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The Latest from Archipelago Books:

Dear readers and friends,

As a response to the pandemic, we would like to offer 30 ebooks FREE from March 19th until April 2nd! Simply click ‘purchase’ on the book page and you will be able to download the book free of charge. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to support world literature. We are grateful. Our free ebook library includes…

It’s an impressive and wide-ranging list, and I applaud both the generous offer (I snagged some great-sounding books) and their attempt to deal with the problem featured in this post. (Don’t forget to click the “e-book” circle; the paperbacks aren’t free!)

Also, the LRB is “featuring just one piece from our archive per day … for 24 hours”; check it out, there’s some good stuff.

Update. Melville House is offering e-book editions of their top ten bestselling novels at $1.99 for the next week. I grabbed Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone; they’ve got Raymond Radiguet, Irvine Welsh, Andrey Kurkov, and others on offer.

Matthew Wills at JStor Daily rehashes the tale of Milman Parry, who (as many Hatters doubtless know) “used textual analysis, anthropology, and field work to show that pre-literate or semi-literate peoples could, in fact, recite long poems.” I hadn’t known, however, about his mysterious demise in 1935:

But Parry’s untimely death from a gunshot wound seems to have sparked all sorts of urban legends—or what you might call oral traditions. Parry, in fact, had carried a gun in the rough terrain of Yugoslavia and took the weapon with him on a family trip to California. It evidently went off by accident while he was unpacking. That “evidently” has been the basis of much rumor since.

Classics professor Steve Reece explores the shooting and the mythology about Parry that arose in subsequent years. He’s been described as a working-class hero/chicken farmer who ran up against Harvard snobbery and killed himself in despair when he wasn’t given tenure. He was compared to Alexander the Great (also dead at thirty-three); T. E. Lawrence, who died in a senseless road accident just months before Parry; and even to Ajax, who “killed himself out of anger and dismay over not receiving the armor of Achilles.” Reece goes to the documentation to meticulously deconstruct the Parry-myths in the context of the fluidity of oral traditions. Though saturated in corporate narratives and televisual plots, we evidently still make up songs about heroes.

Reese’s article is “The Myth of Milman Parry: Ajax or Elpenor?” (Oral Tradition, 33/1 [2019]:115-142), and it’s available free in its entirety. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Recently I’ve run across a couple of omissions from the OED that mildly surprised me; they’re not common usages, but they’re established enough you’d think the grand repository of the English wordhoard, which embraces even absurd hapaxes like pancakewards (1867 Cornhill Mag. Mar. 362 Her allowance would not admit of..a surreptitious egg, might her desire pancakewards be never so strong), would have entries for them:

1) Entry fine. I encountered this as the definition for a prerevolutionary French term, which I forgetlods et ventes [thanks, Xerîb!]; it means “a payment due when a new customary tenant entered land” and is frequently used in books dealing with relevant topics (“to all transfers of land was the imposition of the entry fine”; “Both of these variants confirm the principle that the entry fine was the responsibility of the incoming tenant”; “the 24,000 marks possibly paid as a relief or entry fine to Philip II of France for Richard’s French lands”; etc. etc.). The OED, s.v. entry, has “2. Law. The action or an act of taking up occupation of a piece of land, property, etc., as a legal assertion of ownership; the action or right of entering upon possession of land, property, etc.,” and the phrase writ of entry “a writ for the recovery of land or property from one claiming legal possession of it,” but not entry fine (and the word fine does not occur in the entry for entry).

2) Turquet/torquetum. This one has its own Wikipedia entry (with splendid illustrations):

The torquetum or turquet is a medieval astronomical instrument designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: Horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic. It is said to be a combination of Ptolemy’s astrolabon and the plane astrolabe.

There’s a detailed description in The History of the Telescope, by Henry C. King (p. 10):

Nasir ed-din el-Tusi is believed to have introduced the turquet or torquetum (Fig. 5), an instrument that became very popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a kind of portable equatorial and altazimuth. To a base plate was hinged an inclinable plate which could be set in the plane of the celestial equator by adjusting the length of a graduated arm or stylus. At right angles to the inclinable plate was a polar axis carrying two circles. A movable alidade indicated declinations on the upper circle, while the equatorial circle, in the plane of the inclinable plate, indicated right ascensions. […] In any case, the torquetum appears to have been in regular use in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Torquetum occurs nowhere in the OED; turquet, amusingly, does… in two hapaxes with very different senses:

turquet, n.¹
Obsolete. rare^—1
A player dressed up to resemble a Turk.
1625 F. Bacon Ess. (new ed.) 225 Anti-masques..haue been commonly of Fooles, Satyres, Baboones, Wilde-Men, Antiques, Beasts, Sprites, Witches, Ethiopes, Pigmies, Turquets,..and the like.

turquet, n.²
Obsolete. rare^—1
? Spelt. […]
1725 R. Bradley Chomel’s Dictionaire Œconomique at Stone A Remedy for the Stone and Gravel is, to take the Herb Turquet or Storch-Corn [sic], dry it and reduce it to Powder.

I trust the good folks at Oxford will take note and do the right thing.

It occurred to me I didn’t know where pedant was from, and it turns out I’m not the only one. OED (updated September 2005):

Etymology: < Middle French pedante, pedant, French pédant schoolmaster (1558), someone who shows off his learning, pedant (1561, 1653 as adjective) or its etymon Italian pedante teacher, schoolmaster (mid 15th cent.), pedant (1524), of uncertain origin, perhaps alteration of either pedagogo pedagogue n. or post-classical Latin paedagogant-, paedagogans, present participle of paedagogare to act as pedagogue, to teach (in an undated text in Du Cange), perhaps by association Italian †pedante foot-soldier, pedestrian (see pedanty n.2). Compare Spanish pedante schoolmaster (late 16th or early 17th cent.), pedant (first half of the 17th cent.).

It first meant ‘schoolmaster’ (a1586 Sir P. Sidney Arcadia iii. i. f. 247^v Unto Cupid that boy shall a Pedante be found?) but quickly developed the modern sense of “A person who excessively reveres or parades academic learning or technical knowledge, often without discrimination or practical judgement” (a1593 C. Marlowe Edward II sig. D3^v I am none of these common pedants I, That cannot speake without propterea quod). It’s one of those words you’d expect to have a clear etymology, but not so.

Alexis Moran and Jai McAllister report for ABC News:

Against the backdrop of early colonisation, on Sydney Harbour’s shoreline, an extraordinary exchange took place between a young Aboriginal woman and a First Fleet Lieutenant. This friendship serves as one of the earliest recorded cultural exchanges between Europeans and Aboriginal people, and the history and knowledge they documented together would be priceless.

Patyegarang, a young Gamaraigal woman who spoke the Gadigal language, would prove crucial to the survival of her Sydney-based native tongue. William Dawes, an English Lieutenant and astronomer, recorded the pair’s conversations, in what remains today the only known first-hand accounts of the Gadigal language. […]

Dawes’s notebooks clearly show that he and Patyegarang spent time in each other’s company and shared emotion, humour, intellectual discussions and mutual respect. Patyegarang became Dawes’s chief teacher of language, with the two sharing details of their daily lives. […] Patyegarang taught him words such as Putuwa, which means “to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to gently squeeze the fingers of another person”. Other notable phrases include: Tariadyaou (“I made a mistake in speaking”); Minyin bial naadyimi? (“Why don’t you sleep?”); and Minyin bial widadyemi (“Why did you not drink?”). […]

Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at the University of Sydney, and proud Ngarigu woman, Professor Jakelin Troy has spent the three decades reconstructing Aboriginal languages of the Sydney area and says Patyegarang’s interactions with Dawes have proved vital to the survival of Sydney’s Gadigal language. “The work that Patyegarang did with William Dawes produced the first field notes for an Australian language that provides sufficient information to reconstruct something of the verbal morphology (indicating something of the grammar and syntax) and lexicon (vocabulary) for any of our languages,” she says. […]

Ms Jackson said although the Gadigal clan or family lived in the Sydney CBD, Patyegarang herself came from another part of the coastal region. “She most probably, and we can’t say anything for certain, came from what we now know as the North Shore which makes her Gamaraigal,” she said. “All of the clans of coastal Sydney spoke a language that they all understood, regardless of which clan they belonged to. “Wherever she comes from, her persistence and patience with Mr D (as she called Lieutenant William Dawes) in sharing language and culture is the reason why we now have, in this time of pride in Australian languages, a treasure trove of source material for reviving the language.”

Thanks, Trevor!

I’m about halfway through Bryusov’s novel Огненный ангел (The Fiery Angel) and am enjoying it despite my irritation with its overindulgence in the details of 16th-century magickal philosophy. In chapter 6 there’s a scene where our hero Ruprecht, hopelessly in love with the nutty Renata (who herself is hopelessly in love with Count Heinrich von Otterheim, who she thinks is the fiery angel Madiel in human form), goes to Bonn to consult with the man who is supposed to the age’s great expert on the occult, Cornelius Agrippa, and in Agrippa’s house he meets several boisterous young students, one of whom, Hans, is so meek and girlish “говорит ‘спутники’ вместо ‘панталоны'” [he says sputniki ‘fellow travelers, satellites’ instead of pantalony ‘pants’]. Bryusov’s footnote (he assiduously footnoted his own novel) says “‘Trabanter wie jene Jungfrau, die nicht gerne das Bruch nent, sagt’ — выражение XVI века [a 16th-century expression].”

I have to admit I was familiar with Trabant only as the name of a famously terrible East German car, but I looked it up and discovered it means ‘satellite’ or ‘companion,’ just like Russian спутник (and in fact I learn from that Wikipedia article that “The car’s name was inspired by the Soviet Sputnik satellite”). But where is it from? Wiktionary says “From Middle High German drabant (‘Hussite foot soldier’), of unclear origin”; Lutz Mackensen says the MHG word is borrowed from Czech drabant with the same meaning, though folk etymology connects it with the verb traben; the OED (entry not fully updated since 1913) says “< German trabant a life-guard, an armed attendant, a satellite (also in Astron.), in Italian trabante, French traban, Bohemian drabanti; of Turkish (originally Persian) origin: see drabant n.” and at drabant (“A halberdier; spec. a soldier of the body-guard of the kings of Sweden”) says “< Swedish drabant attendant, satellite: in German trabant, Italian trabante, French traban, draban, Bohemian drabanti, Magyar darabant, Romanian doroban, < Turkish (originally Persian) darbān porter, guard.” All of which leaves me confused and wondering whether any progress has been made in etymologizing this Wanderwort.

I almost forgot to mention that when I looked up Trabant in my huge Harper-Collins Unabridged, I was half amused and half appalled to find the following pair of entries:

Trabant m (a) (Astron) satellite. (b) (Hist) bodyguard; (fig) satellite. (c) usu pl. (dated inf) kiddie-wink (inf).

Trabbi m -s, -s (inf) East German car

They leave the “car” sense out of the main entry (while including “kiddie-wink,” whatever the fuck that is) and then for Trabbi (isn’t it usually Trabi?) they just say “East German car” without mentioning what it’s short for! Tsk.

Update. See also this 2013 XIX век post, which I totally forgot I’d commented on, giving the same Persian-Turkish etymology. Tsk.

Terena Bell writes for The Outline about a situation that has bothered me:

When it comes to literary translation, American publishers have a pipeline problem. But not in the way that tech companies use the phrase — saying they don’t hire diverse array of job candidates because there aren’t enough female and minority applicants. Publishing’s problem isn’t one of supply — real or imagined. This pipeline problem comes from flaws in the industry’s acquisitions system that make it nearly impossible for non-Western authors and U.S. publishers to connect.

In 2018, for the second year in a row, American publishers released fewer translated titles: 609 books were published, down from 650 in 2017 and the industry high in 2016 of 666. These books were largely translated from European languages, with roughly 42 percent originally written in Spanish, German, or French. In comparison, only one book was translated from Bosnian. Some languages, like Somali and Burmese, had no representation at all. […] Why do some countries’ books get over-translated for the U.S. market and others not at all?

It’s definitely not because Americans don’t want to read their stories. Statistically, American Literary Translators Association Executive Director Elisabeth Jaquette told me publishers actually make more money per translated title than they do from books originally in English. […] Less than three percent of U.S. titles are works in translation, but the category accounts for seven to eight percent of sales. […]

Publishing is an old business replete with tradition: To publish, authors must first find an agent; that agent convinces an editor to acquire the book; the editor then convinces colleagues; each decision made in a fairly subjective way. Even at Amazon, a tech company that runs on algorithms, AmazonCrossing Editorial Director Gabriella Page-Fort said acquisition decisions are human-made. Typically, a “yes” is linked to a book’s potential to make money, the same as in any business. In publishing, that comes down to writing quality, past success with comparable titles (or “comps”), and what agents call “platform” — an author’s personal marketing reach. […]

For non-English writers, the process isn’t that different. Instead of selling a book to a publisher in their country, though, an agent sells foreign publishing rights to a U.S. company, working personal connections to make the deal or finding buyers at international book fairs, the most popular held annually in London, England and Frankfurt, Germany. Jaquette said you won’t see much Arabic-language writing at these fairs, or Farsi either — but not because books aren’t written in those languages. […]

For cultures falling outside the pipeline, publishers have to make a concerted effort. At AmazonCrossing, this means attending lesser-known fairs in the Middle East and looking at sales statistics from Amazon stores in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, China, and Japan. If a book sells well in one country, AmazonCrossing is more likely to translate it for the others. Page-Fort’s team has also designed a request page for translators who read a book in the original language, loved it, and now want to translate it into English. This upload form is available in 14 languages. Despite these efforts, Amazon’s stats still linguistically adhere to norms. […] “Think about how many people and decision makers exist between a book and reader,” [Page-Fort] said. “It’s convincing each and every one of those decision points to make a new decision today that breaks the rule they made up about the past.”

It’s one of those infuriating situations that it’s not easy to see how to fix. Thanks, Jack!

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.”