languagehat.com

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a passage from Vita Sackville-West’s Country Notes (1939):

How much one regrets that local turns of speech should be passing away! There was a freshness and realism about them which kept the language alive and can never be replaced. Imported into prose they become fossilised and affected, for, accurately reported though they may be in those novels of rural life of which one grows so tired, the spontaneity and even the accent are lacking; imported into poetry, they instantly sound like the archaisms of a poetic convention. If I read the phrase, ‘The cattle do be biding in the meads’, it gives me no pleasure at all, but if a cowman says it to me (as he once actually did) it fills me with delight. I like also being informed that the rabbits are ‘interrupting’ or ‘interfering with’ the young trees; at least, I do not like the fact, but the way in which it is conveyed does much to mitigate my annoyance. I resent the mud less when I am told that the cows have ‘properly slubbed it up’. Then sometimes comes a proverbial ring: ‘He talks too much, talk and do never did lie down together.’ I do not see where we are to find such refreshing imagery in future, unless, indeed, we look to America where the genius of the vivid phrase still seems to abide.

It’s an acute observation that reminds me of the “kids say the darndest things” phenomenon: when you actually hear a kid say something cute, it’s great, but when you see it written down in a magazine it becomes annoying. (And I’m afraid the genius of the vivid phrase no longer abides in America.)

I was reading Sarah Wildman’s moving NY Times account (archived) of her daughter’s struggle with liver cancer when I was struck by the following passage:

It is not the first time we have been in what rabbis call the meitzar, the biblical narrow place — a place of compression. The meitzar is an expression of all the things that can make life impossibly hard. It appears in Psalm 118: From the narrow place I called to God, the psalm says; I was answered, it continues, from expansiveness. We are constantly seeking moments of that expansiveness, to take a deeper breath.

I thought “From the narrow place I called to God” is powerful and memorable; why don’t I remember it?” Turns out that’s because the major English translations render the line very differently: the King James has “I called upon the LORD in distress,” and most others follow it, either using “distress” or synonyms like “out of trouble” or “out of affliction” (or, in the pathetic-sounding Contemporary English Version, “When I was really hurting”). The Russian Synodal Translation, however, has “Из тесноты” [from narrowness/tightness]. I decided to see if I could find scholarly discussion of the line, and Google Books turned up Harry S. May’s “Psalm 118: The Song of the Citadel,” in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (Wipf & Stock, 2004), pp. 97 ff., which says:
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As part of his Facebook series quoting 19th-century press reports of baseball games, Richard Hershberger posted a Baltimore American story from August 19, 1894, that begins:

It was a glorious day at Union Park yesterday. Nearly 7,000 people saw the Orioles wipe up the earth with their quondam hoodoos; saw the birds outplay and outbat their opponents, and win in brilliant style by the jug-handled score of 17 to 2.

Hershberger points out that the “quondam hoodoos” were the Pirates and adds:

We don’t see sports writing like that anymore! Note the out-of-town scoreboard is a chalkboard, not one of those fancy 20th century contraptions like you see at Wrigley Field. Also, calling the Baltimore team the “birds.” I’m not sure when that started, but it had taken hold by this time, at least in the Baltimore press.

I would add that the Orioles became part of the new American League in 1901 before relocating to New York City after two seasons and becoming the New York Yankees; I’ll try not to hold it against them. But my main interest, needless to say, is in the phrase “quondam hoodoos,” which is a fine example of what I called in 2020 “the rumbustious grandiloquence that has always appealed to the American soul.” Happily, the OED updated its hoodoo entry in September 2021; the etymology is “Apparently < Louisiana Creole houdou, variant of voudou, denoting the religion (compare voodoo n. 1), in English subsequently distinguished in meaning, with a shift in emphasis away from the religion, and the development of additional senses not paralleled for voodoo n.” The progression of senses is:
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Jude Stewart writes for LitHub about her relationship with German:

Nachträglichkeit (noun): “Afterwardness”

Every time I return to Berlin—and this is now 17 years’ worth of returning—I also return to speaking German. I’m always flooded with thoughts and observations about this return. Speaking German elicits big, inarticulate feelings: It’s good, it’s familiar, it’s awful, it’s tumultuous, it’s suddenly great again. But why?

German is the fourth foreign language I’ve studied, the others being French, Japanese and Spanish in that order. Since childhood I’ve wanted to become fluent in a foreign language—any language—and, before German, had only gotten maddeningly close. […]

Why did I stick with German so long? Why German? All of my answers feel like alibis, and maybe they are. Childhood ambitions don’t often play out precisely as envisioned; you feel lucky if they can play out at all. […]

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Back in 2012, I posted about “fake Arabic,” but that focused on the theory (so to speak); Lynne Rutter’s The Ornamentalist post Pseudo-Kufic: A Secret Ornamental Language shows you images of the thing itself, and gorgeous images they are. She writes:

A great number of paintings of the late Byzantine and Early Renaissance era used a similar design device: arabesque lettering, painted as the embroidered decoration in the hems of garments or edges of carpets. Sometimes it was copied from artifacts, and sometimes it was wholly invented. This script is referred to as Pseudo-Kufic.

Influenced by exotic artifacts brought back from the Middle East through both conflict and trade with the Ottoman Empire, Early Renaissance painters embellished their work with complicated patterns and eastern-style scripts in an effort to create an “oriental” atmosphere, especially with regard to persons or scenes from the Holy Land. Eastern Kufic script was a particularly ornamental style of calligraphy dating from the 11th century, whose design lent itself well to borders.

There’s much more at the post, which I highly recommend.

Hannes A. Fellner has a post on the Junge-Akademie-Blog, Sprachkontakte an der Seidenstraße [Language contact on the Silk Road], that has a good many nice bits, like the section “Gegen Sprachpurismus” [Against language purism], and its whole thrust is against any sort of language essentialism (music to my ears), but I’m bringing it here for a map that even non-German-speakers can appreciate, the map “Sprachvielfalt an der östlichen Seidenstraße” [Language diversity on the eastern Silk Road] (scroll down until you see a map). It shows the amazing variety of languages found by archeologists in the area, including Sogdian, Pahlavi, Tocharian A and B, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, Hebrew, Syriac, and Greek. That should be our image of the past (and, if you ask me, our ideal), not the linguistic monocultures too many people idealize these days. (Via a Facebook post from A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts.)

In their Sunday Style section, the NY Times had a Valentine’s Day spread that included a sidebar on the new language of relationships (well, some of it not so new, like “gaslighting” and “ghosting”). I can’t find it on the NYT site, where it seems to have been replaced by a quiz based on it, but it’s been mirrored at the Irish Times; you can either take the quiz (archived) or go straight to the explanations (archived).

The NYT section also featured an interesting piece called “How Multilingual Couples Express Their Love Across Languages” which is worth a read (archived). Sample quotes: “Their first conversations were in English, but as their relationship evolved, French became increasingly important in communicating affection and romance”; “When we got married […] we each said our wedding vows aloud in our native language: I in English and he, in German.”

Oh, and “rizz” is shortened from “charisma,” which I wouldn’t have guessed.

Yarimar Bonilla, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, has an opinion piece in the NY Times (archived) that expresses indignation — fully justified, in my opinion — about the recent Grammys broadcast:

The Puerto Rican reggaetonero Bad Bunny kicked off the Grammys earlier this month with a rich cultural performance that included a masterful blend of plena, reggaeton and Dominican merengue. As traditional dancers and the cabezudos of the Agua, Sol y Sereno collective, who wore papier-mâché heads that paid homage to Puerto Rican legends like Tego Calderón and Julia de Burgos, twirled around him, he sang in Spanish about how everyone wants to be Latino but they lack sazón, the distinct cultural flavor and connection to the past that defines our communities.

Apparently, along with sazón, the Grammys also needed closed captions.

Many Grammys viewers were puzzled when the captions during his performance read “[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH; SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH].” He is, after all, known for proudly singing and speaking in Spanish. CBS later clarified that it’s standard practice for live closed captioning to use these phrases as a catchall for non-English languages for live performances. […]

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I’ve finally finished Alexander Goldstein’s final, and very difficult, novel Спокойные поля [Peaceful fields] (see this post), and I don’t really know what to say about it. I wasn’t sure whether to post about it at all, but having spent the better part of a month on it, and being impressed as well as confused, I decided I might as well. Besides, there’s very little available about Goldstein in English, so I feel I should add my mite. Fortunately, there’s an enthusiastic analysis at The Untranslated (“a work of intoxicating linguistic virtuosity and vast erudition”) that I can send you to for more, and I’ll quote the paragraph on him from A History of Russian Literature, by Kahn, Lipovetsky, Reyfman, and Sandler (see this post):

The in-between prose of the émigré critic and journalist Aleksandr Gol′dshtein (1957–2006) had a significant impact in experimental literary circles. His books Farewell to Narcissus (Proshchanie s Nartsissom, 1997), Aspects of the Spiritual Union (Aspekty dukhovnogo braka, 2001), Remember Famagusta (Pomni o Famaguste, 2004), and Quiet Fields (Spokoinye polia, 2006) were perceived as an updating of the novel through a free-floating combination of fiction, autobiography, impressionistic travelogues, cultural history, and criticism. Gol′dshtein shows that the challenge [Lydia] Ginzburg identified, namely, what literary prose should be in the aftermath of the Great Russian Novel, continued to spur writers to create new literary forms. Gol′dshtein defines the ambitions he has for his prose in a programmatic essay, “The Literature of Existence” (“Literatura sushchestvovaniia”), that concludes his book Farewell to Narcissus. He refers to what has been deemed the “new sincerity,” reflecting both the desire for an unmediated expression of individual experience and the postmodernist understanding of sincerity as a complex of rhetorical devices and discursive principles. […] Gol′dshtein proclaims an ideal of literature synthesizing genres and media, transcending all barriers, including those separating the biographical author from his/her literary image. “The unification of the word and the talking body” remain as utopian as Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty,” to which Gol′dshtein also refers.

So what did I think? For a long time I was simply floundering. He starts with a couple of pages on Hryhorii Skovoroda, the Ukrainian philosopher/poet who has often been seen as Socratic (see Socrates in Russia, Part I and Part II), jumps to a bus ride in Israel and accompanying memories, then to Paris and someone called A.N. (he uses initials a lot, and sometimes lower-cases proper names for reasons I can’t discern), then to his friend Zhenya Pechonkin whom he meets again in Madrid… I couldn’t tell if there was any sequence or if it was a semi-random set of associations. There’s one chapter, “Yu.T. and Yu.N.,” that turned out to be a fairly harsh analysis of the Soviet writers Yuri Trifonov and Yuri Nagibin, both of whom I like (and why hide them behind initials?). Eventually I got to the long central chapter after which the book is named, which is set in Baku (where Goldstein grew up) and has a reasonably connected narrative about his friends Pavel and Oleg and the books they share with him, especially the Aeneid (the fields of the title are Virgil’s Elysian Fields); both friends die, and I began realizing the connecting thread of the novel (aside from literature) is death. The very first sentence is “Григорий Сковорода любил кладбища” [Grigory Skovoroda loved cemeteries], and it ends with a clear reference to his imminent death (“Оставляю себя” [I am leaving myself]). If that sounds grim, it doesn’t read that way; Goldstein’s love for words, books, and language shine through everything he writes and made me want to keep reading even when it took me an hour to figure out a paragraph.

Another thing that kept me interested was his wide range of references; in addition to the long list at the linked review at The Untranslated, I’ll add the Tibetan Bardo, Céline, Ian Dury, Fellini, Allen Ginsberg, Gurdjieff, Knut Hamsun, Ho Chi Minh, Georgy Ivanov, Joachim of Fiore, Mikhail Kuzmin, Mayakovsky, Moby Dick, Henry de Montherlant, Novalis, Fernando Pessoa, Andrei Platonov, Boris Poplavsky, Cole Porter, Ezra Pound, Rilke, Stockhausen, Vasily Yanovsky, and Efim Zozulya. He clearly wanted to memorialize everything he was leaving behind. One of the most moving to me was his quote from the Aeneid near the end of the long eponymous chapter: «Счастливы будьте, друзья, ваша доля свершилась». That’s a Russian translation of Virgil’s “vivite felices quibus est fortuna peracta/ jam sua,” rendered by Robert Fitzgerald as “Be happy, friends, your fortune is achieved.” This is said by a tearful Aeneas as he prepares to leave the mini-Troy created by Helenus, Andromache, and other fellow-exiles at Buthrotum (now Butrint in Albania); he, of course, is fated to sail on, encounter and abandon Dido, and found a more glorious mega-Troy at Rome. Goldstein is fated to move permanently to the Elysian Fields, hopefully (unlike this vale) perpetually peaceful.

Animation Obsessive (no author given) writes about a 1962 animated version of Mayakovsky’s 1930 play Баня (The Bath):

The Bath shocked us when we first ran into it online. It’s an experimental feature whose artistic ambitions rival anything in animation at the time — and not just in the USSR. It’s also the harshest satire of Soviet bureaucracy we’ve seen animated. It’s a firebomb lobbed at its own bosses. It’s pure audacity, and we love that about it.

Yet it’s obscure. The Bath has had English subtitles for years, but we found them hard to parse and struggled to learn more about the film. So, we spent part of our vacation studying and translating it. We’ve produced a new English version, based on several older ones (see the notes), which we feel makes The Bath more accessible than it’s ever been.

They talk about how popular Mayakovsky was in his lifetime and how he “hated bureaucracy and tried to destroy it” with the play, and continue:

The people who adapted The Bath into animated form, working at Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow, counted themselves among his fans. The film’s co-director, Anatoly Karanovich, wrote that Mayakovksy’s name:

… was not only the name of our favorite poet. It was like it served as a watershed, with your friends on one side and your enemies on the other. It is inextricably linked to the youth of my generation, who entered into independent life in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.

The animated Bath is a love letter to Mayakovsky. It’s based on the play, but also on his other work. Snippets of his essays and personal notes turn up as dialogue. Posters he made in the ‘20s appear in the background. Co-director Sergei Yutkevich noted that a few moments from Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug (1929) even show up toward the start, in a market sequence that “introduce[s] the viewer into that amazing, now historical, atmosphere” of the post-revolution. […]

Both directors felt it was necessary to “strike at today’s bureaucrats who are hindering the forward movement of our country,” as Karanovich put it. To strike at the USSR’s powerful philistines, its social climbers, its careerists and bootlickers. The Bath was the perfect story to do it, as long as it was adapted to the new era. […] Not long before August 1960, when The Bath began at Soyuzmultfilm, these ideas would’ve been unthinkable. Karanovich wrote that Mayakovsky hadn’t been animated since the anti-racist cartoon Black and White (1932). Now, these ideas were very thinkable — The Bath was among Soyuzmultfilm’s several new Mayakovsky projects. […]

Adapting Mayakovsky to the screen proved to be “infinitely difficult,” according to Karanovich. The Bath is a wordy play, and almost all of the film’s script is a hyper-condensed version of the original. Yutkevich called dialogue the biggest challenge of the production, writing that they “parted with pain” with reams of Mayakovsky’s writing. […]

This all makes it easy to forget that Soviet animation as openly defiant as The Bath, like the Khrushchev Thaw itself, would not live long. Just a few years later, when Khitruk did The Man in the Frame, the state was unamused and barely distributed it. In 1968, animator Andrei Khrzhanovsky went down in history for Glass Harmonica, one of the rare Soviet animated films to be banned outright. He served two years of forced military duty as punishment.

The Bath couldn’t have been made in 1968, or in 1958. It climbed through a tiny window in the moment when it could. In many ways, it’s an anomaly. But it’s an anomaly that’s very much deserving of another look, more than half a century later.

Go to the link for more details and the film itself; I never knew about any of this. Thanks, Nick!