Amir Ahmadi Arian writes for the Yale Review about another of those amazing people whose stories I have to share with the multitudes; he starts off with an Iranian series called Women’s Secret Network that briefly shows a translator named Zabihollah Mansouri:
He appears suddenly, talks about something he calls his “philosophy of expansionism” in translation, has an awkward interaction with another character, and then vanishes, never to be seen again. The screenwriters didn’t bother to provide an introduction for him because they knew it wasn’t necessary. Most people in Iran, even those who rarely crack open a book, know who Mansouri is, though he died almost forty years ago.
That’s what I call a hook. He goes on to tell about how he first encountered Mansouri as a child growing up in Ahvaz:
No one in my family or our neighborhood was into books, and there was no internet then. So when I looked at the shelves in the library, I had no idea what any of the books were about and knew nothing of the writers who had written them. I had no sense of good or bad literature, good or bad writing, accurate or inaccurate translation. In this total absence of guidance from the outside world, I took a quantitative approach to measuring the significance of writers: the more frequently a name appeared on the shelves, the more important the author must be. One day, I set out to survey the entire library. The result was undeniable: the most important literary figure in Iran was a translator by the name of Zabihollah Mansouri. Our little library carried far more of his titles than any other writer’s.
Having thus grabbed our attention, he gives a brief history of the “great translation movement in Iran” and says “Translators soon became a pillar of Iranian culture and have remained so ever since. And in his day, no translator was more important, or more prolific, than Mansouri.”
There is, though, a catch. I have been referring to Mansouri as a “translator.” But by contemporary standards, the most popular translator in the history of Iran translated hardly anything at all. Most of his works are a hodgepodge of source text mixed with his own additions and musings, which he offered so generously as to sometimes overwhelm the original. In some cases, the author of the book Mansouri was supposedly translating didn’t even exist. He would write something of his own, then make up a French name and publish his work under the fictive author’s byline. Many would say that one of the most popular literary figures of twentieth-century Iran was a full-blown charlatan.
Born in 1897 in Sanandaj, Zabihollah Mansouri was the eldest of three children. His father was a government employee, and his mother came from a highly respected clerical family in Guilan. He studied at the Alliance Française, a chain of schools that the French established in multiple Iranian cities to promote their language and culture. When his family moved to Kermanshah, the young Mansouri befriended a local doctor who was fluent in French, and under the doctor’s tutelage, he excelled in the language. Shortly after his family relocated to Tehran, his father died suddenly, and Mansouri had to give up his dream of becoming a sailor to find some means of providing for his mother and younger siblings. For this, he fell back on the main skill he possessed: his fluency in French.
In 1929, Mansouri joined the staff of Koushesh, a newly launched newspaper. He was assigned to translate crime and romance novels from French for serialization, which set him on the career path he followed for the rest of his life. After one of his serialized crime novels became a hit, he received work offers from other publications, and it appears that he accepted all of them. In the many years that followed, he seemed to do nothing but translate from French and English for a wide variety of magazine and papers, working ten to fifteen hours a day and generating thousands of pages of serializations. The books I found on the shelves of our local library were collections of that fecund magazine work.
While Mansouri began by translating potboilers and romances, his body of translations soon expanded to include science and history and, later on, philosophy. He became a household name thanks to his popular science books, above all his serialized translation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee. The magazine installments of that translation grew so popular that people lined up at newsstands every week to buy the latest issue, which was very unusual in a country that had, at the time, a very low literacy rate. Mansouri claimed that once, when he got sick and failed to publish an installment in the series, he received a call from the offices of Reza Shah, the king of Persia, inquiring about why it hadn’t appeared and when His Majesty should anticipate the next part.
At the height of his productivity in the 1970s, Mansouri worked simultaneously for as many as twenty publications. For many of them, he did more than two columns per issue. Much of his output was published in Khandaniha, which ran lengthy columns of his translations every week. Its owner allowed him to use as his office an attic space on the fifth floor of the walk-up in downtown Tehran that housed the publication. […]
The central question of Mansouri’s career, though, is this: What, exactly, was that contribution? It certainly wasn’t providing Iranian readers with accurate translations of Western texts. Consider, for example, his translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. […] Mansouri cavalierly expands and waters down Nabokov’s painstakingly constructed sentences, explaining everything without even bothering to fact-check his own explanations. His goal here seems to have been to make the text accessible to all of his readers, including the least sophisticated, by providing far more information than the original text does. In the process, he all but ignored what Nabokov set out to accomplish. (Unusually for him, Mansouri acknowledged he was doing this, writing in a preface to the text that if he committed himself to a close translation, “the Persian-speaking reader would not understand a single page of this book.”) This is the strategy he followed throughout the book, which is why he ended up producing a bloated seven-hundred-page tome that’s almost double the length of the original.
This is what Mansouri did consistently across the span of his career. He regarded himself as the provider of a unique service to his readers. He cared so much about being read by the undereducated that he frequently used colloquialisms and slang to simplify his prose and even included deliberate errors in his texts to mimic the speech of those with less formal educations. He sometimes noted to his editor in the margin of a piece: “I know this is incorrect, but this is a commonly used phrase, so I’d like to keep it.”
Indeed, by Mansouri’s standards, Lolita is a rather mild case of translator’s interference. In other translations of his, he set loose his imagination far more freely. When translating Dumas’s work, for instance, he tapped into his lifelong obsession with French court gossip and would sometimes go off on twenty-page-long digressions before returning to the novelist’s text. As a result, his version of The Three Musketeers, which is some six hundred pages long in the original French, weighs in at more than six thousand pages, published in ten volumes. When I was in middle school, I spent a whole summer reading it from cover to cover.
I’m tempted to just go on quoting, but if you want to find out how he got away with it (he published a four-hundred-page book about Mulla Sadra, the seventeenth-century thinker who is widely considered to be the greatest Muslim philosopher after Avicenna, claiming it had been written by Henry Corbin, “at the time the leading authority in the West on the Shia tradition of Islamic philosophy and mysticism” — and then had to deal with the appearance in Iran of Corbin himself, who he had supposed was dead!), you’ll have to click through to the article; I’ll jump to the passage where Arian says he thinks the key to Mansouri’s success is the tradition of naqal:
Naqali is the live performance of stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Persian literature’s greatest epic poem. The naqal is an actor-storyteller who adapts tales from that old book of kings and warriors into more prosaic and dramatic stories, then performs them before an audience, often in coffeehouses around the country.
In Iran, oral storytelling became the dominant form of entertainment in the seventeenth century, during the Safavid dynasty. This was a time of rapid urban expansion, and the formation of neighborhoods in big cities like Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz led to the emergence of modern public spaces in Iran. The most popular of such spaces was the coffeehouse. Just as people today return home and put on a Netflix show, men then would retreat into coffeehouses after a day of work to drink tea, smoke hookah, and chat. Many of these places employed a naqal, who would show up in the evening to entertain the crowds with adaptations of the ancient epic.
In the cultural imaginary of those past audiences, the heroes of the Shahnameh occupied a space similar to the one Marvel superheroes occupy today. During the day, people discussed the naqal’s tales with their friends, and on the nights when their favorite warriors were to be killed, they sobbed and screamed in the coffeehouses, begging the naqal to postpone the tragedy, sometimes even offering him bribes to keep their heroes alive. This kind of theatrical performance was the most popular form of entertainment in Iran until radio and TV drove it to near extinction.
Naqali was not the same as the recitation of the text of the Shahnameh, which was an art performed by more cultured men in courts and elite circles. Naqals performed for general audiences, and since Ferdowsi’s verse is loaded with antiquated vocabulary and complex imagery, they adapted the text to contemporary prose. Most naqals wrote down their adaptations in documents known as toumar, or scrolls. Some of them have been published over the last fifty years. Close comparison with the text upon which they are based has revealed that the adaptations are quite loose; the tenth-century verse was translated to colloquial Persian, and the original stories were expanded and dramatized.
These scrolls, then, correspond to the original epic in the same way that Mansouri’s translations approximate his source materials. This is particularly notable in his translations of Dumas, who, among all the Western writers that he translated, was perhaps most similar to Ferdowsi, and whose proclivity for melodrama and larger-than-life characters provided Mansouri with ideal material. Like a naqal, Mansouri transformed Dumas’s nineteenth-century French prose into colloquial twentieth-century Persian, amped up the melodrama and the adventure, and, whenever he felt the author lost pace, raised the stakes by inserting a tense scene of his own creation. In the process, he also made sure to explain anything that might be even remotely obscure to Iranian readers, and he frequently departed from the original to rhapsodize on the salacious affairs of French royalty. He managed to intrigue readers who would have had no interest in French society or even novels generally by turning those stories into something they could easily recognize.
In this sense, Mansouri’s methods of “translation” connected him to the oldest tradition of storytelling in Iran. That is the deep chord he struck, the corner of our collective psyche he touched. He arrived on the scene just as the last generation of great naqals were on their way out, and, perhaps unwittingly, kept their art alive and attracted their audiences by using their long-honed techniques in his translations of Western literature. Reading him was, and is, akin to listening to an old man spinning tales of dead warriors and unrequited love, telling one high-stakes story after another until the listener loses track of the passage of time.
He continues with some thoughts on the development of modern theories of translation, and ends:
In this light, Mansouri’s career, his ethical flaws and outright plagiarism notwithstanding, is more than just the story of a Borgesian character who got away with a decades-long literary scam. It is also evidence that blurring the boundary between translation and authorship is sometimes a good thing, and that we should leave room for unorthodox philosophies of translation. Mansouri, after all, provided a great service to a population that had little connection to books. Millions of Iranians, myself included, started with the easily digestible products he so abundantly produced, which enabled us to develop the taste and the appetite for richer and more complex foreign works. This was an invaluable service to our culture, and it was one that no translation machine could have ever delivered.
There is no English Wikipedia article on Mansouri, but there is a Farsi one, of which you can read a Google Translate version (Google, understandably but disconcertingly, does not translate the years). I got the link to Arian’s essay from the MeFi post by chavenet, who is one of the few remaining glories of that once indispensable site.
Millions of Iranians, myself included, started with the easily digestible products he so abundantly produced, which enabled us to develop the taste and the appetite for richer and more complex foreign works.
One could see the productions of generative AI in that rose-colored light, if one wanted. A push-start for the imagination and the faculties of narrative, as in fairy tales.
I’m looking forward to all 24+ volumes of Simenon’s novels and stories, having read three of the collections so far. I know of no better way to improve my French.
Is there a counterpart of Simenon for Spanish ?
That’s fascinating, and my only cavil is with the statement that Ferdowsi’s version is the “original epic,” rather than the most important interpretation and codification of that particular mythos—with naqali being a more recent representative in the long continuous development of interpretive practice.
An excellent point with which I’d guess Arian would agree — most of us don’t write as carefully and accurately as we might wish to.
Oh yes, it certainly seems like he feels the same way. That’s why I carefully called my objection a “cavil.”
@Stu: the closest I can think of (in terms of proflicacy and repute) is Javier Marías
Is this the version they’ve been reading in Tehran, then?
@Alon: thanks, proflicacy sounds promising. I would even settle for mere profusion, provided it’s not boring in the manner of printed Mexican telenovelas with their heterobotics.
Of course I may find that the density of obscurely elegant vocab requires Too Much Looking-Up, as in the novels of Márquez. Then I could stop with a sigh.
I’ll start with the children’s book.
I read and enjoyed Fever and Spear back in 2010, but for whatever reason never posted about it.
For several years now, before ordering a book I look for a supplier that is not Amazon. Time and again with such suppliers, I run into unsolvable difficulties with the actual ordering. It’s no wonder Amazon is still on top.
Just now I was at the site of Casa del Libro, a big Spanish chain, to order Mientras ellas duermen. I was unable to open an account, because the site insisted that I provide “billing information” – a “document type” and “document number”, “por motivos de compras fuera de Madrid… or something like that.
So I ordered Tres novelas esenciales through Amazon es.
Blackwell’s has got their shit together, you can actually pay with Paypal. Other bookstores and chains (apart from Amazon) seem stuck in a provincial attitude. They are interested only in customers from the corresponding geographical province. US booksellers often will not take orders from outside the US, or else they charge 30$ for delivery.
A puta continua. Or trabalhadora sexual if you prefer.
If you want to support local commerce and avoid giving money to Mr. Bezos, you can ask at a local book shop that carries international books whether they can order the book for you; I have done that before. It’s easier if you have the ISBN number. (I guess you know all that and have your reasons, but just in case…)
@Hans: Why would I want to “support local commerce” as regards buying books published in other countries, when local commerce doesn’t carry such books any more, and apparently regards them as exotic ?
Ludwigs Buchhandlung in the main train station has shrunk to a third of its size, and the last time I tried to order something from France I allowed them to dissuade me – clearly they weren’t interested any longer, for whatever reasons. In the 90s I ordered all my Foucault books (in French™) through them.
Thalia swallowed up Bouvier in Bonn 20 years ago, the bookstore at the base of my book collection from the 70s onward. There was a successor for a while on the Neumarkt in Köln, but that vanished. Now there’s only an enormous Mayersche (fusion with Thalia in 2019) on the Neumarkt, that used to carry lots of French and English novels but now doesn’t. They too are not interested in ordering furrin books.
Smaller bookstores seem to be restricted to ordering from a specific Grossist.
I don’t mind ordering through the internet. There are many small bookstores in Germany, even used book sellers, who will get older things for me from out of town.
The only thing I have against Amazon is its size, and the fact that it appears to have swallowed every kind of bookseller it got its teeth into. They have driven away the wonderful salespeople vor Ort who were on top of book affairs. There’s no one to talk with any more.
Stu, what about ordering directly from the publishers?
In the case of small publishers, that is significantly in their favor. Not so much an issue for your book, which is published by Debolsillo, an arm (a wing?) of Penguin.
I do that too, of course. I order Suhrkamp publications directly from them. On recent attempts – I can’t order from Dover, or from Librairie Gallimard (and thus from Èditions Gallimard) etc because they require a credit card. I don’t want one but I will have to, apparently.
All this was once so easy. Now I am expected to keep track of who owns who in the bookselling and -publishing world, so as to do maximum good ? But, as I already implied, I am not on a do-good compaign. I just want to deal with people as much as possible. My money wants to go where interest and smarts lie down with the lion. As it is, lions stalk the empty streets.
That was a good read!
The name Zabihollah is quite distractingly strange-sounding for an Arabic speaker; it’s Arabic for “God’s slaughtered animal”. Maybe he was born on Eid al-Adha or something? Among Arabic names coined in, and unique to, the Persianate world, I prefer the more optimistic Mashallah (“what God has willed”, normally a polite expression of evil-eye-free admiration.)
Not so much an issue for your book, which is published by Debolsillo, an arm (a wing?) of Penguin.
Mientras ellas duermen is available from Penguinlibros only as an audiobook. El hombre sentimental isn’t available “directly” from them as bolsillo – I can’t add the book to my basket, but have to choose one of 6 different “sellers” I’ve never heard of. La compra sólo está disponible en el catálogo de tu ubicación: ¿quieres que te redirijamos allí?
Payment only by credit card.
This is all too complicated and provincial. Apparently it would be easy if I were a little old lady living in Madrid.
I shudder to think what a fuss would be involved to order something from Iran.
Thalia swallowed up Bouvier in Bonn 20 years ago
Yes, that’s a shame, that was one of my favorite places.
@Stu Clayton:
As a medium-sized middle-aged gentleman living in Barcelona, I reasonably enjoy La Central.
Admittedly, I have no idea how they live up to their promises to long-distance clients, but their website has a specific Services page that claims they’ll help you manage your orders, accept payment by bank transfer, and ship abroad.
I suspect you may actually need their human help if you want to do all that. In particular, buying online without either a debit or a credit card is definitely unusual in Spain. And Amazon almost surely has cheaper international shipping than any bricks-and-mortar bookstore, though I dislike them too.
@Giacomo: thanks for the tip, I’ll try La Central next time. There will be the additional fun of struggling with Català ! For simple stuff in a familiar context like an online bookstore, I can just get by with my Spanish, plus French and misty memories of Latin. res com un llibre !
Here’s a sentence with a word that threw me: Signatures d’autors: Tindràs preferència per encarregar llibres signats pels autors quan les editorials ho proposin. “pels” ?? I guess “por los“, after rejecting Pelze and Pellkartoffeln.
I don’t expect any difficulties. What’s important is that La Central appears to have the will to sell. The only thing I would worry about as a bookseller is getting paid for the books I sent. That is solved by asking the customer to present a credit card. I thought Paypal must be cheaper for businesses than credit cards, but I may be wrong about that.
Otherwise, it’s just a matter of putting a book in a box, applying stamps and bunging it in a mailbox. How hard can that be ?
I am not addicted to instant gratification. I can wait !!
BTW, Amazon es has already sent my order.
“pels” ?? I guess “por los“
Yup. Catalan personal pronouns are a trip. (Can someone explain the prenoms febles to me? How do they work? Are they as hard as they seem or do they have a pattern? Are all of them used by natives?)
That “els” can’t be a feeble pronoun, if what the WiPe says is true:
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The weak pronouns (Catalan: pronoms febles) are proforms that, as the name indicates, do not carry stress. All are monosyllabic clitics, and all must always appear immediately before or after a verb: they cannot be used on their own or attached to a different element of the sentence. The combination of the verb plus the weak pronoun or pronouns always has a single stressed vowel, that of the verb.
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Rather, “els” is the plural masc. definite article, contracted with the preposition per to give pels. Signats per els autors.
If I knew how that is pronounced, it might seem more reasonable. Like the English “don’t” as a contraction of “donut”.
Germany has had the benefit of the early adoption of a “direct draft” payment method called SOFORT, which has meant that you could handle many domestic online purchases without a credit/debit card. When I was minding the finances of a web shop based in Denmark (actually in Sweden, but for reasons with a tax number in Denmark as well for VAT registration), there was one (1) Danish bank that would let us accept SOFORT payments from German customers.
Denmark, for instance, chose to introduce a law mandating a no-cost “Dankort” for all private customers, back in the late 80s, with a cheaper transaction price than VISA or Mastercard want to offer, with the result that almost all online shopping uses card payments. (The banks are trying to make people use MasterCard instead, but people are not that easy to fool. They also want to gouge my local pizza shop for something on the order of 10k Euros per year and 3-5 percent surcharges for a terminal that will accept MasterCard, which the owner sensibly refuses with the result that Dankort works better domestically).
The next thing is supposed to be “instant” payments in the Single European Payment Area (SEPA), also with a direct draft mode, but implementation is lacking in some countries. I think most bank customers in Germany and Austria will have it by default, but Danish banks have not seen fit to offer the service. (I have a little stash in Revolut Bank which is based in Lithuania, just to be able to do instant transfers of small amounts). But I find it very understandable if a bookseller in Barcelona that already supports card payments, does not want to spend money on adding SEPA instant to their offering. Maybe their payment processor will add it to the base offering if it becomes popular enough, but until then it looks like another Germany+Austria-only thing.
One semi-fascinating thing to outsiders is that it seems totally random/unpredictable which sorts of things have become standardized EU-wide due to either express legal requirement from Brussels or strong market incentives for uniformity versus those that remain randomly different/incompatible from place to place. Making it excessively complicated for a customer in Germany to do business with a bookstore in Barcelona seems exactly like the sort of obstacle to cross-border commerce that a Zollverein w/o grander political ambitions might have focused on early in the game, but apparently not. Although maybe that’s a misleading spin and the Eurocrats would say it’s on Stu for not having taken advantage of some opportunity that was available to him to organize his affairs in a way that would enable him to take full advantage of the Zollverein.
Germany has had the benefit of the early adoption of a “direct draft” payment method called SOFORT
Never encountered that !?
(SEPA), also with a direct draft mode
The very few German bank systems of which I have some knowledge all dragged their feet on that, for years. Even now I am charged when I want an Echtzeitüberweisung from, say, the Commerzbank to a Sparkasse – because they are different bank systems. And it is not always available, in particular over the weekend.
The Sparkasse KölnBonn is guilty of suppressio veri when they claim:
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Mit der Echtzeit-Überweisung können Sie jederzeit Geld überweisen: Rund um die Uhr, an 365 Tagen im Jahr – sogar an Sonn- und Feiertagen.
#
In my experience, that works only when sender and receiver have accounts in the Sparkassenverband. They fiddled around for 7 years and millions of euros, implementing an “online payment system” whose name I have forgotten. It was never offered as a payment method at any German online site I was on. The Sparkassen were too late to the party.
(I have a little stash in Revolut Bank which is based in Lithuania, just to be able to do instant transfers of small amounts).
That is exactly what I use Paypal for, and for that only.
Making it excessively complicated for a customer in Germany to do business with a bookstore in Barcelona seems exactly like the sort of obstacle to cross-border commerce that a Zollverein w/o grander political ambitions might have focused on early in the game, but apparently not.
The primary thing that makes it “complicated” is the mere fact that I don’t have a credit card. That I don’t want one either probably makes me seem even more out of touch with reality, and thus even less salonfähig. It appears that most people don’t mind being chronically in debt, not only because they bought a house they couldn’t afford to buy outright.
I am told that is required in order for capitalism to “work”.
the Eurocrats would say it’s on Stu for not having taken advantage of some opportunity that was available to him to organize his affairs in a way that would enable him to take full advantage of the Zollverein.
That’s right !
@Stu: Given adequate self-discipline it is in my experience perfectly possible to have a credit card and not go into debt – i.e. use if for convenient payment for certain transactions but then pay each month’s balance in full before accruing any of the interest charges where the card issuers can profit from you. Classically, AmEx and Diners Club in the U.S. affirmatively required such monthly payment in full because they were “charge cards” rather than “credit cards,” but AmEx at some point transitioned into the more lucrative business of charging interest to those who didn’t feel like paying in full each month.
@J.W.: null problemo with self-discipline. The point is that I rarely want to spend more money than I have at the moment – so I never had an incentive to apply for a credit card. It would cost me such and such an amount per year, for nothing. Also, I was wary of it being hijacked online.
I order from Barcelona not because I want a book immediately, but because I want a book. I order from Barcelona not because I want to read first and pay later, but because I want a book. I’m willing to wait. Booksellers are not. That’s fine. I now see no alternative to getting a credit card. It is the way of the world.
Given adequate self-discipline it is in my experience perfectly possible to have a credit card and not go into debt – i.e. use if for convenient payment for certain transactions but then pay each month’s balance in full before accruing any of the interest charges where the card issuers can profit from you.
That’s what my wife and I do; we both hate being in debt.
That would merely cost me such and such an amount per year.
Huh? What kind of credit card charges you just for having it?
What kind of credit card charges you just for having it?
I thought most of them did. Maybe that was 50 years ago ? I may be a bit behind the times.
Fact:
The Sparkasse Gelsenkirchen charges a minimum of 30 euros annually for their MasterCard Standard.
Even debit cards cost money. And they are generally not accepted outside of Germany, as I learned from having one. The Kreissparkasse Köln, which I use, isolates debit cards by farming the whole thing out to some non-bank institution. It takes 4-5 days to transfer money to it. Even cancelling it took more than a month until it finally vanished from my account list.
I used to have a MasterCard with like 4000€ credit, which accrued zero interest if I paid it in full at the end of the following month. But the bank wanted to charge usurious interest so when I got it, it was set to only pay off 20% each month (from my current account). That got changed to 100% right quick.
But now I’m with another bank and use a debit card that draws on my current account directly. I do have a credit line of 3 months salary and a bit, again at usurious interest but if I do go into the red by a few hundred once in a while I don’t get angry emails, and if something expensive like a tooth breaks I don’t have to take out a new loan. That aside, my salary is available on the debit card the second it hits my current account, it’s run over the same provider network (Nexi Group) that runs VISA and MasterCard in Europe. (I do have to manage my offshore pot manually, like Stu manages his PayPal balance, but Danish banks actually abide by the SEPA regulations and make transfers fee-less if denominated in Euros).
Stu, did you try using an IBAN for your domestic transfers? I’m pretty sure it will be in breach of some law if your bank charges you in that case.
Credit cards used to charge annual fees commonly, but none of mine, going back almost thirty years, ever did. Around 1990, a friend’s parents got into a hassle with their credit card (due to a merchant’s mistake) and in the process of getting it smoothed out, the card (which they had had since the 1970s) was switched from annual fee to no fee.
I have a credit card, which I use almost only outside of Germany and for online purchases with counterparties who don’t accept PayPal. Inside Germany I use my bank debit card, which also generally works in other EU countries, but is not usually accepted for online transactions. Many companies also offer invoicing and payment by bank transfer, but that’s more usual for bigger bills like handyman work or delivery of furniture, not for everyday shopping. I never used Echtzeit-Überweisung; that always looked like an unnecessary service in search of a purpose to me.
I notice that I use cash much more rarely than a couple of years ago; due to COVID, Germany turned from a country where it was highly unusual to do small transactions with anything but cash to a place where paying by tapping your card or phone has become almost ubiquitous (not yet on a level with Canada where we are spending the holidays right now, but we’re getting there.)
On cash, exactly what Hans said. Austria more or less likewise (just a few years ago there was an attempt to write cash into the constitution).
I’ve probably encountered Echtzeitüberweisung “real-time wire transfer”, but I mostly know it as Sofortüberweisung “immediate wire transfer” or Klarna®. Apparently it doesn’t work in Austria with my German bank account even though I can choose my German bank in the web form; in Germany it works. The point of it is there’s no fee on it; many websites put a fee on other payment methods.
Mine does; I think it’s 29.50 €/year.
That’s even though it’s a prepaid card (meaning it takes money from a separate bank account!) that I have because it happened to come free with my account at the start of the period of zero inflation and zero interest.
On the other hand, my debit card seems to be free, and these days even some ATMs in the US take it (…for a quite silly fee, but still).
Reward cards like airline mileage cards charge an annual fee, but unless you rarely use it, you make up for it. Businesses and by extension other consumers pay for it because the processing fee is at a higher rate. As a former small business owner I hated those things. But also used/use one.
@Ryan: All my cards have rewards, and none include and annual fee.
Yes, even a plain MasterCard here gives perks like travel insurance and zero deductible on rental car insurance, if you buy the whole package on the card. And I get advertisements in my email for some credit card from Norwegian Airlines that will accrue air miles with them if I use it to buy groceries. But the stuff about air miles on cards from “normal” banks is not a thing, I think it’s blocked by consumer protection laws.
Bret,, my United Mileage Plus card and that of my wife have an annual fee. Are we just getting a bad deal? Or are you talking about other low-level rewards, like the kind Lars mentions.
@Ryan: I have an airline card that is 1.5% back on most purchases, 3% on restaurants, and 3.5% back on travel with that airline or their partner hotels, etc. (There are occasion offers to book travel with 5% cash back, but I don’t think I have every done that.) It has no annual fee, nor does my other rewards program card, which offers cash back a complementary collections of expense types. However, given how much I put on my cards, if I could get an extra 0.5% cash back across the board on one of them, it would be well worth a $50 annual fee.
Zabihollah is quite distractingly strange-sounding
I wondered about this too. Commenting on the LH post about Russian калтык ‘trachea, gullet’ (as a technical term in slaughtering and fish processing), I was reminded of this post and something I wanted to follow up on.
For the general LH readers who may be curious… So far, the earliest reference that I have been able to locate for the use of ذبيح ḏabīḥ ‘slaughtered; animal fit or intended for sacrifice; sacrificial victim’ in reference to the son to be sacrificed by ʾIbrāhīm (Abraham) is found in the Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī , which transmits the following narrative from ʿAbdallāh al-Ṣunābiḥī, who is said to have joined the circle of Muḥammad’s companions soon after Muḥammad’s death:
ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, his sonʿAbdullah ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib (the sacrificial victim redeemed by 100 camels), and his son Muḥammad, were all of course members of the Quraysh tribe, and thus descendants of ʾIsmāʿīl (Ishmael). Let us say that the authenticity of this narrative is not secure and leave it at that. However, the story has entered tradition and subsequently been elaborated upon, and that is the important thing for its relevance to the development of the use of the term ḏabīḥ.
The address of the prophet’s visitor (يا ابن الذبيحين yā bna ḏabīḥayn ‘O Son of Two Sacrifices’) and the interplay of son and sacrifice reminds me just a bit of John the Baptist’s words upon first seeing Jesus (Jhn 1:29): Τῇ ἐπαύριον βλέπει ὁ Ἰωάννης τὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐρχόμενον πρὸς αὐτόν καὶ λέγει Ἴδε ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου (‘The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world’).
الله أعلم Allāhu ʾaʿlam
@Xerîb: Any hadith purporting to be based on the word of Muawiya can be suspected of having been invented to make Muawiya look good by personally associating him with the prophet.