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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!

Ilya Perelmuter has a new internet magazine called Four Centuries: Russian Poetry in Translation: I learned about it through his LibraryThing post, where he writes:

Dear friends,
I would like to inform you of a new electronic magazine of Russian poetry translated into different languages, including English. [..] This magazine is absolutely non-commercial and is free for anyone! Three issues have already come out, translations in five languages: English, German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Estonian. Your opinion is extremely important for me as a publisher! Thanks a lot in advance. Ilya Perelmuter, Publisher, Essen, Germany

Check it out; each issue is a separate pdf, and the different languages are on differently colored pages.

Grumbly Stu sent me a link to this website for a company called ReadSpeaker, which calls itself “the worldwide leader in online text to speech.” I have no idea what the competition is like, but their results are impressive; you can listen to a bunch of short samples of languages on that page, or check out the results in English on this page (click “Listen”) and in German on this one (click the easy-to-miss loudspeaker symbol just below the R in BARACKE). Grumbly says “The German sample is much better than the Deutsche Bahn can manage.”

Also, a slight but amusing little story by Max Fisher from the Washington Post: “CIA officially denies that it is trying to erase a letter from the Russian alphabet“; it links to a longer one from the Wall Street Journal, “Yo: In Russia, Two Dots Can Mean a Lot.” We discussed the “yo” controversy back in 2005 (with proponent Chumakov already making an appearance).

Writers No One Reads has a great concept:

Highlighting forgotten, neglected, abandoned, forsaken, unrecognized, unacknowledged, overshadowed, out-of-fashion, under-translated writers. Has no one read your books? You are in good company.

Disclaimer: These writers are famous in some part of the internet or the world. Some may be famous in your own family or in your own mind.

I’ve already found a forgotten poet I like a lot, Carolyn Rodgers (1940-2010): “She was a key member of the Black Arts Movement and a student of Gwendolyn Brooks. As so often happens with women in the arts, she was chastised for what men were celebrated for” (e.g., profanity: “they say,/ that i should not use the word/ muthafucka anymo/ in my poetry or in any speech i give./ they say,/ that i must and can only say it to myself…”).

If you’re thinking George Egerton looks like a woman, it’s because she was (she was born Mary Chavelita Dunne); she “eloped to Norway with a violently alcoholic bigamist, living there until he wisely died two years later. But it was in Scandinavia that her writing began to blossom—she was fascinated by Strindberg and Ibsen, and became both the lover and the first English-language translator of Knut Hamsun.” Alas: “When she settled down as a wife and mother, her prose and popularity collapsed.”

Our Martian friend Siganus Sutor sent me this BBCNews piece by “Dr Mark Turin, Linguist and broadcaster,” a sort of sequel to the Economist article I posted about last year, like it focusing on the Endangered Language Alliance. Turin quotes one of its founders, Daniel Kaufman, as follows:

Several languages have been uttered for the very last time in New York, he says.
“There are these communities that are completely gone in their homeland. One of them, the Gottscheers, is a community of Germanic people who were living in Slovenia, and they were isolated from the rest of the Germanic populations.
“They were surrounded by Slavic speakers for several hundreds of years so they really have their own variety [of language] which is now unintelligible to other German speakers.”
The last speakers of this language have ended up in Queens, he says, and this has happened to many other communities.

You can hear an audio clip of Kaufman with speakers of Chamorro, Mixteco, Livonian, and others. Thanks, Sig!

I’m slowly and painfully making my way through Brodsky’s “Литовский ноктюрн: Томасу Венцлова” [Lithuanian Nocturne: for Tomas Venclova], one of the most difficult poems by that frequently difficult poet, and in the third stanza I hit a couple of particularly difficult words: “Запоздалый еврей/ по брусчатке местечка гремит балаголой,/ вожжи рвет/ и кричит залихватски: ‘Герай!'” In Brodsky’s own translation, this goes: “And a cart-riding Jew,/ late for home, drums the village’s cobblestone, trying to make it,/ yanks the reins hard/ and bellows ‘Gerai!'” By comparison we can guess that балаголой [balagoloi] might have something to do with a cart, but there was no балагола in any of my Russian dictionaries, even Dahl… but when in desperation I checked Vasmer, there it was (in masculine guise): “балагол: ‘еврейский тарантас’, […] из еврейско-нем. balagole “кучер” […]. Ср. знач. русск. извозчик: 1. ‘кучер’, 2. ‘повозка, экипаж’.” In other words, it’s a word for a Jewish springless carriage, from Yiddish balagole ‘coachman’ (for the shift in meaning, compare Russian izvozchik 1. ‘coachman,’ 2. ‘unsprung carriage’). This sent me to Weinreich’s Yiddish dictionary, where sure enough, I found בעל-עגלה [balegole] ‘coachman,’ which appears in my Hebrew dictionary as ba’al ‘agalah ‘coachman, wagon driver,’ with the same ba’al ‘owner’ that appears in so many Hebrew and Yiddish compounds, a familiar one in American Jewish circles being baleboste (sometimes “baleboosteh”) “a capable, efficient housewife, especially a traditional Jewish one, devoted to maintaining a well-run home.”
Oh, and that mysterious “Gerai!” the coachman bellows? It’s simply the Lithuanian word geraĩ ‘well’ (the adverb from geras ‘good’). Except it’s not as simple as all that; as “A. G.” says on this page, it seems unlikely that a Jewish coachman in (necessarily prewar) Lithuania, traveling through a shtetl, would be talking to himself in Lithuanian. A. G. suspects “ироническое значение” (an ironic meaning).