Reading Brodsky always sends me to my dictionary, but usually it’s my Russian dictionary. Making my way through Пятая годовщина (“The Fifth Anniversary”), I ran into the usual slew of difficult Russian vocabulary (и к звездам до сих пор там запускают жучек ‘and to this day they’re still flinging zhuchkas to the stars’—zhuchka looks like a diminutive of zhuk ‘beetle,’ but it turns out it’s an affectionate name for a pet dog) and learned that лишая, the genitive of the word for ‘lichen,’ is accented lisháya these days instead of lishayá as my dictionaries have it, but the worst trouble I ran into was with the line я чувствую нутром, как парка нитку треплет ‘I feel in my gut the Fate something-ing the thread.’

Trepát’ is one of those verbs I’ve never managed to assimilate because it bundles ideas that don’t go together in English: it can mean ‘dishevel (by tugging at),’ ‘blow about,’ ‘pat,’ ‘fray,’ ‘pull (someone’s hair, ears, &c),’ and ‘whip,’ among other things; trepát’ yazykóm ‘to trepát’ with the tongue’ is ‘to babble, chatter,’ and the reflexive trepát’sya (‘to trepát’ oneself’) is ‘flutter,’ ‘go around,’ or ‘talk nonsense.’ But here, in the context of the Fates and thread, it clearly takes on its primordial meaning, ‘to scutch.’ Yes, that’s the first definition in my trusty Oxford: “to scutch, swingle (flax, hemp, etc.).” Well, it was off to the OED with me, where I found it means ‘to dress (fibrous material, flax, hemp, cotton, silk, wool) by beating.’ (There is another verb scutch meaning ‘to strike with a stick or whip, to slash, switch,’ but although it is “not impossible” that this is “a transferred use of [the verb meaning ‘to dress by beating’],… more probably the present verb is an independent onomatopœic formation: cf. scotch vb.”) Unfortunately, due to my deficient understanding of the process of turning fibers into thread, I still don’t have a clear picture; this page helps: “The flax is passed through it, slamming the break as you go, until the brittle outside layer starts to fall away, leaving the fiber intact. Then you ‘scutch’ it, which requires scraping the last of it away with a dull knife.” At least I’m pretty sure it’s Clotho (Клото [Kloto]—why did Greek theta give Russian t here rather than f?) who’s doing the scutching.

So how do you translate it? Brodsky, in his own translation, cheats, which he can get away with, being the author: “I sense the thread within strained by the Parcae’s shuttle.” (I note, sadly, that he mistakes “Parcae” for a singular; the Latin singular is Parca, but that’s not used in English, where we have to say “one of the Parcae.”) Nabokov, of course, would have taken delight in using “scutch”; I suppose I’d go with “I feel in my gut the Fate tugging the thread” for phonetic and associational reasons, but I would regret losing the specificity of the technical term. This is the problem with the English language’s plethora of specialized vocabulary—it can make a grand impression, but it doesn’t serve well when translating a foreign term that is a perfectly ordinary word outside of the particular technical sense used in the given context. (And speaking of context, can any of my Russophone readers tell me what “треплешь парк” means in the fifteenth stanza of Памяти Геннадия Шмакова?)

This is just one tiny example of how difficult, verging on impossible, it is to translate Brodsky (and I have to say I’m not fond of his self-translations in general—he tries too hard to be flamboyant, and is too disrespectful of his originals). Pushkin is untranslatable because of his (surface) simplicity: if you translate literally, it sounds like nothing, and if you gussy it up, it sounds gussied-up. With Brodsky there is the opposite problem—he uses register, reference, polysemy, and every other resource he can work into his text until it presents an interwoven thicket that can be plucked at or hacked at but not, in the normal sense, translated. Which brings me to the final line of the poem:

Скрипи, скрипи, перо! переводи бумагу. [Squeak, squeak, pen! perevodí paper.]

Normally, perevodít’ means either ‘take/carry across’ or ‘translate,’ but here Brodsky is using the colloquial sense ‘use up, waste’ (Не переводить бумагу ‘Don’t waste paper!’). But if you translate “waste paper,” you lose everything that’s memorable about the line. Brodsky renders it “Scratch on, my pen: let’s mark the white the way it marks us”; does that make sense? Is it poetry? You be the judge.

The Kaurna Warra site reproduces a 19th-century dictionary of the now extinct language of the Kaurna people of southeastern Australia (the second link says the name is “pronounced garna”):

In Adelaide, 1840, a remarkable event occurred. Reverends Teichelmann and Schürmann published their work Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary, and Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia. The amazing feature relates to its creation. Two German priests recorded essentially the language of the Kaurna people for the English speaking colonists to read. Indeed, these two remarkable men began teaching the Kaurna children in their own vernacular until forbidden to do so by the government.
Their book was originally self published. Advertisements in the local newspaper detailed the availability of this work. But interest was slight and copies sold slowly. If the Kaurna people were now subjects of the king, it was important that they deal in the king’s English…

I’m not sure why the creators of the site felt the need to sneer at attempts to revive the language (“The good folk of Adelaide will not accept the learning of an ancient language as a substitute for English because of sentimental reasons”)—or why the site renders my Back button inoperative, which is extremely annoying—but it’s an interesting enough site I’m posting it anyway. There’s a nice links page too. (Via Plep.)

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Speculative Grammarian is “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics,” if they do say so themselves.

We are nearing the end of our transition from the real world to online, and we have nearly completed digitizing the tattered remains of our once glorious Archive, re-publishing each issue on the internet.
Having re-emerged from the shadow of our most recent exile, we are, of course, also looking for submissions for forthcoming issues of SpecGram. Standards have never been lower, so get published while you can!

They have just put online Better Words and Morphemes:The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia, Volume I, Number 3 (May 1991), with (among many other items of equally dubious value) an entirely new scientific folk etymology of wombat. You thought it was of Australian Aboriginal origin? Well, you’re right, but they’ll do their damndest to convince you it’s “a purely English descriptive compound.” Go, enjoy, but don’t say I didn’t warn you you might get your brains addled.

Frequent commenter Tatyana just sent me the word ouguiya, which is in the dictionary and legal for Scrabble use. I had never heard of it but was thrilled to know it existed; when I googled it, I discovered the equally marvelous word ariary, of a similar nature. What do these exotic lexical items mean? The answers lie within.

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The African Language Resources page has links to Dictionaries, Glossaries and Lexicons and a list of the Mande languages. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org.)

Artemy Lebedev has an interesting history of the typewriter keyboard, concentrating on the Russian version.

The Russian letterkey layout originated from America in the late 19th century. The author has failed so far to find any credible evidence of the first company to produce typewriters with this layout, let alone its authorship. The only thing definitely known is that all firms that produced typewriters with the Russian key layout employed the same one— ЙIУКЕН (or ЙЦУКЕН after the reform of the Russian language) that was dubbed “Standard”.

It’s fascinating to see the reproductions of early keyboards, and to learn that in the prerevolutionary version “the numerals row lacks one, zero and three that would be replaced with I, О and З respectively.” And here’s a fun fact:

The first typewriter (the Yanalif model) was produced in the USSR in Kazan only in 1929. At first it was manufactured with Latin (!) letterkeys. It means that for at least 30 years after being put on the market all typewriters with the Russian font had been made abroad.

Via blogchik. (“Yanalif” means ‘new alphabet’ in Tatar—you can read about the sad history of Tatar writing systems here.)

Those are Japanese terms for “words which express voice or sounds” and “words which express actions, states or human emotions,” respectively, and this website is all about them. As mj klein of Metrolingua, from whose post [archived 2005 version] I got the link, says: “The only downside (not for me) is that you have to be able to read Japanese—there is no English or any other language there, not even in the about page of the site.” Go to her post for a description of the various features of the site; it sounds well worth bookmarking if you know Japanese!

I was startled by the following sentence in today’s Pepys’ Diary entry: “One thing more; there happened a scaffold below to fall, and we feared some hurt, but there was none, but she of all the great ladies only run down among the common rabble to see what hurt was done, and did take care of a child that received some little hurt, which methought was so noble.” (Emphasis added.) I had thought that this use of so as a mere intensive, unattached to any other components of the sentence, was much later, but apparently not; it’s the OED’s 14.a. (“In affirmative clauses, tending to become a mere intensive without comparative force, and sometimes emphasized in speaking and writing”), which they take all the way back to Beowulf (“þæt we hine swa godne gretan moton”), and there’s another startlingly modern example from 1741: Richardson, Pamela III. 168 “My Face.. was hid in my Bosom, and I looked so silly!”

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Victor Mair of the very useful Pinyin.info has posted his Remarks on the slogan for the Beijing Olympics, in which he compares the Chinese version of the slogan, 同一个世界，同一个梦想 (tóng yī ge shìjiè, tóng yī ge mèngxiǎng) to the English original, One World, One Dream. He has a most interesting discussion of the Chinese word for ‘world’:

Shìjiè is composed of graphs that individually mean “generation, era, lifetime” and “boundary.” They were brought together over a thousand years ago to render into Sinitic the Buddhist Sanskrit term LOKA(-DHAATU), which was also rendered as shìjiàn, composed of graphs that individually mean “generation, era, lifetime” and “space between.” So how do we get from this translatese for LOKA(-DHAATU), which signifies the finite, impermanent realm, to the contemporary understanding of shìjiè as “world”? (Bear in mind that ancient Chinese did not have a word that means what we now mean by “world.” Instead, they had concepts like tiānxià [“all-under-heaven”], sì hǎi zhī nèi [“all within the four seas”], and jiǔzhōu [“nine administrative divisions”], all of which basically indicated the Chinese empire, beyond which was a cloud of unknowing and barbarism.) It was not until the second half of the 19th century that shìjiè was transformed by the Japanese (using the pronunciation of the graphs as sekai) into the equivalent of English “world.” I call words like this (which began in Chinese with one meaning, went to Japan and acquired another meaning, and then were sent back to China with the newly acquired meaning) “round-trip words.”

(For what it’s worth, an article by A.G.S. Kariyawasam says that loka “implies the limitless cosmos in its entirety as a cosmographic concept” while lokadhaatu means ‘solar system,’ or “the area covered by the movement of a sun and a moon.”)

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OK, this is a little silly, but I can’t resist: someone has decided that August 22 is National Punctuation Day. I’ll take that as an excuse to pass along a history of punctuation (including English, Spanish, French, and East Asian) and an exhaustive account [by Nick Nicholas] of Greek punctuation, ancient and modern. (All links via a MetaFilter post by—who else?—?!.)

I’ll also use this opportunity to repeat my plea for a history of Russian punctuation, specifically the late-nineteenth-century change from a “natural,” intuitive system to the present artificial, rule-bound one. Anybody got a link?