languagehat.com

My wife and I watched Une femme mariée last night as part of our ongoing Godard retrospective (it’s very good indeed), and at one point there’s an intertitle LA JAVA which is rendered in the subtitles as THE WALTZ. So just now I looked up java and discovered that my Collins-Robert defines it as “popular waltz,” whereas the very large Larousse gives “java” as though that were an English word. I thereupon checked the OED, and even though the entry was updated in September 2011 it gives no such meaning (only ‘coffee,’ ‘a breed of large domestic fowl,’ and ‘a general-purpose object-oriented programming language used for producing cross-platform programs’). So then I went to Google Books and turned up a bunch of examples in English-language books, but all in the context of French culture: “as dances, we did the one step, foxtrot, java, tango, and waltz”; “the success and institutionalisation of the java/waltz motif”; “For the java – a lumbering waltz that is almost a polka – each partner places his hands at the small of the other partner’s back to form a kind of whirling pretzel”; “This was the dance known as the apache, the java, or, more descriptively, the valse chaloupée (rolling waltz); “Odd, indeed, were he not to play the java, that fast, rural waltz that had become another of the key synonyms for the people”; etc. Here’s a long quotation from Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend by Michael Dregni (OUP, 2006) that gives some history and provides what is doubtless a folk etymology:

In addition, Vacher played the java, a dance that became the pride of musette. Legend held that the java got its name at Le Rat Mort, a grand bal reigning over place Pigalle. Here, the women were infatuated with the 3/4-time Italian mazurka “Rosina” that they danced in quick, minced steps with their hands planted on their partners’ derrières. Throughout the nights, the dancers demanded the band play “Rosina,” calling out for encores, “Ca va?” which in the Auvergnat accent came across as “Cha va?” Paris woke one morning and a new dance had been born. Yet the debut of a new dance was contentious. Some staunchly Auvergnat bals bore signs proclaiming “The java is forbidden.” Others cursed the java: Louis Péguri said the java was “a dance derived from the waltz but with a step that was debauched and vulgar.” Others decried it succinctly as a mazurka massacrée, whereas Parisian novelist Francis Carco summed up all bal dancing, stating, “Here, dance is not an art.”

The Trésor de la langue française informatisé defines it as “Danse à trois temps, assez saccadée, en vogue dans les bals populaires des faubourgs” and gives its origin simply as “Du nom de l’île de Java.” I’m curious as to whether others are familiar with this apparently once notorious dance and its music; is it still a thing?

John Ashbery is a longtime LH favorite (see my 2017 obit post, as well as the previous ones linked therein), so I read Ange Mlinko’s NYRB review (September 23, 2021, issue; archived) of his posthumous Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works, edited by Emily Skillings, with great pleasure, and I will quote below some bits that particularly grabbed me (from one of which I excavated the clickbait post title):

When we say that a poem is “good”—not with the dubious implication that it’s not great but with genuine satisfaction—are we unconsciously echoing Genesis, “And God saw that it was good”? It’s not such a stretch: the poet and critic Susan Stewart theorizes that the declaration of goodness is one of the three qualities of the biblical phrase that make it “a paradigm for the philosophy of art in the West.” And what this paradigm implies is that the work, in order to be judged good, must be done: “The proclamation of something’s goodness indicates it is time to stop making.” The scriptural word in the Hebrew borrows from an Akkadian verb meaning “to inspect and approve,” used in the Code of Hammurabi to refer to the work of masons and other craftsmen; surely a building is good if it’s finished enough to keep the elements out and not fall on one’s head. Alternate translations of the Hebrew have found English terms other than “good”: “It was declared finished” or “brought to a satisfying close.” […]

Collage was the major innovation of modernist poetry in English, and Ashbery wielded the method his entire career. Pound and Eliot introduced it, studding their work with quotations from the classical canon; Moore mixed high and low, newspapers and guidebooks, the famous and the anonymous. Collage was Ashbery’s medium in visual arts; he had pursued painting lessons as a teenager, then became an accomplished collagist at Harvard.

In 1962, when The Tennis Court Oath was received with bewilderment, he probably took the method further than anyone besides Pound. […]

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Back in 2014, I posted a couple of short videos by Nelson Sebezela about Xhosa clicks; now here’s How to pronounce Zulu Clicks with Sakhile from Safari and Surf. It covers a little more ground, including p and hl as well as x, c, and q; comparing the two is useful (Sebezela gives more detailed information on how to make the sounds), but I still can’t say q for the life of me. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Unrelated: somebody had the bright idea of putting together “Пространственная диагностика глуши” [Spatial diagnostics of the hinterlands], a map of “ближайшие к Москве местности, характеризуемые русскими литераторами как глушь, захолустье” [the closest places to Moscow that were characterized by Russian writers as the hinterlands, the back of beyond], each dot labeled with the name(s) of the writers who so designated it; it’s funny and enlightening, and can be seen as Figure 20 on p. 39 of this pdf. I saw it in a different format on somebody’s Facebook feed, but didn’t want to link to that swamp unless I had to.

Sometimes posts come in batches. I had two squirrel posts in a row and three with Latin titles; now comes my third on translations, after Balzac and Cervantes. Via Alex Foreman’s Facebook post (“This is fucking awesome”), Wael Almahdi’s Jabberwocky in Arabic:

This is an Arabic translation of Lewis Caroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky. It’s the first translation of this delightfully wacky work into Arabic (at least I think it is.) Arabic is an ideal language for Jabberwocky, it being replete with flowery expressions and fanciful synonyms. The morphological structure of Arabic, with three-consonant roots and fluid vowels, makes inventing words equivalent to the original creations an especially delicious task. The major inspiration for this translation, in addition to Jabberwocky itself, is Al-Asmai’s equally nonsense, much more ancient poem “Safiru Sawtu Al-Bulbuli” (The Bulbul’s Song). Al-Asmai was an important 9th century Arabic scholar and poet, known for his books on subjects as wide-ranging as zoology, natural science, and anecdotes. There is an interesting story behind The Bulbul’s Song: apparently the Abbasid Caliph at the time could memorize poems from one hearing. He also had a slave who could memorize a whole poem from two hearings, and a slave-girl who could do it from three hearings. Whenever a poet came to the Caliph with a new poem, expecting a prize, the Caliph would tell him he’d heard the poem before, recite the poem, and have his slave and slave-girl recite the poem. Al-Asmai, knowing there was intrigue involved, invented a nonsense poem that would stump the Caliph and his slaves. Upon hearing the inimitable poem, the Caliph resumed the time-honored tradition of rewarding creative poets.

Almahdi has columns headed Original English, Arabic Transliterated, and العربية Arabic; I’ll quote the first stanza in transliteration and send you to the link for the rest:

Jarâdhilu l-wâbi dhuhâ
Tadarbahat tadarbuhâ
Mufarfirun tanahnaha
Wa tâ’iru l-burburi fahâ

We discussed Jabberwocky translations in 2003 and 2006; I checked, and sure enough, there were none in Arabic back in those benighted days.

Via Leanne Martin’s Facebook post, I learn of one of the strangest translations ever made; Sam Jones reports for the Graun:

There is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time. Today, the same word might equally be applied to the efforts of the Bulgarian-born Indologist and Tibetologist who has rescued their text from decades of oblivion.

In 1935, the wealthy American businessman and book collector Carl Tilden Keller – whose shelves already held Japanese, Mongolian and Icelandic translations of Cervantes’s masterpiece – embarked on a quest to have some of the book rendered into an Indian language. To do so, he enlisted the help of his friend, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew India well. “I am frank enough to admit that while I recognise the childishness of this desire of mine I am still extremely interested in having it carried out,” Keller wrote to Stein in November 1935. […]

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Bloggers Karamazov has a post on a topic that sounds so obscure you’re surprised anyone would think to write about it but turns out to be utterly fascinating:

This week Chloe Papadopoulos sits down with Julia Titus to talk about her recent book, Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac published by Academic Studies Press in 2022.

CP: Congratulations on the publication of your book! Tell us a little about it. What do you hope readers will gain from this volume?

JT: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss my work. I hope that my book will introduce the readers to the lesser-known side of Dostoevsky – his creative legacy as a literary translator and illustrate how this experience of translating Balzac’s text influenced Dostoevsky’s own writing later on. Dostoevsky translated Eugénie Grandet in 1844 when he was only twenty-three years old, and it was his first publication. Then his translation was forgotten for a very long time, because it was criticized for taking too much liberty with the original and more of a free retelling or pereskaz than an accurate translation, and it was rediscovered and republished widely only recently.

Papadopoulos asks “Can you speak about some of the major differences between Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833) and Dostoevsky’s Evgeniia Grande (1844)?” and Titus responds:
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Sevindj Nurkiyazova writes about “the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were,” beginning with a striking illustration of a word that has stuck around in recognizable form:

One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”

The piece continues with a description of how the Indo-European family was discovered, and then gets back to the lox:
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Another interesting Laudator post, on an IE topic I’d forgotten about if I ever knew it; from M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 117-119:

A special case of Behaghel’s Law that is distinct and easily recognizable is what I call the Augmented Triad. It consists of the construction of a verse from three names (or occasionally other substantives), of which the third is furnished with an epithet or other qualification. I have devoted a paper to this topic and collected there numerous examples from the Vedas, the Indian epics, the Avesta, Hesiod and Homer, and the Germanic and Celtic literatures (West 2004). A few will suffice here by way of illustration. I can now add one from Hittite and a couple from Latvian.

If he has seen something with his eyes,
or taken something with his hand,
or trodden something with his powerful foot. (CTH 760 V iv 1 ff.)133

Diyaúr, Vánā, Giráyo vṛkṣákeśāḥ.

The Sky, the Forests, the Mountains tree-tressed. (RV 5.41.11)

Tváṣṭā, Savitā́, suyámā Sárasvatī

Tvaṣtṛ, Savitṛ, easy-guided Sarasvatī. (RV 9.81.4)

Daityānāṃ Dānavānaṃ ca Yakṣāṇāṃ ca mahaujasām.

Daityāna and Dānavāna and Yakṣāṇā of great might. (MBh. 1.2.76)

Βῆσσάν τε Σκάρφην τε καὶ Αὐγειὰς ἐρατεινάς.

Bessa and Skarphe and lovely Augeae. (Il. 2.532)

Heorogār ond Hrōðgar ond Hālga til.

Heorogar, Hrothgar, and Halga the good. (Beowulf 61)

Vara sandr né sær né svalar unnir.

There was not sand nor sea nor the cool waves. (Vọluspá 3)

Nōe, Ladru Lergnaid, luath Cuar.

Nóe, Ladru Lergnaid, the swift Cuar. (Campanile (1988), 29 no. 6. 3)

Simtiem dzina govis, vēršus, | simtiem bērus kumeliṇus.

Par centaines elle menait les vaches, les taureaux,
par centaines les bruns chevaux. (LD 33957; Jonval (1929), no. 144)

Līgo bite, līgo saule, | līgo mana līgaviṇa.

Sing, bee, sing, sun, | sing, O my bride. (LD 53542)

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My wife was reading a story in the paper and ran across the word cockloft; she asked me if I knew it, and I said I didn’t but would look it up. Happily, the OED updated its entry in September 2019; it means “A small upper loft; a small room or apartment directly under the ridge of a roof, usually accessed by a ladder” (c1580 tr. Bugbears i. ii: “They gate in by lowe & so in to the cockelofte ouer my old masters head”) and has a figurative sense as “the type of a high secluded place” (1694 P. A. Motteux tr. F. Rabelais 5th Bk. Wks. v. ix. 43 “Unnestle the Angels from their Cockloft”) and a colloquial sense as “A person’s mind or head” (“Originally only in phrases indicating a person’s empty-headedness or stupidity, as a person’s cockloft is unfurnished”). The most interesting thing about it is its etymology: “Apparently an alteration of coploft n., by folk-etymological association with cock n.¹, as if originally a place in the rafters where cockerels roosted; compare hen-loft at hen n.¹ Compounds 1b.” And coploft (1571 in A. Dyer Inventories Worcs. Tradesmen in Miscellany II. 52 “The orrell..a bill, a chaire and a fourme with other ymplementes there and in a coploft above in the forstrete”) is a straightforward joining of cop “The top or summit of anything” + loft; the entry for cop hasn’t been updated since 1893, so its etymology is a little quaint:

Old English cop, copp top, summit; generally thought to be identical with cop n.¹ [‘drinking-vessel, cup’], since in Middle Dutch cop developed (after 12th cent.) the sense ‘skull’ and then ‘head’, and kopf was in Middle High German ‘cup’, in modern German ‘head’. Compare also the analogy of Latin testa pot, shell, skull, Italian testa, French tête head. But in Old English the sense ‘skull’ or even ‘head’ is not known, only that of ‘top, summit’, which hardly runs parallel with the words in the other languages, besides being so much earlier. It is possible that the two words are distinct or only related farther back.
(One might suppose that kop(p) top, was the native Old English word, and copp of the Northumbrian Gospels < Old Norse kopp’r: but the whole subject of the history and origin of these words in Germanic is very obscure: see Kluge, and Franck, also cup n.) There was also an Old French coppe, summit (compare coperoun n.), by which this word may have been influenced.

The word occurs in many names of hills (compare sense 1b), as Coulderton Cop, Kinniside Cop in Cumberland, Meltham Cop near Huddersfield, Mowl Cop in Cheshire, Fin Cop in Derbyshire, etc.

I don’t know what the apostrophe is doing in “kopp’r”; I guess that’s how they rolled in 1893.

Time for the annual roundup of birthday goodies! My wonderful wife got me (with some trepidation) Jonathan Smele’s The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World — she’s a little worried that, added to the state of the world and our nightly reading of War and Peace, it might push me over the brink, but I assured her I wouldn’t let it drive me to despair. After all, I own (and have read) three other books about the Civil War, so I’m well aware of the horrors involved. This book puts the war in a wider context, both temporally and geographically, with more emphasis on the non-Russian parts of the (former) empire than is usual, and I can’t wait to read it.

Other gifts: Keith Gessen’s novel A Terrible Country, which has gotten great reviews; a DVD of Godard’s Une femme mariée (A Married Woman), which especially excited me because it’s the last missing piece from my run of his pre-Mao ’60s movies and will be coming up soon in my retrospective (see this post); Maxim D. Shrayer’s The World of Nabokov’s Stories; Cixin Liu’s The Wandering Earth (I enjoyed his Three-body Problem trilogy, so I’m looking forward to it); and from my generous and punk-loving brother, Ork Records: New York, New York — I may not belong to the Blank Generation, but I love its music.

I guess this is a good place to list all my Godard DVDs, since I’m not likely to get any more in the near future (when will they issue Passion and Éloge de l’amour in a format I can use? and when will Criterion get around to Histoire(s) du cinéma??): À bout de souffle (Breathless), Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live), Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier), Les Carabiniers (The Carabineers), Le Mépris (Contempt), Bande à part (Band of Outsiders), Une femme mariée (A Married Woman), Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Masculin Féminin (Masculine Feminine), Made in U.S.A., 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her), La Chinoise, Week-end, Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself), Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen), Détective, Adieu au Langage (Goodbye to Language). And God still lives, at 91!

Update (Jan. 2023). I have since added Soigne ta droite, Film Socialisme, and Le Livre d’image, and have sent away for a three-disc set that includes Passion. And God is dead.

Update (Apr. 2024). I’ve gotten the Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Le gai savoir, which isn’t nearly as rebarbative as I expected. To quote Richard Hell’s booklet essay:

With Godard, we can take the beauty part for granted. Above all, Godard is an aesthete. But he is also a humanist and so there’s a moral and political aspect of truth for him. In a way, making cinema or art of any kind is by definition humanist because it presupposes the importance of community. Godard is an aesthete of morality. […] So yes, there’s some work involved for the viewer in this movie. But Godard is also a comedian, so it’s funny too. The movie starts with a joke, when Juliet Berto, carrying a pretty, transparent, red-rimmed umbrella, joins Jean-Pierre Léaud on the darkened set. Léaud: “It’s an anti-atomic umbrella.” Berto: “Yes, but I use it as a reflector of consciousness.” Don’t ask me what she means, exactly, but it made me smile gai-ly. […] (For me, casting Juliet Berto in itself brings humor to the movie. Part of her affect is that she often looks as if she’s suppressing a smile, as if she’s distracted or not quite fully understanding or agreeing with things, and is about to laugh…) […] As intellectual as it is, the movie doesn’t have a meaning, rather it is poetry, and about beauty as much as anything else, in other words about itself: the combination of sound and image.

The more Godard I watch, the more I realize that even when he seems to be hectoring (through the mouths of his characters or in propria persona), he’s just trying to get closer to whatever truth can be found by vigorously stating possible angles of approach. Which is much like my own way of doing business.

Update (Aug. 2024). I’ve gotten the OliveFilms Blu-ray of Comment ça va (How’s it going) — and why is that Wikipedia article under an English translation when, as far as I know, the movie is always referred to by its original French title?

Update (Sept. 2024). I’ve gotten Hail Mary and For Ever Mozart, bringing the total to 30 (not counting compilation films he took part in). Still waiting for someone to issue Nouvelle vague…