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Natasha Wimmer’s lengthy NYRB review essay on Alejo Carpentier (February 22, 2024; archived) has some good Hattic material near the start:

The historical novels that make up most of his oeuvre favor the Enlightenment and its ideas, but there are also currents of mid-twentieth-century surrealism and existentialism, Afro-Caribbean legend, Hollywoodesque epic, and Victorian maximalism. His prose—revered and sometimes gently mocked in the Spanish-speaking world—is extravagant, bejeweled with rare words and majuscules (a rare word he would surely favor), and festooned with lists. The Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra describes his grammar school introduction to Carpentier’s verbiage in his affectionate foreword to Adrian Nathan West’s new translation of Explosion in a Cathedral (issued simultaneously with West’s translation of The Lost Steps, from 1953): “Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language?”

This sense of marvel and puzzlement is alive in West’s translations, which reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction. The original 1963 English translation of Explosion in a Cathedral by John Sturrock is mostly sure-footed and highly readable (for better and worse), but West lovingly restores the eccentric sweep and florid detail of the novel, better conveying the grandness of Carpentier’s vision.* That’s only part of the task, though, because for all his ornamentation, Carpentier is not a forbidding writer. West’s translation is sensitive to his humor and irony, and the reader is borne happily along through the thickets.

To begin with, West reverses the decision made by Sturrock (or Sturrock’s editors) to break the text into digestible paragraphs, restoring Carpentier’s monumental slabs of text and thereby the novel’s unconventional pacing. He also takes care not to dispel mysteries unnecessarily. Take the first sentence of the novel: “Last night, I saw the Machine rise up again” (West) versus “I saw them erect the guillotine again tonight” (Sturrock). (In Spanish, Esta noche he visto alzarse la Máquina nuevamente.) Sturrock introduces a prosaic “them,” shifts the ringing Esta noche (“tonight” in his translation) to a weaker position at the end of the sentence, and—most critically—decodes the sinister “Machine,” leaching the text of its cryptic force. (Carpentier never uses the word “guillotine” in this opening section.)

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I found Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Facebook post extraordinarily depressing; I’ll reproduce it here (apart from the photos, which show lots of empty shelves) so you can be depressed too (or not, depending on your attitude toward these things):

Empty shelves. What used to be the literature collection of the University of Amsterdam in the PC Hooft building now feels like a ghostly place. Yesterday I happened to pass by and noticed that the doors were open, so I went inside and found myself wandering for half an hour through what used to be a buzzing place full of students, academics and, of course, books.

They are gone. After the summer last year, the UvA opened its (splendid!) new humanities library at the heart of the university quarter in the old city. The new building is beautiful, a great place for students and staff to come and study, and at first sight it looks like a true library, including many study places lined with books. I very much appreciate this new building, and yet the impression is deceptive, for most of the physical books have actually vanished from the library’s collection, replaced by digital copies. The heart is gone. What’s left is essentially an empty shell.

I had a conversation with a colleague who works in the UvA’s library context, and who told me how few books are actually left in the collection. When I expressed my feelings of malaise about this development, she asked me “but how often do you yourself still order a physical older book?” And I had to admit it: rarely. I buy books that I want to read. But like almost every other academic these days, I use digital copies of books that I just need to consult.

I understand the cold financial logic of getting rid of enormous collections of books that are never used (a previous librarian could tell me the exact housing costs for each square meter of books, in a city like Amsterdam where space it extremely expensive). But even apart from the well-established fact that digital books are much more vulnerable than physical ones and may simply not survive the future development of technology (take a moment to imagine what that means!), some unquantifiable quality gets lost forever if one can no longer smell and turn the yellowed pages in a book that was published a hundred years ago. They have an aura.

Most of all, I’m saddened by the managerial “presentist” mentality of not being worried all too much about the destruction of cultural and intellectual heritage. I’ll never forget a small exchange I once had in a café, when somebody asked me what I did for a living and I told her that I was a historian. For several seconds she looked at me with a stunned expression on her face, and finally managed to blurt out: “but… but… it’s over!” She just couldn’t fathom that somebody would be interested in the past.

In fairness, here’s a response from a librarian:
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I have always vaguely wondered how far back that famous phrase goes, and Dave Wilton has done the relevant spadework at Wordorigins:

The phrase take me to your leader is a science fiction cliché, so much so that in the 2007 “Voyage of the Damned” Christmas episode of Doctor Who the time-traveling, title character said, “Take me to your leader! I’ve always wanted to say that!” (Another phrase in that episode that the good doctor always wanted to say was “Allons-y Alonso!”)

The current popularity of the phrase and its application to extraterrestrials and flying saucers dates to the 1950s, but the phrase itself is considerably older. The first known application of a variant of the phrase to first contact with extraterrestrials dates to 21 March 1953 and a cartoon by Alex Graham that appeared in the New Yorker (shown here). The cartoon depicts a flying saucer that has landed in a field and two aliens talking to a horse, saying, “Kindly take us to your President!”

We see the phrase in its familiar form in an Associated Press article from 21 August 1956 that reported on the Republican National Convention in San Francisco:

One delegate, intrigued by an outer-space type of portable transmitter in the hands of a network reporter, walked up and demanded, “Take me to your leader.”

But the 10 October 1956 issue of Variety also reports on this incident, calling it “the old space-man gag,” indicating that the catchphrase was already well associated with UFOs.

And before the extraterrestrial invasion of our popular culture, the phrase appears quite often in adventure fiction dating back to the nineteenth century.

Click through for the 19th-century quotes, and of course for the cartoon. My curiosity is now satisfied. (For a related joke, see Dan Milton’s joke here; I quoted “Allons-y, Alonso!” in 2022.)

Nicholas Andresen’s recent post annoys me somewhat because (like almost everyone else) he writes as if “AI” were some kind of “conscious” “agent” that does things with purpose (it starts “In September 2025, researchers released the internal monologue of OpenAI’s GPT-o3 as it decided to lie about scientific data. Here’s what it was thinking…”), but never mind, it’s got a lot of interesting material. He starts with the discovery that “a model’s own output could serve as scratch paper” (this is called “Chain-of-Thought”), and continues:

But something strange is happening to Chain-of-Thought reasoning.

Remember that screenshot we started with? “Glean disclaim disclaim.” “Synergy customizing illusions.” Online, people have started calling this kind of thing Thinkish. There’s a whole emerging vocabulary: “watchers” apparently means human overseers, “fudge” means sabotage, “cunning” means circumventing constraints. Some of the other words – ”overshadows,” “illusions” – seem to mean different things in different contexts, and some combinations resist interpretation entirely.

Weirdly, Thinkish reminds me of home.

I grew up near Gibraltar – a tiny British territory dangling off the southern tip of Spain – where a Spanish-English blend called “Llanito” is spoken. Here’s an example:

“Llévate el brolly que it’s raining cats and dogs.”

To a Llanito speaker, this is completely normal: “take the umbrella, it’s pouring”. To anyone else, it might take a minute to parse – there’s a Spanish verb, borrowed British slang, and an idiom that makes no literal sense in any language.

And Llanito feels great to speak. You’re never stuck – you can always grab the best-fitting piece from each language and move on. It’s just less bueno for everyone else.

That’s Thinkish. The model seems to grab whichever token fits best, optimizing for its own convenience. The problem is that we’re the outsiders now.

He goes on to Alfred the Great’s translation of The Consolation of Philosophy and how languages change, and returns to AI:
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I’ve praised Tessa Hadley many times at LH (e.g., last year), and I’m going to do so again; her latest New Yorker story, “The Quiet House” (archived), is every bit as good as I expected, and I thought I’d bring a couple of excerpted paragraphs here in the hope of enticing readers:

During the time of their youthful adventures, and although they proclaimed themselves feminists, they still more or less thought all those things about the inauthenticity of women. They didn’t so much think them with their conscious minds: the sensation of secondariness was built into the very texture of their imagination and their desires. They supplied to every adventure some invisible observer, male, to fulfill it and make it real. And yet the girls also took for granted, with contemptuous confidence, their right to travel alone and wear shorts and sleeveless tops if they wanted to, while girls their age in Italy and Greece were kept chastely at home. They learned how to say foul things in other languages, in order to put off the boys and men in those countries who followed them and propositioned them, pleading with them so insistently and cravenly—“like dogs,” Jane said. They saw the recoil and disgust on the boys’ faces, at hearing those words from a girl’s mouth.
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The book group had degenerated somewhat, Jane and Geraldine both thought, into a kind of dining club, each member feeling obligated to put on a spread of delicious Ottolenghi-type dishes when it was their turn to host. Discussion of the books was too perfunctory; the two friends’ ideal would have been more like a seminar. They brought their books marked up and bristling with torn slips of paper, and were disappointed when they were hardly opened. Both of them devoured fiction: Jane, a history graduate, was susceptible to a serious theme and anything in translation, whereas Geraldine, who’d done English literature, insisted she cared only about the sentences. Life was hard, she said. Thank God for sentences.

And speaking of sentences, here’s the story’s first: “Geraldine woke out of busy dreams into the calms and shallows of old age.” I memorized it even as I read it. Now, that’s writing.

If you want to blow your wig, cast your pies on the Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945):

In the old days the people greeted a new ruler with the cry: “The King is dead, long live the King!” Today there’s a strange shout: “Webster is dead, long live the Hepster!” […]

The Editors feel that JIVE TALK is here to stay and believe that this book is the most complete dictionary of Jive words and phrases ever presented. It may be of no assistance to an Abercrombie but we’re sure it will help most people a great deal.

Zowie! And don’t miss the JEOGRAPHICAL JIVE section, which goes from KEEN from ABERDEEN to CONQUERS from YONKERS. Take a bow, Jay!

I was reading Mary M. Wiles’ Interview with Jacques Rivette (yes, I’m still on my Rivette kick; I recently saw his late sort-of-thriller Secret défense and posted a rant about the folly of calling it “Secret Defense” in English) and was struck by this passage:

mw: Why did you feel the need to return to the theater after La bande des quatre?

jr: After La bande des quatre, I was so pleased with the work we did with the actresses that I wanted to continue. And since they also wanted to do some theater, we got together a small group like that to work with each other on some classics; Corneille, Racine, and Marivaux, is what we were working on. And then at the end of a few months, they wanted to do a real performance, and that’s when we dropped Marivaux, which was too hard. But we kept—and we should have just kept Corneille. Because, it was already too much, Corneille and Racine. It was just that we wanted to continue to work on those classics … on Corneille, which was the driving force. And besides, the work that I did with them and with the guys who had joined them was much more interesting to me, the play by Corneille, that is, Tite et Bérénice [1670], than working on Racine’s plays, on Bajazet [1672]. Bajazet is fabulous, I can’t speak ill of Racine, but you grasp it all in the very first reading. That’s it, we said, we understand it all, but then, afterwards, what were we going to do with it? Whereas Corneille is hard, even for the French, he’s hard.

mw: You can imagine that for us …

jr: It’s like Latin for us. It isn’t French. All of those authors were fluent readers of Latin and Greek, but Corneille couldn’t read Greek, and that’s a big difference between them. Racine read Greek, and Corneille read Latin. And he read so much Latin that it’s almost Mallarmé, it’s so dense. Corneille’s Bérénice, it’s true that it’s a hard play, it’s overloaded, each verse says three things, and its characters are infinitely rich. Infinitely more things are happening between Titus and Bérénice, infinitely more things are happening in Corneille’s play than in Racine’s, where nothing happens. Bérénice isn’t the Corneille play that I like the best though, even if it’s got fabulous language. It’s fabulous as a poem, but it’s like Shakespeare for you. As a matter of fact, I gather it’s hard to translate, like Goethe is untranslatable, like Pushkin is untranslatable, like Dante is untranslatable, well, like all the major poets. I don’t know, but, in any case, it was difficult to stage.

mw: I’ve read a few of Corneille’s plays but have never seen them performed on stage.

jr: In France, I’m not the only one, once you get hooked on Corneille, you’re lost. It’s very deep. He’s an author I find very dense, so full of history, of thought. He’s a very rich author.

It makes me wish I’d kept up the French literature I studied almost sixty years ago with the imperious Mme Ruegg; we read Corneille and Racine and I loved them both, but I can no longer remember them well enough to know whether I agree with what Rivette is saying. It doesn’t matter, though; when somebody expatiates like that about literature they love, it’s the loving attention that matters, I don’t really give a damn whether they’re “right.” (I often have that reaction to Dmitry Bykov’s essays about Russian lit.) Anyway, I should give Bérénice a try.

Once, long ago, when Languagehat was a pup, Blogovia flourished, and friendly links o’erspread the world like a canopy. Now, like a region abandoned by industry, it is full of ghost towns, and all the young pups flock to the dread silos of Social Media. Every once in a while, though, one comes back to life, and such is the case of the blog of bulbul (aka Slavomír Čéplö), the much-loved bulbulistan, which has been missing in action for over a decade apart from a brief pondering of the passage of time in 2019. Now there are three posts in rapid succession: mentalist (a dive into the history and semantic range of Bulgarian пич, which reminded him of “a Slovak vulgar term for feminine genitals”), depowedlajo (an exploration of Targumic used for humorous effect in a Purim play published in Vienna in 1878 titled Reb Simmel Andrichau — I expect this will appeal to rozele among others), and now work, which begins:

So, anyway, been a while, right? How have y’all been the last *checks notes* few years? Yeah, I know, interesting times… How about instead of focusing on that shit, I show you what I have been up to since 2015 or so. Let’s start with some of the projects I have been working on that you might find interesting.

He talks about his work on HunaynNET (a project that collected all texts of classical science that were translated into both Syriac and Arabic: “The translations were then re-edited and aligned on the level of semantic and syntactic units […] The text is also tokenized and links to dictionaries and corpora are provided; and in some cases, we also provided aligned text of translations into modern languages”), Simtho (“an electronic corpus – the only one worthy of the name – of the Syriac language”), and the Zoroastrian Middle-Persian Corpus and Dictionary:

This DFG-supported ongoing project seeks to collect, annotate and analyze all available Zoroastrian texts written in Middle Persian to create a searchable corpus (in transcription) and finally an updated dictionary of Middle Persian. I was largely responsible for data processing, conversion and import, so none of what you see online is my work. The web application is still very much a work in progress, but once finished, it will be a one-stop shop for all your Zoroastrian Middle Persian needs, including manuscript images and comprehensive lexical resources.

Good stuff; congrats, bulbul, and don’t be a stranger!

For almost a decade I’ve had a copy of Jacek Hugo-Bader’s White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia hiding in the depths of the to-be-read pile to the left of my desk; it recently rose to the top, and I thought “I should read that,” so that’s what I’m doing, with great pleasure. Hugo-Bader hangs out with old hippies and the like, and has a whole section called “a small and impractical Russian-English dictionary of hippy slang,” most of which is probably long out of use (he visited Russia in late 2007). At one point he mentions “blatna music, in other words criminal, bandit, jail or prison camp music” (the book is translated from Polish, hence Polish forms like blatna rather than the Russian blatnaya), and goes on to write:

The word blatny probably comes from Yiddish, into which it passed either from the German word ‘Blut’, meaning blood, or ‘Blatt’ meaning a page, a sheet of paper, because whenever the bandits in Odessa came to rob the stores of an old Jew or a German, they stuck a revolver barrel in his face and said it was their ‘Blatt’, in other words their receipt or goods delivery document. Thus bandits came to be called blatniye in Russian.

I figured that was probably all nonsense, but it seems the Blatt idea is taken seriously, though via Yiddish rather than German; Wiktionary has “From Polish blat or Yiddish בלאַט (blat).” But the Russian version has different suggestions — they reference Yiddish blat ‘trusted,’ originally ‘illegal,’ “possibly stemming from an Old Hebrew etymon — pāliṭ “fugitive,” pālaṭ “he fled”), cf. German slang Platt ‘new member of a gang of thieves,’ platt ‘one of us, trustworthy.’” I have no idea how seriously to take any of that.

I wasn’t sure whether to post Naomi Kanakia’s The New Yorker offered him a deal, because it’s very long and wouldn’t be of much interest to someone who didn’t care about John Cheever or the strange phenomenon known as the “New Yorker story,” but if you do care about those things it’s fascinating — she goes into the whole history of the magazine’s stories and why they work (and why they’ve always been criticized), and why the magazine’s demands determined Cheever’s career. And I have a deep respect and affection for people who do a deep dive into a corpus they’re interested in so they can report on the results with authority rather than making the usual facile assumptions and moving on: “All told, I’ve probably read five hundred New Yorker stories over the last three months.” (Compare my appreciation of Vera Dunham’s In Stalin’s Time, for which she “waded through mountains of elephant shit,” and see this 2010 post linking to Slawkenbergius’ “thoughtful take on John Cheever.”) She starts off:

Two months ago, I read a seven-hundred-page collection of short stories by John Cheever. But somehow that wasn’t enough. I went on to read seven-hundred-page retrospective collections from Mavis Gallant, Alice Adams, and John O’Hara. And I still wanted more!

Normally when I get halfway through a story collection I think, “Okay…I’m done now”, but with these authors, it wasn’t like that. I wanted more. Not more of these particular writers, but more work that was like their work in some weird, indefinable way. […]

Not only were these stories similar to each other, but they also seemed quite different from other literary stories. These stories were mostly marked by their extreme restraint. They didn’t just eschew plot, they also eschewed lyricism, symbolism, surrealism, or any other devices that would call attention to themselves. Their plotlessness made them seem highbrow, but their unadorned style made them highly accessible. And I wondered how The New Yorker could’ve arrived at this unique-seeming combination of elements.

And she proceeds to the history of how the early “casuals” became short stories, and how the tastes of the first editor, Harold Ross (who “was never totally sold on the idea of publishing stories”), determined the kind of story that would become the hallmark of the magazine. If any of this sounds intriguing, give it a try and you may find yourself reading the whole thing (and perhaps developing a new respect for Cheever, who for so long was a punching bag for critics of all descriptions and who was persistently underpaid by the magazine).