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In E.M. Cioran’s “Lettre à un ami lointain” (Letter to a Faraway Friend), the first chapter in his book Histoire et utopie (History and Utopia), there is a remarkable passage about his switch from writing in Romanian to French:

It would be the narrative of a nightmare, were I to give you a detailed account of the history of my relations with this borrowed idiom, with all these words so often weighed, worked over, refined, subtle to the point of nonexistence, bowed beneath the exactions of nuance, inexpressive from having expressed everything, alarming in their precision, burdened with fatigue and modesty, discreet even in vulgarity. How should a Scyth come to terms with such terms, grasp their true meaning and wield them with scruple, with probity? There is not one among them whose exhausted elegance fails to dizzy me: no longer a trace of earth, of blood, of soul in such words. A syntax of severe, of cadaverous dignity encompasses them and assigns them a place from which God Himself could not dislodge them. What consumption of coffee, of cigarettes and of dictionaries merely to write one half-way decent sentence in this inapproachable language, too noble and too distinguished for my taste! I realized as much, unfortunately, only after the fact, when it was too late to change my course; otherwise, I should never have abandoned our own, whose odor of growth and corruption I occasionally regret, that mixture of sun and dung with all its nostalgic ugliness, its splendid squalor. Return to it, I cannot; the tongue I was obliged to adopt pinions and subjugates me by the very pains it has cost me.

It’s reminiscent of Nabokov’s famous lament about having to give up Russian for English; I wish I could quote the original French, but the French keep their literary treasures locked up tight.

Katarzyna Bartoszynska’s Asymptote interview with José Vergara about his All Future Plunges to the Past (see this LH post) is full of good stuff, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but what drives me to post it is this exchange:

KB: Who are the Russian translators (ie, people translating into the Russian)—of Joyce or any other authors!—whose work you especially admire?

JV: Given the context, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the monumental work of Andrey Rene (a pseudonym referring to André the Giant), who completed the first Russian Finnegans Wake at the end of 2021. Others have published some fragments before, and Rene’s version is, indeed, imperfect, but the fact that he was able to do it at all is worth commending. There’s a three-volume edition without annotations, as well as a seventeen-volume edition with his commentary—all available for free here.

It’s called «На помине Финнеганов», as distinguished from what is apparently the canonical rendition of the title, «Поминки по Финнегану», and begins:

      рекутопия, после здания Евы и Адама, уйдя от берега, найти чтоб устья изгиб, принесёт нас по разомкнутому прочному круговику назад к границам и Замку-на-Взгорье.

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I found this post by Anatoly Vorobey (in Russian) so interesting I thought I’d translate it here (I’ve added a few links):

Ya. F. on Facebook (link) wrote well a few years ago about diglossia in Israeli high tech:

An acquaintance told me that in their office they write on Slack in Hebrew. And I was like, “What?”

Nowhere I’ve worked do they write anything in Hebrew. I mean, electronically. E-mails, instant messages, presentations, documentation — everything is in English. At the same time, they speak Hebrew, of course. At the Technion, too: lectures in Hebrew, textbooks in English. E-mail messages, too. Well, that’s understandable — just try to write in Hebrew on that scary green terminal.

I think it’s partly for technical-historical reasons (even when you could write in Hebrew, there was no guarantee that the recipient would get the text in readable form), partly (in)convenience (the terms are in English anyway), and partly that you often work with foreign countries, and then if the e-mail is in Hebrew, you can’t forward it.

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Joe Baur writes for BBC Travel about the way Berliners talk:

Berliners generally have a reputation for being cold, outspoken and blunt. This modus operandi is cheekily (or fearfully) called the Berliner Schnauze, literally the “Berliner Snout”. It plays off a need for order, an assumption that everyone else is doing something wrong, followed by a brash correction of the behaviour.

Victims of the Berliner Schnauze are usually passersby, getting told off for something they didn’t realise they were doing wrong. In our case, it was triggered by the recycling bins overflowing at the apartment building. Others have experienced it on the U-Bahn when they were too hasty getting on and someone barked, “Erst raus dann rein!” (“First out, then in!”). Whatever the case may be, the Berliner Schnauze strikes without warning, usually unprovoked, delivering a brutal level of honesty you never asked for.

On paper, Berliner Schnauze is simply a dialect of German spoken in and around Berlin. In reality, it’s a visceral dialect merged with working-class attitude and influences from French and Yiddish that can be as polarising as it is varied.

Dr Peter Rosenberg, a West Berlin-born linguist whose familiarity with Berliner Schnauze comes from years of study and lived experience, describes it as a “schlagfertig”, or quick-witted linguistic game. He says that it’s the colloquial language of Berlin – the spark behind a comment or the way you respond to a situation.

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Via ktschwarz at Wordorigins.org, the OED blog post Comic Strips and the OED, by Matthew Bladen:

When revising an OED entry, our chief concern is that the quotations reflect the reality of current and historical usage: we include the earliest example of a word, sense, or phrase that we can find; we strive to illustrate typicality (while occasionally including unusual material where it’s particularly relevant or helpful); and we attempt to remain objective, using corpus evidence and other tools to counteract the various blind spots and other idiosyncrasies that we each possess. However, when revising Blockhead n., there was one source that I knew I had to include. Therefore, as part of the accompanying evidence of usage for sense 1 of BLOCKHEAD (a word whose illustrious pedigree, as we now know, extends all the way back to Thomas More), you will find a quotation from a 1960 edition of the Texas newspaper Paris News, standing for all the newspapers which, on the 20th of May, printed a syndicated comic strip in which the unluckiest baseball player in history, having previously and miraculously stolen second and then third base, attempts to score his first ever run:

  Charlie Brown is trying to steal home!! Slide, Charlie Brown! Slide!..Oh, you blockhead!

I candidly admit that this quotation from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts owes its place largely to my great affection for the strip, but it is also a fine example of the word’s modern, colloquial register as a mild term of depreciation, while simultaneously being a rare example of an OED quotation taken from a comic strip which doesn’t show a decisive point in the word’s history (except arguably in terms of cultural salience), but is merely a good illustrative quotation.

Why are comic strips so rarely cited in the OED, when the newspapers in which they are widely found are cited so frequently? To a large extent, their format counts against them: the average comic strip contains only a small number of words (supplementing the illustrations which are the main attraction of the art form) to begin with, and even nowadays, when OED editors carry out much of their own research using electronic resources rather than being dependent on submissions from volunteers (valuable as the latter continue to be), these words are often less accessible than the text of the surrounding articles, due to being less readily machine-readable and hence less likely to show up in searches. As alluded to above, many of the OED’s quotations from comic strips owe their inclusion to the fact that they are crucial to the history of an entry […]

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Last month ktschwarz quoted Alison Bechdel’s use of obtunding in her widely praised graphic memoir Fun Home, adding:

Fun Home is in the genre of in-direct-conversation-with-Ulysses (her father’s favorite book), with the last chapter drawing multiple parallels between her/her father and Stephen/Bloom as relationships that are profoundly connected yet incomplete. Also in direct conversation with Fitzgerald, Camus, Colette, and many others including the Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries—look out for the appearance of the Appendix of Indo-European Roots in a sex scene.

When I expressed interest, kts was generous enough to send me a copy for the holidays, and having just finished it, I enthusiastically second all the praise and recommendations — it’s certainly one of the best books I’ll read all year, and of course its use of dictionaries makes it prime LH fodder. But in the note that accompanied the book ktschwarz wrote: “Can you spot the [dictionary] where she used artistic license and did *not* copy it exactly as it is?” Alas, the edition of the unabridged Websters in the book is neither the Third International that occupies a majestic place on my shelf nor the out-of-copyright one that’s available in full at Google Books, so I can only hope someone will enlighten me. And thanks again, kts!

The poet Charles Simic has died at 84. I confess his poetry was never my cup of tea, though I admired it (and quoted a short poem as part of a post making fun of the LRB), but I always liked his essays (see the related posts from 2003 and 2022), and to mark his passing I’ll quote a chunk of his 1980 NYRB review of Collected Poems in English by Joseph Brodsky, edited by Ann Kjellberg (on which see this 2015 post):

What we have under review then are translations Brodsky himself made, the ones he supervised and gave his approval, plus the poems he wrote in English. Brodsky’s output in Russian is large and of the highest quality. In it the breadth of formal invention and rhetorical complexity is staggering. He wrote just about every kind of poem, including long lyrical sequences, dramatic monologues, narratives, odes, elegies, sonnets, and sundry light verse. Modulating levels of diction, playful, witty, and endlessly inventive, he is a mouthful in the original Russian as anybody who has heard him read can testify. His poems, as with most Russian poetry, have meter and rhyme. Despite the difficulties, of which he was well aware, he insisted throughout his life that they both be faithfully preserved in translations of his work:

It should be remembered that verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced by each other, let alone by free verse. Differences in meters are differences in breath and in heart-beat. Differences in rhyming pattern are those of brain functions. The cavalier treatment of either is at best sacrilege, at worst a mutilation or a murder. In any case, it is a crime of the mind, for which its perpetrator—especially if he is not caught—pays with the pace of his intellectual degradation. As for the readers, they buy a lie.

These are very strong words. A demand for fidelity and near-complete identity between the original and the translation is an impossible task to achieve and a prescription for disaster as he himself admitted at times. He said in an interview:

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Balashon, which investigates Hebrew etymology, has a particularly interesting post called persimmon and afarsemon:

I was listening to an episode of The History of English Podcast, and I was surprised to hear “persimmon” included in a list of words originally from the Native American Algonquin language. I really enjoy eating the fruit persimmon, which goes by the name אֲפַרְסְמוֹן – afarsemon in Hebrew. Those two words are obviously connected, and I know that the word afarsemon appears in the Talmud. So how could persimmon be an Algonquin word?

Well, I decided to check my facts. First I confirmed that persimmon is a New World word:

the North American date-plum, a tree common in the U.S. South, 1610s, from Powhatan (Algonquian) pasimenan “fruit dried artificially,” from pasimeneu “he dries fruit,” containing Proto-Algonquian */-min-/ “fruit, berry.”

And I was also right about afarsemon. However, in the Talmud it doesn’t refer to a sweet, fleshy, orange fruit. Rather, it was a fragrant plant whose oil produced very valuable perfume. As noted here, the “afarsimon was considered so valuable that at one point it was literally worth its weight in gold.”

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This is just a word, but what a word: “A gongoozler is a person who enjoys watching activity on the canals of the United Kingdom.” The etymology section says:

“Gongoozler” may have been canal workers’ slang for an observer standing apparently idle on the towpath. Though it was used derisively in the past, today the term is regularly used, perhaps with a little irony, by gongoozlers to describe themselves and their hobby.

The word may have arisen from words in Lincolnshire dialect: gawn and gooze, both meaning to stare or gape. It might be presumed that such an expression would date from the nineteenth century, when canals were at their peak, but the word is only recorded from the end of that century or the early twentieth. It was given wider use by the late L. T. C. Rolt, who used it in his book about canal life, Narrow Boat, in 1944. A gawn is also a small ship of lading, such as a working-narrowboat.

The term “gongoozler” may also be used in any circumstance in which people are spectating without contributing to either the content or interest of an event.

The OED has it (entry from 1993); their first cite:

1904 H. R. de Salis Bradshaw’s Canals & Navigable Rivers Eng. & Wales 473 Gongoozler, an idle and inquisitive person who stands staring for prolonged periods at anything out of the common. This word is believed to have its origin in the Lake District of England.

Gongoozler!

Noetica, that eloquent and erudite Hatter, was kind enough to endow me with a DVD of one of the few Godard movies I was lacking, Film Socialisme, and of course I gobbled it up. I’m here to report that any Godard fan should see it, but it’s probably caviar to the general — unless you’re pretty familiar with his habits and tropes, it will seem scattered and largely incomprehensible. However, it has (unsurprisingly) various elements of Hattic interest worth posting about, a task made immeasurably easier by the existence online of a complete screenplay with English translation (that used in the subtitles), which was a joy to discover, let me tell you.

Where to start? Well, there are lots of languages spoken by characters: French, German, English, Italian, Russian (and there’s a whole chunk of Chekhov’s Three Sisters onscreen at one point), Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, and some West African language or other (see below). Of course I perked up when I saw an intertitle ABII NE VIDEREM (Latin for ‘I went away so as not to see’); I assumed it was a quote from some classic text, but it turns out to be the title of a piece for viola, piano and string orchestra by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli (which Godard has used in more than one movie) — other than that, I have found it only as an example sentence in Benjamin Hall Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer (1919), p. 182. At one point one of the characters, Flo, issues a mandate not to use the verb ‘to be’ (“N’employez pas le verbe être, s’il vous plait”). There are charming callbacks to earlier Godard movies, like the exchange “Et alors?” “Mystère” (the word mystère shows up in a remarkable number of his films), the foregrounding of gender in the mother’s “Et alors, dans LA présidence, il n’y a pas LE,” and the assonance “Je veux, mon neveu” ‘(informal) absolutely! totally!’ There is the inevitable farrago of quotations; two that I happened to look up are the end of Jean Tardieu’s poem «Monsieur interroge Monsieur» (from “Monsieur à travers tout” to “et l’espace se meurt”) and Husserl’s “In allen neuen Gestalten, „die“ Geometrie” (which can be seen in its original context here, on p. 390 under “Beilage III, zu § 9 a¹).” The subtitle renders Frieda’s “Husserl souligne le LA : LA géométrie” as “Husserl capitalizes Geometry,” which of course makes no sense, especially since all nouns are capitalized in German, but I really don’t know how it might better have been done.
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