The online magazine Words Without Borders is trying to promote international literature:

Few literatures have truly prospered in isolation from the world. English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated *from English,* but only 6% are translated *into* English.

Words Without Borders undertakes to promote international communication through translation of the world’s best writing—selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals—and publishing and promoting these works (or excerpts) on the web. We also serve as an advocacy organization for literature in translation, producing events that feature the work of foreign writers and connecting these writers to universities and to print and broadcast media.

Their archives go back to July/August 2003 (Literary Border-crossings in Iran), and they’ve got a blog with authors from the U.S., the Netherlands, Italy, and the U.K. (Via wood s lot.)

Update (May 2026). It seems Words Without Borders revamped its site in 2022, and I find the new site impossible to navigate. Furthermore, they say “Today we launch a beta version of our new website with complete archives through the last five years” — why only the last five years? Yes, you can find the earlier stuff on Internet Archive, and I’ve provided archived links in the post, but what a stupid way to run a website.

I had meant to post about this weeks ago, but it slipped my mind: the New Yorker ran a Talk of the Town piece about words inserted into reference books as copyright traps:

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

So when word leaked out that the recently published second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary contains a made-up word that starts with the letter “e,” an independent investigator set himself the task of sifting through NOAD’s thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight “e” entries in search of the phony…

It turned out to be esquivalience, “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.”

A call was placed to Erin McKean, the editor-in-chief of the second edition of NOAD. Upon being presented with the majority opinion, McKean confirmed that “esquivalience” was a fabricated word. She said that Oxford had included it in NOAD’s first edition, in 2001, to protect the copyright of the electronic version of the text that accompanied most copies of the book. “The editors figured, We’re all working really hard, so let’s put in a word that means ‘working really hard.’ Nothing materialized, so they thought, Let’s do the opposite.” An editor named Christine Lindberg came up with “esquivalience.” The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as its source. “It’s interesting for us that we can see their methodology,” McKean said. “Or lack thereof. It’s like tagging and releasing giant turtles.”

(Thanks for jogging my memory, Jeremy!)

An AP story brings us word of some of the names researchers at the Cornwall Record Office have discovered as they pored over their archives:

“My all-time favorites are Abraham Thunderwolff and Freke Dorothy Fluck Lane,” she [Rene Jackaman] said.

Other discoveries included Boadicea Basher, Philadelphia Bunnyface, Faithful Cock, Susan Booze, Elizabeth Disco, Edward Evil, Fozzitt Bonds, Truth Bullock, Charity Chilly, Gentle Fudge, Obedience Ginger and Offspring Gurney.

There are also some great married couples (e.g., Nicholas Bone and Priscilla Skin). (Thanks, Nick!)

Addendum. Trey (in the comments) has found the complete Silly Names List!

While I’m entertaining you, I recently found my all-time favorite typo in a list of Walt Whitman quotes: “Do I contradict my elf?”

I was reading an essay on Mark Aldanov in Georgii Adamovich’s collection of criticism Odinochestvo i svoboda (Solitude and freedom, 1955), and in a discussion of Aldanov’s novel Начало конца (1939, translated in 1943 as The Fifth Seal) he mentions a character, a “professional revolutionary,” called Вислиценус [Vislitsenus]. This very odd name certainly wasn’t Russian; could it be Lithuanian? Polish? I googled the transliteration and got one hit, but it provided a precious clue: “VISLITsENUS (Wislicenus).” So now I had the proper Latin-alphabet spelling, and quickly found this page, which told me everything I wanted to know about the name, which is German but of Polish origin, from the name of the town Wiślica: “Er leitet sich ab von dem Städtchen Wiślica in Polen (etwa 80 km nordöstlich von Krakau), aus dem Johannes Wislicenus I stammte.” I love the internet.

For those who are interested, there’s a thorough discussion of Adamovich’s complicated relations with Nabokov (who nastily referred to him as “Sodomovich”) here; there’s another piece by Adamovich about Aldanov, a personal reminiscence, here, for those who read Russian.

Looking up the word dives, divitis ‘rich’ (often contracted to dis, ditis) in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, I found the etymology “Pelignian des, deti, cogn. w. DIVVS…” Pelignian was new to me; on investigation I learned that the Paeligni were an Italic people east of the Romans and that their towns were Corfinium (slated to be the new capital of Italy if the good guys had won the Social War) and Sulmo (Ovid’s birthplace), but none of my print references mentioned their language. Now, the Wikipedia page has a fairly thorough discussion, saying the “dialect closely resembled the Oscan of Lucania and Samnium, though presenting some peculiarities of its own, which warrant, perhaps, the use of the name North Oscan” and quoting a number of inscriptions… but the Wiki page is based on the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, and I have a feeling more may have been learned since then. Do any of you know more about this? Is Pelignian still thought to be a dialect of Oscan? I always wanted to know more about Oscan and Umbrian (having a romantic attachment to the anti-Roman side in those wars), but it’s one of those things I never got around to.

Can’t think what it’s called? Enter the meaning you have in mind and the OneLook Reverse Dictionary will look for the appropriate word. (Via MonkeyFilter.)

I just ran across the information that the novelist Irwin Shaw was born, in New York to Russian-Jewish parents, Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff. This immediately struck me as an odd name, and sure enough, it does not seem to exist otherwise: a normal transliteration gets no Google hits, and the Cyrillic equivalent Шамфоров gets only a few references to Shaw. Is it just an incredibly obscure name, or is it an Ellis Island deformation of some name I’m not thinking of?

Also, this morning my wife showed me a reference to an actress named Q’Orianka Kilcher. Needless to say, I was intrigued; my first guess was that it was either self-invented or Klingon, but shame on me—it turns out “her mother is descent from the Huachipaeri and Quechua tribes of South America,” and the name is Quechua for ‘golden eagle.’ I checked my Quechua phrasebook (not yet entered in my catalog because it’s in the second row—there are even more books piled on the backs of the shelves than are visible), and sure enough, the vocabulary has “gold—qori.” But wait: q is a “guttural fricative similar to the ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch,'” and q’ is “Quechua ‘q’ with glottal stop.” So is there a typo in the vocabulary? Because presumably her parents wouldn’t have added the apostrophe just for the hell of it. But since they did, I feel obliged to point out that it’s not like Irish O’, and the following letter should not be capitalized, as IMDb and the newspaper had it; online sources are split, so I’m guessing she spells it Q’orianka and it gets changed by editors or computer programs. But who knows how she says it? (Ms. Kilcher, if you’re reading this, please leave a comment!)

The World Academy of Rusyn Culture has a good site on the language called Rusyn by its speakers and sometimes Ruthenian in English (or “western Ukrainian” by those who do not recognize it as a separate language):

The language territory where Carpatho-Rusyn dialects are spoken coincides with the historical territory of *Carpathian Rus’, which in terms of present-day boundaries is located within southeastern Poland (the *Lemko Region), northeastern Slovakia (the *Prešov Region), most of the *Transcarpathian oblast of Ukraine (*Subcarpathian Rus’), and a small corner of north-central Romania (the *Maramureş Region). Rusyn is also spoken in a few scattered communities in northeastern Hungary and among emigrants from Carpathian Rus’ who settled in the *Vojvodina and Srem regions of present-day Yugoslavia and far eastern Croatia and in the United States and Canada…

The difficulty in classifying Carpatho-Rusyn dialects stems largely from the fact that individual dialect territories experience an overlapping of numerous isoglosses. In other words, certain linguistic features typical of one area encroach into other areas; determining where to draw a boundary between these territories in the process of defining and classifying the dialects thus becomes difficult. Another difficulty in classification is related to the fact that the dialects have in the past and continue to be influenced by numerous sociolinguistic or extralinguistic factors from the larger world in which Rusyns live, whether in Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the United States, or Canada. When attempting a synchronic description of the language system of dialects and in classifying them, researchers must consider the larger linguistic and cultural worlds in which dialects function. The structure and function of the dialects must be described in connection with the languages with which they are in contact.

A nice find by Christopher Culver, who also posts about a projected Indogermanische Grammatik that was begun in 1968 by Kuryłowicz, “was subsequently continued by Watkins, Cowgill, and Mayrhofer, and is nowhere near completion… I wonder what the oldest perpetually unfinished project is in Indo-European linguistics.” So which will appear first, this or The Last Dangerous Visions?

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].)