While contemplating my ever-growing LibraryThing catalog (now at 1,000 books), I was suddenly struck by the odd name Gorgoniev belonging to the author of my Cambodian-Russian dictionary. I did some googling and discovered that this guy, whose name and patronymic turn out to be Yurii Aleksandrovich, is the only Gorgoniev known to the internet (furthermore, the name is not in any of my reference books). I found some discussion of him here; he sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant fellow:

Юрий Горгониев, высокий, худой, скучный и безжизненный, говорил о том, что я не захотел год назад поехать в колхоз, что, хотя с производственной стороны отдел и не имеет ко мне претензий, мой поступок вызвал осуждение парторганизации отдела…

Всё тот же Горгониев, из тверских крестьян. Мне всегда казалось, что он относится к науке, как селянин к своей парцелле: старается никого на неё не пускать. Раз он занимается кхмерским языком — конкурентов ему не надо.

‘Yuri Gorgoniev, tall, thin, boring, and lifeless, said that I had refused a year before to go to the kolkhoz and that even though from the point of view of production the department had no claim on me, my behavior called for condemnation from the Party organization of the department…

‘There was Gorgoniev again, of Tver peasant stock. It always seemed to me that he had the same attitude to science that a peasant does to his plot of land: he tries not to let anybody on to it. If he’s working on Cambodian, he doesn’t need any competitors.’

I’m extremely happy to learn that there there is an book of unpublished poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, The Revolutionary Art of the Future: Rediscovered Poems. ReadySteadyBook has a review:

By all accounts an irascible and rather forbidding character, MacDiarmid was a titanic figure in Scottish literature and should be seen as a major poet: to discount him is to give in to the mania of the chattering classes for middlebrow lyricists rather than to rise to the challenge of his complex work…

Macdiarmid isn’t all politics. His writing is sometimes quite lovely, unexpectedly tender – and there is a religiosity often forgotten. But the poems were primarily written in the 30s and should be understood in this context: a context in which MacDiarmid’s politics had a keener resonance than perhaps they do today.

And as an accompaniment, here‘s “An Introduction tae Metrics and Grammetrics exemplified by The Eemis Stane by Hugh Macdiarmid” (pdf file; here‘s an HTML cache):

Stress: we pit mair stress on some syllables that ithers… Listen to the stress patterns in exemplary and orchestra. (We dinnae need tae concern wirsels wi maitters o primary and secondary stress. Jist stick tae a binary description o mair nor less stress than the syllables roond aboot. Sae exemplary wad be x / x / whaur x is less stressed and / is mair stressed. Orchestra wad be / x /.

Yes, it’s a discussion of metrics in Scots, and a fine read it is. As promised in the title, it uses a MacDiarmid lyric as an example, and concludes:

This craftsmanlike yiss o metre and syntax combines wi his rich, varied and aften mystical imagery, nae tae mention his orra vocabulary, tae mak some o his poetry fell obscure. A gey few readers hae been content tae dook in the rare soond and jist be daein wi the bittockie o meanin that got through til them but the mair ye howk in McDiarmid, the better he gets. Ye’ll find that the mair ye look at the wark o the best poets, the mair ye find. Dinnae be pit aff if a poem luiks a bittie difficult at first glisk. Tyauve on!

If you need help, the Dictionary of the Scots Language is only a click away. (Both titular links via the always dependable wood s lot [09.06.2005].)

David Ball discusses the hazards and delights of translating Alfred Jarry’s notorious play Ubu roi:

Flatten the language into ordinary English and the play simply disappears. For just as the plot and characters of Ubu seem to be taken from Shakespeare—but Shakespeare all ground up and turned into sausage-meat—so the language itself is taken from French, but a French so chopped up and transformed that it becomes Jarry’s (or Ubu’s) own special, meaty idiolect. This, in the land of Corneille and Racine! The assault on art is, first, an assault on language; to the extent that Jarry helped to create a new form of theatre , he created a new language in this play. My class needed a new translation, and by my green candlestick I was going to give it to them. I translated Act One, and finished the job when my colleague John Hellweg wanted to direct the play in the Mendenhall Theater at Smith College. He accepted my version but made a few revisions for performance, as he inserted some contemporary references; since then, I have revised it back to the original, and beyond.

The first word of Ubu roi is, famously, Merdre. Not merde, for which there is really only one translation, but merd-re. It has been translated variously as “Shee-yit,” “Shite”…and it instantly unleashed pandemonium at the first public performance of the play. (After all, can anything be said in the theatre? You better believe it! says Jarry’s play, and today’s translator had better believe it, too.)…

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I know you’ve always wanted to read a translation of H.P. Lovecraft into Basque… No? Well, how about a Basque translation of an H.P. Lovecraft story about “the barbarous Vascones”? The story is “The Very Old Folk” (1927), and it’s here at après moi, le déluge, the Basque version (translated by “our friend Odei”) followed by the original. Enjoy… or rather tremble in eldritch horror!

Update (2018). The original link is dead; fortunately, Lazar kindly provided an archived one, which I have substituted. And for further security, here is the beginning of the text in both languages:

Pulp literatura: Antzinako jendea

H. P. Lovecraft-en ipuina, euskaraz argitaratugabea

1927ko azaroaren 3an, ostegunean, “Melmoth-i” (Donald Wandrei-ri) idatzitako gutunekoa

Ilunabar gartsu batean gertatu zen Pompaelum probintzi-hiri txikian, Pirinioen oinetan, Hispania Citeriorren. Urtea errepublika garaiko azkenetakoa bide zen, zeren probintzia oraindik senatu-prokonsul batek gobernatzen baitzuen eta ez Augustusen legatu pretorioak; eguna azaroko kalenden aurretiko lehena zen. Mendiak arrosa eta gorri jaikitzen ziren hiritik iparraldera, eta bitartean, eguzkia, hilzorian, mistiko eta gorri distiratzen zen hautseztatutako foruko igeltsuaren eta harri zakarrezko eraikin berrien gainean eta ekialdera zenbait distantziatara zegoen zirkuaren oholtzaren gainean. Hiritar talde batzuk –bekoki garbiko kolono erromatarrak eta adats kizkurreko erromatartutako bertakoak, denak berdin artilezko toga merkeez jantzita, eta, han-hemenka, kaskodun legionariak eta auzoko bizardun baskoi gutxi batzuk, beren janzki zakarrekin– firin-faran zebiltzan zolatutako kale bakanetan eta foruan, zenbait egonezin adierazgaitz eta zehazgabe batek mugituta.

The Very Old Folk
by H. P. Lovecraft
From a letter written to “Melmoth” (Donald Wandrei) on Thursday, November 3, 1927

It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo, at the foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the late republic, for the province was still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of a prætorian legate of Augustus, and the day was the first before the Kalends of November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the crude new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the wooden walls of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens – broad-browed Roman colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas – and sprinklings of helmeted legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient Vascones – all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-defined uneasiness.

I meant to post about LibraryThing hours ago, but I just can’t stop using it! A creation of Tim Spalding, it uses the Library of Congress catalog as a database of books to provide an easy means for users to catalog their own. You just enter a few words or an ISBN into the search box, hit Submit, and boom: either the book is entered automatically or a list of choices pops up. Or, of course, the system can’t find anything matching it and you have to enter it manually. You’ll probably want to tweak the entries in the various fields, and you’ll certainly want to add tags (when I’m done, I’ll be able to find out all the books I have relating to Central Asia just by clicking on that tag), but it makes cataloging (a task I always dreaded) supremely easy. You can see my catalog here; so far I’ve entered about 300 books, but there will be many times that before I’m done. I’m starting with the hardest sections, language and Russian, so that I’ll get most of the manual entering out of the way right off the bat; by the time I get to history, literature, and so on, it should be a breeze. Try it yourself!

(Many thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana, currently enjoying the beaches of Portugal, for the link!)

Charles Kelly’s Online Japanese Language Study Materials are “free-to-use online materials that I have developed to help people study Japanese.” Looks like good stuff, and for you Mac users, he’s got crossword puzzles too! (Via Plep, who also links to a Wolof course—but it costs money, so I didn’t make a post of it.)

An article by Dan Bloom reports on a controversy over the way ‘Jew’ is written in Chinese:

There are many Chinese characters for ‘you-tai,’ or Jew, but the combination that is currently being used refers to an animal of the monkey species, and has the connotation of parsimoniousness,” Chien Hsi-chieh, director of the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan, said recently…
Chien said the biased Chinese characters were devised by Christian missionaries in China around 1830, when they were translating the Old Testament and New Testament into Chinese and needed a term for Jews.
“A better choice for the word ‘Jews’ in Chinese writing would be one that is pronounced the same, but written with a more neutral character,” he said.

You can see the characters themselves in the Taipei Times story on the dustup. At first glance the complaint looks plausible, but Bloom quotes a correspondent, MK Shum of Hong Kong, who says:

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Geoff Pullum, back at Language Log after a move to Cambridge, Mass., has posted a long and detailed refutation of the myth that FOXP2 is the “language gene”; he links to “Alec MacAndrew’s authoritative survey of the issue” and provides his own acerbic commentary. Unfortunately, we all know that the press will pay no heed, myths being so much more fun than facts.

A BusinessWeek Online article by Brian Grow reports on companies that market to the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants in the US, focusing on the identification card known as the matrícula consular issued by Mexican consulates. What brings it into LH territory is the following bit:

So far, Blue Cross says it may have signed up several thousand Mexicans with the matrícula, although it doesn’t yet track the number. In May it extended the program to matrícula holders from Guatemala, and it’s working on a video-marketing campaign for Guatemalans who speak an ancient Mayan dialect, K’anjobal, so old that it’s no longer written.

“So old that it’s no longer written”—never mind that it’s not true (Ethnologue, Bible excerpt), what does it even mean? If languages somehow lost their writing systems as they aged, you’d think the Chinese, for example, would have been illiterate for many centuries. I wonder if it’s an editing goof or simple absence of thought on the reporter’s part.

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These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,
Though this is only one example.
They emerged until a tower
Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back
Into the past for swans and tapering branches,
Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.
Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.
The night is a sentinel.
Much of your time has been occupied by creative game
Until now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you.
We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,
To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air
To you, pressing you back into a startled dream
As sea-breezes greet a child’s face.
But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.
The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see
You have built a mountain of something,
Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
    —John Ashbery, from Rivers and Mountains (1966)

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