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After I finished Vodolazkin, my Russian reading project continued with Varlamov’s pretentiously cynical Мысленный волк [The spiritual wolf] (I gave up), Buida’s family novel Яд и мед [Poison and honey] (unsatisfying), and Zaionchkovsky’s snarky Тимошина проза [Timosha’s prose] (I gave up); at that point I took a look at my Chronology and saw that the next tempting item was Аппендикс [Appendix], a novel by the poet Aleksandra Petrova, who was born in Leningrad but has lived in Rome for decades. It had won the Andrei Bely prize for 2016, and I’m generally fond of poets’ prose; on the other hand, the damn thing was over 800 pages long, and I didn’t really want to take that much time on a book right now. Still, I thought I’d check it out — for one thing, I wanted to find out what the title meant.

As soon as I started reading it, I was won over. The first chapter, Новая легкость Меркурия [Mercury’s new lightness], is a description of a childhood appendectomy; the narrator says she shouldn’t have eaten so much on her twelfth birthday (“But everybody overate!”), describes her nausea and being rushed to the hospital, and continues:
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Ann K. Brodsky writes for Tablet about “What I learned from teaching English grammar and punctuation to Hasidic adults”:

A makhloykes, for the uninitiated, is Yiddish for “argument” or “dispute”; its modern Hebrew counterpart is makhloket, although the latter seems to lack some of the “oomph” of its European mate. Think of the scene from Fiddler on the Roof: “Horse!” “Mule!” “No, it was a horse!” “I tell you it was a mule!” […]

One would think that makhloykes, so redolent of mamaloshn, and the Oxford comma, with its British pedigree, would never meet in the same paragraph, let alone in a class of Hasidim. But I had a chance to witness these two words—and worlds—collide.

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From yesterday’s ancient Greek we expand by a couple of millennia with the Portal for the Greek language developed by the Centre for the Greek Language. It’s got sections on Modern, Medieval, and Ancient Greek, with Tools, Bibliographies, Studies, and the like under each; I’m particularly struck by Modern Greek Literature (bibliographical guides to literary journals, Modern Greek short stories, literary translations, anthologies of literary texts, selected studies on Modern Greek literature, issues related to the study of translation, etc.) and Medieval Vulgar Greek Language:

This section of the Portal for the Greek Language is structured around the concise electronic version of the first 14 volumes of the Dictionary of Medieval Vulgar Greek Literature by Emm. Kriaras, Professor Emeritus of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. It is the greatest lexicographical accomplishment in Modern Greece and one of the most important works in Medieval Lexicography worldwide. The concise electronic version (Α – παραθήκη) will be completed in stages, in tandem with the completion of the full print version of the Dictionary.

This section has two chief goals. The first is to offer the student of Medieval Greek a useful set of tools for the study of the language (bibliographies, information on Vulgar Greek texts of the period, a list of relevant web pages, etc.). The second, and equally important, goal is to help the secondary school educator teaching the subject by providing an opportunity to present the evolution of the Greek language more comprehensively with the help of the language exercises and the other online dictionaries available through the Portal for the Greek Language.

Terrific resources; thanks, Peter!

Jo Caird writes for JSTOR Daily:

Only thirty-two full-length Greek tragedies have survived into the modern age. Written by just three men, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, these works represent a tiny fraction of those that would have been performed at the grand theater festivals of ancient Athens, beginning in the fifth century BCE. Of the more than 300 known tragedies from that era, the vast majority exist only as fragments, tantalizing glimpses of imaginative worlds that remain frustratingly out of reach.

Or maybe not. Although just half a scene and a handful of broken lines are all that remain of Cresphontes, a revenge tragedy by Euripides, the British theater company Potential Difference has put the play at the heart of its latest work, Fragments. Set in the papyrology department of a fictional university, the play (on tour in the UK until May 13) centers on a trio of papyrology scholars attempting to decipher the drama of Cresphontes from a handful of badly damaged scraps of text. As they do so, the ancient drama comes to life around them through puppetry and song. […]

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A recent Avva post (mostly in Russian) links to an essay by Jaspreet Singh Boparai (who “recently abandoned academia to cultivate the Muses”) about translation between Latin and Greek and between both those classic tongues and English; he has many interesting things to say (“Cicero frankly acknowledges just how bad a lot of translations were in his day”), finishing up with a piquant anecdote about Reginald Foster (see this LH obit post), and I recommend the whole thing, but I’m going to excerpt the same bit Anatoly did, where he translates “Lorem ipsum” into English:

‘Lorem Ipsum’ is a piece of text that looks like Latin but is in fact gibberish. […] At first glance this has the feel of an authentic Classical text because it is in fact a scrambled version of a passage from De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum (1.32–3) in which Cicero discusses the mistaken idea of scorning pleasure whilst extolling pain. A difficult passage even before scrambling, because (as is so often the case with Ciceronian philosophical texts) it is easy to lose the thread of the argument, once you tire of how long the sentences are. This makes it a perfect template for nonsense.

At the time this was sent to me, I had not yet read De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum. This ignorance was a Godsend: it meant that within twenty minutes I was able to produce the following:

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley’s always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien.

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LH favorite Boris Dralyuk (see, most recently, here) reviews for the TLS two books, Benjamin Balint’s Bruno Schulz: An artist, a murder, and the hijacking of history and a new selection of Schulz’s stories, Nocturnal Apparitions, translated by Stanley Bill; he has a great deal of interest to say about Schulz, but what I’m bringing it here for is something that always pleases me, a discussion of differences between translations:

Bill is the third translator to produce a book-length selection of Schulz’s work in English. As he notes in his elegant foreword (and as Balint chronicles in his book), the first appeared in 1963: an acclaimed translation of Cinnamon Shops by the Warsaw-born Holocaust survivor Celina Wieniewska (1909–85; see TLS, July 26, 1963). This collection – retitled, after another story, The Street of Crocodiles – was then republished in 1977 as part of Penguin’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series, edited by Philip Roth, helping Schulz to reach a far wider audience. In 1988 Wieniewska’s translations of the stories of Sanatorium were published together with The Street of Crocodiles.

Wieniewska’s ear was as keenly attuned to the lyrical potential of English as it was to the music of Schulz’s Polish. Privileging neither sound nor sense, but rather the total effect of the prose – the sharpness of Schulz’s surprising but seldom confusing images and metaphors, the varied but never choppy rhythm of his clauses – she won for Schulz the fervent admiration of stylists such as Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Yet, as Bill points out, “some scholars, especially in Poland, have criticized [Wieniewska for adopting] a deliberate strategy of simplification [and for] occasionally even omitting whole phrases or sentences”. Calls for a new translation were answered in 2018 with Madeline G. Levine’s volume of Schulz’s Collected Stories (TLS, April 6, 2018). Bill calls this work, in which Levine “hews as closely as possible to the idiosyncratic style and Polish syntax” of the stories, a “towering achievement and an invaluable broadening” of Schulz’s image for the English-speaking world.

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Len Pennie is a Scottish poet who “became known on social media in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland for her ‘Scots word of the day’ and poem videos”; she also has longer Instagram videos such as Scottish people might not know about Scots, and theres a reason! and Quite a long, rambly explanation of what’s going on! There’s probably nothing that would surprise the average Hatter, but they’re delightful and would be good introductions to the topics for your curious friends.

Similarly, Elizabeth Harris (YouTube channel) has charming videos about sign language, e.g. “What happens if you lose your arm? Like, your whole arm?”

Thanks, Sven!

I had barely started Andrew O’Hagan’s LRB review (archived) of Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (ed. Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley) when I was pulled up short by a word in the second paragraph (my bolding):

Growing up, I worried I didn’t have the requisite gear with which to launch myself as a leader of tomorrow’s people. I set great store by the small things I did have – a tape recorder, a digital watch – though I worried that Kafka probably didn’t have a gonk pencil-topper with crazy hands jiggling under his chin when he was writing The Castle.

What was “gonk”? A quick googling produced the Wikipedia article, which described them as “novelty toys and collectibles originating from the United Kingdom in the 1960s” and said their “signature features include a small, spherical body, a furry texture and two googly eyes.” Then I tried the OED, and their entry (from 1972) had such splendid citations I had to post them:

Etymology: Arbitrary formation.

The proprietary name of an egg-shaped doll. Also attributive.

[…]
1964 Spectator 29 May 726/1 Those neckless dolls called—I think—gonks, which witless adults are said to give to other adults.
1964 Daily Mail 2 Sept. 4/3 Gonks..are those nasty, expensive, fat balls of felt and rag that are squatting all over our houses and toy shops.
1964 Daily Tel. 11 Sept. 17/3 The principal of a technical college said.. ‘..We had one with what I believe is a “gonk” cut. His ears were invisible and you could just see his eyes and nose peeping out from under shoulder~length hair.’
[…]
1969 A. E. Lindop Sight Unseen xiv. 120 Her hair had degenerated into a gonk style.

I’m pretty sure I’d never seen or heard the term; apparently it’s one of those UK things that didn’t cross the pond. (Are gonks still a thing?)

Beth of The Cassandra Pages (which recently passed its 20-year mark — congratulations!) has posted about an unusual opera:

Saturday night we drove out to Pierrefonds, a western suburb that is still on the island of Montreal, to see Albertine en cinq temps, an opera adapted from Michel Trembley’s 1984 play of the same name, with music by Catherine Major, and is a production conceived, created, and carried out entirely by women. It tells the story of a Montreal woman, Albertine, who has had a difficult life, and at age 70 is spending her first night in a nursing home. She talks with her earlier selves — Albertine at 30, 40, 50, and 60 – as well as her sister, Madeline – and the story of her life is revealed through their conversations. Albertine’s history mirrors the history of many Quebec women who were unable to find much freedom in their lives, and were deeply affected by patriarchal and religious attitudes. Interestingly, too, the story of her life takes place on rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine, the exact part of the city where we used to live ourselves.

Albertine en cinq temps is also the first opera ever produced in Quebec to be written and performed in Joual. This is a Quebec dialect of French that was spoken mainly by the working class and is now a source of Quebec identity; many of its words have entered the main language as Quebec slang, but for those of us who didn’t grow up hearing or speaking it, it can be really hard to understand. One of my close friends, Catherine St-Arnaud, who I sang with in the cathedral choir, sings the role of Albertine at 30 and has been part of the production team bringing this opera to life. She sent us a bilingual libretto to read beforehand, in French and English, and there were projected sur-titles, but because the French was all in dialect, it was a little tricky, as well as being fascinating to a word nerd like me.

And check out her gorgeous art at the link! The libretto has vanished from the ATMA site, but if you’re lucky you can read the cached version here; if not, you can try this page, where it’s inextricably mingled with a Czech translation. (We’ve discussed joual a number of times, e.g. in 2016.)

Johnson’s Economist column A new language textbook in Mexico has caused a brouhaha (Apr 12, 2023; archived) is delightfully sensible:

One letter does not normally cause controversy, yet a single squiggle has set the Spanish-speaking chattering classes to nattering. A new textbook issued in Mexico seemed to bless a non-standard ending on second-person singular verbs in the past tense: dijistes (you said), with an extra “s”, rather than the standard dijiste, and so on with other verbs. The squabble is instructive, and well beyond the Hispanophone world.

For critics, the sin was twofold. First, the textbook “approved” a usage that, though widespread, is not the official form, which is to say approved by the Royal Spanish Academy and observed by most Spanish-speakers (especially in writing). The second misdeed was that Mexico’s education authorities, by acting alone, threatened the unity of the Spanish-speaking world.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reacted with his own hauteur, saying that critics were trying to tell ordinary people to “speak physics” rather than in their natural way. He even played, as is his wont, an indigenous-versus-European card, saying that the Spanish spoken in Mexico “has to do with the roots of ancient cultures”.

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