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Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a poignant passage from Jaspreet Singh Boparai, “Why Read Lesser Writers? Politian on Silver Latin Literature” (Antigone [November 2024]):

The translator’s task here does not stop at the dictionary: you really do need to read all the Latin (or Greek) texts that Politian mentions, if you have not already done so, and take good notes, because this man is never lazy or vague in how he uses words. You must have a clear sense of what he is talking about. The only way to gain this is by reading everything that he expects you to have read — which sometimes feels like every single ancient text ever written.

No wonder translators shy away from this dismal grind. Alas, there is no way of getting around it. You cannot use American-style ‘theoretical’ gobbledygook to cover up your lack of comprehension. You must sacrifice your eyesight, posture and sanity amidst the dim light and strange smells of your local academic library, and move from your uncomfortable seat only to find copy after copy of a great many Greek and Latin books and add them to the pile on your desk. Those worryingly shabby, unhealthy-looking people who seem to have nowhere else to go, and drip from the mouth when they stare at you? Congratulations. You are one of them now.

[….]

The next time you read an accurate-sounding translation of a Neo-Latin text that seems to make coherent sense, and is written in recognisable English rather than objectionable translationese, spare a thought for the hapless wretch who has spent hours on every page, checking and double-checking both the original work and his own rendition of it, whilst knowing that perhaps half a dozen people will fully recognise the effort — and those who do will be those other lost souls who stare occasionally at one another from across the reading-room in the same cursed library, as their only relief from the work to which they have condemned themselves, for reasons no sane or normal man can fathom.

I’ve retained Gilleland’s choice of snippets because it’s a nice self-contained lament, but the whole essay is worth reading — I had heard of Politian, but knew far too little about him, and Boparai brings him to life vividly (and reproduces some gorgeous Renaissance paintings).

This review by Michael W. Clune (in The Point) of Céline’s novel War (the first English translation, by Charlotte Mandell, has just appeared) makes it sound like a book any Céline fan (me, for example) should investigate (“In War, he sets these elements swirling around each other, each interacting on each, to produce in the reader—me, at least—an absolute convulsion of hippopotamic laughter without any parallel in my experience, and which caused my wife and daughter to literally recoil in shock and disgust as I sat there in the corner reading”), but what brings me to post it here is this passage of literary analysis:

Perhaps the most original aspect of War—when compared both with Céline’s classic published novels of the 1930s, Death on the Installment Plan and Journey, as well as with most other great examples of dark comedy—is its liberation from the Quixotic model. Of course Don Quixote’s influence as the greatest and arguably the first Western novel extends far beyond dark comedy. But Céline’s example sensitized us to a special branch of Cervantes’s progeny—call it dark comic quixotism. Quixote provides the template for virtually all literary dark comedy that succeeded it, ranging from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust to George Schuyler’s Black No More to Nabokov’s Lolita to Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote.

Central to all these works is what I will call the Unidirectional Downward Comparison (UDC). Cervantes’s novel is organized around the comparison between the idealized images of chivalric romance and the quotidian images of daily life. Don Quixote sees windmills as giants, roadside taverns as castles. This constant comparison between the real and ideal takes a form so strange and even perverse in its logic that it’s very difficult to find analogues for it outside Don Quixote and its progeny. To explain it, I often draw on a photograph that a friend drew my attention to 25 years ago.

The photograph shows the rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe standing next to each other in a space without other visible objects. I think they were in an alley, with walls to either side of them. Perhaps the photo can still be found somewhere on the internet. At any rate, the feature that my friend pointed out to me was that, in setting up a comparison between Fat Joe and Big Pun, each made the other one look thinner. […]

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I recently ran across the Dutch term kater ‘hangover’ and was curious enough to look it up; Wiktionary told a story interesting enough to pass on:

From German Kater (“tomcat; hangover”), a humorous alteration of Katarrh (“catarrh, mucosal inflammation”, loosely also “malaise”) based on somewhat older German Katzenjammer (“hangover”, literally “caterwaul”). An influence by a brand of beer called Kater is also often cited, though this is doubtful.

Doubtful indeed, but I like the “humorous alteration of Katarrh” origin. Hangover terms must include a wide range of odd etymologies.

The Dial (the new “online magazine of culture, politics and ideas,” not the Transcendentalist/modernist predecessor that published Yeats and Eliot) has a Language issue with a number of interesting items, of which I will feature Julia Webster Ayuso’s Can a Comma Solve a Crime?: “How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.” After introducing us to “France’s best-known unsolved murder case,” that of four-year-old Grégory Villemin, Webster Ayuso goes into the history of her topic:

According to forensic linguists, we all use language in a uniquely identifiable way that can be as incriminating as a fingerprint. The word “forensic” may suggest a scientist in a protective suit inspecting a crime scene for drops of blood. But a forensic linguist has more in common with Sherlock Ho[l]mes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “The man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence?” the detective asks in the 1891 short story. “A Frenchman or a Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.”

The term “forensic linguistics” was likely coined in the 1960s by Jan Svartvik, a Swedish linguist who re-examined the controversial case of Timothy John Evans, a Welshman who was wrongfully accused of murdering his wife and daughter and was convicted and hanged in 1950. Svartvik found that it was unlikely that Evans, who was illiterate, had written the most damning parts of his confession, which had been transcribed by police and likely tampered with. The real murderer was the Evans’ downstairs neighbor, who turned out to be a serial killer.

Today, the field is perhaps still best known for its role in solving the “Unabomber” case in the United States. […] While U.S. authorities hunted down the Unabomber, the field of forensic linguistics was developing in other countries. The University of Birmingham hosted the first British Seminar on Forensic Linguistics in 1992, bringing together academics from Australia, Brazil, Holland, Ukraine, Greece and Germany. Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University has had a forensic linguistics laboratory since 1993. But it wasn’t until the next decade that the field became more structured, with the creation of university research teams, master’s degrees and government-funded police laboratories and agencies.

“It’s still emerging in places outside where it initially started, but it is growing gradually as people are getting trained,” said Nicci MacLeod, a senior lecturer at the Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics in Birmingham, England, which was established in 2019.

She goes on to discuss authorship attribution (“identifying the author of a given text and, in some cases, shedding light on long-standing literary mysteries”); I like this example:
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I recently rewatched La Haine for the first time since it came out almost thirty years ago, and it was just as good as I remembered. But this time I noticed something that must have zipped right past me back then: at one point Saïd says “Tes parents, ils habitent Rue Gama !” It turns out this is not an actual street but a reference to an ad campaign for Gama detergent; here’s a 1980 example. Why Gama is called that I do not know.

It reminds me of the Fry and Laurie Treaty of Westphalia skit, which culminates in the laugh line “you are really spoiling us” — to get the joke you have to be familiar with the Ferrero Rocher ad campaign.

I am familiar with the word condign pretty much exclusively in the (pompous but not obsolete) phrase “condign punishment,” and I suspect this is the case for most modern users of the language; that Wiktionary article defines it as “Fitting, appropriate, deserved, especially denoting punishment.” But when I checked the OED, whose entry dates back to 1891, I find a whole series of senses, beginning with the obsolete senses “1. † Equal in worth or dignity (to)” (c1470 “This Kyng Arthure, to whom none was condigne Through all the world,” J. Hardyng, Chronicle lxxxiv. vii), “2. † Worthy, deserving” (a1513 “She hath great honour..As most condigne to beare the principalite,” H. Bradshaw, Lyfe St. Werburge ii. xxi. sig. r.v), and “3.a. Worthily deserved, merited, fitting, appropriate; adequate” (1413 “Take him vp in to thy blysse on hye in what degree that to hym is condygne,” J. Lydgate, Pilgr. of Sowle ii. xlii. 48) before getting to the modern sense:

3.b. Since the end of 17th cent. commonly used only of appropriate punishment: a use originating in the phraseology of Tudor Acts of Parliament.
Johnson 1755 says, ‘It is always used of something deserved by crimes’. De Quincey Templars’ Dial. in Wks. IV. 188 note, ‘Capriciously..the word condign is used only in connection with the word punishment..These and other words, if unlocked from their absurd imprisonment, would become extensively useful. We should say, for instance, “condign honours”, “condign reward”, “condign treatment” (treatment appropriate to the merits).’ [Cf. 1873 at sense 3a.]

1513 The godly power..Onto tha wikkyt Sawlis..Hes send conding punytioun, and just panys.
G. Douglas, translation of Virgil, Æneid xiii. vii. 64
[…]

1849 He had been brought to condign punishment as a traitor.
T. B. Macaulay, History of England vol. I. 575

1878 To wreak condign vengeance on the common oppressor of them all.
R. B. Smith, Carthage 195

It’s from French condigne, which has the theological sense “Exactement proportionné à la faute ou à la récompense. Peine, satisfaction, mérite condigne” (apparently not restricted to negative senses as in English) but is not in even my largest printed dictionary; the ultimate source is Latin condignus ‘wholly worthy.’ I love that De Quincey quote about its “absurd imprisonment.”

Back in 2013 I posted about the New Linguistic Survey of India and its founder, Ganesh Devy; now the New Yorker has run a feature article about him and his work by Samanth Subramanian (archived), and it’s a good read. (Trigger warning: the author is not a linguist, so some statements about language may be upsetting to those of excessively scientific sensibilities.) Some excerpts:

In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli. It, too, refers to language, but its more accurate meaning is “that which is spoken.” In its sense of the oral, it hints at colloquialisms, hybridity, and a demotic that belongs to the streets. The insinuation is that a bhasha is grander and more sophisticated than a boli. The language of language infects how we think about language.

For more than forty years, the distance between these two words has preoccupied the literary scholar Ganesh Devy. He knows precisely when it all began. In 1979, as he was completing his Ph.D. in English literature at Shivaji University, in the Indian city of Kolhapur, he found in the library a commentary on India’s censuses. The 1961 census had identified sixteen hundred and fifty-two “mother tongues”—many of them, like Betuli or Khawathlang, with speakers numbering in the single digits. But the 1971 census listed only a hundred and eight; the hundred-and-ninth entry was “all others.” That made Devy wonder: What had happened to the other fifteen-hundred-odd languages, the various boli deemed too unimportant to name? “The ‘all others’ intrigued me, then it bothered me, and then I got obsessed with it,” Devy said. “Literature is a product of language, so at some point I thought, When I know that so many other languages have been masked, do I not have any responsibility toward them?” […]

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Late last month I realized that I had never read Irina Polyanskaya’s second novel, Читающая вода [(The) reading water; Water that reads], and decided to remedy the omission (see my previous post about Polyanskaya). As so often happens, I’m not sure what to say about it or even how I feel about it, and I’m posting in part to try to figure that out (and in part, of course, to provide even a brief and inadequate account of a novel by a major writer that is otherwise, as far as I can tell, unmentioned in English). It was first published in Novy Mir in Oct.-Nov. 1999, and came out as a book in 2001, but I can’t find any reviews even in Russian. I don’t think it’s an especially good novel, but it’s well written and worth reading, especially for a fan of Polyanskaya or for someone interested in early Soviet cinema.

It takes the form of a first-person narration by Tanya, a grad student who wants to write about a famous old director called Vikentii Petrovich (his last name is never given); here are the first few sentences, so you can get an idea of the style (the translation is, of course, mine):

My task was to turn him inside out and transmute this headstrong man, a natural and highly experienced hunter, into game, into food for the mind, material for an article, a dissertation, a book, etc., which at first seemed to me unlikely to be realized. I understood that a great deal, if not everything, depended on my quickness of wit, because this man was spoiled by fame, capricious, arrogant, as befits a classic. I already knew that he was not accustomed to treating the writing public with much consideration, and therefore I took certain measures to ensure that he would not immediately recognize me among his students, who were somewhat younger than I. Heightening the youthfulness of my make-up, I pulled on faded jeans and tied my hair into a ponytail with an elastic band…

Моей задачей было вывернуть его наизнанку и превратить этого своенравного человека, прирожденного и многоопытного охотника, в дичь, в пищу для ума, в материал для статьи, диссертации, книги etc., что представлялось мне на первых порах малоосуществимым. Я понимала, что от моей расторопности зависело многое, если не все, потому что человек этот был избалован славой, капризен, спесив, как и подобает классику. Я уже знала, что он не привык церемониться с пишущей публикой, и поэтому предприняла кое-какие меры для того, чтобы он не сразу опознал меня среди своих студентов, которых я была немногим старше. Усилив свой молодежный макияж, натянула потертые джинсы, собрала волосы в хвост резинкой на затылке…

Eventually she introduces herself, he asks her out, and they begin the dance of mutual seduction so (over-)familiar in academic literature — the reader expects that the story will involve the consequences of the unequal affair for her young life. Not so: instead the novel becomes a long series of reminiscences and judgments on the part of Vikentii Petrovich, with only occasional reminders of the fictional context (“… and then we met at Pushkin Square and he began telling me about the time when…”). A great deal of ground is covered, from the pre-revolutionary period through the life and death of Stalin (who watches movies with Molotov, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, etc.), with much discussion of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko (called “Sashko”), and other directors, as well as actors, musical styles, and so on. In other words, this is a novel of ideas. Now, I am a fan of such novels, which range from Middlemarch to Norman Rush’s Mating (see this post), but what is essential is that the ideas be embedded in a convincing tissue of novelistic narration, with memorable characters who are not just vessels for the ideas. Here that is not the case — it’s like Polyanskaya had a bunch of thoughts about acting and movies she wanted to get off her chest (she herself studied acting in her youth) and decided to put them in the mouth of an invented director. It makes for good reading, but not a good novel.
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From a Johns Hopkins press release:

What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers. The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations.

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. “And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.”

Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting. […] “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought.”

Exciting if true, but I’ll await those details. Thanks, Dmitry!

Back in February I posted about Ross Perlin’s attempt to document endangered languages in and around New York City; now Ian Frazier, perhaps my favorite New Yorker writer, reviews [in the New York Review of Books] Perlin’s book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (archived). I’ll quote some bits and urge you to read the whole thing:

Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. The word “bodega” itself reveals a linguistic nest. It’s derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store), as well as to the French boutique, the Russian and Polish apteka, and the Italian bottega. Perlin writes that “in today’s New York, boutiques and bodegas sit side by side.”

[…] Kichwa, a language descended from that of the ancient Incas, is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in New York. As the Inca Empire spread across parts of South America in pre-Columbian times, it drove out other languages. Now Kichwa qualifies as endangered, although 8,000 to 10,000 New Yorkers may speak it; but in a new country, parents are rarely able to pass along much of their mother tongue to their children. (I asked my dentist, who’s from Ecuador, if he spoke Kichwa or knew any Kichwa speakers. He said that when he was growing up outside Quito, he knew people who spoke only Kichwa, but in the US he seldom hears it. He remembered a few words, like chompa, which means “sweater.” I realized that unconsciously I had always pictured the ancient Incas wearing llama-wool sweaters. “Llama” is a word that comes from Quechua, a language category that includes Kichwa. There are speakers of other forms of Quechua in New York as well.) […]

Looking at the city from a linguistic point of view reveals facts you might otherwise not have stumbled on, such as: when Andy Warhol (née Andrew Warhola) met Pope John Paul II in 1980, he spoke to him in Ruthenian, a language of southern Poland and Slovakia, the region where the Pope and Warhol’s parents came from. Sojourner Truth, the antislavery heroine, grew up speaking Dutch; she was born in Ulster County, New York, in 1797, when it still had a Dutch presence. Yitta Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor and member of a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic community in Brooklyn, left maybe two thousand living descendants when she died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. […]

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