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Keith Dale tells a good tale at HeroicStories:

In 1985 I lived near Stuttgart, West Germany. I had taken a semester of German in college, and the standard Department of Defense introductory language course, but wasn’t fluent in German. We lived in an apartment in a quaint village. I could navigate towns, find the Bahnhof (train station), and order from simple menus. But a “real” conversation was beyond my abilities. Days I cared for my 4-year-old son while my wife worked as an Army officer. Then I worked as a DoD contractor on “swing shift”, 4:00 p.m. until midnight. By midnight, driving home was a tired chore. I fought sleep by looking for objects beside the road.

One night I spied a tennis shoe and sleepily thought, “A shoe!” Next I noted, “Some paper.” I observed a body in the middle of the road. “A body.” I saw the other shoe. “Aha, a pair!” Then I shouted out loud, “A BODY!?!” I swerved right and screeched to a halt. I sprinted up the road to the person lying prone. Suddenly I realized: this could be a setup. Terrorist activity against U.S. personnel was increasing in Germany then. Feeling misplaced invulnerability, I kept running.

The “body” was very much alive, German, in his early 40s, and clutching his chest fearfully. Walking beside the road he had experienced chest pains. He purposefully fell down in the road where he would be spotted.

I reacted to the terror in this man’s eyes by wanting to comfort him. With fingers on his pulse, I used a calm voice. Had he had heart problems before? Any existing medical conditions? Was he taking medication? Had he been drinking or taking drugs? Did he live nearby? I told him that he would be just fine. His pulse calmed from 180 to 120 beats per minute. I told him that I’d been a lifeguard for five years and just finished a CPR refresher course. In answer to his heart-wrenching question, I told him that he would NOT die while I was there!

Then I heard a bus coming down the hill. I needed to flag it down, so I tore away, ran up the hill and stood in the road waving. The startled bus driver agreed to drive ahead 300 meters to the Polizei (Police) station for help. In three minutes a German police officer arrived and took control. He took my information, then released me. I was glad to step back! I told my newest best friend that he’d be fine. He repeated, “I love Americans. Thank you!”

Back in the safety of my car, my body shook as I relived the last 10 minutes. Everyone had spoken fluent English …but no, I realized that the conversations were in German!

Funny how emergencies can bring out unsuspected abilities. Thanks, JC!

I’m surprised the name of Jamey Gambrell has never come up at LH (according to the Google site search); she was one of the translators from Russian who seems to have done a consistently good job, and I’m sad to learn from Daniel E. Slotnik’s NY Times obit that she’s died at 65 (which now, at 68, seems to me unforgivably young):

Ms. Gambrell, a native New Yorker, steeped herself in Russian culture and literature, spending time in Moscow in the 1980s and ’90s and becoming involved in its art scene as artists there who had once been underground rose to international prominence. […]

Ms. Gambrell’s process often involved translating a quick draft, then revising it 10 or more times until she captured the nuances of the text. The first book she translated was “Sleepwalker in a Fog” (1992), a short-story collection by Ms. Tolstaya, a great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy; her stories have been compared to Chekhov’s. […]

She also translated several notable books by Mr. Sorokin, including his “Ice Trilogy,” about a cult of people with hearts that can speak, and his “Day of the Oprichnik” (2011), a scathing fairy tale about life in modern Russia.

More recently Ms. Gambrell translated Mr. Sorokin’s “The Blizzard” (released in English in 2015), about a Russian doctor who ventures into a snowstorm to deliver a vaccine to a village battling a zombie plague. The novel is a postmodern take on braving wintry weather, a staple of Russian literature.

The writer and critic Masha Gessen praised “The Blizzard” in The New York Times Book Review in 2016, noting that aspects of it posed “formidable challenges for the translator” — for example, early in the novel Mr. Sorokin uses several nouns in a sentence that Russian readers would instantly recognize as sentimental signifiers of rural life.

“The translator, Jamey Gambrell, has no such words at her disposal and so translates the sentence straightforwardly,” the review continued. “Knowing when to pick one’s battles is the mark of a great translator, and Gambrell is one. Her translation is as elegant, playful and layered as the original — and never appears labored.”

I haven’t read her translations myself, but I certainly trust Masha Gessen on the subject. Incidentally, in the Gessen review, what she actually says about the sentence is “In one breathless sentence describing the driver getting ready for the journey, Sorokin uses eight nouns, seven of which are strongly marked, for the reader of the original, as ‘dewy-eyed Russian writer describing rural life.’” Does anybody happen to know the Sorokin novel well enough to know what sentence that is? I’d be curious to see the original. (I’m eager to read the novel — I greatly enjoy Sorokin — but it’s going to have to wait.) Thanks for the link, Eric!

Erik McDonald updates XIX век rarely enough that it always gives me a thrill to see a new post, and the latest, in his “Words new to me” series, features the obscure Russian word куделька; it begins:

Dictionaries say куделька can mean кудряшка, a curl of someone’s hair, or it can be a diminutive of кудель or куделя, either meaning “sliver” with a long “i,” or it can be used in the regional idiom дать кудельку or дать куделю, meaning to pull someone by the hair or severely punish them.

He goes on to talk about a different meaning (“soldiers in the time of Nicholas I would use куделька to refer to the ‘ceremonial march past the emperor’ that came at the end of an elaborate military parade”) with a funny etymology, but I got stuck at “sliver with a long i”: what the hell was that? If you follow the link, Merriam-Webster tells you the meaning is “an untwisted strand or rope of textile fiber produced by a carding or combing machine and ready for drawing, roving, or spinning” and it’s definition 2, 1 being “a long slender piece cut or torn off”; sure enough, it says “sense 2 is usually ˈslī-.” But AHD gives the normal short-i pronunciation (slĭv′ər) for all senses, and the antiquated OED entry (from 1912) has “Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈslɪvə/, /ˈslʌɪvə/, U.S. /ˈslɪvər/, /ˈslaɪvər/,” with no sense distinction. (The noun is from an archaic verb slive “To cleave, split, divide.”) Is anybody familiar with this specialized sense and how it’s said by those who use the word? As I commented at Erik’s site, “I always thought of кудель as ‘tow,’ though all such words are purely theoretical to me.”

I just finished the Strugatskys’ Жук в муравейнике (‘A beetle in an anthill,’ for some reason translated Beetle in the Anthill — it’s a metaphor, not a description of an actual anthill); for the first 95% of the way, I was engrossed and delighted (I can be exact about the figure, since I was reading on a Kindle), but the last chapter was hasty and melodramatic and brought me down a bit. At any rate, here’s a sentence that struck me:

Саркофаг есть своеобразная «бомба времени», вскрыв которую современные земляне получат возможность воочию ознакомиться с особенностями облика, анатомии и физиологии своих далеких предков.

The sarcophagus [an alien artifact] is a sort of “bomb of time”; by opening it, earthlings today can acquaint themselves with the distinctive features of the appearance, anatomy, and physiology of their distant ancestors.

I translate «бомба времени» as “bomb of time” to suggest how strange it sounded to me; it actually took me a moment to realize it was a Russianing of English “time bomb” (which is normally rendered “бомба замедленного действия,” ‘bomb of delayed action’). I checked the Национальный корпус русского языка and found only a few examples of its use, the first of which was from Mayakovsky’s Баня (The Bathhouse):

Пускай эта бомба времени разорвется у него.

Let that time bomb go off at his place.

Does «бомба времени» sound as strange to Russians as it does to me?

Actually, the more I thought about it, the odder “time bomb” itself seemed to me — a bomb made of time?? The earliest cite in the OED (updated 2012) is:
1893 Daily Tel. 9 Nov. 5/7 The engine of destruction was not a time bomb.
“Timed bomb” would seem more logical, but of course that’s harder to say.

Another oddity was the word кроков here:

Было там несколько схем и как бы кроков, набросанных рукой профессионального топографа, — рощицы, ручьи, болота, перекрестки дорог, […]

There were a number of diagrams and rough sketches, jotted down by the hand of a professional topographer: groves, streams, swamps, crossroads […]

The problem is that the noun кроки (from French croquis ‘quick sketch’) is indeclinable, and surely not common enough to have developed colloquial plural forms like the genitive plural “кроков” used here. But I asked Anatoly Vorobey, and he said:

I’m not very surprised – the word practically shouts “I’m a regularly declined nominative plural”, and the stress pattern fits, too (cf. куски). The dictionary can claim it to be a neut. sing. all it wants, the usage probably won out in these cases.

So there you are: I’ve become more purist than actual Russians.

Yair Rosenberg writes for Tablet about how Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s (bzw. Sorcerer’s) Stone got a Yiddish version, saying “The work of an Indian-American Orthodox Jewish translator, and printed by a publishing house in Sweden, the story behind Harry Potter un der filosofisher shteyn is almost as remarkable as the story it tells”; that’s very true, but I’ll send you to the link to discover the tale of the rival would-be translators (the winner was Arun Viswanath, “a scion of one of America’s greatest Yiddish dynasties”) and pick up the story with decisions about particular translation problems:

One common question: What to do about names? […] As he examined prior foreign editions, Viswanath discovered that different translators had taken dramatically different approaches. “French went totally out there,” he said. “They renamed [Severus] Snape to ‘Rogue.’ In Italian they renamed him ‘Piton’ [snake]. French even changed the name of Hogwarts” to Poudlard, which means “bacon lice.” In his own work, Viswanath didn’t find such radical revisions necessary for the most part, because “Yiddish is a Germanic language, so the English sounds are not that foreign.” […]

In some cases, however, it was necessary to rename characters to preserve Rowling’s intent, which is how Quidditch captain Oliver Wood became Oliver Holtz. In the novel, Harry is introduced to Wood by professor Minerva McGonagall after he demonstrates remarkable skill chasing another student in midair on a broomstick. Thinking he is about to be disciplined for breaking the rules, he misinterprets her meaning when she asks another teacher if she can “borrow Wood for a moment,” wondering “was wood a cane she was going to use on him?” Needless to say, this wordplay would not work unless Wood’s name referred to wood—or holtz—in Yiddish, and so Viswanath rebranded the character, even though he’d found that many “other languages don’t try to do it,” leaving readers somewhat confused. […]

But Rowling didn’t just coin names, she coined many magical terms and concepts, and each of these required its own Yiddish rendering. Translating Quidditch, the fictional aerial sport played on broomsticks in which participants fire a ball through hoops to score points, posed its own challenge. “I could’ve just called it Quidditch [in Yiddish transliteration], but meh, we could do better than that,” Viswanath said. He cast about for something more authentically Yiddish. Inspiration struck when he “remembered that there’s this saying, ‘az got vil, sheest a bezem,’ which means, ‘if God wants, a broom shoots,’ and which possibly refers to somebody who’s impotent, or maybe to a gun.” And so, “shees-bezem”—or “shoot-broom”—was born. Along similar lines, rather than merely transliterate the name of the small flying “golden snitch,” whose capture ends a Quidditch match, Viswanath dubbed it the “goldene flaterl,” or “golden butterfly,” as butterflies are a common motif in Jewish and Yiddish folklore. By riffing off Yiddish sayings and symbols in this way, Viswanath hopes “people will feel the Yiddishe taam [taste].” […]

At the same time, Viswanath didn’t let the book’s Christian components prevent him from infusing the story with genuine Yiddish flavor. Often, this is reflected in how the characters express themselves. They may not be Jewish, but they talk like their Yiddish equivalents would. “I recast some of the characters as certain Jewish archetypes purely on linguistic grounds,” he explained. “I turned Dumbledore into this very lomdish [Jewishly learned] guy who speaks with a lot of loshen koydesh [Hebrew and rabbinic phrases].” In other words, Dumbledore speaks in the Yiddish register of a rabbinic dean of a yeshiva because that’s the role he plays at Hogwarts, not because he’s actually Jewish.

Likewise, “McGonagall and Snape, and especially [Argus] Filch, speak in a particularly Litvish [Lithuanian] register, so you can sort of really hear their dialect. The same thing with [Rubeus] Hagrid, who speaks with a very deep back country Polish register,” a Yiddish analogue to “his west country English accent” in the original books.

Splendid stuff! (For the Viswanath/Schaechter clan, see this LH post.)

Charles Portis recently died; I’d long been meaning to give him a try, since he’s a classic Arkansas writer and my paternal roots are in that state, so when my brother told me that Amazon had lowered the price on his novels to $1.99 for the Kindle editions I grabbed them, and I’ve started on his first, Norwood. It’s just as funny and brilliantly written as it was cracked up to be; I’m going to quote two paragraphs from the early going, and you can judge on the basis of those whether it’s something that will hit your sweet spot:

They later moved to a tin-roof house that was situated in a gas field under a spectacular flare that burned all the time. Big copper-green beetles the size of mice came from all over the Southland to see it and die in it. At night their little toasted corpses pankled down on the tin roof.

* * *

But she was gone these many years and now the old mechanic too, he who had shaken his head and wiped his hands and told at least a thousand people they were losing oil through the main bearing, had joined her. Norwood missed the funeral but Clyde Rainey had gone and he said it had all been very nice. More people came than reasonably could have been expected. There were a good many flowers too. The funeral home had scrubbed Mr. Pratt down with Boraxo and Clyde said he had never seen him looking so clean and radiant.

“More people came than reasonably could have been expected”: that there is a perfect sentence. But what drove me to post is this later passage:

Sometimes he sat on the back steps wearing a black hat with a Fort Worth crease and played his guitar—just three or four chords really—and sang “Always Late—With Your Kisses,” with his voice breaking like Lefty Frizzell, and “China Doll” like Slim Whitman, whose upper range is hard to match.

Of course I was struck by the term “Fort Worth crease” and googled it, and it’s a thing, and someone had wondered about it before me, and the Languagehat terms of service require me to post hat-related material at reasonable intervals, so here we are.

In an earlier thread, Xerîb linked to a great Twitter thread by Ahmad Al-Jallad (Epigraphist | Philologist | Historian of Language || Ancient Near East and Pre-Islamic Arabia) about the origin of the word Saracen; I’m reposting his preferred etymology here, but you can read the alternatives at the link (I have added italics for clarity and expanded an annoying abbreviation):

Let’s consider another etymology, perhaps one of the most popular – a connection with the Arabic root ś-r-q (شرق) ‘east’. Many have assumed a connection with the adjective śarqiyy ‘eastern’. But east of what?
Littmann translated Safaitic verb ʾśrq, the c-stem of the ‘east’ root, as ‘to migrate into the desert’, based on Bedouin usage. A. Musil recorded that the early 20th c. Bedouin used šarrag (< šarraqa) to mean a migration to the desert no matter the direction.
Indeed, we have this exact usage in Safaitic, where for example we find expressions like ʾaśraqa yamanata ‘he migrated southward to the desert’. Macdonald ingeniously connects this usage to the rise of the term ‘Saracen’.
In the 2nd c. CE, the Romans had established the Province of Arabia. At this moment, the meaning of the term ‘Arab’ changed for outside writers. It could referred to the citizens of this Roman province. From this confusion emerged a new term for the nomads.
Perhaps one used by the Nabataeans themselves: ‘śaraq-ers’, that is ‘those who go (or live) in the desert’. A similar term is still used to refer to nomads in Iraqi Arabic (and elsewhere): šrūgi (< šurūqī).
Macdonald understood the Greek term to derive from an agentive formation, śarrāq– ‘desert migrator’. While certainly plausible, I might suggest another possibility. The term śarq or śarāq could have been the generic name for the desert itself in these ancient dialects.
This would mean the Greek Sarakēnoí derives from the geographic name śar(a)q + the suffix ēnos. This also agrees with the verb ʾaśraqa where the Form IV can be used to signify motion towards a place. It would [therefore] be an exonym; it’s not attested as a term of self-designation.
In the following centuries, Sarakēnoí (= Saracen) became the standard term for Arabians beyond the Roman realm and nomads within it, a label covering a multitude of peoples and groups, who lived hundreds of kilometers apart and spoke different languages.
The Arab Conquests, coming from the śaraq (the desert), created a lasting connection with Islam. By the Middle Ages, Saracens could be Turkic warriors, Damascene traders, and nomads from the Sinai. It belongs to a family of vague exonyms like ‘moor’, ‘mohammedan’, and even ‘turk’

Makes sense to me. Thanks, Xerîb!

From that impeachable source, NewsBiscuit, Cockneys announce ‘Miley Cyrus’ as official rhyming slang for Coronavirus:

Above a well-known pie and mash shop in London’s East End, the annual summit of cockneys, an oppressed minority group, unveiled their new rhyming slang for this Jeremy Hunt of a virus. After handing out market flyers for a 50% off sale of ‘Cor Blimey’ trousers and dustman’s hats, it was solemnly announced that the term “Miley Cyrus’ would be used for Coronavirus, beating off stiff competition from “Egyptian Papyrus.”

Britain’s leading cockney actor, honorary pearly king, and five-time Oscar-winner, Sir Jason Statham, fresh from his rhyming slang version of Romeo & Juliet at the Old Vic, expressed his relief at the announcement. “This couldn’t come fast enough. There’s been a load of confusion with us cockneys about what to call this virus. Some people were calling it the Billy Ray Cyrus, while others were saying Egyptian Papyrus. You can imagine the tear-ups that created. Both sides felt they were mugging the other side off. It created a lot of division, I can tell you that and we cockneys don’t need much incentive for us to kick off.

So Miley Cyrus is perfect, and of course, we cockneys, in the finest slang tradition only use the first half, so it will be something like, “Oi, love, wash yer brass bands, we don’t want a dose of that Miley.” Sir Jason is currently translating NHS Coronavirus advice pamphlets into rhyming slang for the benefit of his community.

Thanks, Trevor!

Joel Christensen of Sententiae Antiquae (see this LH post) has an excellent post On Not Reading Homer; I’ll just quote a few bits, but the whole thing is well written and worth clicking through for:

Over the past few weeks there has been a bit of a frenzy over Oxford University’s potential move to drop Homer and Vergil from their required curriculum for Classics. We have heard the typical cries of “O Tempora, O Mores” in articles lamenting the fall of education and the decline of the west. This news even made The Blaze!, quoting only a student who calls it “a fatal mistake” because “Homer has been the foundation of the classical tradition since antiquity.” […]

You know what I haven’t heard much of? People defending this proposal. Well, here I am, and that’s what I am going to do.

I am a Homerist. I have spent more than half my life reading, teaching, and writing on Homer. To say that I love the Homeric epics is such an understatement that it breaks my basic constative ability to do so. But this proposal makes sense. Let me tell you why. […]

First, the brouhaha mis-characterizes the proposal which is to make Homer and Vergil optional. From years of teaching Homer to undergraduates, I know that fewer are prepared to read something of this length and depth. They have read little in pre-collegiate classes of this length and intricacy. And we do not have the time in class to move from understanding a sentence to its relationship to the whole to its critical engagement with cultures over time. […]

This is about the way we teach Homer as a holy, simple thing, with clear messages and heroes who can be understood in a few lessons. Homeric epics are dialogic, they are complex creations between audiences and the words themselves and without time, deep learning, and space, they function to advance a simplistic, but powerful policy of canon-enforcement […]

Before reading Homer, students need to learn to read, to understand the relationship between text and audience, and the operation of literature—and especially the literary canon—as part of cultural discourse. We are better off by spending time teaching students a few poems by Sappho or lyric and elegiac poets, if what we want to learn about is Greek culture and poetry. […]

When one author writes “Within attempts like this to increase access to higher education lies a short-sighted philistinism as destructive as anything that emerged from the Trojan horse,” he is really decrying the collapse of a simplistic and counterfeit system of values based on the idea of Homeric poetry rather than the thing itself. […]

As a Homerist, I think I’ve found myself in part by searching for “Homer”—and I think this is indeed one of the most salubrious effects of literature. But this is not the only goal and this is not the Aristotelian end for Classical Studies. We need students to enter with the world with the ability to question and reframe the worth of the pasts we have inherited.

I wish more classicists had such nuanced opinions; circling the wagons and blasting away at anyone who doesn’t worship at the altar isn’t helping anything. (Tip of the Languagehat hat to bulbul’s Facebook feed, source of many good links and rants.)

Rafaël Newman writes for 3 Quarks Daily about the brave new world of (corporate) translation, beginning with some interesting remarks about Switzerland:

Notwithstanding the spread of English as a global lingua franca, translation continues to be a vital component of international relations, whether political, commercial, or cultural. In certain cases, translation is also necessary nationally, for instance in countries comprising more than one significant linguistic group. This is so in Switzerland, which voted by an overwhelming majority in 1938 to add a fourth national tongue to thwart the irredentist aspirations of its Italian neighbor, and which in certain contexts is obliged to use a Latin version of its own name (Confoederatio Helvetica) to avoid favoring one language group over another.

With its four languages, three of them national and official – German, French, and Italian – and the fourth, Romansh, “merely” national, Switzerland is indeed obliged to do a great deal of translation, especially at the level of its federal ministries and law courts. Its commercial enterprises, too, typically depend on communication in at least one other language region than their own immediate location; and naturally, many Swiss businesses have a linguistically diverse national presence in any case, and thus require a polyglot corporate identity.

Culturally, although Switzerland’s linguistic regions tend to look to the “motherland” of their respective language in matters of tradition, the country’s creative class is by necessity international in its outlook, given the limited size of its domestic market; while its chief cultural funding agency, Pro Helvetia (bearer of a similarly non-partisan Latin appellation), spends a great deal of its resources on representation and “localization” abroad. And finally, since Switzerland’s economy is strongly geared to export, and because its lack of natural resources means that it has come to specialize in services and end manufacturing, those sectors, particularly the financial and pharmaceutical branches, are positively ravenous consumers of translation services, especially into the global tongues: Chinese, Spanish, and of course, above all, English.

No surprise, then, that those same sectors are presently lured by the cost-cutting Siren song of translation “solutions” based on artificial intelligence, whether for their in-house language services or from the agencies to which they outsource their translation orders.

There follows a detailed discussion of computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools which makes me shudder (“The text is further analysed into ‘source segments’, sentences or fragments terminating in variously predefined marks (periods, colons, paragraph breaks), arrayed vertically down the left-hand side of the program window, with blanks in a corresponding column to the right, ready to receive ‘target segments’) but which I will leave you to discover at the link; I’ll jump ahead to the following paragraph:

It is these last – the “mistakes” made by NMT – that give post-editing, which is otherwise drudgery, a certain philosophical interest: because the errors generated by NMT are qualitatively different from those made by the “repair” function built into the statistical database linked to the standard CAT tool, which routinely attempts to make up for a deficiency of 5 percentage points in a potential source-target match by helpfully suggesting absurd inclusions (such as “hat trick” or “DAS Automotive Insurance” for English translations of German sentences containing novel uses of the third person singular of the verb “to have”, or a subordinate clause involving a neuter noun). Mistakes made by NMT are often subtle, involving omissions or reduplications reminiscent of the errors made by medieval scribes, for which scholars have evolved a specialized vocabulary: these moments of inattention are known as “haplographies” and “diplographies”. NMT errors may also display ostensibly cunning inventiveness, as when an English product name in a German context is translated, in an English target segment, into a third language, learned apparently by cross-pollination from a parallel linguistic pair. Or they may go off the rails altogether, resisting interpretation by producing Dadaist sequences of nonsense syllables when confronted by an ambiguous or un-analysable construction – “Zinseszins”, the otherwise common-or-garden German term for compound interest, unaccountably mutating to resemble the name of a disgraced French footballer: Zinazinadinadina…

Newman then soars off into the wild blue yonder — the next paragraph alone name-drops Joyce, Chomsky, Freud, Lacan, “the Marxist philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro,” George Steiner, Hegel, and Olga Tokarczuk — but comes to earth at the end with a nice bit about the name “Geronimo”; I leave you to click through if you so desire. One of those mixed bags which both annoy and educate me.