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The Untranslated has been around since 2013; how am I just learning about it now? The About page says “The purpose of this blog is to bring to a wider attention significant literary works not yet translated into English,” and that’s so far up my alley it might as well be living in my house. Muireann Maguire linked, on Facebook, to the recent post The Virtuosi: Five Translators Whose Names are Hallmarks of Quality, which of course intrigued me, and I was stunned by the opening passage:

I have to confess that I don’t read works in English translation that often. The main reason is neither my language purism nor snobbishness but the prosaic lack of time: in order to maintain seven reading languages besides my native Russian and near-native English, I have to devote the bulk of my reading time to works of literature written in or translated into those languages, which is often a logistical, managerial and mental torment. The very nature of my blog presupposes a tangential role for English-language translators: they are rather the intended audience of The Untranslated, than its subject matter. Ideally, I would love them to read a review of some humongous, linguistically dazzling, arcana-laden novel (and there are quite a few reviewed here) and say: “Yes, I wanna do it!” Of course, you might wonder skeptically:”Is there still anyone left who can pull it off?” Are there human beings capable of translating such bemusing behemoths as Los Sorias and El Troiacord? such a paragon of untranslatable wordsmithery as Remember Famagusta? such unjustly underappreciated, uncomfortable, mesmerising masterworks as The Absolute Marshal and Corporal? The answer is yes.

And then when I clicked on the Remember Famagusta link I discovered there was an important Russian writer I’d never even heard of:

The English-speaking audience might have heard first the name of Alexander Goldstein from one of the most important contemporary Russian writers Mikhail Shishkin. During his talk at the Harriman Institute, Columbia, he actually said the following:

For me now the top of Russian literature is Alexander Goldstein. […] I’m sure in fifty years here at Columbia University and other American universities all professors will consider our time, our epoch, the epoch of Alexander Goldstein. And we, writers, will be just contemporaries of Alexander Goldstein. We just shared with him the epoch. […] And if you asked me, “What Russian writers are important and genius nowadays?” I would say: “Read Alexander Goldstein”.

[…] I’m not sure that Goldstein is really the genius Shishkin would like him to be, but upon reading his first novel Remember Famagusta, I was totally sold on the idea that there had not been a better stylist writing in Russian in the past century, except maybe Andrei Bely, Vladimir Nabokov and Sasha Sokolov.

Wow! I now want to read Goldstein (or Goldshtein, to better represent the Russian Гольдштейн), and of course I’m subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed. The five translators The Virtuosi focuses on are Adrian Nathan West, Charlotte Mandell, Brendan Riley, Isabel Fargo Cole, and Oliver Ready; see the post for extended samples of the work of each. And don’t miss the section on The Great Untranslated.

I’ve always liked the phrase barn burner, which I probably first heard from sports announcers as a kid: “Boy, that was a real barn burner!” Merriam-Webster has a good explanation of the history behind it:

Today barn burner is often used to describe a sporting event or some other contest, such as a political race, which occasions a good deal of excitement.

But before this 20th century use, barn burner had a very specific meaning in US politics. The Barnburners were one of two competing factions in the New York State Democratic Party in the middle of the 19th century. John Russell Bartlett, in his 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms, provided a lengthy quote from the New York Tribune, which explained that the name was “in allusion to the story of an old Dutchman who relieved himself of rats by burning his barns which they infested.” In this case, the Barnburners were so determined to get rid of systemic abuses that they were willing to destroy the system itself.

The Barnburners were the more radical of the two political groups; the more conservative party was referred to as the Hunkers (possibly on the grounds that they were interested in a hunk of the political spoils, or because they hankered after elective office). […] It has long been thought that the New York Barnburners were the originators of that term (aside from the occasional person who literally burned down a barn), but recent findings have indicated that the term began its life describing radicals in a neighboring state, Pennsylvania, slightly earlier.

Also, totally unrelated, but anyone interested in Indic languages will be as glad as I was to know that Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India by Andrew Ollett, thirty bucks in paperback, is currently available free for Kindle at Amazon — hearty thanks go to bulbul for the tip!

An exciting piece by Katherine Davis-Young for Atlas Obscura:

There are many ways a college student might spend spring break. Making an archaeological breakthrough is not usually one of them. In his first year at Harvard, Manny Medrano did just that. […]

With the help of his professor, Gary Urton, a scholar of Pre-Columbian studies, Medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cords used for record keeping in the Inca Empire. By matching the khipus to a colonial-era Spanish census document, Medrano and Urton uncovered the meaning of the cords in greater detail than ever before. Their findings could contribute to a better understanding of daily life in the Andean civilization. […]

Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems. But, until recently, none of the khipus Urton studied could be understood on a very detailed level. If the khipus held messages or cultural information beyond just numbers, the meanings were opaque to modern scholars.

A turning point came when Urton began looking into a set of six khipus from the 17th-century Santa River Valley region of Northwest Peru. One day, Urton picked up a book and happened to spot a Spanish census document from the same region and time period. […]

It was an exciting enough coincidence that Urton mentioned it to his undergraduate students at the end of class in the spring of 2016. For Medrano, who was sitting in the lecture hall that day, it was too enticing of a lead to ignore.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘hey, spring break is coming up, if you need someone to put a few hours into this, I’d be happy to take a look,’” Medrano recalls. […]

Medrano noticed that the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to correspond to the social status of the 132 people recorded in the census document. The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people’s first names. The correlations seemed too strong to be a coincidence. After spring break, Medrano told his professor about his theories. […]

Medrano worked with Urton over the next several months and the two compiled their findings into a paper which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnohistory in January. Medrano is the first author on the paper, indicating he contributed the bulk of the research, something Urton notes is extremely rare for an undergraduate student.

Sabine Hyland researches Andean anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. She has read Medrano and Urton’s forthcoming paper and describes their discoveries as “thrilling.”

“Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it’s a big deal,” Hyland says.

Urton is now optimistic that the six khipus examined in the research could serve as a key to decode the hundreds of others he has in his database.

This is why we can’t decide in advance who’s allowed to work on what, and I very much look forward to seeing what further discoveries are made! (Khipus, or quipus, previously on LH.)

Amelia Soth describes an interesting phenomenon of Ottoman court life:

In the 1600s, the court of the Ottoman Empire employed some 40 deaf servants. They were chosen not in spite of their deafness, but because of it. The deaf servants were favored companions of the sultan, and their facility in nonverbal communication made them indispensable to the court, where decorum restricted speech in the sultan’s presence. As Sir Paul Rycaut, an English traveler to the Ottoman court, wrote:

[T]his language of the Mutes is so much in fashion in the Ottoman Court, that none almost but can deliver his sense in it, and is of much use to those who attend the Presence of the Grand Signior, before whom it is not reverent or seemly so much as to whisper.

The deaf attendants taught pages in training to communicate by means of signs. It isn’t certain whether theirs was a fully fledged sign language, though Rycaut suggested that the attendants “can discourse and fully express themselves; not only to signifie their sense in familiar questions, but to recount Stories, understand the Fables of their own Religion, the Laws and Precepts of the Alchoran, the name of Mahomet, and what else may be capable of being expressed by the Tongue.”

Another European observer, Ottaviano Bon, wrote that “both the Grand Signor, and divers that are about him, can reason, and discourse with the Mutes of any thing: as well and as distinctly, alla Mutescha, by nods and signes, as they can with words.”

She has much more to say about the rule of seclusion and its history (it goes back to the Abbasid Caliphate) and the various courts of the Topkapi Palace. Another good post from JSTOR Daily!

Rasmus Bjørn has created the webpage Prehistoric loan relations: Foreign elements in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary; the introductory text is self-explanatory:

This page allows historical linguists to compare and scrutinize proposed prehistoric lexical borrowings from the perspective of Proto-Indo-European. The first entries are all (135 in total) extracted from my master’s thesis “Foreign elements in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary” (Bjørn 2017). Comments are encouraged at the bottom of each entry. New entries will be added, also on request.

Take this not as the conclusion, but an invitation to join the conversation.

The thesis is available for download here (PDF).

Via this LH comment by David Marjanović; thanks, DM!

Alfred Delvau (1825-1867) packed a lot of writing into his 42 years, including his compilation of French slang, the Dictionnaire de la langue verte (1866), whose second (1883) edition, revised by Gustave Fustier, is available at Project Gutenberg. It is, of course, a lot of fun to look through the lively vocabulary, but I am going to cite here an eloquent passage from the preface:

Puisque j’en suis au chapitre des étonnements, je dois prémunir mes lecteurs contre celui qu’ils éprouveront certainement à rencontrer çà et là, dans ce Dictionnaire de la Langue verte, des mots auxquels le Dictionnaire de l’Académie a donné asile, — comme on donne asile aux gueux et aux vagabonds. Ces mots sont considérés par lui comme bas et populaciers, et il en défend l’usage aux gens du bel air, aussi bégueules que lui: à cause de cela, ils me revenaient de droit, puisque je fais le Glossaire de la langue du peuple parisien, le Compendium du slang. La langue verte, au rebours de la langue académique, se compose précisément des mots qui ne s’écrivent pas, mais qui se parlent à certains étages de la société.

Or, je suis de ceux qui prétendent que «toutes paroles se laissent dire et tout pain mangier», — avec d’autant plus de raison que les expressions proscrites comme indignes, condamnées comme shocking par le Dictionnaire de l’Académie, sont du meilleur français que je connaisse, d’un français plus étymologique, plus rationnel, plus expressif, plus éloquent que celles auxquelles ladite Académie a accordé droit de cité, — le français de Jean de Meung et de Guillaume de Lorris, de François Villon et de François Rabelais, de Philippe Desportes et de Bonaventure Des Périers, d’Henri Estienne et de Clément Marot, de Michel Montaigne et de Mathurin Régnier, d’Agrippa d’Aubigné et de Brantôme, de Froissart et d’Amyot, etc. Il paraît qu’il est de bon goût, dans les hautes régions, de renier ses ancêtres et de mentir à ses origines; les gens distingués se croiraient déshonorés, — savants et gandins, — en parlant la langue des petites gens, qui, cependant, sont les plus fidèles gardiens et les plus rigoureux observateurs de la tradition. Oui, il faut que les gens distingués en prennent leur parti: le peuple est le Conservatoire du vrai langage.

Google Translate does a good enough job that I don’t feel like taking the trouble to translate the whole passage, but I especially love these bits: “the expressions proscribed as unworthy, condemned as ‘shocking,’ by the Academy’s dictionary are the best French that I know, a French more etymological, more rational, more expressive, more eloquent than those the Academy has given the keys of the city” and “the people are the Conservatory of the real language.” You tell ’em, M. Delvau!

Back in 2008 I wrote what is still one of my favorite LH posts, Repetition in Tolstoy; now, thanks to the latest Russian Dinosaur post, we can revisit the issue. The Dinosaur writes about the competing translations of Anna Karenina that appeared in 2014, Rosamund Bartlett’s (Oxford UP) and Marian Schwartz’s (Yale UP), mentioning the problems with which Tolstoy’s “unhelpful syntax” confronts the translator (“adjectival traffic jams; awkward, unmanageable, and not always even conventionally grammatical gerunds”) and points out the translators’ differing approaches:

Schwartz firmly believes that the ‘unconventional and unsettling’ effect of Tolstoy’s style, the occasional ‘roughness’, the use of apparent “mistakes” and of course the repetitions, are all intended to “convey meaning, to express his spiritual and moral concerns’ (Translator’s Note, xxiii). An obvious example of repetition that both translators cite is the adjective veselyi (jolly) and its cognates such as veselost’ (jolliness, good cheer), which Bartlett claims occurs 318 times in Anna (and she should know). Schwartz chooses to translate this word wherever it occurs by a single English equivalent – cheerful – and its cognates (e.g. cheer, cheery). She suggests that by constantly referring to ‘cheer’, Tolstoy meant to provoke ‘ominous associations’ (xxv) in his readers’ minds – a suspicion that the characters were in fact very far from cheerful. Because Russian is an inflected language with multiple derivations and affixations possible from a single stem, in the original, this repetitive technique creates a rich web of inferences and implications. In English, it causes most readers to wonder at the apparent poverty of the translator’s vocabulary. Surely Tolstoy couldn’t have been such a limited writer, constantly re-using the same word?

Bartlett resorts to a richer vocabulary, including ‘merry’, ‘livelier’, and ‘light-hearted’, in order – as her introductory essay explains – to convey the ‘richness of meaning implied in the original’. She asserts that Russian is simply more concise than English, and that therefore multiple meanings may be implicit in a single word; thus to fix on a single English equivalent for that word, as Schwartz does with veselyi, would be unduly confining for the translator (and repetitive for the reader). […] There is a lot of good sense in this approach, and it certainly makes for a richer text for the Anglophone reader. And yet we must remember Tolstoy uses repetition for several reasons, including for emphasis; for the psychologically jarring sensation which Shklovsky would christen ‘defamiliarization’; and for the ‘Hansel’s breadcrumb’ effect, that is, using a chain of similar words to clarify the narrative’s symbolic underpinnings. The style is meant to convey meaning; to provoke discomfort; and to convey meaning by provoking discomfort, rather like a parallel process in cinema, Eisenstein’s notion of intellectual montage, where contrasting or shocking images initiate an emotional or cognitive process in the viewer’s mind. Unwise translators, by gobbling up the repeated words and substituting unrecognizable synonyms, may erase Tolstoy’s subtly laid ‘pathway’ through the plot – and forestall the thought processes that the author had intended to unlock.

She provides a good example from Part Five of the novel in which Schwartz comes out ahead, and in general I am completely on Schwartz’s side here: authors choose to repeat words for a reason, and barring strong contrary reasons translators should respect that choice. But it’s great to see the opposing points of view laid out so eloquently, and it should make each side more aware of the pluses and minuses.

Dino goes on to recount the debate that erupted when Janet Malcolm wrote her review of various Tolstoy translations in The New York Review of Books; the centerpiece was an evisceration of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, of which I thoroughly approved, but it also included an unfair attack on Schwartz for choosing to translate Tolstoy’s “образуется” with the odd “shapify” — however much you may disagree with that choice, it’s absurd to use it to judge an entire book by one of the great translators of our day.

Matt of No-sword sent me a link to Alexander Vovin’s Oxford Research Encyclopedias article Origins of the Japanese Language, saying:

It doesn’t present any new findings, but it’s a reasonable (I think) summary of current thinking among Anglophone linguists working on the history of Japanese specifically. The most interesting point of serious disagreement (it seems to me as an interested non-academic) is the nature of the relationship to Korean — genetic, sprachbund, regular old contact? Vovin does not accept a genetic relationship and I tend to agree with him, as hashed out previously in the LH comments section, but he gives plenty of space to those arguments here. On the other hand, he has little time for any attempt to establish a connection to Altaic; Austronesian is mentioned only in a list that also includes Basque; and the word “Ainu” doesn’t appear in the article at all.

I’ll be curious to know what those who know about these things think of the article, and of course I’ll be glad if people find it useful. Thanks, Matt!

I had meant to write about Krista Ryu’s Imperial miscommunication Log post ages ago, but it got lost among the tabs. The centerpiece is this great anecdote from The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, which she describes as “The story of failed communication between a Goryo Dynasty diplomat and the Hongwu Emperor (1368-1398; r. 1328-1398) of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)”:

Yi Saek (이색, 李穡), a great Confucian scholar from the Goryo Dynasty of Korea, was an expert in “Chinese” language and culture. [KR: I have put “Chinese” inside quotation marks because there was no standard Chinese during this time (end of the 1300s).] He had studied “Chinese” during the Yuan Dynasty since he was 10 years old because of his father who had a position in the Yuan Dynasty government. At the age of 20, he went to Beijing and studied at Guozijian (the imperial college at the time), and even worked at the Hanlinyuan (Hanlin Academy) of the Yuan government. Based on his credentials and knowledge of “Chinese”, he was considered the best expert of “China” in Goryo.

So, when the [Mongol] Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) fell and the Ming Dynasty was established, King Chang of Goryo decided to send Yi Saek as envoy to meet the new Ming Emperor and establish diplomatic relations. When Yi Saek went to address Emperor Hongwu of the Ming, Hongwu said, “I hear that you studied in Guozijian, and were working in Hanlinyuan. So you must know ‘Chinese’.”

Then Yi spoke to the Emperor in “Chinese,” which was clearly his forte.

Unfortunately, the Emperor couldn’t understand Yi’s Beijing topolect! The Emperor was from Central China (around Anhui province now).

The Emperor was confused and then said, “Your pronunciation of Chinese is like that of Naghachu (納哈出– Yuan Dynasty general, a Mongol; d. 1388).”

According to records, Yi Saek was greatly embarrassed and was made fun of for many, many years when he came back to Goryo for what happened.

Krista adds: “So already in the late 1300s, topolects were a real problem, even for foreign diplomats who were speaking Pekingese!! Also, when the Dynasty changed, the new elites probably spoke a different topolect from that of the previous Dynasty’s elites. This change would have meant all the diplomats of China’s tributary states had to learn a new language.” There are references in the post, and a surprise appearance by the (apparently legendary) Endymion Wilkinson in the comment thread.

Courtesy of JC, this Sherlock Holmes puzzler from the Futility Closet (quoted from Andrew J. Peck, “The Solitary Man-uscript,” Baker Street Journal, June 1972):

In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist,” Arthur Conan Doyle created an inadvertent grammatical puzzle: Who does the term “solitary cyclist” refer to?

As I wrote John, “A curious conundrum, but I find it hard to believe it exercised the minds of so many people for so long, given that the reading that turned out (ta-da!) to be correct was the obvious one, at least to me. Of course, I’m very used to the serial comma, but I don’t believe it was so unknown back in the day.” In his response, John linked to Arika Okrent’s The Best Shots Fired in the Oxford Comma Wars, which has a lot of good quotes and ends by linking to yours truly (this 2003 post). Enjoy, and feel free to comment on the Sherlock Holmes thing if you have thoughts on the matter.