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This post from hmmlorientalia popped up in my RSS reader; it begins “The famous passage known as the pericope adulterae…” and includes a sentence beginning “The word pāsoqā above can mean ‘verse’ as well as ‘section, pericope,'” and my attention was grabbed by this word pericope — if I’d seen it before, I’d forgotten. So I checked the OED (the entry was updated in 2003); it turns out it’s pronounced /pəˈrɪkəpi/ (pə-RICK-əpee), it’s from “Hellenistic Greek περικοπή section of a religious text, verse passage consisting of strophe and antistrophe, already in ancient Greek in sense ‘cutting all round,’” and it means “A section or subsection of a religious text, esp. one appointed for reading in public worship; a lesson.” They include this interesting small-type addendum (I don’t know whether the lack of hyphens in “three and a half year” is an oversight or some weird OED style thing): “In Jewish liturgy, the corresponding term is sidrah (see Sedra n.) or parashah (see parashah n.). Quot. 1869 refers to the ancient Palestinian three-year (or three and a half year) cycle of readings; the modern annual cycle consists of 54 sedarim (cf. quot. 1913 at pericopic adj. 1).” Here are the citations; note that the 1884 one refers to the very pericope that started me off on this quest:

1643 W. Burton tr. J. H. Alsted Beloved City p. xxiv, The whole pericope or passage there seemes plainely to point at the Martyrs.
1695 J. Edwards Disc. conc. Old & New-Test. III. xiii. 566 Jerom speaks of a Pericope of Jeremiah.
1837 Biblical Repertory Apr. 206 The more important parts of the New Testament, especially the pericopes or lessons of the Prussian liturgy.
1869 Liverpool Lit. & Philos. Soc. Proc. 23 313 Next in point of antiquity is the division of the Pentateuch into 175 Pericopes.
1884 Edinb. Rev. Jan. 137 The pericope of ‘the woman taken in adultery’ is entirely omitted from this work.
1957 D. E. Nineham Stud. Gospels 223 It accepts the thesis that the Gospels can fairly be analysed into separate sections, or pericopae, which originally circulated independently of one another.
1988 Jrnl. Semitic Stud. 33 40 Beginning with pericope 2 of the baraitha, no source, parallel, or model appears in the Mishnah.
1997 Jrnl. Near Eastern Stud. 56 5 If the literary context of this Qur’anic pericope can be considered trustworthy as a single unit.

In a rather old-fashioned book I found a reference to “Italian paste” in a context that clearly indicated pasta. I wondered if it was a typo, but checking the OED (updated June 2005) I learned it was an old-fashioned expression; under paste A. I. “A mixture of ingredients or components” we find:

c. Pasta. […] Now rare.
1673 J. Ray Observ. Journey Low-countries 405 Paste made into strings..(which if greater they call Macaroni, if lesser Vermicelli) they cut in pieces and put in their pots as we do oat-meal.
1753 Chambers’s Cycl. Suppl., Macaron, the name of a sort of vermicelli, a paste made of flour and water, and formed into the shape of the barrel of a quill, or the guts of small fowls.
1843 Civilian & Galveston (Texas) City Gaz. 5 Apr. 1/2, 2 boxes ass’d Italian Pastes.
1861 Jrnl. Soc. Arts 9 129/1 The manufacture of ‘paste’ (or vermicelli, as it is called in England) continues to be one of the most flourishing trades in Genoa.
1957 Encycl. Brit. XIV. 544/2 Macaroni… The same substance in different forms is also known as vermicelli, pasta or Italian pastes, spaghetti, taglioni, fanti, etc.

In the 1861 quote, I would have assumed that ‘paste’ represented the Italian plural (and thus a pronunciation PAHS-tay) if the OED weren’t around to tell me otherwise. Is anyone familiar with this archaic usage? And is vermicelli still commonly used in the U.K.?

I’m over halfway through Karamzin’s «Письма русского путешественника» [Letters of a Russian Traveler], his partly fictionalized report on his journey to Europe in 1789-90; published in parts during the 1790s and in full not until 1801, it made his reputation, and it’s easy to see why: its easy style (modeled, like so much “modern” writing of the day, on Sterne’s) and lively account of his travels, during which he dropped in on all his literary and philosophical heroes (Kant in Königsberg, Herder in Weimar, and so on) make for irresistible reading, and whenever I need a break from whatever else I’m plowing through I rejoin Karamzin on his journey. He’s in Switzerland now, spending the winter of 1789-90 in Geneva and wandering in fair weather all over the vicinity, into France and Savoy (the borders apparently being only nominally guarded), and I just got to a bit where he’s reflecting on the sudden change when you go from Switzerland, where people are industrious and everything is neat and clean, to Savoy, where… well, as he puts it: “Народ ленив, земля необработана, деревни пусты. Многие из поселян оставляют свои жилища, ездят по свету с учеными сурками и забавляют ребят.” [The people are lazy, the earth unworked, the villages empty. Many of the peasants leave their dwellings, wander the world with trained marmots, and amuse children.]

I immediately smiled and began humming Beethoven’s song “La Marmotte” (“Ich komme schon durch manche Land,” performed here; Russian version, “По разным странам я бродил,” here), about wandering the world with a marmot; I could have sworn I’d posted about it at some point, but no, I seem to be remembering this post (in Russian) by Anatoly from 2006, long enough ago that my memory lapse is more than understandable. At any rate, the Savoyard and his marmot were a real phenomenon; you can read about it (and see Watteau’s famous painting) here (“The marmot in its box was such a familiar object carried by itinerant Savoyards, that even today the word ‘marmotte’ still persists in modern French, to describe a commercial traveller’s sample box”). I did post about the Russian word сурок and its various translations (marmot, woodchuck, groundhog) way back in 2004.

Also, Karamzin tells at length the sad and noble story of Tancrède, the disavowed son of the Duke of Rohan, hidden away in Holland until he emerged to claim his rightful title only to die in the Fronde, and it occurred to me that although I’d seen the name Tancred in various contexts I had no clear idea of who any particular bearer of the name might be, and (more importantly) where the name was from. So I turned to Wikipedia, where the disambiguation page tells all:

Tancred or Tankred is a masculine given name of Germanic origin. Tankrad comes from thank– (thought) and –rad (counsel), meaning “well-thought advice”. It was used in the High Middle Ages mainly by the Normans (see French Tancrède) and especially associated with the Hauteville family in Italy. It is rare today as a first name, but still common as a Norman surname: Tanqueray. Its Italian form is Tancredi and in Latin it is Tancredus.

It would never have occurred to me to associate Tancredi and Tanqueray; you learn something every day.

That’s the title of Michael Wood’s LRB review of Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies Of Realism, and a good review it is, both in making me want to read the book (I don’t read many books of criticism and I probably won’t get around to this one, but still, the desire is there) and in making me think about his main topic, free indirect discourse. He starts off with an analysis of this paragraph from Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (the translation is by Douglas Parmée, slightly modified):

Des nues sombres couraient sur la face de la lune. Il la contempla, en rêvant à la grandeur des espaces, à la misère de la vie, au néant de tout. Le jour parut; ses dents claquaient; et, à moitié endormi, mouillé par le brouillard et tout plein de larmes, il se demanda pourquoi n’en pas finir? Rien qu’un mouvement à faire! Le poids de son front l’entraînait, il voyait son cadavre flottant sur l’eau; Frédéric se pencha. Le parapet était un peu large, et ce fut par lassitude qu’il n’essaya pas de le franchir.

Dark clouds ran across the face of the moon. He gazed up at it, meditating on the immensity of space, the wretchedness of life, the emptiness of everything. Day broke. His teeth were chattering; and half asleep, wet from the fog and his eyes full of tears, he asked himself: Why not put an end to it all? One leap would do it! The weight inside his forehead was sweeping him away, he could see his corpse floating on the water. Frédéric bent forward; the parapet was a trifle wide and sheer weariness stopped him from climbing over.

Wood explains that for a long time he “thought this wonderful paragraph was an instance of Flaubert’s impeccable cruelty towards his characters. ‘A trifle wide’ was a sneer in Flaubert’s own voice, or his narrator’s, and meant that any width would have been wide enough”; now he feels that this is “a shortsighted reading and it misses the chief technical achievement of the paragraph, indeed one of Flaubert’s great technical achievements generally, his masterly deployment of style indirect libre“:

In our paragraph, prompted by the interlude in Frédéric’s mind, we ought to be ready for it, or at least ready to entertain the thought of its presence. Then we can read, if I may crudely transpose the process: ‘Frédéric bent forward; the parapet seemed a trifle wide to him and the thought of his own sheer weariness stopped him from climbing over.’ The psychology is not all that different. Frédéric is still not serious about suicide and his weariness still seems to be a name for something else. But Flaubert has disappeared, and with him all trace of moralising. And there is the possibility now that Frédéric is not merely deluded or copping out, but fully aware of the romantic charade he has designed. ‘A trifle wide’ is his own joke. […]

But then none of this is signalled in the prose. All we are told is that the parapet was a trifle wide. There are effects very close to this in Austen, where the characters or the social world occupy, so to speak, the language of the narrator: ‘About 30 years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton.’ In that sentence ‘only’, ‘good luck’ and ‘captivate’ seem to have crept in from neighbourhood chatter, and if ‘captivate’ means something other than ‘be married to’, it’s slightly at odds with good luck. But we see the occupation and we smile at it, and style indirect libre turns into irony. That’s not quite what libre means in later practice – this is why we need the word ‘free’ in English and why the German term erlebte Rede, ‘animated speech’, isn’t quite right. The important effect is not the animation but the apparent neutrality of the narrative pose. In Flaubert we aren’t even sure the occupation is happening. If it is and we miss it, we have fallen stupidly short as readers, as I did for so long with the width of the parapet; if it’s not there and we find it, we have added free association to our (perhaps) more ordinary style of reading. But even this formulation muffles the deep interest of the device, which is to make us wonder what ‘there’ means in relation to any text.

I’m sure some of you will be impatient with what may seem to be nitpicking, but I find it extremely helpful to think in this way about what effects a writer is trying to achieve. Wood says later on that Jameson’s account of “Zola’s France, the streets, the shops, the light, the crowds, the objects and animals, and his amazing examples – dead fish in a market, an array of cheeses, an ocean of white cloths in a department store – made me feel that Zola was a great writer I hadn’t even started to read,” and that feeling of excited curiosity, the desire to read or reread a book or an author, is one of the things I look for in criticism. Here’s another thought-provoking paragraph, from which Wood (or more likely an LRB editor) draws the title of the review:

Jameson says Flaubert is ‘rightly’ regarded as the inventor of style indirect libre and realism. Stendhal and Balzac would be more conventional candidates for the honour, at least in the case of realism, but Stendhal is too quirky and Balzac, in Jameson’s view, is too dedicated to meaning and story. Too dedicated, that is, not for his own good or our pleasure but to be fully invested in realism as Jameson understands it. Paul de Man once said that Georg Lukács wrote about the novel as if he was the novel. Jameson doesn’t do that, but he does write about the novel in terms of a long-standing intimacy with the form, as if it were a roommate, say. This is a report from the interior.

One minor point of pronunciation: the word antinomy (used in Jameson’s title) has always bothered me, because its pronunciation (an-TIN-ə-mee) conflicts so confusingly with that of its anagram antimony (AN-ti-mo-nee). Fortunately, I almost never have occasion to use either.

Andrew D. Scrimgeour (dean of libraries at Drew University) has a nice piece about marginalia in today’s NY Times [archived]; it starts with one mystery (who’s been defacing translations of 16th-century texts with green ink?) and includes another (which scholar of religion, Will Herberg or Carl Michalson, actually read all three volumes of Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology?) and solves them both, and discusses the marginal habits of various contemporary authors:

The poet Maxine Kumin never writes in her books. Neither does Karen Armstrong, the scholar of religion, or Jonathan Rose, a scholar of Churchill and Orwell. But many do. “We have all seized the white perimeter as our own,” writes Billy Collins in his poem “Marginalia.” David S. Reynolds, a historian and critic, marks up his books, especially paperbacks. He calls it “talking back” to the book.

Myself, I deplore writing in library books, but I don’t really understand people who don’t write in their own books. Like Reynolds, I enjoy talking back, not to mention that seeing my annotations years later reminds me of what I thought when I read the book and provides a hook for new thoughts. But if you prefer pristine margins, more power to you.

Marina Warner’s LRB review of Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, includes the following sentence: “The different churches provided socially bonding rituals (as conveyed by the word religion, from religio, ‘I bind together again’).” In the first place, there is no Latin verb “religio“; she means religo. That could, of course, be a typo or editing error, and I’m not going to make a federal case of it. But the verb religo does not mean ‘bind together again,’ it means ‘tie up/down, hold firmly in place,’ and that’s a pretty embarrassing error if you ask me; back in the days when everyone studied Latin, it would never have been made, or if made would never have found its way into print. Furthermore, the idea that religio comes from religo is plausible-looking but far from certain. The OED says it’s “re– prefix + a second element of uncertain origin; by Cicero connected with relegere to read over again, so that the supposed original sense of ‘religion’ would have been ‘painstaking observance of rites’, but by later authors (especially by early Christian writers) with religāre,” adding “Each view finds supporters among modern scholars.” Modern dictionaries say “perhaps” in their etymologies for the word, and much as I deplore the use of etymology to make philosophical or social points about words, if you’re going to go down that path you should at least make sure you have a sturdy etymology to lean on.

Vaguely related: I was watching an early Fassbinder movie set in Munich when one of the characters ordered Leberkäse and the subtitle said “meatloaf.” I raised my eyebrows (surely Leberkäse means ‘liver-cheese,’ whatever revolting dish that might imply?), paused the DVD, and headed for my biggest German dictionary, which said that, sure enough, Leberkäse is meatloaf. So I went to Wikipedia, which told me that “Linguists believe that the etymology of the word either involves the Middle High German word lab (to clot) or the word laib (loaf), and the Slavic root quas (feast)[citation needed].” Citation needed indeed! Does anybody know more about this? At any rate, I’m relieved to know that if I’m ever in a German-speaking land I can order Leberkäse without fear.

1) Jon Hamilton of NPR News has an interesting interview (audio and transcript) with researchers studying how the brain recognizes the sounds used to form words. I was particularly struck by this:

This let them see precisely what different brain cells, or neurons, were doing as each bit of sound passed by. And [Edward] Chang says they realized that some were responding specifically to plosives, like the initial puh-sounds in Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers. Meanwhile, other neurons were responding to a particular type of vowel sound.

2) Peter Pomerantsev has an excellent primer at LRBblog on the linguistic situation in Ukraine; if you’ve fallen for the simplistic “Russians in the east, Ukrainians in the west” cliché, you need to read and assimilate it. As he says, “The big winner from the conceptual division of Ukraine into ‘Russian’ and ‘Ukrainian’ spheres may well be the Kremlin.”

3) The AHD Tumblr has a guest post by Susan Steinway, Archivist Coordinator at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, about the original paper ballots from the early years of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel, a subject of great interest to me; as I wrote Stan, who sent me the link, “I still remember the thrill I felt when I got the first edition of this magnificent dictionary and how I happily spent hours mentally arguing with the usage panel.” I rolled my eyes at the chest-thumping mini-rants (“Good God, No! Never!”) and appreciated the reservations expressed by Malcolm Cowley (“There is always the danger that we, the so-called authorities, should become too damned pedantic”) and Isaac Asimov (“My opinions are strong, but not necessarily authoritative”).

A friend writes that she remembers working with an interactive system called «Примус» [Primus] back in the ’80s that when you started it up displayed the following greeting:

«И он уже не тот, что был в начале
Чужие судьбы, став его судьбой,
Признав, его уводят за собой.»

Райнер Мария Рильке

Which might be Englished something like this:

And he is no longer that which he was in the beginning
Others’ fates, having become his fate,
Having recognized/acknowledged, take him away after/behind them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I figured if it were genuine I should be able to google it in English and/or German, but I came up empty; on the other hand, it might be a loose translation, so I thought I’d check with the Varied Reader. Anybody recognize it, or is it one of those pseudo-quotes that infest the internet?

Update. It turns out to be from the last stanza of this poem, “Читатель” [The reader] (1908), which means the original German must be this… but the German doesn’t have anything corresponding to the Russian, as far as I can see!

Sorry, I try not to overuse exclamation marks, but this is genuinely astonishing news: two poems, previously unknown, by Sappho have turned up, one of them complete with the five final stanzas complete [thanks, TR!]. Here is James Romm’s Daily Beast piece about it:

The two poems came to light when the owner of an ancient papyrus, dating to the 3rd century A.D., consulted an Oxford classicist, Dirk Obbink, about the Greek writing on the tattered scrap. Dr. Obbink, a MacArthur fellow and world-renowned papyrologist, quickly realized the importance of what the papyrus contained and asked its owner for permission to publish it. His article, which includes a transcription of the fragmentary poems, will appear in a scholarly journal this spring, but an on-line version has already been released.

And here (pdf) is Obbink’s draft paper, with the text (in both diplomatic and articulated versions) at the end. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read the poems; I wanted to get the word out first! (Via Athanassiel’s MetaFilter post.)

Update. Here’s my quick attempt at a translation:

But you keep repeating “Kharaxos is coming
with a full boat”: that, I believe, is for Zeus
and all the gods to know; you should not be
thinking such things;

you should send me instead with strict instructions
to pray fervently to Lady Hera
that Kharaxos might arrive and bring his
ship safe and sound here,

finding us safe as well. As for the rest,
let’s entrust it all to the gods—fair weather,
after all, can come from a heavy gale
all of a sudden.

Those to whom the Lord of Olympus chooses
to send a god, one who will help them forthwith
out of their troubles, they are the blessed onesfortunate
and very wealthyblessed.

We ourselves, if Larikhos should raise
up his head and one day become a man,
we will be from the troubles that weigh us down
freed in an instant.

[Line 7 formerly read “that she might arrive here bringing Kharaxos”; thanks for the grammatical heads-up, TR!]