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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 I can’t find it on the NYT site, where it seems to have been replaced by a quiz based on it, but it’s been mirrored at the Irish Times; you can either take the quiz (archived) or go straight to the explanations (archived).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!

Emine Saner’s Guardian piece doesn’t have any revelations, but it’s got some nice quotes:

If it were the 14th century, your name was Robert Clevecunt and you lived on Pissing Alley, you wouldn’t have hesitated to tell anyone your name or address. Such words were common enough to be unremarkable. It is easily offended 21st-century humans who would change our name by deed poll and lobby the council to change its road signs.

However, we may be becoming more relaxed about swearwords. It was reported last week that an employment judge, presiding over a case of unfair dismissal and discrimination, had decided that using the phrase “I don’t give a fuck” in a “tense” meeting was not necessarily significant. “The words allegedly used in our view are fairly commonplace and do not carry the shock value they might have done in another time,” said the judge.

Swearing is everywhere. It is on TV, on social media, in music. Young children use “WTF” and “OMG”. For many of us, workplace swearing seems so normal that it doesn’t even stand out any more (this was one theory, in that employment tribunal, as to why others in that meeting couldn’t remember if that particular swearword was used). […]

[Read more…]

I’m afraid Konstantin Paustovsky is not much remembered these days, but in the 1960s he was one of the most famous Russian writers — he was nominated for the Nobel Prize Sholokhov got in 1965, and he would have been at least as deserving a winner. His most enduring work is his six-volume memoir with the overall title “Повесть о жизни” (Story/tale of a life), and I was greatly pleased to learn that the always dependable NYRB Classics was publishing a new translation by Douglas Smith of the first three volumes, called The Story of a Life. Since they were kind enough to send me a copy, I can report on it here.

Smith starts his introduction with a striking anecdote that will suggest the impact the author had in his heyday: when Marlene Dietrich visited Moscow in June 1964, the only request she had was to meet Paustovsky, and when this was arranged she fell at his feet, after which they “spent the next several hours together talking about literature and art.” She had been bowled over by a French translation of his 1946 story Телеграмма [The Telegram] (available in English in the old collection Soviet Short Stories [Anchor, 1960], if you can find it), which is indeed powerful, pitting the demands of art and family against each other (and featuring a bust of Gogol as a prominent character). Paustovsky was a natural storyteller, and his memoir is not a standard-issue autobiography (I grew up here, went to school there, got a job…) but a string of vividly observed and beautifully told anecdotes that bring to life the people and places he loved. The three volumes translated here begin with his childhood (and a gripping tale of burying his father) and end with the Bolshevik seizure of Odessa in the Civil War (which resonates very differently in 2023 than it did earlier). Gary Saul Morson has a typically perceptive WSJ review that says, inter alia:

At its best, “The Story of a Life” rivals any autobiography in world literature. Its hero is imagination itself. While the Soviets professed absolute certainty regarding all important questions of life, Paustovsky detected mystery, complexity and hidden poetry everywhere. […]

The present volume takes us from Paustovsky’s childhood to the civil war. It recounts his experiences during pogroms, war, revolution and more war. But in the midst of these he shows us hidden simple wonders. Suddenly, “in the crown of an old lime tree, I beheld a miracle,” he writes. “A shaft of sunlight had broken through the leaves and, its refracted rays scattering here and there, ignited countless little lights of green and gold. It was a sight no painter could ever capture.” […]

Paustovsky’s prose could not differ more from that of a modernist or postmodernist. It is as if he regarded literary cleverness as a sign that one had failed to detect the wonder of the everyday world and so had to fabricate a substitute.

[Read more…]

From an eDIL Facebook post:

The time has finally come! This week the new eDIL project ‘A Chronology of the Medieval Irish Lexicon’ got underway. The aim over the next few years is to establish a chronology for the vocabulary of Irish up to c. 1650 and to produce a new suite of tools for the website, including a visualisation tool to enable users to see at a glance the chronological span of words and meanings. Alongside the academic work, there will be Word of Week, Date of the Day, events, workshops and more.

This project is based at Queen’s University, Belfast, and at the University of Cambridge, led by Prof. Greg Toner and Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, and generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

This is fantastic news — thanks, Trevor! (We have met Ní Mhaonaigh before; she pronounces her name, which is the feminine form of Ó Maonaigh and can be anglicized as Meany or Mooney, something like /niˈwɛwnɪk/.)

Daniel Wakelin (Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at Oxford) reviews a new edition of Gavin (or Gawin) Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid into Scots for the TLS (February 3, 2023):

For Gavin Douglas, translating the Aeneid was hard work. In the prologues that he added to his 1513 version of the poem – the first full translation of classical verse into Scots – he compiled an inky-fingered writer’s diary of his progress. Such a diary is unusual, and allows us to place and date the poem precisely. Douglas worked on it between early 1512 and summer 1513, with interruptions for other “grave materis”, and he did so under commission from Henry, Lord Sinclair. Douglas’s prologues showed Sinclair how busy he had been, but also reshaped the Aeneid for its readers. “I lang to haue our buke done”, Douglas grumbled, and he repeatedly called the poem “lang laubour” and “langsum wark”. Labour and longsome curl down the tongue like a yawn, and in the archaic word it is hard not to hear the German langsam: “boring”. For Douglas, under duress of Sinclair, the Eneados was endurance.

Douglas’s poem – which now appears in a three-volume edition from the Scottish Text Society, edited by Priscilla Bawcutt with Ian C. Cunningham – is certainly longer than Virgil’s Aeneid. This is partly because Latin grammar always needs expanding when translated, but also because Virgil’s hexameters do not fit neatly onto a traditional line of Scots or English poetry. Some later Elizabethan translators would try to resolve this through fourteeners or quantitative metres, but Douglas chose the challenge of rhymed couplets. He uses the couplet form not for discovery, joining words by surprise, but for consolidation, combining registers and parts of speech to fill out the sense of one line with another. […]

Douglas also has a habit of end-stopping lines at the close of clauses or phrases, such as names with their epithets, and to start lines with anaphora, words repeated, foregrounding the form. He describes Virgil’s Latin as yielding puzzles “lyne by lyne”, and it feels as though he progresses through Virgil’s poem this way, methodically. A doctoral thesis by Megan Bushnell (too recent to be cited in the edition) confirmed, from linguistic evidence, how Douglas translated in sequential order, and how he divided sense and chapters by the arbitrary page breaks of the 1501 printed Virgil that he worked from.

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