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One of the underappreciated poets of our day has died at 85, sadly without having finished his great work, the recreation of Homer’s Iliad. I wrote about Logue way back in 2003 and was shocked, in a way I’m not usually shocked any more, to read that he had died. Here‘s Mark Espiner’s excellent Guardian obit; he writes:

Louis MacNeice said of Logue’s Homer poem that never was blood bloodier or fate more fatal, and while Logue remained faithful to Homer’s approach, redrawing the similes and gory detail of the original, he nevertheless made it his own, sometimes even inventing original passages and characters. Logue himself subtitled it an “account” of The Iliad; critics called it Logue’s Iliad rewritten or simply Logue’s Homer….
He won only a handful of literary prizes including, late in life, the 2005 Whitbread award for poetry for Cold Calls. Surprisingly, his name was hardly mentioned as a possible poet laureate after Ted Hughes’s death in 1998…

You can hear him reading from All Day Permanent Red (the fourth book of his Homer series) here, and there’s a two-minute clip (from 1965) of him reading his “Chorus of the Secret Police” (adapted from Antigone; pdf) here. I can’t imagine anyone encountering Logue and not wanting a closer acquaintance with the classics he so brilliantly updated.

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In looking up something else, my eye fell (as it will) on an adjacent word, in this case spinnaker, and I thought the etymology (that it was from a yacht named the Sphinx) might make a good post. Then I checked Wikipedia and found that was only one entry in the etymological sweepstakes; here’s the full discussion:

Some dictionaries suggest that the origin of the word could be traced to the first boat to commonly fly a spinnaker, a yacht called the Sphinx, mispronounced as Spinx. The Sphinx first set her spinnaker in the Solent in 1865, and the first recorded use of the word was in 1866 in the August edition of Yachting Calendar and Review (p. 84). In addition, the term may have been influenced by the spanker, originally a gaff rigged fore-and-aft sail.

It has been pointed out, however, that the skippers of the barges on the Thames … also used the term spinnaker for their jib staysails. Unlike the other, tanned sails of these boats, the spinnakers were usually of white color. It has thus been suggested that the term could be “connected with the obsolete word spoon, meaning to run before the wind (cf. spindrift).” Early usage of the verb to spoon can be traced back to the 16th century; the change from spoon to spin in the term spindrift is attributed to a local Scottish pronunciation. According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, however, spindrift derives from a local Scottish pronunciation of speen (not spoon), meaning “to drive before a strong wind.”

Furthermore, references to a mid-nineteenth century origin are problematic. In the logbook of the USS Constitution, opening “Remarks on Board Monday July 13th 1812” is the comment “From 12 to 4 AM moderate breezes and thick cloudy weather with rain at 1 AM hauled up the mainsail and set the spinnaker at ½ past 3 AM set the mainsail JTS [John T. Shubrick, Fifth Lieutenant].”

According to Merriam-Webster’s etymology, the origin of the word spinnaker is simply unknown.

If that 1812 cite is accurate, the Sphinx idea is obviously dead in the water.

Update (June 2023). MMcM (in his comment of December 3, 2011 at 9:59 pm: “Doesn’t that citation seem a little thin?”) is quite right; having taken the trouble to check the online text of the logbook of the Constitution, I find that the relevant entry (Remarks on Board Monday July 13th 1812) reads:

From 12 to 4 AM moderate breezes and thick cloudy weather with rain at 1 AM hauled up the Mainsail and sett the Spanker, at ½ past 3 AM sett the Mainsail.

Spanker, not “spinnaker”! As you were, and the Sphinx idea is once again sailing with a fair breeze.

I think the first time I wrote about the New York Public Library here at LH was in 2003. Since then I have had many occasions to mention it, reflecting the many visits I made to it in my twenty-three years in the city; the main research library and the Donnell and Mid-Manhattan branches were homes away from home, especially the Donnell with its peerless foreign-language collection (now gone; I wrote about it here and here) and the Slavic and Baltic division with its amazing holdings—I wrote in 2007 about reading Sovremennye zapiski there, “gingerly turning the pages of those beautiful heavy cream-colored issues of the journal” in which Nabokov published his Russian-language works before emigrating to America.

But if you click on the Slavic and Baltic Division link there, you’ll get a 404 (“We’re sorry… The page you requested is unavailable”); that’s not because they’re redoing their website, it’s because they’ve closed down the division, along with the Asian and Middle Eastern division next door to it. I learn this from a long and rage-inducing article by Scott Sherman in The Nation; I’ll quote some snippets below, but I urge you to read the whole thing:

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C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has once again begun the series with my contribution; here it is, featuring my fervent recommendation of Grossman’s Life and Fate, discussed on LH here (and in earlier posts linked from that one). I expect Grossman’s magnificent creation will eventually be thought of, as it deserves to be, as the great WWII novel and as a must-read up there with Tolstoy, Joyce, et al.
Addendum. Adam Kirsch has a good essay about Grossman’s novel at the New Republic.

I had not been aware of Amazon’s translation imprint, AmazonCrossing, but that’s not surprising, since they only introduced it last year (press release). At any rate, they were kind enough to send me a copy of Thirst, Marian Schwartz’s new translation of Andrei Gelasimov’s 2002 Жажда, a prize-winning short novel (what the Russians call a повесть), and it’s certainly a good calling card for the imprint.

The story is simple: Kostya, a young man scarred by service in the war with Chechnya, holes up in his apartment drinking when he isn’t working; his war buddies show up and drag him out to look for one of their number who has disappeared; we get memories of his family and eventually encounter some of them. As always, the telling is all. It starts with a bravura passage I’ll quote in a minute, soon refers to the grenade that landed in his APC in Grozny and broke his life in half—this is the central image to which the book keeps returning—and then begins its slow spiral outward into the world Kostya is trying to avoid having to deal with; it’s told in a high-energy, slangy narrative voice that keeps the reader involved and often amused (an important consideration when dealing with potentially depressing material). The “About the Author” page compares him to Salinger; while I can understand the PR value of this, I think a better comparison is to the Bulat Okudzhava of “Будь здоров, школяр” (translated as “Good Luck, Schoolboy!”), also told from the perspective, and in the colloquial language of, a young man tossed unprepared into a hellish war—though at one point it reminded me of my favorite Okudzhava song, Молитва (YouTube), which made me choke up more than I probably should have.

But there wouldn’t be much point to my recommending a Russian novel if you couldn’t get a decent sense of it from the translation; fortunately, that’s not a problem here. Schwartz doesn’t need any encomia from me; she’s won all sorts of awards and is generally recognized as one of the best translators of our day. But this book is a tougher challenge than a more conventionally “literary” one; as I wrote in a comment to this post (still one of my favorites, if I may toot my own horn), “Russian dialog has a feel that I’ve never seen rendered successfully in translation.” Well, she does a magnificent job, which can be seen from the very first paragraphs:

All the vodka wouldn’t fit in the fridge. First I tried standing them up and then I laid them on their sides, one on top of the other. The bottles stacked up like transparent fish. Then they hunkered down and stopped clinking. But ten or so just wouldn’t fit.

I should have told my mother to take this refrigerator back a long time ago. It’s an affront to me and the little boy next door. Every night this monster cuts in full blast and he cries on the other side of the wall. And my vodka is never all going to go in. It’s too damn small.

Fucking pig.

I was nodding along to the convincing rhythm of the sentences in the first two paragraphs, and then when I got to the “Fucking pig” I laughed, relaxed, and knew I had nothing to worry about; I can’t imagine a better equivalent of “Засранец” here. She obviously spent a lot of time immersing herself in the narration and finding a voice to match its feel. I kept making marginal notes to remind myself of particularly felicitous renditions: “Thank you for the heads up,” “Cut the pity party,” “sweet wine” for портвейн (which far too many translators render “port” or “port wine,” as though it were the equivalent of Taylor Fladgate rather than Thunderbird). The potentially soppy themes of Kostya’s love for drawing and for children are handled with grace and pay off handsomely. And speaking of handsome: the book is a very nicely designed package (and with no typos that I noticed, which is an unexpected pleasure in these poorly edited times). If you have any interest in the subject of young men chewed up by war, or simply in a well-told story, you’ll probably enjoy this book.

The original of the quoted passage:

Вся водка в холодильник не поместилась. Сначала пробовал ее ставить, потом укладывал одна на одну. Бутылки улеглись внутри как прозрачные рыбы. Затаились и перестали позвякивать. Но штук десять так и не поместилось.
Давно надо было сказать матери, чтобы забрала этот холодильник себе. Издевательство надо мной и над соседским мальчишкой. Каждый раз плачет за стенкой, когда этот урод ночью врубается на полную мощь. И водка моя никогда в него вся не входит. Маленький, блин.
Засранец.

I suddenly realized that it had been a long time, maybe years, since I’d set aside The Russian Language Today by Larissa Ryazanova-Clarke and Terence Wade (see this old post), and it was high time I got back to it, since I learn something or get a new insight on virtually every page. And sure enough, I immediately hit this passage:

An interesting tendency characterises the slang of the 1990s: its development runs counter to that of the general stratum of the language. Throughout the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, English was the primary source of Russian youth slang, whereas in the 1990s, when the language was saturated with new words of foreign origin, slang drew on native resources. The reason for this is that while, previously, English had been the means of isolating one sub-culture from another, and thus those who used slang from the rest of society, English is now becoming too popular to be a sub-cultural code.

They go on to discuss the word тусовка [tusovka] ‘gang, crew’ and its derivatives, like тусоваться [tusovatsya] ‘to hang around, go to parties’: “Etymologically, these words probably derive from the verb тасовáть (кáрты) ‘to shuffle (cards)’. Тусóвка, тусовáться originated in criminal argot, тусóвка originally meaning ‘fight, scene, quarrel’ … Thence, the words spread to hippy slang in the 1970s and later to young people’s informal speech in general. The meaning of тусовáться changed to ‘to hang out’, and the meaning of тусóвка changed to ‘company, circle of acquaintances’, or ‘meeting place’.” Fascinating stuff.

I recently finished Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, a superb piece of reporting—David Remnick was one of the few American reporters in Russia who actually knew the language and could go out and talk with ordinary people, and it shows. Anyone who wants to know what the last years of the USSR felt like from the perspective of an informed outsider will want to read this book. Here’s a bit about Dmitry Likhachov:

When he was a boy, Likhachev watched the February and October revolutions from his window. A decade later he had an even closer view of the rise of Soviet civilization, courtesy of a five-year term in a labor camp. Likhachev was arrested in 1928 for taking part in a students’ literary group called the Cosmic Academy of Sciences. The club posed about as great a threat to the Kremlin as the Harvard Lampoon does to the White House. For election as an “academician,” Likhachev presented a humorous paper on the need to restore to the language the letter “yat.” The Bolsheviks banned the letter as part of a campaign to “modernize” Russian after the revolution. Later, one of Likhachev’s interrogators railed at him for daring to waste his time on such things.
“What do you mean by language reform?” the interrogator shouted. “Perhaps we won’t even have any language at all under socialism!”

(For more on yat, see Bezyatie, and nominally Orfografiya and Orfografiya II.)

First of all, sound the trumpets: Polyglot Vegetarian has a new post up, just the second in the last year! The post, Green Bean, starts with restaurant menus and a detailed discussion of Chinese characters and winds its way to the main theme, the etymology of haricot. I’ll quote just enough to whet your appetite and send you over there for the full meal (there are many, many links in the quoted chunk that I won’t bother trying to reproduce):

The etymology of haricot is uncertain, with contenders from three different continents.
Haricot is a pair of homonyms: haricot de mouton is a lamb stew, from a verb harigoter meaning to cut into small pieces. The Ménagier de Paris (ca. 1393) has Hericot de mouton (II, 148). François Génin derives (Récréations philologiques, I. p. 50) this haricot from Latin aliquot ‘a few’ and Littré (s.v.) quotes the Comtesse de Bassanville as proposing Arabic hali-gote (I’m not sure what this is). More sensible sources derive harigoter from Old Low Franconian *hariôn ‘to mess up’, related to the English verb harry.
The idea that haricot beans are so-called because they came to be used in haricot stew is a bit far-fetched, particularly since beans do not seem to be a common ingredient. Even more so is Alexandre Dumas (père) ‘s claim that the stew originally was meat and beans, until “l’un des deux ingrédients a été détrôné par les navets” ‘one of the ingredients was dethroned by turnips’ (Grand dictionnaire de cuisine, s.v.). More likely is that the form of the earlier stew word influenced the later bean word.
Haricot beans (there will be no more about meat) first appear in the mid-17th century. Before then, such beans were faséoles, from Latin Phaseolus (now the name of the genus), like English fasels. […]

The detailed discussion of various possible sources is vintage Polyveg; it ends:

I don’t know the stand of more modern specialized works (and would welcome pointers). The OED still has “Origin uncertain: see Littré,” while we wait for them to make their way around to the H’s. The Oxford dictionary of English Etymology has “perh. – Aztec ayacotli.” The Petits Robert and Larousse stick with French harigoter. French Wikipedia, s.v. Haricot and Phaseolus, is somewhat uncommitted, listing some of the alternatives given above.

If anyone has pointers, now would be the time to share them.

Thanks to this Log post by Mark Liberman, I’ve been introduced to Samosapedia, “The definitive guide to South Asian lingo.” Today’s Word of the Day is home-ministry, “The domain of a wife. A quaint and old-fashioned euphemism, much favoured by men of an earlier generation in Tamil Nadu.” The entry Mark cited is kolaveri: “It means a murderous rage felt by a jilted or spurned lover but in everyday parlance refers to unnecessary anger”; the context is the song “Kolaveri Di,” which Mark links to and which is pretty darn catchy, and one of the commenters links to J. P. Fabricius’s Tamil and English Dictionary, another excellent online resource.

Update (Oct. 2024). The site vanished from the internet around 2022; the last entry seems to have been Front Roll on November 23, 2015.

I can shoehorn this into LH by mentioning that unlike most foreign movies, Edward Yang‘s masterpiece (according to an interview I read, or perhaps according to the critic who introduced the film as his own choice for best overlooked movie of the 1990s at a Museum of the Moving Image festival over a decade ago) was originally titled in English, A Brighter Summer Day, and Yang then came up with what he considered a less adequate Chinese title (牯嶺街少年殺人事件 Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian, “The Boy in the Murder Incident on Guling Street”). But the fact is I just want to shamelessly plug one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s four hours long, and it takes a while to get going, and it references a lot of obscure (outside Taiwan) history, but if you’re a movie lover in Manhattan, where it’s very belatedly making its official US debut, you owe it to yourself to see it. Here‘s A.O. Scott’s review in yesterday’s NY Times, and here‘s a thoughtful Reverse Shot piece by Andrew Chan, which explains the English title in its final paragraph:

The second pun lies in the title itself: a humorous mistranscription of the phrase “a bright summer day” from Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” which one of Xiao Si’r’s friends is learning to sing.

If a Region 1 DVD ever comes out (I believe there was a Chinese one at some point), it’s going straight on my Amazon wishlist. (Criterion, are you listening?)