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I’m not even halfway through Pogorelsky’s Монастырка (The convent girl—see this LH post for my earlier encounter with the author), but I have to pause and post about some of the fun he’s having with languages. The novel starts with a traveler trying to get to an acquaintance’s house in time for a christening—he’s been asked to be godfather—and asking a local if the road is in good shape; this being in northeastern Ukraine, the response is given in the local dialect: “А тож! дорога гладка, от як тик; тилки пискив богато!” Pogorelsky helpfully translates this in a note: “А как же! Дорога гладкая, вот как ток; только песков много!” [Sure! The road’s as smooth as a threshing floor, only there’s a lot of sand!] He has a similarly dialect-infused encounter with a stationmaster who claims not to have horses for him; when he gets to the town of R. and gets a room at the inn, it is so filled with insects he doesn’t even try to sleep but decides to sit up all night. Looking for something to read, he finds three letters from an adolescent girl to a friend at the Smolny Convent in Saint Petersburg, where she had been a student before returning to her Ukrainian village; he’s so taken with them he makes inquiries and winds up meeting the author of the letters, now several years older, and the rest of the novel consists of his narration of her story (which includes one of those villains who can make a novel so memorable, Klim Sidorovich Dyundik).

Of course, the texts of the letters are included, and the first includes a complaint about the way the locals talk, which the author can barely understand; she quotes her beloved aunt talking with a distiller about barda and thinking of the bards in Zhukovsky’s works before she realizes it’s a local word for distillery waste. She provides further examples before saying “But I think I’m boring you with Ukrainian dialect; from now on I’ll write about my aunt as if she’s speaking in Russian.” (I’ll include the original passage below the cut for those who read Russian.) She also throws in a number of French phrases, which introduces the other major linguistic topic, and of that more in a moment. But while we’re on Ukrainian, I’ll mention there’s a character named Pryzhkov who originally had the Ukrainian name Pryzhko but added the -v because he was brought up in Saint Petersburg and wanted his name to sound Russian.

The most extended riff is about Dyundik’s daughters and their French lessons. Dyundik boasts that he’s paying a tutor 400 rubles a year plus room and board to teach them French; it’s a lot, but it’s worth it because they prattle away in it constantly and when they go off to Petersburg they’ll be received immediately into high society—”You’ll see when you meet them!” Alas, when the narrator does meet them, he can’t understand a word. They think he himself doesn’t know French, and mock him behind his back, but then they hear him conversing fluently in French at a social gathering and are deeply offended—he must have been making fun of them, pretending ignorance of the language for a joke. When Dyundik reproaches him later and says he should apologize, he explains that their French is so bad it’s unintelligible—for instance, they say “Kesse-kesse-kesse-lya!” for “Qu’est-ce que c’est que cela!” He convinces Dyundik and later his wife and daughters, whereupon they all begin cursing the hapless tutor and thinking up ever-escalating punishments, whereupon the narrator regrets having ever said anything about it.

But perhaps the most intriguing, and certainly the most unexpected, linguistic encounter is with a trader known as the “Gypsy ataman“; the narrator overhears him calling someone “Dšarro,” and he explains that that is “our word for son or sonny.” I have a few Romany references, but none of them have a word like that; the Kalderash word for ‘son’ is šyav and the Greek Romany word is tšavo (those two are clearly related to each other). If anyone knows what dialect dšarro might be (Servitka?), by all means speak up.

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I attended the Mount Holyoke Wikipedia edit-a-thon this afternoon in case my expertise as a Wikipedia editor might be needed; in the event, it wasn’t, so I spent the time chatting with occasional LH commenter Сара (aka Sarah) about the good old days at Sterling and exploring the shelves of the library’s poetry room, where the meeting was held. I found all sorts of gorgeous books, including the four-volume Collected Poems of Larry Eigner with his typewritten pages lovingly reproduced, but what excited me most was discovering poets I had heard of but didn’t really know, like Gjertrud Schnackenberg (I was brought up short by the first line, “You burned the structure of your intellect,” of a poem she wrote when she was still an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke; Google Video tells me, by the way, that the G- of Gjertrud is silent [and it’s pronounced YAIR-trood]), and poets completely unknown to me whom I now want to investigate further, like André Frénaud—so little known in the English-speaking world he doesn’t have an English Wikipedia article [he does now, created in 2024]—whose “Incertitude des rus et rivières” (the name is wonderful all by itself: ru, from Latin rivus, is ‘stream, rivulet’), from his Nul ne s’égare, précédé de Hæres, begins:

Le Vau ou la Vau, une autre, ou le même,
qui se fond dans l’Oze, et l’Oze on dirait,
—ou si c’était l’Oise, ou c’est l’Ozerain—

—how could I resist a poem that plays with confusion of gender and toponyms?

Also, I thought I’d found the greatest name ever when I saw a book by the Belarusan poet Valzhyna Mort, but Wikipedia tells me she was born Valhyna Martynava, so presumably she chose her Addams Family–like moniker herself.

One of the most famous papal encyclicals is Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), about labor, capital, and social justice. I’m not going to go into either the theological or the historical implications of the speech; my interest here (and, frankly, my interest tout court) is solely in the title and its meaning. I was—”shocked” would be too strong a word; let’s say unhappy—to discover that the Wikipedia article begins: “Rerum Novarum (Latin for On the New Things)…” As I sputtered on the Talk page:

“Rerum novarum” does not mean “On the New Things”! To translate “res novae” by “new things” is like translating “hot dog” into French as “chien chaud.” “Res novae” is a fixed phrase or idiom meaning (to quote the Oxford Latin Dictionary) “constitutional changes, revolution.” That is what it has always meant in Latin, and that is how Leo is using it here: “Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, quae diu quidem commovet civitates…” is rendered (in the Wikisource translation) “That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world…” It should be translated “Of revolution” if it must be translated in the first line of the article. […] Well, “Of revolution” is misleading—that could imply revolution is the topic of the encyclical, which it isn’t, it’s just the first two words. That’s why I wrote “if it must be translated in the first line”; it doesn’t make much sense to translate the first two words out of context.

Cicero says “rem publicam miscerent et rerum novarum causam aliquam quaererent”; Caesar says “cupiditate regni adductus novis rebus studebat”; in a lovely bit from the Novum Organum, Francis Bacon writes “Studia enim hominum in ejusmodi locis in quorundam authorum scripta, veluti in carceres, conclusa sunt; a quibus si quis dissentiat, continuo ut homo turbidus et rerum novarum cupidus corripitur”—if you disagree with the accepted authors in a school or academy, you are accused of being a turbulent revolutionary. This is a public service announcement: to translate a foreign language, it is not sufficient to look up each word in a pocket dictionary and string the results together.

Five years ago I posted about “National Grammar Day,” and I’m doing it again for the same reason: because this silly “official day” inspired a good response, a plea for sanity by lexicographer Kory Stamper:

I have a friend–well, a “friend”–who, every March 4th, marches forth into a variety of local stores with a black marker and corrects the signage in the name of “good grammar.” Grocer’s apostrophes are scribbled out, misspellings fixed, and good Lord the corybantic orgy of less/fewer corrections. This friend also printed up a bunch of stickers one year that read, “FIXED THAT FOR YOU. HAPPY NATIONAL GRAMMAR DAY.”
When he was finished telling me about how he observes National Grammar Day, he waited for me to break into a big smile and congratulate him. So when I didn’t–when, instead, my face compressed itself ever so slightly into a look of utter distaste–he was very confused. “Seriously,” he said, “don’t tell me that’s not awesome.”
Reader: that is not awesome.

Go on, read the whole thing; I call your attention in particular to her use of John E. McIntyre’s brilliant coinage “peeververein.”

Ever since I added Gasan Guseinov’s LiveJournal (in Russian; see this LH post) to my Google Reader feed, I’ve enjoyed his cheeky, hyperliterate essays (and his gravelly voice—the posts come with an audio file) on a regular basis. His latest is called “Жириновский – это Достоевский сегодня!” [Zhirinovsky is the Dostoevsky of today!], and I’m posting about it here because of his citing of Dostoevsky, specifically the November 1877 issue of his Writer’s Diary. The first section of the issue is devoted to explications of two words which Dostoevsky says he introduced into Russian literature, “стрюцкие” [stryutskie], something like ‘worthless bums,’ and “стушеваться” [stushevat’sya], ‘to disappear gradually, fade away to nothing.’ The first is a piece of Petersburg street slang [see Sashura’s comment below] he used several times in the Diary (e.g., “Мы в Европе лишь стрюцкие,” which Kenneth Lantz translates “We are but useless wretches in Europe”) and says people keep writing him about, so he has decided to explain it. He goes into some detail about the situations in which Petersburgers use it (often of drunks), and ends by saying that such worthless creatures exist in educated circles as well, and “how can one resist calling these higher-ups ‘striutskys’ as well?” I enjoyed the word (and Dostoevsky’s obvious relish in it), but the reason I decided to post about it is that I looked it up in Vasmer and discovered that it was an expansion of стрюк [stryuk], with the same meaning, and стрюк in turn is a shortened form of бастрюк [bastryuk] ‘bastard,’ which comes (via Polish) from German bastard! Whodathunkit?

As for стушеваться, he describes how it arose as student slang “when I was studying in the Main School of Military Engineering” and derived from the importance of learning how to shade [стушёвывать] plans drawn in India ink [тушь], but what I want to quote here is the final paragraph of the section, which illustrates one reason it’s hard to dislike Dostoevsky (again, the translation is Lantz’s):

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Here’s another tidbit from Early Modern Russian Writers (see this post), Alexander Levitsky’s introduction to his article on Mikhail Kheraskov:

The slim volume of poetry with which Mikhail Matveevich Kheraskov’s oeuvre is represented in this [i.e., the 20th] century does not even begin to outline the influence this poet had on the development of Russian literature, nor does it give any idea of his actual importance for Russian cultural history. Cliché formulas about Kheraskov, mostly generated during the period following his death and generally hostile to his legacy, abound even among scholars of eighteenth-century literature. Much of this unjust posthumous assessment stems from the fact that Kheraskov simply is not read. If his complete works were ever published, they would fill the space on bookshelves occupied only by the most prolific of poets. His only published collected works (1796–1803) comprise twelve volumes but account for only about half of his writings. Besides being scarce, Kheraskov’s works are but a pale reflection of a man who left his imprint on practically every genre practiced during his long life and who helped shape the aesthetic norms of his age.

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Since Sentence first and XIX век are doing link roundups, I guess I’ll join the club:

1) Txtng Rules: Anne Curzan explains why texting isn’t ruining the English language and passes on what she’s learned from her students; this in particular struck me:

LOL no longer means ‘laughing out loud’ (so the OED gets credit for including LOL in the third edition, but the definition is already out of date). To show laughter, EMC now often relies on “hahaha” (students tell me that you need at least three ha’s to show laughter if they are not capitalized). LOL is now a way to flag that a message is meant to be funny (similar to jk—‘just kidding’) or to signal irony. LOL can also be a way to acknowledge that a writer has received a text—a written version of a nod of the head and a smile (“a chuckle at most,” one student told me).

2) NBC Pronunciation Standards: Ben Trawick-Smith takes a look back at General American English from over half a century ago.

3) No smoking in Arabic! (via Anatoly).

4) Rhymes With Runt: Forrest Wickman answers the question “How did the C-word become such an offensive insult?” (“Others have noted that some people in the 13th and 14th centuries also had the word in their names, in a way that seems unlikely today: Some men and women at that time included Bele Wydecunthe, Robert Clevecunt, and Gunoka Cuntles.”)

5) Story Bud? A video of Dublin phrases, with notes (the helpful notes supplied by Stan Carey).

I’ve long been a fan of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series (Wikipedia, publisher’s site), now up to Volume 366 (Orientalist Writers), but I’ve had to consult them in libraries, since the damn things cost over $300 each. New, that is; a while back it occurred to me to add the ones for Russian writers to my private Amazon wishlist, and sure enough, they occasionally show up used for only a few bucks. So far I’ve accumulated volumes 198 (Russian literature in the age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose), 238 (Russian novelists in the age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), 272 (Russian prose writers between the world wars), and the most recently acquired, Early Modern Russian Writers (Volume 150, covering the late 17th and 18th centuries). It may seem odd to spend one’s time reading biographical articles on obscure writers no one’s given a thought to in a couple hundred years, but I find that in some ways reading about minor writers is more interesting and revealing than reading about major ones. You read about Tolstoy’s life to understand Tolstoy, but you read about Andrey Bolotov or Vasily Kapnist to understand their times. These were people struggling to get by, most of them, who used literature as a means of getting a little money and renown at a time when that was just becoming possible. Irwin Titunik’s introductory paragraph on Vasily Ruban (Russian Wikipedia) will give an idea of how these articles expand one’s idea of Russian literature:

Vasilii Grigor’evich Ruban was an enterprising and prolific participant in eighteenth-century Russia’s equivalent of Grub Street—a host of professional literary men willing and able to undertake any writing task, equally adept at producing manuals on agriculture or card playing, at composing panegyric odes to the high and mighty or Russifying the works of Homer or Horace, and at performing as compilers, editors, and publishers. Such hackwork was by no means necessarily of poor quality; reputable writers were produced in this way. In Ruban’s case there were works compiled, edited, published, and also translated by him that received wide approval and appreciation. However, Ruban was notorious among his contemporaries for producing great quantities of occasional poems, especially those written for or to patrons whose protection, gifts, and monetary support he solicited and often gained. Ruban’s more distinguished and independent fellow writers reviled and mocked these “obsequious” verses, and he was subsequently condemned as a sycophant[…] Although that reputation has survived into the twentieth century, an unbiased assessment, without denying his reprehensible traits, must also acknowledge Ruban not only as a literary entrepreneur of extraordinary energy and versatility (not to speak of productivity) but also a competent writer typical of eighteenth-century Russia and of interest in his own right, especially as a poet.

One of the sad aspects of literary history is the tendency of writers blessed with a good position in society, from Pushkin to Virginia Woolf, to sneer at the lowly scribblers who are unable to match their leisurely grace.

Some other tidbits from this volume: of the religious figure Gedeon (Russian Wikipedia), “the first to preach in Russian rather than Church Slavonic,” Victor Zhivov writes:

Having become a grandee in his way, Gedeon also adopted the accepted cultural codes dictating how a magnate should act. One element of such behavior at mid century was apparently petty tyranny, and anecdotes about Gedeon ascribe such behavior to him. For example, it is said that while walking through the Trinity–Saint Sergius Monastery with his protégé Platon Levshin (the future metropolitan of Moscow; at the time a simple priest), Gedeon noticed the valuable silk cassock Platon was wearing and pushed him into a pond. Afterwards he reportedly made an admonition that someone of a lower rank should not be upset when a superior jokes with him and thereupon presented Platon with two expensive cassocks to replace the one that had been ruined.

Antiokh Kantemir had problems as a young man because his father “named as his heir whichever son excelled the most in his studies by the time of his coming of age,” at the same time calling Antiokh, the youngest, “the best of all in intelligence and learning”; as you might imagine, “the indefiniteness of the will regarding the inheritance later resulted in lengthy family disputes.” And it was fascinating to read David Gasperetti’s article on Matvei Komarov (Russian Wikipedia), forgotten now but in his day “Russia’s first best-selling literary figure,” whose 1779 Van’ka Kain “reached more readers than almost any other Russian novel, with a publication history spanning close to one hundred years,” and whose Milord George was even more successful: “Belinsky went so far as to call the novel immortal, and […] Leo Tolstoy observed that the people were far more interested in Milord George than in the belles lettres and philosophy that the leading lights of Russian culture would have them read. Komarov’s tale of the English lord remained a best-seller in Russia until the newly established Bolshevik state did what the cajoling of previous generations of critics never could: it confiscated an edition of the work that was at press in 1918, thus ending its remarkable 136-year publication history.”

Man, the internet keeps providing me with new goodies. Check this out: The parallel corpus of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” translations “is an electronic philological tool designed to compare different translation versions of that monument of ancient Russian literature.” You enter a numbers from 1 to 218 in the fragment number field, and you get dozens and dozens of versions of that fragment: first the various Old Russian editions (Jakobson’s critical edition, the first edition, the copy made by order of Catherine II, and various reconstructions), then a whole bunch of translations into Russian, then a whole bunch of translations into Slavic languages (about half into Ukrainian, but quite a few into Polish and Czech and several into the South Slavic languages), and finally a whole bunch of translations into other languages, starting with English (the first being Nabokov’s) and ending with Ossetian (translation by G. Pliev). On their About page they go into a lot of detail about the project and how it fits into corpus linguistics; me, I could spend days just splashing around in the various languages, seeing how different people have dealt with the text. And there’s all kinds of ancillary material at the site, like Zaliznyak’s 355-page book on the Slovo (pdf). Gloriosky!, as Little Annie Rooney used to say. (Incidentally, one of the translations into modern Russian is by Yu. Kosirati; does anybody know what kind of name Kosirati is?)

The wonderful Mary Beard is always worth reading; her recent TLS column “Man ist was man isst?” is about “the great horsemeat scandal,” but in the course of it she mentions parenthetically “a friend who recently reminded me that Elizabeth David referred to a celebratory dish of roast cat in Sardinia.” This caught my eye, as it did that of some of the commenters—”Gigi Santow said… Please, please, could someone provide corroborating chapter and verse for Elizabeth David’s cat feast in Sardinia?”—and Mary Beard provided the relevant quote: “An Italian friend of mine once told me that in Sardinia a peasant woman had said to her, ‘Christmas without a roast cat wouldn’t be Christmas’ (Elizabeth David’s Christmas, 2003: 133, under ‘Bread Sauce’).” In response, commenter Caroline said “Cat in Italian is ‘gatto’ but this spelling and pronunciation is used for ‘gateau’, cake in French. I believe that the cat for Christmas in Sardinia is a crunchy almond biscuit!” and Michael Bulley followed up:

Well, nearly. It isn’t to do with cats. Elizabeth David should have brought along a translator or her publishers should have used a proper proofreader. Here’s an extract from “The Sardinian Art of Pastry”:
“The most famous perhaps is the gatto. Prepared every year during the festival that honours a town’s local saint, it is basically a nougat made with sugar and almonds, and sometimes orange peel. What makes the gatto special is that it is painstakingly made to resemble in cake form the town church or religious structure in a miniature replica. During the celebrations, the gatto made especially for the occasion is made the centerpiece.”
In Sicily, however, the gatto is a cheese and potato pie.

There is further discussion of Sardinian gattò and the various ways of preparing it, which you can read at the link, but I wanted to provide the public service of reassuring everyone that Sardinians do not, in fact, eat cats for Christmas. (A tip o’ the Languagehat hat to AJP for the very entertaining link.)