languagehat.com

I was delighted to read Alexander Jacobson’s A Soviet Imprimatur on Imperial Smut: Politizdat’s “Luka Mudishchev” as Parody of the Soviet Book (Jordan Russian Center); not only is it a fascinating bit of literary (or sub-literary) history, it has a personal resonance for me. It begins:

On January 11, 1970, the British émigré newspaper Wiadomości reported on the publication of a new Russian book, a pocket-sized volume that had been a London bestseller during late 1969. In its article, Wiadomości emphasized the volume’s pedigree, writing “[t]he book was published in Moscow by the Central Committee of the CPSU, the editorial board was composed of eight of the most eminent members of the Soviet Writers…the book is dedicated to Sholokhov, and the preface was written by Furtseva, the Minister of Culture.” However, after laboriously establishing these credentials, the newspaper continues in an unexpected direction: “the reader, so prepared, opens the book – and is unable to believe his eyes.” Rather than a work of socialist prose, the book constituted an edition of Luka Mudishchev, an infamous pornographic poem popularly attributed to the eighteenth-century poet Ivan Barkov.

To both Wiadomości and most contemporary readers, publishing this text under a Soviet imprint seemed like some sort of absurd joke. However, beneath its irony, this volume presents a sincere argument. At its core, the 1969 Luka Mudishchev offers a scathing critique of the Soviet publishing process.

To uncover this argument, we need to begin with the book’s true provenance. Of course, this volume was not actually produced by the Soviet government. Instead, it was created by a tamizdat publisher named Alec Flegon, an eccentric Romanian expat famous for his brazen literary stunts.

I don’t know how many people remember Flegon today — I’m surprised to see I don’t seem to have mentioned him at LH — but he was quite a presence in the scruffier suburbs of Russian literature when I was studying the language half a century ago, and I still have a couple of his editions. Here’s a nice tidbit from Jacobson’s essay:

Flegon’s modus operandi was to combine prominent texts, such as Doctor Zhivago, with fake Soviet imprints. In his words, he believed that this pairing could trick “unsuspecting [Soviet] customs” into allowing his books into USSR. Amazingly, Flegon was correct. As Paolo Mancosu recounts, a copy of his Zhivago found its way to Prague, where it convinced Czechoslovakian authorities that the Soviet government had signed off on Pasternak’s text. In response, the government authorized a 1969 Slovakian edition of Zhivago.

But it’s Luka Mudishchev that sets off my nostalgia. It came out while I was in college, and when I saw it I couldn’t believe what I was reading; like most adolescent males, I couldn’t get enough of dirty language, and I translated a chunk of the poem into appropriately filthy English. My then girlfriend and I took turns reading the original and my version at a department party, and a good time was had by all. The original is available here; as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been translated into English (except, of course, by me, and God knows what became of that scribbled sheet of obscenity).

Aaron Reiss and Denise Lu have a wonderful NY Times story (archived) about street signs in New York’s Chinatown; it’s one of those things that wouldn’t have occurred to me to wonder about, but as soon as it’s brought to my attention I want to know all about it. A snippet:

Bilingual street signs have hung over the bustling streets of the city’s oldest Chinatown for more than 50 years. They are the product of a program from the 1960s aimed at making navigating the neighborhood easier for those Chinese New Yorkers who might not read English.

These signs represented a formal recognition of the growing influence of a neighborhood that for more than a century had largely been relegated to the margins of the city’s attention. But as the prominence of Manhattan’s Chinatown as the singular Chinese cultural center of the city has waned in the 21st century, this unique piece of infrastructure has begun to slowly disappear.

The details are fascinating, and you can read about the laborious process of reporting, involving walking more than 12 miles, creating hand-drawn maps for every corner that needed checking and recording each bilingual street sign by taking a picture and jotting down the location, here (archived). When my love for urban history intersects with my love for language, how can I resist?

And a quick shout-out to Scotty Scott for responding to every question in his NPR interview with a straight answer: no “What a great question,” no “So…” — just the facts. You get the Languagehat Responsive Response Award for March, Chef Scotty!

Alan Titley of University College, Cork wrote a paper Polish, Romish, Irish: The Irish Translation of Quo Vadis? (Studia Celto-Slavica 5: 47–58 [2010]; pdf) that is not only full of interesting material but a pleasure to read. Here’s the abstract:

During the height of literary translation into Irish in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, I can only think of two Polish books that were translated into Irish. One of these is Henryk Sienkiewicz’s famous Quo Vadis?, which helped him secure the Nobel Prize for Literature, and which has been translated into numerous languages, and made into several films or series of films for television. It was translated into Irish by An tAthair, or Fr. Aindrias Ó Céileachair (1883–1954) in 1935. There is a long journey from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s travels into the mind of ancient Rome and turning a vicious and genocidal Latin culture into a more civilised Polish, to an English version of this great book by an Irish-American linguist who himself collected stories and tales in Irish, to a learned priest who used the ingenuity of his own people, and particularly the native knowledge of a great storyteller, to fashion one of the finest translations that has been done into modern Irish. I am not sure what Sienkiewicz would have made of it, but I am sure he would have been very pleased.

Here’s a passage from near the start:

It was translated from the English, which in itself is a story that bears investigating. The background to this translation is a project instigated by the Irish state a few years after independence, and which sought to provide much reading material for the new Irish-reading public which they were beginning to create. The scheme is generally known as ‘An Gúm’, which is simply a dialectical word for ‘scheme’, and did manage to provide a wide-range of books for the public within a short number of years (Uí Laighléis 2007). A great deal of these books were translations, as indeed must needs be the case in any minor or less-widely used language.

A great many of the classics of world literature were translated into Irish as a result of this project. Many other translations were done before this scheme, and others after it, both as forerunners and as further exemplars. So, for a reasonably small language like Irish, it is remarkable that we have novels, apart from potboilers and contemporary bestsellers, like Don Quixote (although the translation is suitably quixotic), David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dracula, four versions of Alice in Wonderland as well as stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Daudet, de Maupassant, plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Aeschylus, and world classics like The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, some of Plato’s dialogues (Apologia, Crito, Phaedo), Augustine’s Confessions – indeed, it is possible to be widely read in the literature of much of the world if you only spoke or read Irish.

Some of these translations are brilliant, and some of them are truly awful. The reason for the discrepancy in standard was because the state publishing company had no stated policy on how translations should be conducted. They trained nobody, and neither did they give advice. As a result of this, translators could do more or less what they wished, provide they came up with the goods, or the bads, as they often did. The editors were far more interested in the production of good idiomatic Irish than in the faithfulness of the translation. In translation-study terms, the target language was the god, not the source-language. The source language was merely an excuse to allow the translator to indulge himself. And some of them did just this.

(Does anybody know the etymology of gúm ‘plan, scheme?) There’s a section on the story of Aindrias Ó Céileachair, the Irish translator, which includes the following bit of background:
[Read more…]

Ben Yagoda does a deep dive into the history of the much-maligned phrase “at the end of the day,” starting out:

I love it when the OED gets frisky. It definitely does with the above formulation, which the dictionary pegs as as a “hackneyed phrase.” The meaning, I probably don’t need to point out, isn’t literal but figurative: not “when the clock strikes midnight,” but “eventually” or “when all is said and done.” The first OED citation is from 1974: “Eschatological language is useful because it is a convenient way of indicating..what at the end of the day we set most store by.”

But it was around and about long before that, principally — and fortunately, for the purposes of this blog — in Britain.

The Grammarphobia blog found it in an 1826 sermon:

Christ’s flock is but a little flock, comparatively considered. … They are but little in respect of their numbers. Indeed abstractly considered, at the end of the day, they will make an “innumerable company, which no man can number”; but, viewed in comparison of the wicked, they are but few.

The concluding paragraph:

The chart tells an interesting story in regard to Anglo-American differences: British predominance for most of the century, until (following a British slump in the ’80s) Americans caught up and, at the end of the day, surpassed their trans-Atlantic cousins.

More details, of course, at the link.

I just discovered the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC):

OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.

I got to it by typing “Georgian” into the search box at Marginalia Search, “an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of.” That brought me here, and I clicked on the link OLAC resources in and about the Georgian language, where the first link under “Primary texts” was “Histoire de l’âne en géorgien,” a minute-long audio file that was fun to listen to even though I’ve forgotten almost all my Georgian. Give Marginalia a try!

Cormac McCarthy is publishing two new novels; the NY Times says (archived):

Widely revered as one of the greatest living American writers, McCarthy has not published a novel since 2006, when he released “The Road,” a post-apocalyptic survival story that won the Pulitzer Prize and became a best seller.

I read The Road and found it impressive and memorable, but it didn’t make me want to read more of him (although if the reviews of the new ones make them sound irresistible, I may give them a try). But I’m really just using the news as a hook to bring you the following pastiche by Lavie Tidhar:

He walked out of that door and stood staring at the diminishing sun and he thought back to his childhood how he begged them how he said I want to play with them with the commas and his mother said commas are not toys and his father said youve been a bad boy you cant even have an apostrophe and he said what about speech marks and his mother said no speech marks for you Cormac and he walked outside and stood there like he stood there now watching the blood red sun and blood he thought there must be so much blood at least one per sentences he will show them he didnt need their commas or their speech marks or their stupid apostrophes they were just conventional signs.

He liked full stops though. All that blood. All that blood and short sentences and full stops. But never a comma. Then he went back inside.

I think you can appreciate that even if you’ve never read a word by C McC.

UMass Amherst Libraries Announce Publication of Living Languages – Lenguas Vivas – Línguas Vivas:

The UMass Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of Living Languages – Lenguas Vivas – Línguas Vivas: a new, open access, multilingual journal solely dedicated to the revitalization and sustainability of endangered and minoritized languages. The journal is an initiative of Luiz Amaral, professor in the languages, literatures and cultures department, who collaborated with colleagues from different universities, including the journal’s co-editor in chief, Professor Gabriela Pérez Báez from the University of Oregon. The journal was launched on February 21, 2022 with a special online event to celebrate International Mother Language Day.

The goal of the journal is to promote scholarly work and experience-sharing by bringing together language revitalization practitioners from a diversity of backgrounds, whether academic or not, within a peer-reviewed publication that is not limited to academic contributions and is inclusive of a diversity of perspectives and forms of expression. Living Languages seeks to publish contributions on practical and theoretical issues directly related to actions that support language sustainability and/or revitalization in indigenous and minoritized contexts.

To achieve its goals, the journal publishes papers in three linguas francas (English, Spanish, and Portuguese), plus in any language that is being revitalized. The inaugural volume of Living Languages features 13 contributions that include a paper in Chikashshanompa’ and English (from North America) and one in Kaingang (from South America), plus a variety of other papers written in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

This is a Good Thing. Thanks, Leslie!

Chang Che writes for SupChina about the Latin and Greek courses proliferating in China, focusing on Leopold Leeb, a professor of literature at Renmin University:

Every weekday during the summer, from nine a.m. to noon, Leeb holds a public class in a marble white church just a stone’s throw away from Beijing’s central government. […] In the halls of China’s elite universities, Leopold Leeb is sometimes known as “the legendary Austrian.” His friends affectionately call him “Leizi” — Lei from his Chinese name Léi Lìbó 雷立柏, and zǐ (子) an ancient honorific reserved for esteemed Chinese intellectuals, as in Confucius (孔子 Kǒngzǐ), Mencius (孟子 Mèngzǐ), and Lao Tzu (老子 Lǎozǐ). For Leeb, a pioneer of Classics education (the study of Greco-Roman antiquity) in China, the sobriquet is apt: Leeb’s textbooks and dictionaries form a rite of passage for nearly all Chinese who wish to embark on Western Classical study. He has written several monographs on Greek and Roman history, 13 Classics dictionaries, nine textbooks, and over two dozen comparative works, giving Chinese readers access to Western ideas and texts. At 54 with no family and no hobbies, he displays an almost religious devotion to his work. “Obviously,” one colleague wrote of him recently, Leeb is “more concerned about China’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow than many Chinese.” […]

At first blush, China looks like an improbable place to find “new perspectives” in the Classics. But in the past few decades, its universities have grown into bastions of curiosity about the West and its traditions. The irony is palpable. Across China, patriotic fervor is growing, and nationalists are more confident and dismissive of Western critics. But enter a humanities classroom and one is as likely to find students reciting speeches by Cicero as reading lines of Marx.

He discusses the reform era after Mao’s death:
[Read more…]

Plenty of interesting stuff in this passage from Barbara Newman’s LRB review (archived) of Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, by D. Vance Smith:

Dying can be terminable or interminable. An unfinished death is the theme of two medieval legends, one based on the other, about the thorny problem of righteous pagans. Dante was not the first to wrestle with the injustice of good men (women never came up) who were sentenced to hell for the mere crime of dying before Christ. Although he declined for the sake of dramatic pathos to save Virgil, he did save several other pagans, including the emperor Trajan. An old legend told how Pope Gregory the Great, by weeping over the just emperor’s damnation, secured the extraordinary favour of bringing him back to life long enough to convert and be saved – though God exacted a heavy toll by consigning the pope to ill health as long as he lived. In Piers Plowman, Langland gives the legend a different spin: his Trajan insists that ‘not the prayers of a pope’ but his ‘pure truth’ saved him, not surprisingly in a poem where faith without works is dead. More problematic is Trajan’s memorable opening line: ‘Ye, baw for bokes!’ Ambivalence about the value of learning shadows Langland’s whole sprawling enterprise, but Trajan makes an odd spokesman for untutored virtue. Not only does he go on to cite multiple books, including the Gospel: as Smith points out, he is also ‘the bibliophobic evil twin of the historical Trajan’, who built the greatest library in the Roman Empire. As late as the sixth century it was still used for public readings of the Aeneid.

Trajan’s legend inspired a uniquely English tale of the same type. In Saint Erkenwald, an alliterative poem that some have ascribed to the author of Pearl, the righteous pagan is a mysterious judge whose perfectly preserved body, clad in his robes of state, is discovered deep in the crypt of St Paul’s during building works. Erkenwald, a seventh-century bishop of London, emulates Pope Gregory’s miracle by awakening the judge and baptising him with his tears. Remarkably, his soul’s salvation is accomplished at the very moment his body crumbles into dust, as a death held in suspension for centuries is completed. But Smith concentrates on an earlier moment in the text. Like a medieval tomb, the judge’s crypt is embellished with ‘bright gold’ letters as inviolate as his body itself. Yet their language is dead beyond recall. Not a single cleric can decipher these ‘runish’ characters – an adjective that evokes the half-magical, pre-Roman script of England. The discovery of the corpse inspires a frantic search through the archives – a scene both poignant and comic – for it seems impossible that no record of such a distinguished man survives. But all is vain. In the late 14th century, when this poem was written, Erkenwald’s tomb stood behind the high altar of St Paul’s, visible from all sides. His vivid memory stands in sharp contrast to the judge’s obscurity, just as the failure of historical memory in the poem plays up the cathedral’s public role as its preserver, with its extensive records and historical inscriptions. More than a place of worship, a cathedral was the beating heart of the body politic, linking the past to present and future.

[Read more…]

Marcus Perlman (a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Birmingham) writes for Psyche about a dubious idea with some interesting stuff attached:

Language gives us the power to describe, virtually without limit, the countless entities, actions, properties and relations that compose our experience, real and imagined. But what is the origin of this power? What gave rise to humankind’s ability to use words to convey meanings?

Traditionally, scholars interested in this question have focused on trying to explain language as an arbitrary symbolic code. If you take an introductory course in linguistics, you are certain to learn the foundational doctrine known as ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’, laid out in the early 20th century by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. This principle states that words are meaningful simply as a matter of convention. […] But this raises a conundrum – what is known in philosophy as ‘the symbol grounding problem’. If words are arbitrary and purely a matter of convention, then how did they come to be established in the first place? In practical terms: how did our ancestors create the original words? This is a challenging question to answer. Scientists have little direct knowledge of the prehistoric origins of today’s approximately 7,000 spoken languages, at least tens of thousands of years ago. We do, however, know an increasing amount about how people create and develop new sign languages.

Sign languages – which are articulated primarily by visible gestures of the hands, body and face – turn out to be far more common than previously realised, with a roughly estimated 200 such languages used by Deaf and hearing people around the globe. Crucially, sign languages are, absolutely, languages, every bit as complex and expressive as their spoken counterparts. And many sign languages are much younger than spoken languages, making their origins more transparent. Indeed, within just the past few decades, scientists have actually observed the early formation of entirely new sign languages – a process that happens spontaneously when Deaf people who are deprived of a sign language have the opportunity to live together and communicate freely with each other.

So how do they do it? How do Deaf people first establish a shared set of meaningful signs? Their solution is an intuitive one. Without access to a sign language, Deaf people communicate in essentially the same way that people do when they travel to a place where they don’t speak any of the local languages, or when they play a game of ‘charades’. Tasked to communicate without words, the human strategy is universal: we act out our meaning, pantomiming actions and using our hands and bodies to depict the sizes, shapes and spatial relationships of referents. […] Key to this process of forming new symbols is the use of iconicity – the creation of signs that are intrinsically meaningful because they somehow resemble what they are intended to mean. Iconicity, that connection between form and meaning, is a powerful force for communication, enabling people to understand each other across linguistic divides.

He goes on to investigate studies of iconicity in speech showing that “iconic vocalisations can be a powerful way for people to communicate when they lack a common language.” Which is all very well, and the studies are interesting, but we then get “there is at least a possibility that the forms of many spoken words began – like the symbols of sign languages – as iconic representations of their meanings.” Sure, fine, I can go along with “at least a possibility,” though I don’t know about “many,” but that gets us no closer to the origin of language, which continues to be a mystery. Anyway, like I say, interesting stuff there; thanks, Jack!