languagehat.com

I’m going to quote the start of Lizok’s decade-old post Train Spotting: Buida’s Zero Train and Astaf’ev’s Sad Detective because it’s uncannily appropriate for this one: “There are so many trains in Russian fiction—and history—that I suppose it’s not at all odd that I read, absolutely unintentionally, two short novels in a row with strong railroad themes.” The Buida is one of my pair as well, but the other is Viktor Pelevin’s «Жёлтая стрела» (The Yellow Arrow), from which I recently quoted an extensive passage on the clattering of wheels. They’re both phantasmagorical metaphors having their ultimate origin in Gogol’s famous troika at the end of Dead Souls (Hogarth translation: “Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear […]? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell?”), but updated to a train; Pelevin’s is ultimately comic, if grimly so (it’s a Russian novel, after all), while Buida’s is tragic (in a way that reminded me of Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora), and in the immediate aftermath I’m going to say that Buida’s is the better novel, though they’re both well worth the read, and neither will bore you for even a minute.

Andrei, like the other passengers on the Yellow Arrow, has spent as much of his life as he can remember on the train, can see no end of it (literally — the train appears endless), and has no conception of the world outside, though he can see it speeding past the windows. He interacts with people who have various schemes for making money (mirroring the cowboy-capitalism phase Russia was going through in 1993, when both novels were published). Occasionally he clambers up to the roof, where various groups of people are always gathered for unclear reasons, but mostly he wanders the train in search of quiet places to read and think. The word in the corridors is that the train is headed for a broken bridge, but nobody knows anything for sure.

Buida’s protagonist, Ivan Ardabyev (known as Don Domino, the Russian title of the book, because he likes to play dominoes), is essentially nobody from nowhere — his father and mother were enemies of the people, and he has no parent but the Motherland, represented by an affectionate but terrifying KGB colonel who keeps telling him “I can trust you.” He is one of a group of lost souls working at a remote station on a branch line that services only one train, the hundred-car Zero Train (the title of the English translation by Oliver Ready), whose origin, destination, and cargo are unknown and a constant object of speculation to the people of the station. (Note that Pelevin’s characters don’t know what’s outside their train, while Buida’s don’t know what’s in it.) He is madly and hopelessly in love with Esfir (known as Fira), who is married to Misha Landau, and his desperate lust and attempts to quench it with the women provided for that purpose by the authorities are described with an impassioned eloquence that reminds me of Henry Miller. For more, I refer you to Lizok’s excellent discussion (the first link above); as she says, it’s “a nice balance of allegory, history, and reality,” and I would add that it’s superbly written, with canny use of repetition and a refusal to provide any information beyond that needed for the story he wants to tell — we don’t know where or when the events are taking place, or what happens to various characters. The cloud of unknowing reminds me of another great novel of Stalinist terror, Georgi Vladimov’s Верный Руслан (Faithful Ruslan — see this post): Ardabyev is almost as ignorant and unable to communicate as the dog Ruslan (at one point Buida says “Он боялся слов” [He feared words]), but his story is all the more moving on that account. For this kind of tale, less is more. Writers, even fine novelists like Yury Dombrovsky, run the danger of diminishing their effects by trying to tell too much. It’s not a cheerful read, but as I said here, it’s not depressing, because good writing is never depressing.

From TechTarget, s.v. cruft:

Cruft is a collective term for the elements of a program, system or product that are either useless, poorly designed or both. In computing, cruft describes areas of redundant, improper or simply badly written code, as well as old or inferior hardware and electronics. Cruft may also be used to describe a group of hackers, just as “pod” describes a group of whales, “exultation” a group of larks and “murder” a group of crows. […]

Cruft may also be used as a verb, describing the process of putting together a program, network or physical system in a poorly designed or implemented way. Crufting together a solution to a client’s specifications or organization’s needs may be necessary due to time, budget or staffing constraints. It is, however, rarely a well-respected practice in consulting, though more commonly encountered than many system administrators, VARs or information architects would prefer.

Urban legend in Cambridge, Massachusetts holds that the term “cruft” was coined by MIT students as a derisive comment on the electronics-filled windows of Cruft Hall at Harvard University. Cruft was part of the old physics building at Harvard, where it served as the department’s radar laboratory during WWII, which led to the existence of many kinds of wonderful but quite obsolete technological gadgets remaining on display.

Back in 2005, Andrew Dunbar commented here as follows:

Another word I can’t find in any dictionary seems more common to me: cruft

It’s not in my Shorter Oxford or my Macquarie. It’s not on the online Collins, Merriam-Webster, or Encarta. It’s not even on etymonline or WordOrigins. It is in the Jargon File.

I am happy to report that as of March 2007 it is in the OED Third Edition:
[Read more…]

Chapter 6 of Pelevin’s «Жёлтая стрела» (The Yellow Arrow) begins with this bravura passage which wouldn’t be out of place in Pynchon (the setting is the train called the Yellow Arrow, from which there is no escape and on which the passengers spend their lives):

Andrei unfolded the fresh copy of Put′ [‘The Way/Track,’ a railroad periodical] to the center spread, where there was a heading “Rails and Ties,” under which the most interesting articles were usually printed. Across the entire top of the sheet was a bold inscription:

TOTAL ANTHROPOLOGY

He made himself comfortable, folded the paper in half, and immersed himself in reading:

“The clattering of the wheels that accompanies each of us from birth to death is, of course, the sound most familiar to us. Scientists have estimated that there are some twenty thousand imitations of it in the languages of various peoples, of which about eighteen thousand belong to dead languages; most of these forgotten sounds cannot be reproduced from the scanty surviving records, which have often not even been deciphered. They are, as Paul Simon would say, songs that voices never share. But the imitations that now exist in every language are of course quite varied and interesting; some anthropologists even consider them at the level of metalanguage, as cultural passwords, so to speak, by which people recognize their neighbors in the carriage. The longest turned out to be an expression used by pygmies from the Cannabis Plateau in Central Africa; it goes like this:

[Read more…]

Rober Koptaş writes for T24 about Zaven Biberyan and his novel «Մրջիւններու Վերջալոյսը» [Sunset of the Ants], first translated into Turkish as Babam Aşkale’ye Gitmedi [My Father Didn’t Go to Aşkale]. He starts by describing the novel and Biberyan’s life, then continues:

In the letter he wrote to Paluyan in 1962, Biberyan would say “If I honestly had to admit it, I regret writing in Armenian.” He had begun writing in French but had thought “Since I am Armenian I should write in Armenian”. The result were books each worthy of being masterpieces he published in a language nearly no one read anymore, no one would see, no one would discuss. Although he worked as hard as an ant his modest output contradicted his talent. Through his attachment to his country, his political struggle, his refusal to migrate, and his translations into Turkish, it is possible to discern a desire, at any cost, to find a channel of dialogue with Turkey and Turks. No matter how well he wrote, his milieu was not ready to listen to an Armenian writer, writing in Armenian, or the themes he wished to tackle. The reason for this lay primarily in his identity. Just as he says about Baret towards the end of the novel, for Biberyan, even if he began to write in French, later to return to Armenian and later yet to regret his decision, “Even though he realized was better not to be Armenian …It was impossible not to be Armenian.”

Despite being in this circle without exit, Biberyan’s stubborn perseverance to write and to struggle politically is as precious jewel in my eyes. Not imprisoning himself in the Armenian circles with whom he naturally quarreled, he insisted on positioning himself side by side with the Turkish intelligentsia and the Left-wing movement. His translations, his friendship with publishing circles in Cağaoğlu, his insistence on staying in İstanbul, all of these things made him more than a mere writer, it made him a stubborn resistor; an insurgent. Yet in the milieu he was involved with, was there anyone aware that he was writing novels in Armenian? Or was there anyone who was curious about what he wrote? Wanting to create, to speak, to not be silent, to show solidarity to him to end his silence? Unfortunately, we know that many of the answers to similar questions were not in the affirmative.

Those who knew him, describe Biberyan as a bad-tempered person who was difficult to communicate with.

I’ll bet; how could he not be? Koptaş writes at length about the effort to get a better Turkish translation published:
[Read more…]

Hard on the heels of discovering that many people use balk to mean the opposite of what it means to me, I learn of an even more alarming development — belatedly, since Grant Barrett posted about it on January 16, 2006:

The meaning of “to coin (a word or phrase)” is changing and there’s a clear-cut need for some kind of disambiguation.

The new meaning of the verb, supported by any number of news articles or blog entries, seems to be “to say, especially in a noteworthy fashion” and not the older “to create a unique expression; to say something for the first time ever; to neologize.”

This article claims two fellows coined the word redonkulous, but it’s not clear which meaning of “coined” was intended. Probably the old meaning—that the word was first said, ever, by the two men in question, in which case the reporter is wrong.

A clear-cut case of the old meaning of “coined” is in this article, where the author claims Clarence Williams, the Delta-born pianist and publisher, coined the word “jazz.” Here they are citing Williams himself who made the bold claim that he used the word first, ever, which is so far unsupported by the evidence.

In this article, when Raymond Graves writes, “President Bush coined the word ‘war’ to suit and fuel his desire to attack Saddam Hussein,” it’s clear the new meaning of “coined” is intended, because, of course, the word “war” was not first said, ever, by the president of the United States and nobody sane would think so.

No doubt the expression “to coin a phrase,” tacked on after things that the speaker knows has been said before, is influencing this change in meaning.

In my own writing, I think I’ll disambiguate by using the verb “neologize” when necessary and by avoiding “to coin” altogether.

(All the article links are dead, and the first two have not been archived.) I’m sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Others can use it however they like, but when I say “coin” I mean what it traditionally means. I try not to be the guy flailing futilely at the winds of change, I want to be au courant, but it turns out I have my limits. Here I stand; I can do no other.

In my readthrough of Russian literature, I’ve come to another author I’ve been anticipating for years, Mikhail Shishkin. I’ve now read the first three things he published, and while I’m very much looking forward to more, he’s certainly a stranger writer than I suspected.

His first published story was “Урок каллиграфии” («Знамя», Jan. 1993), translated by the wonderful Marian Schwartz as “Calligraphy Lesson” (it’s available in this collection); it made quite a splash, winning the Debut Prize for 1993, and I can see why — in only a couple of dozen pages it presents an entire world of experience and imagery. The protagonist, Evgeny Aleksandrovich, is a court clerk who describes the appalling cases he’s recorded (and, in the end, participated in) to a succession of women who are present only in brief exchanges, prompting him to further revelations, but the realia of the story are (in good modernist fashion) subordinated to the way of the telling, as you can see from the opening paragraph (Schwartz’s translation):

The capital letter, Sofia Pavlovna, is the beginning of all beginnings, so let us begin with that. It’s like a first breath, a newborn’s cry, you might say. Just a moment ago there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. A void. And for another hundred or thousand years there might still have been nothing, but suddenly this pen, submitting to an impossibly higher will, is tracing a capital letter, and now there’s no stopping it. Being the pen’s first movement toward the period as well, it is a sign of both the hope and the absurdity of what is. Simultaneously. The first letter, like an embryo, conceals all life to come, to the very end—its spirit, its rhythm, its force, and its image.

Заглавная буква, Софья Павловна, есть начало всех начал, так что с нее и начнем. Если хотите, это все равно что первое дыханье, крик новорожденного. Еще только что ничего не было, абсолютно ничего, пустота, и еще сто, тысячу лет могло бы ничего не быть, но вот перо, подчиняясь недоступной ему высшей воле, вдруг выводит заглавную букву и остановиться уже не может. Являясь одновременно первым движением пера к точке, это есть знак и надежды и бессмыслицы сущего. В первой букве, как в эмбрионе, затаена вся последующая жизнь до самого конца — и дух, и ритм, и напор, и образ.

This establishes the primacy of writing over everything else, which is a constant theme with Shishkin. Another thing to note is the name Sofia Pavlovna, which happens to be that of the female lead in Griboedov’s immortal play Горе от ума (Woe from Wit); as it turns out, there’s no happenstance about it, because the other named women are Tatyana Dmitrievna (from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), Nastasya Filippovna (from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot), Anna Arkadievna (the heroine of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), and Larochka (presumably Zhivago’s Lara). This sort of thing will either send readers running for the hills or enchant them; I am in the latter camp. Shishkin has said that this story contains the germ of everything he has written since, and I believe it.
[Read more…]

Two things about this verb:

1) I learn after all these years that the -l- is not normally pronounced (M-W, AHD; the OED, like AHD, has only /bɔːk/); I just asked my wife and she is with the majority. I must have picked up a spelling pronunciation as a wee lad.

2) The author of “Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future” (an interesting piece in its own right: “But the anti-remote crowd seems to believe that the responsibility of a 9-to-5 employee isn’t simply the work but the appearance, optics, and ceremony of the work” — preach it!) doesn’t seem to know what “balk” means: he writes “Ultimately, Spielberg balked” when he means “Ultimately, Spielberg caved” (or “gave in”). None of the dictionaries I have consulted include such a sense. But after all these years I have learned that new senses often escape my notice, so I’ll ask the Hattic multitudes: have you ever seen or heard “balk” used in that way (to mean “give in”)?

My wife was looking at an ad for one of these things and asked me “How do you pronounce that?” while pointing to the word lame. I said “…I dunno,” and dashed for the dictionary. But it wasn’t in M-W or AHD, though they had lame (lām) ‘thin metal plate’ and lamé (lă-mā´) ‘shiny fabric woven with metallic threads, often of gold or silver’; it wasn’t even in the OED. Fortunately, any number of online sites, like this one, explain that it’s pronounced “LAHM” and that it’s from French; presumably it, like the words above, derives from Latin lāmina ‘thin plate.’ This has been a public service announcement, and a nudge to lexicographers.

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from John Jay Chapman’s letter to Robert and Nora Nichols of December 23, 1925:

It looks on all the surfaces as if the intellect of this country had gone to pot through the operation of the natural laws of wealth and prosperity — (and one sees no end or limit to them). I read Horace all the time and see much likeness between the luxury, riot, and folly that went on in the proconsular era, and our own epoch, but nothing of the blaze of intellect that accompanied the breakdown of the old Roman institutions and left behind it a shelf of books.

Of course, the 1920s is now looked back on as a great era of modernist literature, and “this country” (the USA) was a major part of it, with Pound, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Scott Fitzgerald only a few of the more prominent names. Reflecting on this sort of thing should make people hesitant to pronounce in similar doomy terms on their own times, but it rarely does.

Unrelated, but I have to put on the public record one of the worst typos I’ve ever seen. I just came across the Russian word лимб and couldn’t figure it out from context; it wasn’t in my trusty Oxford, so I looked it up in my three-volume bilingual dictionary, and found the following definitions: 1. limb; 2. dial, graduated circle; 3 paleontol border; 4 zool & bot limbus. None of those seemed to fit, so I turned to Wiktionary, where all became clear: the fourth sense listed there is “в католицизме: состояние или место пребывания не попавших в рай душ, не совпадающее с адом или чистилищем” [In Catholicism: the state or place of residence of souls who do not get into heaven; not the same as hell or purgatory]. In other words, limbo. Not only is “limb” wrong, it looks all too plausible, being an exact transliteration of the Russian. I give this typo 10/10!

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and once again my contribution is the first in the series, a tradition which I am honored by and enjoy shamelessly. This year I discuss Yuri Trifonov’s House on the Embankment, Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora, and Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools, the three great 1976 novels I read last year; José Vergara’s wonderful All Future Plunges to the Past, which I wrote about here; Anne Lounsbery’s Life Is Elsewhere and Jonathan Waterlow’s It’s Only a Joke, Comrade!; three Ann Patchett novels (write a new one, Ann!); and Monkey, the Waley version of Journey to the West. There were plenty of other books I could have added — it’s been a good year for reading.