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Wyatt Mason (a favorite of our late compadre jamessal) has a review essay in the latest Harper’s (archived) that focuses on Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, which has come out in a new edition (see this LH post on a previous one) but goes in various interesting directions. Here’s the start:

Translation is an irresistible subject that better writers would do better to resist. It’s too easy to rhapsodize over, theorize onto, sentimentalize at (pick your preposition). There are very few excellent books on the practice that meaningfully address its rich complexity. My favorite heftier entry is The Craft and Context of Translation, edited by William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, published in 1961 by the University of Texas Press. The anthology grew out of a symposium on translation held in Austin in 1959, and it features essays by Arrowsmith, Shattuck, Richard Howard, Kenneth Rexroth, and D. S. Carne-Ross.

In his essay, Carne-Ross, who has no Wikipedia page but warrants a bronze statue in the cultural commons, kicks things off by planting a flag, offering up the term transposition as another conception of what translators might do. In his view, transposition is an activity that walks midway between the literal crib—which would seek for every word its exact-ish equivalent in another language, syntax and style in the destination language be damned, subsumed beneath the so-called allegiance to accuracy—and a practice that attends less to the particulars of definition than to the quiddity of the original. Transposition, for Carne-Ross,

occurs when the language of the matter to be translated stands close enough to the language of the translator—in age, idiom, cultural habits and so on—for him to be able to follow the letter with a fair hope of keeping faith with the spirit.

Carne-Ross’s metaphorical phrase “stands close enough” offers an essential, physical conception of the translator’s work: it’s an act of reportage.

I have (somewhere) a copy of The Craft and Context of Translation, which is indeed a fine collection, and D. S. Carne-Ross has long been a familiar name to me — so much so that I was shocked by that “who has no Wikipedia page.” Sure enough, he doesn’t, and there’s not much information on him online, though I did find this rogueclassicism post quoting the Boston Globe obit at length. LibraryThing knows only three books by him, and only a handful of members own them. Ubi sunt… At any rate, Mason talks about Carne-Ross for quite a while, including this snappy quote:

During the war I heard an Italian woman give a long, circumstantial and very dramatic account of an air-raid which had taken place a few days before, and it struck me at the time that this was the raw material out of which the ancient dramatists fashioned the convention of the messenger’s speech. The Anglo-Saxon, in similar circumstances, doesn’t make a speech; he simply swears and tries to put the fire out.

He eventually gets to Weinberger, about whom he has much to say, and you won’t go wrong by reading the whole thing, which is by no means hagiographic (“I couldn’t accuse it of chinoiserie, as Weinberger does of a few of the translations of Wang Wei, but it does at times bring with it a whiff of Deep Thoughts”).

I recently watched Jean Renoir’s 1938 movie La Marseillaise; sandwiched as it is between his masterpieces La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), it inevitably suffers by comparison, but it is a lively and enjoyable view of the French Revolution from below, avoiding the grand spectacles the public expected (the storming of the Bastille is referred to but not shown, and men like Marat and Robespierre are only names bandied about) and therefore a flop when it came out. The most linguistically interesting thing about it is the strong and authentic Marseille accents brandished by the main actors (who are shown making their way north to Paris, spreading not only revolutionary ideas but the titular song), but I confess what drove me to post was the discovery that one of the actresses sported the remarkable name of Nadia Sibirskaïa. Needless to say, I wanted to know more, and when I looked her up I discovered she wasn’t Russian at all — she was born Germaine Lebas, and given a Russian alias by her boyfriend David Kaplan, an émigré from Estonia, who himself took the name Dimitri Kirsanoff, apparently because “the artistic world was strongly attracted by Russian culture at the time.” I wonder if it helped her get roles? It certainly makes her stand out among names like Lefebvre and Larive.

I was reading along rather desultorily in Brigid von Preussen’s LRB review (archived) of Tristram Hunt’s biography of Josiah Wedgwood when I got to a passage on Wedgwood’s use of clay sent back from Australia in the late 1780s to create a medallion which he described as “Hope encouraging Art and Labour under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employment necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement” (you can see an image at the link). Von Preussen goes on to say: “Back at Sydney Cove, Governor Arthur Phillip was delighted to receive his copies of Wedgwood’s medallion, which ‘showed the world that our Welsh clay is capable of receiving an Eligant impression’.” That snapped me to attention: Welsh?! Then I realized, of course, that the colony Phillip was governor of was New South Wales… but was “Welsh” really used like that? The OED entry, revised in 2011, was full of interesting things (1.b. Having the status of a slave or slaves. Obsolete. rare. Only in Old English; 2.b. depreciative. Designating the lineage of a Welsh person, considered to be exaggerated and excessively lengthy. Chiefly in proverbial phrases. Frequently in Welsh pedigree. Obsolete; 4. Welsh coal. Obsolete. rare: 1905 Have you got that ‘Welsh’ trimmed? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine January 26/2), but there was no hint of any use for NSW. So is this a nonce, perhaps jokey, usage by the governor or is the adjective occasionally used that way, flying below the radar of the OED?

I might add that the OED’s etymology is extraordinarily long, including sentences like:

In the Middle Ages, the Welsh territories consisted of several former kingdoms, subsequently ruled by princes (see prince n. II.6 and the etymological note at that entry); in the 13th cent., Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd, established overlordship over all remaining independent parts of Wales and was acknowledged as Prince of Wales by Henry III in 1267 (Treaty of Montgomery).

Michael Lysander Angerer’s “Hebban olla vogala: An Eleventh-Century Link Between Dutch and English Literary History” (Neophilologus, 22 May 2024; Open access) describes an interesting translingual situation:

Abstract

The short eleventh-century lyric Hebban olla vogala is considered the earliest literary text in Dutch. Yet it only survives as a badly faded pen trial, written in England by a monk from the Low Countries. As a result, the exact reading of the text and even the language it was written in remain uncertain. Now, multispectral imaging of the manuscript has made it possible to provide an improved reconstruction of the text. An analysis of this new reading suggests that the scribe deliberately used the similarity between dialects of late Old English and Old Dutch to produce a rhyming verse text that was intelligible in both languages. As a multilingual and translingual poem, Hebban olla vogala must therefore be situated in English as well as Dutch literary history. The scribe’s other pen trials in the same manuscript demonstrate an interest in different Latin verse forms, indicating that Hebban olla vogala may also be a literary experiment. In exploiting the mutual intelligibility of Old Dutch and Old English, the poem points to an easily overlooked current of influence on late Old English and early Middle English literature. While this is hard to trace due to the similarities between the two languages, Dutch emerges as another potential influence, alongside Anglo-Norman French, on the development of rhyming verse in English after the Norman Conquest. In this way, Hebban olla vogala can be seen not only as a monument of Dutch literary history, but also as a testament to its interaction with English literature.

I got this from a Facebook post where a commenter took issue with the conclusions of the article, but I can’t find it now. At any rate, if you’re wondering about the title, “Hebban olla uogala nestas hagunnan” means ‘all the birds have begun nests.’

Another gem from Laudator Temporis Acti:

Augustine, Sermons 167.4 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 910; tr. Edmund Hill):

There is a well-known Punic proverb, which I will of course quote to you in Latin, because you don’t all know Punic. It’s an old Punic proverb: “Pestilence is begging for a penny; give it two, and let it take itself off.”

Proverbium notum est punicum, quod quidem latine vobis dicam, quia punice non omnes nostis. Punicum enim proverbium est antiquum: Nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da, et ducat se.

Cf. Ps-Augustine, Sermons 111.6 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 39, col. 1966):

pestilentia ante ostium venit et nummum quaerit; duos illi da, et ducat se.

W. Wehle, “Punisches Sprichwort bei Augustin,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 17 (1862) 638, emends Augustine, Sermons 167.4 as follows:

unum nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da et ducet se.

Veselin Čajkanovič, “Ein punisches Sprichwort bei Augustin,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 13.10 (October, 1910) 436-437, argues in favor of Wehle’s emendation.

H.J. Rose, “The Folklore of Saint Augustine,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 133 (Lent Term, 1926) 5-21 (at 11, footnote omitted):

[O]n one occasion he borrows a Punic proverb, which I confess I cannot explain, and would be obliged if anyone could tell me exactly what it means. He translates it, nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da et ducat se.

Click through for Michael G. Cox’s attempt to reconstruct the proverb; I like and agree with Rose’s “which I confess I cannot explain, and would be obliged if anyone could tell me exactly what it means.”

From Terrible Maps, “People’s reaction when you try speaking their language”: Facebook, X-Twitter, Reddit. I can’t say they’re wrong; I myself have had exactly that reaction from Russians (“why would you put yourself through this?”). Thanks, Songdog!

Going through my Facebook feed, I was struck by this John Emerson post showing the cover of the book Nudibranchs, by T. E. Thompson — not because of the unremarkable design but because of the title. “Shouldn’t it be Nudibranches?” thought I… and then realized I must have been mentally pronouncing it wrong all along. Sure enough, a quick trip to Wiktionary told me that it was /ˈn(j)uːdɪˌbɹæŋk/ (NUDE-i-brank), from Latin nudus ‘naked’ + branchia ‘gills.’ Which made perfect sense, and I had obviously been subconsciously seduced by the totally unrelated word branch. It’s the converse of the “conches” discovery described in this post.

Dmitry Pruss sent me the Nature Human Behaviour article “Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers,” by Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, Javier Blanco-Portillo, Bogdan Pricop, Alexander G. Ioannidis, Balthasar Bickel, Andrea Manica, Lucio Vinicius, and Andrea Bamberg Migliano (Open access), and the abstract certainly makes it sound of LH interest:

Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture and which reflect borrowing from farmers. On the basis of musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide data from ten CAHG populations, we reveal evidence of large-scale cultural interconnectivity among CAHGs before and after the Bantu expansion. We also show that the distribution of hunter-gatherer musical instruments correlates with the oldest genomic segments in our sample predating farming. Music-related words are widely shared between western and eastern groups and likely precede the borrowing of Bantu languages. In contrast, subsistence tools are less frequently exchanged and may result from adaptation to local ecologies. We conclude that CAHG material culture and specialized lexicon reflect a long evolutionary history in Central Africa.

Dmitry quoted this bit:

For example, the word ngbídí (see Supplementary Table 13 for variants) denotes a musical bow with two strings that is played exclusively by female CAHGs in the exact same manner by both eastern (Efe) and western (Aka and Baka) groups living over 2,000 km apart and not found in any other population. Another shared word exclusive to CAHGs is ngombi, denoting the harp present in the Baka, Babongo, Aka and Batwa in the west (the latter being at least 400 km away from the other 3 groups). It is also relevant that Aka (Bantu C10 speakers) and Baka (Ubangian speakers) neighbours speak very distinct languages and yet share various unique words denoting exclusively shared musical instruments, such as haka (ankle rattles), bogongo (zither harp), pole.pole (seed whistle), mobio (flute) and mokinda (single-skinned drum). The presence of these instruments and words shared between different CAHG groups but not with their respective Bantu-speaking and Ubangian farming neighbours nor with other farming groups speaking related languages has previously been interpreted as evidence for their descent from a common ancient population.

What do Hatters think?

Kathryn Schulz has an essay in the New Yorker (archived) on the uses of suspense as a fundamental technique of storytelling; it starts with the obligatory hook from the author’s own life (“Awaiting the birth of a child is a very strange experience”), then widens out:

But the final weeks of pregnancy, with all the uncertainty and anticipation that they entail, also foster a very specific emotional state, one produced only by the experience of waiting, for an indeterminate amount of time, for something momentous to happen. And so lately I have been thinking, in the context of life, about something I have thought about for years in the context of literature: the structure, function, and strange pleasures of suspense.

It’s well worth reading, and I hope the corrections I’m about to make won’t put anyone off it — as usual, these linguistic misunderstandings are the fault of the educational system, not of the individual author. But since part of the mission of this blog is to educate people about this sort of thing, I’m going to point out a couple of blunders. First we get this:
[Read more…]

Remember my problems with Ricœur a few months ago? Now, for my sins, I have opened Renate Lachmann’s Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997; tr. of 1990 German original), and before even approaching Lachmann’s text I’m tackling Wolfgang Iser’s introduction. He starts off talking about the Russian Formalists, with whom I’m reasonably familiar, and continues with the Czech Structuralists, with whom I have a nodding acquaintance, and Yury Lotman, about whom I at least know something. In short, despite the thickets of jargon and obscure references, I was not completely at sea. Then I hit this patch:

If this argument sets Lachmann apart from the aesthetics of reception launched by the Czech Structuralists, she remains equally distant from Deconstruction, in spite of the fact that the dissolution of the literary work as a self-sufficient entity makes her appear to have deconstructionist leanings. What runs as an undercurrent through all her interpretations of Russian literature comes to full fruition in her last essay, titled “Decomposition—Recomposition,” which sets out to provide a final assessment of what may be entailed in the countervailing movements to be observed in the literary text. The dually coded sign, the constant dissipation of meaning, and even the dismemberment of the patternings to which the referent texts are subjected are not to be identified as the text’s subversion of its own statements. If decomposition is disfigurement, recomposition implies working out the implicit relationships between the truncated referent texts and the manifest text. But as the referent texts do not decompose themselves, recomposition is marked by a double-sidedness: it mutilates the referent text and composes interrelationships between the fragments selected as well as between the manifest text and the cannibalized text. Thus decomposition and recomposition are interlinked by what one might call dual countering.

Such a description carries in its wake all the connotations of Martin Heidegger’s term jenes Gegenwendige, which he considered the hallmark of the artwork. Dual countering highlights the simultaneity of decomposing and recomposing, since the artwork, for Heidegger, pivots around and thus comprises what is mutually exclusive. It is this rift, as Lachmann sees it, within a composition that works through disfiguring, that makes dual countering emerge as the ineluctable condition for enabling by decomposing. With his notion of jenes Gegenwendige Heidegger stressed the rift, which he considered the origin of the artwork, whereas Lachmann emphasizes the operations through which the two basic impulses counter one another, thereby turning into a matrix of productivity. The different slant she puts on dual countering as the constitutive operation of the literary text reflects her intention to highlight intertextuality as externalized memory.

Now, I have no quarrel with things like “If decomposition is disfigurement, recomposition implies working out the implicit relationships between the truncated referent texts and the manifest text”: sure, it’s jargony, but it’s English, and if I put my mind to it I can work out more or less what’s being said. But I draw the line at jenes Gegenwendige. In the first place, it’s not English, and if you’re translating the essay, why not translate that bit? Well, OK, I can handle German, let me get out my dictionary… I worked my way up from pocket dictionaries to the huge Harper-Collins unabridged, and then turned to the internet, and I couldn’t find any entries for gegenwendig. I did find ad hoc renderings like “counterturning” and “antistrophic” and “conflictual,” but they did not help and I am deeply suspicious of them. The deutsche Wortschatz says “Es tut uns leid, Ihre Anfrage gegenwendig ist nicht in unseren gegenwartssprachlichen lexikalischen Quellen vorhanden,” but has one lonely quote: “Als nach unten gewendetes Fluggerät ist er ein Dementi aus Kunststoff, gegenwendig in sich” [Die Zeit, 02.04.1998, Nr. 15], which shows it’s been used by somebody other than Heidegger. But if someone can explain “jenes Gegenwendige” in terms that I can even vaguely understand, I will be forever grateful.