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My wife has been going through old boxes of family stuff, and she just came across a carbon copy of “Memories of Oliver Gogarty (Written for BBC Radio Program, ‘Portrait of Oliver Gogarty’, tape-recorded at Station CFPA, Port Arthur, Ontario, January 17, 1961),” with no indication of authorship. I have no idea whether it was ever broadcast, but it makes for very enjoyable reading (and makes Gogarty — who “wasn’t exactly grateful to Joyce for having immortalized him as Buck Mulligan in ‘Ulysses’” — sound like quite a good fellow); I can’t let this wonderful anecdote go unposted:

I remember best of all a story Gogarty used to tell about Yeats. Yeats, nearing the end of his life, had just returned from the Continent, where he had been under the care of a famous specialist. Gogarty, his old Dublin friend, was attending the bed-ridden poet, when a telegram was handed to him. Gogarty read it in silence, then quickly stuffed it into his pocket. But Yeats had caught him in the act. “That’s a telegram, Gogarty! Read it aloud.” Gogarty protested it was nothing. But Yeats insisted, and Gogarty had to read him the message. Though it was couched in gentle terms, Gogarty, as a doctor, knew it amounted to a death sentence. It read:

WE HAVE HERE AN ADVANCED CARDIO-SCLEROTIC IN AN ANTIQUE FRAME.

On hearing these fateful words, Yeats, with a great effort, pulled himself out of his bed and began pacing the floor, his deep, doom-like voice rolling out the words in cadence:

“Advanced cardio sclerotic in an antique frame.”

Then he called out, with sheer delight:

“By God, Gogarty, I’d rather have written those lines than be Lord of Lower Egypt!”

Gogarty was a famous raconteur, and I think we have leave to doubt the literal accuracy of the tale, but se non è vero, è ben trovato: it certainly catches the essence of Yeats!

Via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti, Dumas Malone reports on the attitude of Thomas Jefferson toward the classical languages:

During his presidency he stated that he never read translations, but, since he had a good many of them, it would doubtless be more correct to say that he much preferred to read originals. He was at home in French, Italian, and Spanish, and stressed their importance, but he regarded Greek as the finest of human languages. He said that Homer must ever remain the first of poets until a language “equally ductile and copious shall again be spoken.”

He was much interested in the pronunciation of classical Greek, and had made special efforts to ascertain this in Paris, where he learned the pronunciation of modern Greek from persons who spoke it. Though he accepted this as something of a guide, he fully recognized that, since sound is “more fugitive than the written letter,” there must have been very considerable change after so long a time. He did not really hope ever to recapture the voices of Homer and Demosthenes, but he never ceased to regard Greek as a notably euphonious language. He quoted it frequently to John Adams, though in letters to persons of lesser learning he generally contented himself with Latin.

He accepted the Italian pronunciation of Latin and seems to have harbored little doubt of its authenticity. In the last year of his life he bemoaned the necessity of admitting “shameful Latinists” to the classical school (department) of the University of Virginia, being specially disturbed by the pronunciation they brought with them. Thus he said: “We must rid ourselves of this Connecticut Latin, of this barbarous confusion of long and short syllables, which renders doubtful whether we are listening to a reader of Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, or what.”

He appears to have said much less about Latin as a language than about Greek, but, while something of a stickler about its pronunciation, he was not one about its grammar. Outside the realm of poetry his favorite among the Roman writers was Tacitus, of whom he said: “It is by boldly neglecting the rigorisms of grammar that Tacitus has made himself the strongest writer in the world. The Hypercritics call him barbarous; but I should be sorry to exchange his barbarisms for their wire-drawn purisms. Some of his sentences are as strong as language can make them. Had he scrupulously filled up the whole of their syntax. they would have been merely common. He was nearing eighty when he said this. A decade earlier he had made a similar observation: “Fill up all the ellipses and syllepses of Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, etc., and the elegance and force of their sententious brevity are extinguished.”

Gilleland adds:

I was probably one of Jefferson’s “shameful Latinists.” I remember that one of my exercises in Latin Prose Composition at the University of Virginia was criticized by the instructor as “Yankee Latin.”

Hunter Dukes at the Public Domain Review describes a Japanese rebus system; after describing the sad fate of Miminashi Hōichi (Hōichi the Earless), he writes:

If incantatory texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism work through recitation, are the illiterate barred from enlightenment, should they lack the supreme linguistic recall of Hōichi? The answer requires knowing more about literacy and language in Japan. The stakes of correct recitation were high in the pre- and early-modern era, with strict rules for pronunciation existing since the 1100s, and sutra recitation (dokyō) becoming an artform in the following century. Charlotte Eubanks tells the story of Emperor Goshirakawa, who supposedly incinerated a wing of the imperial palace after mispronouncing “a single character of the Lotus Sutra”.

This is to say, even for the literate, the Buddhist scriptures could be vast palimpsests of code-switches and calques. First of all, most East Asian canons of sacred Buddhist texts — known as Tripitaka and venerated by practitioners in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan — have long been written in Classical Chinese. As Greg Wilkinson notes, for those who can read this Tripitaka, the canon’s lack of punctuation, the tonal requirements of Chinese, and the presence of Sanskrit transliteration, makes it “very difficult to understand for a Japanese reader without special knowledge and training”, and almost as difficult to pronounce “correctly”, given the variation in dialects and vernacular speech across the archipelago.

In order to circumvent these issues in the seventeenth century, Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sutras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language. The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable […]. Famously, the Japanese physician, scholar, and travel writer Tachibana Nankei (1753–1805) reproduced an early example of a Heart Sūtra for the illiterate in his 1795 Travelogue of East and West (Tōzai yūki). […]

As these texts were often most used in rural, agricultural regions, the chosen pictograms reflected the lived experience of their “readers”: the implements of work and rice farming (sieves, saws, paddies); domestic animals (from rats to monkeys); and imagery related to fertility, pregnancy, disease, and death. “Villagers, decoding these pictures and pronouncing them aloud in their local dialect”, writes Eubanks, “would thus produce sounds similar to those pronounced by educated clerics”. Furthermore, the presumed incantatory and magical power of an esoteric teaching, in a nearly incomprehensible language, coupled the sounds and promises of spirituality to the visual realm of everyday life.

Lots of striking images at the link.

Dave Wilton has posted a Big List entry for Alaska; here’s the first paragraph, which gives you the basics (go to the link for the interesting details):

The name Alaska comes from the Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland, originally only a reference to the Alaska Peninsula, from which the Aleutian Islands extend. Later it was applied to the entire territory that would eventually become the state.

At the discussion page, I wrote:

A fascinating post, but can you expand on “Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland”? Can that be broken down morphologically?

Dave said “I’m sure it can, but I don’t have the expertise and resources to do it.” So: anybody know anything about Aleut?

Dmitry Pruss wrote me about a Russian counting sequence “эне бене рес” [ene bene res] that he was surprised hadn’t been mentioned on LH; this Pedagogical Encyclopedia page gives an example of the full sequence:

«Эне, бене, рес, / Квинтер, финтер, жес, / Эне, бене, раба, / Квинтер, финтер, жаба».

Ene, bene, res, / Kvinter, finter, zhes, / Ene, bene, raba, / Kvinter, finter, zhaba.

Which was interesting but didn’t seem worth a post of its own (I was going to add it to the “Yan tan tethera” post) until I googled it in the Latin alphabet and found it’s a Latvian thing as well: you can see a woman reciting “Ene, bene, res, Kvinter, finter, džes, Ene, bene, rupucis, Kvinter, finter, pasprucis!” here, and it’s listed with a bunch of other Latvian children’s rhymes on p. 12 of this pdf. So now I’m thinking there’s some Russo-Baltic Kindersprachbund thing going on here; anybody know anything more?

David-Antoine Williams was kind enough to send me a copy of his book The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry last year, and it looked so interesting I didn’t want to rush through it, so shortly after starting it I set it down for a minute and… well, things happened, it slipped out of my field of view, and (to my shame) I forgot all about it. Fortunately, a reader sent me a link to Stephanie Burt’s review for the University of Chicago Press Journals, so I can bring it to your attention that way. She begins:

Neither the sound of a word nor its history provides a metaphysically or intellectually reliable guide to its present-day use and force. Poets, however, sometimes write as if such a guide could exist, or as if their poems could provide one: these imaginary guides stand behind, or direct, some recent poets’ major works. So David-Antoine Williams concludes in this learned, careful, insightful study of how these poets take account of etymology: not only the histories and the origins of words, but also the stories we tell about them, whether or not we believe them.

According to a durable myth—or story or philosophical axiom—the present-day meanings of words, along with their sounds, conceal the truths in their Proto-Indo-European (PIE), or perhaps Edenic or Hebrew or archaic Greek, beginnings. To reactivate the history of a word is to make available for one’s own modern poem these truths, to return the phonemes and graphemes that make up a language to their nonarbitrary, cosmic roots. Martin Heidegger sometimes seemed to believe as much, with his hope to connect “origin, truth, primacy and propriety” (31). So did the Christian Hebraists of John Milton’s time, and the “Latin-speaking early Christians” who heard malum (sin) in mālum (apple) and saw more than coincidence or pun (27). So did such ambitious modern poets as Charles Olson, who promised his followers a way of writing (and reciting, and even breathing) that could extend “from the root out,” from the “Aryan root, as, to breathe” (“Projective Verse” [1950; repr., Poetry Foundation).

Such claims run exactly counter to Saussurean linguistic theory, and to modern historical study, with its emphases on “the non-teleological nature of linguistic development” (35). Signs are not referents, not even in PIE. We have, instead, only words and their empirically, imperfectly researchable histories. And yet those histories give—as Williams shows—contemporary poets ways to make poems: etymology, false or true, conjectured or historically supported, mystified or demystified, supports the verse-making strategies—and the various attitudes toward truth and art—in Williams’s chief subjects, Seamus Heaney, J. H. Prynne, R.F. Langley, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.

I’ll quote a passage on J.H. Prynne, whose poetry I have come to love (see this thread):
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A repost from 2003 (the past is never dead):

Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terrae, mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

The long-forgotten Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been having a revival lately; New York Review Books has published five collections of his fiction, and now Columbia University Press’s Russian Library series (which started with a bang and has gone from strength to strength) has put out Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor, which they were kind enough to send me. It’s every bit as impressive as you’d expect, fourteen pieces dated from 1912 to 1949 rendered into English by a range of translators and provided with a general introduction as well as introductions to each piece, and there are over forty pages of notes at the end. The first essay, “Love as a Method of Cognition,” is a sort of response to Vladimir Solovyov’s “The Meaning of Love” and is apparently his only actual work of philosophy; the last, “Writer’s Notebooks,” is a collection of epigrams (“I have noticed that in games played for one’s life, the trump card is always from a black suit”). In between there is everything from “The Poetics of Titles” (see the detailed discussion at Russian Dinosaur) to “A History of Unwritten Literature,” and of course the title piece, which was not published until 1994 and which the introduction calls an “imaginary autobiography.” Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings has a good review where you can find out more; I’ll just say this is one more bit of evidence that the Russian Library is one of the best innovations in the publishing world in recent years. Keep up the good work!

The Modernist Journals Project “digitizes English-language literary magazines from the 1890s to the 1920s. We also offer essays and other supporting materials from the period.” From the About page:

We end at 1922 for two reasons: first, that year has until recently been the public domain cutoff in the United States; second, most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922 with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. We believe the materials in the MJP will show how essential magazines were to the rise and maturation of modernism.

Via this MeFi post, where you will find links to some of the more important journals, with descriptions.

This is a Good Thing.

Alex Foreman (frequently linked at LH, e.g. here and here) has an informative and (as is usual for this boisterous fellow) provocative essay called What Past Poets’ Rhymes Don’t Tell You About Past Speech:

I’ve just got to get this out there, after seeing so many people make terrible assumptions about what rhymes can tell you about the English pronunciation of the past. Did pre-modern English poets’ verse always rhyme perfectly in their own speech?

Not so much. No. They didn’t in the 16th century. They didn’t in the 17th. Nor at any later point. This becomes obvious when we get the rare chance to see a poem phonetically transcribed (or in this case, notated) by its author.

He provides examples from Richard Hodges’ The English Primrose (1644) and Robert Robinson (fl 1617), summing up as follows:

There is evidence that people in reciting verse might adjust their normal pronunciation to a degree to give full rhymes. For example, the only time Robinson transcribes secondarily stressed final <-y> with /i:/ is when rhyme requires it, e.g. misery/she. Alexander Gil’s transcriptions of Spenser show that when rhyme called for it he could adopt pronunciations of head (rhyming with lead v.b.), desert, swerve (rhyming with art, starve), dear (rhyming with were), and poor, door (rhyming with store, adore) other than his normal one.

But this kind of thing only went so far. Gil’s transcriptions in particular do not accomodate rhymes that rest on a pronunciation used by social groups he found objectionable: thus he transcribes Spenser’s rhyme despair/whilere as / (the rhyme rests on a monophthongized WAIT vowel which Gil condemned with mighty spleen as an effete affectation). Mismatches in shortening of ME /ọ̄/ simply do not affect his transcriptions at rhyme. Wood/stood and move/love are for him / and /. Nor does he drop the velar fricative in “fight” when Spenser rhymes this word with “smite”. Recitation practice (as one might expect) also seems like it varied considerably from person to person. (In Robinson’s transcriptions of his own verse, the two examples I cited are the only imperfect rhymes, but his transcriptions of Richard Barnfield’s verse are on the whole remarkable for how unconcerned with rhyme they are: he often opts to transcribe a non-rhyming form even when the form that would’ve made a perfect rhyme also existed in his own speech.)

And, as I’ve just shown, poets themselves could clearly rely for their rhymes on forms of speech other than their own. My point is that one cannot assume, without a good deal of other evidence, that a pre-modern poet’s use of a particular rhyme implies that the pronunciation on which such a rhyme rests was necessarily their own. It doesn’t even necessarily imply that the rhyme would have been perfect in their own reading of their own verse.

He finishes up with a swipe at careless scholars:
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