Reading Ford Madox Ford’s memoir Memories and Impressions (highly recommended by my wife, who’s become a Ford devotee), I ran across an expression that baffled me. In his encomium to Holman Hunt Ford says:
But I think I never did advance — it was never my intention to advance — any suggestion that the true inwardness of Pre-Raphaelism, the exact rendering hair for hair of the model; the passionate hunger and thirst for even accidental truth, the real caput mortuum of Pre-Raphaelism was ever expressed by any one else than by the meticulously earnest painter and great man, whose death was telegraphed from the dim recesses of London into the chess-board pattern of sunlit Pre-Raphaelite Hessian harvest lands.
My exiguous Latinity told me that caput mortuum meant ‘dead head,’ but what on earth could that signify in this context? I turned to my trusty Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases in Current English
caput mortuum [Lat. ‘dead head’] the residue left after prolonged distillation; worthless residue; red oxide of lead used as a pigment. 17c.
The first definition was clearly the applicable one, and I approve of Alan Bliss (the compiler of the dictionary) having arranged the senses in that order, with what is presumably the historically prior one last because it is the least likely to be encountered. Has anyone else run into this now obscure term?
I think I was vaguely familiar with the term, as a pigment color, although not its history as an alchemical term of art. Google indicates that the overwhelming majority of references of it are indeed to the color. However, there are a few others.
I had an inkling that I might have seen it used more figuratively in something by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Google did not turn up what I was looking for, but I did find this from The Contemporary Review, volume 34, which seemed like hat material:
Questions of technical quality in translation are apt to prove a little tedious even to the most interested students, while to the general reader they are all but intolerable. The Laureate very well knew what he was about when he invited “indolent reviewers” (i.e., worn out pauvres diables writing under gas at two A.M. amid clatter of reporters, proof-boys, &c., &c.), to criticize his hendecasyllabics. It is not otherwise with questions of translation from German into English, though the chief difficulty in what may be called “imitation” of the original lies in the simple fact that the German language abounds in possibilities of double-ending which lie within the poetic vocabulary, while the English does not. The most interesting question for the general English reader who wishes to “arrive at” Heine or Goethe, without learning German, is hardly the technical one; but it is more so with Heine than with Goethe, because in the work of the author of Reisebilder and the Buch der Lieder the use of “double-ending” metres is so vitally connected with that nameless, indescribable element of mockery or diablerie—call it what you will—which counts for so much in his writing. Of course it is not always present; but it is intensely characteristic, and to reproduce it with neither excess nor deficiency is a most arduous and delicate task, and, as every translator feels, a thankless one, because the result looks so much like a caput mortuum. This, however, is trite and of course we cannot discuss Heine or his translators here, except in the most discursive way
I think I just saw it used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge somewhere recently (I mean, I read it recently, he wrote it … less recently). It might have been this:
https://books.google.co.th/books?id=ycRcNJCYKhQC&pg=PA134&lpg=PA134&dq=coleridge+caput+mortuum&source=bl&ots=h6KzPvep8D&sig=2HTYI8-BKjNQgZUI39duea_L47g&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=coleridge%20caput%20mortuum&f=false
AG, I’m getting a few yellow streaks on a blank page.
This, however, is trite and of course we cannot discuss Heine or his translators here, except in the most discursive way
I confess I don’t know what “discursive” means here.
AG, I’m getting a few yellow streaks on a blank page.
Me too.
discursive
I guess that in the context it means “general, abstract”, without giving examples, etc.
Caput mortuum is still used as a color name in some lines of paint and pastels. The Stabilo ‘caput mortuum red’ pastel pencil is a nice alternative to the Conté sanguine chalks, which can be a bit gritty these days.
yellow streaks
They tell you where the words are that they don’t want you to see. Infuriating!
Caput mortuum is still used as a color name in some lines of paint and pastels.
I’ll be damned. I guess I should have checked, but it’s so much more fun to learn stuff from commenters!
As for AG’s Coleridge quote, this link works for me; the relevant bit is “perception has been banished, and with it the imago Dei, leaving ‘the caput mortuum of human nature evaporated.'”
I thought I’d come across this quite recently, though out of context I couldn’t have said what it meant, and found this from William Morris, originally in an address to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1889:
‘Such an ordinary thing as a wall, ashlar or rubble, cannot at the present day be built in the same way as a medieval wall was. Any architect who has tried it who may be present will tell you that what I say is correct. I say the unconscious habit of working the stone in a certain way cannot be supplied artificially, and in such habits lies the very life of the buildings; it was the language in which the story was told when stories were told in buildings. If you have destroyed the language, can you restore the style of the story? You can have but a diagram of it, a caput mortuum. The language gone, the literature is also departed. In short, the art of that time was the outcome of the life of that time.’
https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1889/spab16.htm
Here and elsewhere Morris uses the phrase to mean ‘dross’ where Ford (in much the same milieu) is more equivocal?
I realise the phrase also figures in that passage by Sir John Denham that’s always being quoted in translation textbooks:
‘I conceive it is a vulgar error in translating poets, to affect being fidus interpres… [for] poetry is of so subtile a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum, there being certain graces and happinesses peculiar to every language, which give life and energy to the words… therefore if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this nation, but as [a] man of this age.’
I didn’t know about the pigment. Apparently Mediaeval and Renaissance painters ‘used it to paint the robes and clothing of eminent monastic religious figures and of patrons & donors (ie the people actually paying for the painting)’.
A 1972 painting by Max Bill, Verdichtung zu caput mortuum, suggests alchemy as well as rusty violet.
https://www.march.es/arte/palma/exposiciones/catalogominimal/english/Obra17.asp
https://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/caput-mortuum-violet/
The alchemical symbol for caput mortuum is in the Unicode standard, ????.
Isn’t a caput mortuum someone who’s a fan of the Grati Mortui?
Michael: Thanks, those are great quotes!
Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
§ 44 famously criticizing Kant:
Later and more obscurely to me, § 112 on the Doctrine of Essence:
A little more accessible, in the author’s notes to this paragraph:
I put a comment about Harry Potter, and then realized it was in the wrong place, so I deleted it. In the process I seemed to have deleted all the Harry Potter comments, of which there were about 15. That was not, of course, my intention, and I’m surprised that it was even possible. I hope the missing ones can be restored.
I’m surprised too – would have said it was a cache thing, but I can’t see that many HP comments either.
Hegel […]
Thank god I wasn’t a philosophy major!
I have no idea what’s going on with the HP comments; I see no sign of them. Were they in this thread? Why would there be 15 Harry Potter comments here?
I have no idea what’s going on with the HP comments; I see no sign of them. Were they in this thread? Why would there be 15 Harry Potter comments here?
Because I’m getting senile. I think I only imagined they were here.
TR wins this thread.
Hegel […]
Thank god I wasn’t a philosophy major!
Hegel is caput mortuum of philosophy. Not the worst thing either. There followed a large number of undead. Latinists among us may suggest a suitable term.
As I may have mentioned before, Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes is one of the key books that led me to decide to major in linguistics (by, in its case, convincing me *not* to major in philosophy).
Separately, looking at the full original quote I was struck by the phrase “sunlit Pre-Raphaelite Hessian harvest lands,” and got a bit confused on account of I didn’t understand the implied association between the Pre-Raphaelites and landscapes in Hesse. In case anyone else was also confused, it turns out that “hessian” is a BrEng synonym for “burlap,” which I had not previously known, and possibly also for crops from which burlap can be made. I can’t imagine much jute was grown in pre-Raphaelite rural England, so maybe hemp, although I still don’t see why a field growing a burlap-ingredient crop would be more mystical and pre-Raphaelite than a field growing grain or vegetables or what have you.
Hemp is a very tall plant with finely cut leaves, much taller than the cereal plants wheat or rye, so a hemp field as observed in pre-Raphaelite rural England, looking like a miniature pine forest (or so) did not look at all the same as any of the cereal fields commonly grown and therefore familiar to the people of today.
True but irrelevant — as it happens, he was traveling through Hesse(n) when he saw the news of Hunt’s death. This is how rumors get started!
Thanks for the correction!
Perhaps the fields in Hesse, ready for the harvest, had something in their appearance that reminded the author of pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Yes indeed. Here’s the passage that launches him on his reminiscence of Hunt; it’s quite nice, so I’ll quote extensively:
This was written in 1910; sad to think that that “lasting peace” lasted only another four years.
Boy, that’s a bad translation of the German. Maybe done for comic effect, but I could have done a funnier one.
Well, in that context I doubt he wanted side-splitting humor; I’d guess he was going for the mildest of “here’s how we English construe sentences in the awful German language” irony.
Separately I suppose a field of hemp-as-burlap-raw-ingredient might plausibly have had mystical/visionary implications for anyone of more recent generations familiar with alternative uses for hemp sub. nom. cannabis. (One theory being that “hemp” is from proto-Gmc *hanapiz which is cognate to κάνναβις.)
Syntax aside, “today” is not in the original, and “is dead” should be “has died”.
I never heard of ‘burlap’ until much later in life. ‘Hessian’ was the only word I knew, always pronounced ‘heshen’. I was quite surprised to learn later that it was spelt ‘hessian’.
“Pre-Raphaelite” must have been a very emotionally powerful term for Ford Madox Ford, given his family background.
it all jumped forward as if it were a flat, bright pattern covering a high wall — there was a landscape in checkers of little plots of ground
Sounds like the trend in mobile icons after Apple abandoned skeuomorphism.
I don’t recall having ever seen or heard the term before Hat’s post, but by one of those eerie coincidences I encountered it again a few hours later, listening to an audiobook version of Ford’s The Soul of London: “They are the dust filtered down from all the succeeding dominant types, they are the caput mortuum precisely because they are hopelessly old-fashioned”.
Fans of Gratus Mortuus, rather. The name is from a folktale motif.
But surely we’re told that the grati mortui are those that draw the barge of Ra through the underworld during the night?
“Pre-Raphaelite” must have been a very emotionally powerful term for Ford Madox Ford, given his family background.
Yes, much of the book is about that background, and he has moving things to say about Ford Madox Brown (his grandfather). He also seems to have known everybody who was anybody in the late Victorian era.
But surely we’re told that the grati mortui are those that draw the barge of Ra through the underworld during the night?
I hear the barge of Ra is motorized these days.
The descriptions of Ra’s solar barque as it moves through the underworld were the most evocative part of Fred Saberhagen’s novel Pyramids.
Fred Saberhagen! Boy, there’s a name I haven’t thought of in a long time.
Y, are you saying that “the Grateful Dead” is intended as singular? I don’t think that’s a normally available reading of the+adjective in English (with a few specific exceptions like the deceased, the accused).
Yes, see Wikipedia article.
To my (non-native) eye, a singular reading of The Grateful Dead is more grammatical (though archaic-appearing) than one of The Dead. Certainly Joyce’s story of that name refers to the plural.
The term “grateful dead” was chosen because it was a name for a (singular) helpful ghost. The band probably benefitted from people thinking that it was actually meant as some kind of ironic commentary on Vietnam though (in which case it would presumably be construed as plural).
The term “grateful dead” was chosen because it was a name for a (singular) helpful ghost.
The Wikipedia article agrees with you, beginning “Grateful dead (or grateful ghost),” but I find that a completely impossible reading, and I can’t help but wonder who originated the phrase, and was that person a native speaker of English. In my sense of the language, “the dead” can only be plural, as TR says.
who originated the phrase
Must have been Sergio Leone.
I can’t link anymore, but a translation of Pushkin’s The Drowned Man, in Cosmopolitan, vol. 4, 1888, has “Grave and cross still unprovided / Swims the wandering dead once more.”
Antony, on Julius:
The OED gives sense 1a (thus historically the oldest) of the noun dead (which is defined in group B of the entry dead, adj., n., and adv.) thus: “One who is dead, a dead person. Formerly with a, and with possessive dead’s (dedes, dedis).” Oddly, there are no quotations; however, it is not marked obsolete, and the last two forms suggest Middle English.
The quotations at the OED for sg. and pl. are together, following the plural sense definition. That’s where I got the Shakespeare example.
Interesting. It may not be marked obsolete, but it surely is, unless my sprachgefühl badly misleads me.
It never occurred to me that the Grateful Dead was not meant as a plural.
Singular usage from the notes of a facing-page translation group of Gaelic folk tales, published 1890 in a series called “Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition,” and edited by the Rev. D. MacInnes: “if a human being, he is the soul of a dead man to whom the hero has rendered some signal service, generally that of burial, denied to the dead man by hard-hearted creditors— this story-formula being known as the Grateful Dead.” That Jerry Garcia et al. were clearly plural so dominates my sense of the NP that I don’t trust any intuition of my own that a singular version should have sounded weird to an L1 Anglophone of 1890.
Following a link from that wiki article, we have a writer in 1907 saying “To Karl Simrock is due the honour of discovering the importance of The Grateful Dead for the student of literature and legend. In his little book, Der gute Gerhard und die dankbaren Todten, he called attention to the theme as a theme, and treated it with a breadth of knowledge and a clearness of insight remarkable in an attempt to unravel for the first time the mixed strands of so wide-spread a tale.” So it’s the Germans fault, or, um, would be except for the fact that “die dankbaren Todten” is plural, innit?
Stevenson, 1887, The Ballad of Ticonderoga:
Thrice in the time of midnight,
When the fox barked in the den,
And the plaids were over the faces
In all the houses of men,
Thrice as the living Cameron
Lay sleepless on his bed,
Out of the night and the other world
Came in to him the dead,
And cried to him for vengeance
On the man that laid him low;
And thrice the living Cameron
Told the dead Cameron, no.
“Thrice have you seen me, brother,
But now shall see me no more,
Till you meet your angry fathers
Upon the farther shore.
Thrice have I spoken, and now,
Before the cock be heard,
I take my leave for ever
With the naming of a word.
It shall sing in your sleeping ears,
It shall hum in your waking head,
The name–Ticonderoga,
And the warning of the dead.”
Thanks Michael. I read the whole poem on Google. I knew the name Ticonderoga as something Amerindian but had no idea it was used in a Scottish legend!
Me neither.
It is.
Singular usage […]: “if a human being, he is the soul of a dead man to whom the hero has rendered some signal service, generally that of burial, denied to the dead man by hard-hearted creditors— this story-formula being known as the Grateful Dead.”
That’s not singular usage; we already know the story-formula is known as the Grateful Dead, and the references to singular dead men are “a dead man” and “the dead man.”
Nabokov, Pnin:
A perfect quote.
I must have seen TICONDEROGA on yellow pencils!
TICONDEROGA.
According to Stevenson’s own footnote (#1),
Nevertheless, since both are disyllabic and Cameron never occurs in a rhyme position in “Ticonderoga”, Campbell can be substituted for it throughout the poem.
Wikipedia has Campbell as the surname of the underlying historical figure, but whether this is sourced to actual contemporaneous evidence (e.g. the Black Watch’s muster roll as of that point in 1758 and an indication of who on it was killed at the particular battle) or just sourced to a rival version of the legend is unclear to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_(died_1758)
FWIW “Cameron” is trisyllabic in my idiolect, which ought not to govern the situation, but I do note that the meter in the RLS poem is loose/variable enough that it’s not clear that “Cameron” has to be disyllabic to fit.
Still, Campbell can never spoil the scansion (the muse aside).
BTW, there was also a Pole involved in the history of Fort Ticonderoga.
I also interpreted “Cameron” as trisyllabic, and I also agree that the meter of the poem is loose and/or variable enough that it probably fits either way.
Ford Madox Ford was everywhere.
There was one summer where I read something like 5 or 6 random Victorian/Edwardian/and beyond literary biographies, ranging from Hardy to Stevenson to Virginia Woolf, and FMF showed up in every single one.
The oddest, to me, was an elderly FMF popping up in young Robert Lowell’s life. I couldn’t wrap my head around the timeline – I’d mentally imagined those two occupying very different centuries.
That’s hilarious! I think I first encountered him via Pound (whom he aided by rolling on the floor and laughing at his Victorian-era poeticisms).
BTW, there was also a Pole involved in the history of Fort Ticonderoga.
He is commemorated by a bridge in New York, which was just replaced by a fancy new version. We also have a Pulaski Skyway nearby.
Indeed, the /kaski̩uskoʊ/ Bridge.
Is it the same guy that the highest point of mainland Australia is named for, or a different one?
The same.
Indeed, the /kaski̩uskoʊ/ Bridge.
See this long and ancient thread.
This is post #6250.
Perhaps in imitation of the Hegelian examples, Adorno was rather fond of the term; it appears in rather important passages of the History and Freedom lectures, in Critical Models and in Aesthetic Theory (and perhaps elsewhere; I make no claims to being an Adorno scholar).
Just ran across this in Kaverin’s (excellent) Перед зеркалом [In front of a mirror]; the protagonist, a painter named Liza living in a Corsican village, is talking with her model, a local boy named Joseph:
The original:
I don’t know if “burned bone” is what it’s called in English, but that’s what the Russian literally means.
I discovered an amusing play on another sense of “dead-head” in A Houseboat on the Styx (1895) by John Kendrick Bangs. The relevant senses are given by the OED
The book begins with Charon noticing the titular vehicle and approaching the people on board to discuss the situation. (He is supposed to have a monopoly of transportation across the river and is concerned about the houseboat’s effect on his business.)
I am belatedly looking at other-language wikipedia articles on The Grateful Dead (qua band) to see if they treat the name as singular or plural. Many don’t gloss/calque it at all, but both German (Dankbare Tote) and Interlingua (Le Mortos Grate) seem to go with plural.
It may be that folklore specialists think of it as singular (though, as J.W. Brewer said in an earlier comment, “‘die dankbaren Todten’” is plural, innit?”), but I guarantee you that only an infinitesimal percentage of English-speaking music fans do, so I think we can safely consider it a plural as a band name.
Since I didn’t make it clear above, I agree that the band name is essentially universally construed as a plural. I just thought it was interesting that the original etymon was singular—although, as I said, the name also tended to be misconstrued as suggesting something deeper and more ironic than what the band members actually had in mind.
There is also a moth called in Russian бражник мёртвая голова.
I recently learned deadhead as a verb: to lop off the stems of certain plants (calla lilies in my case) close to the ground, so as to let them grow back anew in the following season.
P.S., mention due of that beloved (apocryphal? The Onion?) headline, on the occasion of the passing of the late Jerry Garcia, “Head Deadhead Dead”.
I think “the deceased” is the singular of “the dead.”
>BTW, there was also a Pole involved in the history of Fort Ticonderoga.
In addition to his bridge and his Australian apex, he’s got a county in Indiana, but they have a strict one foreign digraph rule, so he lost his z. Despite his many namesakes, he’s the Revolutionary generation Pole whose birthday I did not get a holiday for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Pulaski_Day
The holiday was Koscius(z)ko’s to lose, but he was born in February, and we we already took President’s Day and Lincoln’s Birthday off, while March had too much work and school, and on such slender chances Kosciuszko’s contributions have been forgotten in this, the most Polish of cities, Chicago.
@Y: That’s not the only purpose of deadheading flowers. On a bush capable of producing many blooms, snipping off the dead or dying ones before they seed will usually prompt the other branches to continue to grow large new flowers. So the deadheading keeps the plant in flower longer, and it tends to make the flowers larger as well.
whose birthday I did not get a holiday for
Apparently the accepted date would have coincided with Lincoln’s birthday anyway.
Yes, but spelled Toten; the o is long (< *au).
…It is, isn’t it.
The “decedent” is the usual noun in AmEng lawyer-type contexts I suppose it sounds jargony to those who prefer “deceased,” whereas “deceased” sounds vaguely fussy/euphemistic to those of us habituated to “decedent,” which is admittedly less colloquial than “the dead guy.”
Of course, in the “Grateful Dead” folktale genre, the singular-Dead interacts directly with the narrator, which is not the case in most contexts where you use “decedent,” where you are instead trying to sort out some dispute related to the decedent w/o being able to ask him/her relevant questions about it.
>w/o being able to ask…
Well, maybe, but no one actually tries anymore because the statement would be inadmissible.
“I would like to call the late Mr. Marley to the stand…”
Exchange of telegrams in Imperial Russia:
Original: FATHER IS DEAD.
The censor at the other end suspects this of being a code because of its excessive plainness, and changes it before delivery to FATHER IS DECEASED.
Reply: IS FATHER DEAD OR DECEASED?
I’m reading Kaverin’s Художник неизвестен [Artist unknown], and I just got to this:
Which the beleaguered translator of the published English version renders:
The phrase “сепию мертвой головы” should be rendered “caput mortuum sepia,” not “dead sepia.” (I have serious doubts about the rendering of марс as “chrome,” but I have no idea what else it might mean here, so I won’t object. Anybody know?)
Given the other colours in the list, I thin Kaverin must mean
Марс фиолетовый
http://zaholstom.ru/?page_id=956
Excellent find, thanks! So it’s Mars Violet, “Rich reddish wine purple with brown undertones and a really odd name.” (Definitely not chrome.)