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In 2008 I posted about Sarah Ruden’s then-new translation of the Aeneid; now there’s a fresh contender, by Shadi Bartsch [I messed up the names in the first version of this post — sorry!]. Stuart Lyons’ brief review at Classics for All convinces me that if I actually buy another version, it will be Ruden’s:

B.’s new translation has been praised by an American professor as ‘probably the best version of the Aeneid in modern English’. Pacy and often colloquial, with occasional italics for emphasis, much of it reads like prose. A passage in 11.85-88 illustrates the differing treatments […] B., eschewing initial upper-case letters, translates:

‘Wretched Acoetes, weak with age, was led
along. He beat his chest with fists and clawed his face,
falling prostrate on the ground. Next came chariots
spattered with Rutulian blood [and Pallas’ warhorse … ]’

The enjambment of ‘led / along’ is jarring. It distorts Virgil’s architecture and leads to the unidiomatic two-syllable expression ‘with fists’. Nor does B.’s ‘falling prostrate on the ground’ do justice to sternitur et toto proiectus corpore terrae. B. reduces Virgil’s four lines to three and a half before her text merges mid-line into a new period.

Enjambment and compression pervade B’s translation. […] Such preferences give this result as Dido’s story reaches its climax (4.296-300):

at regina dolos (quis fallere possit amantem?)
praesensit, motusque excepit prima futuros
omnia tuta timens. eadem impia Fama furenti
detulit armari classem cursumque parari.

‘But Dido sensed the trick (who can deceive
a lover?) and the launch they planned. Now everything
seemed suspect, even if it wasn’t. That same impious
Rumor told the desperate queen the fleet prepared
to sail.’

Here, motusque excepit prima futuros surely means ‘she was the first to get wind of his future movements’; armari is omitted, as is the English ‘that’, which elegance demands be inserted after ‘queen’.

Generally, B.’s translation is accurate, but there are lapses, e.g. quattuor a stabulis praestanti corpore tauros (8.207) become ‘seven perfect bulls’.

Frankly, I was already recoiling at “much of it reads like prose,” but the details (more at the link, of course) put the nail in the coffin. Translating is hard, and newer is not always better.

Back in 2009 I posted a translation of a Bunin short story, Книга [Book], because I loved it and there were no English versions online; now I’m doing the same for another Bunin story, Пингвины [Penguins]. I sometimes pick up my fat Bunin collection and flip through to find a story I haven’t read when I don’t feel like tackling a new novel yet; a couple of weeks ago my eye fell on the odd title Пингвины at the top of p. 1114 in the table of contents and I thought I’d give it a try. It was so unusual and gripping it wouldn’t let go of me, and I finally had to translate it (and wound up memorizing a good chunk of it in the process). It’s perhaps a slight spoiler to say it’s an account of a dream, but that quickly becomes apparent; the thing about dreams in fiction is that they’re usually either tediously Freudian or pointless echoes of something in the main narrative — if your hero is being beset by enemies, I don’t need to wade through a dream about a bear attacked by hounds, thank you very much. But this has nothing in common with such fictional dreams; it’s self-contained, and its purpose seems to be to give as vivid a picture as possible of what dreaming is actually like, at which it succeeds brilliantly. The sudden changes of locale and of mood, the uncertainty, the intrusions of the inexplicable: it’s all there. (Gurzuf and Bakhchisarai are towns in the Crimea; Pushkin wrote poems about both.) And the ending is very funny.

The Russian text is here, or if you prefer the old spelling (as it was published in his 1931 collection Божье древо [Southern wormwood]) here. Obviously I had to make a lot of difficult translation choices; I’ll just mention that I rendered карагач [karagach] etymologically as “black elm” (I don’t think there is such a term in English) because, as my wife pointed out, if I had “karagach” it would just be a meaningless lump in the English text, whereas the Russian reader at least knows it’s a tree. For general context on these short plotless stories, I’ll quote a perhaps relevant bit from the note on Книга [Book] here: “Бунин всю жизнь был убежден, что художник должен все им виденное и пережитое записывать” [Bunin all his life was convinced that an artist should write down everything seen and experienced by him]. And I’ll also quote something vitalir wrote on flibusta: “Люблю Бунина. Может быть Россия Бунина для меня и есть град Китеж, не знаю. […] Блядь, народ, как можно не прочитать Бунина?” [I love Bunin. Maybe Bunin’s Russia is the city of Kitezh for me, I don’t know. … Fuck, people, how can you not read Bunin?]
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Another great passage from Judith Flanders’ A Place For Everything via Joel at Far Outliers:

Arabic dictionaries also used nonalphabetical methods of organizing. The Mukhaṣṣaṣ, or The Categorized, by Ibn Sīda (d. 1066), was divided, as its title states, by subject or topic, beginning with human nature and continuing on to physiology, psychology, women, clothes, food, and weapons. Al-Khalīl Ibn Aḥmad (d. 791), in his Kitāb al-‘ain, The Book of [the Letter] ‘Ain, used sounds to organize his work: he listed entries in an order of his own, where each sound group was followed by subcategories based on how many consonants a word contained. …

These mainly nonalphabetical developments contrasted with the works of Hebrew scholars, who tended toward alphabetical order simultaneously with (and occasionally a little ahead of) their Christian contemporaries. At the end of the eleventh century, Nathan ben Jehiel (c. 1035–c. 1110) produced his Sefer ha’Arukh, The Set Book. Ben Jehiel, who had been born in Rome, spoke Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Persian, and Syriac, and he drew on his knowledge of these languages to produce an alphabetically ordered book of root words occurring in rabbinic literature. It became one of the best-known dictionaries of its type—more than fifty copies survive—as well as being one of the first Hebrew books to be printed, in Rome sometime before 1472.

Many of these works, both in Arabic and Hebrew, and the scholarship that had produced them, became accessible to scholars in Western Europe for the first time as these languages began to be more widely translated into Latin. … That so many of these works returned to the West via Arabic was significant, for earlier Arab scholars had frequently added substantially to the originals, including details of their own work, which was far in advance of much of Western thought at the time.

The Western rediscovery of the classics had two results, one somewhat abstract, one concrete. More generally, the awareness of how many great works had been entirely unknown before the lifetimes of these new readers, and of how many more had been permanently lost, produced a sense that the current generation needed to ensure that this recaptured knowledge, as well as all the works produced under its influence, were preserved for future generations. Further, it created a drive to ensure that the details contained in all these new works could be found easily—in other words, readers wanted not merely to read the books, but to refer to them: they wanted search tools.

These recently translated manuscripts also brought to the West other elements that are crucial for our story. Educated European readers now became increasingly familiar with foreign alphabets. In Italy and France in particular, Hebrew had routinely been transliterated into the roman alphabet when manuscripts were copied; in the rest of Europe, the Greek alphabet had sometimes been used, but less and less as time went on. In Europe, apart from Spain, where Arabic was in common use, Arabic too had been almost always transliterated into the roman alphabet. By contrast, some in the British Isles were familiar with Old English runes, known as futhorc, or with the Irish writing system known as Ogham. Many more would have recognized, and used in conjunction with the roman alphabet, the Old English runic letters such as thorn (Þ, þ) and wynn (Ρ, ρ). For these reasons, “foreign”-looking letters were more familiar and less unnerving in the British Isles, and so Latin and Hebrew letters were both used, as they were from the ninth century in Germany, a regular destination for highly educated monks from Ireland and Britain.

Victor Mair at the Log reports on an interesting Japanese compound verb that seems to be an adequate substitute for English profanity; he’s discussing this headline from “Japan’s hard-right, anti-China Sankei newspaper”:

「中国よ、消えうせやがれ」 フィリピン外相、“禁句”使って怒り爆発

“Chūgoku yo, kieuseyagare” Firipin gaishō “kinku” tsukatte ikari bakuhatsu

“Hey China, fuck off!” Philippines foreign minister uses taboo word in angry explosion

Mair writes:

The first three characters are the rough equivalent of “Hey China!” (“Chūgoku yo”). So far so good. It gets even better, though, because the delightfully nuanced verbal phrase “get the fuck out” gets translated as a compound of three verbs: “kie-use-yagare.”

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A reader sent me a link to this post by André Barbosa from Portuguese Language Blog:

“Pois não” is an expression used by Brazilians as well as by the Portuguese and means “yes”, “of course”, “sure.” It’s curious, however, that this expression contains the adverb “não” (not) and means just the opposite.

“Pois não” comes from another expression: “Pois não haveria de (+ infinitive verb)”. Here’s an example on how to use it:

– João, você pode me emprestar o seu carro? (João, could you lend me your car?)

– Empresto Maria, pois não haveria de emprestar? (Yes Maria, for sure.)

“Pois não haveria de emprestar” (Wouldn’t I lend it? – literal meaning) means that João will lend his car to Pedro for sure. It’s like João assumed the obligation to do that and disapproved not doing it.

It is common in Brazil for salespeople to greet shoppers by saying “pois não?”

A curious expression; compare “yeah no.”

I have occasionally run across the weird and wonderful word zhuzh /ʒʊʒ/; it turns out the OED has entries for both noun (“Style, glamour; a stylish or glamorous appearance or effect”) and verb (“To smarten up (someone or something); to make (something) more stylish, attractive, or exciting”), both updated just last December. The latter has the full etymology, which is intriguing:

Etymology: Of uncertain origin. Perhaps ultimately an expressive formation (compare e.g. whoosh v., swish adj., and use in similar senses and constructions of e.g. zing v. and zap v.).

Compare from a similar date the related zhuzh n., zhuzhy adj., although the relative priority of the three words is unclear.

The etymology of this word, and of the related noun and adjective, is uncertain and disputed; a number of suggestions have been made, but none of them is entirely unproblematic or confirmed beyond doubt by the available evidence.

Derivation from a Romani verb in the sense ‘to clean’ or a corresponding adjective has been proposed (compare e.g. Hungarian Romani shuzo, British Romani yuzho clean, pure), but this presents both phonological and semantic difficulties, and supporting evidence appears to be lacking.

Dict. South African Eng. connects the present word and the corresponding noun and adjective with South African English slang terms for ‘excellent, smart, attractive’ derived from regional pronunciations of Jewish adj., which appear to have been motivated by the high reputation of Jewish tailors and tailoring (perhaps compare quot. 1968 at zhuzh n., apparently in the sense ‘clothing’). However, this is difficult to reconcile with the earliest documentation for zhuzh v. and related words, which suggests a British context, and no evidence has been found for a corresponding sense or pronunciation of Jewish adj. outside South Africa.

That early noun citation is:

1968 B. Took et al. in B. Took & M. Coward Best of ‘Round the Horne’ (2000) 4th Ser. Episode 4. 192/1 Julian. Let’s have a vada at his zhush. Mr. Horne. Clothing. That’s translator’s note.

The first verb cite is slightly later:

1970 P. Burton Lang. of their own: Polari, West End Homosexual Slang (typescript) (O.E.D. Archive) p. ii A zhooshy quean is a grand quean, to zhoosh up is to get ready.

As for the possible Romani derivation, my Цыганско-русский и русско-цыганский словарь (кэлдэрарский диалект) has vužó for ‘clean,’ which just goes to complicate things. And I posted on Polari way back in 2003.

Last year I posted about Judith Flanders’ A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order; now Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts, and I thought this one was piquant enough to repost here:

In Europe, … where alphabetical order was used, in many cases it was considered not as a tool of reference but as one of recall, a way of imprinting a series of items onto the memory in a culture that continued to rely heavily on oral transmission. It may be for this reason that the second-century Sentences of Sextus, 123 maxims on how to live a philosophically good life, were arranged in alphabetical order. Or it may not have been: once again, all we have are later copies, which might well have been reordered. (And, in addition, the named author, Sextus the Pythagorean, is unlikely to be the actual author of the work.) We know this type of reordering was routine. Fables by an author named Babrius, some of which are today collected under a generic authorship as Aesop’s Fables, survive in copies that were organized by the first letter of the opening word of each fable. Yet an Oxyrhynchus fragment of the same fables, dating from the second century, shows that at least one earlier version was not in this order. The purpose of the reordering may well have been to help listeners remember the stories so that they, in turn, could retell them. For memory was a recurring component of alphabetization: the Greek grammarian Athenaeus listed eighty-one species of fish in first-letter alphabetical order, “in order that what is said may be easier for you to remember.”

(I have complained about fish names more than once, e.g. here.)

I’ve finished Veniamin Kaverin’s Скандалист [The troublemaker] (see this post), and I’m very glad I read it, even though it’s by no stretch of the imagination a great novel. It was, after all, an apprentice effort (he’d written a few shorter attempts at fiction), and the circumstances of its writing were not exactly Tostoyan (this is Kaverin’s own account in Richard Sheldon’s translation, from “Šklovskij, Gor’kij, and the Serapion Brothers” [Slavic and East European Journal 12.1 (Spring, 1968), pp. 1-13]; you can see the Russian here — scroll down to “Зимой 1928 года я встретился”):

During the winter of 1928, at Jurij Tynjanov’s place, I often met with a lively and clever writer then at the zenith of his powers and deeply convinced that he knew all the mysteries of the literature business. We spoke about the novel genre, and the writer observed that even Čexov could not cope with this genre, that it was not surprising that it was not succeeding in contemporary literature. I objected, and he, with the irony at which he was always unusually good, expressed doubts about my abilities in this complicated business. Infuriated, I said that I would launch a novel and that it would be a book about him — about a trouble-maker who conducted his whole life with an awareness of his literary role. He derided me — but to no avail. On the very next day, I began to write the novel The Troublemaker, or Evenings on Vasil’ev Island. Obviously, only youth is capable of such decisions, and only in youth could you so openly follow at the heels of your future character with a notebook. He laughed at me: “the utilitarian factory by the name of Kaverin.” I jotted even this down. He spouted jokes, made brilliant witticisms, sometimes unusually well directed and remembered for a lifetime — I blushed, but jotted them down. Probably, he was fully convinced that nothing would come of the novel; otherwise, he would have been more cautious in this unusual duel.

This “lively and clever writer” was Viktor Shklovsky, a fascinating figure whose writings, a blend of memoir and literary analysis, I’ve enjoyed for years; it was tremendously interesting to see him portrayed (very believably) as a character in a literary work. (He was known among the Serapion Brothers as Брат Скандалист [Brother Troublemaker].) He is shown as funny and argumentative, given to causing trouble for its own sake and then having to apologize later; his culminating deed is plucking the young Vera Barabanova away from Leningrad, where she was poised to marry an unsuitable man she didn’t love, and sweeping her off to Moscow with him on the train. (I’m guessing that her surname, ‘Drum,’ was suggested by the first futurist collection, the 1915 pamphlet Взял: Барабан футуристов [Took: Drum of the futurists].) Shklovsky, understandably, wasn’t pleased by the book (few people like seeing themselves from the outside), but it’s an affectionate as well as acerbic portrait (Kaverin was his student and friend), and on the whole he comes off well.

But beyond the overstuffed plot (two aged brothers reconnect after a quarter of a century, there are various academic intrigues, young Nogin — a stand-in for the author — can’t study because he’s desperately in love with Vera, etc. etc.), the novel is of interest as an example of the “documentary” writing so popular between the wars, not only in the Soviet Union (see this post on Mariengof’s Cynics) but elsewhere (Joyce, Dos Passos, Gide, Döblin, Reznikoff): writers felt the need to incorporate chunks of found reality into their work. Kaverin not only quotes and alludes to Shklovsky’s work repeatedly (mostly Zoo and Third Factory), he quotes chunks of a medieval Old Russian text Professor Lozhkin is trying to study between the various distractions of the plot — I actually found a version online, and I will insert the quoted passage as an image here:

Lozhkin decides that the Малкатушка or Малкатошва in the texts he’s comparing (Малкодушка in the one I found) must reflect a Hebrew Malkat-švo ‘Queen of Sheba,’ and he keeps wondering about the mysterious word кражма (here крыжма). Also, there’s a long and funny account of a lecture where the lecturer (Dragomanov) doesn’t show up but sends a flunky to read what turns out to be a deliberately foolish and insulting proposal that arouses indignation in the audience, which doesn’t enjoy being spoofed; this is scavenged from an event in the 1850s, in which Osip Senkovsky (who in the novel is studied by Nogin) pulls the same trick on a distinguished assembly (you can read an account here, beginning “С первых же страниц было видно, что положения”). And there are many bits that made me laugh, like “Сердце у него стучало, как метроном, как сердце” [His heart beat like a metronome, like a heart] and “Он вернулся домой мокрый и с таким лицом, что старуха, которая отворила ему дверь, растерявшись, заговорила с ним по-татарски” [He returned home wet and with such a face that the old lady who opened the door for him lost her head and started talking to him in Tatar].

But what really impressed me was that, even if it’s not a great novel, it’s a real one, with people who feel real struggling with what feels like life, however exaggerated. Shklovsky wrote no novels, and Tynyanov’s were lifeless attempts to exemplify his literary theories (see my review of Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [The death of the ambassador plenipotentiary]), but Kaverin is discovering that he is a real writer of fiction. And the plot element that felt most real to me and most moved me was Vera’s desperate attempts to paint despite the poverty and chaos of her life (she decided to marry the rich jerk in hopes that she might win the freedom to create art); it seemed a foreshadowing of his great 1971 novel Перед зеркалом [Before the mirror], which I wrote about last year. I look forward to reading more Kaverin.

Sophie Hardach has a very interesting piece for BBC Future about the problem of translating languages that don’t have large written corpora:

Imagine you come across a message that could contain life-saving information. But there’s a problem: you don’t understand a word. You’re not even sure which of the world’s thousands of languages it is written in. What do you do?

If the message is in French or Spanish, typing it into an automatic translation engine will instantly solve the mystery and produce a solid answer in English. But many other languages still defy machine translation, including languages spoken by millions of people, such as Wolof, Luganda, Twi and Ewe in Africa. That’s because the algorithms that power these engines learn from human translations – ideally, millions of words of translated text.

There is an abundance of such material for languages like English, French, Spanish and German […] No such data mountain exists, however, for languages that may be widely spoken but not as prolifically translated. They are known as low-resource languages. The fallback machine-training material for these languages consists of religious publications, including the much-translated Bible. But this amounts to a narrow dataset, and is not enough to train accurate, wide-ranging translation robots.

Google Translate currently offers the ability to communicate in around 108 different languages while Microsoft’s Bing Translator offers around 70 languages. Yet there are more than 7,000 spoken languages around the world, and at least 4,000 with a writing system. […] To break that barrier, IARPA is funding research to develop a system that can find, translate and summarise information from any low-resource language, whether it is in text or speech. […] To tackle the problem, each team is divided into smaller specialist groups that solve one aspect of the system. The main components are automatic search, speech recognition, translation and text summarisation technologies, all adapted to low-resource languages. Since the four-year project began in 2017, the teams have worked on eight different languages, including Swahili, Tagalog, Somali and Kazakh.

There are all sorts of fascinating details about how this works, but I’m going to quote the same passage Trevor Joyce quoted when he sent me the link:
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“Proto-Indo-European ‘fox’ and the reconstruction of an athematic ḱ-stem” by Axel I. Palmér et al. (Indo-European Linguistics 2021) is an open-access paper that looks very interesting:

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed etymological analysis of words for ‘fox’ in Indo-European (IE) languages. We argue that most IE ‘fox’-words go back to two distinct PIE stems: *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’. We provide a revised analysis of the etymology and relationship among the various Indo-Iranian ‘fox’-words, and we argue that Baltic preserves remnants of the ḱ-suffix found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. Additionally, we describe how *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- was borrowed from Indo-Iranian into Uralic and we outline the relationship among the reflexes of this word in various Uralic languages. Finally, we reconstruct the paradigm of *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- as a unique type of hysterodynamic stem, which nonetheless has close parallels in PIE. We observe that a similar ḱ-suffix is found in PIE adjectives and animal names.

Introduction

The Indo-European languages attest several words for ‘fox’, e.g., Skt. lopāśá-, Gr. ἀλώπηξ, Arm. ałowēs, Lith. lãpė, Lat. volpēs, Alb. dhelpër, which are similar enough to have justified hypotheses of a common origin, despite the fact that not all of them show regular sound correspondences. Throughout the history of Indo-European etymological research, these words have either been lumped together under a single etymon (e.g., IEW: 1179) or split into several different roots (Schrijver 1998; De Vaan 2000). The aim of this article is to clarify the inner-Indo-European relationships between these stems, as well as their relationship to similar ‘fox’-words in the Uralic languages. After discussing the evidence for PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ in Section 1, in Section 2 we examine potential Uralic, North Germanic, and Iberian borrowings from an Indo-Iranian descendant of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ-. In Section 3, we reconstruct PIE *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’ based on Latin, Lithuanian, Persian, and Albanian evidence. Finally, in Section 4 we discuss the derivational history of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and attempt to explain the ablaut preserved directly or indirectly in the branches of Indo-European.

Piotr Gąsiorowski on FB called it “A wonderful piece of etymological analysis!” and that’s all the recommendation I need.