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This Guardian review by Alberto Manguel makes Perlmann’s Silence by Pascal Mercier sound like something I’d enjoy:

Throughout the days preceding the conference, Perlmann has with him a paper by a Russian linguistic, Vassily Leskov, on how memory is informed by language. Suddenly, when he can’t avoid stating the subject of his own (unwritten) presentation, Perlmann gives Leskov’s subject as his own. With the help of a dictionary, he translates the Russian paper and copies it for the other participants. Then Leskov announces his arrival. The story acquires here a Hitchcock-like suspense. Suicide and murder are contemplated. Complications multiply. Perlmann’s anguish grows.

(I don’t know whether “linguistic” for “linguist” is a typo or a mistake on Manguel’s part, but either way it’s comforting to see the Grauniad live down to its standards of copyediting.)

I’m not going to make a separate post for this, but if you’re interested in Serbian/Serbocroatian/whatever you call it, you’ll be interested in Monumenta Serbica. Thanks, Paul!

Remember this post from two years ago? The post was about Chukovsky and Gumilyov but the thread started with a discussion of how to translate люблю (literally ‘I love’) and wound up as an extended investigation of the possible sources of Chekhov’s “Montigomo the Hawk’s Claw.” Well, Sashura, who sparked the investigation, has an article (in Russian) in today’s Огонёк about that very topic; if you read Russian, it’s well worth your while, and if you don’t, you can get the basics from the LH thread I linked to. What I want to mention here is the sentence “Особая благодарность здесь посетителям блога американского лингвиста Стива Додсона Languagehat.com, часто публикующего заметки о русской литературе” [Special thanks to the habitués of the blog of the American linguist Steve Dodson languagehat.com, which often publishes notes on Russian literature]. You can all take a bow.

Victor Mair has a typically informative and enjoyable post over at the Log that has a lot to say about (in the words of its title) “The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation”; what I want to highlight here is the following passage about an astonishing and (to my mind) brilliant work of art/épatage:

The ultimate sendup of Chinese character formation is Xu Bing’s famous Tiānshū 天书 (A Book from the Sky), which consists entirely of characters that look like real characters, but are in fact all fake. When A Book from the Sky was first exhibited in Beijing in 1988, it caused enormous consternation, because those who came to view it felt that the characters were familiar, but no matter how hard they strained, they could not make sound or sense of a single character in the entire lot. Sounds and meanings could arbitrarily or imaginatively be assigned to each and every one of Xu Bing’s 4,000 characters from the sky. All of the strokes and all of the components are “legal” in the sense that they occur in officially authorized characters, but they have been combined in “illegal” ways. That is to say, they don’t add up to any characters that occur in historical texts or dictionaries. Once they realized that they had been “had”, conservative viewers were outraged because they thought that Xu Bing was making fun / light of them and their revered writing system. It wasn’t long before the exhibition closed and Xu fled to the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

At the “Tiānshū” link you can see an image of the book; I wish I owned a copy. Xu Bing is right up there with R. Mutt as far as I’m concerned.

I’m reading Понедельник начинается в субботу (Monday Begins on Saturday, Wikipedia), by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, and I’m enjoying it as much as I did their earlier novels (see here and here). So far it’s funny rather than deep/tragic like the others (I’ve just started the second of the three sections), but what continues to amaze me is the literariness of it. American sf of the sixties had quite a few literary references, but it seems to me they tended to be more show-offy: “Look, I’m putting in an allusion to Hegel [“The Only Thing We Learn,” by C. M. Kornbluth] or an obscure quote from Joyce [James Blish, A Case of Conscience]!” With the Strugatsky brothers, I get the sense that, like every other Russian author, they’re drawing effortlessly on the entire history of their literature, which they expect their audience to be as familiar with as they are. When the protagonist arrives at the izba on chicken legs in the first section, the passage is chock-full of allusions to Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila”; the very first line, “Я приближался к месту моего назначения” [I was approaching the place of my appointment], is a direct quote from Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter,” and expected to be recognized as such; there are quotes from and allusions to Gogol, Lermontov, Lev Tolstoy, A. N. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy, and many others, not to mention foreign writers like Ueda Akinari (very moving if you’ve seen Ugetsu, which contains the referenced scene), the Bhagavad Gita, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, etc. It doesn’t feel like showing off because that’s what all Russian literature is like (as discussed so well by Mikhail Gronas—see this post), which is one reason I enjoy it so much. Of course all literature includes references to other literature, but that’s especially true of Russian, and the more of it I read the more I enjoy reading it.

Of course, I don’t get all the allusions on my own, which is why I’m glad to have found this page, which annotates the book (and is part of a site that does the same for all the Strugatskys’ work). The internet: long may it prosper!

A piece by Robert Woolsey of KCAW describes what Zackary Sholem Berger, who sent me the link, justly calls a “comic-tragic” story:

A new encyclopedia of the Tlingit language has teachers in Sitka scratching their heads. The massive work by New Zealand scholar Sally-Ann Lambert is extraordinarily detailed, and the product of years of effort.

The problem is: The language in the book is not recognizable by contemporary scholars, or Native Tlingit speakers.

I won’t try to summarize the story, but I will say that if you produce a “Hlingit Word Encyclopedia” that is unintelligible to actual Tlingit speakers, you’ve gone seriously astray…. although the author’s “rationale for the huge investment in time and energy in the book may ultimately have little to do with whether or not it is accepted.” It’s a weird world, folks.

A recent post by Anatoly (in Russian) sent me to this post at Ganesha’s Scarf, which describes a phenomenon of Canadian speech of which I had been entirely ignorant:

Yesterday Libby informed me that for the past YEAR she has thought that I had some grammar problem because I kept saying I was done things… “I’m done work,” I’m done my sandwich,” I’m done Bossypants so now you can take it”, etc. Apparently she didn’t want to point it out lest she embarrass me, until the other day when she heard another Canadian interviewed who kept saying the same thing. (btw for everyone who has no clue what’s wrong with these quotes, apparently most people would say “I’m done with work” “I’m done with my sandwich” […]

This blogpost is very likely the first website to write anything about the issue. All I’ve managed to find is a lot of arguing on various forums on whether it should be “I’m done dishes” or “I’m done with homework.” The forums confirm that this is Canadian and common to some parts of the East Coast – NJ, New Hampshire, Philadelphia.

The last bit about the East Coast of the U.S. sounds unlikely to me; I think I’d have heard of it in that case, and Anatoly says it’s confined to Canada. Is anybody familiar with this? (There must be linguistic literature about it, but I don’t know how to search for it.)

Kenny Cargill has a relatively new blog on Russian history, culture, language, and literature (“I will also be discussing many readings from my M.A. thesis treating Fyodor Dostoevsky’s significance as a public intellectual and journalist during the 1870s”); it’s been around since August 2010, but there are only seven posts so far. The two most recent are a review of The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English, by Rachel May, which I got for Christmas and am looking forward to reading. I found this paragraph a little odd:

If readers could only become familiar with some translation theory, then perhaps they would be receptive to these more avant-garde translations. In particular, Lawrence Venuti in his The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation has contributed the notion of “abusive translation,” meaning translation that deliberately subverts English stylistic conventions, in providing an academic framework in which to appreciate translations that privilege fidelity to the original text’s linguistic structure over all other considerations. Such a technique is ultimately bound to contribute more to the literature of the target language: “If a work is worth translating, then it should not just slip unobtrusively into the target language. It should be allowed to stretch and challenge that language with the same vitality that its original possesses — possibly even a greater vitality, born of new linguistic and metaphorical contrasts” (8). The problem is, however, that most English-language critics and readers, and particularly those monolingual readers who have no way of understanding or appreciating how the target-language translation mimics the source-language text, will naturally privilege fluency, comprehensibility and even some stylistic normativity over experimentation.

The very name “abusive translation” suggests that it’s a bad thing, but it’s described as a good one. The problem (in my view) comes when the alleged mimicry of the source-language text, rather than preserving “the same vitality that its original possesses,” is actually adding an apparent vitality (or Verfremdungseffekt) that is not there in the original; this is precisely the problem with the much-lauded Pevear and Volokhonsky, and I disagree that the pushback against them means that “we as readers in English want to read translations that adhere to John Dryden’s ‘imitation’ principle of translation, that is we want to read what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pasternak would have written had they been born in England or America, and not in Russia.” I would say rather that it means we want exactly as much weirdness as the author put into the text and do not need added weirdness sprinkled in by the translator for the frisson of exoticism. At any rate, I look forward to reading more by Cargill, whether I agree with a particular point or not. The waterfront he covers is one I frequent myself.

People have been sending me interesting links that I thought I’d pass on to y’all:

1) A Brief History of Blurbs, by Alan Levinovitz. You knew, of course, that the word blurb was coined in 1906 by Gelett Burgess, but did you know that quasi-blurbs (though not on the outside of books) can be traced back to ancient Rome and medieval Egypt, where authors and booksellers “were soliciting longer poems of praise (taqriz) from big-shot friends in the 1300s”? Read some truly loathsome examples of hyperbole, fakery, and shameless cronyism, and writhe in agony at the very idea of blaps and blovers.

2) If you read Russian, Mischa Gabowitsch has collected slogans of the current Russian demonstrations, at this blog, which features photos, links, and a corpus of hundreds of slogans in Russian and other languages, from Czech to Japanese. Mischa says, “It is part of a research project to document the role of the Internet in shaping the language of civil society in Russia.”

3) Avery Morrow has an very interesting page about “The Undecipherable Poem, No. 9 of the Manyoshu.” Not only has the poem never been deciphered, it’s omitted by all English translators; it’s not even in my heavy old 1940 Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai edition. I very much like the rendition “Wyrg gende acbire madentag wher myne Seko once stode, at the rootes of Itsukashi.” (Via the latest post at No-sword, about poem #1 of the Man’yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry.)

4) Aspiring young translators will want to know about the fourth annual Rossica Young Translators Award, which “is open to anyone who will be 24 or younger on the deadline for submissions, which is 15 March 2012. Entrants are required to translate 1 of 3 extracts from recent Russian novels.” If you’re interested, go here and download the brochure containing the extracts and terms and conditions.

xkcd presents: Etymology Man! As always, don’t forget to read the mouseover text. (Thanks, Sven!)

While I have your attention, I am puzzled by the term “affectus” in the following sentence from Russia’s Alternative Prose, by Robert Porter (Berg, 1994): “It would be difficult to find a more authentic-sounding amalgam of half-digested official propaganda, perfunctory reading, emotional confusion and popular bigotry than Irina’s outpourings here – she sounds like the Soviet equivalent of an affectus-cum-aficionado of the British gutter press.” The word, if it can be called that in English, isn’t in the OED or any other dictionary I have access to, and I’m afraid Etymology Man isn’t of much help, since the Latin word affectus has too many meanings (as a noun, ‘mental state; strong feeling; physical condition; influence; eagerness; sympathy, affection; purpose; attitude,’ and as an adjective ‘endowed with; disposed; (harmfully) affected, impaired; related (to), connected (with); emotional’) and it’s not clear which if any might be intended. If anyone has any helpful suggestions, I’m all ears. (If it matters, “she” is the protagonist of Viktor Erofeev’s Russian Beauty.)

My wife and I are on the seventh of the Aubrey-Maturin books, The Surgeon’s Mate (which means we’re eating them up at a rate of almost one a month—see this post for the start of the voyage—and will have finished the series sometime in the spring of 2013, and what will we do then?), and when I read the start of Chapter Three, “The Diligence tided it down the long harbour during the night, and before daybreak she was clear of the Little Thrumcap,” of course I had to know where and what the Little Thrumcap was. The Nova Scotia Pilot provides the answer [text below the cut for those who can’t see the Google Books image]:

But another question remained: what’s a thrumcap? Here we turn to the OED and find “Thrum… A short piece of waste thread or yarn…; pl. or collect. sing. odds and ends of thread… thrum cap, a cap made of thrums.” You can see a couple of illustrations (including one from the movie Master and Commander!) here, as well as read “The Ballad of the Caps” (“The Saylors with their Thrums do stand/ On higher place than all the land”).

Oh, and here‘s a splendid painting, “H.M.S. Shannon Leading Her Prize the American Frigate Chesapeake into Halifax Harbour,” in case you too are a devotee of O’Brian and would enjoy seeing such a thing.

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