Last year I posted Kathleen Maris Paltrineri’s LARB interview with Damion Searls, the translator of Jon Fosse (see also this recent post); now the New Yorker has Max Norman’s take on Searls and his work (archived), from which I excerpt some bits I thought might be of interest:
Searls, who translates from German, Dutch, and French in addition to Norwegian, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation. More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, borrowing a term popularized by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology is the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract—think of how René Descartes theorized an absolute gap between the mind and the body—but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader. Translation is “something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options.” “There are no rules,” Searls writes, “only decisions.”
“Translation” wasn’t always how you said translation. In Latin, the first Western language into which translations were made wholesale, you might “turn” (vertere) a text, or “render word for word” (verbum pro verbo reddere). The noun translatio referred primarily to a physical transfer, as we still use it to refer to the “translation” of human remains. The modern Latin term traductio, the origin of the French traduction, Italian traduzione, and Spansh traducción, seems to have been given its current meaning by Leonardo Bruni, the author of an influential 1424 treatise on translation. A story has it that the Italian humanist gently misunderstood the meaning of the verb traducere, which, in the ancient Roman text he was reading, signifies something more like “to derive from.” The irony, though fitting, is probably too good to be true.
Norman goes into the history of translation in antiquity and the Renaissance, then continues:
Things changed, as they were wont to do, in the spiritual soup of Sturm und Drang, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. The German Romantics associated the idea of the “mother tongue” with “race” and the burgeoning nation-state. In their thinking, language evolved from a mere means of expression into the means “by which man gives form simultaneously to himself and to the world,” as Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of Alexander, and a translator and linguist, put it. The modern ideological stakes of translation—as a fraught operation transposing the utterances of a person enmeshed in a unique cultural fabric—begin here.
So does the basic framework that theorists, and indeed many translators and critics, still use. A key moment came in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating,” a lecture from 1813. Schleiermacher, a German philosopher, stated that “either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him.” In this view, translation is at best a tug of war, at worst a zero-sum game. Lawrence Venuti glossed these alternatives as “domestication” and “foreignization.” A “foreignizing” translation—one that brings you closer to the text, that never lets you forget that it’s a translation—might productively unsettle readers but maybe also put them off, whereas a “domesticating” translation could do violence to the source. […]
Searls seeks a reset, and finds it in phenomenology. In phenomenological terms, there is no boundary between mind and world: the two are intertwined. Searls gives the comfortable example of a chair. When you see one, you’re not “being confronted with ‘sense data,’ as philosophers like to say, which my supercomputer brain then processes.” Rather, you’re simply seeing “a place to sit. That is what seeing a chair is.” You recognize a chair as the thing you sit in. That’s its “affordance,” Searls says, borrowing a term coined by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who initially conceived it during the Second World War, while studying how fighter pilots perceive their environment. This approach to perception has the benefit of breaking down the distinction between self and world: a chair in all of its chairness doesn’t exist without a perceiver to see it as something to sit in; a chair is the affordance of a place to sit.
What does this have to do with translation? Reading, Searls points out, is a form of perception, and a text is rather like a world. Words and phrases present affordances that readers take up as they go. A translator, then, isn’t just a lexical go-between, interpreting one word at a time. A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book. “All the philosophical dilemmas about whether translation ‘reflects’ or instead ‘transforms’ what’s in the original need to be swept aside,” Searls declares. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is neither found nor created through experience but revealed, developed, Searls writes, as if it were a photograph. He suggests that translation does something similar, “developing” the original as if it were a photographic negative.
Practically, then, the translator reads with an eye to understanding the affordances offered by a text—to re-creating its potentialities, rather than merely offering a lexical equivalent. “We don’t translate words of a language, we translate uses of language,” Searls writes. The point is not to capture merely what a text means but to reproduce how it means in context. One way that Searls describes this, borrowing a term from Gertrude Stein, is as the text’s “force.” “In a translation, even what look like divergences or outright mistakes on the single-word level may well be part of what you need to do to re-create the same force in English,” Searls writes. He points to his retranslation of Max Weber’s “Vocation Lectures,” delivered before general audiences between 1917 and 1919—a work filled with ideas, yes, but also a lot of rhetoric. In one passage, an existing translation read, “We can see very clearly that the latest developments are moving in the same direction as . . .” (Nun können wir . . . mit Deutlichkeit beobachten: daß die neueste Entwicklung . . . in der Richtung der [X] verläuft). Searls sashimied this down to “The clear trend is toward . . .” He believes that his version does what the original does: it gets us from one idea to another in plausible academese. But it does so in the way Weber might have if he were giving the speech in English, today, rather than rendering the early twentieth-century German in English. […]
Searls’s philosophy is ultimately one of freedom— to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says. In other words, freedom to do what good literary translators have always done. Some might find this liberty surprising, even alarming, particularly when it comes to texts whose meaning is not merely a product of the reader’s experience but inheres closely in their precise verbal structure. (A philosopher reviewing Searls’s edition of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” observes that the translation’s occasionally revelatory “fluency” could also lead to “sometimes downright misinterpretation.”) But for Searls it’s inevitable that any translation will be deeply subjective. “All translators are faithful,” Searls writes, “but to different things: to whatever they feel is most important to preserve.”
Thanks, Eric!
A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book.
This seems essentially identical to Eugene Nida’s notion of “dynamic equivalence”, but expressed in a somewhat more flowery manner, with added Merleau-Ponty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Nida
(I was lately reading something about a conference organised by Merleau-Ponty at which Gilbert Ryle spoke. There was apparently no appreciable meeting of minds. So to speak.)
I don’t think it’s the case that there’s only one right way to do it. It depends (among other things) on what you are translating for (and for whom.) And, of course, what you are translating. It would not seem sensible to translate a lyric poem in the same way as you would translate a physics textbook. Or a treatise on phenomenology, for that matter …
This seems essentially identical to Eugene Nida’s notion of “dynamic equivalence”, but expressed in a somewhat more flowery manner, with added Merleau-Ponty.
Well, there’s only so many things you can say about this much-chewed-over topic, and all a philosophically-minded translator can really do is come up with a new way to express the same old dichotomy.
I don’t think it’s the case that there’s only one right way to do it.
Needless to say, I am in hearty agreement.
I am certainly in agreement with the basic idea that language is inextricably entwined with culture.
(The worst grammars that I’ve read of African languages, on a purely technical grammatical level, have been those that contain no ethnographic information about the speakers at all. That is surely not a coincidence.)
I think the implications of all this for translation are not something you can simply read off, though.
It reminds me of my early days in Ghana, where I understood everything people said to me in English but often had no idea why they had actually said it or what I was supposed to say in response. On one level, I was having no trouble with “translation” at all. And I don’t think any amount of phenomenological tweaking of the translation would have helped one bit. Only living there and participating could do that.
I would have had pretty much identical problems if I had been in an officially-Francophone country, too. It was nothing to do with the English language specifically.
Even in ever-familiar California, when I first arrived, I had no idea why complete strangers were asking me how I am, whether I can politely avoid answering them, or whether it would be wrong of me to lie if I did answer them. That is a pretty common reaction among newcomers, I learned since then.
And so, if translating a dialog from American English, how does one handle “How are you today”? (Or, I suppose British English “How do you do.”*)
* See also intentional linguistic atrocity here; 0:57, but watch the whole thing.
@David Eddyshaw: It hardly seems like a coincidence that Searls’ translation of Wittgenstein came up.
And so, if translating a dialog from American English, how does one handle “How are you today”? (Or, I suppose British English “How do you do.”*)
And, just to challenge the translator a bit more, what approach should they take to “Y’all right, Cock?” Near as I could tell when one of my wife’s Manchester nephews greeted me with that on a bright summer morning, it was more akin to Hello than ‘How are you’. My East Midlands wife agrees with that, but assures me it can be both. simultaneously.
Moving on to Nottingham, we have ‘Ay up?’
Generally not a question at all.
It hardly seems like a coincidence that Searls’ translation of Wittgenstein came up
True; though Philosophical Investigations would be more to the point than the Tractatus. (I nearly invoked the former myself in my last comment, but reasoned that this would be superfluous at the Hattery, where familiarity with the works of Wittgenstein is as much taken for granted as fluency in Russian.)
It would be more impressive if Searls had translated the Tractatus from Norwegian. (If there is no extant version in Norwegian, perhaps he could have created one for the occasion.)
Practically, then, the translator reads with an eye to understanding the affordances offered by a text—to re-creating its potentialities, rather than merely offering a lexical equivalent. “We don’t translate words of a language, we translate uses of language,” Searls writes. The point is not to capture merely what a text means but to reproduce how it means in context. One way that Searls describes this, borrowing a term from Gertrude Stein, is as the text’s “force.” “In a translation, even what look like divergences or outright mistakes on the single-word level may well be part of what you need to do to re-create the same force in English,” Searls writes.
Well, yes, but if you are translating anything you are faced with the need to pay attention to the original text and its grammatical and lexical features if you want to transfer the force, meaning in context, message, whatever you want to call it, of the passage to a different language and culture. Unless you have a superlative memory, an amazing grasp of cultural nuances and innuendoes, not to mention the habits of the speaker/writer, and a masterly view of the entire point of the passage, you are likely to resort to “literal translation” as a matter of course — by translating everything you see and/or hear. It’s safer that way. Translators run the risk of misrepresenting the intent of the original if they leave out a critical word or locution, or translate with the incorrect tone or terminology. The translator is both the interpreter and recreator of the original work. A person with only a loose grasp of the original text and source culture, and a poor grasp of the target language and culture, could mangle a translation more effectively than any over-literal translator.
It depends (among other things) on what you are translating for (and for whom.) And, of course, what you are translating. Skopos theory?
He points to his retranslation of Max Weber’s “Vocation Lectures,” delivered before general audiences between 1917 and 1919—a work filled with ideas, yes, but also a lot of rhetoric. In one passage, an existing translation read, “We can see very clearly that the latest developments are moving in the same direction as . . .” (Nun können wir . . . mit Deutlichkeit beobachten: daß die neueste Entwicklung . . . in der Richtung der [X] verläuft). Searls sashimied this down to “The clear trend is toward . . .” He believes that his version does what the original does: it gets us from one idea to another in plausible academese. But it does so in the way Weber might have if he were giving the speech in English, today, rather than rendering the early twentieth-century German in English.
A modernising translation is a rewriting of the text. It definitely loses the feeling and language of the original. Whether this is a good thing is another question. Surely the (archaic) feel of the original is an important part of the reader experience and influences the reader’s judgement. Imagine if Chomsky were rewritten in 19th century English….
Searls seems to be unclear on the difference between translating and paraphrasing.
Honestly, Bible translators have been all over this territory for decades. I strongly suspect that Searls is either unaware of all this work or just presumes that it must be unsophisticated amateur stuff that has nothing to teach him. Some of it is; much of it is not. But even at the least sophisticated end, the level of discussion of the competing (and sometimes mutually incompatible) goals of translation which is customary in Bible translation work makes all this wittering about phenomenology look frankly puerile.
Norman, incidentslly, commits this: “first from provincial languages like Hebrew and Greek into the universal tongue of Latin.” Anyone who describes Koine Greek as “provincial” has no idea what he is talking about whatever. Biblical Hebrew, I suppose, technically is “provincial”, but the word seems a touch oddly chosen …
I wouldn’t expect any mention of the noble tradition of Greek into Syriac and Arabic from such a writer (still less of translation from Sanskrit into Chinese), so I wasn’t disappointed.
Imagine if Chomsky were rewritten in 19th century English
Ooh, a challenge! I think the ineffable pomposity could be a natural fit … one would have to be careful not to improve too much on the original, though. In particular, one would have to avoid introducing too much clarity in the process of translation.
— Some German dude.
Moving on to Nottingham, we have ‘Ay up?’
also in maine and northern vermont, where the multipurpose “eyup” can among other things be a greeting.
in yiddish, “how are you today?”/”how do you do?” poses no particular problem (?װאָס מאַכט אַ ייִד | vos makht a yid?, or more ecumenically ?װאָס מאַכסטו | vos makhste?), but the standard responses are so wildly different that translating them (in either direction) without either deeply changing the original meaning or sounding impressively alien would be difficult: “bless the name”; “people spin”; “thank you”; “hauling through exile”; “thank god”; “not difficult”; “like that”; “how should i be?”.
My grandfather (who was not a Yiddish speaker) would reply “alte zakhn”. But that was his own little joke.
If I remember correctly, which I might not, Michael Wex says in Born to Kvetch that a naughty answer to “Vos makht a yid?” (What is a Jew doing/making?) is “Kinder” (Children), and an answer to that is “Gots vinder, a putz makht kinder.” (God’s miracle, a prick makes children!)
A Russian joke says that a correct answer to the question “how are you?” is “don’t wait for it”.
The term ‘domestication’ struck a chord with me. I find it jarring when, for instance, a translator has a French population measuring distances in miles and temperatures in Fahrenheit. So much so that I may abandon the book.
“first from provincial languages like Hebrew and Greek into the universal tongue of Latin.”
Out of context, that sounds like a plausible description of someone working in Rome at a time when Hebrew and Greek were spoken in Roman provinces, so can DE please explain what I’m missing so I can be outraged too?
Greek was the main language of the richer half of the entire Empire, and was also widely used to the east of the empire. It had even been used by the Parthians, and it may actually have been the court language of the Nubian kingdoms in what is now Sudan. King Milinda, who features in the Buddhist Pali Canon, was a Greek king, Menander, of Bactria.
The prestige of Greek was enormous, to the extent that the Romans had something of a chip on their shoulder about the supposed comparative deficiencies of Latin, for a long time not thought to be suitable for philosophical or scientific writing, though that had changed by Jerome’s time.
No Roman of Jerome’s day would ever have thought of Greek as a “provincial” language, any more than a mediaeval Englishman or German would have thought of Latin as provincial. For a modern to call it “provincial” reveals complete ignorance of classical history. In fact, it is such an astonishing misnomer that one might have hoped that a fact-checker or subeditor would have caught it.
“people spin”
I like that — what is it in Yiddish?
No Roman of Jerome’s day would ever have thought of Greek as a “provincial” language, any more than a mediaeval Englishman or German would have thought of Latin as provincial.
It was probably closer to the status of French in mediaeval England than to that of Latin, but otherwise, yeah, that sounds about right.
(I wonder what the status of French was in mediaeval Germany.)
I don’t think it came up much. Some of the troubadours evidently knew it, some of their audience may have as well, and I think that’s pretty much it.
Actually, I doubt if the Romans thought of any language as “provincial” in the sense that Norman understands it. The idea of monolingual ethnostates had not been invented, and a Roman province was not a country in any case. Cispadine Italy itself, the UnProvince, was far from monolingual Latin-speaking in Jerome’s day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Graecia
Norman is projecting his 21st century American understanding of language and place onto people to whom it would have made no sense at all.
Claudius is supposed to have made efforts to limit citizenship to those (of whatever origin) who could actually speak Latin, but the idea seems to have gone nowhere, presumably because of its obvious impracticality as much as anything. After the Edict of Caracalla extended citizenship to all free men in the empire, the notion would have been simply ludicrous.
Surely the (archaic) feel of the original is an important part of the reader experience and influences the reader’s judgement.
But archaism isn’t part of the original readers’ experience, except in cases where the author intentionally used archaic language. The modernizing would be an attempt to recreate the experience of those reading it in the time the original was written.
I don’t entirely agree with “archaism isn’t part of the original reader’s experience”, at least you have to distinguish between an archaic register and archaic diction. You could make a “modern” translation of “Tom Jones” by deleting the chapter headings, translating Latin and Greek citations to English (or omitting such citations entirely), rephrasing sentence structure and substituting modern expressions for more archaic ones, but if the modern reader wants to read the book, it might be better for the translator to make minimal interventions, adding notes where the original text is likely to mislead the reader.
@David Eddyshaw: Claudius was trying to roll back the extension of Roman citizenship to more closely resemble earlier practices. The Republican Romans did have a strong notion that Italic speakers were qualitatively different from other Mediterranean peoples. This was probably more fundamentally about culture, but the Romans, somewhat like modern nation-states, often used language as a proxy for culture. At least early on, however, they did not strictly insist on Latin, recognizing that Sabellic and Faliscan (but maybe not Ligurian) communities were close enough that they could be inducted into the Roman system as allies and subsequently full components of the Republic.
Separately, it is imho hubristic and deceiving to imagine that a pre-modern reader’s reaction to a (contemporaneous) pre-modern text can somehow be equated to a modern reader’s reaction to a (contemporaneous) modern text such that the original effect can be mechanically reproduced if the translation is done with that as a goal. That the particular pre-modern text may not have seemed subjectively “archaic” to its original readers may well be true, but that doesn’t license any given conclusion as to what if anything to do about that. In any event, that the author is not our contemporary and we will almost certainly misunderstand the text if we do not keep that in mind may be one of those facts about a given text that we should not want a translation to obscure.
Slightly to my surprise, estimates suggest that easily the majority of the population of the Roman empire before the loss of the western provinces was actually in the predominantly Latin-speaking parts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire
So Latin really would have been the majority language of inhabitants of the Empire – and of Roman citizens of course at all points, even after the Edict of Caracalla – especially as there must have been many more non-Greek speakers in the East than there were non-Latin speakers in the West.
Though Latin was still by no means a “universal tongue” as Norman has it, when Jerome was working. Nor later, come to that, except in the sense that Esperanto is a universal language. Trans-ethnic …
Two things about Damion Searls, specifically:
1. It looks like he has not translated any pre-20th-century works, so the archaism issues have maybe not quite yet arisen, if we assume that the world of Proust and Mann and the young Wittgenstein remains reasonably comprehensible to us in a way that the world of Shakespeare or Villon or St. Paul isn’t quite.
2. The spelling of his first name struck me as bizarre and I couldn’t previously recall encountering it. But it turns out it is a well-known variant and indeed if you look at the SSA listing of names given to US-born boys for what seems most likely, triangulating from a few different data points, to have been his year of birth (1971) you see the following numbers of baby boys associated with the given spellings: 1,581 for Damon; 371 for Damian; 148 for Damien; and 136 for Damion. Although maybe the first one is something other than a spelling variant of whatever the True Name* the latter three are trying to approximate is? Move forward four decades to year-of-birth 2011 and the order and/or ratios have shifted a bit: 3,013 for Damian; 1,832 for Damien; 682 for Damon; and 288 for Damion.
*The latter three all presumably derive from the 11th century figure known in Vatican-affiliated circles as Sanctus Petrus Damianus, whose surname is etymologically related to the name Δάμων borne by various ancient pagan worthies, but that ancient name may have separately entered the modern stock via a non-ecclesiastical route?
To David E.’s demographic points: surely not every inhabitant of the “Greek East” as of the date the numbers are given was an L1 Greek-speaker and some significant number in rural areas may not have really been L2 Greek-speakers. And the same is true mutatis mutandis in the “Latin West.” Another confounding factor is that the percentage of folks (not necessarily that large in absolute numbers but more common among elites) in the “Latin West” who had some L2 knowledge of Greek may have been higher than the percentage of such folks in the “Greek East” who had some L2 knowledge of Latin. And literacy was the exception rather than the rule everywhere I should expect and maybe the real question or at least a significant question is ratio of people literate in Latin to people literate in Greek (handling those literate in any of several plausible ways).
Further to my earlier note on spelling variation: St. Petrus Damianus is Pietro Damiano in Italian but Pierre Damien in French, with the popularity of the latter spelling presumably boosted in pious Anglophone RC circles by the 19th-century work of the Belgian-born Father Damien, now officially recognized as St. Damien of Molokai. Still not sure what motivated the -ion variant, though.
Good point about literacy.
And I suspect the most important linguistic dividing line all over the Empire was not Italian/provincial but urban/rural. What the peasantry mostly spoke at home is pretty often guesswork, I think, and there were more of them than of those Romanised city slickers.
It’s probably relevant that Christianity (like Islam) is historically largely an urban religion. There is no Epistle to the Hicks.
(The gross population estimates themselves involve an awful lot of – bold extrapolation from the evidence, let’s say.)
The movie “The Omen” (1976) doesn’t seem to have interfered with the rise of Damien as a boy’s name in the US. The name peaked in 1978 and then reached a higher peak in 2007, according to Wolfram Alpha.
The obvious (and incredibly convenient!) test case here is Etruscan: most of the same culture, dramatically different language. What is the result of that test?
(I don’t know – genuine question.)
The literal pagans, who live in the pagus, the rural district.
Pompei? “Nec nare nec litteras novisti”?
“people spin”
I like that — what is it in Yiddish?
מע דרײט זיך | me dreyt zikh
(my rendering was a touch contentious – “one spins”, “spinning around”, or even “i’m all awhirl” would all be perfectly decent englishings – מ/מע/מען | m/me/men is a pretty flexible kind of (nominally/usually) impersonal pronoun)
Thanks! I figured it would start with מ/מע/מען.
(my rendering was a touch contentious – “one spins”, “spinning around”, or even “i’m all awhirl” would all be perfectly decent englishings
Could this be related to today’s German spinnen = “act crazy” (Ils sont fous, ces …)? Does the Yiddish mean something like “It’s all too much” = “everybody’s acting crazy” ?
Keith Ivey reminds me that I think of “Damien” as the “correct” default spelling of the name although the data that I have only today reviewed suggests that “Damian” has been a more common spelling in the U.S. fairly consistently. I don’t know whether _The Omen_ is causally responsible for my perhaps-empirically-inaccurate sense of the matter, but it could be! My late first wife (1969-2008) occasionally made mention of a prior boyfriend named Dami?n, and I now realize I always assumed it was spelled “Damien” but I don’t think I have any specific evidentiary ground for having believed that.
The obvious (and incredibly convenient!) test case here is Etruscan: most of the same culture, dramatically different language. What is the result of that test?
The Etruscans were given Roman citizenship in 90 BCE, shortly before the outbreak of the Social War which led to the extension of citizenship to most of the Italic tribes (indeed, that seems to have been the main demand of the allies against Rome in that war.)
Incidentally, the combatants against Rome in the Social War used the name “Italians” specifically for themselves.
Some feature the inscription Víteliú, Oscan for “Italy.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_of_the_Social_War_(91%E2%80%9388_BC)
Could this be related to today’s German spinnen = “act crazy” (Ils sont fous, ces …)? Does the Yiddish mean something like “It’s all too much” = “everybody’s acting crazy” ?
i don’t think it’s related – it’s more like “the world’s a rollercoaster”/”things are wild”/”i’m a bit spun out”, which is a little bit the “all too much” flavor but not really about individuals in that way. and i don’t feel it having any relationship to craziness.
@J.W. Brewer on “Dami?n”: Still not sure what motivated the -ion variant, though.
I hope you’re open to the possibilities of error (people thought they’d seen it that way but they hadn’t), people having seen it that way, people wanting an unusual spelling, and people just liking that spelling better.
I assume “Damon” came into English as Pythias’ friend.
“Damián” is the Spanish form, and I’ll bet it has a lot of the credit for making the -an spelling the most popular. I can think of two men with that name I’ve met in New Mexico. It’s one of the the names that give you no guidance about whether to pronounce it in English or approximate Spanish.
@Jerry Friedman: I’m certainly open to those possibilities but there’s something distinctive going on with “Damion” because most other -ion boys’ names that are obvious spelling variants (“errors” would be impolite …) of long-standing names are significantly rarer. Compare (parenthetical is number of US-born baby boys given the name in 2011) Damion (288) with, e.g. the combo of Maximillion (23) and Maxamillion (18), or with Christion (22), Julion (20), Adrion (15), or Brion (13). And the “usual” version of some of those names is significantly more popular than any Dam*** option. There are separately lots and lots more lowish-frequency names that end in -ion that are vaguely SF-sounding (or Big-Pharma-sounding) recent coinages, like Jadarion or Zytavion. I don’t know if maybe that apparently-productive pattern has leaked over into respellings of more longstanding names?
The only really longstanding boys’ name I saw in my control-F investigation ending in -ion where that seems to me like the standard spelling was Marion, which seems to have in an Anglophone context a less-girly vibe than Marian.* And maybe (depending on what you think counts as long-standing in Anglophone culture) Dion, as in DiMucci (born 1939), which was only slightly more common in 2011 than Deion, as in Sanders (born 1967).
Back to our original name, you can optionally elaborate the first syllable and get Daemian (11), Daemien (6) or Daemion (also 6).
*Marion is now less common than the Spanish-origin (maybe also Italian?) Mariano, but that has a masculine suffix to override any girliness connoted by the prior vowel. Coincidentally or otherwise, the two best-known 20th-century American men named Marion were better known in adult life by other names, viz. the Rev’d Marion Gordon Robertson, better known at Pat Robertson (a childhood nickname) and Marion Morrison, better known as John Wayne (a stage name).
Though Marion Barry did achieve some degree of prominence despite using the name.
Unhijack: What does “a lot of rhetoric” mean? Is it just a reference to the long-windedness of the quotation from Weber? If not, does it refer to anything detectable in the article?
I’m not convinced at all that “The clear trend is” has the same force as anything with “we” in it.
There’s a lot to be said—in fact, a lot more has been said than I know—about whether to translate something from a century or three ago in something like the style of the time. Thinking you can provide an exact equivalent by that means or any other is hubris, no doubt, but moving somewhat in that direction might be an improvement for some purpose for some readers. Personally I’m happy if my style doesn’t swear at the original.
@Keith Ivey: Indeed, although not on quite so national a stage. I remember seeing t-shirts around D.C. worn by supporters back when he was in trouble with the Feds circa 1990 that alliteratively tried to align him with a number of other prominent (perhaps more prominent …) black historical/political figures who could be referred to mononymously. Something like “Martin Malcolm Mandela Marion & Me.” Maybe Marcus (Garvey) was in the mix as well?
Back to Damian: I don’t know how to account for the differences in name frequency you’re seeing, J.W. I’ll point out, though, that Davion (460) was more popular than Davian (289) in 2011, and Javion (313) was more popular than Javian (didn’t make the top 1000). Of course those are recently invented names, not ones with a long history like “Damian”. Someone will have to write a term paper on this.
Separately, it is imho hubristic and deceiving to imagine that a pre-modern reader’s reaction to a (contemporaneous) pre-modern text can somehow be equated to a modern reader’s reaction to a (contemporaneous) modern text such that the original effect can be mechanically reproduced if the translation is done with that as a goal. That the particular pre-modern text may not have seemed subjectively “archaic” to its original readers may well be true, but that doesn’t license any given conclusion as to what if anything to do about that.
As (in)famously exemplified by The Goddesse of Surrye, the (1925) Loeb Library translation of Lucian’s De Dea Syria, which is written in Middle English throughout, to represent the extremely archaic (by then) Ionic dialect used in the original.
(Apparently there were several Loeb Library authors with similar ideas; another, marginally less ridiculous, example, from 1929, was discussed on LH in 2010.)
The latter three all presumably derive from the 11th century figure known in Vatican-affiliated circles as Sanctus Petrus Damianus
I’d have guessed St. St. Cosmas and Damian (late 3rd/early 4th century martyrs, hagiographically of Arabian origin).
@Jan-FoM: Obviously those Holy Unmercenary Healers have temporal priority over St. Peter D., but their cultus is marginal in the Anglophone world and the comparative lack of U.S.-born boys named Cosmas suggests to me the vector I suggested. You start with baby boys in ethnic-Catholic immigrant neighborhoods where parents take naming advice from priests who are Italians or Benedictines or both, and then it spreads.
Even if you take “Cosmo” as the Anglicized version, the overwhelming majority of wikipedia-prominent Cosmos from Anglophone countries look to be British rather than American. And of course the cosmic/cosmonaut resonances suggest that many real-or-fictional characters of the last 60+ years going by Cosmo when that is not the literal legal name of a literally-existing human being are not merely or primarily Anglicizing Κοσμάς. For example, George Jetson’s animated boss Cosmo G. Spacely (in whatever future century _The Jetsons_ is set in) was not a coin-flip away from being named Damian instead.
Fun fact: Jon Fosse’s translator into Slovak is his wife. She addressed some of the complexities involved in her work in this interview (in Slovak): https://dennikn.sk/3699257/ked-otvorite-jeho-knihu-hned-viete-ze-citate-fosseho-hovori-nobelistova-manzelka-a-prekladatelka-anna-fosse/.
@bulbul: Fascinating fun fact!
I guess the question is whether the only way to make a living in the hyperspecialized niche of Norwegian-to-Slovak translator is to be married to someone who will predictably steer you business or whether instead the point is that she does it for love or perhaps art rather than for the Euros. (I think “for the koruny” would be more euphonious but I may have the wrong case ending* and the currency is for better or worse obsolete. Although I guess the Norwegians still have kroner.)
*Google translate says “za koruny” but I frankly don’t know whether to take its word for “za” taking the accusative.
מע דרײט זיך | me dreyt zikh
Similar in Russian, кручусь (kruchus’, [I am] spinning) means “[I am] keeping busy”. Any sort of madness is purely accidental.
and the comparative lack of U.S.-born boys named Cosmas
…indeed, I hadn’t thought of that! The Russian cognate Кузьма is a sufficiently normal (if old-fashioned) name in Russia that I hadn’t realized it didn’t quite seem to have a cognate in English.
(It does look like the historical Anglicized version is probably “Cosmo”, but even that is extremely rare. “Cosimo” has gotten some popularity via the Medicis but is AFAIK still quite rare for non-Italians.)
As (in)famously exemplified by The Goddesse of Surrye, the (1925) Loeb Library translation of Lucian’s De Dea Syria, which is written in Middle English throughout, to represent the extremely archaic (by then) Ionic dialect used in the original.
Reminds me of Dorothy Sayers’s observation that “Border Scots bears something of the same relationship to English as Provençal does to Italian,” so in her translation of the Purgatorio, she put Arnaut Daniel’s lines into Scots.
the Spanish-origin (maybe also Italian?) Mariano
Presumably Marjan in the language of one of David Marjanović’s ancestors. BCMS?
Google translate says “za koruny” but I frankly don’t know whether to take its word for “za” taking the accusative.
I don’t speak Slovak, but that would be in line with the usage in Russian and Polish when za means “for”.
Re Marion: In Germany, that’s purely a female name.
Sure. It seems to be extremely rare, though – I can’t think of anyone named like that other than the half-mythical ancestor.
And so it is in France. (I suppose Marion Le Pen’s 15 minutes of fame are already over?) The -on is the same as in names that have made it into English, like Alison, diminutive of Alice.
Looks like Marianus may come out in French as the male given name Marien, although that’s maybe pretty rare these days.* There’s a place named Sankt Marien in Austria, near Linz, but whether that’s from Sanctus Marianus or something else I don’t know.
*Here’s a good 20th-century example of France’s cultural/linguistic legacy in Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marien_Ngouabi.
No, that’s simply St. Mary’s. Rendering Latin -a words as n-stems used to be standard procedure.
It looks like the German-onomastics equivalent of Marianus may be, in at least a few instances, just unmodified Marianus. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianus_K%C3%B6nigsperger
or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianus_Czerny
As in Kalifornien but for some reason no other states.
No other states were known early enough to enough people.
Pennsylvanien and [West-]Virginien attempted here, for instance.
here
Friedrich Ratzel.
That English WiPe article contains the conciliatory explanation:
#
The Raum-motiv is a historically-driving force, pushing peoples with great Kultur to naturally expand. Space, for Ratzel, was a vague concept, theoretically unbounded. Raum was defined as where German peoples live, and other weaker states could serve to support German peoples economically, and German culture could fertilize other cultures. However, it ought to be noted that Ratzel’s concept of raum was not overtly aggressive, but he theorized simply as the natural expansion of strong states into areas controlled by weaker states.
#
The German article has nothing of the kind.
Rendering Latin -a words as n-stems used to be standard procedure.
Specifically, the oblique cases; I remember how strange it was when first came across that kind of declination in 19th century literature (e.g., in Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom Nom. Amalasuntha, Acc. Amalasunthen.)
The word natural is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
Yet neither did I have to choose –
So I sat me down in the undergrowth
And closed my eyes for a midday snooze.
Marian and Kozma/Kuzma(n) are not unusual Bulgarian male names, although the latter is distinctively old-fashioned (there’s a wikipedia article about one that is younger than me, though). Marian is mostly my parents’ generation, sliding into people slightly older than me, and then their grandparents. But St. st. Kozma and Damian are widely venerated saints in Bulgaria, and the names themselves are not perceived as exotic in any way. I don’t think most people think of them as of Arab origin. There are local legends about them all over the place, and indeed my hometown was named after them before communism, and the folk belief is that were local healers.
So — Mari(j)an and Damjan are very much current male Bulgarian names, very slightly old-fashioned. Kozma/Kuzma(n) is old-fashioned, but apparently not as much as I thought.
@J.W. Brewer
“za koruny” is actually correct! And the currency may be obsolete, but the word still exists. Just the other day I heard a lady yelling into their phone “Ani korunu odo mňa nedostane, ani jednu jedinú!” (“She won’t get a single koruna from me, not a single one!”)
In the interview, Mrs. Fosse(ová) makes references to her work as a translator from Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, so I guess she makes a living doing that.