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In the course of editing an article on Aulus Gellius (who sounds like an interesting fellow I should investigate further), I came across this quote from the remarkable scholar and editor Leofranc Holford-Strevens (“Aulus Gellius,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 211: Ancient Roman Writers, p. 33): “Aware that in the wrong hands the use of archaic words often creates obscurity, Gellius relates in 1.10 that Favorinus rebuked a young man who affected obsolete usages because he admired antiquity for its moral excellence: he should live by ancient morals but use present-day words.” I’ve put Gellius’s Latin below the cut for those who can read it

Incidentally, Gellius also has the distinction of an oddly nativized French name, Aulu-Gelle. As I pointed out to Marie-Lucie in an e-mail, “all other people named Aulus Something-or-other keep Aulus in French (Aulus Plautius, Aulus Cornelius Celsus, etc. etc.)”; she replied, “perhaps when saying the name the scholars first said Aulus-Gelle as one word, adapting the end only (as with single names like Antoine, Apulée, Pétrone, Térence) but soon the -s was lost before consonants by a regular French rule, hence the pronunciation Aulu-Gelle reflected in the spelling. Others named Aulus X were probably less well-known and came into French texts later, at a time when Latin names were preserved as such if they didn’t already have a French form.” Makes sense to me.

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If there’s one thing I love in literary criticism, it’s a book that shows me a kind of writing I’m interested in from a completely new perspective, one that would never have occurred to me, and makes me see works and authors I already know in a new light while introducing me to others I’ve never heard of. Such a book is Muireann Maguire‘s Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature, which the publisher, Peter Lang, was kind enough to send me. (That Amazon page lists the price as $5,398.35, which seems excessive even for a specialist item; the publisher’s page for the book shows a slightly more reasonable $73.95, €56.45, or £45.00.) Now, I’ve never read Gothic fiction at all—not The Castle of Otranto, not The Mysteries of Udolpho, not even Dracula (though I have of course seen more than one filmed version). In my sf-reading youth I despised anything with ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, and since then, although I’ve found myself reading and enjoying things I thought were as beyond me as brussels sprouts and ballet (Proust, for example), I’ve never gotten around to trying that particular genre. Now Maguire has shown me that the anti-realist impulses that power it underlie much of Russian literature, even though the typical stage props (ghosts, vampires) are rare. She writes, “The centrality of the Gothic-fantastic to Russian fiction is almost impossible to exaggerate, and certainly exceptional in the context of world literature,” and she backs it up.

Though she takes the story back to the early nineteenth century and forward to current writers like Petr Aleshkovsky and Dmitri Bykov, her main focus is (as the subtitle suggests) on the 1920s and ’30s. She spends a good deal of time on well-known masterworks like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Platonov’s Kotlovan, making me want to reread them with these affiliations in mind, but she also goes into detail about lesser-known writers like Alexander Belyayev and Marietta Shaginyan and Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky and largely forgotten ones like Pyotr Krasnov and Nikolai Ognev (obscure enough that he doesn’t have an English Wikipedia page), not to mention Pavel Perov, so obscure his death date isn’t known. She also discusses the unjustifiably neglected early-nineteenth-century writer Antony Pogorelsky, whose Hoffmannesque stories I happened to be reading at the time (see this recent post), which was a nice bit of synchronicity. And in describing a Krzhizhanovsky story called Фантом [Fantom], or “Phantom,” she taught me an unusual sense of both the English and Russian words: “Med. A model of the body or of a body part or organ, esp. one used to demonstrate the progression of the fetus through the birth canal” (OED). (The story is about one such phantom that comes alive and persecutes its creator—brr!) It was such an absorbing read I was sorry it was over, and I’m very much looking forward to the companion book of short stories, Red Spectres, which is even now on its way to me. (I might add that there are amazingly few typos for a 350-page book with lots of passages in Russian; well done, Peter Lang!)

I’ve gotten the following request:

I am looking for Latin reading material I could reasonably give to a curious high-school student. My brother has been taught Latin for the past 4-5 years and he wants to try some “natural” Latin for fun. He’s not interested in the classics of antiquity, but does like reading about the European Renaissance. Realizing that Renaissance Latin is not exactly what students learn in high school, I’d like to find something that’s both COOL and that he can also try to make some actual headway into. My first instinct was a work by Paracelsus or even Kepler’s Somnium. However, I can’t read Latin of any variety and my knowledge of these and similar authors is minimal. Can you think of something you could recommend in this situation? We’re mainly looking for primary documents (i.e., not Hobbitus Ille), preferably in the physical sciences, rather than history or literature. Tractates, manuals, and thesauri are all good.

I, alas, am unable to help, my Latinity being as exiguous and little employed as it is, but I’m sure some of my readers will have recommendations. Fire away!

The always lively Ozwords (“For the dinkum oil on Australian English”) has a post by Julia Robinson on the centennial of children’s author May Gibbs and the popularity of the characters she created, which “has also left its mark on Australian English.” I was particularly struck by the “Banksia Men” who serve as villains; even though I never read the books, just seeing that illustration makes the cone of the Banksia look evil.

The idea of the banksia man as bogey still resonates in adult life: ‘Is “globalisation” the cause of many of the world’s economic troubles, or has it merely become the big, bad Banksia man of our era?’ (Australian Financial Review, 1 September 2001)

If you go to the Ozwords post, you will also learn (if you do not already know) about the gumnut twins Bib and Bub; “the similarity of their names and appearance has given us a way of referring to a pair of people or things who are inseparable or virtually indistinguishable.”

Foras na Gaeilge has just launched its new English-Irish dictionary, Foclóir.ie: “Our aim is to provide comprehensive coverage for every entry, illustrated with examples to give context to the Irish equivalents. As well as translations for the English content, the dictionary also contains sound files and grammatical information.” Those sound files provide Connacht, Munster and Ulster pronunciations of each Irish word, which is so wonderful I can barely believe it. A caveat: “The dictionary is being published on a phased basis, and the full content won’t be online until end-2014. The entries published in January 2013 consist of approximately 30% of the eventual content, however this range covers approximately 80% of general English usage.” But what’s there is very useful, and it’s well worth bookmarking. (Hat tip to Stan Carey.)

Lucy Ferriss at Lingua Franca has a post that made me as intensely nostalgic as yesterday’s Taiwan one, bringing back my late-’60s college days:

I began buttonholing friends and acquaintances. “Picture,” I told them, “a friend who is generally stoned. I say that he’s brought a lid over to my dorm room. What has he brought?”

Men and women born between 1950 and 1958, I found in this completely anecdotal survey, knew immediately that I was talking about four fingers’ worth of marijuana in a plastic bag. Those born before or after those dates (allowing for a bit of regional variation) had no idea what I was talking about. My copy editor, obviously, was a young person.

Slang references give a wide variety of definitions for the pot-related use of lid. Some designate it as an ounce of weed, others as 1/4 or 1/8 ounce. The source may be the lid of a Hellman’s mayonnaise jar, the lid of a Prince Albert tobacco can—in both cases, the amount of marijuana is enough to fill the lid—or, strangely, the finger-shape created by unrolling the lid of a coffee can with its custom key. One source refers to the fold of a sandwich Baggie as its “lid,” suggesting that the bag would be filled to that point. All these so-called authorities agree that the term arose in the 1960s and disappeared by the mid-1970s.

What puzzled me, as I wrestled with the sentence highlighted by my copy editor, was that when we were using the term, there seemed to be no alternative term.[…] [After quoting one theory:] If others have a different story for the rapid, widespread rise of the term lid in the mid-60s and its equally rapid and complete disappearance in the mid-70s, I’d be delighted to hear it.

Decades later, I discover a generational shibboleth I never knew existed!

The translator Howard Goldblatt has a very nice piece in the latest issue of Asymptote, about his decades-long relationship with the Taiwanese writer Huang Chunming:

I finally met Chunming not long after I began teaching at San Francisco State University. Huang, a free spirit like his father (who had come to the US without knowing English and opened a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the Midwest), was traveling around the States in a beat-up, uninsured car he would later abandon when it crapped out on him. We had corresponded briefly, through the good offices of Nancy Ing, so he simply showed up at my flat one day, and that was the beginning of our friendship. I don’t know what we talked about, other than his stories, several of which I had read and was interested in translating; I’m sure he regaled me with his storytelling talent. He would pepper his Mandarin, which I understood, with Taiwanese, which I didn’t, and yet I would always know what he was saying. That talent has stayed with him over the years, and he has become, in my view, the archetype of a speaker of the hybrid language—a mixture of the two languages, with a smattering of English or Japanese—that is contemporary Taiwan’s lingua franca.

It’s quite a story, and makes me miss Taipei terribly; how I’d love to pop into the Astoria (founded by Russian emigres in 1949) for a pastry and coffee!

The rest of the issue looks well worth investigating, too; there’s another piece on translation in which “An author interviews his translator.” Thanks, Bathrobe!

Yuka Igarashi has a nice piece at Granta on a topic close to my heart; the whole thing is worth reading, but I’ll quote the peroration:

There is a danger to copy-editing. You start to read in a different way. You start to see the sentence as machinery. You focus on the gears and levers that connect words to one another; you hunt for the wayward semicolon, the unintentionally ambiguous phrase, the clunky repeated word. You even hope they appear, so you can kill them. You see them when they’re not even there, because you relish slashing your pen across the paper. It gets a little twisted.

As with any kind of technical knowledge or specialization, it is possible to take copy-editing too far, to be ruled by it, to not quite be able to shut it off when it ought to be shut off.

Ultimately, though, I don’t actually think it diminishes the pleasures of reading. The idea of a pure reading experience is a myth, anyway, because purity is a myth. I’m not willing to believe that attending to details or reading very carefully is ever a bad thing. A sentence is, in fact, a machine, an intricate and delicately balanced equation; good copy-editing – good editing more generally – is a way to help a writer get the equation so exactly right that it starts to not seem like one at all. Many times a day, I’ll be hunched over a paragraph, wondering whether a particular pronoun has the correct antecedent, whether one independent clause should be dependent, and suddenly I’ll be caught off guard by a stunning turn of phrase or find myself jolted by a perfectly articulated insight. The power that writing can have, at these times, far outstrips the power it would have were I merely a so-called casual reader. I might be a freak, and ruined for life, but I’m resigned to – no, happy with – this fate.

Allan Metcalf has a nice appreciation of Eric P. Hamp and of his field, historical linguistics, in Lingua Franca:

Indo-European linguists like Hamp compare the modern languages with one another to reconstruct the common ancestor spoken some thousands of years ago, long before any language was recorded. That means observing patterns of relationships among hundreds of current languages. To do this properly means studying those hundreds of languages. Hamp has done this, not only with written languages but also with personal fieldwork throughout Europe and parts of Asia to learn lesser-known languages and dialects.

He quotes some nice bits from Hamp’s articles in the latest issue of Comments on Etymology, e.g. “Welsh illustrates with its normal set of numeral terms how a sophisticated and notably artistic and musical culture can evolve a set of terms at the same time traditionally systematic yet so complex that it would tire out and lose any of their neighbors if they ever took the trouble to learn to read their genuinely gorgeous poetry.” Hamp is 92 and still going strong, and reading things like this makes me wish I’d stuck it out in what was once my field as well.

I’ve been reading Pogorelsky‘s delightful Двойник [The Double, 1828], a series of novellas in open imitation of Hoffmann but none the worse for that; the second concerns a young Russian count who goes to Leipzig to study and falls in love with the beautiful “daughter” of a strange Neapolitan mathematician who turns out (spoiler alert!) to be his clockwork creation; the narrator objects to his eponymous double, who has told him the story, that such things are impossible, and among the examples adduced by the double to counter his doubt is a certain famous talking doll: “Кукла эта, названная Андроидою Алберта Великого, по свидетельству тогдашних писателей, так была умна, что Алберт советовался с нею во всех важных случаях; но, к сожалению, один из его учеников, которому надоела неумолкаемая болтливость этой куклы, однажды в сердцах разбил ее на части.” [This doll, called the Android of Albertus Magnus, according to the testimony of writers of the time was so intelligent that Albert consulted with it on all important occasions; unfortunately, one of his students, tired of its incessant chattering, in his anger smashed it to bits.]

I was quite struck to see the Russian equivalent of “android” used that early, and indeed it is the first use in Russian literature (the next is in an 1836 story by Veltman—”Вот скитаются андроиды на паркетных берегах Стикса” [Androids are wandering there on the parquet banks of the Styx]—and in Bryusov‘s 1908 The Fiery Angel it is again used, several times, of Albertus’s creation). Of course I wanted to know how far back it went in English, so I went to the OED, where I found (in an unrevised entry from 1884) the first citation “1728 E. Chambers Cycl. (at cited word), Albertus Magnus, is recorded as having made an Androides.” I thought perhaps I could antedate that using Google Books, and I did quite well if I do say so myself, taking it back to 1657 in an English translation (The History of Magick: By Way of Apology, for All the Wise Men who Have Unjustly Been Reputed Magicians, from the Creation, to the Present Age) of Gabriel Naudé‘s Apologie pour tous les grands personages faussement soupçonnez de magie (1625, 1653, 1669, 1712). Google Books has the 1653 edition, where we find on p. 539 “Apres quoy si l’on veut insister avec Aristote que le bruit commun ne peut estre totalement faux, & que par consequent tant d’Autheurs n’auroient parlé de cette Androide d’Albert s’il n’en avoit esté quelque chose,” which J. Davies, the translator, rendered “To re-inforce which Argument, if any shall with Aristotle insist, that common report cannot be absolutely false, and consequently, that so many Authors would not have spoken of the Androides of Albertus, if something had not been in the wind.” (I’ll put the embedded image below the cut for those who can see it.)

So is that the first printed occurrence in English? We’ll have to wait and see what else turns up as Google keeps digitizing the world’s libraries. But a more interesting question is, where does the word ultimately come from? Who decided to put Greek ἀνδρ- ‘man’ together with the suffix -οειδής ‘having the form or likeness of,’ and in what language did they do it? There are various sites saying things like “the term ‘android’ was probably invented by Albertus Magnus,” but I suspect they’re just extrapolating from the fact that it seems to have been first used to describe his creation. Does anybody have any information that would shed light on this?

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