languagehat.com

Valentina Gosetti, who writes the “unapologetically multilingual blog” Transferre (“The idea is to encourage poetry in translation for the preservation and the promotion of minority languages”), has a post Alexander Blok in Dialèt Bresà that begins:

Here is another of my translations (or better, trapianti, transplantations) into Dialèt Bresà, my native dialect, a non-standard variety of Italo-Romance. This time I have taken up a new challenge: I have decided to translate a very well known Russian poem written by Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (188o –1921) in 1912, his very famous ‘Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека’.

A quick note on one of my lexical choices: for the Russian word ‘аптека’, which literally means ‘pharmacy’ or ‘drugstore’, here I have chosen the more general word ‘botéga’, meaning ‘shop’ in Dialèt Bresà. I have decided to do so because the sound of this word is very similar to its Russian counterpart, and, more importantly, the stress falls on the same syllable. This permitted me to imitate the rhythm of the original version, especially its widely known opening line.

I wonder if she realizes that аптека [apteka] and botéga are etymologically the same word (as is bodega), Latin apotheca ‘storehouse’? Here’s the Bresà version; I’ll send you to the link for the original and links to a couple of translations into English:

Nòt, viàl, lampiù, botéga,
En ciarùr stras e ‘nsensat.
Va avanti e vif amò vint agn –
L’è semper chèla. S’en va mia föra.

Te möret – e là töt che ricumincia amò
E töt che turna ‘ndré, come ‘na olta
Nòt – co’l sò crispì de giasöi söl canal,
Lampiù, botéga, viàl.

Her reference to the “widely known opening line” is so true that when Trevor Joyce sent me the link, I knew immediately what the Russian poem was simply from seeing the Bresà version of the line as the e-mail subject. Thanks, Trevor!

The Russian writer Ekaterina Vilmont (Екатерина Вильмонт, stress on the final syllable of the surname) has died at 75; she was the daughter of two well-known translators and became a translator herself and then a popular writer of romance novels and kids’ detective stories. I thought this passage from a memorial article by Aleksei Viktorov was striking enough to share (I’m translating from his Russian):

Ekaterina was fifteen when an editor brought her mother a literal version of a Chinese novel, asking her to make a literary translation from it. [This was standard Soviet practice — LH] Natalia Man [her mother] refused, but the editor kept trying to persuade her. While this was going on, Katya, just for the fun of it, translated several pages, which not only surprised her parents but made the editor incredibly happy. The final translation was considered extremely successful, and it was followed by new commissions. Soon the name of the young translator appeared on the covers of books as often as the names of her parents.

In the late 1990s she decided to try her hand at writing her own books, and her first novel, Путешествие оптимистки, или Все бабы дуры [An optimist’s journey, or All women are fools], was wildly successful, starting a new career off with a bang. This description of her working method is also of interest:

She never thought up the plot in advance; as she said, she never knew how the next page was going to end. The only rule she tried to stick to was that each book should end on a positive note. She didn’t otherwise restrict herself, but all her books turned out to be about love anyway, so they were called “women’s novels.” Vilmont herself didn’t like that allocation.

Via Lev Oborin’s indispensable weekly link roundup.

The Sifter is a multilingual historical database of cookbooks:

The Sifter is a public database, free to all users. It is a tool for finding and comparing historical and contemporary writing on food and food-related topics. It is overseen by an advisory board composed of members from The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery as well as other friends of food history. As with Wikipedia, the Sifter will be populated by its users. All entries will have an English translation, enabling users to search languages they cannot read. Soon, we will have over 100 languages represented. Registered users will be able to make corrections and add new information. Future releases will include a data visualization component. We also plan to include more resources linking to digitized photographs, artworks, television and film. With the aid of this tool, it is our hope that what has been invisible will come into focus.

You can read more about it at Reina Gattuso’s Atlas Obscura article:

Now, the public can enjoy the fruits of Wheaton’s 50 years of labor. In July 2020, Wheaton and a team of scholars, including two of her children, Joe Wheaton and Catherine Wheaton Saines, launched The Sifter. Part Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced database and part meticulous bibliography, The Sifter is a catalogue of more than a thousand years of European and U.S. cookbooks, from the medieval Latin De Re Culinaria, published in 800, to The Romance of Candy, a 1938 treatise on British sweets.

The Sifter isn’t a collection of recipes, or a repository of entire texts. Instead, it’s a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks. It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s. Search “peacock” and you’ll find the bird’s meat was sometimes eaten from the 1400s to the 1700s in courtly England. […]

The story of The Sifter’s genesis similarly reveals the connection between gender, labor, and prestige. When Wheaton got started as a culinary historian, as a young mother 60 years ago, “I couldn’t have a PhD, because there wasn’t a PhD in the field until we invented it,” she says. At the time, there was a split in the academy around the study of domestic labor, such as cooking. On one side, traditional historians—predominantly male—considered the history of food to be unimportant, even vulgar. “Food history has been a bit of an embarrassment to a lot of academics, because it involves women in the kitchen,” says Joe Wheaton, a professional sculptor and member of The Sifter’s advisory board.

I was just complaining to my wife about the wretched job dictionaries have done with food-related terms (none of my Russian dictionaries had the common dish жаренка, meat and potatoes fried with mushrooms). Thank goodness things are improving on that front, and I wish The Sifter every success!

A reader writes: “I thought that this fellow, Jeremy Fowler, deserves a little publicity. He and his little team have shepherded the Wîkîferheng into something great, far superior to the Wiktionaries of other languages with more speakers and the force of unitary nation-states behind them—a remarkable achievement for a language that has been oppressed and even outlawed for so long.” This brief article by Nasir Elî says:

Fowler has learned Kurdish for 10 years, but over the past eight months he has studied on a daily basis. He now lives and works in Duhok at Form Foundation and has begun to write an online Kurmanji dictionary for people who want to learn the most-spoken Kurdish dialect. Fowler’s family has even enrolled their daughter at a local Kurdish school.

“It is an honor to have a student coming from Britain and study Kurdish while most of our people want to learn English,” the principal of Zagros School, Zirak Mohammed, told Rudaw.

And here’s a longer piece about the dictionary in which Fowler seems to be going under the nom de plume Ibrahim Kocher:

Wikiferheng, a web-based free content dictionary, does not only include definitions for words in Kurdish but also includes idioms and proverbs commonly used in Kurdish as well as their meanings. “For example, I often say, ‘I am busier than the groom’s mother.’ This is a beautiful idiom, a colorful expression. If you search for that idiom on Wikiferheng, it will define the phrase,” Ibrahim tells Kurdistan 24. “The search will also provide the English variation of the idiom, such as, ‘I’m fighting fit,’ or, ‘I’m fit as a fiddle.’”

Ibrahim has made significant progress in creating an extensive database of definitions as well as idioms and proverbs in the past four years since his project began. He has also provided two platforms for the online dictionary: one through the web, and another through an app.

Congratulations to all involved!

A Literal Map of the United Kingdom (click to enlarge) does what the post title says, giving you the etymological meaning of the county names — Cornwall is “People of the horn,” Hampshire is “Hamlet by the water meadow” (gazing at Ophelia’s drowned body, no doubt). Thanks, JC!

I can’t remember another author with whom I’ve had such a fraught relationship as Andrei Bitov. He was one of the Soviet writers I had never read but for whom I had an anticipatory respect because of what I’d read about them; others were Olesha, Trifonov, Rasputin, and Sokolov. All four of the latter have fully justified that respect (I’ve written posts on them at LH), but Bitov has been a mixed bag. I greatly enjoyed his early short story «Большой шар» [The big balloon], about a little girl who falls in love with a red balloon and against all odds brings it safely home, but his later, longer stories featured an evidently autobiographical protagonist and, as I wrote here, they began to irritate me:

I soon got fed up with his single-minded solipsism. It seemed like every story was about a boy or young man who had an obsessive love for an older woman who showed him amused tolerance, and had endless scenes of the hero walking around (preferably at night) meditating bitterly on his sufferings.

But, as I said there, I reread «Жизнь в ветреную погоду» [Life in Windy Weather] and appreciated it considerably more, and I approached his most famous work, the 1978 novel «Пушкинский дом» [Pushkin House], with great anticipation — it had, after all, been called a “sumptuous masterpiece” and compared to Nabokov. But I found it increasingly hard to get through, and I’m not sure how the fault is to be apportioned between me and the author.

[Read more…]

Ian Austen’s NY Times obit starts off in lively fashion:

In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.

But until Oxford University Press hired Katherine Barber as the founding editor of its Canadian dictionary in 1991, there was no authoritative reference work to decode contemporary Canadian words and meanings. (That sentence describes a man on a sofa in a studio apartment wearing only underwear while expanding his beer belly with a jelly doughnut and a squat brown beer bottle.)

Austen goes on to describe Barber’s work on the dictionary:

Before Ms. Barber was hired to assemble a team to create the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, there had been no research-based attempt at codifying the country’s form of the English language to create a general-use dictionary. At that time, Canadian dictionaries were minimally adapted versions of American or British texts.

The group consulted dictionaries of regional Canadian dialects as well as specialized dictionaries like “A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles,” a scholarly collection published in 1967 that traced Canadian English back to its origins but did not include Canadian pronunciations, Canadian spellings of words common to most varieties of English, or many words that were then contemporary.

To hunt for Canadian entries and the distinct Canadian meanings of words, Ms. Barber partly relied on a technique long used by Oxford. She assembled a small army of freelance “readers,” who pored over catalogs, newspapers, magazines and almost anything else they could find for distinctive Canadian words. Ms. Barber always traveled with a notebook to record words on posters and signs that struck her as possibly Canadian. […]

[Read more…]

Mitch Anzuoni’s heartwarming story of fan translation (see this post for another):

Usually, a Google Sheet is the site of bureaucratic misery and numbing digits; the exact sort of place you wouldn’t want to find yourself on a weekend night. Yet there I was: five hundred rows deep, carefully entering Japanese text I had extracted from the decompiled source code of a twenty-four-year-old .exe file. With me was a cadre of volunteers from around the world offering possible translations nearly as fast as I was pasting in characters. “能力 – skill level,” someone commented. “Ability,” wrote another. 好きな本 was decided as “favorite book”; 耐震工事, “seismic retrofitting.”

These are but a few choice elements of 本屋物語, a bookstore simulator created by the Japanese videogame developer Kairosoft in 1997 (the title translates literally as “Bookstore Story,” or more poetically, “BookStory”). I came across the game recently while searching for book-related sims. While sims (videogames that simulate activities) have been enjoying a genre renaissance lately, there’s still a decided lack of book-related titles, and so I was delighted to discover BookStory, with its charming yesteryear graphics and nostalgic UI elements.

Eager to share my discovery, I tweeted “Someone absolutely needs to translate this Japanese used book store simulator from 1997” with a link to the freeware download on Kairosoft’s site. Some retro gaming accounts picked up the tweet and suddenly I had the attention of several thousand newly minted BookStory fans who also yearned to play this beguiling game. […]

[Read more…]

Garen Torikian writes for Electric Literature about how he came to translate from Armenian:

I had the great privilege of growing up in a house with several floor-to-ceiling shelves bursting with books. So far as I remember, they were largely ornamental, but I have a hard time believing that they went unread: my parents were not the hoarding type. One day, shortly after graduating college, stuck at home and with nothing else to do, I began to really look at the books for the first time. Non-fiction bestsellers like I’m OK—You’re OK sat next to memoirs owned by every Armenian household, like Black Dog of Fate. Tucked between such books, I came across Gostav Zarian’s The Traveller & His Road, published in Armenian in 1926 and translated by Ara Baliozian in 1981.

It has a truly wretched cover—forest green ink on a plain beige backdrop—and I would’ve reshelved it had I not read Baliozian’s introduction:

Next we find [Zarian] in Istanbul, which was then the most important cultural center of the Armenian diaspora, where in 1914, together with Daniel Varoujan, Hagop Oshagan, Kegham Parseghian, and a number of others, he founded the literary periodical Mehian. This constellation of young firebrands became known as the Mehian writers, and like their contemporaries in Europe—the French surrealists, Italian futurists, and German expressionists—they defied the establishment fighting against ossified traditions and preparing the way for the new.

Until that moment, the idea that an Armenian literary tradition existed had never crossed my mind. Students of literature have all but memorized the various networks of influence between different writers and artists, but whoever has not achieved sufficient popularity remains the other on the outside. I became very excited at the idea of Zarian’s literary works running alongside the rest of the 20th-century canon. On top of that, he had learned how to wield the language he had forgotten at the age of 25 while living in Europe. I held in my hands an irrefutable testament that the obstacle of one’s diasporic status could be overcome. […] After reading The Traveller & His Road, I acquired all of Baliozian’s translations; after exhausting the list, I became a literary translator myself. […]

[Read more…]

The European Review of Books has a kind of busy website for a sedate old codger like me (LH is well into its second decade of unchanged minimalism), but I like this mission statement:

Great essays can resonate in more than one voice. The ERB seizes a linguistic paradox: the ubiquity of English can animate the multilingual. Global English – a post-American English, a low common denominator – lets a magazine reach beyond, al di là di, ötesinde, jenseits. Pieces written in Greek or Arabic or Italian or Polish or Dutch – or, or, or – will be available in English and in the original. A good essay, after all, is something you want to read twice.

(If you’re wondering, ötesinde is Turkish; it’s based on öte, for which Wiktionary gives no etymology.) And this is only their “campaign website”; they say here:

The full ERB will comprise three book-length print issues per year, and online pieces every week. […] We will prioritize the essay, that cocktail of aspiration and humility, and we want writers—old, young, aspiring—who will flourish in that open form. Every good essay is a pilgrimage to somewhere or other. But we’ll reach beyond the essay, too: poem, travelogue, rant, parody. Anecdotes, interviews, profiles, afterthoughts. The ERB will be multilingual, but how to make multilingualism beautiful and alive? It’s a thrilling design riddle.

Check ’em out.