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Having taken another course from Professor Sashura, I’m going to pass on some more information that may be of general interest but will certainly help anyone trying to make their way through Life and Fate in the original (the Amazon link is to the Chandler translation my wife gave me for Christmas). In chapter 38, the pilots about to leave the northern village where they have been held in reserve to return to the front are discussing the relative merits of German and Soviet fighters, and one of them says that the German pilot “doesn’t like horizontal fighting, he tries to get vertical.” Someone else agrees, saying “Who doesn’t know that? Even the village girls know he breaks away from tight turns.” Then comes the line I needed help with: “Эх, «чаечек» надо было тогда получше прикрыть, там люди хорошие” [‘Well, then, the chaechki should have been covered better, those are good people there’]. I figured out that chaechki was a diminutive of chaiki ‘seagulls,’ even though it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries (even the ones that have a lot of obscure diminutives), but the only definition for chaika I could find was the literal ‘seagull,’ which obviously (from both context and scare quotes) wasn’t intended here. So I wrote Sashura, who provided his usual full explanation:

Chayka was the nickname of the Red Army’s И-153 fighter plane (И – for истребитель, same as F designation in USAF), a biplane that was the mainstay in the Soviet air force throughout the later 1930s and early 1940s. The nickname is because of the gull-like shape of its wings. While it was superior to Japanese aircraft in 1939, shooting them down at a rate of 3 to 1, it wasn’t an even match for the German Messerschmitt 109. They talk about their engagement near Rzhev, the bloody continuation of the Moscow counteroffensive. By the time of the battle of Stalingrad the Polikarpov-designed Chaykas were mostly replaced by monoplane Yaks and American Airacobras, but many pilots had warm feelings towards the older planes, as the phrase shows (прикрыть – to give cover, covering fire).
This is brilliant, how the scene is built! The pilots are discussing fighting manoeuvres and saying that German pilots don’t like dog-fights involving tight curves (виражи), for which the Chaykas were famous. Then one pilot says, even girls in the village know that ‘he’ (the enemy, Germans) avoids tight turns. Chayka is of course feminine. The gender of the word prompts the next comment about giving better support to Chayka planes. Then they all stay quiet thinking about their girlfriends in the village whom they will leave in the morning.

He’s absolutely right about the brilliance of the scene, and the deeper I get into the book the more I feel its greatness—I’m deeply grateful to Sashura for urging me to read it in the original. (For one thing, I would have missed this line entirely, since Chandler leaves it out, as he tends to do with difficult lines; I don’t want to be overly harsh, since it’s a common practice among translators, it’s a huge and difficult book that presumably, like most such jobs, had a too-tight deadline, and readers won’t notice unless they’re familiar with the original, but it’s a nuisance when you’re reading the original and checking the translation mainly to help resolve just such difficulties. Also, leaving out the line makes the sudden silence in the next line unintelligible.)

A reader sent me a link to Harold Bloom’s 2008 NYRB review (single page) of the new Yale University Press edition (with restored footnotes, “extraordinarily copious and rich”) of Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language (only $300!). I’ve called Bloom a blowhard, and he is, but when he’s talking about Yiddish (of which he is a native speaker, which I hadn’t known), he’s much more interesting than when he’s bloviating about the anxiety of influence. In his discussion of Weinreich’s Chapter 2, “Yiddish in the Framework of Other Jewish Languages,” Bloom says “Hebrew itself probably began as a fusion language” before mentioning Babylonian, Aramaic, Hellenistic Greek, Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino:

Weinreich’s zest for Jewish languages was awesome; you can drown happily in his oceanic discussions of Marranos (converted Jews secretly practicing Judaism) using the Portuguese language, or of deviations from Arabic and Turkish idioms in the other varieties of Ladino. The byways lead Weinreich into folklore, which aids him in asserting that “of all Jewish languages Yiddish has…the largest degree of individuality.” Literary achievement in Yiddish, even now underestimated, sustains the linguistic esteem that Weinreich conferred on a tongue that he himself had not spoken as a child.

He also quotes at length from another wonderful book on Yiddish that I do own and am surprised I haven’t mentioned on LH, Benjamin Harshav’s The Meaning of Yiddish, about which the Times Literary Supplement said, quite accurately, “It is a remarkable feat of high popularization, written with great flair and without a hint of pedantry. . . . The book should be read by all who are interested in language.” An enjoyable review of a book I’ll probably never read; thanks, Rick!

I’m still reading Grossman’s Life and Fate (see here and here), and I’m here to report on another lexical item that required some interesting research. I was proud of myself for correctly analyzing начканц [nachkants] as начальник канцелярии [nachal’nik kantselyarii, ‘chief clerk’] without assistance, but on the very next page I hit матчасть [matchast’] and was lost at sea. The sentence was “Вот уже месяц, как полк вышел из боев, пополнял матчасть, принимал взамен выбывшего летный состав” [‘It had already been a month since the regiment had withdrawn from combat to replenish/restock its matchast’ and replace its missing flight personnel’]; it was clearly part of the makeup of a military unit, but what? It turns out it’s short for материальная часть [material’naya chast’], which means ‘equipment, matériel,’ which makes sense. And in the course of googling it, I found it’s commonly used in the phrase Учи(те) матчасть ‘Learn your equipment,’ and that led me to the wonderful site Луркоморье, “русский lurkmore”—i.e., a Russian version/equivalent of the English-language site lurkmore.com, which apparently deals with memes among other things. What’s wonderful about the Russian site is not just the full explanation of things like the phrase I was researching, but the name, which is a beautiful pun on “lurkmore” and лукоморье [lukomor’e] ‘cove, creek,’ one of the best-known rare words in Russian because of its strategic presence in one of the best-known lines of Russian poetry, the beginning of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila: У лукоморья дуб зеленый ‘By a cove a green oak’ (see the first paragraph of this LH post for some context). This is further proof of the difference between America and Russia: even young Russian snarkmeisters of the type who create and classify internet memes are steeped in their poetic tradition in a way few Americans have been for a couple of generations now.

At any rate, the Луркоморье entry for the phrase not only helpfully equates it (in the appropriate context) to the English RTFM, it mentions that it entered popular culture in part from a 1973 movie «В бой идут одни „старики“» [No rookies in this battle!] and it provides a “bearded joke” from WWII: The Germans carry out a raid on an airfield and capture a technician. The Gestapo torture him: “Give us the specifications of the Il-2!” He says “I don’t know, leave me alone!” This goes on for a day or two, until the technician manages to escape. When he gets back to his unit, they, of course, start asking him about his experiences. He says, “Guys, learn your equipment! Over there, they just keep beating the shit out of you about it.”

Update (July 2023). The Lurkomore site is down, but archives are available here, and there’s a mirror here.

I am delighted to report that Helen DeWitt’s new novel, Lightning Rods, will be published by New Directions in October (as reported by Helen here); you can preorder it at that Amazon link, or wherever you like, or simply wait for it to appear at your local bookstore (if such things still exist by then). If you’re not familiar with the author, I refer you to my 2003 rave about her first novel (which has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name). Huzzah for her and for New Directions, which has been doing its damnedest to save American literature for many decades now (note the list of forthcoming publications provided in the second parenthetical paragraph of this post—my, I do seem to be addicted to parentheses).

Thomas G. Lannon of the New York Public Library has posted “A History of the Library as Seen Through Notable Researchers” at the Library blog:

One unique way to trace the history of the Library is through call slips. In order to use books in the research collection, patrons request specific titles by filling out a call slip, which includes the following information: author, title, and call number. Not all call slips have been saved over the years, but some have been preserved for posterity. Here are their stories.

Read about Max Eastman and Aristophanes (1920), Lewis Mumford and Moby-Dick (1928), and other relics of bygone research, each with an image of the bit of paper by which the books were requested, which has changed pleasingly little over the years. (I’m sure I have some of them around the house; I filled out more than I ever actually turned in.) Thanks, Leslie!

You’ve probably seen the touching statement “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy” quite a lot lately, attributed to one of the usual suspects (or “quote magnets,” as Dave Wilton of wordorigins.org calls them); it was actually composed by Jessica Dovey, “a principled and reserved 24-year-old teaching English in Kobe” (according to this interview at The Atlantic). By all means read Megan McArdle’s fascinating account of how Dovey’s Facebook post got reposted without the crucial quotation marks and misattributed and tweeted and retweeted until the entire world seemed to be quoting it; it’s a tale for our hyperconnected times. I made the mistake of reading some of the comments on both Atlantic threads, which are full of the usual asininity and bile; this one (from the interview) illustrates a common confusion about what grammar involves: “I think this young woman’s original post (the words that came from her own mouth) is wonderful. We can’t fault her for a grammatical error made by someone who reposted her comment and lost the original quotation marks.” You’re doing a bad job, English teachers!

I’ve finally gotten far enough into Grossman’s Life and Fate (see this post) to get hooked (with books that long, I find it usually takes a hundred or so pages); the Russian is quite readable for me, but every once in a while I hit a mystery that can only be resolved by an appeal to Sashura, who (I keep telling him) is as good as a university education—he gives explanations that leave me feeling as if I’ve learned a whole new aspect of Russian or Soviet life. The most recent example is when I got to the middle of Chapter 21 and Mashchuk said of Neudobnov: “Одно время думали, что он членом коллегии будет” [‘At one time it was thought he’d become a member of the collegium’]. I asked Sashura “What коллегия is he talking about?” I had gone to the Russian Wikipedia disambiguation page and found a whole bunch of different senses, but the only one relevant to the USSR was Военная коллегия Верховного суда СССР (Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR), which didn’t seem relevant. Sashura wrote back:

Figuratively, it means ‘he was thought he’d make it to the top’. [In the context of the chapter] it’s Коллегия НКВД [the Collegium of the NKVD]. It refers to the structure of Soviet – and Russian – ministries. Ministries and other government agencies have colleges or collegiums normally comprised of the minister, deputies and heads of the most important departments. I’ve looked up the Foreign Ministry, its коллегия now has 23 members. The collegium is where important decisions are discussed and approved (it’s called пройти коллегию), then, depending on the subject matter, executive decisions are made by the minister or relevant deputies and heads of departments. Moving and appointing cadres (кадры – workers in position of special responsibility or sensitivity) was also decided by коллегии. Sometimes the party would appoint a person to sit on the collegium for political control and liaison, but without any direct functions within the ministry. Коллегия is a way of diffusing personal responsibility and also of political control. In practical individual terms making it to the коллегия meant having all the perks of the ruling class, good food from special distribution centres, better doctors, better clothes, a better apartment, a dacha, access to better курорты [health resorts] and a personal car with chauffeur. But it also limited personal freedom. … The word is obviously of Latin origin, but was borrowed into Russian from Swedish when Peter I radically reformed the State replacing numerous приказы [offices, departments] with a few коллегии (ministries) that existed until Alexander I replaced them with министерства based on the French ministère. But коллегия as a substructure survived.

I had known about Peter’s “colleges,” but I thought they were purely of historical significance—I had no idea they’d survived as a substructure into modern times. It’s actually somewhat shocking to me that I was a Russian major in college and have been reading up on Russian and Soviet history and culture for years, and yet I knew nothing about this. As I wrote Sashura, “My God, the Soviet Union was a complicated place. No wonder Kremlinologists were a little nutty.”
Since then, I’ve found a decent brief definition in the American Heritage Dictionary: “An executive council or committee of equally empowered members, especially one supervising an industry, commissariat, or other organization in the Soviet Union.” But it needs Sashura’s fleshing out to be truly comprehensible, and I’d really like to read more on the system; anybody know of a good source?

[Read more…]

A Wall Street Journal article by Susan Bernofsky explains “Why Donald Duck Is the Jerry Lewis of Germany”:

Donald Duck’s popularity was helped along by Erika Fuchs, a free spirit in owlish glasses who was tasked with translating the stories. A Ph.D. in art history, Dr. Fuchs had never laid eyes on a comic book before the day an editor handed her a Donald Duck story, but no matter. She had a knack for breathing life into the German version of Carl Barks’s duck. Her talent was so great she continued to fill speech bubbles for the denizens of Duckburg (which she renamed Entenhausen, based on the German word for “duck”) until shortly before her death in 2005 at the age of 98.
Ehapa directed Dr. Fuchs to crank up the erudition level of the comics she translated, a task she took seriously. Her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens Mr. Barks’s often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day.
Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.” …
Not only young kids were reading it. Micky Maus became popular entertainment among a newly politicized generation who saw the comics as illustrations of the classic Marxist class struggle. A nationally distributed newsletter put out by left-leaning high school students in 1969 described Dagobert (Scrooge) as the “prototype of the monocapitalist,” Donald as a member of the proletariat, and Tick, Trick and Track as “socialist youth” well on their way to becoming “proper Communists.” Even Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer admitted to enjoying reading Donald Duck comics before bed.

I had no idea (though I expect Grumbly Stu did).

That’s the title of a post at Poemas del río Wang that I discovered only because Studiolum opened up a back door to his wonderful site that allows you to see over a half-year’s worth of posts at once (as opposed to the normal view, which only shows one or two posts because of the large number of images each contains); I never realized how many posts slipped under my radar, and this one from a month ago it would have been a particular shame to miss, because Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey/Kurban Said is a favorite of mine (I’ve written about him here and here). I wrote a long enthusiastic comment only to have it eaten by some damn Blogspot glitch (reminding me of how glad I was to leave that motheaten venue back in 2003 when I got my own domain); too grumpy to try again, I licked my wounds and finally decided to post here instead.

As you would expect from río Wang, there are many gorgeous old images of Baku, as well as one of “Essad Bey in Caucasian mountain dress” and one of the cover of this issue of Azerbaijan International, entirely devoted to the silly business of trying to prove that the book was not written by its oddball Jewish/Muslim Azeri/German author but by a “real” Azerbaijani, “the national poet Yusif Vazir Çemenzeminli.” This is comparable to the desperate attempts to prove that the works of Shakespeare were actually by someone other than the commoner who wrote them, a mere actor who could not possibly have written great poetry and seen into the depths of the human soul (as we all know earls are able to do by virtue of their blue blood); class prejudice and nationalism are parallel forms of blindness, and I wanted to warn the good Studiolum against allowing his mind to be swayed (he writes that the issue “offers very convincing arguments for the authorship of Yusif Vazir”), but I’ll do so here rather than chez lui. At any rate, do go over there and enjoy the material on display, and perhaps bookmark that most useful back door link.

I always kind of liked the obscure term hendiadys (hen-DYE-a-dis: two words linked by a conjunction to express a single complex idea), because the name is from a Greek phrase ἓν διὰ δυοῖν [hen diá duoín] ‘one through two’; what I didn’t realize, until I saw it at Memiyawanzi [Aug. 2024: That link goes to a spam site, but the Internet Archive has not indexed old Memiyawanzi posts], is that the Germans borrowed the phrase just as it was, creating the magnificent word Hendiadyoin. It’s actually a good thing we didn’t do that in English, because I have no idea how we’d pronounce it, but I’m glad it exists.