W.
so what motivated the perception that a convenient rail connection to Vienna was a higher priority than one to Berlin?
My sense is that the Vienna line was chosen because the desire to connect Warsaw to Cracow, the Polish cultural capital at the time, was a lot stronger than the desire to connect to Poznan, which was being harshly Germanified. For economic reasons as well, a rail line in the 1850s connecting to the agricultural areas in Galicia and the rising industrial production in Upper Silesia and Bohemia, probably seemed more important than a line to Brandenburg.
Also, Vienna was a cultural capital second only to Paris — Berlin may have been big, but who wanted to go there except for practical reasons?
Pretty recently there was a fairly detailed concept of a plan to extend the Transsiberian Railway all the way to Vienna, on Russian gauge, to boost everyone’s economy.
Day saved.
What Vanya says makes perfect sense, although I still think it interesting that the original line to Vienna didn’t actually go via Krakow but as noted above got to Austrian territory very close to the Romanov/Hohenzollern/Hapsburg tripoint – when you got near that tripoint coming from Warsaw you could transfer to an intra-Galician train heading to Krakow, just as (soon enough) you could transfer in a different direction to an intra-Silesian train heading to then-Breslau. Although maybe there were separately reasons of topography why the direct route to Krakow would have been harder to build and only happened later?
Here’s an amusing American story from the 1850’s about how while changes of track gauge were inconvenient for passengers and freight shippers just trying to get to their intended destination, they were of economic value to whatever town was located at the breakpoint, which thus had an incentive to resist standardization proposals that would allow trains to pass through town without needing to stop and transfer their passengers/cargo. Warsaw presumably benefited a little bit from that dynamic. https://www.erieyesterday.org/news-and-events/159th-anniversary-of-eries-gauge-war/
“tripoint” – I didn’t know the word. It’s wonderful and surprisingly I can’t remember any good Russian name for it:/
(Weirdly, when I google the word, Google says, in “questions”: “Что такое точка пересечения трёх точек?”, literally, “What’s a point of intersection of three points?” )
I have not experienced life with coal (and am not nostalgic about it). Does it have a particular smell when it burns?
in ian mcdonald’s many-worlds-hypothesis-based Everness trilogy, the distinct smells of various londons due to their different energy regimes are a significant element in how he presents them through different characters’ eyes/noses: our world with its myriad petroleum/natural gas engines; another with coal-powered electrical plants (that pre-empted an age of steam, leading to a much quieter world of smokestacks & batteries); others that haven’t stuck with me.
@drasvi The tripoint in question “Russian: Угол трёх императоров” it says for ‘Three Emperors’ Corner’.
Googling “what’s the point of intersection of three borders” leads me to wikipedia ‘tripoint’.
Official Russian term for tripoint is пограничный стык (something like “border connection” in literal translation). Unfamiliar to me and sounds clunky. Also, it includes higher number of areas with a common point, with specifically tripoint being … трипойнт.
I have not experienced life with coal (and am not nostalgic about it). Does it have a particular smell when it burns?
Very much so. I personally associate the smell of coal with the PRC in the late 1980s. It was pervasive when I was there in the winter of 89-90. It was also still common in southern Poland 10 years ago.
I think in English “tripoint” is a pretty obscure or technical or jargonish word, but it’s a useful one. Any given tripoint that local folks have occasion to refer to may of course have a name of its own (like the sogenannte Dreikaisereck I was referring to upthread), and conversational contexts in which one needs a more generic/abstract word for it are maybe not all that common?
Looking around the internet for the equivalent in other languages I see that some languages have greater clarity by adding an additional morpheme to the compound, like the Danish “trelandsgrænse” or the Luxembourgish “Dräilännereck.” Or I guess the Esperanto “trilanda punkto.”
I’m somewhat surprised that German Dreiländereck is a general geographical term; I always knew das Dreiländereck as the name of the point where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands meet – which WP lists under Vaalserberg.
I grew up close by.
See Triplex Confinium.
I grew up within maybe 20 miles of this surveyed-by-Mason-and-Dixon domestic tripoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware%E2%80%93Maryland%E2%80%93Pennsylvania_Tri-State_Point but can’t recall anyone ever talking about it or visiting it as a novelty attraction back then. To be fair, the linked article says that public access to the site was significantly improved only a decade or so ago.
Many interstate tripoints in the US are underwater, due to the use of lakes and rivers to mark certain boundaries. I would have thought I grew up even closer to a submerged Del./N.J./Pa. tripoint but it turns out that technically there isn’t such a tripoint because due to the vagaries of how the state lines work vis-a-vis the river you don’t have a single point where all three touch.
See Triplex Confinium.
And American English “tri-state area”, although that can mean any area where three states are close together.
ulr: I’m somewhat surprised that German Dreiländereck is a general geographical term
Similarly, Norwegian Treriksrøysa “the Three Kingdom Cairn” is specifically the point where Norway, Sweden and Finland meet, even if the meeting point with Finland and Russia is also marked with a cairn
Not only is a “tri-state area” an area rather than a single point, such areas need not have a tripoint, as in the one consisting of relevant parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, where the first two lack a common border because the third is in between them.
BTW the animated series _Phineas & Ferb_ was set in the Tri-State Area, and according to this source that one is so named because it “was founded by John P. Trystate, who united the Bi-State Area with The Adjacent Area, founded by Otto H. Adjacent.”
https://phineasandferb.fandom.com/wiki/Tri-State_Area
Vanya: I grew up in West Virginia in the 50s and 60s. The answers are yes and yes.
I also grew up in a tri-state area with the triple point underwater.
…technically there isn’t such a tripoint because due to the vagaries of how the state lines work vis-a-vis the river you don’t have a single point where all three touch
This doesn’t seem to be possible geometrically unless there is part of the river that doesn’t belong to any state.
@D.O.: You are indeed correct geometrically. I managed to confuse myself because the in-the-river border takes a weird-looking sideways jog* on the map when the right bank switches states, but of course there’s a point at the beginning of that jog (or its end, depending on your POV) where the underwater pieces of all three claimants touch.
*As confirmed by a 1934 U.S. Supreme Court decision that starts its historical explanation with a “deed of feoffment” given by the then-Duke of York to William Penn in 1682.
You are indeed correct geometrically.
The best kind of “correct.”
I want to see that in a movie: “I am correct… geometrically.”
I clearly still have my work cut out for me if I hope to assert as many as six geometrically-impossible things before breakfast.
probably doesn’t need to be mentioned, but its uniqueness is why Four Corners (the quadpoint where utah, colorado, arizona, and new mexico converge) is a named spot and (rather low-key) tourist attraction. the other potential quadpoints – and the two potential quintpoints, at the southern tip of illinois and western tip of oklahoma – are all narrowly evaded. if we only had a proper geometers’ lobby in this country!
Not only is a “tri-state area” an area rather than a single point,
Like the Triplex Confinium [Edit: as Hat defined it. (Apparently there’s a narrower sense that means the single point.)]
such areas need not have a tripoint, as in the one consisting of relevant parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, where the first two lack a common border because the third is in between them.
As I noted. Our country’s Second Tri-State Area, which includes Chicago, also doesn’t have a tripoint (or maybe it does, underwater).
FWIW I cannot recall anyone using the phrase “Tri-State Area” to describe anything local back when I lived in “Chicagoland” (as people sometimes said).
There are examples of tri-county and quad-county around. Beyond that there’s “five county” and more, but at some point I assume they tend to be thought of as less of a geographical unit and more as a handy shorthand.
OTOH, the first page of hits in the google books corpus for “in the tri-state area” is oddly heavy with references to the Mo./Kan./Okla. one (apparently important for lead and zinc mining), plus mentions of one relevant to endangered birds (basically the Yellowstone park vicinity) and one relevant to tobacco growing (Virginia plus both Carolinas). And an old copy of the Tri-State Medical Journal published in Texarkana, which should be a clue as to the three relevant states.
JWB: BTW the animated series _Phineas & Ferb_ was set in the Tri-State Area
I’m trying to remember how my son suggested to translate local evil scientist Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz*’s “entire Tri-State Area” with the same level of overly precise imprecision in Norwegian. I think he started with hele midtfylket “the whole middle part of the province” but decided that it would be too small and insignificant compared with the original and went for Oslo med omegn “Oslo with vicinity”.
* I really wrote this comment just to quote that description from Wikipedia.
@Vanya: the steam enthusiast sites I found suggest that pre-revolutionary passenger trains heading West would have burned coal.
Hm. Here’s the recently returned U.S. Ambassador to Russia saying in 1913 they burned birch logs, not coal, and mentioning the “mass of sparks”.
And Nabokov was circumstantial about it. He says that when he and his family changed trains entering Russia, he saw “the birch logs piled high, under their private layer of transportable snow, on the red tender.”
Vanya, so what is burnt-coal smell like, as compared to, say, diesel? What other not-obvious sensory experiences go with it?
Not like I’m writing a historical novel or anything, but in a similar way, I am trying to imagine what it was like. The sensory experiences of cities full of horses are also, uh, notable, but easier to imagine.
@Trond: Back when my oldest child (now 24) was 7 or 8 years old we watched a lot of Phineas & Ferb in our household. It turned out that she could not correctly parse “Tri-State Area” when Dr. Doofenshmirz said it and assumed he was just menacing (in his comically-incompetent local-evil-scientist way) a fictional locale with a semantically opaque Latinate name like Tristatarium.
Y said: There are examples of tri-county and quad-county around.
California has the Tri-Counties region of San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. It straddles Central and Southern California.
What is the significance of the California Tri-Counties? It partly matches what I think of as the Central Coast (minus Ventura, plus Monterey). Is there any sort of political association between the three?
Moving down the political-hierarchy scale but up in numbers, America also has the Quad Cities (along the upper Mississippi, including representatives from both the Illinois bank and the Iowa bank) and the Five Towns (on Long Island). I can’t immediately think of a well-known Six X’s that fits the pattern in the U.S. (we leave the Six Counties to the British(?) Isles), but maybe I’m overlooking something.
Six Flags!
Conversely, I’m somewhat surprised that das Eck goes so far north – into an area* where die Ecke not only exists, but even still means “edge”** instead of “corner”.
* Cologne anyway. There’s an episode of Die Sendung mit der Maus that talks about die lange Ecke repeatedly!
** Yup, cognate.
There’s one at the tip of Namibia.
And isn’t NYC “the Five Boroughs”?
Hat, that no one generally refers arthrously to “the Six Flags” is syntactic evidence that it’s not parallel to the phenomena under discussion but is instead parallel to brands like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Roses.
we leave the Six Counties to the British(?) Isles
and the Seven Cities to the transylvanians. (and, i suppose, the conquistadors)
the Five Boroughs
i feel someone should say something on the nyc semantics of “boro” vs. “borough”, but i’ve got nothing.
—
there are also quite a lot of u.s. “tri-cities”, including albany-troy-schenectady, and a few variants, like “the triangle” in north carolina, comprising raleigh-durham-chapel hill (slighting carrboro, as usual).
I raise you Decapolis
As the old Swiss confederacy expanded it evolved from the Vier Waldstätten (four forest-states) to the Acht Orte (eight cantons) and then the Dreizehn Orte, not counting the Drei Bünde (three leagues), who were allies but not included in the count of 13.
At one point the official style of the pre-Napoleonic Dutch political entity was the Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden, but I don’t know how often it was called the Seven Provinces rather than the United Provinces of unspecified number. (There was apparently an eighth province, but they were so poor they were excused from paying taxes and also denied representation in the States-General, so they didn’t get to be in the count.) This was of course a rump successor to the Seventeen Provinces (Zeventien Provinciën), whose unity was fractured by various developments in the 16th century and thereafter.
@rozele
I thought “seven castles/fortresses”, not “seven cities”.
Hat, that no one generally refers arthrously to “the Six Flags” is syntactic evidence that it’s not parallel to the phenomena under discussion
I know, but how could I resist?
@JWB (and @all), what surprised me is that a tripoint is a very simple geometrical object.
They do arise – necessarily – in political maps, but what’s a political map? A partition of a plane into continuous areas. Tiling. Or foam.
Not a part of school geometry, but still something you see every day here and there. And you have a word for it and I do not:/
For this reason I don’t like trelandsgrænse, Dräilännereck and trilanda punkto that much.
Speaking of das Eck, I was absolutely astonished by Dreieck. Compared to Russian треугольник it sounds very simple. I learned it when my wife and I gave several math lessons to a German schoolgirl, and laughed when I heard it from her (and maybe repeated and laughed again)… not sure if she understood that I’m laughing because I like the word.
I recall from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold the surname Viereck. How did that come about?
tripoint
I used to live almost on top of the Ghana-Burkina-Togo one. There is very nearly another one at Cinkassé, just east of there. The border does extremely weird things at that point. Positively fractal …what were they thinking?
One of my home towns in various times was a part of 1. Chernihiv (Ukraine) 2. Gomel (Belarus) 3. Bryansk (Russia, now) oblasti. Within the area of the tripoint’s drift, in other words.
“seven castles/fortresses”, not “seven cities”
non-german-speaking me thinks of “bürgen” as “walled cities” or “towns with enough feudal autonomy to have citizens”, which kinda goes in either direction. but there are people here who actually speak the language, and i defer to them…
@Y, once it occured to me that the recognisable-but-undescribable smell of Russian trains can, in part, possibly be that of coal used – as I though – to boil water and for heating*.
* to my shame, I don’t remember if there’s heating, but logically trains must have it. And there is a large boiler in every carriage. You, of course, DO buy tea, because tea in glasses in podstakanniks as it is served there is why you take a train and not a plane.
But you also can fill your cup – or your glass in podstakannik – from the boiler.
Is the smell diesel-stinky, kerosene-pharmaceutical, gasoline-chemical?…
“fractal”
@DE, at the moment I’m not fully confident that there is always a point (and always precisely one point) where such three countries meet. Imagine you’re drawing the borders, and at first you do it in the simplest way but then you pinch this point and “pull” it along something like the space-filling curve.
Maybe (didn’t think of it seriously) it will be a trisquare instead of a tripoint…
Don’t know what such tricks can give us.
I have no idea, but the surname Viereckl is real somehow. I’ve met a bearer.
But yes, Viereck is the ordinary word for any quadrangle, and it is actually an ordinary word, unlike quadrangle.
In modern Standard German, which may be completely beside the point, “state” is Staat, pl. Staaten; Stätte, pl. Stätten, is “place (e.g. where something happens)”, “site” – and it’s a doublet of Stadt, pl. Städte “town, city”…
Ort, pl. Orte (but Örter in Luther), is “place (especially settlement)”, the cover term for villages through cities.
Siebenbürgen is a singular collective; the plural of Burg is Burgen… in modern Standard German, see above.
Nowadays, Burg strictly means “medieval/defensive castle”, but of course this is blurred by its occurrence in so many placenames.
Or just barbecue-smokey?
A moment of satisfaction: thinking of what I wrote about tea in glasses in podstakanniks I realised that I REALLY want tea…
…and then remembered that I have already prepared it:)
@Y, I didn’t try to describe the smell for myself (I tried to identify it: I either thought about it as the ‘peculiar’ smell of trains or unsuccessfully tried to remember if I know a part of it) and hesitate to do it now:/
But it (that they burn coal) s a theory. Perhaps they don’t do it and the smell is something else.
@dm, rozele
Der Ursprung des deutschen Namens ist nicht verbindlich zu entschlüsseln; denkbar ist eine allmähliche Übertragung der zunächst nur für die Hermannstädter Gegend gebräuchlichen Bezeichnung („Sieben Stühle“) aufs ganze Land wie auch eine Herleitung von der Redewendung „hinter den sieben Bergen“ für eine (aus dem Blickwinkel der deutschen Länder) weit entlegene Gegend. Die Interpretation „sieben Burgen“ ist fragwürdig, da sowohl die mundartliche Form wie auch die frühen Wappendarstellungen eher auf Berge deuten.
https://ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/regionen/siebenbuergen
So (behind the) seven mountains?
For anyone unfamiliar, the “Six Flags” brand name for amusement parks referred to six polities that had controlled the site of the original park, Six Flags Over Texas: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States of America.
Regarding fractal boundaries, I am fond of the Lakes of Wada, which are three disjoint sets in the unit square that all have the same topological boundary. (That means the closure minus the interior.)
@David Marjanović: Quadrangle is a relatively ordinary word, although not in the sense “quadrilateral.” The primary meaning is (per the OED) “a square or rectangular space or courtyard, entirely or largely surrounded by buildings, typically in a college, palace, etc.” Most commonly, it is shortened to quad though, at least in the context of a college campus.
Previous discussion of the etymology of Siebenbürgen starting from here.
(Time for Peaches in Cluj again.)
There’s a Siebengebirge in Germany.
…and indeed…
“7 mountains” it is, then.
That’s where Snow White is. Frau Königin, Ihr seid die Schönste hier; aber Schneewittchen, hinter den sieben Bergen, bei den sieben Zwergen, ist noch tausendmal schöner als Ihr!
That is the collective formed from “7 mountains”.
I found it irksome when the Six Flags empire expanded east and rebranded e.g. the Great Adventure amusement park in Jackson, N.J. as “Six Flags Great Adventure” without coming up with a cockamamie list of six locally-historically-relevant flags, but I should have been more open to the way in which brand names predictably abstract away from any initial literal meaning.
Of course the original branding of the original site is fairly dubious because that far north in Texas neither Spain nor France nor Mexico ever did much of anything to enforce their theoretical claim against the actual indigenes – that various colonial powers agreed with each other about lines on a map did not have much impact on the facts on the ground. A fellow with the colorful name Athanase de Mezieres may have passed through the area in the 1770’s but no actual white settlement occurred until the late 1830’s.
I am fond of the Lakes of Wada
Odd that Japanese Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for Takeo Wada (和田健雄).
…well, no; I just reread the other thread…
The smell of burning coal isn’t like any petroleum smell. It’s sharpish, more like a variant of wood smoke (naturally enough–or maybe some other burning plant smell).
@DE, at the moment I’m not fully confident that there is always a point (and always precisely one point) where such three countries meet.
There are two France-Spain-Andorra tripoints.
@Jerry F.: There are three different Missouri-Kentucky-Tennessee tripoints, due to the vagaries of the course of the Mississippi river. (As you’re going downstream with Missouri on the right bank, Kentucky on the left bank eventually gives way to Tennessee as you would expect, but then the river curves until you’re headed north and then you’re back to Kentucky on the left bank until it curves again south and again gives way to Tennessee the second time and then that sticks.)
I see, Kentucky has an exclave called Kentucky Bend (pop. 9 in the 2020 census).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_enclaves_and_exclaves might suggest other amusing situations.
I think, John Grisham uses a similar geographic setup for one of his novels. Probably it was The Reckoning, but apart of that plot element, I don’t remember anything.
Jerry, I meant within a small vicinity (or a little circle) where the three countries meet, e.g. (the vicinity of DE in Africa). But you, of course, can say that however small my vicinity is, Andorra can be made smaller.
It is too bad our topologist is no longer with us….The condition for the existence of at least one tripoint seems to be that, for each state S, the union of the two boundaries of S with the other two states forms a connected set.
Handwavy proof:
Start at any point P of the “union of the two boundaries” B. Suppose P is a point belonging to state S and T, but not state U. Trace the entire length of B (if necessary), starting at P. Continue until you reach a point belonging to state U. This point is the tripoint.
I think you need to restrict “state” to something connected. Otherwise the exclaves of S and T could have all kinds of disconnected boundaries, which wouldn’t affect the existence of the tripoint.
I’d be tempted to make the condition “there’s a connected open set A in which S and T have a boundary, T and U have a boundary, U and S have a boundary, and every point of A is in S, T, U, or the above boundaries.” No proof.
And no fractals.
@drasvi: It depends on what you mean by three countries meeting. My suggestion above was an attempt at a suitable definition. Both that and pp’s definition (I take it) were attempts to exclude “isthmus” situations such as small regions containing only Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, though there’s no tripoint of those three countries. Likewise Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
And I don’t want to make Andorra, or Eswatini, smaller. The Andorrans and the Swazis would probably object.
If you delve into the mathematical literature there is of course the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem, which at least has a working theory of what do and don’t count as tripoints implicitly baked into it and maybe a rigorous definition that can be extracted from it. As I understand it, the way the four color theorem works (by disqualifying certain purported counterexamples that are not hard to draw …) is by a specific definition of what it means for two “regions” (whether countries or provinces or whatever other geographical units) to be “adjacent” to each other and thus entitled to different colors from each other. In the Four Corners region of the U.S., Colorado and Arizona, for example, are not adjacent to each other in the relevant sense, so they could if needed be given the same color on the map.
Other two-tripoint examples like Andorra and Eswatini would definitely include Liechtenstein and also, for those acquiescing in Indian imperialism and the conquest of Sikkim, both Bhutan and Nepal. If you don’t get hung up on “whether the U.S. State Department officially agrees that X really exists” you’ve also maybe got Transnistria and South Ossetia.
It seems plausible to me that you can’t get a set of three “countries” (or whatever) with more than two common tripoints unless there’s an exclave involved, but I’m not prepared to do a rigorous mathematical proof of that. I note that the Four Color Theorem assumes no exclaves or, rather, does not assume that an exclave must be colored the same color as its “mainland.” If you accept the reality of the de facto tripartate division of Cyprus, you can color all the non-contiguous British bits the same color but probably one or more of those bits has two tripoints with the Greek and Turkish zones?
Yeah, the Four Color Theorem only considers regions that share a one-dimensional linear boundary, not ones cattywampus across a zero-dimensional intersection point like the Four Corners. If you disallowed colorings that had like colors meeting at a point, there would be nothing to say; a moment’s thought would show that there could be no minimum number of colors required.
The proof of the Four Color Theorem was, historically, a very important landmark in the history of mathematics. A lot of work had been done to reduce the problem to a statement about graphs, but the number of possible graphs was enormous. So a computer was used to check all the graphs involved. This upset a lot of people. Erdős was particularly disappointed that there was not a human-readable proof. The correctness of the computer algorithm was also doubted by some, but while some of this was probably reasonable caution, a lot of it in retrospect sounds like sour grapes.
Ultimately, the proof set a new standard. It wasn’t just the use of a computer, but that was important, leading to the development of computerized proof checking software. It also heralded the development of proofs of important results being too complicated for a human to process in their entirety. Important results, like Fermat’s Last Theorem or the classification of finite simple groups, were proved over multiple papers, some of them hundreds of pages long. There was, for a while, a project aimed at condensing the classification to just a few thousand pages, but it seems to have been abandoned. These are a very different kind of proof from that of something like the Hilbert Basis Theorem, which only takes a few lines, although it took a lot of work to figure out what the right thing to prove was.
Also (pipped by JWB) you need to exclude exclaves from the definition of “region,” otherwise it’s too easy to construct counterexamples. For the purposes of the FCT, a tripoint is not enough to make the three regions adjacent, but it seems obvious that each is adjacent to the other two along the border segments that end at the tripoint. (If the borders are not fractal, that’s where the fun comes in so map colorists just refuse to deal).
Three is magic here, the regions around a quadripoint are not all adjacent because of that point. (You may be able to gerrymander the map so they are, “away” from the quadripoint, but that’s not that interesting).
Hmm, I think you can have regions B and C with a D straddling their common border (two tripoints), and tripoints with regions A and E “further along.” I’ll spare you any attempt at ASCII graphics.