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It’s been a while since I’ve featured Poemas del río Wang, but the latest post is right up my alley:

The Kumbaracı yokuşu, that is, “Bombardier descent” runs down to the always crowded İstiklal Avenue at its end near the sea, not far from the Passage Oriental, which housed the Café Lebon, the once famous café built in Art Nouveau style by the Istanbul-born French architect Alexandre Vallaury, not long after returning home from his studies in Paris. There were several similar passages on the İstiklal, the former Grand Rue de Péra, the main avenue of the European quarter of Istanbul from the Galata Tower up to Taksim Square, some of them are still open nowadays.

But if you also wander into the small streets and alleys opening from the İstiklal, you can find other, more neglected heralds of old Istanbul, a world gone almost a hundred years ago. On the Kumbaracı, not far from the fountain of Miralem Halil Ağa built as a pious gift in 1729, there is an interesting fin-de-siècle house. Arriving from the İstiklal, the French inscription on the left side of the doorway catches the eye first: “Fabrique et dépôt de meubles”, furniture factory and depot. The inscription on the right side is indecipherable, but the ones on the street front are mostly still there, defying time and weather, advertising the wares of the former owner in three languages and three different scripts.

The one on the left side seems to be the most interesting of all of them. The script is Armenian, but the language is Ottoman Turkish: ՄԷՖՐՕՒԶԱԹ ՖԱՊՐԻՔԱՍԸ mefroizat fabrikası, in modern orthography mefruşat fabrikası, “furniture factory”. It may sound strange today, but Ottoman Turkish was often written with Armenian script until the alphabet reform in 1928, after which the Latin script has been used for Turkish – even the very first Turkish novel, the Akabi’s story was published in Armeno-Turkish script in 1851. For most people it was easier to learn and the language itself could be rendered more precisely than in the otherwise used Ottoman Turkish script, a modified version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Precision depended on the language user him/herself too, however. In the inscription of the furniture factory two peculiarities can be observed: first, the ՕՒ oi standing in ՄԷՖՐՕՒԶԱԹ mefroizat instead of the properly used Ու u, which seems to be an influence of Greek. Then, the use of Ք k in ՖԱՊՐԻՔԱՍԸ fabrikası is quite uncommon as it usually stands before front rounded vowels. Before back vowels its almost mirrored counterpart, a Գ should be used (the difference between the two might be more palpable if one looks at their counterparts in the Ottoman script: ك and ق‎, respectively).

It turns out I actually posted about Armeno-Turkish in 2017, but in the interim I forgot all about it, so this is a useful reminder! It’s well worth visiting the río Wang post for the gorgeous images; I will make one pedantic correction: İstiklal Avenue is not “at its end near the sea” but at the upper end; the one near the sea is Kemeraltı Caddesi, as you can see from the map.

Полка (polka.academy — see this 2018 post) became concerned that they had so few women writers in their list of 108 important Russian books, so they decided to put together a female canon, from Catherine the Great to Elena Fanailova (they stopped in the year 2000, having decided that the 21st century needs its own list). I thought I had delved pretty deeply into women writers in Russian, but I found both writers and books I was unaware of, from Alexandra Zrazhevskaya’s 1842 Зверинец [The menagerie], “one of the first examples of feminist criticism,” to Olga Komarova’s 1999 Грузия [Georgia], a posthumous collection of a dozen stories, the only remaining legacy of a woman who steeped herself in an extreme form of Russian Orthodoxy, burned her writings, and asked that none of her stories, originally published in samizdat, be reprinted after her death (which came in a car crash in 1995). Thanks, as always, to Lev Oborin for his work on Polka and for posting about it on Facebook where I can keep up with it.

Charles Q. Choi writes for Spectrum about an unusual new programming language:

The world’s first programming language based on classical Chinese is only about a month old, and volunteers have already written dozens of programs with it, such as one based on an ancient Chinese fortune-telling algorithm.

The new language’s developer, Lingdong Huang, previously designed an infinite computer-generated Chinese landscape painting. He also helped create the first and so far only AI-generated Chinese opera. He graduated with a degree in computer science and art from Carnegie Mellon University in December.

After coming up with the idea for the new language, wenyan-lang, roughly a year ago, Huang finished the core of the language during his last month at school. It includes a renderer that can display a program in a manner that resembles pages from ancient Chinese texts.

“I always put it off and tried to read more books in classical Chinese. Eventually I decided that reading more books might be just a euphemism for procrastination, and I needed to just implement it,” Huang says.

I know the feeling! There is more description at the link, little of which I can understand, and some gorgeous illustrations. I have no idea if this is useful or just a jeu d’esprit, but I’m glad to know about it. Thanks, Trevor!

I’m still making my way through Irina Reyfman’s How Russia Learned to Write (see this post), and I just came across a translation that amused me. On page 93 she quotes a typically excitable and mendacious letter Gogol sent his mother in May 1829, in the course of which the young scapegrace invents a position he’d been offered at a thousand rubles a year and asks loftily why he should sell his health and precious time for such a pathetic sum (as Reyfman points out, it was actually a good salary for a starting position, and he would later accept much less), adding “и на совершенные пустяки, на что это похоже?” which she translates “And [sell it] in order to do nonsense. How can this be acceptable?”

That made me laugh out loud. I mean, it’s not wrong; “на что это похоже,” though it literally means “what’s it like?” (i.e., what does it resemble?) and can be used that way, is a common expression signifying indignation, and Sophia Lubensky’s invaluable Dictionary of Idioms renders it “whoever heard (of) the like?; whoever heard of such a thing?; what (sort of game) is this? what do you <they etc> think you <they etc> are doing? [in limited contexts] what will (did) it look like?; what sort of situation is this […].” Even those renditions sound too formal for the context (though “whoever heard of such a thing?” would pass well enough), but “How can this be acceptable?” is just ludicrous. (I suppose if he were a young man today he might say “What’s that about?”)

I’d say the paradigmatic example of its use is this, from Vera Panova’s Валя (1959):

― Как можно, ― говорили одни, ― ехать зайцем, на что это похоже!
[“How can you ride without paying,” some of them said, “na chto eto pokhozhe?”]

The thing is that you can’t really render it “whoever heard of such a thing?” because of course everyone has heard of such a thing, it’s common practice, it’s just reprehensible. I guess “shame on you!” is a likely equivalent, but does anyone say that any more? I think there are few vestiges left of the shame culture that used to govern civilized people. For that matter, do Russians (other than old babushkas) still say на что это похоже? Or is it all mat these days?

Joe Moran writes for the Guardian about a new book by Judith Flanders, A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, which sounds like an interesting read:

One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders’s book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is. Writing has been invented independently at least three times in different parts of the world. The alphabet was invented only once – over 3,000 years ago, in Egypt’s Western desert, along a road used by traders and soldiers from across the Middle East. […] Alphabetical order, however, had a much longer and more circuitous road to dominance. A Place for Everything tells this complex and layered story. The alphabet has always been learned in a set order – but it was ages before this order was used for anything other than memorising the letters. Alphabetisation arrived piecemeal and for centuries remained one arrangement among many.

The Library of Alexandria, founded around 300BC, only used first-letter alphabetical order. Not until the Middle Ages did it occur to anyone to file Aristophanes before Aristotle. Even then, they did so halfheartedly. Monasteries, the location of most books in Europe at this time, had few holdings, so librarians themselves, rather than catalogues, served as their institutional memory. In the 13th century, Durham Cathedral Library, one of the largest, held just 352 books.

The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.

Every dictionary compiler seems to have thought that he alone invented alphabetical order. Few realised its significance. Hugh of Pisa’s 12th-century Great Book of Derivations kept interrupting its alphabetical ordering of words by giving precedence to longer over smaller entries. John Balbi’s 13th-century Catholicon, another early dictionary, includes a pained entreaty about its alphabetical arrangement: “I have devised this order at the cost of great effort and strenuous application … I beg of you, therefore, good reader, do not scorn this great labour of mine and this order as something worthless.”

Many scholars remained suspicious of using alphabetical order for reference purposes. It was somehow cheating, they felt, not to memorise large tranches of text or read books through from beginning to end. In 1588 the poet and barrister Abraham Fraunce rebuked those who “prefer the loathsome tossing of an A.B.C. abridgement, before the lightsome perusing of a methodical coherence of the whole common law”. As late as 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge denounced those encyclopaedias “where the desired information is divided into innumerable fragments scattered over many volumes, like a mirror broken on the ground”. By then, however, the phrase “walking encyclopaedia” had been coined, signifying an amused disdain for dependence on mere memory.

I’d never really thought about it, and now I want to know more; thanks, Kobi!

How have I never come across vājabāz (“musings on Persianate vocabulary”) before? Talk about LH material! It makes me want to resume my long-interrupted study of Persian. Take, for example, the entry ناز / nāz:

For a long time, I have been wondering how to define ‘Persianate’ cultural traits. If there is a distinct culture that has come to be known conveniently in academia as ‘Persianate’, how do we describe it? How do we define the Homo Persicus? As any effort of definition inevitably results in generalisation, the best way to explain ‘Persianate’ culture is through concrete cultural examples, such as the celebration of Nawrōz, self-deprecation as expression of (fake or genuine) politeness, love for banqueting and feasting followed by music, and so on and so forth. None of these, however, are as human and endearing as the word ناز/nāz, a social code that covers a range of behaviours in inter-personal relations.

‘Coquetry’, a word of French origin and the most common translation of ناز/nāz in English, is inexact in that it infuses the love game it represents with too much proactive flirtatiousness, whereas ناز/nāz does not have to be a proactive thing, nor does it have to be confined in love games; ‘affectation/affected airs’, an alternative translation, assumes too much deliberateness, interpreting the behaviour as an ‘act’ and therefore missing the point of ناز/nāz entirely, not to mention carrying a negative undertone as well. ‘Lackadaisical’ is a lovely translation, but too clumsy for the register of daily speech, and ناز/nāz is a word used in all registers. […]

The origin of ناز/nāz is mysterious, as no Indo-European etymology has been found (Cheung 2007). The earliest form we can trace it back to was also *nāz, which was present in the lexica of all Middle Iranian dialects across the Iranian cultural sphere comprising today’s Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, under different attested forms, independent or as a part of a compound, and with more or less the same combination of meanings. Among the meanings that Cheung (2007) gives for the verbal root *nāz-, we see, from an Anglophone point of view, faintly connected ones such as ‘to take pleasure in’, ‘to be proud’, ‘to be delicate’, ‘to triumph’, and the verbal noun nāzišn in Middle Persian is explained as both ‘boasting’ and ‘kindness’. This is exactly what ناز/nāz is – complex, ineffable, yet mundanely tangible.

The New Persian ناز/nāz is present in all Persianate languages, an ancient Iranian lexical and cultural heritage from Azerbaijan to Khotan, from Otrar to Delhi. However, the frequency of its daily, common use differs from language to language. The highest frequency, in my experience, is among speakers of Iranian languages and Persianate Turkic languages, who readily use the word to describe the behaviour it designates, and it is in these languages that verb collocations/derived verbs exist in common use, for example, ناز کردن/nāz kardan ‘to do nāz‘ (more of a temporally and spatially specific act) or ناز داشتن/nāz dāštan ‘to have nāz‘ (more of a general behavioural trait) in Persian, ناز کردن/naz kirdin ‘to do nāz’ in Sorani Kurdish, naz et– ‘to do nāz’ in Azerbaijani, noz qil– ‘to do nāz’ in Uzbek, and نازلان-/nazlan– ‘to act with nāz’ in Uyghur. Other Persianate languages may have the word ناز/nāz, but it belongs to an older or more literary parlance and contemporary speakers may not be universally aware of it or use it in everyday life, preferring to paraphrase it, as it is in the case of modern standard Turkish and Urdu. In these languages, however, even though ناز/nāz may not be used frequently as an independent word, its derivations have more currency than itself, such as nazlı ‘having/with nāz‘ in modern standard Turkish, and نازک/nāzuk ‘delicate’ in almost all Persianate languages.

Languages that have long been in contact with Persianate culture, especially Greek, Armenian, and Georgian, have picked up bits and pieces of ناز/nāz themselves. The Greeks have νάζι/nazi (collocates usually in the plural, νάζια/názia, with verb κάνω/káno ‘to do’) as a colloquial term to describe the exact same phenomenon, although having a much more negative implication, as it emphasises on the ‘affectation’ aspect of ناز/nāz and even describes the mischiefs of spoiled children acting up when things goes against their will. The Armenian understanding of ناز/nāz is closer to its meaning and implications in Persian, whereas in Georgian, under the form of ნაზი/nazi, the meaning of ‘delicate, soft, tender’ takes precedence.

Isn’t that great? I have to stop myself from quoting the whole thing, and there’s lots more where that came from. (For more on Persian as a lingua franca, see this 2013 post.) Thanks, Trevor!

The first poem in my handy one-volume collection of Pasternak is “Февраль. Достать чернил и плакать!” (you can hear Sergei Narovchatov read it or Russian-born Regina Spektor sing the first stanza halfway through “Après Moi”); it’s perennially popular, and for good reason — it’s a splendid showcase for the virtues of early Pasternak. I fell in love with it immediately (especially, for some reason, the phrase “обугленные груши” [carbonized pears]), and on this first day of the month it occurred to me to see if there were any translations out there. Here are three.

Translated by A.Z. Foreman (“A language nerd obsessed with literary translation and anthropology, and an incurable addiction to historical phonology”):

February. Get ink. Weep.
Write the heart out about it. Sing
Another song of February
While raucous slush burns black with spring.

Six grivnas for a buggy ride
Past booming bells, on screaming gears,
Out to a place where rain pours down
Louder than any ink or tears

Where like a flock of charcoal pears,
A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry
From trees to puddles, knock dry grief
Into the deep end of the eye.

A thaw patch blackens underfoot.
The wind is gutted with a scream.
True verses are the most haphazard,
Rhyming the heart out on a theme.

(There’s a footnote “Grivna: a unit of currency”; specifically, a grivna was ten kopecks.) It’s lively, but perhaps too lively for its own good (it loses much of the poetry), and I don’t like “(Write/Rhyming) the heart out.” Also, грачи are rooks, not blackbirds.
[Read more…]

In Muireann Maguire’s Facebook feed I found a link to Maxim D. Shrayer’s memoir of his father, David Shrayer-Petrov, for Tablet, A Russian Typewriter Longs for Her Master. It’s long and full of good stuff; here’s a passage on language (the family emigrated to the US in 1987):

My father’s deep knowledge of popular and peasant speech amazes me still today. He used to be able to place a person by region and province of Russia. In January 1998 I accompanied my father on his first trip back to Russia (I had already been back a few times). After a reading not far from Arbat Street, where in February 1987 my mother stood amid a small group of protesters facing plainclothes KGB thugs, father and I hitched a cab. Punctuating his mellifluous speech with undulations of his right hand, the driver delivered his opening tirade about the intolerable Moscow traffic.

“You must be from Smolensk,” my father said to the driver.

“Right you are, a smolyak,” the driver smiled broadly. “How did you know?”

“I have my ways.”

“You must be good with languages.”

My father just nodded, without saying “yes” or “no,” and the driver from the Smolensk province pried on.

“You look like a military man,” he said. “Oh, I think I know. You teach at the Military Interpreters School.”

My father beamed and fired off: “You’re right, I’m a Translator General.”

The driver loved it so much that he didn’t want to charge us.

Later, he writes:

Growing up in postwar Leningrad, my father heard several tongues. Yiddish, the private domain of his grandparents’ home, reminded him of his roots. Soviet newspeak taught him to discern threads of truth amid publicly spoken untruths. A richly polyphonic Russian was both the language of street culture and high culture.

And of course there’s a fair amount about typewriters; at one point he recalls being given “a portable Sarajevo-made UNIS tbm de Luxe,” and I was suspicious that the odd-looking “tbm” was a typo — but no, it’s a thing. (It allegedly stands for tvornica biro mašina, translated as “office machine factory,” but I’m suspicious, since if you google the phrase you get only references to the typewriter, and I don’t think a sequence of three nouns in the nominative works in Serbo-Croatian.) There’s a reference to “Jewish refuseniks who had returned their tickets to Soviet paradise,” which of course is an allusion to Dostoevsky (see this post). And the sentence “In the final cut, you hear the ringing of bells, the staccato of keys, and you see a close-up of the top of the page with the emerging story” links to a video I’m glad I clicked on, because after Dan Rather interviews the Shrayers he talks with Anatoly Rybakov about his then-unpublished blockbuster novel Children of the Arbat (Дети Арбата; see this post), and you see the stack of typed pages of the manuscript. The whole thing is good reading, and now I’m interested in the elder Shrayer’s refusenik novels.

Leon Aslanov writes for the Ajam Media Collective about the “long history of exchange and dialogue [which means] that Armenians and Azerbaijanis share more than they might like to imagine”:

Music is a witness to this fact. It is an important carrier of cultural memory that can overcome the forced forgetting of the last century and remind us how closely bound these communities really are. Armenians and Azerbaijanis share not only instruments like duduk, zurna, and tar but even rhythms and melodies, like the classic Sari Aghjik/Sarı Gəlin. In this article, I explore Eastern Armenian and Azerbaijani folk music traditions that host a variety of shared songs, tales, and cultural features revealing just how intertwined these cultures are.

The most prominent example of shared musical heritage between peoples of the South Caucasus is that of Sayat Nova, an 18th century Armenian bard (known as ashough in Armenian and aşıq in Azerbaijani) who composed songs in Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian. His works in Azerbaijani are either unknown or hidden from the public. This is testament to the nationalisation of Sayat Nova, in which his legacy of multilingual artistic production has been written out and he is instead presented as a solely Armenian musician. His music and melodies were inspired by a range of folk musical traditions in the region. They were notated centuries after his death during an Armenian national musicological project — part of why he became to be seen as exclusively Armenian in the future.

Songs would be passed on from village to village, leaving behind little trace of where they came from or what the “original” version was. For instance, the Armenian song Mejlumi pes is said to have been composed by Sayat Nova; but there is an equivalent Azerbaijani folk song called Yar bizə qonaq gələcək with exactly the same melody. […]

There are many examples of such songs whose melodies are identical, but are performed in differing musical styles and sung with different lyrics and titles. In certain cases, the composer of the song is known in one or both of the languages. However, this does not represent sufficient proof as to who actually composed the melody. A musician living in an ethnically-mixed town or village or a bard who travels from region to region may pick up melodies and transpose them with lyrics in their mother tongue. […]

Despite the current animosity between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, as this article makes clear there is a long history of musical collaboration. The possibilities for collaborations are endless thanks to the centuries-old development of musical traditions in constant contact with eachother. The last known collaboration between folk singers from both countries took place in a concert in Baku in 1987, a year before the initial clashes over Nagorno-Karabakh erupted. But more recently, musical commonalities have also been used as part of reconciliation efforts as documented in the following short film about the kamancha, an instrument common to both cultures.

The imagined contours of national heritage when it comes to music are broken when the similarities revealed. Debates around origins of songs and instruments become redundant when removed from nationalistic discourse. At that point, this shared musical heritage becomes something that brings us together instead of dividing us.

There are numerous images and musical clips. I love this kind of exploration of forgotten commonalities, and as always I wish nationalism would take a long walk on a short pier. (Thanks, Trevor!)

I’m editing a book on European history that mentions “magisterial reformers” in its section on the Reformation; I suspected this was a specialized sense, and sure enough there’s a Wikipedia article on the Magisterial Reformation:

The Magisterial Reformation is a phrase that “draws attention to the manner in which the Lutheran and Calvinist reformers related to secular authorities, such as princes, magistrates, or city councils”, i.e. “the magistracy”. While the Radical Reformation rejected any secular authority over the Church, the Magisterial Reformation argued for the interdependence of the church and secular authorities, i.e. “The magistrate had a right to authority within the church, just as the church could rely on the authority of the magistrate to enforce discipline, suppress heresy, or maintain order.”

What drives me to post is the shocking discovery that the OED ignores this sense; under “magisterial, n. and adj.” (entry updated March 2000) we get (I’ve included a few piquant citations):

1. Of, relating to, designating, or befitting a master, teacher, or other person qualified to speak with authority; masterly, authoritative, commanding. Also (occasionally) of a person: pedantic, arrogant, or dictatorial. Of an artistic work, performance, etc.: masterly, imposing.
[…]
1988 B. Chatwin Utz 34 The fruit of these researches..had culminated in his magisterial paper ‘The Mammoth and His Parasites’.
[…]
†2. Of, relating to, or displaying the skill of a master artist; (also) having the qualifications of a master. Obsolete.
[…]
3. Of, relating to, or befitting a magistrate or magistrates. Of a person: holding the office of a magistrate. Of an inquiry: conducted by a magistrate or magistrates.
[…]
1847 L. H. Kerr tr. L. von Ranke Hist. Servia 115 In the villages, Subasches appeared as executors of the judicial and magisterial power.
[…]
1957 Encycl. Brit. IV. 430/2 In the villages, the thugyis or headmen, chosen by the villagers and approved by the government, have limited magisterial powers and collect the revenue.
[…]
†4. Alchemy and Medicine. Relating to a magistery; (also) = magistral adj 2. [Of a remedy: compounded according to a physician’s own formula; not included in the pharmacopoeia]. Obsolete.
[…]
1722 J. Quincy Lexicon Physico-medicum (ed. 2) Magisterial Remedy, is yet sometimes retained in the Cant of Empiricks, more for its great Sound than any Significancy.

But nothing that would enable you to decipher a sentence about magisterial reformers rebelling against the Catholic Church. If you can’t go to the OED for obscure senses, where can you go? (Yes, yes, the internet, I know, but my point stands.)