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It’s been a while since I posted a poem, and since I just bought Donald Hall’s White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006 (Kindle Edition on sale today for $1.99), I thought I’d share “The Farm”:

Standing on top of the hay
in a good sweat,
I felt the wind from the lake
dry on my back,
where the chaff
grew like the down on my face.

At night on the bare boards
of the kitchen,
we stood while the old man
in his nightshirt gummed
the stale crusts
of his bread and milk.

Up on the gray hill
behind the barn, the stones
had fallen away
where the Penacook marked
a way to go
south from the narrow river.

By the side of the lake
my dead uncle’s rowboat rots
in heavy bushes.
Slim pickerel glint
in the water. Black horned pout
doze on the bottom.

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The Transactions of the Royal Society have published a theme issue on Reconstructing prehistoric languages, compiled and edited by Antonio Benítez-Burraco and Ljiljana Progovac; some of the articles are free to download, others are behind a paywall. Here’s the description:

This theme issue brings together prominent experts in the field of human evolution to achieve a deeper, richer understanding of human prehistory and the nature of prehistoric languages. The contributions in the issue begin to outline a profile of the structures and uses of prehistoric languages, including the type of sounds; the nature of the earliest grammars (used e.g. for conversation, insult); the nature of the earliest vocabularies; and the role of some recently evolved brain circuits. By projecting some specific features of language and brain organization into prehistory, the contributions to this volume directly engage the genetic and the neuroscientific aspects of human evolution and cognition.

The sections are:

PART I: PREHISTORIC SOUNDS AND GESTURES
PART II: PREHISTORIC GRAMMAR AND THE LEXICON
PART III: PREHISTORIC BEHAVIOUR, COGNITION, AND THE BRAIN
PART IV: MODELLING PREHISTORIC LANGUAGES

Thanks, Hans!

I’m a sucker for discussions of translation that delve into the details, and Julia Sanches, translator of Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost, provides a good one:

Marguerite Duras as translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan writes that “translation is not a matter of the literal exactitude of a text, but perhaps we must go even further: and say that it is more of a musical approach, rigorously personal and even, if necessary, deviant.” I learned one day over lunch with Eva Baltasar’s editor that her only condition during edits was that the word in question be replaced with one that was similarly stressed or unstressed, as the case may be. What mattered was how each word affected the music of the sentence, what this music conveyed, and how the music delivered up the image to the reader. An example:

Catalan: Jo em sentia cada dia més empetitida, reduïda, a una cortineta de cuina al seu costat.
My translation: I felt smaller and smaller by the day, next to her nothing but a frilly kitchen curtain.

Let’s look at the words in detail, or rather in musical detail. Hopefully my highlights have helped to make clear what’s at play in this sentence. It may be odd to speak of a sentence being moved in a certain direction—we read from left to right in English, so what other direction could it possibly go?—and yet there is a definite sense here of being ushered forward by the end rhymes (ee-ah, ee-ah, ee-dah, ee-dah) of the first clause as they flow into the head rhymes of the second (coo, coo, coo), and come to a sudden and dry stop: costat.

The image is a bit odd, or at least odd enough that it puzzled the English editor. One thing she wanted to know was: What is a kitchen curtain? Though the simile seemed obvious to me—“it’s one of those ridiculously tiny curtains that are sheer and mostly decorative,” I wrote in the comments—one thing I have learned from translating is that when an image is obvious to the translator but opaque to everyone else, there is often something missing. The fact that the editor had been puzzled by the image also raised several questions for me, all of which took me back to the dedication and helped inform the rest of my draft: Is it possible that the image owed its existence entirely to the musicality of the (Catalan) words? Had that felicitous, musical connection between the words cortineta and cuina not existed, would the author have arrived at this image at all? If so, what should I prioritize? Does the image take precedence over the music, or do I do my my best to maintain both? To what do I owe my contentious fidelity?

[…] I’d like to zoom in on a small Durassian deviation: the word frilly. It may surprise you to find out there are no frills on the Catalan kitchen curtain. What “frilly” seeks to capture instead is a close reading of the simile, and especially a close reading of the diminutive, cortineta. As any Romance speaker knows intuitively, the diminutive inserts a variety of nuances into a word, ranging from smallness to tenderness, and to depreciation, not all of which can be captured by “little,” or “small,” or “wee.” The Catalan not only makes (a very natural) use of the diminutive, but also doubles down on the sense of demotion with the words “empetitida” and “reduïda.” I have tried to reflect this in the English version by creating a sense of progressive reduction in “smaller and smaller” and finally in the “nothing but” in order to give the reader the feeling—much like the sentence’s abrupt end with the word “costat”—that this is as small as our protagonist is able to feel in relation to the other character.

I think “frilly” is a brilliant addition, giving the necessary image to those unfamiliar with such curtains (I was surprised at the editor’s question, since I immediately knew what Sanches had in mind). And for the benefit of those with no Catalan, I should point out that unstressed o is /u/, so cortineta, cuina, and costat all start with the same syllable. Thanks, Trevor!

Almost exactly a decade ago I got Chingiz Aitmatov’s И дольше века длится день… (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years), as described in this post; now I’ve finally read it, and I’m afraid it turned out to be another disappointment, following my sad experience with Bitov’s Pushkin House (see this post). The disappointment was not as disappointing, though, since I had been expecting great things from Bitov; after my experience with Aitmatov’s earlier Белый пароход (The White Steamship) — as I said here, I found it almost unreadable and gave up after fifty pages — I was pleased simply to be able to read it with some enjoyment. It’s got good things in it, but as a novel, it’s a mess. Warning: what follows will contain spoilers.

I’ll start with the good stuff. One of Aitmatov’s favorite themes was the natural world, and he has some great descriptions here, especially of animals: the novel starts with a passage about a hungry fox searching along railroad tracks for food that might have been tossed from a passing train, and towards the end there’s a bravura description of a kite flying over the area where the action is taking place, eyeing from high above a camel, a bulldozer and tractor, some people, and especially a dog who has tagged along on the expedition (happily, he does not swoop down and attack the dog, which I had been expecting). There’s even a bit seen from the point of view of a rare sturgeon the protagonist, Edigei, has caught in the Aral Sea (and one of the themes of the book is the diminishment of the sea, caused by human action). There are very well written episodes like the train ride of a prisoner passing through the village he has been living in, looking eagerly through the barred window in hopes of seeing his wife and children. And above all there are the mankurts, Aitmatov’s brilliant creation (I just had to change the Wikipedia article, which claimed it was an actual Central Asian tradition); nobody who reads the novel ever forgets the image of people turned by torture into slaves deprived of memory. Dmitry Bykov, in his article on the book, calls it a metaphor for the suppression of the horrors of the Soviet past; referring to that scene at the end, when Edigei leads a small group to the traditional cemetery to bury an old friend and is turned away because the burial site is part of the secret cosmodrome area (based on Baikonur), Bykov writes:

The cemetery surrounded by barbed wire was one of the most frightful symbols of the late Soviet empire. Memory was behind barbed wire, one was not allowed to remember what was frightening, the main thing. A generation of mankurts grew up.

Обнесённое колючей проволокой кладбище было одним из самых страшных символов поздней советской империи. Память была за колючей проволокой, нельзя было упоминать о страшном, о главном. Выросло поколение манкуртов.

And for the linguistically oriented, there are some bits of a Turkic language (I don’t know whether it’s Kazakh or Aitmatov’s native Kirghiz).
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Zui at The Language Closet (“anything and everything about languages”) posts about a language hitherto unknown to me, Wymysorys:

Spoken in the region of Wilamowice, Poland (Wymysoü), this language is also quite an interesting anomaly. […] Wymysorys, Vilamovian or Wymysiöeryś is the Germanic language spoken in that small Polish town, between Silesia and Lesser-Poland. Considered the most endangered Germanic language today, it has experienced a significant decline since the 19th century. From the phasing out of Wymysorys in local schools in favour of Polish in 1875, to the banning of its use in the communist period until 1956, many have stopped speaking Wymysorys, instead turning to Polish, or for those who left Poland for Germany, German.

Mutually unintelligible with German, along with all of its dialects, Wymysorys features a rather Germanic sound system, with borrowed sounds in Polish loanwords. The language has had major influences from Polish, even incorporating its orthography in literary works by the author Florian Besik. However, this has since been standardised, as a distinct Wymysorys alphabet. Polish influences include the letter “ł”, which represents the sound /w/ but way closer to the Polish articulation than what you might hear in Germanic languages. […] Literary works are also rather few and far between, since the first author known to publish Wymysorys literature did so in the 19th century, around when the language started to decline. […] However, in the 21st century, there have been movements to revitalise the declining language.

Zui links to a more detailed Culture.pl article by Mikołaj Gliński, who studied classics at Humboldt University in Berlin and cultural studies at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of Polish Culture:
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My wife and I watched one of my favorite movies, Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion; it’s also one of the best war movies ever made, precisely because it doesn’t show any of the war itself, just its destructive effects on humanity. (As I’ve said elsewhere, even movies intended as anti-war tend to promote war simply because the battle scenes, however grueling, are also exciting.) The acting is excellent and the filmmaking superb; Renoir gets important ideas across simply and without pounding them in. (Alas, the commentary track by film historian Peter Cowie on the Criterion release, while acute about filmic virtues, is larded with historical errors verging on idiocy — Cowie thinks the Battle of Tannenberg was fought in Flanders and that the Bolshevik government could have been sending packages to Russian captives in 1916. I was reminded of Simon Winchester.)

But I’m not here to talk about filmic virtues, I’m here to talk about languages, which play a role here second only to the wild multilingualism of Godard’s Contempt (see this 2003 LH post). Renoir made the decision — unusual then as now — to have everyone talk in their own languages, and the interplay, especially of French and German, is an important plot element. When the main heroes of the movie, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Captain de Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay), are shot down near the beginning of the movie by Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), Rauffenstein apologizes in good though accented French for the inconvenience he’s caused them; then he and Boëldieu exchange reminiscences in English, a language only the two of them understand. Throughout the movie there is that tension between the shared nationality of the Frenchmen and the shared class background and interests of the aristocrats; Rauffenstein can’t understand why Boëldieu feels any fraternity with his low-class fellow officers (when he asks Boëldieu for his word of honor about something, the latter asks why he doesn’t do the same with the other officers, and Rauffenstein, with inimitable hauteur, says “The word of honor of a Rosenthal and a Maréchal?!”). And when Maréchal finds it strange that Boëldieu still uses vous rather than the informal tu with him after they’ve been cooped up together for weeks, the monocled Boëldieu says calmly “Je dis vous à ma mère et vous à ma femme” [I use vous with my mother and with my wife]. Different worlds…

When the French officers are transferred to another camp, they want to tell the incoming English prisoners about an escape tunnel they’ve been digging, but when Maréchal daringly defies the guards and dashes over to warn them, he can’t get the message across because he doesn’t speak English and the blitheringly genial Englishman he’s so urgently talking to doesn’t understand French (“Yes, thank you, my good chap…”). And there’s even a bit of Russian: when a large box arrives from Petrograd (marked with a large А for Александра, the Empress Alexandra — not Л for Lenin, Cowie!), everyone assumes it will contain luxury foodstuffs and vodka, so the Russians invite the Frenchmen to share the feast, but when opened its contents prove to be unexpectedly high-minded. “Книги!” [Books!] the appalled Russians shout, and set the box on fire to express their disgust.

When (spoiler!) Maréchal and Rosenthal make their escape, they wind up staying in the isolated house of a widowed German woman who treats them kindly and does not give them away when soldiers come knocking; Rosenthal, it turns out, speaks German, so he can communicate with her while Maréchal has to have her remarks translated — though he quickly comes to understand some words and phrases, having (as he says) more incentive than he had with the prison guards. And the very last line of the movie is in German: just as they are about to make it out of Germany, a patrol sees them and begins shooting, but then the officer in charge says to stop, because the fugitives have crossed over into neutral Switzerland — “Desto besser für sie” [So much the better for them]. A great ending to a great movie.

Matt Treyvaud of No-sword sent me a link to Anton Howes’ essay Did the Ottomans Ban Print? from his newsletter Age of Invention; it’s an investigation of why the printing press seemingly didn’t take root in the Ottoman Empire and specifically of whether there was actually a ban on “printing in Arabic characters, or perhaps the Arabic or Turkish languages, or perhaps printing outright” (there are various claims about this). It’s a long essay, and somewhat unsatisfactory because Howes is limited to sources he can access in languages he can read — I’d love to see what an actual Ottoman historian had to say on the subject. But it’s worth a read if you’re interested in digging into the details of the available evidence (and finding out about the skulduggery practiced by rival religious groups); here’s his conclusion:

So the principal evidence of Ottoman suppression of printing is overwhelmingly related to its use by non-Muslims. We have, of course, only some of the vaguest hints to go off. But I think a rough, albeit speculative picture is starting to come together. It appears that in the mid-sixteenth century Ottoman authorities might have been worried about the profanation of Islamic religious works by non-Muslims printing in Arabic script, so they prohibited the Jewish printers from doing so. Following the 1590s attempt of the Medici Press to sell them works in Arabic script that were secular, however, they became suspicious about the foreign Christians’ ultimate aims, blocking such books during wartime, and then during peacetime on the grounds that foreign, heathen printers would be benefiting at the expense of local Muslim scribes. This wariness then extended to the non-Arabic script presses of the empire, too, especially when foreign powers seemed to be behind the unrest. Thus, it was in response to the missionary or commercial agendas of Europeans, that Europeans learned of the justifications for not allowing the printing of Arabic script.

What this doesn’t explain, however, is the absence of printing among the Turks themselves. After all, if the evidence we have mainly relates to the suppression of non-Muslim printers using Arabic characters, why didn’t Muslims themselves print? That’s the question I will try to answer in the next post.

If Matt sends me the follow-up thus tantalizingly promised, I will add an update here. Thanks, Matt!

I have recently learned that there is such a thing as a mechanical calculating device called a dumaresq. Now I happen to know (thanks to my perusal of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names and Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary in my leisure hours) that the surname Dumaresq (as in John Dumaresq, inventor of the dumaresq) has the unintuitive pronunciation /dʊˈmɛrɪk/ (du-MERR-ik), but I’m wondering whether the calculating device retained that pronunciation or was given a new one by the sailors who used it. Wikipedia says that the dumaresq Mark VIII “lasted into service through WWII,” so it’s still (barely) within living memory; does anyone happen to know how it was said? (Shockingly, it’s not in the OED.)

Also, I have just learned that there is a word pneudraulic ‘of or relating to a mechanism involving both pneumatic and hydraulic action.’ I do not approve.

Update (Oct. 2022). I found this video, seemingly authoritative, which uses /ˈduːmərɪk/ (DOO-merik) for the device.

Via Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti post, a quote from Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996):

As everyone knows, Greek religion was not a ‘religion of the book’. No doubt it acquired its distinctive stamp before writing was thought of. But it persisted as a religion ‘not of the book’ through something like a millennium of literacy. (And it had passed through an earlier literate phase in the Mycenaean period.) In this area, it seems, social factors prevented the ‘technology of communication’ from exercising a really decisive influence.

The city used writing to record publicly its commitment, financial and so moral, to the cult of particular gods. What mattered about this declaration was that it could be seen to have been made, even if not all Athenians had the skill, and fewer still the interest, to read the dry and difficult inscriptions. Writing was not, by contrast, used to build up a complicated specialized corpus of ritual knowledge. We stressed earlier the crucial importance of the fact that ‘sacred laws’ (not a Greek term) are a subsection of the whole law-code of a community, not an independent category resting on a different authority. They are so, of course, because of the indissoluble unity of ‘church and state’ in Greece, powers that could never be at odds because they could never be clearly distinguished. A crucial aspect of this integration of religion in Greece is the ordinariness of the priests; they were ordinary in many ways, but above all in lacking all pretension to distinctive learning. Elaborate ritual texts are the hallmark of a more specialized priesthood and a more autonomous religious order than those of Greece.

The amateur status of the Greek priesthood was not affected in any way by the advent of the art of writing. One does not picture the priestess of an Athenian public cult with a book in her hand. The famous sixth-century marble sculptures of ‘seated scribes’ from the acropolis are generally held to represent not priests but, significantly, ‘treasurers’ or similar officials, bound to give account of the sacred monies in their care. When the religious book begins to appear, it is rather the mark of marginal figures, the wandering initiators and purifiers and prophets, who in the phrase of the Derveni papyrus ‘make a craft out of rites’. Lacking a position in the civic religious structure, they naturally need to display credentials of other kinds. The association between bookishness and irregularity is at its clearest in Orphism. Both in social and religious terms Orphism is profoundly unorthodox; and it displays several characteristics of a ‘religion of the book’, being indeed transmitted through a ‘hubbub of books’. The only books of public cult, by contrast, are the calendars inscribed for all to view (though few to read) on wood or stone.

See the linked post for footnotes.

Alison Flood reports for the Graun about a new dictionary:

Victorian attempts to veil the meanings of crude ancient Greek words are set to be brushed away by a new dictionary 23 years in the making. It is the first to take a fresh look at the language in almost 200 years and promises to “spare no blushes” for today’s classics students. […]

It was initially thought that Chadwick’s project would take five years, but Cambridge professor James Diggle, who was then chair of the advisory committee, said it soon became clear that the Intermediate Lexicon was “too antiquated in concept, design and content”, and the team would need to start afresh.

Diggle and his fellow editors then set out on the “Herculean task” of rereading most examples of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to the early second century AD. They then worked through the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to create a modern guide for today’s students to the meanings of ancient Greek words and their development through the years. The lexicon is the first to be based on an entirely new reading of the Greek texts since 1843. […]

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