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Ben Zimmer sent me a link to this Wall Street Journal article by Kristin M. Jones about a wonderful development for lovers of Russian and Soviet film:

On April 26 Mosfilm announced a partnership with YouTube allowing viewers to watch a substantial number of landmark movies from the studio’s collection in their entirety.

Karen Shakhnazarov, Mosfilm’s general director and also a filmmaker, producer and screenwriter, released a statement saying in part: “For us the project with YouTube is very important and interesting. The aim is to offer users the possibility to view online legal quality video content and prevent illegal use of our films.” Fifty titles were initially made available, and five more are being uploaded each week; by the end of the year, Mosfilm aims to have uploaded more than 200 movies to Mosfilm’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/mosfilm). Many are subtitled. According to Youri Hazanov, who handles YouTube partnerships for Central and Eastern Europe, the deal followed YouTube’s standard partnership arrangement; YouTube will sell advertising on the channel and share the revenue with Mosfilm. …

The array of movies viewers can explore includes not only masterworks by Tarkovsky, such as his complex, dreamlike meditation on memory, “The Mirror” (1974), but also comedies, live-action and animated fantasy films, musicals, melodramas and action and adventure films.

I can enthusiastically recommend The Mirror myself, and there are a bunch of other movies there that I either love and want to see again or have been wanting to see (like Девять дней одного года, “Nine days of one year”). Here‘s the direct link to the site; enjoy! (I should point out that Karen, in Shakhnazarov’s name, is masculine; it’s an old Armenian name. I believe it’s an Armenianized form of the Arabic name Karim ‘generous.’)

Peacay sent me a link to the page New Digital Collection: Soviet Samizdat Periodicals:

The University of Toronto Libraries have launched a new digital collection, Soviet Samizdat Periodicals.

Soviet Samizdat Periodicals is a database of information about editions of classic Soviet samizdat, 1956-1986. The fully searchable database includes approximately 300 titles, representing all known types of samizdat periodical editions from this late Soviet era, including human rights bulletins, poetry anthologies, rock zines, religious and national editions. Researchers will find detailed bibliographic and archival information. The site also includes information about samizdat and dissidence for the general public. The website is intended to provide a forum for continuing discussion about this outstanding phenomenon of recent history.

Peacay warned me that “it appears right now to be down or throwing up connection errors so maybe it’s just going through some birthing bumps. Persist!” Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get through to the linked database; ordinarily I don’t post stuff I haven’t actually seen, but this is such an exciting development I’m going to put it out there and hope it isn’t a chimera. (If anyone from U Toronto knows something about this, maybe has a link that works, by all means chime in!)

Update. It turns out, now that the site is accessible, that it’s nothing but a catalog of samizdat publications with a few images of covers, not worth posting at all. I apologize; as some slight recompense, here’s The Hat That Talks, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, circa 1908 (click to enlarge photo and examine awning of hat store).

Kerim Friedman sent me a link to Ruth E. Kott’s “Language duel” (The University of Chicago Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2010), about Yigal Bronner, “the first scholar to seriously study Sanskrit puns and bitextual poems”:

Called slesa, the literary device was used by Sanskrit poets from the sixth century to as late as the 20th. The same text can be read multiple ways simultaneously. Different from an allegory, Bronner writes in Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (Columbia University Press, 2010), slesa “typically involves a metamorphosis of the entire utterance—nouns, verbs, and prepositions—in a way that creates a new sentence with a new vocabulary.” Slesa can inhabit a word, a phrase, a sentence, or an entire piece. A word like naksatra, Bronner cites as an example in his introduction, which means “planet,” can also be read as two separate words: the “negative particle na and the word ksatra (warrior).” In commentaries printed alongside a slesa poem, single verses are usually discussed as two separate ones….
In Extreme Poetry, Bronner traces slesa’s evolution from its first-known use by sixth-century poet Subandhu. A century later slesa was part of most narrative poems, “often occupying entire sections or chapters and typically appearing at the centermost plot juncture,” Bronner writes. By the early eighth century, poets were merging the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Structural and plot parallels lent the two tales to slesa. When the male protagonists, the Mahabharata’s Arjuna and the Ramayana’s Rama, attract nonhuman females, both men spurn the women; Arjuna refuses and humiliates the “dancing-girl from heaven” Urvaśī, and Rama physically harms demoness Surpanakha. When the two epics were fused, poets came to embrace a new aesthetic ideal, Bronner writes, in which “telling a single story was no longer the highest goal for a work of narrative art.”
The use of slesa continued, with fluctuating popularity, until colonial times, when it “gradually came to be seen as the epitome of everything that was decadent and distasteful about South Asian culture.” The bias against “the clever manipulation of language in literature,” says Bronner, has its roots in the Romantic movement, which valued simple, unembellished literature. Since then, Sanskritists haven’t touched the subject. “Few living scholars have actually read a bitextual poem,” Bronner writes, “and no modern scholar has seriously analyzed one.”

The piece ends with an intriguing comparison:

[Read more…]

David Bellos has an article in The Independent (actually an extract from his book Is That A Fish In Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything), “How Google Translate Works,” that makes some interesting points but also has some problems, which Asya Pereltsvaig has dealt with in a post at her blog Languages of the World. I especially like her conclusion:

If you, like David Bellos, think that human translators store sentences they’ve already translated, try this little experiment. When you are in the middle of a conversation or discussion with someone, stop them and ask them to repeat verbatim the previous sentence they’ve just said. Chances are, they will remember the “pure meaning” of what they said, but not verbatim how they said it. (You might want to wear a wire in order to confirm!). In the off-chance that you get a correct response, as rare as that is, next time ask you interlocutor to repeat verbatim the third sentence back from where you stop them. I’ve tried many times, and always got a negative result (and a stare of incomprehension to go with it!). When you scare all your friends off with your little crazy experiments, try it on yourself — just stop suddenly and think what your sentence three sentences ago was, verbatim.
What this experiment will convince you of, I am sure, is that, contrary to David Bellos’s beliefs, even if we “encounter the same needs, feel the same fears, desires and sensations at every turn”, we do not “say the same things over and over again”, at least not in exactly the same way. Although when I debate the merits of machine translation with its advocates, it does seem to me that we do.

I finally finished One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, liking it much better than I did at the beginning. It’s not easy to get into, either linguistically or as a story; Solzhenitsyn’s Russian is as barbed as the wire around the camp he writes about, full of nonstandard grammar and lexicon, both the “real Russian” words the author salvaged from the nineteenth-century pages of Dahl and the slang of the Gulag. If I hadn’t had Rossi’s The Gulag Handbook (which now, I see, costs $163.83 used—thanks for convincing me to pay $10 for my copy in Ojai in 2002, Eric!) and Carpovich’s Solzhenitsyn’s Peculiar Vocabulary (which isn’t available at all now—again, I paid $10 for my copy back in 2000)—and the unfailing assistance of frequent commenter mab, who checked with her Gulag-survivor friend when she didn’t know the answer to my recondite questions—I’d never have been able to hack my way through it. But I’m glad I did; once I got into the story (and got used to his sentence structure), it became more and more riveting, and I gobbled up the last twenty pages or so in a rush.

What makes the book work is the fact that it’s not (as one might have expected) a catalog of horrors, in which the protagonist suffers every sling and arrow the Gulag could toss at him. Instead, Shukhov (as the author calls him—he’s called “Ivan Denisovich” only by fellow inmates) has a good day; at the end he gives thanks for his extra bowls of soup, the bit of metal he smuggled into his barracks to use for shoe repair (by which he earns a little money on the side), and the fact that he had escaped punishment and his brigade hadn’t gotten sent to the freezing work they had feared. One man from his barracks, who had mouthed off to a guard, is given ten days in the camp jail, and Shukhov reflects: “Ten days! If you had ten days in the cells here and sat them out to the end, it meant you’d be a wreck for the rest of your life. You got TB and you’d never be out of hospitals long as you lived. And the fellows who did fifteen days were dead and buried.” (I quote the translation by Ronald Bingley and Max Hayward, which is truly excellent; unlike many of the translations I’ve seen lately, they never fake it or just skip the hard parts.) We learn about the worst aspects from stories prisoners tell, but our hero, who has learned the art of survival in his eight years in camps (the story is set at the beginning of the year 1951), makes his way through the obstacle course with aplomb, even wondering as he finally lies down for a night’s sleep whether he’d be any happier outside.

Observations on the mores of the camp occur in mordant asides like “Украинцев западных никак не переучат, они и в лагере по отчеству да выкают” (“They simply couldn’t teach Western Ukrainians to change their ways. Even in camp they were polite to people and addressed them by their full name”) and “Чтоб носилки носить — ума не надо. Вот и ставит бригадир на ту работу бывших начальников.” (“You didn’t need any brains to carry a hod. That was why Tyurin gave this work to people who used to run things before they got to the camp.”) By the end, you’ve learned some survival lessons you hope you will never need, and been thrilled by unexpected adventures involving trying to get bricks laid before the mortar freezes and discovering a bit of sharp metal you’d forgotten about just as your brigade is about to be searched. It’s not a cheerful book (and as usual with Solzhenitsyn, there’s hardly anything you could call humor), but I recommend it to anyone who wants to know what Gulag life was like but doesn’t want the grimness of, say, Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales.

Incidentally, I asked here, “does anyone know if the film made from Aksyonov’s book [Звёздный билет (A Starry Ticket)], Мой Младший Брат, is any good?” I watched it on YouTube, and no, it’s not very good, but one actor, Oleg Dahl (who plays the bespectacled would-be writer Alik) is astonishing—when he’s onscreen you can’t take your eyes off him. I was sad to learn from Wikipedia (English, Russian) that he hadn’t even made it to the age of 40. If any readers would like to recommend any of his other movies, I’d be grateful.

Back in May, I posted about IndigenousTweets.com, a website that tracks speakers of indigenous or minority languages on Twitter; now its proprietor, Kevin Scannell, has “added an exciting new feature to the site that tracks blogs written in 50 indigenous and minority languages”:

You can find this new feature at http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/ (I also registered http://indigenousblogs.com/ but it should just redirect you to the other address).

For now, I’m only tracking blogs hosted at Blogspot, which hosts more than 90% of the blogs written in the languages I’m interested in. That said, I hope to add other popular services like WordPress, Tumblr, MovableType, etc. going forward.

The site is laid out just like Indigenous Tweets: there is a main page with a table of the supported languages, and then if you click on a language in the table you’ll be taken to a new page that shows all of the blogs in the language along with some statistics for each: number of posts, percentage of posts in the language, total number of words, date and title of last post.

There are feeds on each language page; “these will contain every post in every blog written in the language.” You can, of course, subscribe to individual blogs, and he urges you to submit new ones. An excellent project, and I thank Stan for alerting me to it.

Update (Dec. 2024). Needless to say, the original link is dead; here’s an archived version from around the time of the post, and here’s one from 2016 that doesn’t seem much different. Blogging was already on its deathbed.

Cherokee artist Roy Boney Jr., who grew up speaking the Cherokee language, has created a graphic story for Indian Country Today showing the history of the Cherokee syllabary over the last two centuries, from the “curvilinear, free-flowing” handwritten version it started with to today’s Unicode and digital media. It’s as good a brief presentation as I can imagine, and I thank overeducated_alligator for creating the MetaFilter post that brought it to my attention.

As I wrote here (and Sashura writes at more length here), the BBC’s Radio 4 is doing a dramatization of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, one of the great novels of the twentieth century and almost certainly the greatest novel of WWII; it began Sunday, but all the episodes are available for download—see the schedule page for links to individual episodes (as well as a pdf of the family and other relationships, very useful for this sprawling epic). I meant to write about it Sunday but forgot, and then our cable got cut; thank goodness for downloadable episodes, because I haven’t been able to start listening myself. I’m very much looking forward to it.

Kári Tulinius (aka Kattullus) e-mailed me this link, calling the post by saxophonist Josh Rutner “one of the finest portrayals I have read of the joy of hunting down elusive quotes.” And so it is. The first part, after an encomium to Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave and a quote from it about words as living organisms, continues:

I remember a funny instance of being misled by those living word-organisms: I was reading Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, an intensely beautiful vision of Gustave Flaubert, revolving around a fight for authenticity between two stuffed parrots. Towards the end of the book, I found a phrase which Barnes takes from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary which struck me as particularly poignant:

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

I knew I’d read that phrase before. I hadn’t (and still haven’t) read Madame Bovary, so it wasn’t that. It’s true that at the time I’d been listening incessantly to Randy Newman’s album Sail Away, and perhaps I’d imagined hearing that line within the song, Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear; but no such luck. I was convinced it’d been quoted in the book I’d just finished, Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman. I went through every page trying to locate this little quote. I was so convinced that after finding nary a bear reference in my first flip through, I re-read the book. Again. And again: no bear, no kettle; no stars.

Finally, I was distraught enough to imagine that I’d in fact read the quote earlier in the book. I began again at page one; hunting for bears. Turns out I had seen it earlier in the book—twice. In Barnes’ multifaceted look at Flaubert’s life and work, he used this same quote in three places, each as if for the first time. It had become lodged in my mind the first two times, and only the third time did it appear as a friend, waiting to be unveiled.

You can read the three citations of the quote at the link, and if you scroll down you can read a wonderful passage about investigating the history of the quote “God is a circle, whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.” Great stuff; thanks, Kári!

Oxford is good enough to send me copies of many of their language-related books, and here are a couple of major new additions to their list.
1) The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (which I mentioned here) is the twelfth, and centennial, edition of this handy distillation of the sprawling magnificence of the OED. For a book that’s almost 1,700 pages long, it’s amazingly light and easy to hold, and it’s impressively comprehensive, including (for example) protonotary ‘a chief clerk in some law courts, originally in the Byzantine court,’ ‘pump and dump ‘the fraudulent practice of encouraging investors to buy shares in a company in order to inflate the price artificially, and then selling one’s own shares while the price is high,’ and punani (also punany) ‘the female genitals,’ none of which is in the comparably long Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (though, to be fair, the latter has words not in the Concise Oxford, like pung ‘a sleigh with a box-shaped body’). It has usage notes (“prove has two past participles, proved and proven. Both are correct and can be used more or less interchangeably…”) and “1911-2011” boxes (“Punk is perhaps the last word you would expect to find in the first edition of the Concise, but it has a long history…”), and in the center are a set of useful lists of countries, kings and queens, chemical elements, and the like (it’s a shock to see the list of planets missing Pluto; they explain its demotion in a footnote). It’s already become the first dictionary I consult after the M-W Collegiate, and I’m very glad to own it.
2) James W. Pennebaker‘s The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us is a very interesting look at, well, pretty much what the title implies; I’m not really competent to review it, but fortunately Ben Zimmer has done a fine job at the NY Times, and there’s an interview with the author at Scientific American. (Mark Liberman discussed some of his findings earlier this year at the Log.)