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I’m reading Michael Hofmann’s NYRB review (Dec. 20, 2018) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (it’s not very favorable, first complaining about the book’s length and exclusion of some excellent poems, then proceeding to rubbish the translations), and I thought I’d canvass the German-speaking Hatters about this passage:

Brecht has a knack of writing ordinary German and meaning it that makes him extraordinarily difficult to translate—maybe (surprisingly) the hardest of all the twentieth-century Germans. Of Rilke the similes survive, even if they baffle as they dazzle; of Trakl something gaudy and barbarous; of Celan the twist of an opaque pain; of Benn the human Mutter. In Brecht, simple words (kalt, fahl, früh, böse) and plain statements are asked to bear an awful lot of weight. The great poem “An die Nachgeborenen,” written in 1938, a confession of inadequacy to coming generations, has a stanza that goes:

Die Kräfte waren gering. Das Ziel
Lag in großer Ferne
Es war deutlich sichtbar, wenn auch für mich
Kaum zu erreichen.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Not one word sticks out, sounds pretentious or hollow, even though the plural Erden is archaic. Abstraction and concreteness, the personal and impersonal, are held in exquisite balance. The whole thing has a gravity and stateliness of centuries. The stanza, in Tom Kuhn’s English version, “To those born after,” goes:

Our powers were feeble. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible even if, for me
Hardly attainable.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

Here, there’s just one odd- or offsounding word after another: “powers” (what powers be these? magic powers? dark powers? height of his powers?), “feeble,” “goal” (though perhaps the fault is with the article), “thus” (always a little high-smelling in English), “granted.” The poem, which in German sounds universal, sounds in English equivocal, vague, even a little coquettish. […] The Manheim/Willett translation (it’s. unsigned, and hence collaborative) goes:

Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance.
It was clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

This seems preferable to me all over. A lot of translating is the avoiding of weakness, or the needless display of weakness; hence no “the goal” and no “thus”; the active construction in the middle with the emphatic “I myself” followed by the (very English!) understatement of “was unlikely” is cleverly done; and “time” and “given” are better than the more portentous “days” and “Granted.” The last line has altogether more force and purpose.

(I don’t understand his objection to “the goal,” but we all have our idiosyncratic preferences.) I find it odd that he ignores the translation by H.R. Hays, which I have in the ancient but handy (and bilingual) Selected Poems:

Men’s strength was little. The goal
Lay far in the distance,
Easy to see if for me
Scarcely attainable.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

That’s my favorite of the bunch. Incidentally, Hays was a poet himself, and a good one; you can see some of his work in this affectionate reminiscence by Sandy McIntosh (“The Assassins” is particularly Brechtian), and here’s an interview (shortly before his death) by Jonathan Cohen — I was struck by this passage about Dudley Fitts’ 1942 Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry:

Did you work with Fitts on this project?

I never worked with Dudley Fitts. I was hired to do all the biographies in the back of the book, which I did. I took part in some of the translating — I did a poem of Neruda’s — but Fitts was such a schoolmaster: he docked everybody 50¢ for every mistake. Now really, isn’t that childish? It was an “omnibus” anthology all right. Somebody once said that Fitts included everybody in Latin America who had ever written a poem!

Childish indeed! (Incidentally, it saddens me that Hays doesn’t have his own Wikipedia article; he was certainly more notable than some of these people.)

Sara Goudarzi, a Brooklyn writer, has a wonderful NY Times piece called We All Speak a Language That Will Go Extinct that starts with a striking anecdote:

“We can’t play tennis because you don’t have a net.”

I was standing on a quiet, suburban street in Bristol, Conn., when Eric, the boy next door, said that to me. Two rackets in hand, I felt my face ablaze. Then anger spread through my slight 10-year-old frame and my mouth erupted.

“I don’t have net?” I yelled. “I don’t have net?” I repeated for effect. “You don’t have net. Your father doesn’t have net. Your mom doesn’t have net,” I continued, bombarding him with what I thought were insults. I wanted to hit him where it hurt — his family — a common tactic among my people, Iranians. I just had to make my playmate understand that I had plenty of net.

Eric was dumbfounded. He confessed that indeed, he and his family had neither a tennis court nor a net, but he seemed unable to make sense of my reaction to this shortcoming.

For reasons I still don’t understand, as a new arrival to the United States, armed with a limited palette of English words, I had presumed that “net” meant “manners.” Eric didn’t want to play with me because I lacked good manners. It was only after I stormed back into the house that my brother, who had been breathing American air for close to a decade, explained where I had gone wrong.

She goes on to talk about language and culture, and continues:

By the time I reached early adulthood, English had become my dominant language and made a sprawling home in my brain, forcing Farsi into a tiny corner, so much so it worried me at times. To lose that connection, or have it weaken, felt devastating. But as it turns out, a language doesn’t just slip out of your mind. In fact, in a 2014 study, researchers found that our mother tongue creates neural patterns on our infant brains that stay with us even if we don’t use the language. […]

[Read more…]

Now that I’m back to the twentieth century in my reading of Russian literature, I’ve reached the year 1970 (and it occurs to me that I began studying Russian right at that time, in 1969-70, which gives me an odd feeling, as if I’m retrospectively catching up to the contemporary literature of the day). That has given me the chance to experience two famous authors I’ve been looking forward to: Chingiz Aitmatov, whose 1980 novel И дольше века длится день (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years) has fascinated me since I first read about it, and Valentin Rasputin, whose most famous work is the 1976 Прощание с Матёрой (Farewell to Matyora). They both published short novels in 1970, and I began with Aitmatov’s Белый пароход (The White Steamship). Alas, I found it almost unreadable, and gave up after fifty pages — it’s written in the sort of sing-songy, repetitious, faux-naïf style that drives me up the wall:

The boy loved to talk with himself. But this time instead of himself he talked to the schoolbag: “Don’t listen to him, Grandfather isn’t like that. He’s not clever at all, and that’s why they laugh at him. Because he’s not clever at all. He’ll take you and me to school. You don’t know where the school is yet? It’s not so far. I’ll show you. We’ll look at it with the binoculars from Karaulnaya hill. And I’ll show you my white steamship. Only first we’ll run to the shed. That’s where I hide my binoculars. I’m supposed to watch over the calf, but every time I run to look at the white steamship.”

Etcetera. I am reminded of Dorothy Parker’s immortal review of A.A. Milne: “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.” I will still give The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years a shot when I get to 1980, hoping that he will have developed a more adult style by then, but I no longer have that first keen anticipation.

So I moved on to Rasputin’s Последний срок, which was translated as Borrowed Time (I’ll get to the literal meaning of the title later). I was immediately drawn in; Rasputin begins with the aged Anna, the focus of his story, taking to her bed in anticipation of death and her son Mikhail (the only one of her children to have stayed in the village) sending telegrams to his brothers and sisters telling them to come, and then develops the consequences. The weepy Varvara, the standoffish city girl Lyusya, and the older brother Ilya arrive promptly, but Tanya, who lives in far-off Kiev, keeps not showing up, and this provides the main narrative tension of the novel. (Note to aspiring novelists: you don’t need ticking time bombs to provide tension.) The brothers buy a great deal of vodka in anticipation of the funeral and the need to provide food and drink for all the villagers, but when Anna doesn’t die right away, they start drinking it themselves (in the makeshift bathhouse, so as not to disturb their mother); Lyusya wanders off to get away from it all, climbs uphill to a remembered bird-cherry bush, and unexpectedly finds herself immersed in long-suppressed childhood memories from the hungry postwar period (a horse collapsed under her but her mother managed to get it back on its feet and keep it alive; a Vlasovite soldier escaped from a prison camp and tried to rape her). There is a tremendously effective account of a drunken binge (it reminded me of Malcolm Lowry’s devastating Under the Volcano), and the description of Anna’s preparations for death is poetic and convincing — at one point she moves from a memory of stepping into the river to try to keep sight of her son being taken off as a draftee to a much earlier memory of her feeling ecstatically free by the riverside as a still unmarried girl. After I finished and started looking for material about the book, I discovered that Kevin Windle, in his introduction to Money for Maria and Borrowed Time: Two Village Tales (Quartet Books, 1981), wrote:

In an interview in September 1976 Rasputin stated that his favourite writers were Dostoevsky and Ivan Bunin, a novelist and memoirist who spent most of his life in exile, but who has found favour with Soviet readers since the fifties. In a later interview, in answer to a question about the role of the writer, Rasputin quoted the words of Lev Tolstoi: “An artist is an artist only because he sees things not as he wishes to see them, but as they are.” […] Rasputin’s predilection for Dostoevsky and Bunin, however, seems to have less to do with matters of philosophy than with themes and technique. He confesses his admiration for Bunin as a stylist, and it may be that he is also drawn to Bunin as a meticulous memoirist, for Bunin, throughout his years in Paris, never forgot his youth in rural Russia, and wrote with penetrating accuracy about a way of life which was passing.

Dostoevsky and Bunin — what a great pair of influences! I’m as impressed with Rasputin as Soviet readers of the day were (the novel made him famous), and I’m very much looking forward to his later work.

Oh, and that title: it’s literally untranslatable. Russian срок [srok] is one of those maddening words which seems straightforward in its own language but which becomes slippery when you try to render it in English; my Oxford dictionary has “1. time, period, term; […] 2. date, term,” with various phrases to show you particular uses, such as крайний срок ‘closing date’ and срок аренды ‘term of lease,’ but when it comes to последний срок you’re at sea. The phrase occurs twice in the novel:

Старуха понимала, что Таньчора может приехать только сегодня, что это последний срок, который ей отпущен […]
The old woman understood that Tanchora [her nickname for Tanya] could come only today, that this was the final srok allotted to her […]

Но сегодня был последний срок: если до темноты Таньчора не приедет, значит, нечего больше и надеяться.
But today was the final srok: if Tanchora didn’t come before darkness, it meant there was no more hope.

In the first sentence you could say “this was the final time allotted to her” and in the second “today was the last chance,” but I don’t see how to use the same rendition in both contexts, and I don’t think you can make it work as a title. I think Borrowed Time is a good solution, since that’s what Anna is living on and it gives a similar sense of finality. And while I’m on the topic of language, the book is full of fine Siberian dialect words and colloquial expressions; apart from its novelistic essence, powerful and moving, it was a constant pleasure to read. I’m planning to do so again, and I recommend it to all and sundry; I haven’t seen the translation, but the review I found made it sound decent. I’m glad to have found another favorite author.

Back in 2015 I posted about Lameen Souag’s comparison of Berber and Korandjé, the language of Tabelbala, an oasis village in western Algeria; now he’s given a talk in the SOAS Linguistics Seminar Series, online here, about the odd situation of a Songhay language so far from the rest of the family, with details of its borrowings from Berber and Arabic and much else. It’s absolutely fascinating — I haven’t finished watching it yet, I have to keep stopping to read the slides carefully and think about them — and I wanted to share it here for those who don’t follow him on Facebook.

We’ve discussed the French of Québec before, but mostly in the context of its colorful swearing (tabarnak!); here are a couple of links about the language as a whole:

How to speak French like a Quebecker is an amusing introduction to the topic by the author of Le québécois en 10 leçons, with sample sentences and explanations:

J’peux-tu t’aider, mon gars?

This -tu may sound like the pronoun “you” but it’s actually a question particle, similar to the Mandarin ma, the Esperanto ĉu or the Japanese ka, except that it follows a subject-verb group. Note that mec is never used in Québec: we only use gars. […]

Pis, t’aimes-tu mon char? Si t’as frette, dis-moé-lé, gêne-toé pas!

In this sentence, pis is the equivalent of so, or alors. It can also replace et. In Québec, auto is much more common than voiture, and informally, people say char. Frette means froid. As you can see, the order of words in the imperative form is different (dis-moi-le instead of dis-le-moi), moi and toi are often pronounced moé and toé, and the object pronoun -le can be pronounced -lé. Since Québécois doesn’t use ne, the pronoun doesn’t move before the verb in gêne-toé pas.

And OffQc | Québécois French Guide (For lovers of French + diehard fans of all things québécois!) has been inactive since 2017, but there are 1,200 entries for your learning pleasure. Thanks, Ryan!

I was looking up a Russian particle I wasn’t sure of when I stumbled on William H. Girvan’s Russian Handbook of Spoken Usage, a marvelous analysis of the subtleties of usage which turns out to be available at HathiTrust (apparently only in the US — sorry!). As an example, here’s his entry for но [no] on p. 251 (not the word for ‘but’; I’ve changed his underlines to bold):

НО (as interjection)
1. Но, но, но, …! = Во, во, во…! = Вот, вот, вот…!
–А куда делись ребята?
–Она зашла за ними.
–Но, но, но, теперь ясно!
  –But where have the kids gone?
  –She stopped by and picked them up.
  –Oh yeah, right, now I see!
2. Used when urging or prohibiting, with a suggestion of threatening.
Но! Но! Чего перестали? Толкайте!
  Come on. Come on! What did you stop for? Push!
Но- Но! Это мне не нравится.
  Now watch it! I don’t like that.
3. Used in questions when reacting with surprise and doubt to what has just been said.
Н-н-о-о-о?
  Wha-a-at?

And then I discovered it was part of a whole HathiTrust Online Books Page (Browsing subject area: Russian language) with a whole slew of books on just about every aspect of Russian!

And here are two links readers sent me:

Живы ли русские диалекты? [Are Russian dialects alive?] by Igor Isaev; Dmitry Pruss said “I liked the narration a lot.”

Я послал тебе бересту… [I sent you a birch bark…] by V. L. Yanin; Steven Lubman said:

Came upon a great book about Novgorod birch bark manuscripts. It has an excellent afterword by Zaliznyak about the Novgorod dialect – apparently it didn’t go through the second palatalization process which practically makes it a unique separate Slavic language!

Thanks to both of you!

Addendum. Avva discusses the entry for но; he finds the first and third senses odd and asks his readers if they’re familiar with them. (He thinks the book in general is excellent, so he’s readier to suppose it’s his own ignorance rather than Girvan’s error.)

From Twenty Years Before the Mast, by Charles Erskine (via Far Outliers):

The following Monday I went to work at painting ships and steamboats for an old Portuguese, by the name of Desimees, in Algiers, a town situated on the opposite side of the river. A party of five, one an old shipmate of mine, hired a small shanty and kept bachelor’s hall. We employed an old colored woman as housekeeper. On Saturdays we used to quit work early and go across the river to New Orleans and purchase our weekly supply of provisions. Although there was a United States mint in the city, there were at this time no cents in circulation. The smallest pieces of money were a five-cent piece, and a picayune, — six and a quarter cents, — and a Spanish coin called fourpence. It used to confuse Jack before the mast very much, that in Boston it was six shillings to the dollar, and in New York eight; that an eighth of a dollar, or twelve and a half cents, should be called ninepence in Boston, a shilling in New York, a long bit in New Orleans, and a levy in the Western States.

“Jack,” of course, is Jack Tar.

Anna Elena Torres writes for In geveb about her seminar “Yiddish Poetics of the Border”:

This past spring, I taught a new course at the University of Chicago exploring Yiddish literature of the borderlands. Titled “Language is Migrant: Yiddish Poetics of the Border,” the course featured Yiddish writing in contact with Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, German, and other languages. As I wrote in the syllabus:

“What and where are the borders of Yiddish? How do the ‘borders’ of the Yiddish language shape its poetics? And how has Yiddish literature informed the development of other world literatures through contact and translation? This course aims to think with contemporary theories of the border/borderlands during our literary exploration of Yiddishland, as we listen more deeply to the hum of Yiddish etymology. As a diasporic language unattached to a single nation, Yiddish has long been constructed as subversively internationalist or cosmopolitan, raising questions about the relationship between language and the state, vernacularity and statelessness.”

As a field, Yiddish Studies often emphasizes the internationalism of its subject, focusing on the volatile trajectories of language and culture across borders. Rather than these narratives of travel and cultural mobility, I became interested in examining the particularities of life and language within Yiddish borderlands, the peripheral spaces where the idea of the state inscribes itself most viscerally.

For our opening session, I introduced some ways that geographical and linguistic borders are discussed in Yiddish. The first-day materials included a vocabulary list of border terms, shading gradations of meaning between grenetz, geyder, rand, and the phrase ganvenen di grenetsn (to steal the border). We then read Yankev Glatshteyn’s puckish poem “Zing Ladino” (Sing Ladino), a macaronic text that makes merry with linguistic components and presses the sounds of Esperanto, Arabic, and others upon Yiddish.

“Zing Ladino” is a rich text for introducing the concepts of diasporic language, Jewish utopianism, reciprocal word borrowings, and komponentn-visikeyt (component consciousness, the Yiddish speaker’s awareness of the provenance of the language’s varied elements). We returned to “Zing Ladino” later in the semester when we read Monique R. Balbuena’s article “Dibaxu: A Comparative Analysis of Clarisse Nicoïdski’s and Juan Gelman’s Bilingual Poetry.” Gelman, an Ashkenazi Argentinian poet, wrote the bilingual book Dibaxu in both Spanish and Ladino, the Sephardic exilic language derived from Old Spanish. Balbuena describes the poet’s self-Sephardization as a political process: “Gelman proceeds backwards in an exploration of the Spanish language and arrives at Ladino as a way of rejecting a limited and oppressive national identity—that of an Argentina controlled by a military dictatorship. To write his exile and express his deterritorialized, decentered identity, Gelman instead writes in a minor and diasporic language, one of a culture created without a State.” Gelman’s poetry thus thematizes Max Weinreich’s insight on the presence and retention of Jewish words into non-Jewish languages: “Surely, we may draw conclusions from the facts that Jewish words penetrated into the language of the non-Jewish population on the Iberian Peninsula. […] Most interesting is desmazalado (unlucky), which has found its way even into Cervantes. To be sure, Cervantes was born fifty-odd years after the Expulsion, but Jews must have left the word; only people could be expelled, not their impact.” Their words persist after the desmazalados’ exile. Weinreich notes that “similar formations are found among so many nations that have Jews in their midst: kakomazalos (ill-starred) in Greek, Schlamassel (mess) in German, ślamazarny (negligent, slovenly) in Polish.” Reading Glatshteyn, Gelman, and Weinreich together illuminates the kinship between their language politics and linguistic melancholy.

There’s lots of good stuff there; it ends with a discussion of “Clarice Lispector, the iconic Brazilian novelist whose first language was Yiddish, and Bruno Schulz, the Polish prose writer and painter whose work was profoundly informed by his friend, Yiddish poet Dvoyre Fogel.” Thanks, Jonathan!

David Shariatmadari at the Guardian has one of those silly but enjoyable quizzes I can’t resist: Know your Hrvatski from your Old Norse? The first couple questions are relatively easy, but don’t get cocky — the only way you can get 100% is with the help of luck, since some require you to guess what year a word was first recorded. That said, I should have done better than 15/20; I tried to second-guess the quiz and got a little too tricksy. Don’t do what I did; if it seems right, it probably is right. Thanks, Trevor!

Anatoly Vorobey sometimes says of his more recondite posts “вряд ли кому-то будет интересно” [unlikely to be of interest to anyone], and the same is probably true of this, but I have found a tear in the fabric of spacetime and I cannot be silent. Back in my college days, Natalya Baranskaya’s 1969 story «Неделя как неделя» (A Week Like Any Other, also translated as The Alarm Clock in the Cupboard) was famous not only among students of Russian like me but internationally, as a look into the daily life of a Soviet woman trying to juggle life and work; it was translated into many languages and much discussed. Now that I’m finally reading it, I imagine it’s pretty much forgotten, and it’s not easy to find a Russian text online. The only version I’ve found is copied from the 1981 collection Женщина с зонтиком [Woman with an umbrella], which I happen to own and in which I’m reading it. At the bottom of page 17, continuing onto the next page, in a passage about hurrying to work on a Tuesday morning, we find:

Когда мы утрясаемся немного, мне удается вытащить из сумки «Юность». Я читаю давно уже всеми прочитанную повесть. Читаю даже на эскалаторе и кончаю последнюю страничку на автобусной остановке у Донского.

When we’ve settled in a bit, I manage to pull Yunost′ [Youth, a popular magazine] out of my purse. I read a story long since read by everyone else. I read it even on the escalator, and finish the last page at the Donskoi bus stop.

Frustrating — one wants to know what that story was. Well, if we go back to the original magazine publication in the November Novy mir, which happens to be available online as a pdf, we find out; the passage reads there (pp. 31-32; I’ve bolded the part omitted in republication):

Когда мы утрясаемся немного, мне удается вытащить из сумки «Юность». Я читаю давно уже всеми прочитанную повесть Аксенова о затоваренной бочкотаре. Я не все в ней понимаю, но мне делается от нее вeceлo и смешно. Читаю даже на эскалаторе и кончаю последнюю страничку на автобусной остановке у Донского.

When we’ve settled in a bit, I manage to pull Yunost′ out of my purse. I read Aksyonov’s story about surplused barrelware, which everyone else has long since read. I don’t understand everything in it, but it makes me happy and amuses me. I read it even on the escalator, and finish the last page at the Donskoi bus stop.

So the story is Vasily Aksyonov’s famous 1968 Затоваренная бочкотара (translated as Surplused Barrelware; see this LH post), which everyone was indeed reading at the time. Why the different texts? Between them came the Metropol Affair of 1979, after which Aksyonov was a nonperson and couldn’t be referred to in such an approving context. Now that the Soviet Union and its stupid censorship are history, it’s high time to restore this nod to a fellow writer.

An interesting point: when Olga, the protagonist, complains to her husband that they never talk about anything other than the kids and the hassles of daily life, he tries to come up with counterexamples and says they’ve talked “О войне во Вьетнаме, о Чехословакии …” [about the war in Vietnam, about Czechoslovakia…]; I’m surprised that covert equivalence (Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968) made it past the censors in either year.