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Seamus Perry reviews Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived), and I find myself enchanted — Ellmann’s book may have been the first literary biography I ever read, and just picking the hefty volume off my shelf makes me want to reread both it and Joyce. Perry begins:

Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, has written an unusual and engaging book, half an account of Ellmann’s life leading up to the Joyce biography, and half a detailed history of the book’s composition and its subsequent place within Joycean scholarship. His admiration for the achievement is palpable and he describes the way Ellmann went about his task with the sympathetic warmth of a fellow labourer; but he is alert, as well, to some of the criticisms that have been made of the enterprise and gives them a fair hearing, so that the overall effect is a sort of primer in the possibilities and quandaries of literary biography. To write the biography of a biography already suggests a certain disciplinary self-consciousness. Ellmann emerges, Leader implies, as exemplary, the biographer’s biographer.

One of the excellences that Empson singled out was the happy chance of timing: the book ‘must be the last of its kind about Joyce’, he wrote, ‘because Mr Ellmann, as well as summarising all previous reports, has interviewed a number of witnesses who are now dead.’ The number of witnesses was in fact immense: Leader calculates that 330 people from thirteen countries are acknowledged somewhere or other in the biography and thanked for (as Ellmann says) having ‘made it possible for me to assemble this record of Joyce’s life’. He was evidently a disarming interviewer and managed to win round several crucial but initially unwilling participants, such as Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, and J.F. Byrne, Joyce’s best friend at university. A good deal of Ellmann’s research methodology was old-style charm. ‘He let them talk,’ one observer recalled. ‘He showed himself grateful for what they told him; now and then with a quiet question he would elicit some particular point of information, and in leaving would express his thanks again. He left them smiling and thinking, what a nice young man!’ He would write graceful follow-up letters: ‘It was very pleasant meeting you both and your charming daughter, and it is nice to know that Joyce had such good company in Zurich.’ Such a remark, Leader says with just a hint of drollery, ‘suggests the role sympathy as well as objectivity played in Ellmann’s approach’: success was sometimes a matter of ‘kindness and calculation combined’.

After some examples of Ellmann’s “tenacity of purpose,” Perry continues:
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The Guardian story I’m posting (by Kate Connolly) is adequately represented by its headline: Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of German apartments turns out to be a slug. Here are the paragraphs of Hattic interest:

At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths. Ding dong ditch, knock-a-door run, or knock-down-ginger as it is variously referred to in English, it typically involves children or youths ringing on a doorbell then running away before they are caught.

But when the ringing continued even after the arrival of two police officers, despite the fact that no one was at the door and a motion detector had failed to activate, a closer look at the metal bell plate revealed the presence of the slug, or nacktschnecke in German – literally a “naked snail”.

If it were any other paper, I’d complain about the lack of capitals on the German nouns, but hey, it’s the Graun, and I’m just glad to learn about ding dong ditch, knock-a-door run, and knock-down-ginger — I don’t remember knowing any special terms for this obnoxious practice. Thanks, Trevor!

I’m very fond of this poem by Michael Symmons Roberts from the new TLS (which has gone over to a biweekly schedule, shock horror!), but the reason I’m posting it here is that — despite the titular reference to Mandelstam — it reminds me strongly of one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Опять весна [Spring again], which I posted about back in 2018 (with my literal prose version and two poetic translations, one by George Reavey and the other, slightly better in my opinion, by Jon Stallworthy and ‎Peter France), and I thought the resonances were worth noting. Here’s the poem:

Mandelstam Variables – VI

Wildcat city. Crouched. Coiled.
Light on a patrol car beats like a blue heart.
On the outskirts, an empty bread van
speeds home to meet the curfew.
A cuckoo, mad as befits this city,
tells the same joke on repeat
in a belltower without a bell,
– ropes cut, change-ringers dead –
but I, for one night only,
walk as I choose, unwatched, ungrounded,
along the rim of the abyss.
One day, you and I will meet,
I’ve been rehearsing for it,
a speech that will unlock it all for us,
though I fear words will fail us again.
Perhaps we’ll fill our mouths with bread,
so much that talking is impossible.
Just laugh at our gluttony.
The wildcat will doze at our feet.

The first line has a very similar rhythm and structure to Pasternak’s “Поезд ушел. Насыпь черна” [Póezd ushól. Násyp′ cherná, literally ‘Train gone. Embankment black’], and the poems have a similar rhythmic feel; “the same joke on repeat” repeats Pasternak’s theme of repetition, “along the rim of the abyss” is almost identical to “у края обрыва” [at the edge of the precipice], and “words will fail us … talking is impossible” reminds me of “Commotion, gossips’ babbling … snatches of speech” in the Russian poem. I don’t know, maybe it’s all in my mind (lately I’ve been repeating the Pasternak lines as I drift off to sleep), but I thought I’d share it. (I don’t know what Mandelstam poem or poems he might be thinking of — and now that I google “Mandelstam variables” I discover that it’s a thing in theoretical physics, so maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the poet except for the resonance of the name.)

Matthew Scarborough has featured at LH many times (see, e.g., here), and he has now posted The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset (Scientific Data 12. 1541):

This is somewhat old news since the dataset (v1.0) has already been available since the publication of the analysis paper in Science two years ago, but since that paper was finally published, we (mainly Cormac Anderson and Paul Heggarty who wrote most of the paper) finally have been able to publish The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset paper in Scientific Data as of yesterday. The paper discusses the underlying dataset, and its organisation and structure and is published together with a revised version (v.1.2) of the dataset on Zenodo. The dataset itself can be explored using its web application at https://iecor.clld.org.

From the article’s abstract:

The Indo-European Cognate Relationships (IE-CoR) dataset is an open-access relational dataset showing how related, inherited words (‘cognates’) pattern across 160 languages of the Indo-European family. IE-CoR is intended as a benchmark dataset for computational research into the evolution of the Indo-European languages. It is structured around 170 reference meanings in core lexicon, and contains 25731 lexeme entries, analysed into 4981 cognate sets. Novel, dedicated structures are used to code all known cases of horizontal transfer. All 13 main documented clades of Indo-European, and their main subclades, are well represented. Time calibration data for each language are also included, as are relevant geographical and social metadata. Data collection was performed by an expert consortium of 89 linguists drawing on 355 cited sources. The dataset is extendable to further languages and meanings and follows the Cross-Linguistic Data Format (CLDF) protocols for linguistic data. It is designed to be interoperable with other cross-linguistic datasets and catalogues, and provides a reference framework for similar initiatives for other language families.

Not to understate the achievement here, but where we say benchmark dataset, I believe this is the most comprehensive cognacy-indexed dataset for the Indo-European since that of Isidore Dyen’s dataset that was used in Dyen, Kruskal & Black’s An Indoeuropean Classification: A Lexicostatistical Experiment (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82 (5)) which, with some modifications, has been essentially the same modern language dataset behind many recent phylogenetic studies that have focused primarily on lexical cognacy data including Gray & Atkinson (2003), Bouckaert et al. (2012) and Chang et al. (2015). And while Heggarty et al. (2023) is a paper not immune from criticism, I believe that we and our co-authors have at the least made a solid new dataset that can be used for research on the Indo-European language family, and a database structure that can serve as a template for work on other language families for many years to come.

Congratulations to all the co-authors for finally getting this out. This one has been a long time in the making.

Congratulations from me as well: y’all have done a great thing.

Two letters from the latest LRB column (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived):

Colin Kidd, writing about Stefan Collini’s history of English studies in Britain, mentions that ‘Anglo-Saxon is still a compulsory element in the English curriculum at Oxford despite a campaign in the 1990s to abolish it’ (LRB, 14 August). In a short interview with Mary Bennett, principal of St Hilda’s College, at the end of my first term in 1970, I politely complained about the tedium of studying Anglo-Saxon and was politely put right: the correct expression was Old English, not Anglo-Saxon (this despite our set handbooks being Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader). I was also informed that the purpose of the Oxford English course was to prepare the one in twenty or so future Oxford English scholars with the comprehensive knowledge necessary for a career in teaching and research. I wonder how much has changed since those days – one of my tutors, Anne Elliott, told me that nothing of value had been written after 1830.

                    Sharon Footerman
                    London NW4

Colin Kidd notes the survival of compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the Oxford English syllabus. When I was an undergraduate at Manchester in the early 1970s, we had to study Old English, as it was called, for all three years of the honours course. This was at the insistence of the professor of English language, G.L. Brook, who had been appointed in 1945 and whose approach to the subject was exclusively philological. I once heard him complain that the publication of his edition of the Harley Lyrics had been held up for years because the publishers required some commentary on the literary value of the poems, and he couldn’t think of anything to say.

                    Paul Dean
                    Oxford

I too can’t think of anything to say.

Here’s a beautiful example of a garden-path sentence that needed additional context to disentangle. I was wondering how the cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw pronounced her name, and as is my wont I tried to find a video in which someone said it aloud (ideally her, but I’ll take a well-informed interviewer). No luck so far, but at the 1:57 mark in this video she says “And obviously I’m picking glass that the director is comfortable with and works for his or her story.” I was immediately distracted from my quest by a linguistic question: what did “picking glass” mean? It sounded to me like an idiomatic phrase parallel to, say, “sweating bullets,” but I couldn’t think of an obvious interpretation. I googled but found nothing, so I decided to go back and finish the video, whereupon I heard her say “I tend to like softer glass, vintage glass…” Oh! She meant literally picking glass — choosing which lens to use! So I thought I’d share that with y’all. (Also, I’m delighted to see a female cinematographer on a blockbuster movie. I wasn’t as thrilled with Sinners as a lot of people, e.g. Richard Brody, but I’m glad it was a hit and I hope everybody involved gets lots of work.)

Barbara Newman reviews two Boccaccio books for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 14 · 14 August 2025; archived):

Histories​ of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin. This bilingualism is a dominant theme in both Marco Santagata’s new biography of Boccaccio and Brenda Schildgen’s critical study [Boccaccio Defends Literature]. Santagata links Boccaccio’s vernacularity to his appeal to a female audience, while Schildgen considers his contributions to literary theory in the Decameron and his Latin masterpiece, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods).

Chaucer, a younger contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio, read all three writers. During his early diplomatic career, he learned Italian and eagerly sought out their works. Yet while he proudly cites Dante and ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the laureat poete’, he never mentions Boccaccio, to whom his debts were far greater. Boccaccio’s Teseida became ‘The Knight’s Tale’; his Filostrato inspired Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer borrowed several tales from the Decameron and adopted Boccaccio’s appeal to reader responsibility to defend bawdy stories such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Why the reticence? Why, to avoid naming Boccaccio, did Chaucer invent a fictional Latin poet as his source for Troilus? It seems that Boccaccio already had a reputation problem. From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film of the Decameron, he has been best remembered – understandably, if unfairly – for his most obscene and ribald tales. In Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means ‘lascivious’; the New Yorker once described the Decameron as ‘probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon’.

Boccaccio himself would have been startled to learn that his immortality rested on that ‘dirty book’, rather than his Latin humanist works. […] Late in life he was certain he had been a failure, especially when he compared his output with Dante’s or Petrarch’s. Yet the same restlessness also led him to experiment in genre and style, making him, in Santagata’s words, ‘the most modern writer of his day’.

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Back in June I posted to Facebook as follows:

OK, I need to know what to make of what appears to be a meaningless sentence in Paige Williams’ article on Green-Wood Cemetery at the New Yorker [archived]. Here’s the context:

A hundred and eighty-seven years after its founding, Green-Wood resembles a sculpture garden. There are more than two hundred and fifty thousand monuments and more than five hundred mausolea. Owls, horses, baseballs, clasped hands, winged hourglasses, and empty beds are among the iconography that I have seen incised on the funerary surfaces. The angels (and they are many) weep and sag, but they also look heavenward. Lambs mean children. Broken flower stems and shorn columns symbolize early death. There are sarcophagi and plinths and cenotaphs. Lord at the obelisks.

Can anybody make sense of “Lord at the obelisks”? I thought it might be a typo (“Lord” for “Look”? — but that would be a lousy sentence even if intelligible), but it’s in the online version as well, which has been up for at least a week and a half.

(Don’t ask me why I posted it there rather than here; the past is a foreign country.) I got a bunch of replies but no clarification; I wrote the magazine but never heard back. Today I got this comment from B.J. Wills:

“Lord at the” is a Southernism. “Lord at the obelisks” means wow, *so many* obelisks.

I responded: “Huh! Well, that would certainly explain it, but googling isn’t showing me any other examples. Maybe if I had access to a spoken corpus…” So I thought I’d bring the whole mess here and ask if anyone knows anything about this alleged Southernism.

I recently came upon the Wiktionary page Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/tewk- and was struck by the wide semantic divergence involved. The reconstructed meaning is ‘germ, seed, sprout, offspring’ (presumably based on Indo-Iranian *táwkma), but it gives rise to Proto-Germanic *þeuhą ‘thigh’ (see there for further descendants), Proto-Slavic *tȗkъ ‘fat, lard’ (see there for further descendants, including Russian тук ‘fertilizer’), Ossetian тог/туг (tog/tug) ‘blood,’ Irish tón ‘anus’ (whence Pogue Mahone), and Latin tuccetum ‘a kind of sausage made with meat of ox’ (whence Spanish tocino ‘bacon; salt pork’), among many others. Does this seem like trying to cram too much into one word family?

The indefatigable Bathrobe has sent me a couple of good links I hereby share with you:

1) Arthur Waley’s “Notes on Translation” (The Atlantic, November 1958; archived) has lots of discussion of translations, both his and others; some samples:

Almost at the end of the Bhagavad Gita there is a passage of great power and beauty in which, instructed by the God, the warrior Arjuna at last overcomes ail his scruples. There is a war on, he is a soldier and must fight even though the enemy are his friends and kinsmen. This is what various standard translations make him say:

1. O Unfallen One! By your favour has my ignorance been destroyed, and I have gained memory (of my duties); I am (now) free from doubt; I shall nowdo (fight) as told by you!

2. Destroyed is my delusion; through Thy grace, O Achutya, knowledge is gained by me. I stand forth free from doubt. I will act according to Thy word.

3. My bewilderment has vanished away; I have gotten remembrance by Thy Grace, O NeverFalling. I stand free from doubt. I will do Thy word.

4. My bewilderment is destroyed; I have gained memory through thy favour, O stable one. I am established; my doubt is gone; I will do thy word.

In addition to being totally without rhythm No. 1 has the disadvantage of a pointless inversion of word order and of quite unnecessary explanations in brackets. If any reader has got as far as this in the poem and yet still needs to be told what it is that Arjuna now remembers and what it is that he proposes to do, he must be so exceptionally inattentive as not to be worth catering for. No. 2 is better; but as the title Achutya will convey nothing to the mind of the reader, it seems better to translate it, as the other three translators have done. And is there any point in trying to preserve, as all the translators do, the Sanskrit idiom “get memory” for “to remember”? In No. 3 the rhythm would be better without the “away” after “vanished,” and “away” adds nothing to the sense. But I think No. 3 (by Professor Barnett) is the best of the four. No. 4 is spoiled by “I am established,” which, though a correct etymological gloss on the original, is not a possible way of saying “I have taken my stand” — that is to say, “I am resolved.”

After examples from The Tale of Genji and a No play (“I must confess that when recently I read Sam Houston Brock’s translation of Sotoba Komachi […] I felt at once that my translation was hopelessly overladen and wordy and that it tried in a quite unwarrantable way to improve upon the original”), he goes on:
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