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Vesna Goldsworthy has an interesting — and depressing — Asymptote review of a book I’d definitely like to read:

Miloš Crnjanski’s A Novel of London (1971) is one of the key works of twentieth century Serbian fiction. Given the novel’s significance in the former Yugoslavia, its powerful and enduringly relevant story of East–West migration and exile, and its meticulously evoked setting based on the author’s first-hand experience of London during and immediately after World War Two, it might seem surprising—shocking even—that Crnjanski’s work remained unpublished in English for so long. Yet all too often that is the fate of even the most important literature from small languages and small countries.

This belated English version appears half a century after the original, largely as a result of the personal endeavours of Will Firth, one of the pre-eminent translators of writing from the former Yugoslavia. I would love to say that it has been eagerly awaited. That may be true for the small number of Crnjanski scholars in the West, and for those members of the Serbian diaspora who already knew the novel. However, in the twelve months since its publication by the New Orleans-based publisher Diálogos, Crnjanski’s masterpiece has, so far as I know, yet to be mentioned on the pages of a literary review, let alone properly reviewed, barring a piece from the novel’s translator in the Los Angeles Review of Books. […]

As a prolific novelist and poet, in Serbia, and in the former Yugoslavia, Crnjanski has enjoyed—with a brief exception in the mid-twentieth century when he was in exile and out of favour with the post-war communist government—the status of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot combined. Lines from his poetry and prose are so widely known that they are quoted casually in everyday conversations. Yet, beyond ex-Yugoslavia, he remains little known and even less translated. The only other book by Crnjanski to have appeared in English was Michael Henry Heim’s translation of the first of the two volumes of Crnjanski’s novel Migrations, published in 1994 by Harvill (his name in that edition was transliterated, French-style, as Tsernianski).

In his excellent essay, “Filling the Gaps: On Translating Miloš Crnjanski’s Novel of London,” published on the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, Will Firth recounts the hustling involved in his role not just as a translator but also as a posthumous agent struggling to generate interest in the project. Notwithstanding a pledge of funding from the Serbian Ministry of Culture, he searched in vain for a publisher in the UK—a natural home given the novel’s setting—before finally finding an outlet for A Novel of London in Louisiana.

I can almost see a wry smile on Crnjanski’s face. If he could but hear about this saga, it would confirm every prejudice he bore towards the British. “So sorry,” they keep saying in A Novel of London, “So, so sorry.” […]

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Pompeiisites.org reports on an interesting find:

Mummified remains, along with the hair and bones of an individual buried in an ancient tomb have been found at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, to the east of the ancient urban centre of Pompeii. On a marble slab located on the pediment of the tomb, a commemorative inscription to the owner Marcus Venerius Secundio makes reference, extraordinarily, to performances at Pompeii that were conducted in Greek, direct evidence of which has never before been found. […]

The figure of Marcus Venerius Secundio – who also appears in the wax tablet archive of the Pompeian banker Cecilius Giocondus, owner of the domus of the same name on Via Vesuvio – was a public slave and custodian of the Temple of Venus. Upon being freed, he reached a certain social and economic status, as can be understood from the rather monumental tomb, and the inscription: in addition to joining the ranks of the Augustales, or the college of priests dedicated to the Imperial Cult, as the epigraph recalls he “gave Greek and Latin ludi for the duration of four days”.

“Ludi graeci are to be understood as performances in the Greek language”, – observes the Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Gabriel Zuchtriegel – “It is the first clear evidence of performances at Pompeii in the Greek language, which had previously been hypothesised on the basis of indirect indicators. Here we have another tessera of a large mosaic, namely the multi-ethnic Pompeii of the early Imperial Age, where Greek, the then lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, is indicated alongside Latin. That performances in Greek were organised is evidence of the lively and open cultural climate which characterised ancient Pompeii, similar to how the special exhibition of Isabelle Huppert, held in French at the Large Theatre a few weeks ago, showed that culture has no borders.”

Hurray for multicultural cities, say I.

Stan at Sentence first has a post about a gap in the (official) lexicon:

If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech. […]

Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Without further information, there’s no way to be sure. The choice of conjunction ambiguates the sense. […]

Disambiguate is also useful, being more specific than synonyms like clarify and resolve. Disambiguate is a relatively new and specialized term, but it’s established enough to appear in major dictionaries […] The OED has citations for disambiguate from 1960, generally in linguistic and philosophical contexts, and the word’s usage has risen steadily since then […] The noun disambiguation has been in use since at least 1827; it has become more familiar this century from its common appearance at the top of Wikipedia pages […]

As it turns out, ambiguate exists in the lexicon, but only barely – not enough for lexicographers to include it. […] Ambiguate is not even in the OED, that great historical cabinet whose vast shelves swell with obscure Latinate vocabulary. Instead of the verb you’d expect – even if labelled archaic or obsolete ­– nestled in among ambigual, ambigue (n.), ambigue (adj.), ambiguity, ambiguous, ambiguously, and ambiguousness, there is a lacuna where ambiguate might go. […]

When I mentioned ambiguate on Twitter a while back, I suggested that if you ever need to use the word, do. Its meaning should be transparent enough in context, and with more usage it will gain in familiarity and acceptability. Whether it will gain enough to ever show up in major dictionaries, or even in language corpora, is an open question.

I join him in urging the use of this occasionally useful word. (If you’re wondering about ambigue, it’s attested once as a noun, “An ambiguous statement or expression” [a1592 R. Greene Orpharion 48 What need these ambigues, this schollerisme, this foolery..? Canst thou not say flatly I am in loue.] and once as an adjective meaning ‘ambiguous’ [a1734 R. North Examen ii. v. ⁋19. 327 A clear Explication of running down, an ambigue Term of the Author’s]; I presume it’s pronounced /ˈæmbɪˌgjuː/.)

A good thing from UPenn:

The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD) is an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America. MEAD preserves and makes available these datasets in their original format and as comma-separated-value files (.csv). Each body of data is also accompanied by a codebook. MEAD provides sweet, intoxicating data for your investigations of early North America and the Atlantic World.

I’m not sure why they call it a magazine (yes, the word used to mean ‘storehouse,’ but how many people know that?), but never mind, I’m glad it exists.

I have written about my love of old street names more than once (2007, 2020, 2021), and now that I’m reading Luc Sante’s The Other Paris (thanks, Keith!), I’ve come across a mother lode of them:

Sometimes the histories of streets are inscribed in
their names: Rue des Petites-Écuries because it once
contained small stables, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire
(Daughters of Calvary) after a religious order that once
was cloistered there, Rue du Télégraphe marking the
emplacement during the revolution of a long-distance
communication device that functioned through relays of
poles with semaphore extensions. Sometimes streets
named by long-ago committees take on a certain
swagger from their imposed labels: the once-lively,
nowadays flavorless Rue de Pâli-Kao given a touch of
the exotic (the name is that of a battle in the Second
Opium War, in 1860), the stark and drab (and once
extraordinarily bleak, owing to the presence of
enormous gas tanks) Rue de l’Évangile endowed with
the gravity of the Gospels, the already ancient Rue
Maître-Albert made to seem even more archaic in the
nineteenth century by being renamed after the medieval
alchemist Albertus Magnus, who once lived nearby.

Among the oldest thoroughfares in Paris are the
streets of the Grande and Petite Truanderie, which is to
say the Big and Little Vagrancy Streets. There is the
Street of Those Who Are Fasting (Rue des Jeûneurs),
the Street of the Two Balls, the Street of the Three
Crowns, the Street of the Four Winds, the Street of the
Five Diamonds, the Street of the White Coats, the Street
of the Pewter Dish, the Street of the Broken Loaf—one
of a whole complex of streets around Saint-Merri
church (near the Beaubourg center nowadays) that are
named after various aspects of the distribution of bread
to the poor. Many street names were cleaned up in the
early nineteenth century: Rue Tire-Boudin (literally
“pull sausage” but really meaning “yank penis”)
became Rue Marie-Stuart; Rue Trace-Putain (the
“Whore’s Track”) became Trousse-Nonnain (Truss a
Nun), then Transnonain, which doesn’t really mean
anything, and then became Rue Beaubourg. Many more
streets disappeared altogether, then or a few decades
later, during Haussmann’s mop-up: Shitty, Shitter,
Shitlet, Big Ass, Small Ass, Scratch Ass, Cunt Hair.
Some that were less earthy and more poetic also
disappeared: Street of Bad Words, Street of Lost Time,
Alley of Sighs, Impasse of the Three Faces. The Street
Paved with Chitterling Sausages (Rue Pavée-
d’Andouilles) became Rue Séguier; the Street of the
Headless Woman became Rue le Regrattier.

You can see more of the text, along with some wonderful old photos (the book is full of them), here. And if you’re curious, rue Maître-Albert was called, from the 14th century until 1844, rue Perdue (“Lost Street”).

I’ve started Sasha Sokolov’s Палисандрия (translated as Astrophobia, though for some reason Russian Wikipedia says there are no translations); I haven’t gotten very far, but I can already see I’m not going to enjoy it as much as Школа для дураков (A School for Fools; post) and Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf; post) — it’s heavy-handed and full of political satire, which does not much appeal to me. But of course it’s still Sokolov, with lots of the wordplay he’s so generous with, and there’s plenty to enjoy, like the following passage in which the hero, Palisandr Dalberg (a nephew of Beria, brought up in a phantasmagorical Kremlin where the secret services are called the Order of Watchmakers), is trying to decide what language to write in (my translation is followed by the Russian):

The featureless file of tutors, governors, maids, summoned thence on a private basis for my upbringing, had long since passed by. But before merging into the far-off type-image of a mentor-Esperantist in the neuter singular, in the most tedious of cases, the accusative, these modal creatures succeeded in giving the pupil a certain polish and roused him to the knowledge of a whole row of dialects, from which he had to choose: by means of which of them to express himself.

Ancient Greek and Latin fell away with no need of discussion; lapidary and scanty, they would only constrain my imagination. Tosk, on the other hand, manifested an excess of grandiloquence. The use of my native Russian or Georgian could create in my addressees the false impression that their future grandson was a lout, an ignoramus, not on friendly terms with foreign languages, ​​and that, shirking his education, he was leading a life of idle pleasure. Should I write in Etruscan? Why, to write in Etruscan to Etruscans — would that not mean to condescend to them obligingly, to oblige them condescendingly? Basque, I must admit, was not one of my strong points, Sanskrit seemed too dead, French too lively, German rough, English prissy, and my Berber needed a thorough freshening. The Gypsy language also demanded practice, since the motley tents of its restless bearers had not brightened our walls for a long time; lengthy spells of inclement weather had compelled these heat-loving merry fellows to migrate closer to the south. Paradox! Two or three squeaky and crunchy, like a cabbage leaf, winters in a row and you start to mix up conjugations. On the other hand, the frost freed up additional hours for communication with interlocutors of a more Nordic nature.

Worried about being observed from the adjoining bathroom by the Mongolian serving-woman Eos, he settles on a course of action:

I then took special measures. I ordered the laying down of three layers of paint on the glass in the toilet and began to write in Chuvash. As the poorly educated Eos tried to read my texts, her lips moved helplessly and in vain. I myself almost pointed out that for all their curiosity, our serving class is lazy, incurious and far from linguistics.

A few pages back he had been reading the newspaper “«Албанское Танго» (Орган тоскских сепаратистов в Новой Этрурии, ратующих за провозглашение северной ее половины анклавом Албании)” [Albanian Tango (Organ of the Tosk separatists in New Etruria, fighting for the proclamation of an Albanian enclave in its northern half)], so he’s acquainted with the Tosk dialect. Here’s the Russian:
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This is pretty juvenile, but hey, we all have an inner twelve-year-old hidden within our mature selves, and I figure others might enjoy it as much as I did, so without further ado, from David A. Cox’s reminiscence of his fellow mathematician Steven Zucker (“‘Steve’ to everyone who knew him”; from here):

I met Steve in the fall of 1970 when we were entering graduate students at Princeton. We both studied algebraic geometry, though I was more algebraic (à la Grothendieck) while Steve was more transcendental (à la Griffiths). This made for some lively conversations. A few weeks after we met, we realized that we had to write a joint paper because the combination of our last names, in the usual alphabetical order, is remarkably obscene.

See: Cox–Zucker machine. (Via Avva.)

I got a very interesting e-mail from frequent commenter Jongseong, which he gave me permission to quote in full:

Recently, I chanced upon the word 벨로니테 bellonite (Belonite) in the Korean dictionary, supposedly designating a type of volcano. However, in English-language sources, I could only find reference to belonite referring to certain crystalline forms found in glassy volcanic rocks.

This puzzling discovery led me down a rabbit hole. I soon learned that the Korean dictionary includes seven terms corresponding to the basic types of volcanos as classified by Prague-born geologist Karl Schneider in the early 20th-century based on their shape—Pedionite, Aspite, Tholoide, Belonite, Konide, Homate, and Maar—in straightforward transcriptions of their German pronunciation: 페디오니테 pedionite, 아스피테 aseupite, 톨로이데 tolloide, 벨로니테 bellonite, 코니데 konide, 호마테 homate, and 마르 mareu. Translated Korean equivalents are given for all of these apart from the last, and at least a couple of the translated terms are familiar to many Koreans from their earth science lessons in school.

These names have fallen out of use in English-language scholarship however, volcanoes being usually classified nowadays based on their formation or composition rather than shape. This would explain why belonite only seemed to have the other meaning in English; also, when I search for many of the terms, many of the first results are in Korean (we seem to have clung on to the outmoded terminology in our textbooks). The exception is maar, which was not coined by Schneider but already existed as a term originally referring to craters and crater lakes in the Eifel region of western Germany (probably from Latin mare via post-classical Latin mara, per the OED).

The terms that do seem to have been introduced by Schneider mostly have transparent etymologies, with Pedionite, Aspite, Tholoide, Belonite, and Konide coming from the Ancient Greek roots πεδίον, ἀσπίς, θόλος, βελόνη, and κῶνος respectively. But the derivation of Homate is stumping me.

Homate refers to a low volcano whose crater is very wide relative to its size, Iceland’s Hverfjall being the prime example given by Schneider. It has been described in German as Wallberge or Ringwallberge because of the resemblance to circular ramparts. In Korean, Homate is translated as 구상 화산 臼狀 火山 gusang hwasan or 절구꼴 화산 jeolgukkol hwasan, meaning mortar-shaped volcano (as in mortar and pestle).

But I haven’t been able to come up with a derivation for Homate which would fit this definition. Perhaps it is derived from Ancient Greek like the others, the first part being the prefix hom(o)-, but if there is a second part that fits, it is escaping me. I have looked at Schneider’s Die vulkanischen Erscheinungen der Erde where he introduces his classification, but he does not explain the derivation of his terms.

Any idea where the term Homate could have come from? I am hoping you or the community of Hatters can help solve this mystery.

I join him in his hope.

Back in 2013 I reviewed Muireann Maguire’s anthology Red Spectres; I am happy to announce that after what has apparently been a long process of gestation (“This collection has been almost a decade in the making”), the companion volume White Magic: Russian Emigre Tales of Mystery and Terror has been published, and Russian Life Books was kind enough to send me a copy. It is just as good as its precursor.

After Maguire’s introduction, a set of author bios, and a list of sources with the original Russian titles (which I very much appreciated), the anthology opens with two stories by Alexander Amfiteatrov, whose novels were briefly popular before WWI but who has since been forgotten (the only one of my histories of Russian literature that mentions him does so only by surname, in a list of authors published in Belgrade by an emigré press). His stories “He” and “The Cimmerian Disease” make an effective point of departure; the first is narrated by a teenage girl who has been seduced by a vampire (“He always comes to me as soon as the last ray fades from the belltower of that tall church”), and the second is in the form of a letter by a young man who had the misfortune to rent a Moscow apartment formerly occupied by his friend Petrov and now haunted by a woman Petrov had driven to suicide — he is writing from Corfu, where he fled to escape her. (At one point the narrator thinks the woman might be a psychopath, and Maguire has a footnote explaining that the term had been known in Russian since at least 1885; I remembered I had done a post on the word, did some more research, and turned up an antedate from 1856!) They are followed by a Civil War shocker by Pyotr Krasnov called “The Eightieth” and two Petersburg stories by Ivan Lukash, “Hermann’s Card” (a gambler runs into Pushkin’s protagonist from “The Queen of Spades”) and “The Bells” (a cry of outrage at the Bolshevik’s destruction of the antiquities of the city).

Then comes one of the highlights of the collection, two stories by the great Pavel Muratov, almost as little remembered as Amfiteatrov, but very unfairly so. One of the books I was happiest to get in my recent buying spree was a fat Azbuka paperback of his «Образы Италии» [Images of Italy], of which Clive James wrote “As a book on the Italian Grand Tour it not only stands directly in the tradition of Goethe, Gregorovius, Burckhardt and Arthur Symons, but it is better than any of them.” I had been vaguely aware that he wrote fiction as well as art history, but I was blown away by his work here. “The Venetian Mirror” (which, oddly, has the same title as a story by Chayanov in Red Spectres) starts, enticingly, “I broke my promise — I never did send you a Venetian mirror…” and goes on to explain that the protagonist found the perfect mirror only to learn its terrifying secret; it ends: “May the marvelous gilded frame never hang on that wall, spangled with the glints of summer, in the peace of your room in the countryside, to encircle the fragments of its magical world.” The second, “The Companion,” is about “the oddities of Lord Elmore,” who was “wealthy beyond belief, and uncommonly handsome,” and who depended on his endlessly competent and loyal French servant Auguste. His life illustrates the saying that power corrupts; he ruins his gentle and lovely bride, Lady Helen, and after many other destructive interactions with the world he turns away from it and barricades himself (along with Auguste) in his ancestral Woburn Abbey. He takes to reading and collecting, but neither activity soothes his savage soul; I will quote a wonderful paragraph that illustrates both Muratov’s style and Maguire’s fine work as a translator (after her version comes the Russian for those who can appreciate it):
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An amusing quote from Li Juan’s Winter Pasture: One Woman’s Journey with China’s Kazakh Herders (Astra Publishing, 2021), courtesy of Joel at Far Outliers:

Of course, there were occasions when the siblings argued. Sometimes they even insulted each other in Mandarin. Sister would shout, “Ben dan!” (idiot) and brother would shout back, “Wang ba dan!” (bastard)—which amused them to no end.…

Then, they both turned to ask me, what do “ben dan” and “wang ba dan” mean? For the sake of complete honesty, I offered them a boring literal explanation: a ben dan is a chicken egg that’s gone bad. And a wang ba dan … luckily, I had just seen “The Tortoise and the Hare” in Nurgün’s Kazakh textbook, so I pointed to the tortoise: “This is wang ba.” They let out an “oh.” Then I added, “Wang ba dan is its child.” A disappointed “oh”; they were unable to understand what was so special about a bad egg and a tortoise’s child that these terms could be used as insults? Thoroughly underwhelmed, that was the last time they insulted each other using these words.

Of course, that’s not “complete honesty,” it’s prissy disingenuousness; Joel adds this further explanation:

My ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (U. Hawaii Press, 1996) defines 王八 wángba as 1. tortoise, 2. cuckold, 3. son-of-a-bitch. It next lists two expressions flagged as colloquial: 王八蛋 wángbadàn N. turtle’s egg, son-of-a-bitch; and 王八羔子 wángba gāozi N. baby turtle, son-of-a-bitch.

The same source defines 笨 bèn as ADJ. 1. stupid, dull; 2. clumsy, awkward; 3. cumbersome. Lower on the same page it lists 笨蛋 bèndàn N. fool, idiot.

I heard several of those terms on a regular basis when I was living in Taiwan in 1977-78.