languagehat.com

I’m rereading Mandelstam’s 1933 Путешествие в Армению (Journey to Armenia) in preparation for reading Andrei Bitov’s 1969 Уроки Армении (Lessons of Armenia), and I keep the Clarence Brown translation handy in case of emergency (Mandelstam’s prose is not easy reading). Just now I got to the fourth section, Сухум (Sukhumi), which opens with a passage on the local language:

В начале апреля я приехал в Сухум — город траура, табака и душистых растительных масел. Отсюда следует начинать изучение азбуки Кавказа — здесь каждое слово начинается на “а”. Язык абхазцев мощен и полногласен, но изобилует верхне- и нижнегортанными слитными звуками, затрудняющими произношение; можно сказать, что он вырывается из гортани, заросшей волосами.

Боюсь, еще не родился добрый медведь Балу, который обучит меня, как мальчика Маугли из джунгей Киплинга, прекрасному языку “апсны” — хотя в отдаленном будущем академии для изучения группы кавказских языков рисуются мне разбросанными по всему земному шару.

My translation:

At the start of April I arrived in Sukhumi, a city of mourning, tobacco, and fragrant vegetable oils. This is where one should begin the study of the alphabets of the Caucasus — every word here begins with “a.” The language of the Abkhazians is mighty and full-voweled, but it abounds in fused sounds of the upper and lower larynx, making pronunciation more difficult; you could say that it is ripped out of a larynx covered with hairs.

I’m afraid the kindly bear Baloo has not yet been born who would teach me, like the boy Mowgli from Kipling’s jungle, the lovely language of “Apsny” [Abkhaz Аԥсны ‘Abkhazia’] — although in the distant future I foresee academies for the study of the Caucasian languages scattered over the entire globe.

When I looked at Brown’s translation, I discovered that the poor guy, not knowing what to make of “апсны,” had identified it with апчхи [apchkhi], the Russian conventional representation of sneezing, and translated the phrase as “the splendid language of ‘ahchoo.’” I, an aficionado of languages and endonyms, knew immediately what апсны was, but you have to pity Brown in the mid-1960s with no knowledge of Abkhaz and no search engines — how was he to know what the devil it meant?

I recently made another swerve back to the late nineteenth century and read Tolstoy’s Крейцерова соната (The Kreutzer Sonata); I wasn’t expecting great things from it, but it was very famous and I thought “How bad can late Tolstoy fiction be?” It came between The Death of Ivan Ilich and Hadji-Murat, after all. Turns out the answer is “very bad indeed.” It’s basically a long rant by the wife-killer Pozdnyshev, going on and on about how so-called love is just lust and it’s evil and marriage is just prostitution by another name (a respectable feminist position, of course, which has led some feminists to praise the story) and God wants us all to be chaste and blah blah blah. He’s a nineteenth-century Russian Howard Beale. Aside from the tediousness of it all, it’s just sad to see the flexible, lively style of Tolstoy’s great novels fall so low, his carefully calculated repetitions turn into a brutal, thudding, deadening drumbeat that makes you want to skip as badly as the Second Appendix. I can see why its message was newsworthy, but I don’t understand how anyone could think it was a good story.

Fortunately, I followed it up with a work I had no expectations of (and don’t remember having heard of), Chekhov’s Моя жизнь (My Life). It’s one of his longest stories, almost a hundred pages in my edition (the 1956 Complete Works), but it’s nowhere near as famous as short stories like “The Lady with the Little Dog.” I can understand why — it’s hard to summarize, and you don’t end it with that Maupassantesque feeling of narrative satisfaction — but I think it’s one of his best, and unlike anything else I’ve read of his. It’s narrated by Misail Poloznev, a twentysomething scapegrace who refuses to do the kind of high-class work his architect father expects of him (the story opens with him getting fired from yet another job) and yearns to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, to be one with the common people of Russia. But he’s not one of those Turgenev or Dostoevsky characters, the young ideologues who make fools of themselves trying to “go to the people” — his resistance is not political, it’s a gut reaction to the hypocrisy, cruelty, and ugliness he sees all around him in the bourgeois society he grew up in (it’s set in a provincial city much like Chekhov’s hometown of Taganrog). He finally cuts his ties with polite society, goes to work as a laborer for a house-painter and contractor, marries a woman who shares his views, and for a while feels deep satisfaction.
[Read more…]

Anne-Wil Harzing’s 2017 white paper “The mystery of the phantom reference” describes an annoying phenomenon:

Through my work with Publish or Perish I get in touch with many academics who are doing bibliometric work, oftentimes as a “research hobby”. In one of these exchanges, Pieter Kroonenberg, a Dutch emeritus professor in Statistics, told me about an interesting puzzle he had come across. When looking at the author guidelines for an Elsevier journal that he intended to submit to he noticed the following reference:

•   Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J.A.J., Lupton, R.A., 2000. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci. Commun. 163 (2) 51-59. [The journal name can also be found with its full title Journal of Science Communications]

He was intrigued to see that one of his former colleagues Prof. John van de Geer had a “hidden side”, publishing about the art of academic writing in addition to his work on experimental psychology and multivariate analysis. But, wait a minute…, this reference referred to Van der Geer instead of Van de Geer. Still…, the paper looked interesting so he ventured to look it up. However, despite strenuous efforts he was unable to find it. An (Italian) journal with a similar name did exist, but its full name was Journal of Science Communication rather than Communications and it had only started in 2002. Looking at the original reference again, it did strike him as a little odd for a journal to have published 163 volumes in a discipline that normally equates volumes to years. Moreover, the second author seemed to have only ever published this particular article, which obviously is rather strange for someone writing about the art of writing a scientific article.

To cut a long story short, the article appeared to be completely made up and did not in fact exist. It was a “phantom reference” that had been created merely to illustrate Elsevier’s desired reference format. Even so, Pieter found that in the Web of Science there were nearly 400 articles citing this non-existing reference and many more citing articles appeared in the more comprehensive Google Scholar. The fact that academics don’t always take the necessary care in their referencing behaviour is something that is not unfamiliar to me. Early on in my career, I even wrote an article about this: Are referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? But even so, how could authors cite a publication that didn’t in fact exist?

I’ll let you read the details at the link; here’s Harzing’s conclusion:
[Read more…]

I enjoyed Charlie Smith’s “On Translating the chinari” (the чинари, stress on the final syllable, were a group of nonconformist writers whose best-known members were Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky) for its own sake, but what drove me to post was his link to Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Art of Translation” (New Republic, August 4, 1941), which includes the following amusing demolition of incompetence and stupidity:

The howlers included in the first category [“obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge”] may be in their turn divided into two classes. Insufficient acquaintance with the foreign language involved may transform a commonplace expression into some remarkable statement that the real author never intended to make. “Bien être general” becomes the manly assertion that “it is good to be a general”; to which gallant general a French translator of “Hamlet” has been known to pass the caviar. Likewise, in a German edition of Chekhov, a certain teacher, as soon as he enters the classroom, is made to become engrossed in “his newspaper,” which prompted a pompous reviewer to comment on the sad condition of public instruction in pre-Soviet Russia. But the real Chekhov was simply referring to the classroom “journal” which a teacher would open to check lessons, marks and absentees. And inversely, innocent words in an English novel such as “first night” and “public house” have become in a Russian translation “nuptial night” and “a brothel.” These simple examples suffice. They are ridiculous and jarring, but they contain no pernicious purpose; and more often than not the garbled sentence still makes some sense in the original context.

The other class of blunders in the first category includes a more sophisticated kind of mistake, one which is caused by an attack of linguistic Daltonism suddenly blinding the translator. Whether attracted by the far-fetched when the obvious was at hand (What does an Eskimo prefer to eat—ice cream or tallow? Ice cream), or whether unconsciously basing his rendering on some false meaning which repeated readings have imprinted on his mind, he manages to distort in an unexpected and sometimes quite brilliant way the most honest word or the tamest metaphor. I knew a very conscientious poet who in wrestling with the translation of a much tortured text rendered “is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” in such a manner as to convey an impression of pale moonlight. He did this by taking for granted that “sickle” referred to the form of the new moon. And a national sense of humor, set into motion by the likeness between the Russian words meaning “arc” and “onion,” led a German professor to translate “a bend of the shore” (in a Pushkin fairy tale) by “the Onion Sea.”

The second, and much more serious, sin of leaving out tricky passages is still excusable when the translator is baffled by them himself; but how contemptible is the smug person who, although quite understanding the sense, fears it might stump a dunce or debauch a dauphin! Instead of blissfully nestling in the arms of the great writer, he keeps worrying about the little reader playing in a corner with something dangerous or unclean. Perhaps the most charming example of Victorian modesty that has ever come my way was in an early English translation of “Anna Karenina.” Vronsky had asked Anna what was the matter with her. “I am beremenna” (the translator’s italics), replied Anna, making the foreign reader wonder what strange and awful Oriental disease that was; all because the translator thought that “I am pregnant” might shock some pure soul, and that a good idea would be to leave the Russian just as it stood.

The “Pushkin fairy tale” is Ruslan and Lyudmila, which begins У лукоморья дуб зеленый ‘By a cove a green oak,’ where лукоморья ‘cove’ includes the root of лука ‘bend (in road or river),’ Nabokov’s “arc,” which could be mistaken for лук ‘onion(s).’ I have to say that I no longer enjoy Nabokov’s mandarin, de-haut-en-bas style as I did when I was a pompous would-be-mandarin youth; it now seems to me an attempt to bully the reader into submission with a sneering assumption of omniscience, something that came natural to the scion of a fabulously rich aristocratic family. He knew a lot, but he didn’t know as much as he thought he did, and other people weren’t as stupid as he thought they were. Pull down thy vanity, as another great writer once said.

cormullion’s blog has a deep dive into the history of the asterisk which is lots of fun (and educational too!):

The asterisk has a long history. The first appearance of this simple mark was probably on a cave wall somewhere, but we like to assign inventions to known individuals, so the inventor of the asterisk was: Aristarchus of Samothrace, in about 200 BCE.

I was disappointed that this wasn’t the other Aristarchus, Aristarchus of Samos, the famous mathematician with an interest in astronomy, because ἀστερίσκος means “little star”. The man from Samothrace howrver was a librarian, scholar, critic, and proofreader, who liked to make numerous marks (*) [marginal note: * Like this.] in the margin of texts and manuscripts, like notes, queries, and critical comments.

If you have a long memory or are into typography, you may be thinking “Isn’t there a Keith Hou­s­ton post about this?” There is, but:

Keith Hou­s­ton’s excellent book Shady Characters covers the history of most of the punctuation marks in great detail. But his chapter on the asterisk concentrates entirely on the asterisk’s use as a footnote indicator, and ends more or less here.

There’s a great deal about multiplication at the link, as well as glorious illustrations.

Oliver Morgan writes at OUPblog about an interesting problem of covid-era communication, when “more than three people try to chat informally via Zoom”:

The kind of interaction that would be relatively straightforward in person becomes torturously difficult. Everything takes longer. Everything requires more effort. Without careful attention to what linguists call “turn-taking,” things quickly descend into chaos.

Why this should be the case is not immediately obvious. If we can hear and see our interlocutors, if the connection is good and the lag minimal, why is it so much harder to string together rapid sequences of talk? The best way to answer that question is to turn it on its head. Properly understood, even the simplest conversation is an astonishing feat of interpersonal coordination. The remarkable thing is not that turn-taking so frequently goes wrong on Zoom, but that it ever goes right at all.

It is an observable fact that speakers are able to coordinate transitions between turns at talk to within a fraction of a second. Average response time in conversation is around 200 milliseconds. This is surprising because language production is comparatively slow—some 600 milliseconds from conception to articulation, even for a single word. Somehow the other participants appear to know in advance exactly when the current speaker will stop, what she will have said when she does so, and which of them should speak next.

To explain how this is possible, conversation analysts have come up with an awkwardly-named but brilliantly useful concept. A “transition-relevance place” is any point at which the current speaker might plausibly have finished. The end of a sentence, obviously, or some other less emphatic point of syntactical completion. But also, potentially, the punchline of a joke—or even just the moment, part way through a turn, at which the sense of the whole becomes clear. Two things matter about transition relevance places. The first is that they are projectable: it is possible to hear them coming. The second is that they are optional: the occurrence of a transition-relevance place does not necessitate a change of speaker any more than the occurrence of an exit necessitates that I come off the motorway. As the exit approaches, the possibility of my coming off becomes relevant (hence the name) but I can still choose not to take it.

A single turn may thus contain a series of transition-relevance places at which no transition occurs. Unlike a letter, or a WhatsApp message, the turn at talk is telescopic. Its length is the product of a fragile process of incremental expansion that might have stopped when it didn’t and needn’t have stopped when it did. And clustered around these potential stopping points is a series of micro-negotiations about whether this next exit is the one we will finally take. It is possible, of course, to make such things explicit: “I’ll stop there and hand over to Mike.” Most of the time, however, the exchange of turns is negotiated in ways that are largely subconscious. Intonation, gaze-direction, gesture, and facial expression, all play a part. An intake of breath or a tilt of the head can be enough to suggest that a new speaker is ready to launch. A glance upward can be enough to show that the current speaker is not yet done.

What Zoom does is to filter out much of this layer of subconscious communication. We cannot tell who anyone else is looking at, nor sense the tiny adjustments of body and face that would ordinarily help us to coordinate the exchange of turns. If you combine that with even a tiny lag, the whole exquisitely calibrated system begins malfunction.

I find that extraordinarily interesting. (We discussed “turn-taking” back in 2016.)

I had thought of waiting for an obituary to link to, but several people have already sent me e-mails about it today, and I can’t bring myself to post filler while this is all I can think about, so I’ll just go ahead and share the bare news: Jeremy Hawker, known in these parts as AJP Crown, died suddenly on Monday. I don’t know any details yet, but he’d had heart trouble for a long time. He was a longstanding and much-loved part of this community, and it’s a heavy blow; my deepest condolences go out to his wife Dyveke and daughter Alma, as I’m sure yours do as well. He was a wonderfully good-hearted and generous person, and I can’t believe there won’t be any more comments or e-mails from him. I’ll add more details when they’re available. Hvil i fred, old friend.

Addendum. I just had a good talk with Dyveke, and she told me (and said I could write about it here) that Jeremy died Monday morning in front of his computer (apparently instantaneously, of a massive heart attack), in the midst of composing a comment at LH (for the thread about Jesus’ language). She said this site meant a huge amount to him; his diabetes kept him from getting around much, and it was a perfect way for him to interact with people who said interesting things and appreciated him. We regretted that we’d never gotten to meet, and she mentioned the Hatters who had visited them in Norway — Trond and marie-lucie and Siganus, I think. As she said, they got to know Jeremy’s voice as well. Lucky them.

Update. Dyveke sent me an image of the notice she placed in the newspaper Aftenposten, which reads:

Jeremy Nicholas Hawker
Died suddenly 5.10.2020
Born 8.6.1953

Without you all streets would be one way — the other way
Adrian Henri (1967)
Without you

Ann E. Hawker – mother
Alma M. S. Hawker – daughter
Dyveke Sanne – wife
Friends and family

A planting ceremony will take place in our garden on Jeremy’s birthday.

If you send her (at dsanne@broadpark.no) the name of a plant, wild or tame, they can plant it in their garden in your name that day.

I’ve finally finished reading Венедикт Ерофеев: посторонний (Venedikt Erofeev: The outsider) by Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky, which is seemingly (and amazingly) the first biography of one of the most famous Russian writers of the last half-century. It took me longer than it might have because it’s a tough read — not on account of the writing, which is excellent, but because the story is such a sad one, especially towards the end. Most biographies of writers follow a predictable pattern: early attempts, first sales, growing mastery, acquaintance with other writers and cultural figures, fame, prizes, etc.; they tend to get boring in the latter parts because they feature dinner parties and arguments with publishers. This is very different; it’s at least as much the story of a drunk as of a writer, and the writer is known, essentially, for only one book. If Erofeev hadn’t written Moskva-Petushki (my review), no one but his friends would remember him, and there would be no biography. There’s nothing wrong with that — Cervantes, Proust, and Ellison are in much the same position — but it creates an overbalance of the life (which consisted mostly of quitting schools, getting fired from jobs, and endless drinking) at the expense of the works. The authors deal with the problem in part by interspersing chapters about the life with (brilliant, convincing) analytical chapters about the novel, but finally they run out of novel and there is nothing left but a slog towards an early grave; the sudden fame and recognition at the end of the 1980s came too late for him to get much enjoyment from them (the throat cancer that killed him was already forcing him to speak through a mechanical apparatus), and the brutally indifferent Soviet government refused to let him go abroad for treatment just as it had Blok almost six decades earlier.

That gives too bleak a picture; it’s what’s foremost in my mind, because I just finished reading it, but the book is full of good things, notably quotes from pretty much everyone who ever crossed his path. Here’s one from Sergei Ivanov, plucked pretty much at random:

«В 1973-м на филфаке МГУ самиздатную рукопись дал почитать однокурсник Андрей Зорин. В обмен на „Николая Николаевича“ Алешковского. Помню, в момент обмена (на „Большом Сачке“) подошла Наташа Нусинова и полюбопытствовала: „Что это у вас?“ На что Зорин одними губами произнес: „Forbidden!“»

“In 1973 at the philological faculty of Moscow State University my classmate Andrei Zorin gave me a samizdat manuscript [of Moskva-Petushki] to read, in exchange for Aleshkovsky’s Nikolai Nikolaevich [see this post]. I remember that at the moment of the exchange (at the ‘Big Goof-off’ [a place on the first floor of the First Humanitarian Building of the university where students hung out]) Natasha Nusinova came up and asked curiously ‘What’s that you’ve got?’ To which Zorin responded, just moving his lips, ‘Forbidden!’ [in English].”

Those few sentences give a vivid image of a certain aspect of student life at the time. I wish there was any prospect of a translation, but I’m afraid Erofeev is too little known in English-speaking lands; if Bykov’s superb biography of Pasternak hasn’t gotten one, this is probably a lost cause. But if you read Russian, it’s well worth your time.
[Read more…]

Eiichi Miyashiro writes for the Asahi Shimbun:

A manuscript of commentaries about Confucianism written apparently between the sixth and early seventh centuries in China was confirmed in Japan, a discovery one scholar described as “invaluable.” It is believed to be one of the oldest of any religious teaching written on paper, except for those of Buddhist scriptures, found in the country.

Researchers at Keio University and other institutions say the writing is also most likely the oldest among manuscripts of commentaries on the Confucian Analects that have been handed down at temples, shrines or homes. […] The manuscript is a compilation of commentaries, known as Lunyu Yishu (the elucidation of the meaning of the Confucian Analects), put together by Huang Kan, a Confucian scholar of Liang (502-557), during the Northern and Southern dynasties period. All manuscripts of Lunyu Yishu had been lost in China by around the 12th century, according to experts. […]

Researchers consider the books on the commentaries as part of the Confucian Analects in a broad sense. The manuscript discovered in Japan is expected to provide scholars with significant clues into the history of exchanges between Japan and China in philosophy and other realms. […] Based on the shape of the characters, the team concluded that the manuscript was most likely written between the Northern and Southern dynasties period and the Sui Dynasty (581-618). They also believe it was brought to Japan through Japanese missions sent to the Sui Dynasty and Tang Dynasty (618-907) in China. […]

Until the recent discovery, the world’s oldest manuscript of the Confucian Analects originated from the Song Dynasty between the end of the 12th century and early 13th century. The oldest one in Japan dated back to the latter part of the Kamakura Period (1185-1333).

It’s nice to know such things are still coming to light.

Jonathan Morse sent me Marcia Lynx Qualey’s Aljazeera roundup of newly translated medieval Arabic cookbooks; cookery, of course, is not an LH concern as such, but there’s some interesting stuff here:

In her introduction to Treasure Trove, [Nawal] Nasrallah tells us that meals would often begin with an array of small dishes that arrived on a beautiful large tray, called “sukurdan”. The word, she writes, is thought to be a combination of the Arabic ” sukr”, or “imbibing alcoholic drinks”, and the Persian “dan”, or “vessel”. […]

Nasrallah is a fan of sweet-and-sour pickled fennel, and has adapted a recipe on her website. She added over email that, “One of the reasons for the popularity of pickles, or ‘mukhallalat’ as they were called, was that they were believed to arouse the appetite and facilitate the digestion of dense foods.”

Hummus is one of those Thousand and One Nights-like dishes that has travelled widely in space and time. Versions appear in the 13th-century Scents and Flavors, and in, Winning the Beloved’s Heart with Delectable Dishes and Perfumes, by Aleppan historian Ibn al-‘Adeem (d. 1262), which has not yet appeared in English translation. Many hummus dishes also appear in the 14th-century Treasure Trove.

Yet after that, according to Nasrallah, there is a long period when hummus disappears from cookbooks. When it reappears in 1885, in, The Master Chef’s Culinary Memento for Housewives, by Lebanese author Khaleel Sarkees, the recipe uses ingredients we associate with contemporary hummus: chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, and tahini. And by the time “Hummus bi Tahina” appears in its first print cookbook in Iraq in 1946, the English-language, Recipes from Baghdad, it calls for tinned chickpeas, tinned lemon juice, and a tin of “crushed sesame”. […]

One of the wonderful aspects of medieval Arabic cookbooks are the titles of the individual recipes. There are three recipes for a dessert called “ma’muniyyah”. One is subtitled “The first recipe”, while the next is “The second recipe, better than the first”, and the third is “The third recipe, which is better than the second”. […]

“It is good manners to use toothpicks,” Treasure Trove informs us. “One needs to clean the teeth and remove the tiny pieces of meat between them. If meat stays in the mouth it rots, especially the solid particles.” People of all social strata were encouraged to avoid such a situation. The common folk could make “khilal ma’muni”, or toothpicks from esparto grass stems, while middle-class people could use Egyptian willow twigs for picking their teeth.

Thanks, Jonathan!