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A very funny and interesting piece by Edward Docx about a visit to Tolstoy’s estate for the awarding of the Yasnaya Polyana literary prizes; I’ll quote the bit where he makes the mistake of mentioning that the chair of the judges for the Man Booker “is Dame Stella Rimington and that she is an ex-head of the security services in Britain”:

And—bam!—that’s it: now everyone is laughing. Oh, the west, they guffaw. Oh, England, they chortle. Oh, hypocrisy. Oh, MI5. Oh, MI6. Even the FSB would not dare! You mean, they splutter, that the winner of your most famous literary prize is judged by the security services? It seems I could not have told them a more perfect Anglo-Russian joke if I tried.

I try to explain that they are mistaken, that Dame Rimington is retired and is a now an author herself. Yes, someone cackles, like Putin is retired from the KGB!

The Yasnaya Polyana prizes are not tied to the year they are awarded; one is for a novel written in the 20th century, and the second is for “the most significant book written after 2000.” An interesting set-up. (Thanks, Paul!)

In this thread Sashura convinced me to finish Astafyev’s short novel “Стародуб,” which I first rendered “The old oak” (which is what it looks like it means: стародуб [starodub] = старый ‘old’ + дуб ‘oak’) but was informed by MOCKBA that it actually refers to a flower, “an ephemeral spring yellow anemone (wind-flower), Adonis sibirica.” (You can see some nice pictures here.) I’ve now gotten halfway through; it’s a good story, and I’m glad I decided to go ahead with it. But I now realize how impossible it is to translate the flower’s name, and hence the title, in the context of the story; you’ll see why when you read the passage in which it’s introduced (original Russian below the cut; Faefan [a peasant form of the name Feofan = Theophanes] is the hunter who rescued the maimed child at the beginning and raised him as his own, “Stumpy” is my rendition of the name the villagers gave him, Култыш):

Once Faefan took Stumpy by the arm and brought him to a bare-topped hill that had worked itself free, egglike, of the taiga underwood at the mouth of the Izybash. Here the hunter showed the boy a flower with such a shaggy and aromatic stem that it seemed all the forest smells had soaked into it.

“Starodub [Oldoak]!” said Faefan with unusual gentleness, and told his adopted son about how, long ago, there appeared in those parts a stern and steadfast people who did not bow their heads before anything. They had come from a place where oaks grew, where there were apple, pear, and cherry trees and no forests of Siberian pine or larch. They gave their own names to everything, and they named the most curative and beautiful flower in honor of their most beloved tree, the oak. In that way, this fragrant yellow flower became a constant, deathless remembrance of their own region, lost forever. The generations came and went, people died, those who had oppressed and been oppressed for their devotion to the old faith disappeared, but each spring, all over Siberia, the staroduby blazed up with their clear fire and dropped their seeds, so that the earth would never stop flowering, so that the heart of man would be filled with its juice and spirit/smell, and the memory of the region that gave birth to him would never decay.

It would be great if this flower were named “oldoak” in English, but since it’s not, there’s no way to render that passage without the kind of footnote or parenthetical explanation one hates to encumber fiction with.

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1) Corey Kilgannon has a nice story in today’s NY Times that begins thus:

The jolly trash man was going about his route in the Rockaways, Queens, when he spied a woman in front of her house. “Cé hé bhfuil tú?” he greeted her. Naturally, the woman replied, “Tá mé go maith.” “Ceart go leor,” the trash man shot back.

This exchange — roughly: “How are you?” “I’m fine.” “Ah, grand!” — was in Irish, the Gaelic language that survives only in parts of Ireland — and to a lesser extent, along the garbage route of Ed Shevlin, 51. The route winds through the Belle Harbor section of the Rockaways, where conversations were once commonly conducted “as Gaeilge.”

“I was amazed to find there were people I could speak Irish with, while picking up their garbage,” said Mr. Shevlin, a New York City sanitation man — a “fear bruscar” in Irish — who began studying the language a few years ago.

He studied in Galway, so he speaks the same Connemara dialect I studied myself several decades ago.

2) From the Washington Post, Linda Davidson’s “At French immersion school, a love for Russian“:

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Now that baseball is over (I refuse to pay attention to this World Series, since I can’t decide which team I dislike more), it’s time to enjoy retrospectives on classic hot-stove league topics like baseball names, and Ben Zimmer has provided a fine one at Visual Thesaurus. His focus is on “unpronounceable” names like Rzepczynski (nicknamed “Scrabble”) and Mientkiewicz (“Eyechart”). I especially enjoyed this joke:

An immigrant from the old country came through Ellis Island. As part of a physical exam, he was asked to read a line of letters on an eye chart. Pointing to the fourth row (which contained the letters S Z Q W R E K Z I), the doctor asked, “Can you read these letters?” “Read them?!!” The man exclaimed, “I KNOW the man!”

And this video (which teaches you how to say the classic Polish tongue-twister W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie (“In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed”). Also, my wife and I are in full agreement with him on this: “My favorite surname among active baseball players is Saltalamacchia, as in Boston Red Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia.”

Having read and enjoyed Viktor Astafyev’s 1964 story “Конь с розовой гривой” [Horse with a pink mane] (about a kid who longs for the titular gingerbread horse but gets into trouble with his grandmother, who has promised to buy one in the nearby river town where she sells berries), I decided to read his 1959 story “Перевал” [The passage], about a boy of around ten who flees an impossible living situation in a tiny village and joins a crew of rafters shepherding logs down the Yenisei River. Touchy and standoffish at first, he works hard, is accepted as one of the gang, and earns his first money and true self-respect after helping them get the wood past a difficult set of rapids (this is the “passage” of the title, which I have seen mistranslated “The Pass”); while it clearly fits into what we think of as kid’s lit, it’s very effectively written, taught me a lot of Siberian words and technical logging terms, and made me want to read more Astafyev, so I turned to his 1960 story “Стародуб” [The windflower].

It turned out to be set in a tiny Siberian village on a river, cut off from the rest of the world by dense forests and difficult rapids, a scene almost identical to that of the previous story. This village is inhabited by Old Believers (for whom I learned a new word, кержак) who have chosen the inaccessible spot to avoid contamination from the sinners around them; the plot is kicked off when a raft comes to grief in the rapids and only a young boy survives, cast up on shore with a badly mangled arm and barely conscious. What to do with him? The villagers gather in council and vote to get rid of him, since if they allow him to stay people may come looking for him and spoil their pure existence. They put together a tiny raft and force him onto it despite his wounds, explaining that they are not committing any sin, merely returning him where God put him, and it is God’s decision whether to rescue him or let him drown. At this point I decided that the story was a little grimmer than I felt up to, so I set it aside and moved on to another 1960 story, Vladimir Tendryakov’s “Тройка, семерка, туз” [Three, seven, ace—an allusion to Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”].

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You never know what you’re going to find when you visit the eudæmonist; today’s post reproduce a couple of Boswellian quotations about Dr. Johnson’s working methods, of which this is the first:

The words, partly taken from other dictionaries, and partly supplied by himself, having been first written down with spaces left between them, he delivered in writing their etymologies, definitions, and various significations. The authorities were copied from the books themselves, in which he had marked the passages with a black-lead pencil, the traces of which could easily be effaced. I have seen several of them, in which that trouble had not been taken; so that they were just as when used by the copyists.

The second has italics in it, which I’m feeling too lazy to reproduce (long day), so you can go on over there if you want to read it.

The multifarious aldiboronti, in this Wordorigins thread, posted a quote from Charles Mackay’s Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds that I enjoyed so much I can’t resist passing it on:

“What a shocking bad hat!” was the phrase that was next in vogue. No sooner had it become universal, than thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat shewed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the war-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats. He was a wise man who, finding himself under these circumstances “the observed of all observers,” bore his honours meekly. He who shewed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice. The mob soon perceive whether a man is irritable, and, if of their own class, they love to make sport of him. When such a man, and with such a hat, passed in those days through a crowded neighbourhood, he might think himself fortunate if his annoyances were confined to the shouts and cries of the populace. The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed in the pauses of their mirth, “Oh! what a shocking bad hat!” “What a shocking bad hat!” Many a nervous, poor man, whose purse could but ill spare the outlay, doubtless purchased a new hat before the time, in order to avoid exposure in this manner.
The origin of this singular saying, which made fun for the metropolis for months, is not involved in the same obscurity as that which shrouds the origin of Quoz and some others. There had been a hotly-contested election for the borough of Southwark, and one of the candidates was an eminent hatter. This gentleman, in canvassing the electors, adopted a somewhat professional mode of conciliating their good-will, and of bribing them without letting them perceive that they were bribed. Whenever he called upon or met a voter whose hat was not of the best material, or, being so, had seen its best days, he invariably said, “What a shocking bad hat you have got; call at my warehouse, and you shall have a new one!” Upon the day of election this circumstance was remembered, and his opponents made the most of it, by inciting the crowd to keep up an incessant cry of “What a shocking bad hat!” all the time the honourable candidate was addressing them. From Southwark the phrase spread over all London, and reigned for a time the supreme slang of the season.

(I have restored Mackay’s spelling, punctuation, and italics from an 1856 edition on Google Books.)

Alissa Stern of BasaBali.org saw this LH post on digitizing Balinese and wrote to tell me about her organization’s project “to develop the first interactive, multimedia material to teach conversational Balinese and Balinese script…. We are particularly excited about this project because it brings together Balinese linguists, videographers, and animators along with Balinese focused anthropologists and historians in addition to linguists and language software specialists… We’re happy to hear from anyone working on similar initiatives and would welcome any support.” Sounds very worthwhile, and I thought I’d pass along her recommendations for Balinese language materials:
Kersten SVD, J. Bahasa Bali. Ende, Flores: Penerbit Nusa Indah, 1984.
Singaraja, Balai Penelitian Bahasa. Kamus Indonesia-Bali. Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1975.
Spitzing, Gunter. Practical Balinese: A Communication Guide. Hong Kong: Eric M. Oey.
Sutjaja, I Gusti Made. Concise Balinese Dictionary. Hong Kong: Tuttle Publishing, 2009.
Sutjaja, I Gusti Made. Everyday Balinese. Hong Kong: Tuttle Publishing, 2009.

The Morgan Library has a blog post by Carolyn Vega showing a charter signed by King John and dated March 5, 1205, that “conferred land holdings or privileges on the abbey and monks at Selby.” It’s a beautiful document, but the reason I bring it to your attention is the last bit:

John signed the charter “.J. Reg” on the verso, along with a note that I cannot decipher. Notice how the quality of his penmanship varies from that of the trained scribe above. His signature seems almost to quaver, and not only does he fail to form the individual letters with the precision that is present in the formal gothic script, but the ink fades out towards the end of each line. I am curious about John’s added note — can you help us decipher it?

If you fancy your ability to read medieval English script, give it a shot. (Thanks, Leslie!)

Another quote from Dobrenko’s “The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon” (see yesterday’s post):

In this way [by the crushing of individuality in the late Stalin era], the beachhead of self-consciousness had been shrunk to a small bit. But this small bit was not too cozy (like a chilly apartment with rented furniture); hence the desire to brighten it, fill it with light, joy, cheerfulness, optimism. This injunction became fixed in the titles. Not being able to stop to consider these works, I give only the titles — a sampling of a vast wave: Light over the Earth, Light over the Fields, Light over Lipsk, The Sun of Altai, the Earth in Bloom, Happiness (Pavlenko), Happiness (Baialinov), The Azure Lights, The Azure Fields, Youth Is with Us, Song over the Waters, Life’s Summits, The Happy Day, Winged People, The Future Begins, The Star of Happiness, Our Youth, The Rise, Youth, Always Ahead, The Stars Never Pale, The Road to Happiness, The Dawn, Toward the Dawn, The Moscow Dawns, The Sun That Never Sets, In the Happy Path. There is an amazing amount of a kind of feeling of spring, breadth, spaciousness (“a spring wind blows over my country”). The small bit is narrow, yet “broad is my beloved country” [a famous song of the Stalin era]; the person is a function, yet “with every passing day it is a greater joy to live.” Here they are, passing before one’s eyes: The Spring Winds, Spring-time, The Spring Streams, Spring, Spring on the Oder, The Big [Spring] Flood, What Airiness, The Wind of the Century, The Sea Breeze, The Wind from the South. And where there are winds and the spring, there are also roads: The Road to Frontiers, The Road Within, The Road to the Ocean, Roads That We Choose, Roads. Spaces also define the optics: The Great Fate, Great Kin, The Great Ore, The Great Family, The Great Art, The Great Day. Even someone who has never touched any of the books mentioned must sense a certain kind of disposition and understand that everything here is not accidental. These titles have a semantics of their own.

It makes me tired and depressed just reading that list of determinedly upbeat titles.

(Another note on translation: a few sentences later, the Russian word фабула ‘plot’ is simply transliterated as “fabula.” I have no idea what the English-speaking reader is supposed to make of that.)

Addendum. I’ve just found (here) a quote from the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz (translated by Agha Shahid Ali) that admirably sums up this particular aspect of totalitarian art:

See our leaders polish their manner clean of our suffering:
Indeed, we must confess only to bliss.