languagehat.com

Sam Taylor (translator of Laurent Binet’s HHhH) has a piece in the Financial Times that has some interesting if not terribly original things to say about translation; I want to reproduce one paragraph that I find odd:

Although translators often say they enjoy the inter­action with authors – as I enjoyed my email exchanges with Laurent Binet – I am ambivalent about the idea of authors being involved in the translation process. Perhaps this is because I have been on the other side of the equation. When I told my French editor I would like to read the translation of my second novel, The Amnesiac, at an early stage, she told me I ought simply to trust in her and the translator’s judgement. I think she was right. No matter how good their understanding of the target language, the author is generally too subjective – too focused on the idea of seeing their exact phrases reproduced in another language – to be able to judge the effect of the translation.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think a translator who doesn’t want to deal with the author is motivated more by fear of reproach than high-minded scruples.

Taylor goes on to say “There is also something else slightly troubling about the relationship between authors and translators. It can, I suppose, be reduced almost to a hierarchical relationship: the author is primary, the translator secondary.” Well, yeah. Why is that troubling? If you want to be primary, write a book.

I’ve started Moscow, 1937 by Karl Schlögel, a book I’m enjoying every bit as much as I’d anticipated—it’s just the kind of blend of literary, cultural, and political history, with constant references to geography (and a nice annotated map of Moscow on the endpapers), that I love. It opens with a bird’s-eye conspectus of the city in a chapter called “Navigation: Margarita’s Flight” (from the novel I posted about here), which leads to a discussion of “Bulgakov’s Moscow,” in the course of which Schlögel mentions “N. Piashnin’s apartment in Savelevskii pereulok 12, the meeting place of the literary Moscow of the end of the 1920s.” Well, I’m extremely interested in the literary Moscow of the 1920s, so of course I wanted to know who this N. Piashnin was. Unfortunately, Google could find no trace of any Piashnin or Pyashnin, and I didn’t have any better luck with Пяшнин. Fortunately, it occurred to me that this “sh” might be a Germanized version of Russian ж, normally rendered in English by “zh” (see this cri de coeur from the very first week of LH), and with a little detective work I turned up this page on Bulgakov from Москва энциклопедия (clearly Schlögel’s source), which says “на квартире Н.Н. Пяжнина (так называемые пяжнинские чтения, куда съезжалась вся литературная Москва 20—30-х гг.; Савельевский переулок, 12)” [in the apartment of N. N. Pyazhnin (the so-called Pyazhnin readings, which all literary Moscow of the ’20s-’30s attended; Savelevsky pereulok, 12)]. But there is no other record of this “N. N. Pyazhnin”! In fact, if you google the surname you get “Your search – Пяжнин – did not match any documents.” So I turn to the Varied Reader: does anybody happen to know what literary figure is being referred to here? Or is this a Russian Mountweazel?

Update. OK, I think I’ve solved part of the puzzle. It turns out that Bulgakov’s close friend N. N. Lyamin (Булгаковская Энциклопедия entry for Лямин Николай Николаевич) lived at Savelevskii pereulok 12 with his wife Natalia Ushakova. The nonexistent name “Pyazhnin” is clearly a distortion of Lyamin. But how and why did the distortion creep in? At any rate, it just goes to show you can’t trust any information without double-checking it.

Addendum. Just came across another name so badly mangled I feel I should note it here for the benefit of other readers of the book: on page 148, the nonexistent “Nina Neshkina” is actually Militsa Nechkina, a historian prominent enough to have her own Wikipedia page.

Update. The excellent Arthénice posted about this, and the discussion is well worth reading; commenter labas writes that although Lyamin existed, “ни понятия ‘ляминские чтения’ (одно упоминание в книге 1993 г.), ни съезда на них ‘всей литературной Москвы’, насколько я могу судить, не существовало” [there don’t seem to have been any “Lyamin readings” (there’s one mention in a 1993 book) nor did “all literary Moscow” go to them, as far as I can judge], and crivelli links to this interesting article about Lyamin’s widow and her memories of Bulgakov (in Russian, of course).

I’ve written about “the whole nine yards” more than once as new evidence has emerged; the last time was back in 2009. Now a startling new development has thrown the number of yards into question and antedated the phrase by decades, to 1912. To quote Jennifer Schuessler’s NY Times story:

The recent discovery of several instances of “the whole six yards” in newspapers from the 1910s — four decades before the earliest known references to “the whole nine yards” — opens a new window onto “the most prominent etymological riddle of our time,” said Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who announced the findings in next month’s issue of The Yale Alumni Magazine.

Other language experts agree about the import of the discovery. “The phrase is interesting because it’s so mysterious,” said Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, who has written previously on the search for its origin. “It’s been a kind of Holy Grail.”

See Schuessler’s story for details; I like very much the final quote from Shapiro: “People are drawn to colorful etymologies. But they are almost always wrong.”

I don’t know if there ever was such a thing as a “said book” listing innumerable substitutes for the simple and useful verb “said,” but that concept is the basis of the term “said-bookism,” known to most professional writers as something to avoid as a sure sign of amateurism. You can get examples and explanations many places, e.g. here and (in inimitable TV Tropes style) here; google the term for more. I’m posting about them because I’ve finally gotten irritated beyond endurance by an (otherwise excellent) book I’m reading, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald J. Raleigh. Raleigh has interviewed a bunch of Russians who graduated from high school in 1967 (a year before me)—specifically, from the well-known Moscow School #20 (now 1239) and Saratov School #42, both elite institutions focused on teaching English and full of nomenklatura kids—and the information presented is riveting, to me at least; I’m getting a real sense of what it was like to grow up and go to school for my coevals in a country I’ve always been fascinated with.

But the writing! Raleigh has the expected academic sins of plodding prose enlivened by occasional attempts at slang or wit, but what really gets my goat are the said-bookisms; I’ve never seen so many collected in one place before, and they’re almost all wretchedly misused. I wouldn’t mind an occasional “exclaimed” or “complained,” but these are so awful you wonder whether he understands the meaning of the verbs. Let’s take “quipped”: “As Sofiya Vinogradova quipped, ‘Children with grandparents had a better childhood than those without.'” “Repeating a popular saying, Father Valentin quipped, ‘There are no atheists in the trenches.'” “The majority of members of the B class (BESHnik/beshniki), however, called attention to the distinction between the two groups [children of the Party elite and others]. As Irina Tsurkan quipped, ‘It’s probably the children of the Party officials who claim there was no difference.'” “‘It was never interesting there,’ quipped Tatyana Artyomova, ‘because the other kids were strangers.'” The mind boggles. Of course, there are normal, merely awkward and pointless said-bookisms like “‘If I see in a store evaporated milk made in Verkhovie, I buy it,’ stated Starik.” But the verb that infuriated me enough to post comes at the end of this paragraph:

But the elite schools did not prepare the interviewees for the oppressive politicization of college-level instruction that Anna Lyovina called “awful.” Going against the current [most students wanted to switch from night to day classes], she switched from the daytime to the evening division of Moscow’s IFL. “I did so after my freshman year. I thought I’d go out of my mind, because of the History of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], History of the CPSU, and History of the CPSU. It was torture. I couldn’t stand it. Then there was Military Science. There was far less of it in the evening division,” she said. Yet even there, “they constantly tried to indoctrinate us, ‘You are translators on the ideological front. You will interact with foreigners and you have to be careful, you have to be grounded.’” An old Bolshevik who taught Party history regaled her charges about how she carried out collectivization. As a child, however, Lyovina had been exposed to a counternarrative: “My dear nanny would tell me that all of her relatives from Tambov province, hard-working peasants who fed Russia, were exiled to Siberia. I couldn’t happily reply, Hoorah! Collectivization!” rationalized Anna.

“Rationalized Anna”?! All I can say is: what

I’m pretty beat—we had the family over here this year, and what with two young boys and a dog (a very well-behaved dog, mind you) and gallons of Norwegian meatballs and potatoes and cabbages and beer (and a little Linie) and the opening of presents and playing of games, I’m about ready to pack it in, so I’ll just list the books I’ve received that may be of interest to LH readers:
Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer
The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes
Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts by David C. Engerman
Moscow, 1937 by Karl Schlögel
The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930 by Gerald Janecek
Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald J. Raleigh
It’ll take me a while to work through them all, but I’m looking forward to it. The very best holiday wishes to all LH readers!

My brother sent me this Guardian link:

Authors choose their favourite short stories
For the next two weeks over the festive period we will be running a short story podcast each day. Our contributing authors introduce the stories they have chosen to read

From Zadie Smith on Giuseppe Pontiggia to Will Self on Jorge Luis Borges, the selections and descriptions are interesting even if you’re not a podcast person, and (as I told my brother) it’s worth it just for the chance to read “The Story of My Dovecote” by Isaac Babel (chosen by Nathan Englander; the Russian text is here, for those who read Russian). It’s not exactly cheery holiday fare—in fact, it’s grim as death—but boy, is it one hell of a story. And I look forward to checking out some of the others. Thanks, Eric!

Having enjoyed A Russian Gil Blas so much, I’m reading Narezhny’s other best-known work, Бурсак (Bursak, ‘the seminary student’; for more on bursa ‘seminary’—not ‘stock market’!—see this post). For the first half I wasn’t sure why it was one of the young Dostoevsky’s favorite novels, but now that the titular seminary student, Neon (virtually all Narezhny’s characters have what seem today ludicrous pseudo-classical names), has become a warrior in the service of the hetman, fighting for his native Ukraine and getting into complicated moral situations, I’m starting to get a sense of what attracted him. (One thing I don’t understand is when the action is supposed to be taking place; the only date that’s given suggests the end of the seventeenth century, as does the siting of the hetman’s capital at Baturin, but it is repeatedly stated that the Ukrainians are fighting to free themselves from the Poles and put themselves under the protective wing of Moscow, which implies the uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in midcentury. But I suppose one can’t expect historical accuracy from what is essentially a Boy’s Own adventure.)

At any rate, in Part Three, when Neon becomes a valued commander and begins to learn the secrets of his own origin, his father-in-law says that a nasty fellow named Varipsav (“Dog-cooker,” speaking of literary names) had been publicizing shameful things about his family, “и думаю, что если бы в городах наших, по примеру польских, устроены были книгопечатни, то стыд моего дома он распространил бы по всей Малороссии” [‘and I think that if printing presses had been built in our cities on the Polish example, he would have spread the shame of my household over all Ukraine’]. That’s one aspect of print technology that hadn’t occurred to me.

Once again, a publication that hides most of its material behind a paywall has kindly left accessible to one and all an article I want to share: in this case, Colin Burrow’s LRB review of Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature, by Alastair Fowler [archived]. Here’s the start:

James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name.

And here’s a bit on Jane Austen:

Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The fact that Austen called the knightly Knightley ‘Knightley’ suggests the way the choice of a name can follow from the particular nature of a specific work, and may also feed back into a larger literary design. The point of the one-off over-explicit name is that Knightley’s knightliness is utterly obvious to the reader every time his name is mentioned, but it passes Emma by. That was a strong enough reason for Austen to break one of her unwritten rules about naming.

How can you resist a reviewer who finds a way to work “knightly Knightley ‘Knightley’” into a review? The book sounds like an enjoyable (if dense) read itself, with the proviso that Fowler is one of those innumerate people easily led astray by coincidences, a folly which Burrow spends the last half of the review exploding—the particular species of folly in this case being an over-ready acceptance of the idea of hidden anagrams (compare Saussure’s similar succumbing to wacky ideas): “Fowler […] cites with approbation an article by Roy Winnick (‘now I cry ink’) which he says ‘startled the scholarly world’ by revealing anagrams which spell out the name WRIOTHESLEY buried throughout Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” I should add that my title is borrowed from Burrow: “I part company with Fowler when he gets on to anagrams and hidden names, perhaps because the best anagram of my own name is ‘I, lowborn cur’.”

Update (Sept. 2024). The LRB no longer leaves the article accessible to one and all, so I have provided an archived link as well.

Kerim Friedman wrote me, “Amitav Ghosh is doing some great posts on the ‘lost languages of the age of sail’ on his blog,” and so it turned out to be. Here’s the first of eleven (he’s up to number 6 as of today); I’ll give a brief sample:

The crew of the William Stewart was by no means exceptional in its heterogeneity. The Tynemouth, a steamship of 1228 tons that sailed from Hong Kong to Australia in 1858, had a crew of 70, of whom thirty-six were white sailors, all English except for four Germans. The others were lascars of various grades, of whom seven were from Bengal. As for the rest they were from places too various to list severally: Daman, Cochin, Gorakhpur, Mungher, Bencoolen (off Sumatra), Massawah (in East Africa) and so on.

On lists like these the term ‘lascar’ has so wide an application that we might well wonder where the word came from and what it meant. The term would appear to be an Anglo-Indian adaptation of the Persian/Urdu lashkar/lashkari, meaning ‘soldier’ or ‘army’.

In passing between languages the word appears to have taken on the connotation of ‘mercenary’ or ‘hired hand’ and was applied in this sense to a certain kind of sailor. The transition seems to have occurred first in Portuguese, in which the words laschar/lasquarim have been in circulation since about 1600 CE: as with many other nautical terms, it was probably through a Lusitanian route that it entered English. The nautical usage of the term is however, distinctively European: in the Indian subcontinent, for example, the word is still generally used to mean ‘army’ or ‘militia’. The extended meaning of ‘sailor’ would appear to have been introduced to the subcontinent by Europeans; when thus used today, it has a touch of both the exotic and the archaic. In sum, the word ‘lascar’ as used on the manifest of the William Stewart, belongs to two kinds of jargon, the nautical and the colonial, and its meaning is specific to those contexts.

If you like this sort of thing, there’s a lot to like at Ghosh’s blog.

People keep sending me links to Joshua Foer’s New Yorker piece “Utopian for Beginners” (“An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented” [archived]), and having read it I can certainly understand why. It’s one of the best language-oriented things I’ve read in a mainstream publication; not only is it about an artificial language and the man who created it, John Quijada, but Foer takes the trouble to get the facts right and talks to or references all the people whose names popped into my head as I started reading it (including Arika Okrent—see this LH post). Furthermore, it gets into the murky waters of the real world in ways that I won’t spoil for you but that make it start to read like a thriller. If I didn’t already subscribe to the magazine, this would make me want to (just as that damn Joan Acocella piece made me doubt the wisdom of subscribing). Here’s a tidbit to get you started:

Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.”

It wasn’t long after he released his manuscript on the Internet that a small community of language enthusiasts began to recognize what Quijada, a civil servant without an advanced degree, had accomplished. Ithkuil, one Web site declared, “is a monument to human ingenuity and design.” It may be the most complete realization of a quixotic dream that has entranced philosophers for centuries: the creation of a more perfect language.

Thanks, everyone who told me to go read it!