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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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This is one of those posts about a very obscure term that took me some trouble to elucidate, so that I want to save others the trouble should they run across it. I’m reading Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s short novel Петрович [Petrovich], a series of episodes in the life of a young boy, and in the course of a description of Persia in the early twentieth century there is a mention of “кровавая процессия «шахсей-вахсей»” [the bloody shakhsei-vakhsei procession]. There’s a Wiktionary entry for «шахсей-вахсей» which told me that it meant “a Shiite religious ceremony imitating the suffering and death of Imam Hussein” and had the stress on the final syllable of each half of the compound, but of course I wanted to know the origin, and Wiktionary just said “Происходит от ??” Some googling turned up Muharram in Iran, which includes this enlightening section:

Tabriz

Another glorious ceremony held during the mourning days of Imam Husayn in Iran is the “Shah Husayn” ceremony in Tabriz. This ritual, called “Shakhsi” in the local dialect, begins a few days before Muharram and continues until the noon of Ashura.

In this ceremony, the mourners in the black form a human path. They move a special stick from head to toe. These movements follow a chant “Shah Husayn” (Shakhsi) and “Vay Husayn” (Vakhsi) of the mourners. Shah Hussein’s religion is a symbolic behavior; It seems that the mourners are leaving for Karbala and standing next to the companions of Imam Husayn.

So there you have it; it’s Tabrizi and formed from “shah” and “vay” [‘alas’]. I have no idea how widespread it is, but if it made its way into Russian usage it seems to be worth noting.

Some decades ago, back when Tillie Olsen was a big name in American literature (in the sense that everybody who read the classier book reviews felt obliged to read her), I read several of her books, perhaps including Yonnondio — I frankly don’t remember. But the name has always stuck with me, and it recurred to me just now as I read Why the Lakota Migrated West, the latest in Joel’s extraordinarily interesting sequence of Far Outliers posts with excerpts from Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Yale UP, 2019). The final paragraph begins:

By the mid-eighteenth century the Sioux had shifted shape many times over. They had opened their lands and villages for real and potential allies—Sauteurs [Ojibwe], Cheyennes, Mesquakies [Fox], Frenchmen, and many others—while contending with numerous rivals as they struggled to find a place in the rapidly changing world. They had reached out to Onontio [‘Great Mountain’, the French colonial governor] far in the East—Sioux visits to Montreal had become almost commonplace—while expanding aggressively in the West.

“Onontio sounds like Yonnondio,” thought I, “but that must be a coincidence.” Apparently not, though; googling turned up Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun, “Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case” (Duke Law Journal, Sept. 1990: 625–659), which says:

When Walt Whitman wrote his poem Yonnondio for the collection Leaves of Grass, he added the following parenthetical explanation under the title: “The sense of the word is lament for the aborigines. It is an Iroquois term; and has been used for a personal name.”‘ In fact, Yonnondio also is the title of a long narrative poem by William H.C. Hosmer published in 1844 with the subtitle Warriors of the Genesee: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century. That poem, Hosmer wrote, is a description of “the memorable attempt of the Marquis de Nonville, under pretext of preventing an interruption of the French trade, to plant the standard of Louis XIV in the beautiful country of the Senecas.” In a note following the poem itself, Hosmer explained that “Yonnondio was a title originally given by the Five Nations to M. de Montmagny, but became a style of address in their treaties, by which succeeding Governor Generals of New France were designated.”

It is easy to understand that Whitman took “Yonnondio” to signify “Lament for the Aborigines”; if “Yonnondio” was indeed the word the Iroquois used to address the state, then as Whitman says in his poem, its mere mention “is itself a dirge.” For the Iroquois, “Yonnondio” itself took on new meaning as the relation to which it referred shifted. Even as the word became a greeting, its meaning was different for the Iroquois than for the French and other Europeans with whom the Iroquois had contact. This cascade of meanings reflects the highly volatile system of relations produced by contact between the Iroquois and the various Europeans intent on “opening up” or “claiming” the “New World.”

We know that Olsen took her title from Whitman, so the provenance is clear, and the Wikipedia article Onontio (which should probably link to Yonnondio) says “Onontio is a Mohawk rendering of ‘great mountain’, the folk etymology translation of ‘Montmagny,'” so it all fits. But does anybody know how exactly onontio means ‘great mountain’? What’s the morphology?

Philip Terry writes for the LRB (“Diary,” Vol. 44 No. 2, 27 January 2022; archived) about a remarkable discovery:

In​ August 2006 I visited an architect friend called David Martin who lived near the town of Montignac in the Dordogne. He was in the middle of a complicated job converting the interior of a nearby château, which had been acquired by a wealthy Japanese client. One evening he produced a large and rather dirty wooden crate. ‘I found it tucked away at the back of a cupboard in the château. They’re the papers of a local poet who used to live there, Jean-Luc Champerret. Have you heard of him?’

The crate, when I finally opened it, contained papers, some loose, some tied in bundles, all covered with thick brown dust, along with a few rusty pens, some pieces of charcoal, several bundles of letters, three small notebooks – one black, one grey, one blue – and six copies of a volume of poems by Champerret, Chants de la Dordogne, published in 1941 by a small press in Perigueux, Editions du Noir (presumably a reference to Perigord Noir, the region south of Perigueux, which takes its name from the black oaks that grow there). The poems were written in rhyming alexandrines, and were based on, or attempted to re-create, peasant songs from the region. The papers were fragile, and some of the leaves turned to dust when you picked them up. What survived included notes, and more poems, written in much shorter lines, accompanied by diagrams reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy, and a number of abstract drawings in charcoal done on standard Bureau de Poste blank postcards. There were also a number of visual poems with words and letters of various sizes distributed sparsely across the page, perhaps indebted to Apollinaire, certainly influenced by Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, of which they seemed a belated imitation. The grey notebook, the first I opened, had the title ‘Notes sur Lascaux’, and was written in pencil. The first 36 pages were filled with writing and diagrams in a diminutive and impenetrable script. The rest of the notebook was blank.

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Just a tweet incorporating a video of less than a minute, but it’s remarkable:

1929 video of 94-year-old Rebecca Latimer (born 1835), talking about the world changing.

Note the accent and vocabulary — she has a manner of speech rarely seen today

She was from Georgia; Luis says in the Twitter comments:

Accent seems to be very similar to the UK accent (London area). Born in 1835 in an area probably populated by many British descendants !? Since then, English US has been influenced by the waves of migrants coming from Europe (Germany, Nordic countries, Italy, etc) and elsewhere.

I’ll be curious to see what Hatters think of her manner of speaking. It’s quite something to hear the voice of someone born in the 1830s; thanks, Trevor!

Among the presents my generous brother gave my wife and me for Christmas was a DVD of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (whose Japanese name is a transliteration of the English phrase: ドライブ・マイ・カー Doraibu Mai Kā). I’d been eager to see it, and we watched it yesterday (when we had time for a three-hour movie); it was even better than I expected, and I recommend it to all lovers of cinema. But what brings it to LH is the linguistic element, for which I quote Nina Li Coomes’ Atlantic article (archived):

Though the film is mainly about the close friendship that forms between an actor and director named Yusuke Kafuku and the young woman, Misaki Watari, who is hired as his driver, it also follows Kafuku’s efforts to stage a play in Hiroshima. Specifically, he’s directing a multilingual production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with a cast composed of actors who speak English, Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese, and Korean Sign Language; during rehearsals, not all the actors can understand what the others are saying. But the task Kafuku lays out for his multilingual cast is the same one that Hamaguchi lays out for his multilingual audience: Even if you don’t understand all the words being spoken in the script, trust that the emotional response you have will be genuine.

In many scenes, the dialogue has nothing to do with the real drama taking place. For example, during table reads for Uncle Vanya, Kafuku asks his performers to practice their lines by delivering them in their mother tongues with as little acting as possible. The idea seems to be to first have the actors memorize the rhythm of the script, reducing it to an instinctive ebb and flow of sound rather than meaning. A young actor named Takatsuki, who is cast as Uncle Vanya, chafes against this directive, adding too much feeling to his lines; an exasperated Kafuku asks him to try again and again.

The multilingual element is brilliantly done (and I was awestruck by the actress who uses Korean Sign Language — one is used to seeing interpreters for the hearing-impaired, but this really brings home the difference between interpreting and acting); I love movies that throw various languages into the mix, like Godard’s Contempt (see this LH post from 2003). And Godard had exactly the same attitude: “Don’t try to act, just say the lines!”

Also, I had somehow never gotten around to reading the Chekhov play, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. It too (you will not be surprised to hear) is excellent.