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Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the greatest Italian directors; everybody loves his The Conformist (Il conformista), but nobody seems to care about The Spider’s Stratagem (Strategia del ragno), which he made immediately afterwards and which blew me away when I saw it in New York decades ago. Last October, irritated by its unavailability on DVD/Blu-ray, I finally gave in and rented it from Prime Video and was as impressed as before. It’s about a guy who returns to the fictional town of Tara, where his father was killed in 1936, and tries to untangle what happened; what’s important for our purposes is that there’s a scene almost a minute long in which two townspeople have an animated discussion in Emilian (the subtitle says “Emilian dialect”), which of course excited me. I haven’t posted about it because I recorded the passage on my phone and kept hoping I’d be able to decipher enough to quote at least a phrase or two, but it’s defeated me, so I mention it in the hope that someone out there will have access to a screenplay in Italian or some other source that reproduces what the guys are saying.

The Italian Wikipedia article Lingua emiliana says:

L’unico film interamente girato in una varietà emiliana è L’uomo che verrà (2009) di Giorgio Diritti, che fa ricorso al dialetto bolognese nella sua versione originale. L’amministrazione comunale di Piacenza, con un finanziamento della Regione Emilia-Romagna, ha invece prodotto I strass e la seda (2020), la prima serie web in emiliano, i cui attori si esprimono in diversi dialetti del Piacentino.

(Note the almost meaningless “invece,” which Italians toss into sentences as if adding salt to pasta water; I complained about Ann Goldstein’s translating it as “instead” here.) I think they should at least mention the Bertolucci, surely the most prominent showcase that form of Italian has had. And it may be worth mentioning that The Spider’s Stratagem is based on “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” [Tema del traidor y del héroe] by Borges.

I’ve long been a fan of Roger Ebert’s film criticism, so how could I resist “The Thinking Molecules of Titan”? Chaz Ebert (his widow) introduces it thus:

In honor of World UFO Day we are reprinting Roger’s unfinished science fiction story about a phenomenon on Saturn’s moon, Titan. In 2013, I invited readers to write an ending to Roger’s tale and we got so many good ones that I asked our Far Flung Correspondent Krishna Shenoi to illustrate all of the finalists. They are also being reprinted today in a separate Table of Contents on this website. Please note that the version of Roger’s short story printed below is slightly altered in that it contains a couple of sentences added from a second version he wrote.

I know lots of Hatters are sf fans and will appreciate both the story and the artist’s rendering of the “cover of Amazing Stories from the Gernsback era” mentioned therein; furthermore, the central question of what kind of pattern might be coming from Titan resonates with the themes used by Peter Watts in his novels Blindsight (see this post) and Echopraxia (which bulbul gave me and which I am reading with great enjoyment now). What is communication, anyway? Something to ponder.

Oh, and here’s an amusing bit:

“An act of God,” said Alex, needling Regan. He knew Regan was a Unitarian and so would both reject God and maintain an open mind in the subject.

I thought I’d quote a bit from the chapter on Russian (pp. 281-98) in How Literatures Begin (see this post), by Michael Wachtel:

Histories of Russian literature invariably begin with the medieval period. However, this period can be understood as the beginning of the Russian literary tradition only if literature is defined in the narrowest sense, as any word that is committed to paper—or, more precisely, to parchment. Even within this limited definition, it would be difficult to argue for the medieval period as the beginning of Russian literature because the language used was not Russian, but rather what is now called “Old Church Slavonic” or—depending on one’s linguistics and politics—even “Old Bulgarian.” The creation of an alphabet can be dated to the ninth century. It was the work of Cyril (hence the word “Cyrillic”) and Methodius, two monks who sought to translate holy texts from Byzantine Greek into a language that could be understood by the Slavs in Moravia. Whether Cyril and Methodius were of Greek or Slavic origin is disputed, but to call them Russian would be anachronistic, since the concept of Russia as a distinct location or even ethnicity did not exist at the time. […]

The existence of a written language was essential for disseminating holy writ. Over the next few hundred years, numerous texts were produced in this “church” language, almost all of which were translations of the Gospels and the liturgy, the only texts familiar to most believers in the early centuries of Slavic Christianity. Precise numbers are revealing: only twenty of the fifteen hundred surviving parchment manuscripts from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries are not concerned with religion. Once again, there is a thorny issue of nomenclature in regard to the language used in these texts. As Alexander Schenker notes: “Depending on the local political situation the terms Old Russian, Old Ukrainian, and Old Belarussian have been applied to essentially the same body of texts.” Regardless of what we call this language, it must be emphasized that the range of texts it produced was extremely limited. While Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium (much like Christian culture in the West) was steeped in the traditions of antiquity, Kiev’s approach to Orthodoxy was narrow and pragmatic. In the words of D. S. Mirsky: “The study of rhetoric, dialectics and poetry, of the Trivium and Quadrivium, of all the ‘humaniora,’ never penetrated into South Slavia, Georgia or Russia, and only those forms of literary art were adopted which were considered necessary for the working of the national Church.”

The few literate people in the Slavic lands were primarily engaged in copying religious texts. There was no tradition of exegesis, nor was it encouraged. To the extent it was deemed necessary, interpretation of the holy texts was borrowed from preexisting Byzantine sermons. In this regard, it is worth noting that well into the eighteenth century, literacy in Russia was acquired by painstakingly working through sacred texts and committing them to memory. As Victor Zhivov writes: “The basic means of learning language was reading ‘po skladam’ (‘by syllables’). The procedure was strictly regimented and considered sacred. It began and ended with prayer and was seen as a kind of introduction to Christian life. The special importance of correct and comprehensible reading was conditioned by the fact that the failure to follow the rules of reading could, from the point of view of Eastern Slavic bookmen, lead to heretical error.” […]

Perhaps the most Hattically interesting passage is this (pp. 292 ff.):
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Nick Nicholas has been reporting at Facebook on his latest visit to his ancestral haunts in Crete (he lives in Australia and has been featured at LH many times, first in 2005), and this post expresses a particular form of linguistic distress I don’t recall seeing mentioned before:

There’s a melancholy in this visit, that wasn’t there the last couple of times. I had bits of it in Athens, and it’s been crystallised with a different trigger here in Sitia.

Through my thirties and forties, I’d come here and try to fit in, and be saddened when I realised that I wasn’t embraced as fully as I’d expect, that I didn’t fit in. People were not arseholes about it: this isn’t Italy or Ireland, where those who stayed behind have come to sneer at their diaspora. But there was always that recognition, five or ten minutes into a chat, that I wasn’t from these parts; or people that already knew me from online, addressing me as Nick and not Nikos. That hurt, the hurt of being left outside.

A couple of years ago, I made the decision not to try and fit it in. That turned out to work in my favour, because this country in the meantime has globalised enough, that I had more points of contact with Zoomer Greeks if I did not try so ha[r]d to be Greek the way I recalled and constructed, from Boomer Greeks.

It’s worked all too well. This time around in Athens, I didn’t feel reassured by all the English code-switching and American trends: I felt alienated. My construct of Greekness was itself now out of place in my environment. I had that feeling I increasingly have back home, to my persistent surprise, of being a fossil.

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I’ll start the new year off with one of my favorite things (e.g.), writing in praise of books — to wit, Ed Simon’s Literary Hub essay Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania:

Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.

In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.

Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus. From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.

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A couple of words that struck me while rummaging through my new Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (see this post):

1) trough ‘a long shallow often V-shaped receptacle for the drinking water or feed of domestic animals’: pronunciations ˈtrȯf, ˈtrȯth, by bakers often ˈtrō. It never would have occurred to me that it was anything but the first (/trɔf/); has anybody heard the others?

2) jerrican ‘a narrow flat-sided container for liquids usually holding about five U.S. gallons (about 19 liters)’: etymology Jerry + can; from its German design. Who knew?

And a very happy new year to all those who follow the Gregorian calendar!

I’ve read a fair amount about the so-called Reading Wars over the years, but nothing as convincing as David Owen’s New Yorker article in the latest issue (archived). It starts:

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.

Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.

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I just watched Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert again; every time I see it I find new things in it, and this time I scooped up plenty of Hattic material. As it happens, the movie itself is available on YouTube (for the moment) and the published screenplay is at Internet Archive; in what follows I will provide [minute:second] timings and follow each line in Spanish with the translations in the subtitles and then the screenplay.

The first bit that made me think “I’ll have to post this” comes shortly after Simon heals the man whose hands had been severed (and who immediately uses them to slap his daughter for asking questions):

Con estas entelequias nos hemos entretenido demasiado. [8:17]
We’ve spent long enough on these spiritual shenanigans.
We have spent too much time on these revelations.

The Spanish usage made me quiver with delight, because entelequia is one of those words whose literal definition — in this case, entelechy — is so recherché it’s known to almost nobody, but which in Spanish has developed the colloquial sense (per my trusty Harper Collins dictionary) ‘pipe dream, pie in the sky’; both the movie translations are inadequate, but at least “spiritual shenanigans” shows some awareness of the meaning, while “revelations” sounds like sheer guesswork.

Much later, Simon is delivering a sermon from his pillar, and he says:

No cedamos en la ascesis, tendámosla como un arco. [20:35]
Let us not yield in our asceticism. Let us spread it like an arc.
We shall not rest from our sacrifice. We shall span it like a bridge

Both translations have completely misunderstood the word arco; “tendámosla como un arco” means ‘let us draw it like a bow.’

Immediately after that, Brother Trifón, a monk possessed by the devil, starts spewing blasphemies; at one point he curses Christ “y su madre putativa.” [24:21] I don’t think I’d realized before that this is a pun on “y su puta madre” ‘and his whore of a mother’; the subtitler renders it literally as “and his so-called mother,” while the screenplay ignores the pun and has “and his whore of a mother.” Trifón then goes into a hilarious rant in which his blasphemies get more and more recondite, and the monks have increasing trouble figuring out how to respond:
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Trevor Joyce, the generous and inquisitive Irish poet so frequently seen around here as a source of Hattic items, writes as follows: “I’m sifting through some files of research on family history, and came across this, which drew my attention for its boozy air. The anecdote is obviously the thing, but when I went googling, expecting to find very many instances, I found myself flooded with BMX bikes, but divil the cocktail of this name.” Here’s the thing itself, quoted from the Boston Globe of June 11, 1893:

UNDER THE ROSE

Considerable curiosity has been aroused as to the exact nature of the beverage alluded to in Dr Frank Harris’ editorial of last Sunday, to wit, the “Frogtown racer.” None of the wine clerks seems to be familiar with it. Happening to meet the doctor, I ventured to ask him for the recipe. He said that the beverage was invented, or at least exploited, by that bohemian of medicine and literature, the late Dr Robert Dwyer Joyce, who consumed. according to his own account, two gallons of the “racer” while endeavoring to get Deirdre down from the tower into which he had put her in the course of his construction of the poem of that name.

The recipe indicates that the Frogtown racer is a very light whisky punch made with soda, into which a teaspoonful of maraschino is put and on top of this is carefully laid a “lemon float,” that is, a thin section of the fruit cut at the middle of the lemon. On this is gently poured a little port wine.

The effect is to make a drink of delicate flavor and presenting alternate zones of amber, yellow and purple whose relations, owing to the difference in specific gravity, are maintained during its consumption. This drink was a favorite not only of the doctor, but of the late Edgar Parker and many others of the Papyrus at a time when the club coat was a tradition.

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Per Vjosa Isai, reporting from Toronto for the NY Times, “Canadian Linguists Rise Up Against the Letter ‘S’” (archived):

Canadian linguists and editors are not pleased.

Words using British spellings have suddenly appeared in documents published by the Canadian government.

Gone was the “ize” construction standard in Canadian English in favor of the “ise” spelling used in British English. So “emphasize” became “emphasise,” and “trade liberalization” became “trade liberalisation.”

“At first we thought it was an aberration,” said John Chew, the editor of a forthcoming Canadian English dictionary being produced with the help of the Society for Canadian English. But the examples continued to pile up, both in a recent news release and, perhaps more notably, the federal budget […] Hundreds of words were spelled the British way: “de-industrialisation,” “amortisation,” “catalyse,” “digitalisation” and so on.

The choice undermines Canadian English, a group of linguists and editors said in an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney this month. They noted that the English adopted by Canada has been used by the federal government for half a century.

I could have gone with the similar story from CTV News, “Canadian English supporters urge Carney to abandon federal shift to British spelling,” but how could I resist the “Linguists Rise Up” hook? Thanks, Eric and Nick!