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I had heard of Victor Segalen only fleetingly and long ago, and I’m not even sure whether in connection with poetry or Sinology, but he was clearly an interesting guy: the (absurdly skimpy) Wikipedia article says he was “a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic” and that he “died by accident in a forest in Huelgoat, France (‘under mysterious circumstances’ and reputedly with an open copy of Hamlet by his side).” The much more expansive French Wikipedia article goes into detail about his two expeditions to China, whose language he studied and loved; what Wesleyan University Press calls “his bilingual poetic masterpiece Stèles / 古今碑錄” sounds amazing:

Stèles / 古今碑錄 is a hermetic collection of wry, intriguing, and at times haunting prose poems that are presented like translations of imaginary Chinese “steles” or inscribed stone monuments (shibei 石碑), each of which bears a heading in classical Chinese — sometimes quoted from classical texts or actual monuments, sometimes composed in literary Chinese by Segalen himself. Although written in a tightly formal French and a broadly allusive style in imitation of Chinese inscriptions, these poems often speak of the more intimate matters of friendship and erotic love, the self and otherness, the spiritual and supernatural, in addition to the corruptions within organized religions (from Buddhism to Christianity). Among Segalen’s creative work, this collection of poems is the most sustained and concentrated realization of his ideas about l’exotisme and the transformative power of what he termed le Divers or la Diversité. It is a truly original work that continually thwarts the expectations of the typical critiques of Orientalism, and that has an immediate appeal and an enduring interest to lovers of poetry and theorists alike.

Wesleyan has published it in two volumes; the first, which contains a facsimile reproduction of the 1914 edition, a complete English translation, and extensive critical notes and materials, is available only in print, but they’ve put the text online, and “Volume Two (available only online) contains excerpts of sources and contexts as well as the unpublished stèles found in Segalen’s manuscripts, and much more.” What a great thing to do! I’m very glad to know about it, and I thank Jon for the link — it is, as he says, “a lovely model for how to share this sort of scholarship.”

(Incidentally, the name of the Breton village where he died, An Uhelgoad, means ‘high woods’; uhel ‘high’ = Welsh uchel, and koad ‘woods’ = Welsh coed. I don’t know whether there are standard rules of Frenchification that explain why it’s Huelgoat in French.)

Merrill Perlman has an edifying rundown of the chaotic situation with regard to single or double consonants before suffixes in English. After laying out what might laughably be called the rules, she says:

“Worship(p)er” is a victim of the confusion that can arise when there are too many “rules.” Generally, the final consonant is not doubled if the last syllable is not accented (in American English, that is), as in “listen/listener.” That means “worshiper” should be a no-brainer. For whatever reason, though, as Bryan A. Garner says in Garner’s Modern English Usage, the single “p” never caught on in American English; the double “p” appears three times as often as the single.

Let’s move to the “l” problem, which is where British and American English diverge the most. someone is a “jeweller” there and a “jeweler” here; a legal document is “initialled” there and “initialed” here. And a favorite TV show is “cancelled” there and “canceled” here. Most words that end in “l” add a second one before many suffixes that begin with vowels.

Except.

In The New Yorker and Chicago style, the show is “cancelled.” Just to play with your head more, everyone uses “cancellation.” And though many dictionaries, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Moon prefer “tranquillity,” many people seem to prefer “tranquility.”

The important thing to remember, as we say so often, is that sometimes things are not necessarily “right” or “wrong,” just a matter of choice or style. With doubled consonants before a suffix, the answer sometimes is simply “it depends.” Or, maybe, you could look it up.

An admirable conclusion. Just to repeat for emphasis: sometimes things are not necessarily “right” or “wrong,” just a matter of choice or style. Life would be so much more pleasant if people would keep that in mind.

One of the incidental pleasures of reading books like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery, in which people bounce around between cities, is discovering another example of the Grand Historic Hotel, one of my favorite phenomena. To honor the occasion, I’ve compiled a list of them, the sort of place movie stars, counts, and foreign correspondents were likely to be found in l’entre-deux-guerres, having a drink on the terrace or losing their shirts in the casino. I’ve had to eliminate those with excessively common monikers like Grand, Plaza, Europe, Ritz, and Astor(ia); I’ve arranged names and cities alphabetically, and your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to match them. There are no prizes, since this stuff is easily googled. The city names are historic because the hotels are, and this is an exercise in nostalgia. I imagine most of you will recognize at least a few, but I doubt anyone will know them all. (Alas, I have only stayed in one, but I have had eaten in another and set eyes on a couple more.) Without further ado, the hotels:

Aletti
Baron
Cathay
Cecil
Continental
Grande Bretagne
Imperial
La Mamounia
Nacional
Peninsula
Pera Palace
Phoenicia
Raffles
Shepheard’s
Strand

And the cities:

Aleppo
Alexandria
Algiers
Athens
Beirut
Cairo
Havana
Hong Kong
Istanbul
Marrakech
Rangoon
Saigon
Shanghai
Singapore
Tokyo

Needless to say, I welcome both additions and anecdotes. (Oh, and there’s a nice list of historic hotels here.)

Alison Flood reports on a clever initiative:

It’s not quite as vital as the battles to save the likes of the Amur leopard and giant panda from extinction, but a campaign to preserve a host of endangered regional American words and phrases has been launched, looking to save the likes of “wamus” to “sonsy”, and “spouty” to “bonnyclabber”.

The list of 50 words and phrases was compiled by the Dictionary of American Regional English, a project that has been running since 1965, when almost 3,000 face-to-face interviews were conducted with people across the US to map the thousands of differences in dialect across the states. DARE has chosen the words it believes to be “on the cusp of extinction” and teamed up with podcasting platform Acast, asking its producers and presenters to “adopt” an endangered word or phrase and use it on their shows.

The words and phrases range from to “be on one’s beanwater”, a New England phrase that means to be in high spirits or to feel frisky, to the south Atlantic verb “to fleech”, meaning to coax, wheedle or flatter. A heavy rain is described as a “frog strangler” in the southern states and south midlands, or a “goose drownder” in the midlands; “to vum” is to swear or declare in New England; “the last button on Gabe’s coat” is used in the south to refer to the last bit of food.

“Although language change is inevitable, it’s too bad to see some of our most colourful expressions going out of use,” said Joan Hall, former editor of DARE. “It would be fun to see them revitalised.”

I agree, and I hope people will take them up on it; the piece ends with a list of “the 50 endangered words and phrases.” A couple of quibbles: they should have made more of an effort to separate out “cute dialectal terms that nobody else is ever going to use” (e.g., Racket store: a variety store; Skillpot: a turtle) from words that one can imagine being adopted (Cuddy: a small room, closet, or cupboard; Fogo: An offensive smell; Sonsy: cute, charming, lively). Also, Shat: a pine needle? Get serious. (Thanks, Trevor!)

My (excellent) local NPR radio station, during their afternoon classical program, announced Telemann’s Violin Concerto in A major, nicknamed “The Frogs”… or “Die Relinge” in the original. Huh? thought I: isn’t the German for ‘frog’ Frosch? So it is, but the Grimm dictionary has an entry describing it as a kind of toad:

reling, m. krötenart, sumpf– oder teichfrosch: eine art krotten, die man reling oder möhmlein nennet, so im frühling und sommer in den unsaubern pfützen sitzen und singen, sind goldgelb oder fast rothgelb und unten am bauch schwarz gescheckigt, gar unlustig anzusehen. Simpl. 1, 384 Kurz. es ist schreibung für röhling, und das thier hat seinen namen von dem ihm eigenen tone, vgl. bair. röheln, rüheln, grunzen, wiehern, schreien wie ein esel (s. dazu röcheln); in Nordfranken rühling sumpf- oder teichfrosch Schm.2 2, 85; hessisch roeling wasserfrosch und wassereidechse Vilmar 330.

It’s not in any of my modern dictionaries, even the Harper-Collins Unabridged. So my question is: would modern German-speakers recognize this word, or would it be taken as the homophonous Reling ‘rail (on a ship)’?

I’ve recently finished Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and am still stumbling about in a Neapolitan daze (in fact I’m starting on my little stack of other novels set in Naples, beginning with John Horne Burns’s The Gallery), so I’m pleased to be able to bring you a relevant link, Melinda Harvey’s interview with Ann Goldstein, her English translator. (Warning for those of you who might want to read the books: there are spoilers.) She talks about learning Italian:

Superficially, it was easy because I had studied French and Latin. I had the basic vocabulary and the basic grammatical structures, in a sense. Because I’ve never lived there I don’t have a verbal fluency that I wish I had, you know, street language. I learned my Italian in such an unconventional way, that is to say through reading. I don’t have any academic training and I don’t have “living there” training—I have book training! I often feel that I have big gaps in my ways of understanding things. I don’t speak idiomatic Italian—I have that fluency when I read but not when I walk around.

That’s the same way I know Russian. And here’s an exchange that describes a couple of obscure words:

MH: You translated the Neapolitan novels as they fell off the press, as it were. You didn’t have the full sweep of the novels at your disposal when you began your translation of them. Would you have done certain things differently in terms of the translation had you known what you do now about the series? […]

AG: The obvious example is smarginatura. It appears just once in My Brilliant Friend and then Ferrante doesn’t use the word again until The Story of the Lost Child. And there it becomes this huge, elaborate thing—I don’t think she uses the word again until then, or maybe only once or twice. Just as a one-word example, I might have translated it differently, had I known. I’m not sure. I certainly would have had a much better idea of what she meant; of what it meant to her. Also in Frantumaglia she talks a lot about the word frantumaglia. She says it’s a word that her mother used, and she talks at great length about the many meanings that it has. I’m not even sure if it’s a real Italian word… Literally, it means both “the process of shattering” and “the result of shattering.” So it’s already complicated. And then she talks about how her mother used it in different contexts and how she then adopted it.

Thanks, Trevor!

Meg Miller reports on what sounds like an interesting exhibit:

The acrylic mural of a Queens map that greets visitors to the Queens Museum, in New York, is enormous, abstract, and angular, rendering the borough in a colorful array of polygons. Inside the shapes is the word for “tongue” in each of the endangered languages still spoken in Queens, by residents the artist Mariam Ghani refers to as people with “forked tongues.” There are 59 such languages in total.

“Migrants and the multilingual are constantly speaking with forked tongues, slipping from one language to another,” Ghani writes in her description of her project The Garden of the Forked Tongues, which is part of the exhibition Nonstop Metropolis, a collaborative show based around the work of author Rebecca Solnit and geographer Josh Jelly-Schapiro. […]

Queens has been called “one of the most diverse places on Earth.” The evidence is in the languages. According to the Endangered Language Alliance, whose data Ghani used to create the mural as well as an accompanying interactive graphic, an estimated 500 languages are currently spoken in Queens. The 59 languages depicted in the map are the ones endangered, which means that Queens residents are some of the last people on Earth who know the language that they speak. Given that there are a total of 574 “critically endangered” languages worldwide, according to UNESCO, 59 is a pretty remarkable number to have just in one borough.

Here‘s the project site, and if you click on the interactive graphic link you get a clickable map that will provide information on each of the languages, e.g.:

Bukhori (Tajiki: бухорӣ – buxorī, Hebrew script: בוכארי buxori), also known as Bukhari and Bukharian, is a dialect of the Tajiki language spoken in Central Asia (and in the diaspora) by Bukharian Jews.

Spoken in: Kew Gardens, Queens

alternate name(s): Bukharian
word for tongue: זבאן/zabon
language family: Indo-Iranian (West)
place(s) of origin: Uzbekistan, Turkestan, Tajikistan
worldwide speaker population: 110000

And it’s got a video of an elderly gentleman speaking the language, which is so much like Persian/Farsi I could understand chunks of it even though my studies of the latter are a couple of decades in the past — in fact, I wouldn’t have guessed it was a different language. Thanks, Trevor!

(Warning: the “interactive graphic” link didn’t work the last time I tried it; I just got a blank page. Don’t know if there’s a site problem; maybe wait a day and try again.)

Having finished Sergei Aksakov’s wonderful Семейная хроника, which I had read years ago in its English translation as The Family Chronicle, I’m now reading his follow-up, Воспоминания [Memoirs] (translated as A Russian Schoolboy), which oddly uses real family names instead of the “Bagrovs” of the earlier book — it must have been an odd experience reading them when they were published together as a book in 1856. At any rate, at the start of the book eight-year-old Sergei is taken by his parents to Kazan in the winter of 1799, and one night as he has just gotten to sleep he is dragged off to visit his parents’ friends the Knyazheviches, whose house “отличался вполне славянской надписью над воротами: ‘Добрые люди, милости просим!'” [was notable for the thoroughly Slavic inscription over the gate: “Welcome, good people!”]. A footnote explains:

Надпись по длинноте и крупноте букв не умещалась, а потому была написана следующим образом: “Д. Л. Милости просим”. Читая буквы по-старинному, то есть “Добро Люди”, получался почти тот же смысл, какой выражался бы в полной надписи.

There wasn’t room for the inscription because of its length and the large letters, so it was written as follows: “D. L. Milosti prosim”. Reading the letters the old-fashioned way, that is “Dobro [good] Lyudi [people],” the same sense was expressed as in the full inscription.

The old Russian letter names are given in a chart here, and further fun with them was had in this 2008 LH post.

Searching for something else, I happened on the complete online text (pdf) of Barry A. Popik and Gerald Leonard Cohen, Studies in Slang, VII (2006). Anyone interested in slang will want to check it out; a few article titles picked at random:

POPIK: Tin Pan Alley origin is explained in a 1903 newspaper article

COHEN: To need hair of the dog that bit you ‘need a bit more booze to get over a hangover

COHEN: Lose one’s marbles–Jonathan Lighter’s 1902 attestation refutes my suggestion of a 1920s Missouri origin of the expression

POPIK: Cakewalk–1897 New-Orleans Times-Democrat article explains it was originally a marriage ceremony among French blacks in Louisiana

POPIK: Slang applesauce (spoken dismissively) derives from a once popular but corny joke, possibly in a minstrel context

The joke involves a teacher with twelve pupils and only eleven apples, and “corny” is a good word for it.

Esther Allen writes about the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto and his 1956 novel Zama, which she translated; both he and it sound fascinating and well worth investigating, and I recommend the whole essay, but I’ll feature a couple of bits of particular LH interest. First, an odd edition:

Perhaps Di Benedetto imagined he could leapfrog Buenos Aires, going directly from Mendoza into an international literary career. Some suggestion of this is present as early as Declinación y ángel / Decline and Angel, a curious bilingual edition published in 1958 by Mendoza’s public library. The intent behind the inclusion of English translations, as the jacket copy explains, was to make the slim paperback a missive out into the world beyond Spanish. It was a good idea, but one ahead of its time; Borges would not see the first volume of his work in English translation until 1962. And the execution was problematic. The translator—her name given simply as “Ana” on the title page—was equipped for her daunting task with a bilingual dictionary and an at best intermediate grasp of English. If Di Benedetto presented the non-Spanish speakers he met in the course of his travels with copies of this slim volume, it can’t have served him well.

After his mysterious 1976 arrest by the new military government of Argentina:

Whatever the real reason, Di Benedetto would not be silenced. He was forbidden to work as a writer while in prison but was allowed to correspond, so he devised a way of including short stories in his correspondence. He would begin, “I had a lovely dream last night; let me tell you about it,” and then write an entire story in letters so microscopic they had to be deciphered through a magnifying glass.

And the opening of the essay resonates with this very early LH post (I am amused by my passionate defense of my position in a long-forgotten blogwar, but I stand by that position):

On December 23rd, 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, arrested and imprisoned seven months earlier, stood in the heart of St. Petersburg with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle while an officer read out a sentence condemning them all to death by firing squad. For five minutes, the 28-year-old Dostoyevsky knew his life was about to end. The first three men were tied to stakes, guns lowered in their faces; the future author of Crime and Punishment was in the next group. Just as the shots were about to be fired, an aide-de-camp arrived at a gallop, bearing a stay of execution from the tsar that commuted the group’s sentence to exile and hard labor in Siberia. Many a biographer has linked that moment to themes and passages in the subsequent works. “The memory of this false execution,” observes Henri Troyat, “remained alive in Dostoyevsky’s writing.”

Antonio Di Benedetto, a writer so influenced he would say he was “invented” by Dostoyevsky, also heard his own execution read out and knew he was about to die. For 18 months during Argentina’s Dirty War, from March 24th, 1976 to September 3rd, 1977, he was imprisoned, tortured, and, on four occasions, taken from his cell and placed before a firing squad. For the Di Benedetto biographer, however, the impact of the mock executions on the literary work requires a more complex calculation. Di Benedetto faced the firing squads two decades after writing Zama, his first novel and third book, which in its growing and inexorable dread, its sense that the present results not only from the past but also from the future, seems uncannily imbued with what its author would live through 20 years later.

Thanks, Trevor!