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I’ve just learned a term so marginal it’s not even in the newly revised M section of the OED, but useful enough to occur frequently in books about West Africa: moriman, plural morimen (sometimes written “mori man,” “mori men”). It refers to people in Sierra Leone who earn a living from writing Arabic charms for magical amulets, and of course I wanted to know its origin. Assiduous googling made it clear that mori is a Mende word for ‘Muslim’ (morimo or moremo is “Muslim/mori man”), but the only suggestion I could find about its origin is in a footnote on page 211 of The Mende Language: Containing Useful Phrases, Elementary Grammar, Short Vocabularies, Reading Materials (London: Kegan Paul, 1908) by F. W. H. Migeod (available at Archive.org): “Mori, corruption of Moor, means magician, or Arabic charm writer, etc.” Now, Moor goes all the way back to Latin Maurus ‘inhabitant of North Africa,’ so it’s not unthinkable (as dear Prof. Cowgill used to say) that some related form is the source of the Mende word, but I have no idea whether it’s plausible. Anybody know? And for that matter, does anybody know what kind of a name Migeod is, and how it’s pronounced?

Update. Lameen says in the comments: “One plausible etymology proposed derives it from Arabic mu’addib …, and that would fit well with the Fulani form moodibbo ‘teacher’ …. However, I would also consider deriving it from a Berber form like Tuareg əmud ‘pray’, since Islam reached the area mainly via Berbers.”

Addendum. A quote from Robert Launay and Marie Miran, “Beyond Mande mory: Islam and Ethnicity in Côte d’Ivoire,” Paideuma 46 (2000), p. 66: “In its most restricted sense, the word mory (or mori) refers to an Islamic scholar, and [sic] individual whose religious learning entitles him to authority in that domain…. Much more generally, mory were all those persons who, by virtue of their hereditary membership in certain lineages, were expected to conform rigorously to Sunni standards of piety: regular prayer five times daily, fasting during the month of Ramadan, abstinence from forbidden foods and alcoholic beverages, etc.” Unfortunately, they don’t say anything about the etymology, but it’s useful to have the alternate spelling and the definition.

OK, not actually a poem but sort-of-rhymed doggerel, but David Bukszpan’s Poem So You’ll Know All 101 Two-Letter Words is fun and might even prove useful for some of you. My favorite line is the second of this couplet:

QI, Scrabble’s most popular word, is just ki spelled with a kue,
and like qat (or your cat) it doesn’t need U.

And the line most relevant to a recent LH post is “DO, like the deer, is the first tone you hum.”

Completely irrelevant, but I can’t resist sharing it: Aulus Gellius quotes Herodes Atticus as saying of a man who claimed to be a philosopher “Video barbam et pallium; philosophum nondum video” (I see a beard and a cloak; I don’t see a philosopher yet). Hence the proverb Barba non facit philosophum, “A beard does not make a philosopher.”

A couple of months ago I reviewed Muireann Maguire’s Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature, which I liked a great deal. Now Overlook Press has sent me her companion volume, the anthology Red Spectres, which is even more fun (and much more affordable!). The introduction has a quick overview of the historical background gone into in much more detail in Stalin’s Ghosts, but the focus is on the early twentieth century, which is when all the stories included were written (and all but two in the 1920s).

Valery Bryusov’s “In the Mirror” (1903) is essentially a nineteenth-century story (Poe would have loved it) about a woman obsessed since childhood with mirrors who winds up in a terrible struggle with her own reflection; it’s a good choice for an opener, since Bryusov was an excellent writer and it establishes a compelling mood (not to mention serving as a source for Chayanov’s “The Venetian Mirror,” virtually a parody). The Bryusov is followed by three stories by Aleksandr Chayanov, who’s much better known as an agricultural economist but who wrote five Gothic stories which he published at his own expense; I’m not as impressed by him as Maguire is—as a writer, he’s essentially an antiquarian, doing pastiches of early-nineteenth-century Gothic rather than rethinking the genre for his own grim era—but the stories are enjoyable, especially the first, “The Tale of the Hairdresser’s Mannequin,” which jumps from Moscow to Kolomna to Korcheva (which was flooded for a reservoir in the 1930s—how I love drowned cities!) to various European locales and has a cheerful brio. I didn’t care for the doleful and clotted “Venediktov,” but apparently it influenced Master and Margarita (the hero is named Bulgakov, which must have struck the imagination of the greater writer), and that by itself justifies its inclusion.

Then come two stories by Bulgakov himself, and what a leap in quality: here’s a writer who can’t help but infuse whatever he writes with the terror of his time. “The Red Crown” is about a White officer going mad because he couldn’t obey his mother’s plea to save his brother’s life during the Civil War; it starts “More than anything else I hate sunlight, loud conversations and, of course, the endless thudding.” The second story, “A Seance,” is largely funny rather than grim (it starts “Ksyushka, the idiot maid, announced ‘That feller has turned up to see yer…'”), but it does involve the secret police. Both are fine examples of Bulgakov’s brilliance even in miniature forms, and they justify the existence of the book all by themselves. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Phantom” (which I described in the earlier post) is both funny and terrifying, and makes me want to read more by him. Aleksandr Grin’s “The Grey Motor Car” is a splendid example of his peculiar genius and hopefully will introduce a lot of English-speaking readers to a wonderful writer who should be as well loved as he is by Russians. The two stories by “Georgy Peskov” (actually the émigré Yelena Deisha) are effective genre pieces; only the last item in the book, “Professor Knop’s Experiment” by the completely unknown Pavel Perov, is a disappointment, the kind of mad-scientist riff that would have served as filler in Weird Tales (already in existence for a year by 1924, when the story was published in Berlin). I’m delighted to say that Maguire’s translations are uniformly excellent and that so far as I could tell there’s not a single typo, both highly impressive feats. I recommend the book warmly to anyone with the slightest interest in stories of the uncanny, in early-twentieth-century Russia, or simply in good writing.

Addendum. Maguire’s thoughts about translating the book are well worth reading.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so many people send me a single story before, and I can understand why: it’s an astonishing piece of journalism and right up my alley. Go read Eric Naiman’s “When Dickens met Dostoevsky” (TLS); it’s long, but trust me, it just keeps getting better. And it starts off pretty darn good, with Michiko Kakutani getting duped in the very first sentence. Ah, Stephanie Harvey! Ah, humanity!

Update (July 2013). See now Stephen Moss’s fascinating and sad Guardian interview with Harvey (thanks, David!).

Many years ago I visited the Topkapı Palace. As that Wikipedia article says, “The palace complex has hundreds of rooms and chambers, but only the most important are accessible to the public today,” and I was frustrated by the quick march our guide was providing through that limited number of rooms, so at a convenient moment I slipped away from the group and wandered for a bit through some of the closed areas. It was amazing seeing those dusty rooms with their faded ornamentation by myself; I soon hurried back to the group, not wanting to cause distress if my absence was noticed, but ever since then I’ve slipped into reveries thinking about the experience, and wished they’d open more of the place up.

Now that I’ve finished Veltman’s Strannik [The wanderer] (see this post), I have a very similar feeling. I started my swerve back to the beginning of modern Russian literature more or less on a whim, thinking I’d dash through some stories and at least start a few novels to get a sense of what the early stuff was like before settling in to Dostoevsky, but here it is the better part of a year later and I keep devouring writers of whom I, like most aficionados of Russian literature, had barely heard, thinking “Why don’t more people read this?” After finishing Narezhny’s Rossiisky Zhilblaz (A Russian Gil Blas; see this post), I went on to read two more of his novels (Bursak [The seminary student] and Dva Ivana [The two Ivans]), and once I had a taste of Pogorelsky (see this post) I read whatever else I could find by him. But what about the writers who aren’t even available online? What about Alexander Izmailov (1779–1831), whose Evgeny, ili pagubnye posledstviya durnogo vospitaniya i soobshchestva [Eugene, or the ruinous results of bad upbringing and association] Mirsky called “a cautionary and moral story, where the author describes vice with such realistic gusto that his critics were inclined to doubt the sincerity of his moral purpose”? What about Alexander Benitsky (1781–1809), whose style (again according to Mirsky) “surpassed in elegance and lucidity everything written in Russian prose before Pushkin” and upon whose death Batyushkov wrote to Gnedich: “What wit, and now no longer with us! Aren’t you ashamed not to write a line in praise of him, not in verse but prose? Why not let people know that a certain Benitsky lived and wrote ‘The Next Day’?” [Был умен, да умеръ! А тебе не стыдно ли не написать ни строчки в его похвалу, не стихами, а прозою? Зачем не известить людей, что жил некто Беницкий и написал На другой день?] (I’ve added a Google Books clip below the cut for those who can see it.) He’s so completely forgotten I can’t find a list of his stories with dates, let alone any texts, and it’s not even clear how to spell his last name (there are comparable numbers of hits for Бенитцкий and Беницкий). It’s a striking sign of the richness of Russian literature that it can afford to forget about writers that other cultures would name avenues after.

But enough preamble; let me tell you about Strannik (online here). I mentioned Moby-Dick in my previous Veltman post (linked above), and Melville certainly comes to mind; compare the openings of the two novels. Strannik: “This sedentary, monotonous life has grown wearisome; let us go, sir! — said I one day to myself — let us go a-traveling!” [Наскучив сидячею, однообразною жизнию, поедемте, сударь! — сказал я однажды сам себе, — поедемте путешествовать!] Moby-Dick (after the famous opening sentence): “Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.” And the constant detours, the apparently inconsequential interruptions and side-thoughts, these too are reminiscent of the greatest American novelist (not a considered judgment that I am prepared to defend against all comers, mind you, but it is impossible for me not to feel it after immersing myself, however briefly, in Melville’s prose)—except that both writers got this style from the fons et origo of all divagating, diverting, dissertating novelists and prestidigitators of prose, Laurence Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy. The former (see this LH post) provides the template for the personal (“sentimental”) approach to the act of traversing a landscape, the latter the focus on war and the memory of war—Shandy’s siege of Namur becomes the Wanderer’s sieges of Shumla and Varna, all of them equally obscure after the passage of a few centuries (and indeed, the War of the League of Augsburg is one of the least remembered of the early modern pan-European wars, as the War of 1828–29 is one of the least remembered of the Russo-Turkish wars). (Here he sums up the twin poles of the book: “I do not intend to devote this day either to peaceful wandering through the Universe and through events, or to military campaigns through Bulgaria. It is as fine as the first of May.” [Этот день я не намерен посвящать ни мирному странствию по Вселенной и по событиям, ни военным походам по Булгарии. Он так хорош, как 1-е маия.]) Another source is Xavier de Maistre‘s Voyage autour de ma chambre, but of course de Maistre himself is heavily indebted to Sterne.

At any rate, what am I to say of the novel now that I’ve gotten its genealogy out of the way? It’s a war memoir, a travelogue, a fantasy, a dream of fair women, with poetry and ethnography tossed in, not to mention a phrasebook with bits of Greek, Turkish, Yiddish, French, and just about every other language to be found in the surprisingly cosmopolitan towns of early-nineteenth-century Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Bulgaria. It’s definitely postmodern avant le mot. It’s funny and wistful and occasionally hints at the devastation of war without ever rubbing the reader’s nose in it. I guess the best thing to do is quote a typical passage (I’ll put the original at the end of the post). Here are a couple of chapters from the end of the second part):

CCXXIII
Boring, boring! … no, without [my Amazons] not a step forward! I’m ready to put off the march on Shumla to the end of the third part! Oh, to accomplish great deeds, one needs patience!… angelic… diabolic… do you think? no, mine—i.e., midway between them.
How patient is he who, having satisfied thirst and hunger, feelings, mind, and heart, stretches out to rest in downy waves and, already falling asleep, feels that something is crawling on his face, but fears to move lest in frightening off the insect he should also frighten sleep from his eyes… how patient he is!
And that isn’t everything, because everything is more than the whole Universe. That is not the end, nor is it the beginning… Show me a beginning and an end in anything, and I will say: No, that is a continuation.
CCXXIV
Such transitions can be likened to familiar transitions… No, better yet, to the familiar Mozart chord in the overture to La clemenza di Tito. It goes without saying that he who does not know the thoroughbass of human emotions cannot understand the rightness of abrupt transitions; he can understand only a simple scale… Haydn, expressing the creation of the world, first of all depicted Chaos… In everything, harmony arises from disharmony… Thoughts, opinions, speeches, deeds, all of life, everything is subject to this law.

That’s as close as he comes to a manifesto. I wish I had a physical copy of the book, so I could mark all the cross-references and allusions, but although a Russian edition is available, Amazon wants $30 for it, and I’m not willing to shell out that much. But I would like to be living in a world where Strannik was as valued as any other nineteenth-century masterpiece, and I continue to meditate on the reasons it’s not. I suspect it has a lot to do with the turn toward Seriousness and Social Responsibility that Russian literature took in the 1840s. Belinsky has much to answer for.

CCXXIII
Скучно, скучно!.. нет, без них ни шагу вперед! готов отложить поход к Шумле хоть до конца 3-й части! О, чтоб совершать дела великие, нужно терпение!.. ангельское… дьявольское… думаете вы? нет, мое — т. е. среднее между ними.
Как терпелив тот, который, утолив жажду и голод, чувства, ум и сердце, ложится в пуховые волны и, уже засыпая, чувствует, что что-то ползет по лицу, но боится пошевелиться, протянуть руку, чтоб, спугнув насекомое, не спугнуть и усыпления с очей своих… как терпелив он!
Это еще не все, ибо все более целой Вселенной. Это не конец и не начало… Покажите мне в чем-нибудь начало и конец, я скажу: нет, это продолжение.
CCXXIV
Подобные переходы уподобляются известным переходам… или, еще лучше, известному моцартовскому аккорду в увертюре Титова милосердие. Разумеется, что тот, кто не знает генерал-баса чувств человеческих, не может понимать правильности резких переходов; для понятий его доступна только простая гамма… Хайдн, выражая создание мира, прежде всего изобразил Хаос… Во всем стройность создается из нестройности… Мысли, мнения, речи, дела, вся жизнь, все подвержено этому закону.

Ben Zimmer sends me a link to this NYRB tweet—”First (and most likely only) occurrence of ‘doh’ in The New York Review, from 1979 http://j.mp/XsMwfT“—and asks “What do you suppose that seraphic (as opposed to Homeric) ‘doh’ was all about?” The link goes to Brodsky’s own (typically awful) translation of his “A Part of Speech” (Часть речи), and the lines in question are:

After all these years it hardly matters who
or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes,
and your mind resounds not with a seraphic “doh,”
only their rustle. […]

Here’s the Russian:

После стольких зим уже безразлично, что
или кто стоит в углу у окна за шторой,
и в мозгу раздается не неземное “до”,
но ее шуршание. […]

I’m pretty sure “до” in “неземное ‘до'” (‘unearthly “do”‘) is the note do (=C), as in “do re mi fa sol,” and the “doh” is just Brodsky’s idiosyncratic spelling; at any rate, it certainly has nothing to do with Homer Simpson’s familiar exclamation.

A reader writes:

My wife and I are both Americans and have been living in Germany for four years. I speak German well and my wife speaks it, well, reasonably well, though we speak English at home.
My son was born here 3 years ago. He goes to a German-only preschool and is fully bilingual. For some dumb reason, despite a strong (amateur) interest in linguistics I haven’t read anything at all on child language acquisition. We’re expecting our second child in September and I’d like to be better informed about what’s going on in my kids’ noggins and see what I can do to help them.
I’d be very grateful for some help finding the best books/articles on child language acquisition (both general stuff and things relating specifically to bilingual kids). I can read English, German and French, and probably Spanish in this area, if that expands the field.

That’s an area I know nothing about (except for the practical experience of watching two grandsons acquiring language), so I thought I’d toss it out there and get some recommendations from people who know about this stuff.

Margalit Fox has a nice New York Times obit for linguist John J. Gumperz, “one of the leading authorities on discourse analysis, which studies not only who says what to whom, but also how it is said and in what context.” If you can’t access the[The Times link is archived here;] much of the obit is reproduced at Ben Zimmer’s Log post (and there’s a touching comment by Gumperz’s son Andrew in the thread), but he doesn’t quote a bit that brought a wry smile to my face:

Hans-Josef Gumperz was born on Jan. 9, 1922, in Hattingen, Germany. (His surname is pronounced GUM-perts in German, though after settling in the United States he was inclined to pronounced it GUM-purrs.)

Didn’t anybody notice that Fox used “GUM” the first time to represent German /gum/, i.e. what sounds like GOOM to an English-speaker, and the second time with its “natural” English value to represent /gʌm/? Ah well, a minor slip in a good obit of a good linguist.

Just got an e-mail from frequent commenter John Cowan with a worthy cause and a book offer:

The Dictionary of American Regional English is very
close to being canceled, unless they can get more money. See here for details.

I accidentally bought two copies of McWhorter’s Power of Babel.
I will send a hardback in very good condition to the first Hattic who
contacts me at cowan@ccil.org, and I will pay postage.

On your marks, get set, go!

Tim Parks is translating “a selection of entries from Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone […] a book all Italians know from school and almost nobody has read in its entirety,” and he’s written a post about it at NYRBlog. He asks “do I write in modern prose, or in an early nineteenth-century pastiche?” (the former, of course) and “Do I tidy up the very personal and unedited aspect of the text, or do preserve those qualities, if I can?” The latter question leads to a very interesting discussion, with alternate possible translations of the same passage; he also has to deal with “the first unabridged and fully annotated English edition of the Zibaldone,” which “will not be published until July (by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States) but I have a proof copy. Do I look at it? Before I start? Or only after I finish, to check that at least semantically we have understood the same thing?” Of course he looks at it, and “after reading a few paragraphs of the translation itself I’m reassured that my work will not merely be a duplication of theirs, because I hear the text quite differently”:

What I’d rather like to stress is my intense awareness, as I read their translation, of the uniqueness of each reading response, which is the inevitable result, I suppose, of the individual background we bring to a book, all the reading and writing and listening and talking we’ve done in the past, our particular interests, beliefs, obsessions. I hear Leopardi in an English that has a completely different tone and feel than the one my colleagues have used. I just hear a different man speaking to me—a different voice—though what I hear is no more valid than what they hear.

A good response, and the whole thing is worth your while.