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Good links have been piling up, so here are several:

1) Russian Dinosaur is back, with Nothing but spiders: Bobok in the bathhouse, a rich post about stories set in graveyards, from which I learned about Vladimir Sharov’s father “Aleksandr Sharov, born Asher Israelievich Nurenberg (1909-1984), a bibulous but none the less brilliant writer and journalist”; his novel The Death and Resurrection of A.M. Butov (1984) “is a serious study of the consequences of dying, but not going away. Effectively extinct, but still conscious, Butov revisits his typical Soviet life – and its moral and emotional consequences.”

2) Speaking of Sharov fils, Caryl Emerson has a long and fascinating LARB essay, “Our Own Madness, Our Own Absurd” (Andrei Platonov, Vladimir Sharov, and George Bernard Shaw), that discusses Platonov’s plays and Sharov’s essays about Platonov. The longest section is devoted to Fourteen Little Red Huts (1933), a play about the appalling consequences of collectivization; one of its characters is Johann-Friedrich Bos, “world-renowned scholar, chairman of the League of Nations Commission for the Resolution of the Riddle of the World Economy, one hundred and one years old,” who is in part based on G.B. Shaw, who “had celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in the Soviet Union in 1931 and had asserted afterward that the world’s only hope lay in the success of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan.” Here’s a passage of linguistic interest:

Shaw-Bos comes on the scene in Moscow already knowing Russian (“Of course I know Russian! What don’t I know? I no longer remember how much I know…”) When he arrives with Futilla [“Futilla” is the translators’ suggestive rendering of the unusual female first name Suenita, which recalls the Biblical phrase “vanity of vanities” (“sueta suet” in Old Church Slavonic and modern Russian)] at the desolate pastoral kolkhoz, he takes up the language of the new society from the inside. The kolkhoz is affectionate and supportive of his seniority. He becomes a mascot. Futilla is grateful and allows herself to be embraced. At her request, Bos learns bookkeeping so he can help with the registration of workdays; in her absence, he even does a stint of managing himself. In his transition to Soviet worker and bureaucrat, he passes through a lyrical phase — lamenting to Futilla that nature is indifferent, that “the wind doesn’t feel boredom, the sea doesn’t call anyone anywhere,” that all these hopes of progress and the harnessing of nature are all fraud, “worldwide, historically organized fraud.” But obliged to deal with written records and file reports, Bos the dreamily disillusioned poet adapts to the language of the present.

By the beginning of Act III, Bos can speak like a native. He is now on a learning curve quite different from his burlesqued predecessor Stervetson in Hurdy-Gurdy. Futilla is away in Astrakhan, fetching the recovered babies. Before her departure, she delegated her power to Bos. His name has been Russified and furnished with a patronymic. He is doing his job, and with the right vocabulary. He asks Ksyusha whether she has overfulfilled her quota, and he accuses the elderly kolkhoz worker Filipp Vershkov of being a class enemy, liar, and saboteur. Both reply to these administrative pronouncements matter-of-factly, without dismay or panic.

3) Two Latin-related links from Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti: Genuine (on the disputed etymology of that word) and The Two Chief Pleasures of My Life, a passage from Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random, of which this is a taste:

At our entrance, the landlord, who seemed to be a venerable old man, with long grey hair, rose from a table placed by a large fire in a very neat paved kitchen, and, with a cheerful countenance, accosted us in these words: ‘Salvete Pueri—ingredimini.’—I was not a little pleased to hear our host speak Latin, because I was in hope of recommending myself to him by my knowledge in that language; I therefore answered, without hesitation,—Dissolve frigus, ligna super foco—large reponens. I had no sooner pronounced these words, than the old gentleman, running toward me, shook me by the hand, crying, ‘—Fili mi dilectissime! unde venis!—a superis, ni fallor?‘

4) LH commenter Garrigus Carraig sent me an e-mail saying “I found a story which may interest you. A student defended her dissertation in Quechua, a first at 400+-year-old Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima.” He included links to a Guardian story by Dan Collyns (“Quechua is still spoken by 8 million people across the Andes, but Roxana Quispe Collantes hopes she can give it added value”), a Remezcla story by Yara Simón (“Her work was titled ‘Yawar Para, Kilku Warak’aq, Andrés Alencastre Gutiérrezpa harawin pachapi, Qosqomanta runasimipi harawi t’ikrachisqa, ch’ullanchasqa kayninpi,’ which focuses on transfiguration and uniqueness of Quechua poetry, particularly the works of Andrés Alencastre Gutiérrez”), and a three-hour video, Primera tesis sanmarquina sustentada en quechua (Quispe Collantes starts talking at 27:45; it’s fun to hear the Quechua). Thanks, Garrigus!

5) Anther commenter wrote me to say “Do you know about the British system of hill classification, as used by hill walkers? It gives me a headache. I figured you might like it.” Marilyns, HuMPs, Simms, and TuMPs; Munros, Murdos, Corbetts, and Grahams; Hewitts and Nuttalls; it’s a real trove. Thanks, Yoram!

I’m about halfway through Marcus C. Levitt’s Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, one of those books that sounds deadly boring when you see the title but is unexpectedly fascinating when you actually read it — it saddens me that I have the only copy listed on Librarything. In Chapter 3 Levitt describes the serendipitous way the celebration came together (there was no reason to expect it to be any more significant or memorable than any other of the literary commemorations in vogue at the time, and it might very easily not have happened at all), and on p. 74 he has a quote from the conservative newspaper Bereg attacking the radicals (aka “the demented pinkos of our periodic press”) for allegedly misusing Pushkin’s hallowed memory to further their subversive agenda: “Instead of rendering the proper honors to the memory of the great poet, they are ready to dance a cachucha over his grave.” Cachucha: what a wonderful word! Of course I googled it, and Wikipedia gave me the basic information: the dance was created in Cuba (though Russian Wikipedia says Cádiz, Spain) and popularized by a Rossini opera in the 1830s, and the word is “From Spanish cachucha, small boat. Possibly from diminutive of cacho, shard, saucepan, probably from vulgar Latin cacculus, alteration of Latin caccabus, pot, from Greek kakkabos, a small container.” The Real Academia dictionary gives several definitions (a boat, a cap) besides the dance, but they prudishly omit the sense prevalent in the Cono Sur, which is ‘cunt.’

So I used the invaluable Национальный корпус русского языка (Corpus of the Russian Language) and found that Russian качуча was first used by Botkin in 1847, had a spell of popularity in the 1850s (it occurs frequently in Pisemsky’s excellent short novel Комик [The comic actor, 1851] — one of the highlights of the planned artistic evening is that Fanny will dance the cachucha) and again in the 1880s (in Chekhov’s Ворона [The crow, 1885] the drunken clerk in the brothel demands “Я желаю, чтоб танцевали! Вы должны мой характер уважить! Качучу! Качучу!” [I want people to dance! You have to respect my character! The cachucha! The cachucha!]), and has occasionally been used since (Darya Simonova, Сорванная слива [The plucked plum, 2002]: “танцуя на Аниной могиле качучу” [dancing the cachucha on Anna’s grave]). The word sounds irresistibly funny, and it should be used more often.
[Read more…]

I encountered Mikhail Gronas as a literary theorist (see this LH post and its first two links) and therefore thought of him that way, even though I knew he was a poet. Now, having read Lev Oborin’s review of his new collection and delved into his poetry, I will be thinking of him primarily as a poet. The review starts:

Gronas’s last collection, Dear Orphans, came out 17 years ago. As I see it, it was the most important book of Russian poetry of the first twenty years of the 21st century, and there’s not much you can set beside it. A Short History of Attention has been eagerly awaited.

Fortunately, the earlier book is online in its entirety, so I was able to dive in, and the first poem blew me away. Here’s a link to the poem on its own (with a photo of the author), and here’s a slightly adapted Google Translate version (which was surprisingly accurate):

what was acquired – burned: coals

I’m going to rake the ashes I might find an iron ruble (not in use for a long time) or a top
in the former children’s corner
and don’t poke into the former kitchen, it will collapse: weak ceilings, foundation, risers

we my children my old people were on the street not knowing where to poke around
however, the Lord does not spare either a warm winter or free food
it turned out that the house was not needed outside is no worse

and everything is quietly arranged

our neighbors are also fire victims
they
are rebuilding a house
I don’t really believe in the success of this new fuss: they’re not builders, but like us are fire victims, it’s not even that, it’s just not clear why they need a house – it will be a reminder about the house

houses about houses people about people hand about hand meanwhile in our language forgetting means starting to be forgetting means starting to be nothing is brighter and I need to go but I will say goodbye several times so that you forget well:

to forget is to begin to be
to forget is to begin to be
to forget is to begin to be

I used GT so as not to drive myself crazy trying to render it into poetry, because I could spend way too long and not succeed; in Russian it’s magical. To give you one example of pure untranslatability, the last line, repeated several times, is “забыть значит начать быть” [zabyt’ znachit nachat’ byt’]. The play of sounds (z – b – t – z – n – ch – t – n – ch – t – b – t) is bad enough, but the crucial element is the fact that забыть ‘forget’ looks like the prefix за- ‘begin’ (as in залаять ‘to start barking’) plus быть ‘to be.’ I don’t know if I had ever noticed that; if I did, it didn’t stick with me — it would be like analyzing forget as for + get: mildly curious, but what’s the point? Except of course when a poet sharpens the point until it pokes right through you, and there’s absolutely no way to convey it in English (or indeed any language outside of East Slavic, since the other Slavic languages have different forms for ‘forget’). Another example from the second poem in the collection: the line “родство и сиротство” [rodstvó i sirótstvo] ‘kinship and orphanhood’ gets its effect from the striking assonance of the two words. That kind of linguistic play is something I crave in poetry, and I’m glad to have found a mother lode of it.

I always thought Beyoğlu, the name of a section of Istanbul, was ‘son of the bey,’ but apparently that’s a folk etymology. Wikipedia:

According to the prevailing theory, the Turkish name of Pera, Beyoğlu, is a modification by folk etymology of the Venetian ambassadorial title of Bailo, whose palazzo was the most grandiose structure in this quarter. The informal Turkish-language title Bey Oğlu (literally Son of a Bey) was originally used by the Ottoman Turks to describe Lodovico Gritti, Istanbul-born son of Andrea Gritti, who was the Venetian Bailo in Istanbul during the reign of Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) and was later elected Doge of Venice in 1523.

And if we follow that Bailo link, we learn:

Bailo or baylo (plural baili or bayli) is a Venetian title that derives from the Latin term baiulus, meaning “porter, bearer”. In English, it may be translated bailiff, or otherwise rendered as bailey, baili, bailie, bailli or baillie. The office of a bailo is a bailaggio (sometimes anglicised “bailate”). The term was transliterated into Greek as μπαΐουλος (baioulos), but Nicephorus Gregoras translated it ἐπίτροπος (epitropos, steward) or ἔφορος (ephoros, overseer).

Huh, thought I, “bailiff” looks suspiciously similar, and sure enough it too is from Latin bāiulus. So Beyoğlu = Bailiff!

I was reading a NYRB article by Hilary Spurling about Alexander Calder when it occurred to me to look “mobile” up in the OED. I was very surprised to find there were five separate entries for it as a noun:

mobile, n.1 Brit. /ˈməʊbʌɪl/, /ˈməʊbᵻli/, U.S. /ˈmoʊb(ə)l/, /ˈmoʊbəli/ “In the medieval version of the Ptolemaic system: the outermost of the concentric spheres supposed to revolve around the earth (Obsolete); A body in motion or which is capable of movement (Now archaic and historical); A cause of motion; a motive for action (rare).”

mobile, n.2 “The mob, the rabble; the common people, the populace (Obsolete).”

Mobile, n.3 Brit. /məʊˈbiːl/, U.S. /moʊˈbil/ “A member of a North American Indian people formerly inhabiting the Gulf Coast of Alabama and areas nearby; The unattested language of the Mobiles.”

mobile, n.4 Brit. /ˈməʊbʌɪl/, U.S. /ˈmoʊˌbil/ “A sculpture consisting of hanging or pivoting pieces of metal, plastic, etc., in abstract or (more recently) representational shapes, connected by wires and threads so as to be able to move and rotate in response to air currents or when propelled by an internal mechanism; A small-scale decorative structure resembling this, used as a domestic ornament or to provide visual entertainment for young children; Music. A composition consisting of units or sections which can be performed in any of a number of different orders according to the performer’s choice or to specified parameters.”

mobile, n.5 Brit. /ˈməʊbʌɪl/, U.S. /ˈmoʊb(ə)l/, /ˈmoʊˌbaɪl/ “colloquial. A mobile canteen. Also (Australian): a large trolley from which food is served; Horse Racing (Australian and New Zealand). A foldable barrier used in trotting races to facilitate a flying start.”

Number 4 is, of course, the one I was looking for; the first citation is from 1932 (Art News 21 May 11/2 “Mr. Calder..calls his newest phase, ‘Mobiles’. This brand new art form, signifying abstract sculptures which move..were [sic] first shown in Paris in February”), and the etymology says “< French mobile mobile n.1 (1931 in sense 1a) […] The French noun was apparently first used in this sense by Marcel Duchamp, French artist (1887–1968), to denote the moving abstract constructions of Alexander Calder, U.S. sculptor and painter (1898–1976).”

As for the adjective (which is from Latin mōbilis ‘capable of being moved’), the “Pronunciation” section is interesting:

N.E.D. (1907) gives the pronunciation (mōu·bil) /ˈməʊbɪl/. This agrees with the majority of late 19th-cent. dictionaries, but the pronunciation clearly varied widely: Cent. Dict. (1890) gives the variant /ˈmɔbɪl/, while D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. (1917), alongside /ˈməʊbiːl/ and /ˈməʊbɪl/, recommends /ˈməʊbaɪl/ as its preferred variant. By the end of the 20th cent. this variant, apparently originally a spelling-pronunciation, had become universal in British English, while North American English continued to show variation.

“N.E.D.” is the first edition of the OED (then called the New English Dictionary); I myself say /ˈmoʊb(ə)l/, to rhyme with “noble,” except in the Calder sense, for which I do not have an established pronunciation. Fortunately, I rarely have occasion to talk about Calder mobiles.

Another quote from A History of Russian Literature by Victor Terras (see the previous post):

The Igor Tale has some epic traits, though it is in prose. In fact, the preamble prepares the reader for an epic, as it invokes the memory of an ancient bard, Boyan. But the many lyric digressions, the absence of continuous action, and the density of the text are not epic […]. The Igor Tale is called a slovo by its author (or by the scribe who copied it). A slovo (literally, “word”) is in Old Russian usage any discourse, pamphlet, orison, sermon, or speech — a rhetorical work addressing itself to a specific topic.

I found that last sentence very helpful; I’ve never been sure what exactly slovo meant in that title, usually translated “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” or “The Lay of the Host of Igor” (though Nabokov, who always had to be different, called it “The Song of Igor’s Campaign,” and the long-forgotten Leonard A. Magnus rendered it “The Tale of the Armament of Igor“). We discussed the work itself here, and while I’m on the topic of slovo, the journal of that name is still online free and still publishing new issues (see this LH post).

I hadn’t been to Troubadour/Grey Matter Books (“Hadley’s premier hard-to-find bookstore for hard-to-find books” — see this post, where I discovered Troubadour, and this one, where I bade farewell to it) in too long, so my lovely and generous wife dropped me off there this morning. I limited myself to a few purchases, the main one being A History of Russian Literature by Victor Terras — I now own all the major such histories in English, from Mirsky to Kahn, Lipovetsky, Reyfman, and Sandler, which gives me great satisfaction. Of course I started on it immediately, and I loved this anecdote in a footnote on p. 19 (where he also mentions the gospel manuscripts called aprakos — see this LH post):

The Russian Middle Ages had a decided bias against the Old Testament. The Kiev Patericon tells the story of a monk who knew all the books of the Old Testament but could not stand the sight or sound of the gospels and epistles of the New Testament. Through the prayers of his brothers in Christ he eventually forgets the Old Testament entirely, so that he has to learn how to read again. He becomes meek and obedient and is rewarded by being made bishop of Novgorod.

Steven Lubman wrote me as follows:

A funny posting by a Lithuanian poet and translator Marius Burokas made me fall into a rabbit hole of Yiddish etymology. One of the commentators asked if “Tsvuak” and “чувак” were related (they’re not) and I was surprised by the Romani origin of “чувак” which is apparently related to “chav”!

Most of the comments are in Lithuanian, but I enjoyed this macaronic verse:

Татэ, татэ, wos i dos?
– О! Dos is’ паравоз.
– Wos i dos паравоз?
– О! Dos is aine mashyne, mitte pružyne, mitte пар, puff, puff, puff und пошол.

[Papa, papa, what is that?
Oh! That’s a steam engine.
What’s a steam engine?
Oh! That’s a machine with a spring, with steam, puff, puff, puff and it goes.]

At any rate, the first thing I did was go to Vasmer, where I was surprised not to find чувак ‘fellow, guy, dude’ listed; then I went to the Национальный корпус русского языка (Corpus of the Russian Language), where I learned that both чувак and its feminine equivalent чувиха are first attested in Kornei Chukovsky’s 1962 Живой как жизнь [Alive as Life; I wrote about it back in 2004], so no wonder it’s not in Vasmer. (Chukovsky says “Студент Д. Андреев в энергичной статье, напечатанной в многотиражной газете Института стали, громко осудил арготизмы студентов: ценная девушка, железно, законно, башли, хилок, чувак, чувиха и т. д.” [The student D. Andreev in a forceful article printed in the factory newspaper of the Steel Institute loudly condemned student slang: tsennaya devushka, zhelezno, zakonno, bashli, khilok, chuvak, chuvikha, etc.] — I’m not translating the terms because I’m not familiar with student slang of c. 1960). In his comment, Lubman says:

Tsvuak is not ‘chuvak’, it’s ‘hypocrite’ from Hebrew tsviyut, in Yiddish pronounced as tsviyes. Wiktionary suggests Romani origin of chuvak, similar to English “chav”

That Wiktionary article says “Possibly of Romani origin. Compare English chav“; I’d like to see more documentation, but it’s not implausible. One oddity is that my Oxford Russian-English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1992) includes чувиха but not чувак!

Robert Mesibov, of Tasmania, Australia, posts about a pleasing conjunction of old and new:

If you were wandering the streets of a busy city in the Fertile Crescent a few thousand years ago, you might have run across someone jotting down a few notes on a small clay tablet […] The jotting-down was done with the cut stem of a reed, and the result is today called cuneiform writing, after the wedge shape of some of the written elements (Latin cuneus, “wedge”). Cuneiform writing on clay was around for at least 3000 years and was adopted for use in a range of languages. […]

Like many people, I’m fascinated by this ancient solution to the data storage problem. Archivists in the digital era have to cope with bit rot and frequent changes in media and format. Clay is clay, and today there are still hundreds of thousands of ancient cuneiform tablets, their data content unaltered after thousands of years.

If you’re interested in cuneiform writing, you’ll be pleased to hear that the major cuneiform symbol groups have been assigned blocks in Unicode. There are also online resources for everyday computer users who want to learn more about cuneiform and the cuneiform-using cultures. The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC) project not only welcomes new participants, but is also strong on FOSS and open data.

Some cuneiform TTF fonts are available. The best-looking I’ve found are the four Old Persian fonts built by “Fereydoun Rostam”, the pseudonym of a Brazilian graphic artist: “Behistun”, “Kakoulookiam”, “Khosrau” and “Zarathustra”. Fereydoun includes a keymap and a Unicode chart in each font package. All four fonts play well with LibreOffice […] and look great in a terminal […]

(The Mesibov post has links to the fonts as well as images.)

I recently ran across the meaningless Russian phrase Глокая куздра, which has its own English-language Wikipedia article for some reason; the text is short enough I might as well just reproduce it here (in case some overzealous Wikian deletes it for non-notability):

Glokaya kuzdra (Russian: Глокая куздра) is a reference to a Russian language phrase constructed from non-existent words in a grammatically proper way, similar to the English language phrases using the pseudoword “gostak”. It was suggested by Russian linguist Lev Shcherba. The full phrase is: “Гло́кая ку́здра ште́ко будлану́ла бо́кра и курдя́чит бокрёнка” (Glokaya kuzdra shteko budlanula bokra i kurdyachit bokryonka). In the phrase, all word stems (glok-, kuzdr-, shtek-, budl-, bokr-, kurd-) are meaningless, but all affixes are real, used in a grammatically correct way and — which is the point — provide enough semantics for the phrase to be a perceived description of some dramatic action with a specified plot but with unknown entities. A very rough English translation (considering no semantic information is available) could be: “The glocky kuzdra shteckly budled the bocker and kurdyaks the bockerling.”

Shcherba used it in his lectures in linguistics to emphasise the importance of grammar in acquiring foreign languages. The phrase was popularized by Lev Uspensky in his popular science book A Word about Words.

It turns out Sashura mentioned it in a comment back in 2012, but given that I had since completely forgotten it, I thought I’d give it its own post. I’ve been fond of meaningless sentences in other languages ever since I read a selection of them as a wee lad in some popular text on language, perhaps by Mario Pei; for years I could rattle off the ones in pseudo-Japanese and pseudo-Italian, but alas, no more.