Another break from Sokolov, another great Bunin story (see this post): his 1916 “Петлистые уши” [Loopy Ears] (published in 1917, in Slovo 7) is far more interesting than it is made to sound in the usual summary (“man murders prostitute”). Yes, in the last sentence we learn that a prostitute has been murdered, but that’s just the donnée on which the story is based (apparently it was sparked by Bunin’s having read a newspaper account of such a killing). Bunin was polemicizing with his least favorite writer, Dostoevsky (one of the things he and Nabokov had in common), replacing the loquacious and tormented Raskolnikov with the sullen Adam Sokolovich, a former sailor who spends his time wandering around Petrograd, looking into shop windows, and hanging out in dives. At the start of the story we see him in such a dive, in the down-at-heels neighborhood near Five Corners (Пять углов, associated with Dostoevsky), haranguing a couple of sailors about the depravity of mankind (I quote the translation in Thomas Gaiton Marullo, “Crime without Punishment: Ivan Bunin’s ‘Loopy Ears’,” Slavic Review 40.4 [Winter 1981]: 614-624 [JSTOR]):

It is time to abandon the fairy tale concerning pangs of conscience, those moments which supposedly haunt the murderer. People have lied enough as it is — as if they shudder from the sight of blood. Enough of writing novels about crimes with their punishments; it is time to write about crimes without any punishments at all. The outlook of the criminal depends on his view of the murder — whether he can expect from his crime the gallows, reward, or praise. In truth, are they tormented, are they horrified, those who accept ancestral revenge, duels, war, revolution, and executions?

He goes on to mention the famous (in his day) French executioner Louis Deibler (who chopped off “exactly five hundred heads”), the violence in popular literature (including James Fenimore Cooper and the Bible), and the horrors of World War I (Bunin was writing two years into the war): the mass murder of Armenians by the Turks, the poisoning of wells by the Germans, and the bombing of Nazareth (I can find no reference to this — maybe a war rumor in 1916?). He concludes that it was only Raskolnikov who was ever tormented by murder, and only because his spiteful creator insisted on sticking Christ into all his trashy novels (“по воле своего злобного автора, совавшего Христа во все свои бульварные романы”). By the time he leaves his indifferent companions and heads out into nighttime Petrograd, oppressed by a wintry fog, half the story has gone by, and since Bunin does not waste sentences, we obviously need to give due weight to that conversation.
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Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posts about a striking example of ancient macaronic poetry:

Inter ‘eils’ Goticum ‘scapia matzia ia drincan’
non audet quisquam dignos edicere versus.

It’s quoted from D.R. Shackleton Bailey, ed., Anthologia Latina, I: Carmina in Codicibus Scripta, Fasc. 1: Libri Salmasiani Aliorumque Carmina (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1982), p. 201 (number 279), where it’s titled “De conviviis barbaris” [On barbarian banquets]. In Bailey, it’s followed by this (number 280):

Calliope madido trepidat se iungere Baccho,
  ne pedibus non stet ebria Musa suis.

Gilleland then cites Magnús Snædal’s excellent article “The ‘Vandal’ Epigram” (Filologia Germanica/Germanic Philology 1 [2009]: 181-213), which concludes that the Germanic words are Vandal rather than (as often previously thought) Gothic and that the verses were probably composed around the beginning of the sixth century; Snædal “regards 279-280 as one poem and translates the Latin thus (at 184)”:

On foreign guests.
Among the Gothic ‘eils scapia matzia ia drincan’
No one ventures to recite decent verses.
Calliope hurries to depart from the wet Bacchus,
So it does not happen that a drunken muse doesn’t stand on her feet.

He adds:

The simplest assumption is that the author had himself tried — with limited success — to recite poetry among drunken Vandals, had witnessed such an attempt, or had been told about one. He composed the epigram about this and, although it is presented as a general truth, most likely he had a certain incident in mind. He is not making fun of Vandal poetry but only saying that dignified verses cannot been [sic, i.e. be] read while they are always ordering food and drink because Calliope flees from there. This is indeed all we can say with some certainty about the occasion of the epigram.

I refer you to Snædal for pretty much everything you could want to know about these verses, and to Gilleland for further conjectures and notes; what puzzles me is Snædal’s assumption that the verses form a single poem. The first two lines (number 279) are a pair of dactylic hexameters, while the second (number 280) comprise a line of dactylic hexameter followed by one in dactylic pentameter — in other words, a standard elegiac couplet. I do not recall ever seeing those two forms combined (a number of hexameters followed by a line of pentameter), so I am dubious about the assumption. But then my understanding of late classical Latin verse is exiguous to say the very least, so I am probably wrong. Anybody know about this stuff?

I seem never to have posted about Livonian, which surprises me, since I’ve always found it one of the more interesting dead-or-dying languages. Alastair Gill at BBC Travel writes about its current situation, opening with Davis Stalts talking about his seafaring grandfather, who “seldom spoke in Latvian to his grandson: he would relate his stories in a language full of extended vowels, dipthongs and tripthongs.”

It was only when Stalts reached the age of nine or 10 that he started to understand that aside from a few relatives, nobody else around him spoke like this. “I remember thinking, what’s going on? Why does nobody speak this language? Only some very old people.”

In fact, Stalts’ grandfather was one of the last native speakers of Livonian, a language now considered by linguists to be on the verge of extinction. Unlike Latvian, which is an Indo-European language from the Baltic group, Livonian belongs to the group of Finno-Ugric tongues, most of which are spoken by ethnic minorities in modern-day Russia. Like its cousins Finnish and Estonian, it has a complex grammar […].

Today’s Livonian population is estimated at just around 200, making them Europe’s smallest ethnic minority. But it wasn’t always this way. For centuries this Finno-Ugric race of fishermen thrived on Latvia’s remote western shores, with as many as 30,000 people speaking the language in medieval times. The Livonians carefully preserved their distinct heritage as the region passed from German to Russian hands, and eventually, in the early 20th Century, became part of an independent Latvian republic.

But the war years and subsequent decades of Soviet occupation brought harsh repressions, executions and deportations for Latvians and Livonians alike – for Stalin, anyone with a strong sense of national identity was a threat. […] By the time Latvia regained independence in 1991, the Livonian community was fragmented, and extensive intermarriage with Latvians had seen the use of the language dwindle. Grizelda Kristiņa, the last true native speaker of Livonian, died in 2013, leaving just a handful of Livonians who were able to communicate in the language.

But there’s an ongoing revival effort:
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The main Marine Lexicon page describes the project thus:

Marine Lexicon is a cooperation initiative between CHAM – Centre for the Humanities in Portugal and the University Museum of Bergen and NIFU (Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education) in Norway, funded by EEA Grants and CHAM – Centre for the Humanities, aiming at the construction of a thesaurus of European common names of marine mammals (cetaceans, seals and sea lions, sirenians, polar bear and otter), symbolic elements (sea monsters, hybrid beings, folklore creatures) represented in the early modern age (15th-18th centuries) and place names related to the exploitation of marine mammals.

For now, words and expressions in 14 languages, including old versions of the respective languages, are collected in a thesaurus. All are languages from countries and regions with a coastal line. The thesaurus is presented here, allowing scholars and the public to search within the true ocean of possibilities that is the European vocabulary about marine mammals.

Looks good; thanks, Trond!

And if you’re interested in non-biological things of the sea, J. Richard Steffy’s Illustrated Glossary of Ship and Boat Terms has you covered.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf); it’s both a delight and a real slog to read — I keep switching between text, translation, Ostanin’s annotations, dictionaries, and computer to look up things that aren’t in any of the books — and after each chapter I take a break to read other stuff so I don’t get too frustrated to continue. I usually turn to Bunin, simply because I never get tired of reading him, and the other day I reread Худая трава, which I hadn’t really appreciated the first time around. Now I think it’s one of his best stories, and I want to talk about it a bit.

The first thing to notice is the title. The adjective худой can mean either ‘thin, skinny’ or ‘bad’; I have actually seen the title translated as “Thin Grass,” but that’s ridiculous — the phrase is from a proverb (used as an epigraph and quoted in the story) “Худая трава из поля вон” ‘Bad grass [should be taken] out of the field,’ and it clearly means ‘weed.’ On the other hand, it’s also ridiculous to translate the title “The Weed,” as Serge Kryzytski does in his The Works of Ivan Bunin ($154.00!), since the usual Russian for ‘weed’ is entirely different (сорняк or сорная трава) and “The Weed” sounds banal and boring. So “Bad Grass” it has to be.

Bunin called the story “my Ivan Ilyich,” and one can see why: both are long, detailed accounts of the slow death of a male protagonist, with emphasis on his reflections on his past. But the two stories could not be more different — Tolstoy, in his late avatar as Finger-Wagging Moralist, makes very clear who’s bad and who’s good, freely employing his beloved generalizations (“The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible”) and pointing out everyone’s hypocrisy as though it were a mortal sin. Bunin never moralized and certainly never thought that simple, ordinary lives were terrible; he wanted simply to present life and people as they were, in language as effective as he could make it, and he nearly always succeeded. In this story he is describing the final months of the old farmworker Averky (no surname is provided), who after decades of hard labor feels his end approaching and decides to go home and be with his family (who he hasn’t seen much of over the years). He feels himself indifferent to the concerns of those about him, doesn’t find their jokes funny, and when a drunken itinerant pilgrim (странник) he used to dislike shows up and starts being obnoxious, he thinks “Не хуже меня, такого-то” ‘He’s no worse than me.’ He hears girls singing an old wedding song in the distance and remembers hearing it the night he met his wife as she was scooping water from a river at dusk (the passage in the Russian text linked above starts at “Ай помочь?”):
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Reading The Recognitions (see this post) involves encountering a whole lot of allusions, and one of them was to a Saint Olalla. Wanting to make sure I was pronouncing that right (/oˈlayə/, in Americanized form), I looked it up and discovered it was a by-form of Eulalia, which made sense. But then I noticed that the Galician form was Baia, which didn’t: “O nome Baia (Olalla) é a evolución galega do nome culto Eulalia do grego Ευλαλια.” Can anyone explain how you get Baia from Eulalia?

I just discovered the Lessico Etimologico Italiano, a splendidly done etymological dictionary of Italian. Unfortunately it’s only up to the letter E, and given the rate at which these projects progress it may not be finished in my lifetime, but what’s there is so good it’s worth bookmarking and playing around in. There’s an alphabetical list of words and phrases on the left, and clicking on one brings up the page (pdf) on which it’s treated. I clicked on “ecce homo” and found a two-and-a-half-column entry beginning with the literal “immagine di Cristo sofferente” and going on to the much more productive “persona malridotta, diforme,” with all sorts of dialectal developments I won’t try to copy here (combinations of accents on top and dots beneath are too much trouble for me to deal with, though I imagine it’s possible to reproduce them). Unfortunately, I can’t seem to link to a particular page; trying to open one in a separate tab and then copying the URL (my usual hack in such situations) doesn’t work. But take a look for yourself and enjoy the thoroughness and the very attractive layout.

…but parents still don’t want kids hearing it, according to Mark Brown’s Guardian piece on a recent survey:

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) published a report on Thursday into attitudes towards swearing and whether people want a more liberal approach in media content.

It includes a survey of 1,000 people that found:

• Six in 10 people say strong language, such as the F word, is part of their daily lives.

• About a third of people say they use strong language more than they did five years ago. The figure is slightly higher for women (32%) than men (27%).

• There is a generation divide when it comes to swearing with 46% of generation Zs – people born after 1996 – saying they frequently use strong language. That compares with 12% for people aged 55-64.

• Asked about swearing in public, 65% of over-55s say they would never do it; for 18-24-year-olds the figure is 25%.

• Most parents don’t want their kids hearing them swear with only one in five admitting they are comfortable using strong language in the home.

The research also asked whether parents would accept more frequent use of strong and very strong – eg the C word – language in content classified in the 12 category. The response to that was no.

That “12% for people aged 55-64” sounds like straight-up lying to me, but what do I know, I’m not a Brit. In any case, the link has discussion of TV shows and films (“for a U-rated film such as Monsters Inc, ‘look at the big jerk’ will be as strong as it gets,” but Bohemian Rhapsody includes the immortal phrase “Freddie fucking Mercury”). Thanks, Trevor!

As I anticipate my birthday curry, I’ll post about the goodies I’ve received. Since it’s my seventieth, people have been especially generous; here are the books I’ve gotten so far:

Dictionary of Advanced Russian Usage, 2nd Edition: A Guide to Idiom, Colloquialisms, Slang and More (English-Russian, Russian-English) by Michael Kayser; as I told Lizok (to whom I bragged about it), Kayser is very idiosyncratic, and I wouldn’t let an inexperienced learner/translator near this book, but if you have a good background it’s invaluable — he includes all sorts of stuff nobody else would think of, and many entries make you both think and chuckle.

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova — the Russian edition came in at #1 in Polka’s list of the 100 most important Russian books of the 21st century, and the translation by Sasha Dugdale (done in collaboration with the author: “I’ve benefited from Maria Stepanova’s highly literary understanding of English and English-language culture, and the generosity and freedom she gave me to recreate her brilliant work in a new poetic language”) is supposed to be excellent. I’m very excited to read it.

Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray — I’ve been wanting to read this for years.

Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford — I’ve long wanted a good biography of my favorite composer.

My brother gave me two collections of sf stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu and Exhalation by the great Ted Chiang, as well as the intriguing-looking The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars; he also gave me two movies, the 1950 Losey noir The Prowler and the much-lauded Minari (I look forward to hearing the Korean). From person or persons unknown, I got in the mail a very welcome gift of The Second Marxian Invasion: The Fiction of the Strugatsky Brothers by Stephen W. Potts — many thanks, whoever you are! And I treated myself to the DVD set of the first season of In Treatment, which I’ve heard great things about. Even the hot, steamy weather has let up; the high dropped from the 90s to the 70s. It’s been a good day.

Stuart M McManus writes at Psyche about yet another of those remarkable cosmopolites who have been largely forgotten:

[…] I bet you’ve never heard of the Japanese-born Martinho Hara (原) (c1568-1629). This is a pity because not only did Hara’s life overlap with better-known Renaissance scholars such as Montaigne in France and Giordano Bruno in Italy, but he also shared many of their humanistic interests and standards. Perhaps the most surprising of these was that this Japanese Renaissance humanist was an accomplished Latin public speaker (or ‘orator’ to use the contemporary term). In other words, he was a Japanese echo of the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), the Renaissance’s ‘poster boy’ whose speeches were widely imitated by diplomats, preachers and professors from the late 14th century onwards.

How did this happen? Born close to the thriving Luso-Japanese port of Nagasaki in Southern Japan, Hara studied with the Jesuits who had founded colleges across Asia and Latin America. This was facilitated by Iberian (ie, Spanish and Portuguese) mercantile and imperial expansion, which simultaneously ravaged the world’s coastlines and created new opportunities for cultural interactions on a global scale. In the Jesuit college in Nagasaki (as well as in the colleges of Mexico City, Puebla, Guadalajara, Lima, Manila, Goa, Macau, etc), students followed a typical Renaissance curriculum, including classical rhetoric: the rules for structuring and ornamenting speeches that had been key to elite education at Athens and Rome and were later revived in the Renaissance. […]

Hara delivered his Latin oration in 1588 in the chapel of St Paul’s College in Goa during a stop-off in India on his return journey from the Tensho Embassy to Rome. In his speech, which was pronounced in a space that evoked antiquity with its Corinthian columns and gate reminiscent of a Roman triumphal arch, this Japanese Cicero thanked the head of the Jesuit mission in Asia, Alessandro Valignano, praising him as a new Alexander the Great, conquering Asia for Christ. As an epideictic oration (ie, a speech focused on either praise or blame, and commonly used in Roman imperial rituals), this was meant not just to celebrate its subject. Rather, it aimed to exhort its listeners to follow in Hara’s footsteps in spreading Christianity and countering its ‘enemies’ in Japan: Buddhism and Shintoism. […]

After its delivery, Hara’s rousing speech was printed by another Japanese student on a press brought from Europe. This was later taken to Macau and Nagasaki, where it was used to print Latin textbooks for use by aspiring Chinese and Japanese priests. Clearly then, the Latin books, Ciceronian orations and classicising architecture that we associate with the Renaissance were found not just in famous European centres, such as Florence, Venice and Paris. Rather, the Renaissance was a widespread, almost global movement initially carried beyond Europe by Spanish and Portuguese expansion in Asia and the Americas.

There’s much more at the link, e.g. Jesuit sermons in Chinese and Manuel Micheltorena’s 1844 oration to celebrate Mexican Independence; you can see McManus give a 20-minute talk about Hara at Gakushuin Women’s College here. (I assumed Hara must have had a Japanese given name besides the Portuguese Martinho, but if he did, Japanese Wikipedia doesn’t know it.) Thanks, Jack!