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Antony Shugaar has a good piece on the NY Times Opinionator site about his experiences in Milan in the ’80s, working for a super-fancy Italian art magazine where he met all sorts of interesting people, including the great translator William Weaver, who recently died. There are lots of nice details about translating Italian (“The Italian author refers to someone falling face-down onto the asphalt: the Italian reader knows that asphalt is what sidewalks are made of; streets are made of cobblestone or slabs of granite”), but what I want to feature here is this discussion of dealing with dialect:

I remember one specific comment on translation technique that was pure Weaver. The great white whale of Italian postwar literature is “Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana,” by Carlo Emilio Gadda. It’s a big, ungainly philosophical treatise of a murder mystery, interlarded with rich seams of dialect of all kinds: Roman, Neapolitan and various minor subdialects of the areas between those two cities. Gadda was an austere Milanese scholar, the opposite in personality and style of these overemphatic, swaggering, loud forms of speech. But Gadda was an acute observer and a gifted mimic. And the “Pasticciaccio” — “That Awful Mess,” in Weaver’s rendering — takes gleeful delight in lampooning, personifying and ultimately embracing these dialects, Italy’s equivalents of Brooklynese, Bronxese and perhaps Boston’s Southie accent.

“What did you do about the dialect?” I asked him, at one of our lunches. He laughed, and replied, “Oh, I just left it out!”

At first glance, it’s a little like translating “Moby-Dick” and leaving out all references to boats. But I understood. Weaver explains it better in his introduction to the English edition: “To translate Gadda’s Roman or Venetian into the language of Mississippi or the Aran Islands would be as absurd as translating the language of Faulkner’s Snopeses into Sicilian or Welsh.” Weaver asks the reader, therefore, “to imagine the speech of Gadda’s characters, translated here into straightforward spoken English, as taking place in dialect, or a mixture of dialects.” In other words, supply the boats yourself.

Makes sense to me. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Ilya Bernstein wrote me with a Google Books link to his new collection of Mandelstam translations, The Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Ilya Bernstein, 2014). I gave it a polite look, then found myself hooked and unable to do anything else (like work) until I’d looked through the entire thing, frequently comparing his versions with the originals. I had, frankly, stopped expecting to find any published translations that represented what I considered a faithful approach to one of the greatest poets of the last century; pretty much every other Russian poet has fared better in English translation. (That’s why I started translating him myself; see here and here for examples.) As I wrote Ilya,

These are superb translations, some of the best I’ve seen — you have a wonderful ear for English rhythm, which is (to my mind) the most important factor in translating a poet like Mandelstam. A solution like “My vision damp enough, my mind not too too clever” must have taken a lot of turning over possibilities in your mind and on your tongue. It’s an indictment of American publishing that you have to put out the book yourself.

But he corrected me on the last point, saying:

I’m not sure that it’s an indictment of American publishing that I’ve put out the book myself — I like having it freely available online (since most of the things I read fall into that category). My favorite books are in the public domain, and I like being in their company. As long as readers find their way to it, I’m very happy with this format.

An admirable attitude! So go immerse yourself in his renditions of Mandelstam poems, mostly from his later period (though he starts off with the 1918 “Tristia”: “I have learned the art of departure/ In loose-haired lamentations of the night…”); I could pick out a whole bunch of lines I love so much I want to share them (“Oh, how much dearer to her is an oarlock’s creak”; “I inhaled the clutter of space”), but since I can’t copy-and-paste and am inherently a lazy person, I’ll just assure you that you’re getting as close to the original as you’re likely to get in English. Well, OK, just for the heck of it, here’s a comparison of the first four lines of this 1937 poem, first in two versions put out by commercial publishers and then in Bernstein’s:

I sing when my throat is damp, my soul dry,
Sight fairly moist and the mind clear.
Are the grapes in good condition?
The wine-skins? And the stirrings of Colchis in the blood?

–tr. James Greene, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1991)

I sing when my throat is moist, my soul dry,
my vision is humid enough and my conscience plays no tricks.
Is the wine healthy? Are the wineskins healthy?
Is the rocking in Colchis’s blood healthy?

–tr. Richard & ‎Elizabeth McKane, The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937 (Bloodaxe, 1996)

I sing when my throat is wet, my soul is dry,
My vision damp enough, my mind not too too clever.
Is the wine wholesome? Are the wineskins sound?
Does my blood quicken with Caucasian fervor?

–tr. Ilya Bernstein (2014)

You be the judge.

The OED’s ancient (1888) etymology for brothel goes as follows:

Etymology: Middle English broþel, < Old English broðen ruined, degenerate, past participle of bréoðan to go to ruin: a variant of brethel n. [“A worthless fellow, good-for-nothing, wretch.”]

The modern sense arises from confusion with an entirely different word bordel n. (q.v. [ < Old French bordel ‘cabin, hut, brothel’]); the brothel was originally a person, the bordel a place. But the combinations bordel-house and brothel’s house ran together in the form brothel-house, which being shortened to brothel, the personal sense of this word became obsolete, and it remains only as the substitute of the original bordel.

That’s still about as much as can confidently be said, but there are a couple of weaselly bits there (right at the start the punctuation between the two forms in “broþel, < Old English broðen,” and later on “a variant of”), and etymologist Anatoly Liberman, ever eager to explore new terrain, sinks his teeth into them in this OUPblog essay. Among the interesting things he has to say is that bordel “existed in Old French”:

Its root (bord-) is a Germanic word, akin in sound and meaning to English board. From an etymological point of view, bordel designated a small board house, a hovel (-el is a diminutive suffix) and only later acquired the meaning that has stayed without change to this day.

He goes on to say “I would risk defending and developing an etymology offered in The Century Dictionary but disregarded by all later authorities,” and although I don’t necessarily buy it, it makes enjoyable reading (though Liberman’s odd puritanism can be offputting; he talks about “the unhealthy popularity of our F-word in the remotest countries of the planet”). Anyway, read the whole thing if the topic is of interest to you; thanks for the link, Kobi!

A NY Times interview with Michael Proffitt, the new chief editor of the OED, is well worth reading if you are interested in lexicographers and want a sense of where this one might be steering the greatest lexicographic enterprise in the world. I must admit these bits made me twitch:

“As much as I adhere to the O.E.D.’s public reputation,” he said, “I want proof that it is of value to people in terms of practical use.”
. . .
Although the O.E.D. survived the Internet upheavals that devastated other reference works, it has yet to capitalize fully on the potential online audience. Mr. Proffitt is eager to do so, perhaps with lower prices, certainly with tweaks to the website and less stuffy definitions.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with practical use and a decrease in stuffiness per se, but I am uncomfortably reminded (as I said in this Wordorigins thread) of libraries that get rid of all books over ten years old (if they’re not getting rid of physical books altogether, because digital is so much cooler). By all means bring the OED into the present, but don’t even think of lowering its standards in the name of alleged practicality or fear of stuffiness. (Thanks for the link, Eric!)

While reading the sports section over breakfast this morning (a lifelong habit), I plunged into an AP story headlined “Tiger opens with a 72 at Torrey Pines” purely because it was there — I care nothing about golf — and was pulled up short by this paragraph:

“Even par is not too bad, but I didn’t play the par 5s worth a darn today,” Woods said. “Obviously, that’s (tantamount) to try to get any kind of scoring on the South Course. You’ve got to take care of the par 5s because there’s not a lot of holes you can make birdie here. Subsequently, I didn’t finish under par.”

Tantamount? (thought I) — that makes no sense here. What on earth did Woods actually say? So I googled another phrase from the quote and got this USA Today story, which has the actual quote:

“Well, even-par’s not too bad, but I didn’t play the par-5s worth a darn today,” said Woods, who won last year’s Farmers by four shots. “I played them even-par. Obviously that’s paramount to try to get any kind of scoring on the South course … “

Paramount. Of course. A perfectly good word which some idiot at the AP changed to the meaningless (in context) tantamount. It is of paramount importance to know what words mean before editing them; to change a perfectly good word to one that will cause readers to lose the train of thought is tantamount to treason against your language and your profession.

My wife and I are continuing to read Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (we’re approaching the end of the third book, The Acceptance World), and the second time the expression “shooting stick” came up (“There were the same golf clubs and shooting-sticks and tennis racquets…”), she asked me “What is a shooting stick, anyway?” I didn’t know, so I had to reach for a dictionary, where I learned that it is (in the words of the AHD) “A stick resembling a cane, pointed at one end with a folding seat at the other, typically used by spectators at outdoor sporting events.” The OED explains the origin (as well as giving a couple of obsolete senses):

shooting-stick n. (a) Printing a piece of hard wood or metal which is struck by a mallet to loosen or tighten the quoins in a chase; (b) slang = shooting-iron n [“a firearm, esp. a revolver”]. (obs.); (c) a walking-stick with a handle that may be opened to form an impromptu seat, first used by shooters.

The two citations for the last sense are:

1926 E. P. Oppenheim Golden Beast i. xvii. 163 Judith had already disappeared, swinging her shooting stick in her hand.
1967 Guardian 23 May 2/6 The shooting sticks will prod the roots of every stately garden.

Are you familiar with this odd-sounding but useful term?

Just got an e-mail from the esteemed bulbul offering “two things you and your readership might enjoy”:

1. This is a website of a project investigating the mutual intelligibility of Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages and one of the methods of data collection they use is this nifty little language game. Folks at work had a lot of fun with it, so I thought hatters might too. Plus, it’s all for science!

2. This is the blog of Adam McCollum, the Lead Cataloger of Eastern
Christian Manuscripts a Hill Museum & Manuscript Library where [he] posts the most interesting bits and pieces of Syriac, Arabic, Georgian and other manuscripts he comes across, along with notes on paleography, history (especially of the ecclesiastical bend) and linguistics. All insanely cool stuff.

Cool indeed, so there it is. (I clicked on the blog link, saw “Old Georgian phrases and sentences 19,” and immediately added it to my RSS feed.)

A couple of people have sent me a link to this HerbalGram article by Arthur O. Tucker and Rexford H. Talbert or this press release about it (Revolutionary Analysis Unlocking Mysteries of 500-Year-Old Manuscript! Authors Propose Unique New World Origins of Obscure Voynich Manuscript!!); the burden of it, to quote from the article itself, is that the mysterious text is “the work of a 16th century ticitl (Nahuatl for doctor or seer). … The main text … seems to be in an extinct dialect of Nahuatl from central Mexico, possibly Morelos or Puebla.” Now, I’ve never been very interested in the Voynich Manuscript, because my interest is in language, not hoaxes, and it’s always seemed pretty clear to me that the thing is a clever hoax — in fact, the only previous time I’ve posted about it was last year, linking to “Cracking the Voynich Code” by Batya Ungar-Sargon, which still seems to me the only thing one needs to read about it unless one is sucked into the woo vortex. As Matt of No-sword wrote me, “even if all the visual identifications are correct I wonder if ‘non-meaningful gibberish text with illustrations cribbed from books about South America for added exoticness’ wouldn’t still be a more parsimonious explanation.” But I recognize that I am a crusty old cynic, and I’m curious to know what those with more open minds and/or an actual knowledge of Nahuatl and Aztec texts think, so fire away.

I spend so much time complaining about the idiotic things non-linguists say about language that I like to give public kudos when they say sensible things, and this footnote on page 727 of How to Read the Bible (see this post) is so full of interesting details it’s worth quoting in extenso (the topic is the passage in Deuteronomy in which the temple is said to be the place where God “caused His name to dwell”):

On the Akkadian roots of this expression see Richter (2002). Richter’s thesis is that the “name theology” attributed to Deuteronomy by modern scholars is the result of a great misunderstanding: the biblical phrase “to cause My name to dwell” is essentially a cognate translation of the Akkadian expression šuma šakānu, which refers to the erection of a “display monument” marking a victory and a claim to the land where the monument is erected. Despite this erudite element […], her critics have rightly countered that Deuteronomy itself offers ample evidence of its far more abstract concept of deity than that of earlier writers. As Richter herself notes of this phrase, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history contain, beside the Hebrew cognate of this phrase, other noncognate expressions, “to build a house for the name” of God, to “offer praise to the name,” and so forth. These would suggest that, whatever the origin of “to cause My name to dwell,” the idea of God’s “name” as a kind of a divine hypostasis is reflected in these other uses; “name” had been freed from its specific meaning in the original Akkadian idiom. Indeed, her overall argument appears to be based on a misconception, that because a word or phrase meant X in its original language, it will also mean X when borrowed by another language. Reality is full of examples of precisely the opposite. Thus, the French loan-word outrage suggests to most speakers of English an element of anger that is quite lacking in French. The reason is that English speakers unconsciously analyze the word as a combination of out + rage, whereas French speakers, having no morphological out, do not isolate the element rage (indeed, most native speakers will correctly perceive -age as the nominalizing suffix of outre, “beyond” [Latin ultra]). The legal phrase corpus delicti originally meant “the body of the offense,” that is, “the actual facts that prove that a crime or offense against the law has been committed.” But many people (including some lawyers) with a poor grasp of Latin understand corpus in the specific sense of a “(dead) body,” corpse. It is true that in a murder trial, the corpse does constitute the corpus delicti, but the phrase of course has much wider applicability — it can mean the stolen bicycle or the broken storefront window as well. Nevertheless, corpus delicti has actually developed in English the secondary meaning of a dead body — even in some dictionaries. Other examples could be given. Thus, the fact that šuma šakānu had the meaning it had in Akkadian does not guarantee that it ever had the same meaning in Hebrew. […] Indeed, it is not hard to imagine the learned Deuteronomist borrowing this foreign idiom with the specific intention of creating an authoritative-sounding equivalent that would support his new theology. That is, he consciously took over šuma šakānu to help legitimate the idea that God had merely caused His “name,” but not Himself, to dwell in the earthly temple devoted to Him.

Extra points for talking about corpus delicti developing “the secondary meaning of a dead body” rather than calling it an error!

Readers may be wondering what happened to my Russian reading, which I haven’t mentioned for a while now. Well, for one thing, I’ve been absorbed in the Bible material I’ve been posting about recently, but that’s not all there is to it — I read at least some Russian literature every day. The thing is that as I approach the plunge into the familiar nineteenth-century realist literature that might be said to begin in 1846 with the publication of Dostoevsky’s first work, Бедные люди [Poor Folk], I’ve been slowing down and savoring the last of the earlier material (Romantic, I guess you’d call it) I’ve come to enjoy so much. I recently finished Русские ночи [Russian Nights], which I had been looking forward to, since I enjoyed his earlier stuff so much (1, 2, 3, 4), and this was supposed to be his masterpiece. I guess it is, but, well, I have serious reservations about it.

People at the time did, too. It was published too late; ten years earlier, when Odoevsky was one of the most popular writers in Russia, it would have been a hit, but by 1844 he was already considered out of date, and reviewers objected to the fact that the stories it contained had all been published in the previous dozen years. The stories themselves are excellent, among the author’s best; Бригадир [The Brigadier], about a dying man who realizes he has wasted his life, is a worthy precursor of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich; “Opere del Cavaliere Giambattista Piranesi” is a wonderful character sketch of a madman who thinks he’s the long-dead Piranesi and begs for money to bring his impossible architectural visions to realization; Город без имени [City without a name] is a grim vision of a society that’s taken the ideas of Bentham to extremes; Импровизатор [The improvvisatore] tells the tale of a young man desperate to be able to compose poetry easily so as to woo his Charlotte, but comes to regret his deal with the demonic Segeliel; and there are brilliant little romanticized biographies of Beethoven and Bach, the latter providing a fine ending for the series of stories. But not, alas, for the book.

The stories, you see, are set in a tale-telling framework comparable to those of Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin (LH post) and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (LH post). In this one, a group of poorly differentiated young people visit their wise friend Faust (a stand-in for the author) and argue about life, history, and everything. Let me quote Ralph E. Matlaw’s introduction to his 1965 translation, Russian Nights:

The range of problems and questions raised by the discussants and the illustrative stories is enormous: the boundaries of knowledge, the meaning of science and art, the sense of human existence, atheism and belief, education, government rule, the function of individual sciences, madness and sanity, poetic creation, logic, Slavophilism, Europe and Russia, mercantilism, to name some of the important issues. Clearly, this is not merely a collection of stories, or a novel, but an imaginative exposition of human achievement and limitation at a specific time.

The book thus differs from collections like Hoffmann’s Serapionsbrüder and others that intersperse commentary between stories. The primary argument rests in the speeches of the four leading characters, to which the stories are subordinate.

And subordinating stories to philosophical-historical commentary is pretty much always a bad idea as far as I’m concerned. Still, I was going along with it, enjoying the stories greatly and the philosophical filler mildly, until I got to the end of the Bach story, saw that there was still a lot of the book to get through, and realized to my mounting horror that it was a worthy precursor of the dreaded Second Appendix of War and Peace (LH post), and it too could be called “the literary equivalent of an extremely long-winded Hyde Park orator, haranguing passers-by about how the so-called experts don’t know what they’re talking about.” As a matter of fact, if I were forced at gunpoint to reread one of the two, I don’t know which I’d choose. Perhaps the bullet. At any rate, with that caveat, I recommend the reprint of the Matlaw translation to whose Amazon page I linked above to anyone interested in Russian literature of the period, especially if they’re more interested in Romantic ideas of history and progress (spoiler: the ancients already knew all about our so-called modern discoveries!) than I am. To wash away the bitter taste of my captious complaints, let me quote the concluding passage of Neil Cornwell’s Afterword (1997):

Russian Nights may also appeal more to the “postmodern” age than to earlier epochs. Odoevsky’s mysticism and his Gothicism may be, if anything, better displayed in certain of his other works (see The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales). However, Russian Nights, Odoevsky’s single completed magnum opus, with its mixture of genres and styles, mingles fiction with nonfiction, romanticism with social reality, philosophical dialogue with historical reportage. It will perhaps be in the twenty-first century that Odoevsky’s reputation will finally be made.