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I’m surprised I’ve never posted about Daniil Kharms on LH, considering how much I love him, so I’m happy to find Alex Cigale’s The Absolute Nonsense of Daniil Kharms (Numéro Cinq IV:1, 2013), which presents translations of his poetry and prose with a preface, which I will excerpt:

The artlessness of Daniil Kharms, in accord with his age (in the wake of Satie, and Duchamp and Ernst, Kokoschka and the German Expressionists, yet almost certainly unaware of them and without precedent other than say Gogol in Russian) is Anti-art. […] Thumb-twiddling boredom, repetition, hoaxes, and other violations of expectations in evidence here are dissonant and discomfiting in themselves. Elsewhere, Kharms strikes a more distasteful, even offensive pose, an epatage that practically wallows in degradation and self-degradation. Explaining his “program” he wrote: “I am interested only in absolute nonsense, only in that which has no practical meaning. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. I find abhorrent heroics, pathos, moralizing, all that is hygienic and tasteful … both as words and as feelings.” In his other work we may find a precedent, for example, for The Theater of Cruelty, but also in its minutia of daily life for the post-modernist, documentary yet ironic and paradoxical approach of the Moscow Conceptualist artists and poets of the 1970s who acknowledged Kharms as an essential influence.

One of them, Ilya Kabakov, wrote: “…Contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of Russian conceptualism….” Kharms was similarly central for the non-conformist poets of the 1950s and 60s (Yevgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Jan Satunovsky, Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, Alexei Khvostenko) and the Minimalist poets of the 1970s and 80s. Just to enumerate some of the aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) values: plain speech, written as it is spoken, folksy simplicity, daily life or byt, but also the spiritual values of Absurdism: the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an Absurd age.

As I believe is true of all minimalist practice, the above not only doesn’t preclude a spiritual dimension, but makes it necessary. This particularly (also Kharms’s silly rhyming) is what is likely most incomprehensible to Anglophone readers of Kharms, and of the work of his colleague and friend, the proto-existentialist poet Alexander Vvedensky. How may their seeming nihilism (I would argue they were not) be made coherent with and even motivated by their conceptions of God?

Cigale ends by noting that Kharms “falls squarely within the Russian tradition of the yurodivy, the ‘holy fool’”; here are a couple of his translations:

Olga Forsh approached Alexei Tolstoy and did something.

Alexei Tolstoy did something too.

Then Konstantin Fedin and Valentin Stenich ran out into the yard and began searching for an appropriate stone. They didn’t find a stone, but they did find a shovel. With this shovel, Konstantin Fedin smacked Olga Forsh across her mug.

Then Alexei Tolstoy stripped off all his clothes and completely naked walked out onto the Fontanka and began to neigh like a horse. Everybody was saying: “There neighing is a major contemporary writer.” And no one even lay a hand on Alexei Tolstoy.

(1931)

A Northern Fable

An old man, for no particular reason, went off into the forest. Then he returned and said: Old woman, hey, old woman!

And the old woman dropped dead. Ever since then, all rabbits are white in winter.

(undated)

You can make comparisons, but there’s really nobody else like him.

I was leafing through my beloved old copy of Daniel Jones’s Everymans English Pronouncing Dictionary (13th ed., 1967) when my eye lit on the following entry:

Churchdown (near Gloucester) ˈtʃəːtʃdaun
  Note. — There was until recently a local
    pronunciation ˈtjəuzn, which is
    now probably obsolete as far as the
    village is concerned. It is preserved
    as the name of a hill near by, which
    is now written Chosen.

That is one of the most remarkable deformations I have seen, far better than Beauchamp “Beecham” or Cholmondeley “Chumley.” I’m not surprised it’s gone out of use, but I’m glad it got recorded.

And in trying to find somewhere to copy the text from (being a lazy fellow), I found what is apparently the first edition of the dictionary online at Internet Archive; if you want up-to-date info, you’d do better to look elsewhere, but for old-fashioned ways of speech Jones is your huckleberry. Bookmark and enjoy. [As mollymooly points out in the comments, it appears to be the second reprint of the eleventh edition (1958) — bad metadata!]

Back in 2006 I had occasion to quote Simon Karlinsky’s “wonderfully splenetic blast at poor Michael Glenny, the translator”; now that I’m reading Dombrovsky’s Хранитель древностей (see this post), I’m occasionally checking Glenny’s 1968 translation, The Keeper of Antiquities, when I run into difficulties, but I quickly realized he wasn’t going to be much help. I can forgive him rendering Усуни ‘Wusun‘ as “Usuni” — there probably wasn’t an easy way to check on such things in 1968 — but not his leaving out entire chunks of text (a practice depressingly common among translators). This passage, on the other hand, gave me as much true pleasure as Isidor Schneider’s manglings of Gorky (see here, here, and here). The narrator has gone to his office in the museum where he works, the former cathedral of Alma Ata, and found the old carpenter, a notorious drunk, sitting there; he accuses him of smoking up the place:

– Нет, я сейчас много курить не могу, – ответил дед печально. – Сейчас у меня задышка и грудь ломит. Скажи, что это вот тут, под лопатками, колет? Вот тут, тут, смотри.
Дед опять похозяйничал, привел монтера Петьку и они дулись в козла. Деревянный ящичек с костями торчал из лошадиного черепа (Усуньское погребение), и я сразу его заметил, как только вошел. И пили они тут, конечно. […]
– […] Нет, ты вот скажи, отчего у меня задышка. Иногда будто ничего, а иногда так подопрет, вот тут, – он ткнул себя пальцем под лопатку, – ой-ой-ой!

Here’s my translation (and of course I welcome corrections);

“No, I can’t smoke much these days,” answered the old fellow sadly. “I can’t breathe, and there’s a pain in my chest. Tell me, what is it that’s hurting here, under my shoulders? Here, right here, take a look.”

Once again, the old man was acting like he owned the place, he’d brought the electrician Petya and they’d been playing dominoes. A little wooden box with tiles was sticking out from a horse’s skull (Wusun burial), and I had noticed it as soon as I came in. And of course they’d been drinking. […]

“[…] No, you tell me why I’m so short of breath. Sometimes it seems like nothing, but sometimes I can feel it really pressing, right here” — he poked his finger under his shoulder blade — “oy oy oy!”

And here’s Glenny’s:

“No, I can’t smoke much nowadays,” he replied sadly. “I have asthma and it’s bad for my chest. Say, what’s that leaking over there, under those spades? Look, over there.”

The old man had brought Petka the plumber with him and they had been blowing through the heating pipes. A little wooden box of bones was sticking out from inside a horse’s skull (Usuni burial), and I noticed as soon as I walked in that some liquid was dripping from it. They had been drinking, of course. […]

“[…] But I wish you could tell me why I get asthma. Sometimes it seems to go, then it comes back here,” and he tapped himself under the shoulder-blade.”

(I’ve omitted a funny passage where the narrator tells the old man the alcohol he’s been drinking had been used to preserve a rattlesnake.) Now, задышка isn’t “asthma,” but shortness of breath is a symptom of asthma, so fine, I won’t quibble. A монтер is not a plumber (it can mean a fitter or mechanic, but usually means an electrician), but never mind — what’s all that about leaking and “blowing through the heating pipes” and “some liquid was dripping from it”? There’s not a hint of any of that in the Russian. Glenny seems not to have understood колет (literally ‘[it] pricks,’ but used impersonally, as here, it refers to bodily pain), and he couldn’t make head nor tail of дулись в козла (colloquial for ‘played dominoes’), so in desperation he created this tale of dripping liquid leaking from the “spades” (he’s also mistaken the word for ‘shoulder-blade’). The odd thing is that the second time the word comes around, after only a few paragraphs, he renders it correctly (“he tapped himself under the shoulder-blade”). I can only shake my head and wonder how these guys keep getting work.

In 2012, I wrote:

For those of you who might be wondering about the progress of my march through Russian literature, it has taken a sudden swerve. I had gotten up through the year 1968 […] when I suddenly decided to reverse course and go back to the beginning of modern Russian literature […]. There were several motives coalescing in this decision, but probably the most basic was a desire to get to Dostoevsky sooner rather than later.

Eight years later, I am reversing course again. Having finished The Brothers Karamazov last November, I spent some time reading early-20th-century novels (Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Bryusov) interspersed with Chekhov stories, but it was starting to feel like homework, and reading the Strugatskys reminded me of the different joys of more recent literature, so I’ve returned to the 1960s and have started on Yury Dombrovsky’s Хранитель древностей (The Keeper of Antiquities), first published in Novy mir in 1964. I love the opening passage, in which the narrator describes arriving in the garden- and poplar-filled streets of Alma Ata in 1933, suddenly changing from the spring thaw of Moscow to the southern summer. Of course, being the kind of reader who insists on knowing the geography involved, I wanted historical maps of the city, and I was thrilled to discover Dennis Keen’s Walking Almaty site (“It’s a project about learning to read a city’s visual landscape”), which has exactly what I wanted, 13 Historic Maps of Verny, Alma-Ata, and Almaty, starting with “Project for a Fort on the Ili River in the Almaty Valley in the Big Kirgiz Horde”, 1854, and ending with “Alma-Ata. Map of Public Transportation” from “some time before 1983”; the “Schematic Plan of Alma-Ata”, 1935-1936 should give me what I need for the novel. Bless you, Dennis, and I wish there were obsessives like you for every city! (A question for Russian-speakers: is the dialect word ростепель, which he uses for that Moscow thaw, an exact synonym of оттепель, or is there some shade of difference?)

After the Dombrovsky, I’ll probably move on to Valentin Kataev’s dream-memoir Святой колодец (The Holy Well, 1966) and its sequel Трава забвенья (The Grass of Oblivion, 1967), and then finally get to the 1970s: Trifonov’s “city novels” (all nice and short), Sinyavsky-Tertz’s Прогулки с Пушкиным [Strolls with Pushkin] and В тени Гоголя [In the Shadow of Gogol] (both 1975), and (from 1976) Rasputin’s Прощание с Матёрой [Farewell to Matyora] and Sokolov’s Школа для дураков [A School for Fools]. But we shall see. I take it one book at a time.

Arika Okrent (a perennial LH favorite) has a list of “11 Little-Known Words for Specific Family Members” that’s worth a look; I personally consider straight-up Old English words cheating, which lets out four of them (fadu, modrige, fœdra, eam), but the rest could be pressed into service ad libitum (note that Yiddish words are far more susceptible to borrowing than Old English ones). I particularly like the first and last:

1. Patruel

This one means “child of your paternal uncle.” Also, a child of your own brother. It hasn’t gotten a lot of use in the past few centuries, but it was once convenient to have a term for this relationship because it factored into royal succession considerations. The first citation for it in the OED, from 1538, reads, “Efter his patruell deid withoutin contradictioun he wes king.”

11. Machetonim

The parents of your child’s spouse. Your child’s in-laws. Ok, this is a Yiddish word, but one that, like a lot of Yiddish words, has poked its way into English because it fills a gap. When it comes to marriage, this can be a very important relationship, so it’s good to have a word for it. If your parents get along with their machetonim, the family—the whole mishpocheh—will be happier.

Thanks, Trevor!

Occasionally I run across remarkable people who deserve to be better remembered and post about them, and the latest is the anthropologist Robert Armstrong; I was trying to provide more information for his LibraryThing entry, which had only his birth year, and I eventually discovered the Monuments Men Foundation biography:

Anthropologist Robert Gelston Armstrong was born in Danville, Indiana on June 29, 1917. Extraordinarily adept at languages, he was conversant in Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and both Yoruba and Idoma (the official languages of Nigeria). Armstrong studied economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in Marxism. He joined the Communist Party shortly before graduation in 1939. Armstrong then attended the University of Chicago, translating his interest in socioeconomic theories to the study of cultural anthropology. As an active member of the campus antiwar movement, Armstrong served as Chairman of the Peace Action Committee and planning several “peace strikes.” In the fall of 1941 he began a year of field research among the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians sponsored by the University of Oklahoma. Just four months into his assignment, however, Armstrong was called up for service with the U.S. Army. A special dispensation allowed Armstrong to prolong his induction for six weeks in order to write an abbreviated thesis paper. […]

Following the end of hostilities, Armstrong was transferred to the Office of Military Government for Germany as a Russian translator. In September 1945 he joined the MFAA as a Scientific Collections Specialist in Berlin. During the course of his duties, Armstrong worked alongside Monuments Man Capt. Bernard D. Burks to salvage and reconstruct the collections of scientific museums and institutions in Germany. […]

Following his return to the United States in early 1946, Armstrong reenrolled in the University of Chicago and began his dissertation on economic and social organization in Africa. In 1947 he was appointed as assistant professor of anthropology at Atlanta University, where he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. His efforts included persuading the dean of the Episcopal Cathedral to allow African Americans to attend services, and participating in a conference on the report of President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. The following year, he secured a leave of absence to teach for one year at the University of Puerto Rico while conducting field research, first with anthropologist Julian Steward, and later on behalf of the British Colonial Social Science Research Council. Armstrong conducted further field work in Ibadan, Nigeria at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research of the University College (today, the University of Ibadan). He completed his doctoral dissertation, State Formation in Negro Africa in 1952.

The onset of McCarthyism in the early 1950s targeted the faculty of a number of prominent universities. In 1953, during negotiations for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, the FBI informed the university’s dean of Armstrong’s past interest in Communism: negotiations faltered. This disappointment proved to be the first of many instances in which Armstrong was passed over for a teaching position or isolated by former colleagues who feared associating with him. Armstrong did finally receive a five year appointment at Atlanta University, but only after two years of searching for a new position. The FBI continued its investigation into Armstrong’s past, culminating in a surprise interrogation at his home in August 1959.

In an effort to escape his controversial past and build a more promising professional future, Armstrong moved to Nigeria in September 1959. There, he conducted field research on the Yoruba people of Western Nigeria using a grant from the Social Science Research Council. He never returned to the United States.

Robert Armstrong died in Lagos, Nigeria in May 1987.

A good man whose career was destroyed by vile political attacks. I’ve seen the effects of McCarthyism in my own family and in those close to me; I don’t think people today realize how much was lost to its malice and amorality. I hope his last years in Nigeria were enjoyable.

Back in 2014, Buber’s Basque Page reprinted an article that originally appeared in Spanish and Basque on Kondaira’s Facebook page; it describes a remarkable language:

The Basque-Algonquian language is a pidgin that arose for intercommunication between the members of the Mi’kmaq tribe, Innu and other Amerindians with the Basque whalers, cod fishermen, and merchants in Newfoundland, Quebec, the Labrador Peninsula, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Most of its vocabulary consisted of the Micmac, Innu and Basque languages, but also had words from Gascon, since it was the lingua franca of southwest France at the time.

While the Basques were in those waters whaling and fishing cod in the late fourteenth century, it was not until about 1530 that this pidgin was spoken. The Basques established a minimum of nine fishing settlements in Newfoundland and Labrador; the largest could hold 900 people and was in found in what the Basques called Balea Badia (“Whale Bay”), now known as Red Bay (Labrador Peninsula). The French and British sent expeditions to North America, following the routes of the Basque whalers, to explore routes to the Indies shorter than those of the Spanish, as well as to map fishing grounds. The French settled in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and began the conquest of North America.

The golden age of Basque-Algonquian would occur between 1580 and 1635. In 1612, Marc Lescarbot, writing in his “Histoire de la Nouvelle France” (History of New France), indicates that the local population spoke a language to communicate with the Europeans which had Basque words. In 1710 there was still evidence of the use of Basque-Algonquian. […]

The result of this pidgin is that the Micmac integrated Basque words into their language. From the Basque word atorra (shirt), the Basque-Algonquian word “atouray” derived and from this the actual Micmac word “atlei”; “king” is said in Micmac as “elegewit” (from the Basque-Algonquian “elege” which, in turn, is from the Basque errege) or, for example, France is called “Plansia” (from the colloquial Basque “Prantzia”).

There are quotes from the period at the link, as well as illustrations and some examples of Basque-Algonquian.

Slavomír Čéplö aka bulbul wrote me about the YouTube channel Abralin Ao Vivo, saying:

It contains a bunch of online lectures from various linguists – all free, naturally – some of them in Portuguese, some in English. Past highlights include David Crystal and Salikoko Mufwene, but it really gets rolling this week with lectures by Dan and Caleb Everett, Barbara Partee and Andy Wedel.

Looks good — thanks, Slavo!

I’m slowly making my way through Leonid Girshovich’s 2001 novel Суббота навсегда [Saturday forever], which is very complex and allusive but also very funny, and I’ve run across several bits of Hattic interest that I thought I’d share. At one point he’s talking about old-fashioned Jewish families:

кто-то даже в пенсне, а кто-то по-русски (по-английски, по-испански, по-вавилонски) сказать двух слов не может: оф дем полке ин кладовке штейт а банке мит варенье.

even somebody in a pince-nez, and somebody who can’t say two words in Russian (English, Spanish, Babylonian): of dem polke in kladovke shteit a banke mit varenye.

That last bit is a distorted version of what is apparently a common example of Russo-Yiddish jargon, ин кладовке аф дер полке штейт а банке мит варенье [in kladovke af der polke steit a banke mit varenye], ‘in the pantry on the shelf is a jar with jam,’ where the words I’ve bolded are Russian stuck into a Yiddish sentence.

I was almost thrown by “в Степуне, этом почти что тезке Хайдеггера” (‘in Stepun, who had almost the same name as Heidegger’) — Stepun was Fyodor or Friedrich, Heidegger was Martin — until I realized that in Степун you can see степь ‘steppe,’ while Heidegger has Heide ‘heath.’ Clever!
[Read more…]

Yes, Which Indo-European Subfamily Are You? is just another dumb Buzzfeed quiz, but obviously it’s not one I could resist. You get eight or so silly questions and then it tells you your subfamily. The first time I got Germanic; the second, picking different answers for everything, Armenian (“Exasperation of aspiration, sensitive to satemization. Only God can judge you but that doesn’t stop every philologist from trying”). Enjoy!