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I’m a great admirer of P. G. Wodehouse, but I don’t seem to have said much about him here except to call him “immortal” in this brief post (about the influence of “Babu English” on him); what, after all, is there to say other than that he was a master of English prose and perhaps the most consistently funny writer the language has produced? All you can really do is to quote him endlessly, and now there is a tool that enables you to do just that: the Wodehouse quote generator. Keep refreshing and you’ll have as many Wodehouse quotes as you like; I just got:

‘Unhappily,’ said the bishop, ‘my wife has instructed me to give the vacant vicarage to a cousin of hers. A fellow,’ he added bitterly, ‘who bleats like a sheep and doesn’t know an alb from a reredos.’
  The Bishop’s Move (1927)

Via this MetaFilter post, with a surprise guest appearance by the guy who created the site (who goes by the moniker of phliar)—he says “people send me their favourite quotes and I just add them to the list.” I will take this opportunity to say, as I did in that thread, that I wish I could see again the BBC show that introduced me to Wodehouse many, many years ago, The World of Wooster (1965–1967), of which only the opening titles seem to have been preserved.

I’ve written about the controversial historian Orlando Figes a number of times (for the correct pronunciation of his name, see this post); his prose is very readable, but his facts are not always reliable (and of course there was that business about his Amazon reviews and threats to sue, covered in the links below). There’s more controversy, this time about his recent book The Whisperers; Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen publicized it in a Nation article, and Robert Booth and Miriam Elder reported on it for the Guardian, saying:

Figes had commissioned hundreds of interviews with the relatives of victims of gulag labour camps to produce a 700-page chronicle of “private life in Stalin’s Russia”, published in 2007. But the Moscow-based publisher, and a historian who conducted some of the interviews, claim some of the material was misrepresented. While none of the alleged errors would strike the lay reader as particularly egregious, the Russians argue Figes’ version of some of the most tragic events in Russian history would cause distress to relatives of gulag victims.

For that reason, Russian publishers have rejected a translation of the book.

That sordid squabble by itself wouldn’t necessarily be LH material, but in the comments at the Guardian, a reader says “One thing that Figes has done is to put his source material on the Internet, where anyone can access it. In a way these documents and interview transcripts speak more eloquently that the book could. It’s an extraordinary oral history project,” and gives links to extended extracts from the interviews and the family archives; I thought they were worth passing along here for anyone who is interested in the period (and can read Russian). Hat tip to Garrigus Carraig for the links.

Hey, remember that Rossica Young Translators Award I posted about a few months ago? Well, they’ve announced the winner, and I couldn’t be more pleased to proclaim here that the prize goes to Gregory Afinogenov, known around these parts as Slawkenbergius. He won by translating an extract of S.N.U.F.F by Victor Pelevin, who has got to be one of the most difficult modern writers to render into English; you can read his version (alongside the original) on pages 34-35 of this brochure (pdf). And he found out about the contest from my post, so I take special pride in his achievement.
The winner of the main translation prize was John Elsworth, for his translation of Bely’s Petersburg; from the excerpt in the brochure it looks like he did a fine job. Congratulations to both men!

From n + 1 (see this LH post), an interesting essay by Robert Moor about the history of the e-book (“usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S. Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server”) and an associated concept, electronic literature:

The field of electronic literature began as a hundred loose strands, which briefly appeared to braid into a new art form called hypertext fiction. The influential hyperfictionist Stuart Moulthrop’s “Subjective Chronology of Cybertext, Hypertext, and Electronic Writing” cites as the form’s founding influences a 1945 Atlantic article by Vannevar Bush that envisioned a machine for organizing and linking information; a 1961 computer game called Spacewar!; the writings of Robert Coover, Milorad Pavic, and Thomas Pynchon; the work of hypertext pioneer and theorist Ted Nelson; and Donna Haraway’s 1991 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Those influences collided in the mid 1980s, when a novelist (and early PC adopter), Michael Joyce, working from his home in Michigan, grew frustrated with the constraints of his word processing software. For decades, experimental writers like Coover had been pushing against the static linearity of the page—a restriction that, Joyce quickly realized, ceased to exist in a digital space. “In my eyes, paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes,” Joyce later wrote. “All that kept me from doing so was the fact that, in print at least, one paragraph inevitably follows another.”
When Joyce met a young computer scientist named Jay David Bolter at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1984, they began working on such a program. They called it StorySpace, because it allowed readers to navigate a text spatially rather than sequentially, by following hypertextual threads like corridors in a labyrinth. Partly to test out the new software, Joyce wrote afternoon, a story (1987), which is known as the world’s first hypertext novel.

Moor describes some interesting experiments, but I think I’ll stick with boring old sequential text. (Thanks, Paul!)

Back in 2004 I posted about a book (online at that link in both Yiddish and English) by the last editor of Haynt, a pre-WWII Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw that “chronicles the history of Jewish life in Poland between 1908 and 1939.” Now the newspaper itself is online, thanks to the Historical Jewish Press Site, which “contains a collection of Jewish newspapers published in various countries, languages, and time periods. We display digital versions of each newspaper, making it possible to view the papers in their original layout. Full-text search is also available for all content published over the course of each newspaper’s publication.” This Forward article by Shoshana Olidort describes it:

Founded in Warsaw in 1908, Haynt was the most widely read Yiddish newspaper in Eastern Europe, with a readership numbering in the tens of thousands. In addition to news reporting and columns on everything from humor to women’s issues, Haynt featured highbrow literary works by prominent writers like Sholem Aleichem and Hirsch Dovid Nomberg, as well as the more popular serialized shundromanen, or trash novels.

The political turmoil of the era, beginning with the outbreak of World War I, dramatically altered the scope of the paper, which for a time cut back to the bare bones of news reporting. Still, despite heavy censorship, the paper continued to be published (albeit under different names, including Nayer haynt and Der Tog), even after the outbreak of World War II. The final issue appeared on September 22, 1939, just days before Warsaw surrendered.

Olidort finishes by saying that “the next Yiddish paper to be added to the site is Literariche Bletter, which was also published in Warsaw in the 1920s and ’30s,” and adds her hope “that one day this will be true of the Forverts, too.” (Thanks, Paul!)

The Dictionary of Old English offers a “word of the week,” and last week it was hand-saex, with which Warren Clements has some fun in his Globe and Mail column; surprisingly (to me—I wasn’t familiar with him), he doesn’t linger on the cheap laughs but goes on to a useful examination of the history of the word:

Saex comes from a Germanic root (sah or sag) meaning to cut. It survives today only in the narrowly defined word sax, a tool used to trim roofing slates. But before the Norman Conquest of 1066 reshaped the English language and gave us Middle English – a process that took about a century to filter down to ordinary folks – saex was all the rage.

There is even speculation that the Saxons, the Germanic invaders known once in England as Anglo-Saxons, got their name from the knives they carried. After all, the Old English spelling of Saxon was Seaxan (and Seaxe in the plural).
The saex played a significant role in Beowulf, the epic poem written in Old English in the eighth century or thereabouts. After the warrior Beowulf has mortally wounded the monster Grendel[…], Grendel’s mother comes seeking vengeance. She pulls Beowulf into the watery depths “ond hyre seax geteah, brad, brun-ecg” – which Seamus Heaney translates as “and pulled out a broad, whetted knife.”

He goes on to say that “Since the Dictionary of Old English’s teaser defined hand-saex as a dagger, it is worth noting that dagger, which entered Middle English by 1375, seems to have been dreamed up by the English themselves, without reference to other languages.” Most dictionaries agree with this, but The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition has a more interesting idea, tracing Middle English daggere back to various Romance forms, “perhaps” from Vulgar Latin *Daca (ensis), ‘Dacian (knife),’ from the feminine form of Latin Dācus ‘Dacian.’ Not proven or provable, but clever.

Incidentally, in relation to the saex/Saxon thing, the OED says:

In the well-known story related by Geoffrey of Monmouth after ‘Nennius’, the signal given by Hengist to his Saxons for the treacherous slaughter of their British hosts appears in the form ‘Nemet oure saxas’. The Old English form would be Nimað éowre seax, the n. being uninflected in the plural.

(Thanks, Paul!)

A report of a nice project:

In September 2011, Google and the Israel Museum launched the ambitious Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, with the aim of eventually making English translations and high-resolution images of all of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts available online. Within days of the project’s launch, more than a million people from across the world had stopped to browse digital versions of five of the longest and most complete scrolls: the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll, the Habakkuk pesher (or commentary), the Temple Scroll and the War Scroll. In recent months, the project has expanded to allow visitors to view two separate, verse-by-verse English translations of the Isaiah Scroll, one based on the standard translation of the Masoretic text, and the other provided by scroll scholar and regular BAS lecturer Peter Flint. In viewing the two translations side by side, readers can consider the various ways an ancient text can be translated and the slight variations in meaning and interpretation that can result.

Here‘s the project website. (Thanks, Paul!)

When I was studying Indo-European, back in the Jurassic Era, “Sabellian” was considered to mean… well, I’ll quote Webster’s Third International: “one or all of a number of poorly known languages or dialects of ancient central Italy that are presumably closely related to Oscan and Umbrian.” A book I used a lot in my grad school days, W. B. Lockwood’s A Panorama of Indo-European Languages, has one mention of it, on p. 58: “A few early inscriptions characterised as Sabellian show that this dialect was closely akin to Oscan.” Now, having found myself confused by the Memiyawanzi post about Karin Tikkanen’s A Sabellian Case Grammar (Heidelberg, 2011)—how could you write a grammar about a minor dialect of which almost nothing is known?—I did a little googling and discovered that, as Wikipedia says under Osco-Umbrian languages, “Sabellic … was later used by Theodor Mommsen in his Unteritalische Dialekte to describe the pre-Roman dialects of central Italy which were neither Oscan nor Umbrian. Nowadays, it is used to describe the Osco-Umbrian languages as a whole.” I have several questions about this. First, when did it happen? Second, is there free variation between “Sabellic” and “Sabellian”? Third, and most importantly, why the hell? Why take an obscure term like “Sabellian” (or, if one prefers, “Sabellic”) and decide to use it instead of a well-known and transparent term like “Osco-Umbrian”? Since the Wikipedia article is called “Osco-Umbrian languages,” I assume the term isn’t actually obsolete; is it just fuddy-duddies like me who hang onto it, or are there warring camps, Osco-Umbrianists versus Sabellianists (and/or Sabellicians)? It seems pointless to me, as if people were to decide one fine day to replace the term “Balto-Slavic” with “Prussian.” The only thing gained seems to be confusion. But, as always, I welcome enlightenment from those who actually know something about it.
Two amusing bits from the Memiyawanzi post: a photo showing “Grammar” misspelled as “Grammer” on the spine—”ouch,” as the blogger says—and a remark about Jürgen Untermann’s Wörterbuch des Oskisch-Umbrischen (Heidelberg, 2000), “a fabulously exhaustive dictionary famously known for glossing just about everything as Bedeutung unbekannt [meaning unknown].” Borges would have loved that.

An LJ post by glo_ku (in a sort of English after the first paragraph) reveals a wonderfully Joycean sense of wordplay, and would make an excellent test of a student’s mastery of Russian idioms, colloquialisms, and slang. The “Russian” part starts off “Глад бонжурствовать юс апресле лунгаминного абсенствия” [Glad bonzhurstvovat’ yus apresle lungaminnogo absenstviya], which when looked at through multilingual glasses translates as “Glad to greet you after the long absence,” and proceeds to become too multilingual even for me (I have no idea what “взыл мучень бешафнят” means). The “English” part starts “The events I’d like to tell you about took place in a small town of Derry Vushko right after the old fart Party Zahn have thrown away the hooves”; “Derry Vushko” is the Russian word деревушка [derevushka] ‘small town,’ Party Zahn is партизан [partizan] ‘partisan’ (the partisan fighting behind enemy lines is a familiar figure in Russian/Soviet life and literature), and “thrown away the hooves” is отбросил копыта [otbrosil kopyta (thanks, Valera!)], a slang phrase comparable to “kicked the bucket.” Similarly, later on дифирамб [difiramb, ‘dithyramb, eulogy’] becomes “Dee Fee Rumba” and катить бочку [katit’ bochku, ‘to take action to harm someone else’s career’] is literally rendered as “to roll a barrel.” It’s lots of fun if you like that sort of thing. (Via Anatoly.)

As Paul, who sent me the link, wrote, “To me this is asking : which is better eating, poulet de Bresse roasted with herbs or prime New York strip perfectly char-grilled ?” And of course he’s right, and everyone involved in this poll at The Millions agrees, but it’s still an ever-enjoyable question to chew over, and the eight Russian experts asked for their opinions by Kevin Hartnett provide an enjoyable variety of answers. (An irrelevant remark: Duke University has a Professor of the Practice of Russian? I wonder how that odd title came about.) Myself, I will have no opinion until I’ve read more of each writer in the original, and even then I’m pretty sure my answer will be “They’re both great, and which I prefer depends on my mood that day.” I must say, though, that the respondents who come down on Dostoevsky’s side tend to write more entertainingly than the Tolstoyophiles, and the latter occasionally evidence a certain pomposity; when Andrew Kaufman says of Dostoevsky “What he doesn’t do, however, is make you love life in all its manifestations,” my response is “You shouldn’t need a novelist to make you do that, and that’s not what literature is for anyway.” I liked Chris Huntington’s conclusion:

In any case, I realize that the “competition” between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is just an exercise in love. No one really has to choose one or the other. I simply prefer Dostoevsky. For my last argument, I will simply cite an expert far older and wiser than me:

  Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again, and I do not know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin. It’s not the tone but the wonderful point of view – genuine, natural, and Christian. A splendid, instructive book. I enjoyed myself the whole day as I have not done for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.

  -Leo Tolstoy in a letter to Strakhov, September 26, 1880