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Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti posts an intriguing quote, from Jonathan Bate’s new book How the Classics Made Shakespeare, about Richard Stanyhurst’s translation of the Aeneid:

Thanks largely to Nashe’s attack, Stanyhurst has come to be regarded as a kind of literary-historical bad joke. The Cambridge History of English Literature solemnly asked whether we can plausibly “Imagine Dido Queen of Carthage asking in fury ‘Shall a stranger give me the slampam?'” and a more recent guide is characteristically dismissive in suggesting that Stanyhurst “insisted on not being mistaken for an ignoramus” but that his translation “proves, in unconscious burlesque, how bad neo-classical theory was.” The indecorum of high classical matter being rendered through low verbal coinages is what provokes the derision. Thus the Cambridge History again: “he surpassed in a fantastic eccentricity the vainest of his contemporaries. Never was there a stranger mixture of pedantry and slang than is to be found in his work.” Wait a minute, though: is not the juxtaposition of high and low, of kings and clowns, of soaring poetry and earthy vernacular, one of the qualities that we so value in the plays of one William Shakespeare? Do we not praise the Stratford grammar school lad to the rafters for the living sound of his lines and the astonishing array of his verbal coinages? Stanyhurst gives us: Chuff chaff, clush clash, crack-rack crashing, hob lob, hurly burly, huf puff, kym kam, muff maff, pell mell, pit pat, rags jags, swish swash, tag rag, tara-tan-tara, thwick thwack, trush trash, wig wag, yolp yalp.

Again, do we not consider the art of creating compound adjectives as one of the marks of all true poets since Homer and the ancient Greek tragedians? Stanyhurst delights in: “Herd-flock,” “Frith-cops,” “Blustrous huzzing with clush clash buzzing, with drooming clattered humming,” “It brayeth in snorting,” “The push and poke of lance,” “Deep minced, far chopped,” “Rapfully frapping,” “With belling screech cry she roareth.” One almost hears Tony Harrison’s acclaimed translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Or even the sheer zany word-adoring inventiveness of another Irishman in exile on the continent: could Richard Stanyhurst be not so much a joke as a pioneer? Was he the Elizabethan James Joyce?

In the Oxford English Dictionary, Stanyhurst is credited with the invention of a rich array of more than one hundred and fifty words, including Bepowdered, Breakvow, Carousing, Disjoincted, Distracted, Flailing, Flounce, Frolic, Gadding, Gutter, Hoblobs, Hoodwink, Makesport, Mopsy, Pertlike, Plashy, Rake, Sea-froth, Smocktoy, Spumy, Unhoused, Wanton (as a verb), and Whizling. OED also gives him nearly two hundred nonce-words, among them Bedgle, Bepurpled, Blastbob, Breedsleep, Crabknob, Garbroils, Gyreful, Hedgebrat, Pack-paunch, Plashbreach, Racebrood, Snarnoise, Sportbreeder, Uddered, Upvomited, and Windblast. Many of his coinages failed to make it into the Oxford English Dictionary at all: Bughag, Birthsoil, Foresnaffled, Hailknob, Hell-swarm, Hotlove, Lustilad, Nightfog, Rapesnatched, Seabelch, and about seventy more. And on about fifty occasions, his usage of a word predates the OED‘s earliest citation. In the following instances, Shakespeare is cited as the earliest usage but the credit should really go to Stanyhurst: Baggage, Beldam, Eyeball, Huddle, Post-haste, Quillet.

Shakespeare and Joyce may be pushing it, but the list of words is certainly impressive (I suspect “Bedgle” is a typo for Bedagle, in OED s.v. bedaggle [= bedag “To bemire the bottom of (dress)”]: 1582 R. Stanyhurst tr. Virgil First Foure Bookes Æneis ii. 29 “With dust al powdred, with filthood dustye bedagled”).

Speaking of the Aeneid, April Bernard in the November 23, 2017 NYRB recommends the new translation by David Ferry in the strongest terms: “it is what Ferry accomplishes […] that makes this new translation such a marvel throughout. […] This kind of translation almost needs a new name, to distinguish it from all the other worthy efforts to bring the ancient poets to life: it is an iteration, another version, but also—perhaps, almost—the thing itself.” And speaking of poetry, they’ve found an extra quatrain by Baudelaire (see Alison Flood’s Guardian story).

Sara Wheeler writes for LitHub about Constance Garnett and other translators:

My first publication was a translation, not something I wrote myself. It was an essay in Greek about the poet C.P. Cavafy for a literary anthology of that kind of thing. Before taking up Modern Greek I had spent thousands of hours of my youth translating Homer for my studies—probably too many hours, when I should have been doing something else. I am not very good at written translation, and have a tremendous respect for those who carry it off. Having a smaller vocabulary than English, Russian in particular requires the translator to wrestle constantly with nuance. (Dusha, for example, means “soul,” and also “heart” in a figurative sense. The word appears more than a hundred times in War and Peace.)

The one I hold dear to my own dusha, as a woman, and as a translator, is Constance Garnett. Born in Brighton in 1861, Garnett translated 70 volumes from Russian, including all Dostoyevsky’s baggy monsters. She was an indefatigable worker who moved through the literary and political circles of a troubled time and emerged as a heroine, always on the side of the poor and oppressed, fighting in a man’s world. She was the opposite of a Little Englander, determined to see things from an international point of view.

Fair-haired, short-sighted, and in poor health all her life, Garnett had a pinched childhood. When she went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a scholar at 17, she had never before left Sussex. She read classics and math, both of which provided rigorous training in the art of translation and the expression of precise meanings. She began learning Russian just before she turned 30 when she fell in with a gang of fiery exiles. She lectured a little, taught, moved to London, and associated with the Fabians—a movement which she later joined, and later still left. She was friends with George Bernard Shaw, who claimed he would have liked to marry her had he been richer.

Garnett worked at the People’s Palace, a library designed to improve the education of working people in London’s East End. She married Edward Garnett, a publisher’s reader and would-be novelist who started a newspaper for cats (motto “Cave Canem”) which included a food column. His family had always been sympathetic to political refugees, and the newlyweds embarked on married life with an altruistic sense of purpose. For her part Connie befriended many Russian Jews who had fled persecution after the assassination of Alexander II. The couple set up home in Surrey in a cottage where Constance once picked 27 quarts of blackberries in a day and found a mouse preserved in a jar of treacle.

We talked about Garnett’s life back in 2014, but this account has more details (and more piquant ones — that newspaper for cats!), and there’s a nice slap at Nabokov, who “jumped in to damn her versions”:

But compare his translation of Gogol’s sleighbells in Dead Souls to Garnett’s. Chudnym zvonom zalivayetsya kolokolchik becomes:

Garnett: “The ringing of the bells melts into music.”

Nabokov: “The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy.”

Who, do you think, has the tin ear?

Thanks, Trevor!

We recently discussed the vanishing fig, but that was the gesture; there was a brief mention of the fruit word here. This is neither fig, but the one that occurs only in phrases like “in full fig” and “in fine fig” — it is the second entry in this AHD link. I recently ran across that usage, wondered what it was from, and discovered (see that AHD link) that it is “Perhaps from fig, to trot out a horse in lively condition, dress up, variant of feague, to make a horse lively, probably from Dutch vegen, to brush, from Middle Dutch vēghen.” The OED entry is ancient (from 1896) but has the same derivation, from to fig out “to dress, ‘get up’” from feague from German or Dutch, though “there may be mixture of a native word; compare feak v.3 [‘To twitch, jerk, pull smartly’],” whose etymology says “Compare fike v.1 and Old Norse fjúka to drift, fly away, and its causative feyka to blow, drive away, to rush.” And fike “To move restlessly, bustle, fidget” says “? < Old Norse fíkja (rare in Icelandic) = Middle Swedish fíkja to move briskly, be restless or eager. Compare Old Norse fíkenn eager. See fig v.3, fitch v.1, fidge v.” At this point I gave up the chase and decided it was one of those knots that’s best left alone.

There’s apparently a novel called The Green Eyed Lama (“The year is 1938. The newly-installed Communist Government of Mongolia, under orders from Moscow, launches a nation-wide purge. Before it’s over, nearly tenth of the country’s population is murdered. Sendmaa, a young herdswoman, falls in love with Baasan, a talented and handsome lama…”) whose website includes a glossary useful to anyone with an interest in Mongolia. Here are the first couple of entries:

Aarts Boiled fermented milk without the watery component called yellow milk. Its dried version is called aaruul. During autumn, herders put aarts into an animal stomach and freeze it. In winter, frozen aarts – also called tsagaa — is used as an addition to soup and the hot soup-like drink made of aarts, flour, and water. For children, frozen aarts is a favourite snack during winter and is eaten like ice-cream. Depending on the animal milk from which it is derived and the method of boiling, aarts can have different tastes, colour, and content. Some families add Sugar, rice, aaruul, eezgii and cheese to their aarts before freezing.

Aaruul A dried milk product. Aaruul is light, hard, and sturdy for long travel — the perfect snack for nomadic herders. Thick, big aaruul is called huruud. Aaruul is rich in calcium. It can be of many tastes, shapes, levels of hardness depending on the milk of which animal it is made such as cow aaruul, sheep aaruul, goat aaruul, camel aaruul, reindeer aaruul, and yak aaruul. Yak, sheep, camel and reindeer aaruuls are distinctive with their richness, while goat and cow aaruul are typically less oily. Arkhan and Dayan Deerkh people commonly produce cow and sheep aaruul. There is no aaruul from mare’s milk. Aaruul is made of boiled fermented milk called aarts. Before producing aaruul from boiled fermented milk, herders separate out so called ‘yellow milk’ (water and protein) from the boiled fermented milk. During the boiling process of the fermented milk, Mongolian herders extract ‘milk vodka’. In summer pieces of aaruul are often seen drying on wood trays placed on the sloping tops of gers or other surfaces out of reach of goats and other animals.

It includes historical/biographical entries like Amar (“Prime Minister of Mongolia 1937-1939. Well educated and wealthy, he didn’t like Russia’s interference in Mongolian affairs”) and Bogd, Eighth or Javzundamba Hutagt VIII (“Mongolia’s religious and secular leader having the title of Bogd Khaan of Mongolia from 1911 to 1921”); particularly interesting is the entry for the much-renamed capital city:

Urga (also spelled Örgöö) The name for Ulaanbaatar from its founding in 1639 to 1706. From 1706–1911 it was known as Ikh Khüree (great camp) or Da Khüree (from the Chinese dà for “great”). After the declaration of Independence from the Chinese Manchu Dynasty in 1911 the city was known as Niislel Khüree (capital camp). In 1924 the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Government renamed the capital, Ulaanbaatar (red hero).

Thanks, Bathrobe!

I have finished The Brothers Karamazov (see earlier posts: 1, 2), and am still stunned and unsure of what to say. I should probably go right back and read it again, but I think I’ll put that off for a few years; I’ll just mention a few things that struck me. The remainder of the novel, since that last post, consists of Book 10 (Alyosha hangs out with the schoolboys), Book 11 (Ivan hangs out with Smerdyakov and has his encounter with the Devil), and Book 12 (the trial and its consequences). The Alyosha chapters are charming if not especially relevant to the main line of the book; the same, in fact, could be said of the earlier sections focusing on him — the whole Father Zosima section could have been cut with no detriment to the plot, but of course it was central to Dostoevsky’s vision, and Alyosha would have been the protagonist of the projected sequel that he never got to write. The Ivan chapters are riveting and harrowing, just as I remembered them from my decades-old first reading. And the trial is far better than I remembered; the local prosecutor, hitherto not much respected by the community, gives the speech of his life, eloquently tying the various bits of evidence into a convincing (and erroneous) picture of events, and then the hotshot Petersburg defense attorney turns that picture inside out, showing how each of the apparently damning elements could be otherwise explained and insisting there is no proof that Dmitry either killed his father or stole his money. The jury retires, there is a brief section of comments from the crowd (the ladies want Dmitry let off, the men want him convicted), and then vox populi speaks: the jury finds him guilty on all counts. There is no explanation, just the bare fact; Dmitry cries out that he is innocent, then prepares himself as best he can for Siberia, while those who love him hatch a plan for his escape.

What struck me forcibly about the trial, especially having recently read Anna Karenina, is its exemplification of what Gary Saul Morson calls vortex time, the apparent swirling of events down and in to create a sense of inevitability that is not objectively inherent in life (if, like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and me, you believe in free will). Anna allows herself to be swallowed up by it as she hurtles toward suicide, while the prosecutor forces Dmitry into it, each creating a plot focused inexorably on producing doom. Life has no plot, but people love plots and insist on creating them, often with bad results. Dmitry knows he is innocent of the murder he is charged with, but knows also that he had wished his father’s death and could easily have accomplished it that night; he welcomes the chance to atone for all his previous vileness (though he doesn’t think he can bear to be struck by an officer if he actually goes to Siberia, a convincing trait for a scion of the landowning gentry class). The last few pages, with Alyosha delivering a “we will never forget this moment” speech to his assembled disciples (twelve kids!), are sickly-sweet, but he wouldn’t be Dostoevsky without some of that (just as Dickens wouldn’t be Dickens). Whatever my qualms about one or another detail, on the whole this is the only Dostoevsky novel I don’t yearn to edit, to carve off extraneous elements and bring out the potential greatness. The Brothers Karamazov needs no apology and no editing, and I’m glad he lived to write it.

And now I have finished my Long March through 19th-century Russian literature. I will tie up a few loose ends (finish the Writer’s Diary and the Golovlyov Family), then celebrate by rereading the Strugatskys’ Улитка на склоне (Snail on the Slope), which I found confusing the first time around. Then, who knows: maybe Sologub’s Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon), maybe some Merezhkovsky, maybe Trifonov — I can splash around as the spirit leads me. I will, of course, report on whatever I read if I find I have anything to say.

I was excited to discover a new post by Helen DeWitt on her long-dormant blog paperpools, which linked to an hour-long interview with Jeremy Kitchen and Michael Sack of Lumpen Radio’s books and literature program Eye 94 Radio; I was listening to it with immense pleasure, and then at the halfway point she mentioned Languagehat, which made me kvell and run into the living room to tell my wife. DeWitt is, of course, the author of The Last Samurai, the best book ever written, and about half the interview is devoted to it; she talks about her inspirations for it and her travails trying to get it published, and there are several readings from it (unfortunately not by the author but by someone who mispronounces too many words — picquet, the card game, for instance, is /pᵻˈkɛt/ or /pᵻˈkeɪ/, with the stress on the second syllable, not, as the reader has it, “picket”). The interviewers clearly love her work and have read it with attention, but of course they are media types and ask if things she wrote were “based on your experiences” (why are people so obsessed with this?) and want to talk about feminism and Harvey Weinstein, while she wants to talk about Mel Brooks and Aristophanes. But the important thing is that they let her talk, and sometimes pause and feel for the right word or expression, only rarely butting in impatiently, and she has lots of interesting things to say.

One of them gave me a wry chuckle; they asked her about the long string of jobs that paid her bills while she was trying to write, and she said it had been frustrating because she had no free time — she felt obliged to spend her time at work doing what her employers paid her to do. Since it was a Chicago radio station, she added this obiter dictum: “If you have the job, you should do the job — Midwesterners will understand this. New Yorkers seem to have no problem getting a well-paying job and then not doing it.” It’s true, it’s true! I mean not literally — I and my fellow workers in NYC corporate jobs did what we were paid to do, but we had no compunction about using our down time on our own personal projects rather than looking for more work to do. No one in our low-level worker-bee jobs had any particular respect for the company, any sense of mutual obligation beyond the basic “do what’s required to get paid.” The boss is the jailer, the enemy, not the benevolent patron or partner in a mutually satisfying relationship. I’m not saying it’s right, but there it is. I’m a Wobbly at heart.

As always, I’m astonished she’s had so much trouble getting her books published the way she wants them; you’d think publishers would be competing for the honor of doing right by one of the best writers of our time. But I guess publishers are to writers what bosses are to workers.

Christopher Joby at Neerlandistiek reports on a recently discovered translation from Dutch to Siraya, formerly spoken in the southwest of Taiwan:

It’s not often in one’s career that one comes across a book or manuscript that has lain ‘hidden’ for several hundred years, but by chance this happened to me recently. In Amsterdam in 1661, the Dutch missionary Daniël Gravius published a volume comprising his translations of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John in the Formosan language, Siraya, a member of the broader Austronesian family of languages. Until recently, it was thought that only the translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew had survived. However, I recently identified a copy of the 1661 publication which contains both Gospel translations. The Gospel of St. John differs from that of St. Matthew in several respects and will therefore allow scholars in this field to increase their knowledge of this language, which became extinct in the nineteenth century. Hopefully, it will also add to our knowledge of the history of Austronesian or Formosan languages in Taiwan and Austronesian languages more generally.

The translation is based on the Dutch States Bible (Statenbijbel), first published in 1637. This includes several Latin and Greek words, which have been carried over into Siraya. Gravius’s publication consists of 70 folios of Dutch and Siraya parallel texts. It is a good example of the Bible translations that Dutch missionaries made in the seventeenth century into languages in East Asia and also illustrates how they mastered new languages such as Siraya in order to translate the Bible and other Christian literature into these languages. It is also a good example of the role that serendipity plays in scholarship!

There’s a nice image at the link; I love stories like that. (Via a Facebook post by bulbul.)

Barbara Partee has a Log post that so baffled me I have to repost the topic here. It begins:

Today in Seth Cable’s seminar on Montague’s Universal grammar, he gave out a problem set that included the task of adding “Neither Mitt smokes nor Barack smokes” to the little fragment of English that had been developed. And in the discussion of the problem set, it turned out that I was the only one in the class who seemed to have any doubts about whether the sentence “Neither Mitt smokes nor Barack smokes” was grammatical. My own intuition was that it had to be “Neither does Mitt smoke nor does Barack smoke”, though that sounded a little funny too.

My first reaction (since it’s not April 1) was that this is the kind of morass people get into when they spend too much time theorizing about constructed sentences; I couldn’t imagine that any native English speaker, uncontaminated by a linguistics PhD, could possibly think “Neither Mitt smokes nor Barack smokes” was an acceptable English sentence, and “Neither does Mitt smoke nor does Barack smoke” sounds more than just “a little funny,” it sounds like a construction that hasn’t been in use since the 16th century. But reading the comment thread, it seemed that some people disagree, and other examples (just as bad from my point of view) were proposed — e.g., Suzanne Valkemirer said, “If the sentence read ‘Neither does Mitt smoke nor does Barack drink,’ you would presumably find nothing odd about it.” Nothing odd?! I’m not sure whether I’ve fallen irrevocably out of touch with English or these people are all existing in an alternate linguistic universe, so I thought I’d turn to the Varied Reader and as: does “Neither Mitt smokes nor Barack smokes” work for you? What about the other proposed sentences? (N.b.: If you’re confused by my post title, S is a linguistic abbreviation for “sentence.”)

Alexander Golikov has what looks like an interesting paper at Academia: Translating through the Cultural Barriers: the Qing Imperial Multilingualism. Here’s the abstract:

The Qing Empire, from its establishment in the Manchu homeland, followed with the con-quest of Ming China, and dramatic expansion towards Inner Asia, became one of the largest imperial states in the history of China. By 1800s it encompassed proper China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Eastern Turkistan. Bringing such different (ethnically, culturally and historically) regions under the sole Son of Heaven inevitably led to development of various political practices to deal with the challenge of complexity.

The Qing dynasty practiced various administrative modes (the civil bureaucracy, the Eight banners, Jasagh, Beg) to govern separate categories of the populace. Also important was building the all-encompassing concept of Emperorship, which was able to address simultaneously to the distinct political cultures of, e.g. post-imperial Mongolian törö/ulus, Tibetan concept of mchod-yon or the Turkic-Muslim combination of the Islamic, post-Qarahanid, and Chinggisid elements.

Another manifestation of the Qing multicultural approach may be found in the multilingual glossaries, composed during the last half of the 1700s, notably the Manchu-Han-Mongol-Tibetan-Turki Pentaglot or six-lingual Description of the Western Region or the Glossary of the Six Boards.

Particularly interesting is the variety of translation of the institutional (e.g. the Court of the Outer Dependencies), ethnic (Korean, Russian, Muslim, etc.) and geographical (especially in contemporary Xinjiang) names. Occasionally they reflect unique historical background, in other situations the translation tend to emphasize different cultural perceptions (from ummah-al-islamiya to sedentary/nomadic dichotomy). We may find the concepts which (through translation) were imposed on the conquered population or, alternatively, imported from one linguistic milieu to another.

Broadening the approach, we may encounter similar phenomena in the cultural practices of both con-temporary world (e.g. in the so-called Gunpowder Empires, that are the Ottoman Turkey, Safavid-Qajar Iran and Mughal India) and in modernity. For example the non-Han translation of the Chinese political vocabulary manifests the careful manipulation of the terms and concepts.

It’s full of interesting bits, like:

The very translation of the title of Emperor was reflecting different cultural norms. The Manchu version is identical to Chinese, while Mongol and Tibetan are representing indigenous concepts of power. Interestingly, the Turki translation is identical to the Mongol. The Manchus faced here the transition from Chinggisid legitimacy to one based on the descent from the Prophet Muḥammad. The fierce opponents of the Qing rule were the kʰwājagān (sing. kʰwāja), leaders of Sufi Brethren and seyid (the descendants of the Prophet). Since the Manchus were not Muslim, they could only claim political authority on the basis that they be-longed to the clan of Chinggis […].

Thanks, Bathrobe!

Keith Hou­s­ton writes the blog Shady Char­ac­ters, about “the stor­ies be­hind dif­fer­ent marks of punc­tu­ation” (I welcomed it back in 2011), and he’s also published a book on the topic (LH). A few years ago he did a post on an obscure and fascinating symbol:

Com­puters are not type­writers: this is evid­ent. Even so, it’s easy to for­get that Chris­topher Latham Sholes’ mech­an­ical mar­vel was the well­spring of the QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY and sim­ilar key­boards we use to in­ter­act with our laptops, tab­lets and smart­phones. Sholes and his in­ven­tion play sup­port­ing roles in the Shady Char­ac­ters book, too: the type­writer helped pop­ular­ise the @-sym­bol even as it sav­aged the em and en dashes, but there was al­ways one sym­bol on Sholes’ em­bryonic QWERTY key­board that I never quite got to grips with. Take a look at the left­most key on the third row of Sholes’ key­board, as shown in his 1878 pat­ent for “Im­prove­ment in type-writ­ing ma­chines”. What on earth is that? Or rather, what on earth is this: ‘⋮’?

He did some investigation which led to Morse code; Thomas A. Fine of Sentence Spacing (which promotes the argument “that wide spacing is a perfectly valid style choice, and at most that two spaces are the more functional logical choice for our modern world,” to which I say “amen”) was inspired to carry out his own in­vest­ig­a­tion into the “ver­tical el­lip­sis,” which turned up an instance of the mark being used as a line separator:

This leads me to the following working theory. Sholes, or one of his testers, wanted a vertical bar character on the typewriter for situations like this one, with a bibliography. It could be useful for borders and other things too. But the typography of that first typewriter was stone simple. It was a sans serif font, and the letter “I” was already a vertical bar. Given that Sholes doubled up “1” and “I”, there’s no point in adding a relatively obscure symbol that was identical. To be useful it would have to look different than an “I”. So Sholes simply used an existing alternate form. Later, when it turned out to be less useful, it was changed to a slash which carried the same function, but could also be used to write fractions, and the percent sign, and to double up with “c” to make “¢”, as well as a number of abbreviations common in that era that used a slash.

Hou­s­ton responded in Miscellany № 71 — ‘⋮’ redux, singling out Fine’s image of a line of typing produced by Mark Twain’s daugh­ter Susie:
BJUYT KIOP N LKJHGF­DSA ⋮ QWER­TY­UIOP:_-98VX5432QW RT

As a ex-com­pos­itor, Twain would have been quite at home with un­com­mon marks such as the pil­crow (¶), double dag­ger (‡) and man­icule (☞) — as per the ed­it­ors of his col­lec­ted let­ters, he used these and other marks in his cor­res­pond­ence — but the ‘⋮’ never ap­peared again. Even if he knew what the mark meant, evid­ently, he never saw the need to use it. So near, and yet so far! Who would have been bet­ter than Mark Twain to en­lighten us as to the mean­ing of the ‘⋮’?

It’s a lot of fun, and I recommend reading the whole sequence. And as lagniappe, I’ll link to a new Log post by Victor Mair that begins:

Note from June Teufel Dreyer: “Driving around Coconut Grove [Miami neighborhood] to admire old houses on back streets, [daughter] Elizabeth [Dreyer Geay] and I saw one with a plaque on the perimeter wall that read ‘Maison d’Etre'”

(You can see a couple of images at the link.) I am bemused to report I had to read the whole post to get the pun; somehow my mind wasn’t connecting to the obvious phrase.