languagehat.com

I do love a debunking, and Victor Mair provides a good one at the Log:

If you do a web search for “Hsigo”, you will find thousands of references and hundreds of images. I won’t give specific references, because they’re all complete and utter nonsense, but you can read detailed descriptions of these fake, mythical Chinese monkeys — including pseudo-learned discussions of their name — in works like the following: Erudite Tales, Creepy Hollows Encyclopedia, Mythical Creatures Guide, Encyclo, Societas Magic, Monstropedia, etc., etc. Hsigo are supposedly flying monkeys with bird-like wings, the tail of a dog, and a human face. […] It all started with a typo.

Do read the whole thing; it’s quite entertaining.

I’m reading Erich Auerbach’s article “Figura” (and every time I read Auerbach, I think I should be reading more Auerbach; I still haven’t made my way very far into Mimesis [see this LH post]), and I came across a quote from Varro that I liked so much I have to share it: “fictor cum dicit fingo, figuram imponit,” which Auerbach translates “The image-maker (fictor), when he says fingo (I shape), puts a figura on the thing.” (He has earlier rendered figura “plastic form.”) I’ve always been a sucker for varying verb stems (as a young Latin student, I used to go around muttering “fero ferre tuli latus,” enjoying the knowledge that latus was once tlatus and showed the zero-grade form of the root of tuli), and the conjunction of fic-, fing-, and fig- in one sentence was deeply satisfying to me.

On the next page, Auerbach, still discussing Varro, says:

We have, as he says in De lingua latina (9, 21), taken over new forms of vessels from the Greeks; why do people struggle against new word forms, formae vocabulorum, as though they were poisonous? Et tantum inter duos sensus interesse volunt, ut oculis semper aliquas figuras supellectilis novas conquirant, contra auris expertes velint esse? (“And do they think there is so much difference between the two senses, that they are always looking for new shapes of furniture for their eyes, but yet wish their ears to avoid such things?”).

Needless to say, I liked that as well.

I’m a big Ian Frazier fan (and anyone interested in Russia should get his wonderful Travels in Siberia), so I read his “The Last Days of Stealhead Joe” even though it’s long and I have no interest in fly fishing, and I didn’t regret it a bit. The point of LH interest shows up in this sentence: “It was a red 1995 Chevy Tahoe with a type of fly rod called a spey rod extending from a holder on the hood to another holder on the roof like a long, swept-back antenna.” Naturally, I was curious about “spey rod,” and a bit of quick googling took me to this Wikipedia article, where I discovered that it is so called after the River Spey. But if it is from a proper name, shouldn’t it have a capital letter? Well, not necessarily; it depends how close a connection is felt to its geographical origins. For example, Brussels lace always takes the capital, but the sprouts can be either Brussels or brussels; frankfurter is always lowercase, because its German origins have been forgotten except by the historically minded. How do we decide which to use when we’re writing something for which proper usage matters, or when we’re copyediting? Why, we look in a dictionary, an easy decider for these essentially arbitrary matters.

Except that spey isn’t in the dictionary, not any of them, not even the OED (though it does have speys [< Old French espeisse < espeis ‘thick’] Obs. rare. A thick or dense part of a wood). So all one can do is check Google Books to see what other editors have done, and we discover it seems to be about fifty-fifty; the Outside editor who worked on the Frazier piece went for lowercase spey, and I think I’d do the same, since presumably most fishermen aren’t aware of the origin in a Scottish river. But this is an example of why large dictionaries include so many words most people have never heard of; they may not be used often, but when they are, it helps if there’s an official way to write them.

As an accompaniment to my Long March through early-19th-century Russian prose, I’ve been reading through the collected poetry of Lermontov and increasingly realizing what a great poet he was. I mean, of course he was a Great Poet, we all know that, he’s taught right along with Pushkin, and as soon as beginning students are judged ready for poetry they’re fed the standard anthology pieces like Ангел/The Angel and И скучно и грустно/Bored and sad. But back when I was in Russian class I knew a lot less about Russian, poetry, and life; now, some decades on, I can see his excellences more clearly, and I thought I’d share with you my recent discovery of some suggestive parallels in three poems of 1840-1841 (the year he died—what a stupid, destructive institution dueling was!).

As much as I enjoy running into old friends in the Collected Works, it’s even better to make new ones, and I was hit hard by “Как часто, пестрою толпою окружен” [How often, surrounded by a motley crowd]. It wasn’t the framing section that got to me, a complaint about soulless people and their meaningless talk (the poem, dated January 1, was apparently conceived during a hectic New Year’s Eve masquerade at the Assembly of the Nobility), but the central two and a half stanzas that I will translate here (from “Наружно погружась в их блеск и суету” to “Шумят под робкими шагами”; the Russian text is at the link):

Outwardly immersed in their brilliance and bustle,
I cherish in my soul an ancient dream,
  The sacred sounds of perished years.
And if somehow for a moment I succeed
In sinking into a reverie, I fly in memory to the ancient times
  Of not so long ago, like a free, free bird,
And see myself as a child; and all around
Are my native places: the high manor,
  And the garden with its ruined greenhouse;
The sleeping pond is covered by a green net of grass,
And past the pond, smoke rises from a village—and in the distance
  Mists rise over fields.
I enter a dark avenue; between the bushes
Appears an evening ray, and yellow leaves
  Rustle beneath my shy footsteps.

It sounds like nothing in my half-baked attempt at a hasty translation, but you’ll have to take my word for it that the Russian is magical. The unexpected repetition in “вольной, вольной” [vol’noi, vol’noi, ‘free, free’] slows you down abruptly, like a swiftly applied brake pedal; the assonances chime in Вдали туманы [vdalí tumany, ‘in the distance mists’] and В аллею темную [v alleyu tyómnuyu, ‘into a dark avenue’]; and you can hear the rustling in the final quoted line, Шумят под робкими шагами [shumyát pod róbkimi shagami]. But even in clumsy translation you can sense the emotional force of the passage, the insistent intermingling of ruin, darkness, and foreboding with the superficially joyous return to the lieux d’enfance.

This is distilled in Lermontov’s well-known free translation (or version, if you will) of one of the most perfect lyric poems ever written, Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied II (“Über allen Gipfeln/ Ist Ruh”), whose twenty-four words sink instantly into the memory of anyone who knows even a little German and stay for life. Lermontov’s poem has only twenty-two words, but even so manages to seriously distort the original; it says “Mountain tops sleep in nighttime darkness, quiet valleys are full of fresh haze; the road is not dusty, the leaves do not tremble… Wait a little, you too will rest,” and of course Goethe has no quiet valleys, with or without haze, and no roads, with or without dust, whereas he does have birds which Lermontov omits. Never mind, it’s a pretty little thing and is much memorized (or used to be). You can see why Lermontov wanted to write it, but I suspect it did not satisfy him. It was too silent.

The following year (the last of his life), he combined the themes in one of his finest and most mysterious poems (one that meant a lot to Mandelstam, among others), Выхожу один я на дорогу/I go out on the road alone. You have there the road, the night, the sleeping earth, the longing for surcease: “Я б хотел забыться и заснуть!” [I would like to sink into a reverie (literally “forget myself”) and sleep!]. But, and this is crucial, “не тем холодным сном могилы” [not the cold sleep of the grave]; he wants to hear things, voices singing of love and, as the last line says, “Тёмный дуб склонялся и шумел” [A dark oak would lean over (me) and rustle]. It’s Hamlet’s quandary in reverse; Hamlet wanted to die, to sleep, but without dreaming, while Lermontov (or his poetic persona) wants to sleep, to dream, but not to die and leave the sounds of earth behind.

Addendum. Coincidentally, my Long March has brought me to Lermontov’s own great contribution to Russian prose, Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time), and early on I encountered a passage that makes an interesting parallel to those cited above (I’ve lazily used the English translation from here):

Кругом было тихо, так тихо, что по жужжанию комара можно было следить за его полетом. Налево чернело глубокое ущелье; за ним и впереди нас темно-синие вершины гор, изрытые морщинами, покрытые слоями снега, рисовались на бледном небосклоне, еще сохранявшем последний отблеск зари. На темном небе начинали мелькать звезды, и странно, мне показалось, что оно гораздо выше, чем у нас на севере. По обеим сторонам дороги торчали голые, черные камни; кой-где из-под снега выглядывали кустарники, но ни один сухой листок не шевелился, и весело было слышать среди этого мертвого сна природы фырканье усталой почтовой тройки и неровное побрякиванье русского колокольчика.

[It was quiet all around, so quiet that you could trace the flight of a mosquito by its buzz. A deep gorge yawned black to the left. Beyond it and ahead of us the dark blue mountain peaks wrinkled with gorges and gullies and topped by layers of snow loomed against the pale horizon that still retained the last glimmer of twilight. Stars began to twinkle in the dark sky, and, strangely enough, it seemed that they were far higher here than in our northern sky in Russia. On both sides of the road naked black boulders jutted up from the ground, and here and there some shrubs peeped from under the snow. Not a single dead leaf rustled, and it was pleasant to hear in the midst of this lifeless sleepiness of nature the snorting of the tired stage coach horses and the uneven tinkling of the Russian carriage bells.]

This Bookends piece from the Oct. 8 NY Times Sunday Book Review features Daniel Mendelsohn and Dana Stevens discussing translation; the theoretical points are sometimes interesting, but I’m afraid what grabbed me was the parade of horribles. Mendelsohn says “When David R. Slavitt chose to pepper his 1997 translation of this titanic masterpiece [Aeschylus’ Agamemnon] with phrases like ‘learning curve,’ ‘stress-related’ and ‘Watch what you say, mister,’ he was not only cheapening the diction but hamstringing the play’s larger meanings,” and both he and Stevens have a whack at poor Barry Powell’s new Iliad—Mendelsohn singles out his calling Chryses “a praying man” rather than a priest (“for English readers, ‘a praying man’ is a devout individual, not an officiant at a religious ritual, which is what Chryses is”), and Stevens reports on his having Achilles say to Agamemnon “O.K., I’m off to Phthia.” Mind you, that kind of thing can work in a completely reimagined Iliad, but you pretty much have to be Christopher Logue to pull it off.

Ben Zimmer is interviewed by The Chicago Manual of Style about “the transformation and technologization of language”; it starts off with this question:

A favorite debate in the CMOS community is whether new word usages should be allowed, with classic examples of hopefully and literally. How do you think we should draw the line between common usage and Standard Written English? Are there cultural or academic checkpoints that a word must go through before making the transition?

Zimmer talks about the recency illusion, points out that Alexander Pope used literally the “wrong” way in 1708, and says that “in our schooling, we are constantly encouraged to think that there is only one right answer, which flies in the face of the flexibility and mutability of language.” All of which is true, and I wish I could think it would do some good, but the CMOS (which I use constantly in my professional life as a copyeditor and which is a superb reference for its central mission) enraged me a couple of editions ago when they cut short a promising trend toward good sense and outsourced their grammar section to Bryan A. Garner, the most reactionary usage maven currently working. By comparison with Garner, William Safire (alevasholem) was a wild-eyed linguistic radical. Frankly, I’m surprised the CMOS crowd took it into their heads to talk to a real live linguist; could it be that there is a dissident faction that may someday overthrow Garner and bring their grammar recommendations into the current century? A man can hope…

Actually, Alexander Veltman’s 1835 “Неистовый Роланд” [Orlando Furioso] concerns a fake governor, not a fake inspector, but the parallel with Gogol’s The Government Inspector, one of the most famous Russian plays, is so striking I couldn’t resist the title. (Speaking of titles, James Gebhard, in Selected Stories, renders this one “Roland the Furious,” which makes no sense to me—sure, you might translate Неистовый Роланд that way if it were an invention of Veltman’s, but since it’s the standard Russian equivalent of Orlando Furioso, and since the story features a performance of a dramatic version of that poem, it can’t help but confuse the reader.)

Gogol’s play is straightforward in action, if Gogolianly bizarre in its imagery and conversational divagation (Nabokov says “the Mayor automatically continues to read aloud and his mumbling engenders remarkable secondary beings that struggle to get into the front row… The beauty of the thing is that these secondary characters will not appear on the stage later on”); it starts with the mayor alerting various other town officials that the terrifying Inspector is due to arrive, and shows us the contortions everyone goes through in trying to please the official, who turns out to be a con man. Veltman’s story has the same basic idea (Gebhard says in his introduction “it would be difficult to prove that Veltman’s story influenced Gogol since at the time many anecdotes were in circulation regarding such occurrences in real life”—Gogol began writing his play in October 1835 and it was performed for the first time the following April), but it is Veltmanly bizarre in its telling, leaving the reader completely confused for many pages. It opens with a young man crying out incomprehensibly (“Angelica!… Nature, you are deaf to the outcries of the unfortunate!”) in an inn in a provincial city (which Gebhard says seems from its description to be Mogilev); it then jumps to a feast at the mayor’s house for the name day of “his honored spouse … Nymphodora Mikhailovna” (a name worthy of Gogol) in which there is discussion of Paris and what Kotzebue had to say about it; and it goes on to an increasingly ramshackle performance by a traveling company of actors, which is interrupted by the news that the new governor general has arrived. It eventually turns out that the person in question is actually a member of the troupe who fell out of his carriage and became disordered in his head; because he was wearing a high-ranking uniform for a performance, he was taken for the awaited official.

I would like to note two things that struck me about the story. One is that unlike in the Gogol play, where all the town officials simply make fools of themselves trying to impress the “inspector,” here they actually start performing their jobs as best they can. And the other is the astonishing effect produced by the actor trying to interpret the things said to him by the other characters as lines from the plays he knows and responding accordingly (creating, of course, complete confusion among his interlocutors); it reminded me strongly of Pirandello, and I know of nothing else like it from the period. Of course, I am by no means an expert in the early nineteenth century, and perhaps some learned reader will enlighten me further.

In a better world, of course, Veltman would be well known and this story would be routinely taught alongside the Gogol play; it would be great for compare-and-contrast. But this is not that world.

Larissa Shmailo wrote me a while back to tell me about the new anthology she edited, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry; I’ve been remiss in letting so much time go by before passing the information on, but what can I say? I’m just a feckless kinda guy. At any rate, she says in her Preface:

This anthology celebrates the Russian translator along with the Russian poet. All the work herein is translated from the Russian originals, with a few exceptions for “English-as-a-Second-Language” poems from noted bilinguals Philip Nikolayev (who provided many of the translations in this volume), Katia Kapovich, Irina Mashinski, and Andrey Gritsman (who also provided translations); there is also one English-language poem from Alexandr Skidan. Except where noted, all of this work is seen in English for the first time.

In the interests of accuracy and inclusion of as many poets as possible, I have decided not to provide the Russian text of the poems. This omission will be rectified in a future and expanded print version of this anthology. I have included the Russian for the “hostile” translation of Igor Belov by Eugene Ostashevsky, since the original is needed to “get it.” (Ask a friendly Russian-we are most of us quite friendly- to let you in on the inside joke.)

She thanks some of my favorite people (Boris Dralyuk, Alexander Cigale, Irina Mashinski, and others), and I thank her for putting it together and alerting me to it; other anthologies of recent Russian poetry can be found at Zephyr Press.

Antoine Amarilli presents Non-homophonous homographs in French:

In this post, I present a list of French words which are spelled the same but pronounced differently. This is, in a sense, the converse of the much more frequent phenomenon of non-homographic homophones. […] As it turns out, the phenomenon is surprisingly rare. Besides, it almost always occurs between words of different grammatical categories (except for “fils” and “plus“), which means that grammatical context should help to disambiguate.

There are three general categories—Indicative imperfect first person plural of a verb vs. plural of a noun (e.g., acceptions), Indicative present third person plural of a verb vs. adjective or noun (e.g., affluent), and Infinitive of a first group verb vs. nouns (often borrowed from English) (e.g., boxer)—plus “Miscellaneous cases” like as (a, as), “Clash between verb ‘avoir’ (‘to have’) indicative present second person singular, and noun ‘as’ (‘ace’, from Latin ‘as’).” I expect John Cowan already knows about it, but the rest of you may enjoy it (especially perhaps marie-lucie).

Joe Iles at The New Statesman has an idea about learning languages: stop focusing on learning how to talk with people, and concentrate on culture.

Whether through literature, film or art, language teaching should focus also on the culture that surrounds a language, on the way that foreign languages differ to English and how this allows for subtle and nuanced distinctions in meaning. To learn a language should be to immerse yourself in a different world and way of life, to view a situation through a completely new lens. Not only will this make learning languages more appealing, it also means that language learners gain a much better understanding of what’s around them, encouraging them to focus on more than the English-speaking world.

Kobi, who sent me the link, is dubious; I can get behind the general idea, but unfortunately Iles’s examples tend to the deeply silly:

The Germans, for example, use the excellent “Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher” – an instrument designed to help you eat your boiled egg and which literally translates as “Egg-shell-breaking-point-causer” as it causes the egg shell to split in two at its breaking point. Not only is this a great word, but it also highlights the highly logical structure of German, a logic that extends beyond German as a language to other areas of German life and culture. It gives an insight into the German way of thinking.

As the logical Germans say: Quatsch!