languagehat.com

Mikael Gomez Guthart writes for the Forward about a remarkable translator:

Although you may never have heard the name Lin Shu, it should be featured in every book on literature history.

[Lin] Shu, a self-taught scholar, originated from the region of Fujian in southwest [sic; should be southeast] China. An heir to the Qing Dynasty — the last to have reigned over the Chinese Empire — he was a painter, calligrapher, novelist, poet, essayist and translator.

In the late 19th century, he penned the first literary translations to adorn the shelves of Chinese libraries. […] He first promoted writers from England, then France, the United States, Sweden and Germany, although he did not speak nor read any language other than his own. […]

With the help of 19 successive assistants, he translated, or more accurately, rewrote close to 200 classics of western literature by Honoré de Balzac, William Shakespeare, Alexander Dumas and Alexander Dumas fils, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henrik Ibsen, Montesquieu, Victor Hugo, Anton Chekhov, and Pierre Loti, among others. Some of his adaptations even became bestsellers in early 20-century China, such as “The Lady of the Camellias,” renamed “The Legacy of the Parisian Lady of the Camellias.” More fascinating and mysterious still, 50 or so of his unpublished translations are said to stem from texts whose authors and source languages remain a mystery to this day. Masterpieces of which we know nothing are among these lost manuscripts. […]

In 1921, Lin Shu tried his hand at “Don Quixote” from an English translation dating back to 1885. His assistant, Chen Jialin, had attended university in England as part of his higher education and appeared competent enough to read the story to Lin Shu. But as it turned out, he interspersed his version of the tale with invented dialogue and shortened it by many chapters, including the book’s famed prologue; in total, 285 pages that formed the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece were missing — a fact somewhat reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard” about the secret initiative of a writer who aspired to rewrite the first opus of Don Quixote.

“This Biography of the Crazed Knight” (or “The Life of the Bewitched Knight,” depending on the translation) was published in 1922 in Shanghai, stronghold of the Chinese book industry, then nicknamed the “Paris of the Orient” owing to its publishers, printers, and literary cafés. Lin Shu died of illness two years later; this partial Quixote was to be his last work of words.

It’s worth noting that “Don Quixote de La Mancha” recounts the tribulations of an old ailing man with a passion for novels about chivalry, and was purportedly translated from a text in Arabic that Cervantes astutely attributed to a Muslim historian. The fake-translator trick had been a much-used sleight of hand since the 14th century among authors of chivalrous literature, who often pretended to have translated their writings from Tuscan, Tartar, Florentine, Greek, Hungarian, and even unidentified languages. Literary modernity thus emerged in 1605 with a work that was supposedly a translation and whose main character was a reader of novels. The circle was skillfully complete. […]

I’m particularly struck by the “texts whose authors and source languages remain a mystery to this day.” I should note that the article was translated from Yiddish by Susan Brown. Or so they say… Thanks, Trevor!

Patricia Palmer, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, King’s College, London, writes about English, Irish, and Ireland in an article first published in 2005; once again, the linked piece is long and complex enough it defies summary, so I’ll just quote a few bits to whet your appetite:

We lived in a landscape of strange and obdurate names. My grandmother came from Cumeenduassig, my grandfather from Tureenafersh. Years later, I would be bewitched by the transparency of English placenames: Juniper Hill, Milton-under-Wychwood, Woodstock; you knew, at one level at least, where you were. But to grow up in Kerry was to be at play in a landscape where names guarded their secrets closely. We swam in Coumeenoole, climbed Beenkeragh and sailed out to Ilauntannig from Scraggane Pier in the Maharees. In one sense, these places meant everything. But in another, they drew a veil over our world, locating us in a landscape of sound effects rather than sense. Of course, if we picked away at the Ordinance Surveyors’ haphazard nineteenth century anglicisations and reconstructed the original Irish name, we could lift the veil for a moment. My grandmother would come not from mesmeric but meaningless ‘Cumeenduassig’, but from Coimín dú easaigh, ‘the dark little coomb of the waterfalls’.

The poet John Montague speaks of a similar disorientation growing up in South Tyrone: ‘The whole landscape a manuscript / we had lost the skill to read’. What is lost when a placename becomes detached from meaning, and becomes just a sound, is the connection between a place and its history: space is set adrift from time. Irish history and mythology are written onto the face of Ireland to a degree that is unusual elsewhere in Europe. (You have to read the journals of Captain Vancouver, splattering the names of midshipmen and misadventures – Puget Sound, Deception Pass – all over the intimately named haunts of the Salish and Kwakiutl people on the Canadian Pacific to get a similar sense of place sacralised through naming – and a similar sense of loss.) Slieve Mish, which I look out on as I write, is not only a mist-covered hill, but a repository of memory. It was there, the ninth-century Book of Invasions tells us, that the Milesian invaders met Banba, a queen of the Tuatha De Danann, and her druids. And when the Milesians braved the magic mist of her tribe and wrested the land of Ireland from them, it was in that epic battle that Mis, a Milesian princess, fell, on the bare mountainside that still bears her name. To live in a landscape where rich, time-layered meanings swim in and out of view, at the mercy of placenames that block access and sound like melodic nonsense words, is to be made acutely aware of language. You learn that English alone cannot fully explain your world; and you are left haunted by the sense of a missing language.

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A long Utne article by Patrick McCartney, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, is structured around his search for “a village somewhere in India where everyone speaks Sanskrit”:

Approximately seven years ago, during an Internet search for information about these villages, I came across a clip on YouTube about a Sanskrit-speaking village called Jhiri. In this nationally syndicated news clip the presenter asserted that “almost all the people always converse in Sanskrit.” I found this phrase deeply ambiguous. I wanted to know more, and so, during April and May 2015, I spent four weeks in the village of Jhiri, where I faced exceptionally challenging conditions related to my health, the heat, and the fact that the village does not have electricity or running water.

His description of the trials and tribulations of finding the place is enjoyable (Google Maps was no help):

We stopped countless times at dusty, windy intersections to ask people if they knew how to get to the Sanskrit village. While many had heard of it, even people within the same group offered various potential locations and subsequent directions. On more than one occasion two people standing next to each other pointed in the opposite direction at the same time.

And he has interesting things to say about the sociology of the place:

The attitude of several Sanskrit speakers in Jhiri towards the hybridised Sanskrit they speak is that it ought to be purer. I heard the phrase atiśuddhaṃ bhaviṣyati (it will become more pure) on several occasions when discussing with the villagers the frequent mixing of Sanskrit with Hindi, Malvi, and English that I observed in the village. The community sees this as a sign of impurity that must be countered through the adoption of a purer, higher-register form of Sanskrit that is free of the perceived influence of other languages as well as of the camouflaged use of loan words.

There’s an awful lot about yoga, but that’s understandable given that his work “focuses on various aspects of the transglobal yoga industry,” and if you’re not interested in that you can skim it, as did I. Thanks, JC!

I’m reading Зимние заметки о летних впечатлениях [Winter Notes on Summer Impressions], Dostoevsky’s delightfully acerbic account of his 1862 trip to Europe, with attacks on Western/socialist rationality (tell someone you’ll feed them and guarantee them work in exchange for a tiny drop of freedom, but “no, even that droplet is too heavy”), and I’ve reached the final chapter, which is called Брибри и мабишь [Bribri and ma biche]. He says the Parisian bourgeois normally calls his wife mon epouse or ma femme, but if he’s deeply moved or wants to deceive her, he calls her ma biche ‘my doe.’ So far, so good; biche is in the dictionaries with that sense (‘darling’). But then he says the loving wife playfully calls her husband bribri, and I can find no other trace of this word (the search results are unhelpfully filled by an indigenous people of Costa Rica whose language has nasal harmony). It is not in even the largest print or online dictionaries, and a Google Books search turned up only a page in Capucine Motte’s novel Apollinaria that quotes this very passage (in French translation) and says “elle regarde ces deux mots dans son dictionnaire français, sans succès.” So as a last resort I turn to the Varied Reader: any thoughts on this mysterious term of affection?

The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence by Julie Sedivy is one of those long, meaty articles that make too many points to summarize briefly, so I’ll just quote a few bits and urge you to read the whole thing:

Languages with very simple sentence structure are, for the most part, oral languages. It’s the languages that have a culture of writing, developed over a long span of time, that display a fondness for stacking clauses onto one another to create towering sentences. This pattern raises the possibility that the invention of writing, a very recent innovation tagged on to the very last millennia of human evolution, can dramatically alter a language’s linguistic niche, spurring the development of elaborate sentence structure, and leading to the shedding of other features, on a timescale that cannot be achieved through biological evolution. If that’s so, then the languages that many of us have grown up with are very different from the languages that have been spoken throughout the vast majority of human existence.

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I generally find lists of “untranslatable” words irritating; they tend to consist of variations on “comfortable” and “longing” plus a few implausible items alleged to mean, say, “the sensation of dipping your pinky finger into a pond freshly dappled by rain.” Like “funny things my students write in their papers,” you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. But Shashank Bhargava has a much better idea in What is untranslatable? Ten translators from Indian languages list their candidates: “In an effort to understand the struggles and the ingenuity that goes behind translating literature, we asked some of India’s best-known translators about the things they have found the hardest to translate.” Here’s the first, by Aruni Kashyap:

Recently, I translated Arunachali writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi’s short story The Smell of Bamboo Blossoms to English, written in Assamese. I found the first line of the short story very hard to translate: Kameng noit enduror uzan uthise.

Now, “uzan uthise” in Assamese refers to a very specific phenomenon during the monsoon, when freshwater fish start to breed after the first showers. When this happens, mature fish swim up to the surface of the water bodies, making it very easy to catch them. People choose this time to catch fish with their nets because it ensures high yields.

This makes the phrase difficult to translate to English. Literally, it means the river/pond is swarming with fish because when they want to breed, they come to the surface, making them look voluminous. But “uzan uthise” means not just the swarming of a large number of fishes to the surface, but also their behaviour during breeding.

In this short story, Thongchi uses this phrase to describe the growth in the population of rats in Arunachal after consuming bamboo flowers. He wasn’t necessary referring to the activity of reproduction, but after consuming bamboo flowers the rats were reproducing in enormous numbers anyway, forcing them to cross the river in thousands in search of food and consume everything on their way. The opening sentence describes this phenomenon of rats crossing the river en masse.

Isn’t that fascinating? And this, from V Ramaswamy on Bengali, resonated strongly with me:

For me the novel is the language, not the plot, which is merely a device through which the language is expressed. A little bit of the nature and quality of that language can be conveyed in translation but the auditory experience is entirely lost.

Similarly, in Bangla there are two registers of writing the language, shuddha or formal, and cholti or spoken. So when you have the two registers appearing next to each other, you can do this or that to render it in English, but the fact is that it achieves nothing. The nature of the act of reading this in the original can be explained, but it is not experienced in its details, with all its cognitive linkages.

Yes, “the novel is the language, not the plot” — that’s a concept I’ve tried to express more than once, but never managed such concision. Thanks, Trevor!

Joe Parkin Daniels writes for the Guardian about an intriguing new movie:

Bad Lucky Goat is the first film ever written and produced in San Andres-Providencia creole, the distinct variant of Caribbean English spoken on Providence and its larger sister island, San Andres.

The movie – which tells the story of a brother and sister who accidentally kill a goat with their parents’ car on the eve of tourist season – is the first feature project by the Colombian director Samir Oliveros, who hopes the film can serve as a testament to the island’s language and culture.

“We knew from the beginning it was going to be 100% in creole, and in [mainland] Colombia, people don’t even know that they speak creole in Old Providence,” said Oliveros. “We wanted to showcase the island as it is – that’s never been done before.”

The creole spoken in Old Providence shares most of its vocabulary with English, and sounds close to typical Caribbean English, though it borrows certain phrases and grammatical tics from Spanish and a host of African languages.

The trailer looks good, the music is delightful, and of course it’s fun to hear the dialect, but I’d almost be willing to post about it just for the title Bad Lucky Goat. Although the actual title seems to be Day of the Goat — it’s a bit confusing. Anyway, thanks, Bathrobe and Yoram!

Alison Kroulek provides six facts about Dracula around the world that you might not have heard before; my favorites:

Dracula’s origins are lost in translation.
“[T]he mistranslation of a 15th-century poem dramatically changed the poet’s intent and poet’s intent and let to a misleading interpretation of Bram’s intentions. In describing the cruel actions of Vlad Dracula III against Saxon traders in Transylvania, Michael Beheim . . . wrote that Vlad washed his hands in the blood of his enemies. A portion of the poem was translated incorrectly, telling of Vlad dipping his bread into a bowl and drinking the blood of his dead enemies, thus labeling him as a vampire.”

An Icelandic translation of Dracula from 1901 is actually a different story.
The original Icelandic translation of Dracula is actually a different novel, with a different title and an altered plot. The Icelandic version is called Makt Myrkranna, or Powers of Darkness. Makt Myrkranna condenses the second part of the book, which takes place after the Count arrives in England. According to Dracula expert Hans Corneel de Roos, the result is a novel “more exciting and elegant than Dracula itself.” Translator Valdimar Ásmundsson also made the original novel’s sexual undertones more explicit.

Other fun facts: the first language Dracula was translated into was Hungarian, and most Romanians had no idea what Stoker’s novel was about until after the fall of communism. Thanks, Trevor!

Gerald (G. S.) Smith, now that he’s retired as Professor of Russian at Oxford, is devoting himself to continuing his project of translating the late Lev Loseff (Лев Лосев; I quoted one of his poems here and wrote about his biography of Joseph Brodsky here and here). He’s putting them up at [Dimitry Loseff’s] Lev Loseff blog, each translation followed by the original Russian and sometimes notes to explain allusions, and I urge you to investigate them if you love good poetry of the formal/tradtional sort. At the moment the top entry is “D’you hear me… / Ты слышишь ли…,” so the first thing that greeted me was this quatrain:

D’you hear me, the shutters are open, hey you, rise and shine,
unwashed and uncombed, as you are, just get yourself out,
to where some enamel’s been chipped from the rim of the sky,
and daybreak holds forth with its whistling and steaming spout.

If you like that, you’ll probably want to spend some time there. I learned about it via this post by Anatoly Vorobei, in which he quotes and rightly praises “Documentary,” Smith’s version of Loseff’s “Документальное”; the one thing I don’t like is his translation of these lines:

Там русский царь в вагоне чахнет,
играет в секу и в буру.

Stuck in his airless railway carriage,
the Tsar plays snap and more besides.

“Stuck in his airless railway carriage” doesn’t convey the sense of чахнет, which means ‘withers away, goes into a decline, becomes exhausted or weak’ (a pretty important sense in the context of WWI); more importantly, “snap and more besides” is just awful. The Russian means ‘plays seka and burá,’ two simple-minded card games — in the former (also called сика or три листа ‘three leaves/sheets’ and traditionally played by coachmen), each player is dealt three cards and the winner is the one with the highest point total according to an agreed-on system of values (the maximum is 33); in the latter (also called тридцать одно ‘31′ and apparently associated with criminals), the winner is whoever gets 31 points when the deck is fully dealt. I guess “snap,” though even more simple-minded, is a reasonable substitute, but “and more besides”? Come on, that’s just lazy, and it throws this reader right out of the poem for a moment.

But that’s only a minor quibble; the translations are lively and provide a great deal of pleasure, and I’m even learning new words (like кемарить ‘to doze, snooze’). A great way to start the day!

Victor Mair’s latest Log post is about Mandarin Chinese, but its implications are far more general. He begins:

When I began studying Mandarin over half a century ago, I very quickly developed a pet phrase […]: lǎoshí shuō 老實說 / 老实说 (“to tell the truth; honestly”), After I married one of the best Mandarin teachers on earth (Chang Li-ching) several years later, she corrected me when I said my favorite phrase. She told me that I made it sound like lǎoshī shuō 老師說 / 老师说 (“teacher says”).

Now, I know my tones very well, and can tell the difference between first and second tone. I’m also able to produce them clearly and distinctly. So it wasn’t a problem with my being incapable of distinguishing tonally in my speech between lǎoshí shuō and lǎoshī shuō. Something else was wrong with the way I said “lǎoshí shuō” (“honestly speaking”) that made it sound like “lǎoshī shuō” (“teacher says”).

He goes into great deal about what that “something” was, and gives similar examples from spoken Nepali. As I said in a comment there, it applies to much more than just Chinese:

I’ve never heard a convincing example of spoken Ancient Greek on those videos that purport to provide one, because the people speaking are working so hard to make sure the consonants, vowels, and pitches are correct that they don’t sound like they’re speaking a real language. I’ve even heard this complaint about actors speaking Klingon; it may not be “real,” but if it’s to be believable as a spoken language it has to sound like one, not like a careful combination of painfully learned sounds.