A NY Times story by Timothy Williams on the poet August Kleinzahler (thanks for the link, Bonnie!) sent me to Kleinzahler’s scathing, unfair, and thoroughly enjoyable assault on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac (which I praised here, though I agree he certainly reads a lot of bad poems), which contains a magnificent quote from one of my favorite poets, Basil Bunting:

Poetry is no use whatever. The whole notion of usefulness is irrelevant to what are called the fine arts, as it is to many other things, perhaps to most of the things that really matter. We who call ourselves “The West,” now that we’ve stopped calling ourselves Christians, are so imbued with the zeal for usefulness that was left us by Jeremy Bentham that we find it difficult to escape from utilitarianism into a real world.

[Read more…]

I’m reading yet another wonderful book, American Colonies: The Settling of North America by Alan Taylor, and I wanted to share a passage that might shake up your ideas about “ancient tribes.” After describing the grim consequences of the Spaniards’ delusion that there had to be more rich cities laden with gold and silver somewhere north of Mexico, including the devastation of Mississippian culture caused by Hernando De Soto‘s 1539-43 expedition, Taylor says:

The demographic and cultural disaster profoundly disrupted the geography of power in the Mississippi watershed. At the time of Soto’s expedition, the densely settled villages of the powerful chiefdoms occupied the fertile valleys. Poorer and weaker peoples dwelled in small, scattered villages in the less fertile hills, where they lacked the means to sustain a centralized chiefdom. After Soto’s invasion and epidemics, the hill peoples became comparatively powerful as the valley chiefdoms collapsed. Indeed, the dispersed hill peoples suffered less severely from the microbes that fed most destructively on the human concentrations in the lowland towns. And the upland peoples absorbed refugees fleeing from the valleys to escape the epidemics.

In the depopulated valleys, forests and wildlife gradually reclaimed the abandoned maize and bean fields, while the refugees farmed the less fertile but safer hills. The resurgent wildlife included bison, common in the southeast by 1700 but never sighted by Soto’s conquistadores 160 years before. Far from timeless, the southeastern forest of the eighteenth century was wrought by the destructive power of a sixteenth-century European expedition. Soto had created an illusion of a perpetual wilderness where once there had been a populous and complex civilization.

[Read more…]

I was idly leafing through a book on Gunnar Ekelöf’s “A Mölna Elegy” (don’t ask me why, since I knew nothing about Ekelöf and have never been particularly interested in Swedish poetry) when I was struck by the mention of his great respect for the poet Edith Södergran. (So great was his respect that he incorporated chunks of her poetry into his own long poem without attribution, about the ethics of which there has been much discussion, but that’s another story.) It turns out Södergran was one of the first modernist poets in Scandinavia, one of the Swedish minority in Finland… and she was born in Saint Petersburg in 1892, a year after Mandelshtam! She went to a German-language school in SPb and started writing poetry in German, only switching to Swedish later; as this impassioned webpage says:

Her first poems fill a school notebook, 225 altogether, never published. Most of these youthful poems were written in German — only 10% in her mother tongue, Swedish. At fourteen Edith Södergran had become a cosmopolitan, reading Heine, Goethe, and other classical poetry in French, Russian, German and Swedish. One day she wrote in her notebook, Ich weiss nicht, in wessen Sprache schreiben (‘I don’t know in which language to write’). At this point in her writing a long series of poems in German comes to an end. After one poem in French, she now began to write exclusively in Swedish.

For any poet, fluency in foreign languages enriches the diction of the mother tongue, as Chaucer’s daily use of French as ambassador in Paris brought so much wealth to the English language. At the beginning of her switch to her mother tongue, Edith showed better mastery of German than Swedish. She had been intensely studying Goethe, Heine and other German poets, whereas she had read very little Swedish poetry. She grew up outside the boundaries of Swedish culture, just as Jules Laforgue and Isidore Ducasse (“le comte de Lautréamont”) grew up outside of French culture in Montevideo, Uruguay. She spoke an old-fashioned Swedish, often grammatically incorrect. Her spelling was also shaky.

All of that interested me enormously, and of course one can’t help but be fascinated by poets who die young (she died in 1923 of that killer of poets, tuberculosis, in Raivola, then part of newly independent Finland but now the town of Roshchino in Russia, a northwestern suburb of Saint Petersburg). When I looked her up in Martin Seymour-Smith’s Guide to Modern World Literature, I was very taken with the brief bit he quoted in translation:

For my little songs,
The funny plaintive ones, the evening purple ones,
Spring gave me the egg of a water-bird.
I asked my beloved to paint my portrait on the thick shell.
He painted a young leek in brown soil—
And on the other side a round soft mound of sand.

So when I discovered there was a bilingual Selected Poems available (translated by Stina Katchadourian), I sent off for it. I may even learn a bit of Swedish.

There’s surprisingly little on her in Russian, considering that she was born and spent most of her life in what was then Russia and could rightly be considered part of the generation of Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, and Tsvetaeva, but here’s a nice page with pictures of her, her gravestone in Roshchino, and a sculpture of her favorite cat Totti.

Addendum. Thanks to prinses Hyacinta, I’ve discovered a lengthy review by Johannes Goransson of the Complete Poems translated by David McDuff, which is well worth reading.

I have to admit it surprises me this thing is still going after three years of near-daily posting. If I were simply talking to myself, I’d have given it up long ago; it’s the feedback that makes me want to continue, so let me repeat what I said in my first anniversary post:

People occasionally apologize for intruding on my time or say they don’t know enough to comment; I want to make it clear that I welcome everyone with an interest in the things I write about, whether they have any prior knowledge or not, and I love answering questions I get in e-mails—if your message comes at a busy time, I may take a while to get around to it, but I will answer it. And, of course, if you have an interesting link to pass along or a subject you’d like to hear about, let me know; I’m always on the lookout for new topics!

I thank all those I thanked there, and I note with pleasure that since the second anniversary the number of countries from which I’ve had visitors has grown from 120 to 150 (hello, Tonga and Ethiopia!). I quoted Pound (the end of Canto IV) in that first anniversary post; this time I’ll quote him (in Canto CIX) quoting Coke:

Si nomina nescis perit rerum cognitio.
[If you don’t know names the knowledge of things perishes.]

Well, actually, he’s slightly misquoting Coke, who said (in Coke upon Littleton 86) “nomina si nescis perit cognitio rerum.” (If you know not the names of things, the knowledge of things themselves perishes.) But if you googled that to try to find out who said it, you’d be convinced it was Linnaeus, because that’s what virtually every hit tells you; only the Bouvier Law Dictionary (1856) gives the proper attribution. (I imagine Linnaeus said it too, but he lived over a century after Coke.) So be careful out there on the internet, folks, and double-check everything you read, even if you read it here.

Addendum. I thank everyone for their kind (and frequently multilingual) comments, and an amusing one by MM reminded me that it might be a good idea to point out, for those who don’t know, that the family name Coke, as in the Sir Edward Coke quoted above, is pronounced like the word cook and not like the word coke. Amend your puns accordingly. Also, as long as I mentioned Linnaeus, I might as well debunk the myth that his real name was von Linné. His father’s name was Nils Linnaeus and he was born Carl Linnaeus; he took the name von Linné when he was admitted to the aristocracy. Amend your cocktail-party chatter accordingly. (What, they don’t talk about Linnaeus at the cocktail parties you attend? Pfft.)

Name another city that falls into the same category as Carthage and Chiang Mai.

Thanks to the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised aldiboronti at Wordorigins, I hereby present to all and sundry the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names.

The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) was established to collect and publish all ancient Greek personal names, drawing on the full range of written sources from the 8th century B.C. down to the late Roman Empire… The work thus starts with the period of epichoric scripts, embraces the classical and hellenistic periods of Greek history, following dialect and the development of koine, and continues through the period of the Roman Empire when Greek nomenclature underwent changes as a result of Roman rule, and religious, social and other factors. Excluded names include mythological and heroic names, Mycenaean names, later Byzantine names and geographical names.

The search page explains the two different searches available [2024: Now replaced by this page with a single search option], and the Greek names section [2024: New version] includes

an introduction to Greek personal names themselves, how they were formed and used, and how we know about them… Although LGPN is concerned with Greek names in antiquity, we are aware that many modern Greeks are interested in our site, and contact us with questions about their names. Although we must stress that this is not our area of expertise, we add here some paragraphs on how modern Greek name-giving has been influenced by the past, and how some ancient names came through to be used in the modern world.

A wonderful resource; may it thrive and expand!

I was very happy to read about Baboo Jabberjee, BA, and his influence on the immortal Wodehouse in the latest post at Dick & Garlick, and you will be too if you have any interest in “Babu English,” Bertie and Jeeves, or a good laugh.

Plep yesterday featured Apmonia, The Modern Word’s Samuel Beckett page. I’m familiar with the site and its wonderful author sections, but I wondered about the odd name. It turns out to come from Beckett’s early novel Murphy; the quotes page has the relevant passage from the first chapter:

Murphy’s purpose in going to sit at Neary’s feet was not to develop the Neary heart, which he thought would quickly prove fatal to a man of his temper, but simply to invest his own with a little of what Neary, at the time a Pythagorean, called the Apmonia. For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, ausculated, percussed, radiographed, and cardiographed, it was all that a heart should be. Buttoned up and left to perform, it was like Petrouchka in his box. One moment in such labour that it seemed on the point of seizing, the next in such ebullition that it seemed on the point of bursting. It was the mediation between these extremes that Neary called the Apmonia. When he got tired of calling it the Apmonia, he called it the Isonomy. When he got sick of the sound of Isonomy he called the the Attunement. But he might call it what he liked, into Murphy’s heart it would not enter. Neary could not blend the opposites in Murphy’s heart.

Now, isonomy is an English word (meaning ‘equality of laws, or of people before the law’), as is attunement, but not so “apmonia”; where did Beckett get it? I googled, and on the first page of results found a Greek book page that included the title ΕΡΩΤΙΚΗ ΑΡΜΟΝΙΑ [erotikí armonía]. The upper-case form of the Greek word αρμονία ‘harmony’ happens to look exactly like Latin-alphabet “apmonia”; Beckett had presumably noticed this at some point and made a note of it for future use.

Daniel Foster of Logos writes to tell me his organization is hoping to produce the Oxford Latin Dictionary on CD-ROM; they are trying to gauge interest by soliciting pre-orders. The deal is that people who pre-order get a steep discount; they will not be charged until it’s completed, and they won’t be charged at all if the project is cancelled. If you’re interested, you can read more about it here.

Update (Aug. 2023). Sometime between Mar. 31 and June 1, 2007, they reached their goal of preorders and went from “Status: Gathering Interest” to “Status: Under Development,” and by May 15, 2010, you could push a button to preorder. I don’t know if they ever manufactured the things. Now, of course, the OLD is online.

English and Russian both have words derived from Greek hupóstasis ‘sediment; foundation; substance; (in Christian use) any of the persons of the Trinity.’ The Christian sense is basic to both English hypostasis and Russian ипостась (ipostás’). Looks like an easy case for bilingual equivalence, eh? Think again, and consider these sentences from “Stovelore in Russian Folklife” by Snejana Tempest, whose Russian seems to have taken precedence over her English:

“In Russian folk tales the stove frequently appears as a female character endowed with a specific, if varying, name. In this hypostasis, her main role is to reward respectful attention on the part of children by extending them protection in her bosom in case of danger.”

“Different hypostases of the Russian dragon slayer—a brave protagonist of fairy tales and legends who rescues his bride-to-be from the clutches of the dragon—bore names which pointed to their connection with the stove: Ivan Popialov, Matiusha Pepel’noi, Zapechnyi Iskr, Ivan Zapechnik (from the Russian words for ashes and stove).”

Whereas the English word has remained a technical term in philosophy and theology, unknown (I would venture to say) to 99.9% of the speakers of the language, the Russian word has entered common use in the extended sense ‘role, capacity’—the only definition in Katzner. The Oxford dictionary, stuck in an earlier era, defines it as ‘hypostasis,’ which helps not at all when trying to read modern texts. Another example of the perils of treating lookalikes as synonyms. (And another example of the havoc wrought by the lack of editing in books these days; even the laziest of copyeditors would query the use of “hypostasis” in the Tempest article, and it should definitely have been changed to “capacity” in the first sentence and “version” or perhaps “avatar” in the second.)

Incidentally, the Russian word, in the old spelling [ѵпостась] with initial izhitsa, is the last entry in Dahl‘s great Russian dictionary.