A reader sent me a link to this remarkable Wikipedia article: “Su Hui … was a Chinese poet of the Middle Sixteen Kingdoms period (304 to 439) during the Six Dynasties period. … She is most famous for her extremely complex ‘palindrome’ (huiren) poem, apparently having innovated the genre, as well as producing the most complex example to date. Apparently, all of her other thousands of literary works have been lost.” I suspect she wouldn’t be happy to know that her elaborate literary stunt would be all that survived of her work, but hey, at least she’s remembered for something. At any rate, gaze at the multicolored reproduction of her magnum opus in the Wikipedia article and marvel: “The poem is in the form of a twenty-nine by twenty-nine character grid, and can be read forward or backwards, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. This arrangement allows for 2,848 different readings.” I presume it’s no masterpiece as a poem, but I’d be curious to know what my Sinophone readers have to say about it. (Thanks, Trevor!)
THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN THOUGHT.
Sarah J. Young is a Lecturer in Russian at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies; on her About Me page she writes:
I currently teach an MA course on narratives of imprisonment and exile, and undergraduate courses on Russian thought, Dostoevsky, and Modern Russian Prose Fiction (1917-41). […] My main areas of research are nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, thought and culture. I am specifically interested in questions of ethics and subjectivity in the development of narrative, including narratives of trauma and imprisonment; the tradition of Russian literature and the arts as the locus of political debate and dissent; the role of religion and spiritual ideas in Russian literature; the significance of silence and what is not said in literary texts; and questions of time and space in Russian literature.
Which all sounds extremely interesting, but the reason I’m posting about her is that course on Russian thought, for which she is putting online a series of lectures intended to provide necessary background. Her introductory post includes this appetizing bit:
Last year, one of my students said that this was the course where everything else made sense – where Solov’ev’s esoteric poetry and the rise of Bolshevism came together. Whatever their flaws (and sometimes within their flaws), one can discover in very different thinkers common ways of approaching specifically Russian questions, which can provide significant insight into Russian culture. I hope that’s what this course enables, and I hope these lectures will help overcome some of the challenges the texts present.
I’m adding her blog to my Google Reader feed and will be educating myself with avidity, and I imagine there are those among my readers who will want to do the same. I discovered her site because her first lecture, “Petr Chaadaev and the Russian Question,” was linked by XIX век, which anyone interested in Russian intellectual and literary history should also bookmark.
ARABS STUDYING YIDDISH.
An Al-Monitor story by Dudi Goldman focuses on an unexpected phenomenon:
“Yiddish intrigues me with its majesty and its enigmatic, refined musical tone. I have no explanation for the fact that I have always felt a connection to this language.”
Contrary to what you might expect, the speaker of these lines is not a Polish poet or German philosopher. He is Yusuf Alakili, 50, from Kfar Kassem, currently investing much effort in his studies for a Master’s degree in literature at Bar Ilan University’s Hebrew. Alakili studies Yiddish on the side for his own enjoyment.
How did this affair start? “In the 1980s, I worked with a Jew of Polish origin who lived in Bnei Brak, and Yiddish was the main language there. I was captivated by its musical tone and decided to study it in earnest. My dream is to read Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman [the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof] in its original language.” […]
Alakili is not alone. About a quarter of the 400 students studying Yiddish at Bar Ilan are Arabs, says Ber Kotlerman, academic director of Bar Ilan’s Center for Yiddish Studies.
I know it’s not going to solve the problems of the Middle East or anything, but it’s encouraging in its small way, and there are some touching quotes in the piece. (Thanks, Paul!)
A SOFT A.
I try not to waste too much mental energy or blog space on the silly ways people find to talk about linguistic phenomena, because after all, not having had any education whatever in linguistics (which would provide them with non-silly ways), what are they going to do but fall back on the inaccurate? But this one really baffles me. From “The Great Pasty Debate” by John Willoughby (part of the NY Times Magazine “Food” issue, which has some very nice pieces): “As is so often the case, food is the last tradition left from those glory days, and I returned to Copper Harbor this summer in search of pasties (properly pronounced with a soft “a”).” Now, I happen to know that pasty, as in “Cornish pasty,” is traditionally pronounced with the low front vowel of pat or at, and that’s a useful fact to pass on to the reading public, but why not do it the way I just did? For an American audience, you could simply say it rhymes with nasty (adding “not with hasty” if you wanted to really drive the point home). But what is anyone supposed to get out of “a soft ‘a'”? In what conceivable way is the a of pat softer than any other kind? To make things even worse, when I googled the phrase I found this: “Soft A Sound ɑː (arm, father).” It’s like the very subject of language makes people unable to write sensibly.
TAKE NOTE.
The historian-in-training known to the phone book as Greg Afinogenov and to Hatters as slawkenbergius sent me a link to something he’s been working on for quite a while which is finally launching: TakeNote. He says, “It’s a virtual exhibition, tied to a conference happening at Radcliffe next month, of historical notes from all kinds of sources in Harvard libraries, with high-quality images and a tagging/commenting system.” The site itself says:
The contributions to this virtual exhibit exemplify the great range of note-taking that furthers intellectual or artistic activities (excluding commercial or administrative kinds of notes, among others). Most past note-taking does not survive at all, either because the notes were designed to be temporary (like notes on post-its today) or because they were discarded intentionally or unintentionally at some point. When notes survive, institutions such as libraries and archives have typically played a key role in their survival. This exhibit celebrates the role of agents of preservation as well as the role of note-takers themselves in offering us a glimpse into the working (and thinking) methods of past readers and writers.
It’s well worth looking into.
WORD AND THING.
I’m currently reading The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
MICHAEL HEIM, RIP.
I own a number of translations by Michael Henry Heim, who died at the end of September, but his name had somehow not stuck with me, so when I read Margalit Fox’s NY Times obituary I was shocked to learn about “the wide array of languages with which he worked. Conversant with a dozen tongues, he translated from eight of them, spanning Slavic (Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian); Germanic (German, Dutch); Romance (French, Romanian); and Hungarian, a non-Indo European language.” How did he do that? His translations include “from Russian, the novel The Island of Crimea, by Vassily Aksyonov; from Serbo-Croatian, a volume of stories, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, by Danilo Kis; from Czech, the novella ‘Too Loud a Solitude,’ by Bohumil Hrabal; and, from Hungarian, the novella ‘Helping Verbs of the Heart,’ by Peter Esterhazy.” I pulled down a couple of his translations and was struck by the elegance of the English; here’s a sentence from the opening of The Encyclopedia of the Dead: “It cannot be denied that he himself contributed to the confusion, answering the most innocent questions about his origins with a wave of the hand broad enough to take in both the neighboring hamlet and half the horizon.” Susan Bernofsky has a nice reminiscence of him at her blog; I can’t help but wish that when the Czech government called him up to ask “what words to use in English to name their new country,” he had told them to go with Czechia rather than the Czech Republic, but that’s water under the bridge. Thanks for the link, Eric!
THE LEATHER CASE AND THE HONED SICKLE.
The eudæmonist couldn’t resist this quote from Patrick Leigh Fermor (Roumeli, p. 112; see this LH post for more Fermor), and neither can I:
Yet it is impossible not to have a sneaking respect and liking for this hieratic mandarin language with all its euphuistic artificialities and its archaic syntax. Katharévousa has even been used now and then (a feat of unnatural virtuosity) as a medium for poetry; some of the poems of Calvos have a curious fabricated beauty, and there are elements of Katharévousa in Cavafy: cunningly placed bits of whalebone in the more sinuous demotic. It is elaborate and forbidding, but it is precise: indispensable, its champions say (which its opponents bitterly deny), for legal, scientific or mathematical definition. Katharévousa is an expensive faded leather case stamped with a tarnished monogram, holding a set of geometrical instruments: stiff jointed dividers and compasses neatly slotted into their plush beds. Dimotiki is an everyday instrument – a spade, an adze or a sickle – the edge thinned and keen with honing and bright from the whetstone; and the wooden shaft, mellow with sweat and smooth with the patina of generations of handling, lies in the palm with an easy balance. Partisanship for the two idioms has led to rioting in the Athens streets, to bloodshed and even death.
And for an example of American mastery of mixing whalebone with demotic, see jamessal’s latest GQ review; he makes me want to see The Walking Dead, which takes some convincing writing, let me tell you.
GLOSS.
Via MetaFilter:
The Global Language Online Support System (or GLOSS), produced by the Defense Language Institute […] offers over six thousand free lessons in 38 languages from Albanian to Uzbek, with particular emphasis on Chinese, Persian, Russian, Korean, and various types of Arabic. The lessons include both reading and listening components and are refreshingly based on real local materials (news articles, radio segments, etc.) rather than generic templates.
Important note: level 1 is considered “low intermediate” and assumes a basic knowledge of the language. For more elementary lessons […] try the ever-popular FSI Language Courses.
THE BOOKSHELF: BEYOND PURE REASON.
Back in 2007 I quoted a paragraph about the groundbreaking ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure and said it “reawakened in me the impact—not just intellectual but emotional (it was almost like falling in love)—of learning about all this as I was in the process of deciding linguistics was what I wanted to do, several decades ago”; I get the same feeling from reading Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents
To provide a simplistic but not inaccurate caricature/summary of that history: for the first half-century after his death in 1913, “Saussure” meant two books, the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes (Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages), which appeared in December 1878 (though the cover date is 1879) when he had just turned twenty-one, and the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics), which he did not even write (it was compiled by his students from class notes) and which came out in 1916. The first put historical linguistics on a sounder theoretical footing than it had had and famously postulated the existence of a Proto-Indo-European laryngeal which actually turned up in Hittite (sadly, two years after his death); the second jump-started the entire field of synchronic/structural linguistics and was foundational for everything that came after—Jakobson, Bakhtin, and my very own pre-Chomsky American linguistic tradition. Then the tide turned; structuralism was out, poststructuralism was in, and the Cours was considered laughably outmoded. Just around that time, however, Saussure’s own notes began being excavated, thousands of pages of them, and people realized there was a whole different side of Saussure that was much more attractive to the postmodern mentality, notably his three-year obsession (which I, an unrepentant modernist and structuralist, consider utter nonsense) with what he variously called hypogram, leitwort, Stichwort, mot-thème, logogram, antigram, paragram, cryptogram, and anagram; the last is the term that has stuck, thanks to Jean Starobinski, who published some of the papers in 1964. The people who were excited by that sort of thing accused Saussure’s students of having grievously misrepresented their teacher’s ideas when putting together the Cours.
Gasparov deals with all this sensitively and sensibly. As is my wont, I’ll quote some chunks of the text to let you see his style and approach. From p. 46:
Virtually all the works Saussure published in his lifetime were dedicated to various problems of Indo-European linguistics.Yet even though he continued publishing some miscellaneous articles on the subject through the 1890s, he had essentially ceased to be an “Indo-European linguist” since the beginning of his inquiry into the nature of language. Looking now at the whole scope of Saussure’s oeuvre, including what he himself was resigned to let perish, we can say that Saussure eventually ceased to be a “linguist” altogether.
From p. 60:
We should reconcile ourselves to the fact that the definitive or “genuine” representation of Saussure’s ideas does not exist, nor has it ever existed. A plurality of representations, freely evolving in different directions, was constitutive of Saussure’s thought and essential for the conceptual vision he pursued. It corresponded to the central principle of his approach to language, which, in the end, has made any systemic and definitive picture impossible: the principle of the unfettered freedom of language, resulting in the infinite plurality of forms that language assumes and the infinite diversity of the directions in which they may evolve.
From p. 75, an admirable illustration of why apparent exceptions to the basic principle of arbitrariness do not contradict it:
Looking at words with clear derivational patterns, one can easily be lured to the conclusion that, even if one had no knowledge of the value assigned to them by convention, one would still be able to grasp it by inference. This conclusion, however, is illusory. Both the form and the meaning of housekeeper stem from house and keeper in a way that seems perfectly logical. Imagine, however, someone trying to infer the meaning of housekeeper from its ingredients, without knowing that meaning for a fact. Does housekeeper mean a person who guards the house, or owns it, or retains it temporarily, or occupies it as a squatter—or perhaps not a person but a device that prevents the house from collapsing? The only way to know that our educated guesses are wrong is to know the meaning of housekeeper as determined by convention—that is, to treat it as arbitrary.
On the late-eighteenth-century romantic tradition that Saussure seems to have drawn on (something of which I had no inkling), he first quotes a striking passage from Novalis (p. 103):
It is a ridiculous delusion, which causes one to marvel, to think that when one is speaking, one does so for the sake of things. Nobody is aware of the proper nature of language, namely, that it is concerned with nothing but itself. . . . If only one could make people understand that language is like a mathematical formula. Both constitute a world of their own—they play with nothing but themselves, express nothing but their own wonderful nature, and it is precisely because of this that they are so expressive. . . . They become a part of nature solely as a result of their freedom, and it is solely through their free movement that the universal soul expresses itself, making them a gentle scale and foundation of things.
He then goes on to say:
That seeing language as a tool through which one reaches the phenomena of the world is “a ridiculous delusion” (here, Novalis’s lächerlicher Irrtum anticipates Saussure’s favorite ridicule); that it is in fact a free interplay, responsible to and expressing nothing but itself; and that it is precisely the total freedom of language that connects it to nature, making it a “gentle scale and foundation” of things rather than a label attached to them—these points of the Monologue contain, in embryonic form, the quintessence of Saussure’s teaching about language: its immanent “emptiness” resulting in its unbounded freedom.
On pp. 115-116 there is a superb summary of his approach to Indo-European historical linguistics that is too long to quote; I will just give the last sentence, which I like very much: “Saussure’s book [the Mémoire] played a pivotal role in the development of a more cautious and abstract attitude in comparative studies, an attitude that has become prevalent in the twentieth century, when hunting for the Ursprache and its speakers gave way to the sober realization that all that could ever be achieved was to place the relations between kindred languages into a coherent model.” I won’t get into Saussure’s analysis of mythology, or his relationship with Schlegel’s ideas, or those “anagrams” (vaguely defined alleged hidden insertions of names into poetic texts, supposedly passed down for thousands of years as a poetic technique without leaving any explicit trace in the record); I hope I’ve given at least some idea of the riches to be found here. I will say, though, that if he hadn’t been so contemptuous of “mere facts” (he reproached the Junggrammatiker or Neogrammarians with whom he studied at Leipzig as being dusty fact-grubbers who had no clue how language worked) and so obsessed with the theoretical basis of everything (he famously asked “unde exoriar?”—”Where shall I begin?”), he might have wasted less time haring off on wild-goose-chases and more time using his genius for better things, and even written another book or two. I’ll close with another nice quote (from p. 86): “The truth about language lies not in ultimate generalizations but, on the contrary, in the unceasing comparative analysis of its diverse manifestations.”
Well, actually, I can’t close with that, because I have to complain about the terrible proofreading and editing of this important scholarly book. A few samples: “did not shaken the fundamental premises” (p. 43), “casts off the conventional constrains of sequentiality” (p. 47), “veritable” (for véritable) (p. 65), “bêtisses” (for bêtises) (p. 90), “emerged in 1790s” (p. 92), “toutes notre [should be nos] distinctions, toute notre terminologie, tout [should be toutes] nos façons de parler” (p. 109), “the principle vowels” (p. 113), “to name just a few” (after two names, p. 125) [n.b.: John Cowan thinks this is OK, and presumably he’s not alone], “TO HAVE A SYSTEM AND TO HAVE NONE IS [sic] EQUALLY DEADENING FOR THE SPIRIT” (heading, p. 177). A “which” is missing in the first line of p. 174, déception is translated as “deception” on p. 189 (a classic faux ami [should be “disappointment”]), every smooth breathing in the Greek on p. 143 is from the wrong font and wrongly placed, every occurrence of the title Cours de linguistique générale (except, oddly, for one on page 42) wrongly begins with “Course,” and of course (as I wrote here), “Lotharingia” is used throughout for “Lorraine.” Come on, Columbia University Press, you can do better than this.
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