I was just asked about the origin of the phrase “can’t hold a candle to,” and now that I’ve looked it up I’m going to share it with you all. In the words of the OED:

to hold a candle to another: lit. to assist him by holding the candle while he works; hence, to help in a subordinate position. not to be able or fit to hold a candle to: not fit to hold even a subordinate position to, nothing to be compared to.

My favorite of the citations: 1773 BYROM Poems, Others aver that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.

I’ve been meaning to write about this ever since Glyn sent me the link some days ago: John Simmons, the Oxford librarian who built their Slavic collection, died Sept. 22 at the age of 90. I hadn’t known of him, but the Times obituary makes him sound well worth knowing:

After war service and three more years at Birmingham, Simmons was invited to Oxford to fill the post of librarian-lecturer in charge of Slavonic books, created for him by Konovalov. His buccaneering spirit showed itself in August 1953 when he flabbergasted the director of the Lenin Library, Moscow, by turning up unannounced, armed with a list of desiderata and the catalogues of Oxford University Press, to propose a book exchange. In return for OUP publications, scientific material and two runs of Punch, Oxford received thousands of valuable, out-of-print Russian publications.

Simmons’s proudest achievements were his part in building up the retrospective collections of Russian books in the Taylorian and Bodleian libraries and the creation in Bodley of the only specialised Slavonic reading room in the country. He considered, with justification, that it was these library collections, together with the remarkable group of Russian academic teachers recruited by Konovalov, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin, that led to the establishment of Oxford as a unique centre for Slavonic studies…

At All Souls, which became his second home, he was a genial host, an inspiring guide, and a fount of knowledge on college history, Oxford’s libraries, and a host of other subjects which he gladly put at the disposal of resident and visiting Fellows. He was a regular visitor to the Codrington Library; he sometimes came in to read The Times, and would inquire of former colleagues: “Has anybody interesting died recently?” His hundreds of publications are listed in his Autobibliography (1975, with two later supplements), one of several samizdat publications composed on his typewriter and reproduced in limited editions.

Margaret Marks of Transblawg has an interesting post on “Pseudoenglisch,” elements of the German vocabulary that look like English words but would not be recognized by an actual English-speaker, like Talkmaster ‘moderator’; she links to the Fruchtbringendes Wörterbuch, a Wiki site that defines such terms in standard German, or tries to—as she says, far too many of the entries are actual English: “Perhaps this is the topic where the Wikipedia concept won’t work, because the more confused Germans add to it, the more useless it will become!” Unfortunately, the definitions aren’t always reliable, either; “Arm candy” is defined as schmückendes Beiwerk ’embellishment, accessory’ when it actually means (in the words of the New Oxford American Dictionary) ‘a sexually attractive companion accompanying a person, esp. a celebrity, at social events.’ I think a reference site like this should definitely be maintained by people who know what they’re talking about rather than by all comers. Still, a nice idea and an enjoyable site to browse despite the problems.

A strange, choppy essay by Murray Bail that’s ostensibly a review of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (and if you’re going to call yourself Volokhonsky instead of Volokhonskaya, why Karenina rather than the Karenin Nabokov was so keen on? but I digress) but is really a series of thoughts on literature and translation. It’s tricked out with a nutty false dichotomy between “Europe” and “English or American culture,” and it comes to a stop without actually ending, but there are enough nice bits along the way it’s worth a read:

It is only a matter of time in a Russian novel before a sturgeon arrives on a plate, a “fine sturgeon” or a “large sturgeon”. It is like the appearance of bicycles in Irish novels, or the dog wagging its tail in every other Tom Roberts painting. The sturgeon makes its entrance on a plate held by an old footman in a greasy shirt. At other times a landlord of an inn brings the fish half cold to a filthy table. At a rundown estate a traveller is ushered into the presence of the impoverished landowner, tucking into a local sturgeon (Gogol). Russian characters have healthy appetites. They’ve been travelling on bad roads, in badly sprung carriages. In the 1950s, in Adelaide, reading about “black bread” sounded not tasty at all, but peasant-poor, positively wretched; in a Russian novel it coloured the domestic scene – made it extra-foreign. Where else in literature do you find a languid landowner pondering a pleasantly wasted life, while at the same time reaching out, as if for another slice of sturgeon, for some essential, life-saving truth?

(Via wood s lot.)

Bill Poser at Language Log has an excellent post on an important topic, the shortage of interpreters in all branches of the government. Knowledge of foreign languages has always been in short supply in America, but it used to be encouraged; as Bill says:

The military seems to have taken language skills much more seriously during the Second World War. My father went directly from being a buck private in basic training to Master Sergeant in an intelligence position because he could speak French, Flemish, and German. The Army recognized that the ability to speak these languages was useful for interviewing civilians and interrogating enemy soldiers.

Now… well, we all know the problems lack of knowledge of Arabic has been causing, and there doesn’t seem to be much official interest in remedying it. Strange.

Three years ago Michelle Woods reviewed a couple of translations of The Good Soldier Švejk; it’s the kind of detailed critique and comparison that isn’t easily summarized, so I’ll just quote a representative bit and send you over to Jacket:

In some cases, indeed, interesting avenues are opened up in their use of American slang. For instance, when Švejk is arrested for sedition and sits with other imprisoned innocents, Sadlon and Joyce use the phrase ‘how they had gotten into this mess’ (Sadlon and Joyce, 11) which may suggest to many English-language speakers connotations of Laurel and Hardy, thereby contextualizing Švejk in a domestic comic tradition:

[Read more…]

I have written a number of times—probably more than on any other nonlinguistic topic—about the appalling results of the search for purity in the human world, the consequences of the lust for classifying things and people, and my deep affection for the mongrel and the creole. Some of the posts that evince this are Purifying Iraq (the results of classifying Iraqis), the Purity vs. History series (on Greece and the Greeks), How the Balkans Got Balkanized (“The process of ethnic cleansing begins when cultural and especially religious homogeneity is required”), American Babel (America’s native “prodigious multilingualism”), Braw and Witty with its comment thread that wound up discussing Bonnie Prince Charlie (Annie: “Yes, there were Jacobite protestants, although simplified histories paint all Jacobi[te]s as Roman Catholic. Politics was just as complicated and messy in those days as it is now”), and perhaps my all-time favorite LH thread, Peaches in Cluj (with Germans in Siebenbürgen, Dacia Porolissensis, the Klausenburger Hasidim of Brooklyn, putative Illyro-Thracian substrates, Sesut, Crimean Goths, Zipsers, Flemings, Armenians, and Székelys, not to mention Maria Benet’s wonderful poetry).

Now I want to direct your attention to Indonesia. Everybody “knows” that Indonesia is Islamic except for the island of Bali, which has stubborly preserved Hindu court culture and thereby isolated itself from the surrounding culture. Well, yesterday I ran across Adrian Vickers’ article “Hinduism and Islam in Indonesia: Bali and the Pasisir World” (the linked page links to a pdf of the article, and may I add that I wish all journals would adopt the policy of Indonesia: “All articles and reviews published in Indonesia published more than five years ago are available at no cost”), which says “Most writers on Bali have used religious difference to characterize the essential distinction between Bali and the rest of Indonesia,” and goes on to show why that’s a misleading oversimplification that distorts both history and the current situation. He begins with the history:

In the nineteenth-century Orientalist perceptions of Bali…, Balinese religious identity, formed through opposition to Islam, led to the development of a “Museum” of Hindu Java. One of the first to articulate this view in any depth was Raffles, who was particularly interested in the literature of the Kawi or “Old-Javanese” language: “For Raffles, Old Javanese was an Asian Latin, banished to Bali by invading, Goth-like Muslims.”…

Most twentieth-century Dutch administrators still maintained the idea that Balinese Hinduism was something to be “preserved” from Islam, which they associated with a lack of art or the destruction of a noble culture. This aim of preserving native culture was not unique to Dutch colonialists in Bali, but was generally the avowed goal of most imperial powers. In the case of Bali, however, the perception had a long genealogy. In 1633, for example, when the VOC sent a mission to Bali to promote an alliance between Batavia and Bali against the Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram, the premise the Dutch worked from was that “[the king] and all his folk are heathens, and therefore certain enemies of the people of Mataram, who are Moors.” The Dutch were surprised when Gèlgèl, the principal kingdom on Bali, procrastinated and subsequently expressed a desire to establish friendly relations with Mataram. The Dutch could not comprehend this change, since their system of religious classification did not accord with the political practices of the Balinese ruler.

Vickers goes on to discuss how the Balinese saw things:

In this Balinese categorization, religious differences function like clothing styles. They are signs used to differentiate groups which have basic similarities. The signs of distinction can be translated as “cultural” differences — culture, however, not in the sense of an underlying structure of ideas or complex of meaning, but of observable behavior, especially artistic behavior. The many “cultures” are manifestations of a common “civilization.” It is impossible to conceive of a different system of social organization, and so there is no absolute category of the “alien,” only a distinction between people of the same island and people from overseas (sabrang). The nature of this model can be gauged from the way it accommodated the Dutch. They were seen as a group belonging with Chinese and other traders, since they were not led by kings and princes; they partook in maritime trading and lived in coastal regions; and they did not manifest the signs of belonging to a “kingdom” which the Balinese knew from their immediate neighbors and their own Majapahit background. Therefore the Dutch were fitted into the Balinese social order, at the bottom.

He finishes up with a description of the cosmopolitan nature of the region:

The weight of historical research makes the picture of a cosmopolitan milieu undeniable. From early times there was a great circulation of trade goods, people, and cultural forms and objects throughout the area, which was only exacerbated by later events, such as the fall of Malaka which led to the movement of Malay princes, or the fall of Makassar with the consequent migrations of groups from South Sulawesi to as far away as Thailand. History has shown that political events in one state of this polyglot, cosmopolitan world had implications for many others. Thus it is possible to talk in terms of historical developments which characterize the region as a whole. Denys Lombard has proposed that the culture of the region, if we take culture in its narrower sense of literary and artistic forms, could be termed a “Pasisir” (Coastal) culture, utilizing the name hitherto given to the literary culture of Java’s north coast.

and, particularly pleasing to me, an emphasis on the importance of texts:

The major barrier to locating Bali within a “Pasisir” civilization is to think of the Pasisir world as essentially Islamic, and Bali as essentially Hindu. The picture changes dramatically when viewed from the standpoint of texts instead of religion. The texts are products of historical interaction within a civilization, and they are produced in order to pattern participation in that culture. Panji narratives like the Malat are the most widespread manifestation of Pasisir culture. By following the trail which leads from studies of individual Panji texts and related artistic forms, it is possible to use positive aspects of earlier textual scholarship to displace an Orientalist tendency to separate Bali from the rest of the archipelago.

A little more googling led me to a paper by Riwanto Tirtosudarmo, “The Orang Melayu and Orang Jawa in the ‘Lands Below the Winds’” (pdf), which widens the net:

In the Java-Malaya nexus, Houben [in V.J.H. Houben, H.M.J. Maier and W. van der Molen (eds.), Looking in Odd Mirrors: The Java Sea]… outlined the important concept of ‘borrowing’, meaning that some specific elements of Javanese culture were borrowed to be implemented and play a role in local societies elsewhere. It should be noted, however, that the pasisir as a place of origin for influences in the tanah sabrang (outer islands, the land beyond) was far from homogenously Javanese in the period under consideration. Reid, for example, made a strong case for the ‘Chineseness’ of the Islamic ports on the north coast of Java. Other groups (Indian, Arabs, Malays) had settled there, bringing their ideas and values with them. In this respect it is striking that the Portuguese were the first to make a sharp distinction between Malays and Javanese (Jaos in Portugese), whereas the Arabs before that (and the Malays in their wake) called all the inhabitants of the Archipelago ‘Orang Jawi’, making no distinction between the Malays and the Javanese.

Finally, there’s the parallel case of a Hindu enclave in Java itself, as described by Robert W. Hefner in his book Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton, 1985): the Tengger society of a handful of villages on the north slopes of Mount Bromo near the eastern end of the island. Hefner had been told that the Tengger were “backward,” “primitive,” and generally exotic (they “throw live animals into the volcano’s smoldering crater”). Intrigued, he made his way to the villages only to find they looked “much like the Javanese community from which I had set out several hours earlier” except that it was more compact and had no mosque. He briefly describes the historical background (the fall of Majapahit and the consequent Islamicization of the rest of the island) and the villagers’ attitude towards it, concluding: “According to their own notions, in other words, Tengger are not an ethnic enclave of non-Javanese ways, but heirs to a tradition with deep roots in Javanese history.” He adds:

The “ethnic isolation” explanation of Tengger tradition… fails to take seriously Tengger claims that their tradition is Javanese, and ignores historical evidence that clearly indicates that Tengger have long been affected by developments in larger Java. Under closer scrutiny, the ritual tradition can provide insight into the social organization of at least one popular tradition in pre-Islamic Java… Investigation of the same tradition, however, reveals how profoundly it has been affected by the challenge of Javanese Islam. Although the ritual tradition Tengger preserves is now restricted to this mountain region, the cultural conditions to which it has responded are similar to those in many areas of rural Java… From this perspective, the Tengger story is not that of an isolated ethnic group unaffected by developments in larger Java. It speaks to developments that have transformed all of Javanese society, and are reworking it still today.

Or, in older words, “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated… No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Second-guessing the Swedish Academy’s often bizarre choices and omissions for the Nobel Prize in literature is a time-honored game; Andrei Krasnyashchikh has done a particularly good job, presenting two columns, one “Swedish Academy (without A.P. Krasnyashchikh),” the other “Swedish Academy (with A.P. Krasnyashchikh).” He gives not only names but short versions of the reasons, both the Academy’s and his; on a couple of occasions he has the same laureate but changes the reason (as for Saint-John Perse). I’m afraid it’s only available in Russian, but I’ll present a few of his alternate selections here. There are the no-brainers: Chekhov instead of Mommsen (1902), Ibsen for Sienkiewicz (1905), Tolstoy for Eucken (1908), Rilke for Reymont (1924), Joyce for Karlfeldt (1931), Fitzgerald for Pearl Buck (1938), Akhmatova for Johannes V. Jensen (1944). He takes advantage of war years when the Academy abstained to slip in some of his favorites: Jack London in 1914, G.K. Chesterton in 1918, Celine in 1940, Musil in ’41, Pound (yay!) in ’42, and Erich Maria Remarque in ’43. His 1973 prize goes to V.V. Nabokov instead of Patrick White, and his 2000 prize to Tom Stoppard rather than Gao Xingjian. There are some I disagree with (Salinger and Lem, for example), but on the whole it’s an excellent list. And I love his reason for Borges (instead of Seifert, in ’84): “Because it’s high time, he’s 85 already (his jubilee, by the way), and at any moment he could… Well, you understand. And that business with Pinochet is long forgotten.” (Via Avva.)

Two words that have nothing in common except that they’re near each other alphabetically, they’re so obscure they’re not even in the big Webster’s, and pronouncing them is no easy matter:

Magh: “A member of the (largely Buddhist) people of Arakan, a district on the west coast of Burma (Myanmar), and Chittagong, on the Bay of Bengal.” (OED, 2002 draft entry, which adds in smaller type: “Chittagong was formerly part of the kingdom of Arakan but is now in Bangladesh. The Chittagong Maghs were formerly renowned among Europeans in Calcutta as excellent cooks.”) The OED’s etymology is “< Bengali Mag, Magh, name of the kingdom of Arakan, the kings of Arakan and its people, esp. as coastal pirates < Sanskrit Magha a non-Aryan country.” (You can read about the Bengali attitudes towards the “Magh” here and some history here.) Just looking at the word as Generic Foreign, you would pronounce it /mag/ (with the vowel of ah), and this is indeed what the OED suggests; on the other hand, it’s from a Bengali word pronounced /mog/ and is so spelled in early citations, e.g. 1599 R. FITCH in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations II. 257 “The Mogen which be of the Kingdom of Recon and Rame, be stronger then the King of Tippara, so that Chatigan or porto Grande is oftentimes vnder the king of Recon” (where Recon is Rakhaing, the local name of Arakan, Tippara is Tippera or Tripura, a hill district of Bangladesh with its own language, and Chatigan is Chittagong, known in Portuguese at the time as Porto Grande; if anyone can tell me what is meant by Rame, I will be much obliged). Furthermore, the short a is pronounced in Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), the main local language of the British Raj, as a central vowel (like the vowel in cut), which gives us the form mugg under which we find it in Hobson-Jobson, whose entry includes the following judicious observation:

[Read more…]

Anyone with any interest in Finnegans Wake will welcome the appearance of the website Fweet (which claims to stand for Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury and to be pronounced “thweet,” but you can ignore both those pieces of possible misinformation). The Prologue explains how the compiler, Raphael Slepon, began by putting annotations to the book on his computer for easier access and how he “came up with the idea of setting up a website, allowing others to browse and search the collection.” But you can ignore that too; all you really need is the search engine and the tutorial and you’re good to go. Don’t ignore the tutorial, though; the tour guide gets quite testy and you may end up with blood-stained fingers and a torn vest. Right, then, off you go. This way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in!
(A deep bow in pf’s direction for the link.)