languagehat.com

The first essay in Eliot Weinberger’s collection The Ghosts of Birds is about The Life of Adam and Eve, a group of pseudepigraphical writings hitherto unfamiliar to me that exists in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Armenian, Georgian, and Coptic versions (Wikipedia: “They differ greatly in length and wording, but for the most part are derived from a single source that has not survived”). I was struck by this bit:

An angel guides Seth’s hand as he writes, and what he writes is called achiliacae, defined in the text itself as “writing without the teaching of words.” Generations see the stelae, but no one can read them until long after the Flood, when an angel appears to Solomon and gives him the knowledge of this indecipherable language.

Of course I googled the mysterious word in italics, and found a slightly longer explanation in Brian Murdoch’s The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe: Vernacular Translations and Adaptations of the Vita Adae et Evae:

Some versions take the story further down to the reading of the tablets by Solomon (again with angelic or archangelic assistance), who names the letters achiliacae, a word the form of which varies very considerably, and for which different interpretations are offered in the text itself, ranging from ‘without lips’ to ‘without books’.

Gustav Hölscher, in Kanonisch und Apokryph: Ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte des alttestamentlichen Kanons (A. Deichert, 1905), p. 51, provides a few of those variant forms and a learned guess:

Die rätselhafte Schrift heißt hier literae achiliacae (oder achilicae, achylicae, vgl. auch archilaykas [altenglisch]), was ich als γράμματα ἀχειλι[α]κά (d.h. mit Lippen unaussprechbar) deuten möchte.

Truly one of the more obscure and useless cruxes (or, if you like, cruces) I have run across.

And speaking of difficult words, in reading Samuil Lurie’s excellent biography of Pisarev (see this post for an appreciation of Lurie) I’ve run across one no dictionary will explain to me: “Лекций он записывал бисерным почерком в красивеньких, украшенных декалькоманиею тетрадочках с розовыми клакспапирчиками” [He took notes on lectures in a minute script in pretty little notebooks decorated with decalcomania and little pink klakspapir]. It clearly represents a German Klackspapier ‘blob-paper,’ but such a word does not seem to exist in German. Any ideas what it might be?

John le Carré has a fine piece in the Guardian explaining his lifelong love for German:

I began learning German at the age of 13, and I’m still trying to explain to myself why it was love at first sound. The answer must surely be: the excellence of my teacher. At an English public school not famed for its cultural generosity, Mr King was that rare thing: a kindly and intelligent man who, in the thick of the second world war, determinedly loved the Germany that he knew was still there somewhere.

Rather than join the chorus of anti-German propaganda, he preferred, doggedly, to inspire his little class with the beauty of the language, and of its literature and culture. One day, he used to say, the real Germany will come back. And he was right. Because now it has.

Why was it love at first sound for me? Well, in those days not many language teachers played gramophone records to their class, but Mr King did. They were old and very precious to him and us, and he kept them in brown paper bags in a satchel that he put in his bicycle basket when he rode to school.

What did they contain, these precious records? The voices of classical German actors, reading romantic German poetry. The records were a bit cracked, but that was part of their beauty. In my memory, they remain cracked to this day:

Du bist wie eine Blume – CRACK – So hold und schön und… – CRACK (Heinrich Heine)

Bei Nacht im Dorf der Wächter rief… – CRACK (Eduard Mörike’s Elfenlied)

And I loved them. I learned to imitate, then recite them, crack and all. And I discovered that the language fitted me. It fitted my tongue. It pleased my Nordic ear. […]

I didn’t have the same reaction to German, but then I didn’t have that kind of teacher. Read the whole thing; le Carré is always worth reading. And read the post at Boris Dralyuk’s site where I got the link; it’s full of great links (I especially recommend André van Loon’s essay on Dralyuk’s translation of Babel’s Odessa Stories).

Lucy Ferriss reports for Lingua Franca on one of the imports that’s making inroads in the US:

Ask a person of a certain age, and they will probably tell you that Good on you is Australian slang, pronounced and emphasized mostly as Good ON ya. In fact, apparently in some parts of Australia the expression can be neatly shortened to Onya! Ask a younger person, though, and you’ll hear a distinction that has nothing to do with nationality or region and everything to do with intent.

If I back up my own timeline to, say, 20 years ago, I would have said to my husband, “Good for you!” I would have used the same expression if he had come home with the news that he had won the raffle at an office party. In other words, I would have said “Good for you!” to mean either “Well done!” or “How lucky!” When I spoke to a couple of millennials this week about Good on you, they confirmed what I suspected: These two meanings have now taken different paths. The appropriate response to my husband’s clever footwork on the downhill path would be Good on you. The response in regard to the raffle, unless I believed he had earned the prize in some way, like by a years-long perseverance in buying raffle tickets, would be Good for you.

And now that the phrase has been uncoupled, as it were, Good for you finds itself increasingly used sarcastically. […]

I confess I still think of it as an Australianism, but obviously I’m out of the loop. Does Ferris’s analysis sound right to those still in the loop?

This site looks very useful; thirty years ago I wanted to try learning Bambara but could find almost no resources, but now if I give it another go I’ll know where to look.

Incidentally, I got a notice that the LH server “will be taken offline for power maintenance between 21:00 UTC July 2, 2017 and 00:00 UTC July 3, 2017,” so if you happen to try to access it during that period and have a problem, that’s what’s going on.

My birthday isn’t over, and I expect to be adding at least one more item to the list later today, but I wanted to get the post up so those who wish to congratulate me can do so (and those who are going to envy the books can get their envy on). So far generous souls have added the following books to my collection:

Time and Narrative, Volume 1 by Paul Ricoeur
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
The Ghosts of Birds by Eliot Weinberger
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America by Bernard Bailyn
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia by Alison K. Smith
A History of Russian Thought by William Leatherbarrow (ed.)
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The last three have no indication of the giver (except for an indecipherable squiggle on the “Sender’s signature” line on the customs declaration for the Smith book); don’t worry, you’ll get your karma upgrade even if I don’t know your identity. And I got myself Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson; the reviews suggest that it will enable me to finally start understanding Bakhtin.

Update: My wife gave me Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia by Valerie Kivelson; I very much enjoyed her Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century, and I’m looking forward to this. (Maps! It’s got maps!)

I haven’t reported on my Russian reading in a while, which doesn’t mean it’s been uninteresting — I just haven’t had anything interesting to say about it. I read Ostrovsky’s Гроза [The Thunderstorm], which is just as great as they say (the 1933 film is surprisingly good despite the fact that it was heavily cut) and Turgenev’s Накануне [On the Eve] (not bad but not great — the Bulgarian hero, Insarov, is unconvincing) and Первая любовь [First Love] (just as great as they say). Now I’m on one of those books I wouldn’t have read except for my comprehensive reading program, Nikolai Pomyalovsky‘s Мещанское счастье [Bourgeois happiness — I don’t think it’s been translated]. Pomyalovsky is one of those “minor writers” nobody ever especially recommends (and the title is awful), but I’m enjoying it a great deal and already looking forward to the sequel, Молотов [Molotov — the protagonist of both is Egor Ivanych Molotov], and ruing the fact that the author died at 28 — I suspect he could have been one of the greats if he’d had a chance to mature.

But I’m not even halfway through, so I don’t want to comment on the story as a whole other than to say it has some very effective scenes; I just want to excerpt this self-contained section, which I found unexpected and striking (Russian after the cut):

Egor Ivanych walked onto the forest glade and on it saw two small graves. This caught his attention. “Who would be buried here?” he thought. “What a strange place — in a forest!” Looking around, he saw that he was completely surrounded by forest. After a moment’s thought, he climbed the highest tree and saw the road from there. He walked out onto the road and, hearing women’s voices, approached them. It turned out to be three peasant women; the oldest was nattering on about something. Molotov addressed himself to her.

“Auntie!” he called out.

The women looked around and made low bows, as simple peasant folk do when meeting someone dressed like a gentleman.

“What is it, sir?” she asked.

“Do you know whose graves those are, auntie?”

“What graves, sir?”

“Over there by the river, on the glade.”

“Ah!” cried the old woman. “There are graves, there are… That’s Miron’s little daughters… two of them died…”

“Why are they buried there?”

“The little girls? They died unbaptized.”

She raised her eyes to the heavens, sighed, said “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy,” and dropped her eyes. But suddenly her face became enlivened, and she began to talk:

“Of course, if an unbaptized child dies, it’s just like a piece of wood… You can dig anywhere, it’s all the same… There’s no spirit in it, it’s a kind of person who… it’s born without a spirit… it’s got steam inside… You don’t baptize one like that, it up and dies… God won’t allow it, no.”

“Where did you get the idea that an unbaptized child doesn’t have a spirit?”

“But how can a Christian child die without being baptized? Is that possible? It’s not possible… Sometimes one is born completely dead… this one doesn’t have a spirit… An unbaptized child isn’t born a holy child.”

She spread her hands and was silent. Molotov was amazed at her peasant woman’s sense.

“Goodbye, auntie, and thanks,” he said.

“Goodbye, sir.”

Molotov was even more amazed at her peasant woman’s sense later on, when he learned that this belief about unbaptized children was purely personal, that nobody in the village knew about it. He had run into a peasant woman poet, a peasant woman mystic. It might be that until that moment it had never occurred to her to try to explain to herself the fate, incomprehensible to her, of certain children, and then as soon as the question of the children entered her head, not wanting to remain long in perplexity, she at once, with the help of her inspiration, went past all contradictions and created an instant myth. And it’s very possible that this myth will be passed down to her children and grandchildren, will creep into other families, to neighbors and acquaintances, and in thirty or forty years will become a new local folk belief, and then you won’t be able to guess where it arose. It’s not only ancient times that stored up prejudices, they’re created even now.

Me, I’d rather have characters musing about things like that than the pressing social issues of the day.

Update (July 4). Sigh… Just as with Netochka Nezvanova, no sooner do I write an enthusiastic post than the book falls off a cliff. Molotov meets the neighbor girl Lenochka and they have a sort-of-romance, complete with heaving bosoms, flaming cheeks, and tears falling like hail; he overhears a conversation between the Obrosimovs, a family of landed nobility for whom he’s working, and decides they have contempt for him, which leads to just the sort of endless chewing-over of social issues that I was congratulating Pomyalovsky for resisting. It all ends in drawn-out and repetitious cliché. I’ll read the sequel, but no longer with high hopes.

[Read more…]

Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports for The Guardian on Iran’s unfortunate copyright situation:

Iranian authors who publish in their home country are offered some protection under national law, but the work of writers who publish outside Iran is completely unprotected. According to the Tehran Times, one Iranian translator has secured the copyright to produce a version in Farsi of Paula Hawkins’s 2017 novel, Into the Water. But at least five others are already working on competing translations.

Thanks to Iran’s love for literature, Tehran bookshops boast a diverse range of foreign titles, spanning everything from Marcel Proust to Haruki Murakami. Even works rarely seen in UK bookshops, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, are abundant in Iran – and widely read. That said, censorship is rife: the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance vets all books before publication, and most are redacted – although under the current moderate administration, there is increasing leeway.

Translators in Iran enjoy a degree of popularity rarely seen in the west; their names are published on covers alongside the authors’, and some are famous cultural figures. […]

The popularity of foreign fiction and the difficulties of obtaining permission have exacerbated the problem of multiple translations of the same book popping up, with some translators exploiting the copyright vacuum – particularly so for bestsellers. Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, for instance, has been translated into Persian by at least 16 different people. Recently, Arsalan Fasihi, who has translated Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, warned that the issue could trigger a “downfall of Persian literature” because it was affecting the quality of translations.

At least there seems to be some pressure to change things. (I might add that I shake my head sorrowfully at “works rarely seen in UK bookshops, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.”) Thanks, Trevor!

I just read Paul Pickering’s TLS review (from 2015 — yes, I’m way behind) of Juan Filloy’s 1937 novel Caterva, translated by Brendan Riley for the indispensable Dalkey Archive. The review makes both Filloy and his “grand modernist novel” sound fascinating, but what concerns me here is the title. Pickering says:

“Caterva” means “crowd”, but in this book, with its radical and criminal undertones, it is best translated as “mob”. […] Brendan Riley’s masterly translation enters into this bleakly comic spirit but everything is clear, precise and easy to read. This is a heroic achievement, as the title alone can be rendered in many different ways (Riley, who perhaps wisely left it as it is, coolly describes the multilingual and poly-rhetorical text, which contains everything from cipher to gravestone inscriptions, as “a challenge”).

What strikes me is that if it were called The Crowd or The Mob, it would immediately sink into the bog of “books with hard-to-remember titles that sound vaguely like a bunch of other books,” whereas Caterva can’t be mistaken for anything else and is quite memorable. Riley was wise indeed. I know there are other examples of books whose foreign titles are kept in English translation, but my tired brain isn’t coming up with them at the moment. (The word caterva, by the way, is straight from Latin; see Wiktionary.)

A fun post [scroll down at the blog link] from goofy at bradshaw of the future:

Guido Crepax’s Valentina comics feature a subterranean race with a language that was heavily influenced by Germanic languages – he calls it “Lautverschiebung in reverse” as I noted in my previous post.

These stories have recently been published by Fantagraphics in beautiful English editions and I am reading them for the first time. Here are some of the words of the subterranean language, their meanings, and my guesses on where Crepax got them. Most of them are from Gothic.

A few that goofy couldn’t find in the dictionaries: LÉTNAN
‘land,’ MÁTNAN ‘man, men,’ QÉD ‘kneel,’ MÁKLA ‘great,’ GEQÚNDAN ‘dances,’ JGHNA ‘Virgo,’ and MÁUTIA ‘woman.’

Like many people, I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of “dreamtime” (which I was probably introduced to by the notoriously unreliable Bruce Chatwin); I’ve also been uneasy about depending on vague thirdhand understanding of what I was aware must be an incredibly complicated cultural complex of ideas. If you’re like me, you will welcome as I did the chance to improve your understanding at least a bit by reading Christine Judith Nicholls’s series of three posts from 2014, ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘The Dreaming’ – an introduction. It begins with a good quote by Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi, formerly a Warlpiri teacher at the Lajamanu School in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory:

To get an insight into us – [the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert] – it is necessary to understand something about our major religious belief, the Jukurrpa. The Jukurrpa is an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment.

The philosophy behind it is holistic – the Jukurrpa provides for a total, integrated way of life. It is important to understand that, for Warlpiri and other Aboriginal people living in remote Aboriginal settlements, The Dreaming isn’t something that has been consigned to the past but is a lived daily reality. We, the Warlpiri people, believe in the Jukurrpa to this day.

Nicholls writes:

In this succinct statement Nungarrayi touched on the subtlety, complexity and all-encompassing, non-finite nature of the Jukurrpa.

The concept is mostly known in grossly inadequate English translation as “The Dreamtime” or “The Dreaming”. The Jukurrpa can be mapped onto micro-environments in specific tracts of land that Aboriginal people call “country”.

As a religion grounded in the land itself, it incorporates creation and other land-based narratives, social processes including kinship regulations, morality and ethics. This complex concept informs people’s economic, cognitive, affective and spiritual lives.

She later adds that “words from many different languages have been squished into a couple of sleep-related English words – words that come with significantly different connotations – or baggage – in comparison with the originals”:

As noted earlier, the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert describe their complex of religious beliefs as the Jukurrpa.

Further south-east, the Arrerntic peoples call the word-concept the Altyerrenge or Altyerr (in earlier orthography spelled Altjira and Alcheringa and in other ways, too).

The Kija people of the East Kimberley use the term Ngarrankarni (sometimes spelled Ngarrarngkarni); while the Ngarinyin people (previously spelled Ungarinjin, inter alia) people speak of the Ungud (or Wungud).

“Dreaming” is called Manguny in Martu Wangka, a Western Desert language spoken in the Pilbara region of Western Australia; and some North-East Arnhem Landers refer to the same core concept as Wongar – to name but a handful.

Part two asks the question “who dreamed up these terms?” (it started with Francis Gillen, an Arrernte speaker and keen ethnologist in the late 19th century); part three is “‘Dreamings’ and dreaming narratives: what’s the relationship?” There’s lots of food for thought, and the illustrations are gorgeous.