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JSTOR Daily has a post on the British soldier-poet Edward Thomas, killed in action in 1917; it consists mainly of scans of his poetry in MS form, which is interesting in its own right, but I was stopped by this passing observation: “In the army, Thomas wanted to hide from other soldiers the fact that he was writing poetry, so he wrote straight across the page, using commas to signal line breaks.” It reminded me of Dmitry Bykov’s point that when Valentin Kataev quoted poetry in his novelized memoirs, he did so without line breaks in order to partially efface the boundary between poetry and prose. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

I was reading Adam Leith Gollner’s GQ article “The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Jailbreak Artist” (and if you like jailbreak stories, this one’s a corker) when the following passage leaped out at me:

Investigators will later note that the prison staff seem completely stupefied. The descriptor employed by the ministry of justice in its subsequent audit is sidération, an archaic word that refers to the state of being “planet-struck.”

The noun may be archaic (it’s only in my very largest French-English dictionary, the Larousse Unabridged), but the related sidérer ‘to dumbfound, flummox’ and sidérant, which the Larousse defines as ‘staggering, amazing, stunning’ (“C’est sidérant! “it’s mind-blowing!”), are not; the Trésor de la langue française informatisé gives the etymology as “Empr. au lat.sideratio « action funeste des astres; insolation ».”

So much for French, but when I said sidération was in the big Larousse, I didn’t give the English equivalent provided there, which is sideration. I had been unaware of the existence of this word, for which the OED has the following entry (updated March 2016):
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I always assumed burnoose was from Arabic, and so it is: “From French burnous, from Arabic بُرْنُس‎ (burnus).” But where is that from? Aha:

Via some Aramaic form (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic בורס‎, Classical Syriac ܒܢܪܘܢܐ‎) from Byzantine Greek βίρρος (bírrhos), from Latin birrus, from Gaulish, from Proto-Celtic *birros (“short”). Doublet of بِرْنِيطَة‎ (birnīṭa).

(That last transcription should read birrīṭa; someone who can edit Wiktionary should fix it. Also, Proto-Celtic *birros gives Welsh byr ‘short,’ as DE will be the first to tell you.)

Anthony Ossa-Richardson, who sent me the link, said “now that’s a well travelled word,” and I can’t disagree.

Alison Killilea writes:

A number of weeks ago, I got it into my head to start translating Beowulf after my good friend and colleague, Victoria Koivisto-Kokko, mentioned something about editions. I remembered my eternal desire to produce one in Cork slang, and thought, sure jaysus why not, and alas, Boyo-wulf (name courtesy of Ciarán Kavanagh) was conceived.

While this is first and foremost a translation with a humorous intention, as someone who has studied translation theory and translations of Beowulf for four years, there is an element of seriousness to it. I am translating this from the Old English itself (generally using Klaeber’s edition for line numbers), and looking to R.D. Fulk’s and Kevin Kiernan’s editions for backup. […]

I have decided on a prose translation because, in short, it is quite loose in some places in order that it reflect the purity of the daycent Cork slang.

It begins:

C’mere to me! Well we’ve all heard of those pure daycent kings of the Spear-Danes from donkeys’ years, and how the mad yokes of princes did alright for themselves. Sure half the time Scyld Scefing was off among a rake of enemies, pulling the mead-seats out from under their arses, scaring the shit out of the boss-men, ever since he was found skint as a young fella.

He then found joy, good man himself, did just mighty beneath the heavens, lapped up fierce respect ’til all the bais across the whale-road had to obey him and cough up a bit of moola – That was some class king, like.

There’s another paragraph at the link, and more in later posts (ll. 53-85, ll. 371-389a); you can hear it read in genuine Corkonian “by the pure class feen Panda Terry” here. Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve started Kaverin’s 1928 Скандалист [The troublemaker], and I just got to a passage that made reading it worthwhile no matter what else it contains. The novel focuses on the academic world of 1920s Leningrad, and specifically on literary studies; what I hadn’t realized is that it also featured linguistics, and in this passage the character Dragomanov, based on Yevgeny Polivanov (who was eventually shot for opposing Marr) is lecturing on his theories of historical linguistics (the original can be found here — scroll down to “Уставившись на одного из слушателей”):

Fixing his indifferent gaze on one of his listeners, he began talking about the theory of a pan-European parent language. He had expounded it previously. Every “introduction to linguistics” culminated in that theory. From the time of Schlegel and Bopp, countless linguistic works had been built on the basis of that theory.

But he, Dragomanov, announced that day that, in all sincerity, he could not agree with it.

Suddenly starting to pronounce his r’s in the French way, he took chalk in hand and laid out his evidence.

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Just found this in the NYRB letters column (September 26, 2019 issue):

To the Editors:

James Gleick writes, in “Moon Fever” [NYR, August 15], “If it wasn’t for Sputnik, we wouldn’t have had ‘beatniks,’ ‘peaceniks,’ or ‘no-goodniks.’” He is mistaken. The OED shows that S.J. Perelman used “nogoodnick” in The New Yorker in 1936: “A parasite, a leech, a bloodsucker—altogether a five-star nogoodnick!” H.L. Mencken’s American Language (1919) has an entry for the general suffix “-nick”: “The suffix –nick, signifying agency, is…freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an offensive boaster…consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis.”

Ernest Davis
New York City

Now, that’s the kind of correction I like to see. (I find it hard to believe, however, that anyone but Mencken ever used “consumptionick.”)

Viktor Shklovsky said the word is not a shadow.

He wrote:

If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously – automatically. […] By means of this algebraic manner of thinking, objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes us, as if it were prepackaged.

For this reason he wanted enstrangement (остранение), to make the stone feel stony. He wanted fresh images, not ones that had been lying on the greengrocer’s table all day.

His book Третья фабрика [Third Factory] is a sort of autobiography: “The first factory was my family and school. The second was Opoyaz. And the third – is processing me now.” It’s full of fresh images — his book will be “dry as a cough,” enforced speech is a red toy elephant squeaking. One of the ongoing images is that of flax (Shklovsky worked at a flax center after returning to the Soviet Union and criticized Gorky for his inaccurate account of the subject in a novel); he compares writers to flax and says “Flax, if it had a voice, would shriek as it’s being processed.”

The first reference to flax is on p. 24 of the translation: “We are flax in the field.”

This seemed vague to me, limp, as if it had been lying on the table all day. I found the Russian original (pdf), and on p. 39 it said “Мы лен на стлище.” What was a стлище? It wasn’t in my dictionaries. But the internet told me: стлище is “место, где расстилают по траве лен или коноплю для приготовления его к дальнейшей обработке (для мочки под дождем или росой),” a place where flax or hemp is spread on the grass to prepare it for further processing, for being soaked in rain or dew. In other words, for retting. A стлище is a rettery. Both are unusual, not very pretty words that mean something very specific. They wake up the reader. Field is a common and pretty word that puts the reader to sleep.

The translator did a disservice. He sold me limp greens that were not what I wanted.

Donogoo-Tonka or the Miracles of Science: A Cinematographic Tale is a 1920 novel by Jules Romains (French edition); the complete review gives a nice summary:

A depressed Lamendin, complaining that his “soul is failing”, seeks the advice of a psychotherapist (and “suicide specialist”), whose proposed remedy leads Lamendin to professor Yves le Trouhadec, who has his own troubles. Le Trouhadec’s great ambition is to be named a member of the French Institute, but his election is in doubt, his rivals having spread the word that le Trouhadec’s study of the city of Donogoo-Tonka, in deepest Brazil, is all a fraud (as, in fact, it is).
Lamendin is inspired:

I could, from here, try to found the city of Donogoo-Tonka, since I believe I’ve understood that it doesn’t yet exist.

A staged film purporting to show the distant city, “a heavy-duty scientific lecture”, and soon enough even a prospectus for potential investors: the ruse becomes ever more convincing. So too does the investment-opportunity — helped by some cinematic-novelistic trickery:

The maid brings in the mail. The first envelope, when opened, lets out the prospectus for Donogoo-Tonka. The man skims it, without ceasing to eat his bread and butter. But watch how the twelve letters Donogoo-Tonka rise up, tear themselves free, escape from the paper and start scurrying, one after another, on the table, like a band of little mice.

The reality of Donogoo-Tonka poses something of a problem — there’s nothing to it, after all — yet all those rushing to it, and the capital involved, lead inevitably to the only solution: to create what was supposedly already there. A real Donogoo-Tonka rises on the imagined Donogoo-Tonka. It’s farcical, of course — and sensibly, then, it is decreed, when all is said and done, that: “The worship of Scientific Error is obligatory throughout” the territory.

I love the whole idea, I love the worship of Scientific Error, and I especially love the word Donogoo-Tonka. I discovered it because Viktor Shklovsky referred to it in his supposed recantation “Monument to a Scientific Error.” And I note its possible relevance to deepfake geography.

Anatoly Mariengof has been pretty much forgotten. To the extent he’s remembered at all, it’s as an imaginist poet and as a writer of memoirs, and then only because he was a close friend of Sergei Esenin, perhaps the most beloved poet of the early revolutionary years and an object of enduring fascination since his 1925 suicide. He gets wildly varying treatment in the standard English-language histories. Edward J. Brown’s excellent Russian Literature since the Revolution doesn’t mention him at all, A History of Russian Literature (see this post) simply names him as one of the imaginists, and The Cambridge History of Russian Literature does the same (confusingly calling them “imagists”) but adds that he “deliberately presented himself as a bohemian and clown.” Victor Terras’s A History of Russian Literature does better by him, giving him a whole paragraph that includes a brief description of his 1927 Novel without Lies (about his friendship with Esenin), and ends with the useful summary “Marienhof’s favorite genre was the lyric poema, his favorite persona the tragic clown, and his main themes the nightmare of the modern city and the chaos that was Russia in revolution”; Wolfgang Kasack’s Dictionary of Russian Literature Since 1917 gives him a substantial entry, with good accounts of his life, poetry, and plays. But none of them mention the book I just read with great enjoyment, his novel Циники [Cynics], whose 1973 translation by Valdemar D. Bell and Louis Coleman appears to be unavailable. Given its low profile, I probably wouldn’t have read it if Joseph Brodsky hadn’t called it one of the most innovative novels in Russian literature [одним из самых новаторских романов в русской литературе]. And he was right, and I’m here to tell you it should be much better known (and the translation should be reissued in paperback, or someone should commission another one — I have no idea how good the Bell/Coleman version is).

Those of you who remember I was working my way through the books of 1978 may wonder what I was doing reading a book from half a century earlier. As I mentioned here, I was reading Valentin Kataev’s Алмазный мой венец [My diamond crown] a couple of weeks ago (I wound up being a bit unhappy with it, because he ends up slandering Isaak Babel, who was not only a greater writer but who was tortured and killed by the regime while Kataev was climbing the ladder of Soviet success to the point that in old age he was living the good life and visiting Italy and Paris), and a large part of it is about his close friendship with Yuri Olesha, with frequent mentions of Olesha’s 1928 Три толстяка [The Three Fat Men], and I thought “Hey, I have that book and have long meant to read it, why don’t I read it?” So I did (I wasn’t thrilled — it was way too cartoon-revolution-for-kiddies), and then I noticed that the Mariengof book was published the same year, and I thought “Hey, I have that book and have long meant to read it, why don’t I read it?” So I did.
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Alex Foreman writes on Facebook that you’re not a real prescriptivist unless you believe that the past participle of choose should be corn. Quite right, but the very form “choose” is a despicable piece of illiteracy; the true heirs of Alfred the Great say I cheese in the present, I chess in the past, and I have corn when the participle is called for. And of course they use beech as the plural of book. If you do not do these things, stop whining at the rest of us for our lax usage.

Addendum. More FB Foreman:

A father and son arguing in a reconstruction of 15th century Eastern Norwegian. The father is rebuking his son for his lazy speech, including his merger of /θ/ with /t/

Þ-þ-þ-þak!