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I’m about two-thirds of the way through Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf); it’s both a delight and a real slog to read — I keep switching between text, translation, Ostanin’s annotations, dictionaries, and computer to look up things that aren’t in any of the books — and after each chapter I take a break to read other stuff so I don’t get too frustrated to continue. I usually turn to Bunin, simply because I never get tired of reading him, and the other day I reread Худая трава, which I hadn’t really appreciated the first time around. Now I think it’s one of his best stories, and I want to talk about it a bit.

The first thing to notice is the title. The adjective худой can mean either ‘thin, skinny’ or ‘bad’; I have actually seen the title translated as “Thin Grass,” but that’s ridiculous — the phrase is from a proverb (used as an epigraph and quoted in the story) “Худая трава из поля вон” ‘Bad grass [should be taken] out of the field,’ and it clearly means ‘weed.’ On the other hand, it’s also ridiculous to translate the title “The Weed,” as Serge Kryzytski does in his The Works of Ivan Bunin ($154.00!), since the usual Russian for ‘weed’ is entirely different (сорняк or сорная трава) and “The Weed” sounds banal and boring. So “Bad Grass” it has to be.

Bunin called the story “my Ivan Ilyich,” and one can see why: both are long, detailed accounts of the slow death of a male protagonist, with emphasis on his reflections on his past. But the two stories could not be more different — Tolstoy, in his late avatar as Finger-Wagging Moralist, makes very clear who’s bad and who’s good, freely employing his beloved generalizations (“The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible”) and pointing out everyone’s hypocrisy as though it were a mortal sin. Bunin never moralized and certainly never thought that simple, ordinary lives were terrible; he wanted simply to present life and people as they were, in language as effective as he could make it, and he nearly always succeeded. In this story he is describing the final months of the old farmworker Averky (no surname is provided), who after decades of hard labor feels his end approaching and decides to go home and be with his family (who he hasn’t seen much of over the years). He feels himself indifferent to the concerns of those about him, doesn’t find their jokes funny, and when a drunken itinerant pilgrim (странник) he used to dislike shows up and starts being obnoxious, he thinks “Не хуже меня, такого-то” ‘He’s no worse than me.’ He hears girls singing an old wedding song in the distance and remembers hearing it the night he met his wife as she was scooping water from a river at dusk (the passage in the Russian text linked above starts at “Ай помочь?”):
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Reading The Recognitions (see this post) involves encountering a whole lot of allusions, and one of them was to a Saint Olalla. Wanting to make sure I was pronouncing that right (/oˈlayə/, in Americanized form), I looked it up and discovered it was a by-form of Eulalia, which made sense. But then I noticed that the Galician form was Baia, which didn’t: “O nome Baia (Olalla) é a evolución galega do nome culto Eulalia do grego Ευλαλια.” Can anyone explain how you get Baia from Eulalia?

I just discovered the Lessico Etimologico Italiano, a splendidly done etymological dictionary of Italian. Unfortunately it’s only up to the letter E, and given the rate at which these projects progress it may not be finished in my lifetime, but what’s there is so good it’s worth bookmarking and playing around in. There’s an alphabetical list of words and phrases on the left, and clicking on one brings up the page (pdf) on which it’s treated. I clicked on “ecce homo” and found a two-and-a-half-column entry beginning with the literal “immagine di Cristo sofferente” and going on to the much more productive “persona malridotta, diforme,” with all sorts of dialectal developments I won’t try to copy here (combinations of accents on top and dots beneath are too much trouble for me to deal with, though I imagine it’s possible to reproduce them). Unfortunately, I can’t seem to link to a particular page; trying to open one in a separate tab and then copying the URL (my usual hack in such situations) doesn’t work. But take a look for yourself and enjoy the thoroughness and the very attractive layout.

…but parents still don’t want kids hearing it, according to Mark Brown’s Guardian piece on a recent survey:

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) published a report on Thursday into attitudes towards swearing and whether people want a more liberal approach in media content.

It includes a survey of 1,000 people that found:

• Six in 10 people say strong language, such as the F word, is part of their daily lives.

• About a third of people say they use strong language more than they did five years ago. The figure is slightly higher for women (32%) than men (27%).

• There is a generation divide when it comes to swearing with 46% of generation Zs – people born after 1996 – saying they frequently use strong language. That compares with 12% for people aged 55-64.

• Asked about swearing in public, 65% of over-55s say they would never do it; for 18-24-year-olds the figure is 25%.

• Most parents don’t want their kids hearing them swear with only one in five admitting they are comfortable using strong language in the home.

The research also asked whether parents would accept more frequent use of strong and very strong – eg the C word – language in content classified in the 12 category. The response to that was no.

That “12% for people aged 55-64” sounds like straight-up lying to me, but what do I know, I’m not a Brit. In any case, the link has discussion of TV shows and films (“for a U-rated film such as Monsters Inc, ‘look at the big jerk’ will be as strong as it gets,” but Bohemian Rhapsody includes the immortal phrase “Freddie fucking Mercury”). Thanks, Trevor!

As I anticipate my birthday curry, I’ll post about the goodies I’ve received. Since it’s my seventieth, people have been especially generous; here are the books I’ve gotten so far:

Dictionary of Advanced Russian Usage, 2nd Edition: A Guide to Idiom, Colloquialisms, Slang and More (English-Russian, Russian-English) by Michael Kayser; as I told Lizok (to whom I bragged about it), Kayser is very idiosyncratic, and I wouldn’t let an inexperienced learner/translator near this book, but if you have a good background it’s invaluable — he includes all sorts of stuff nobody else would think of, and many entries make you both think and chuckle.

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova — the Russian edition came in at #1 in Polka’s list of the 100 most important Russian books of the 21st century, and the translation by Sasha Dugdale (done in collaboration with the author: “I’ve benefited from Maria Stepanova’s highly literary understanding of English and English-language culture, and the generosity and freedom she gave me to recreate her brilliant work in a new poetic language”) is supposed to be excellent. I’m very excited to read it.

Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray — I’ve been wanting to read this for years.

Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford — I’ve long wanted a good biography of my favorite composer.

My brother gave me two collections of sf stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu and Exhalation by the great Ted Chiang, as well as the intriguing-looking The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars; he also gave me two movies, the 1950 Losey noir The Prowler and the much-lauded Minari (I look forward to hearing the Korean). From person or persons unknown, I got in the mail a very welcome gift of The Second Marxian Invasion: The Fiction of the Strugatsky Brothers by Stephen W. Potts — many thanks, whoever you are! And I treated myself to the DVD set of the first season of In Treatment, which I’ve heard great things about. Even the hot, steamy weather has let up; the high dropped from the 90s to the 70s. It’s been a good day.

Stuart M McManus writes at Psyche about yet another of those remarkable cosmopolites who have been largely forgotten:

[…] I bet you’ve never heard of the Japanese-born Martinho Hara (原) (c1568-1629). This is a pity because not only did Hara’s life overlap with better-known Renaissance scholars such as Montaigne in France and Giordano Bruno in Italy, but he also shared many of their humanistic interests and standards. Perhaps the most surprising of these was that this Japanese Renaissance humanist was an accomplished Latin public speaker (or ‘orator’ to use the contemporary term). In other words, he was a Japanese echo of the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), the Renaissance’s ‘poster boy’ whose speeches were widely imitated by diplomats, preachers and professors from the late 14th century onwards.

How did this happen? Born close to the thriving Luso-Japanese port of Nagasaki in Southern Japan, Hara studied with the Jesuits who had founded colleges across Asia and Latin America. This was facilitated by Iberian (ie, Spanish and Portuguese) mercantile and imperial expansion, which simultaneously ravaged the world’s coastlines and created new opportunities for cultural interactions on a global scale. In the Jesuit college in Nagasaki (as well as in the colleges of Mexico City, Puebla, Guadalajara, Lima, Manila, Goa, Macau, etc), students followed a typical Renaissance curriculum, including classical rhetoric: the rules for structuring and ornamenting speeches that had been key to elite education at Athens and Rome and were later revived in the Renaissance. […]

Hara delivered his Latin oration in 1588 in the chapel of St Paul’s College in Goa during a stop-off in India on his return journey from the Tensho Embassy to Rome. In his speech, which was pronounced in a space that evoked antiquity with its Corinthian columns and gate reminiscent of a Roman triumphal arch, this Japanese Cicero thanked the head of the Jesuit mission in Asia, Alessandro Valignano, praising him as a new Alexander the Great, conquering Asia for Christ. As an epideictic oration (ie, a speech focused on either praise or blame, and commonly used in Roman imperial rituals), this was meant not just to celebrate its subject. Rather, it aimed to exhort its listeners to follow in Hara’s footsteps in spreading Christianity and countering its ‘enemies’ in Japan: Buddhism and Shintoism. […]

After its delivery, Hara’s rousing speech was printed by another Japanese student on a press brought from Europe. This was later taken to Macau and Nagasaki, where it was used to print Latin textbooks for use by aspiring Chinese and Japanese priests. Clearly then, the Latin books, Ciceronian orations and classicising architecture that we associate with the Renaissance were found not just in famous European centres, such as Florence, Venice and Paris. Rather, the Renaissance was a widespread, almost global movement initially carried beyond Europe by Spanish and Portuguese expansion in Asia and the Americas.

There’s much more at the link, e.g. Jesuit sermons in Chinese and Manuel Micheltorena’s 1844 oration to celebrate Mexican Independence; you can see McManus give a 20-minute talk about Hara at Gakushuin Women’s College here. (I assumed Hara must have had a Japanese given name besides the Portuguese Martinho, but if he did, Japanese Wikipedia doesn’t know it.) Thanks, Jack!

I recently ran across the term “cat’s eye” and (since it clearly did not refer to a cat) was puzzled; looking it up, I discovered that “A cat’s eye or road stud is a retroreflective safety device used in road marking and was the first of a range of raised pavement markers.” The Wikipedia article has this history:

The inventor of cat’s eyes was Percy Shaw of Boothtown, Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. When the tram-lines were removed in the nearby suburb of Ambler Thorn, he realised that he had been using the polished steel rails to navigate at night. The name “cat’s eye” comes from Shaw’s inspiration for the device: the eyeshine reflecting from the eyes of a cat. In 1934, he patented his invention (patents Nos. 436,290 and 457,536), and on 15 March 1935, founded Reflecting Roadstuds Limited in Halifax to manufacture the items. The name Catseye is their trademark. […]

The blackouts of World War II (1939–1945) and the shuttered car headlights then in use demonstrated the value of Shaw’s invention and helped popularise their mass use in the UK. After the war, they received firm backing from a Ministry of Transport committee led by James Callaghan and Sir Arthur Young. Eventually, their use spread all over the world.

All over the world… except in the US: “The closest equivalent in the United States is the Stimsonite retroreflective raised pavement marker. Stimsonite markers are made out of plastic, not metal, and were first invented in 1963.” I guess this is one of those transatlantic differences, but one I’d never learned about. Are any of my US readers familiar with the term, and am I correct in thinking it’s well known to those in the UK?

A decade ago I posted about Chinese typewriters; now I’m happy to pass along Thomas S. Mullaney’s Fast Company article about the woman who helped demonstrate and publicize IBM’s 1947 electric Chinese typewriter, invented by Kao Chung-Chin. Yes, you read that right, 1947. Mullaney tells a riveting tale about how he contacted Lew and got her life story (which is in itself an amazing trajectory) and about how the thing worked (you can see a clip of it in action); I’ll just quote this paragraph about the outcome of the team’s initially triumphal visit to China:

In the end, however, it was geopolitics that would kill Kao’s project. “The Communist takeover in China was well underway at the time,” a 1964 retrospective article explained, “and was completed before the typewriter had a chance to achieve significant sales in an understandably nervous Chinese market.” Not only did Mao’s victory in mainland China push IBM’s anxieties to the breaking point, it also threw Kao’s national identity into turmoil. He became a man without a country, being issued a special Diplomatic “Red” Visa by the United States. The IBM Chinese Typewriter never made it to market, leaving the challenge of electrifying—and eventually computerizing—the Chinese language to later inventors in the second half of the twentieth-century (a topic I’ve written about elsewhere, including in a forthcoming book on MIT Press called, unsurprisingly enough, The Chinese Computer).

Thanks, Bathrobe!

I recently heard the word habitat and thought “That sounds like a Latin verb, but that can’t be right, can it?” After all, debit and credit look like Latin verbs too, but it’s just appearance: they’re both French forms of Latin nouns with the ending chopped off, as is normal for French. But I looked up habitat and found that it is indeed what it looks like; OED:

Etymology: < Latin habitat, 3rd person singular present tense of habitāre, literally ‘it inhabits’, in Floras or Faunas, written in Latin, introducing the natural place of growth or occurrence of a species. Hence, taken as the technical term for this.

As you can probably tell from the style of that etymology, it hasn’t been updated since 1898, but other sources tell the same story, e.g. AHD: “Latin, it dwells, third person sing. present of habitāre, to dwell.” Here are the first two OED citations:

[1762 W. Hudson Flora Anglica 70 Common Primrose—Habitat in sylvis sepibus et ericetis ubique.]
1796 W. Withering Arrangem. Brit. Plants (ed. 3) Dict. Terms 62 Habitatio, the natural place of growth of a plant in its wild state. This is now generally expressed by the word Habitat.

I get that they were used to seeing it in such Latin contexts as the 1762 citation, but I would have thought Latinity was ubiquitous enough in the 18th century (among the educated word-coining classes, obviously) that it wouldn’t have occurred to them to treat it as a noun. Why not habitation?

I’ve quoted Gary Saul Morson a lot here; I’m doing it again, I’ll do so in the future, and I make no apologies — he’s one of the few writers on literature and culture who pretty much always gets it right, and this interview from the NYRB newsletter is worth quoting in extenso (the introduction includes this striking bit of backstory: “Born in the Bronx, Morson had initially planned to study French, but due to a blizzard he arrived late for his entrance exam and failed it, leading him to take Russian instead”):

Andrew Katzenstein: In an introduction to Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, you wrote that “Russians are all possibility,” owing to their proclivity “for absorbing others’ culture, for extremes, and for sudden transformations.” This national disposition seems to result from a tension between the country’s indigenous culture and Western influence—a tension that runs throughout Russian history and literature. How has it played out in the work of the writers you’ve discussed in the Review?

Gary Saul Morson: By brute force, Peter the Great utterly transformed Russia almost overnight. Noblemen had to learn Western values, shave their beards, bring women out of seclusion, and copy Western manners, and so they had a strong sense of play-acting and impostorship. Customs that had taken centuries to evolve in Western countries and were natural there seemed arbitrary to Russians. They had a strong sense that things could be otherwise because they had recently been so.

High culture itself seemed like a foreign import. Millennia of Western thinkers and writers were absorbed simultaneously, so that, let us say, Sophocles, Dante, and Descartes entered Russia together and seemed like contemporaries who argued directly with one another. This telescoping of cultural history created a sense of urgency, and of the presentness of the distant past, that is absent in the West.

Because of a strong sense of the utter conventionality of genres, the Russian tradition became one of metaliterature. Tolstoy famously said that War and Peace belongs to no recognized genre, and that makes it quintessentially Russian since “not a single work of Russian literature, from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House” conforms to Western norms of genre. It is hardly surprising that the Russian Formalists developed a theory of literature centering on what they called “baring the device.”

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