I got a number of presents of linguistic interest, including foreign movies (La Meglio gioventù and Akarui mirai—thanks, Eric!) and Russian opera DVDs (Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, The Gamblers, and War and Peace, and Shostakovich’s The Nose—thanks, Elias!), but certainly the two most directly connected with the concerns of this blog are Тень русской ветки: Набоковская Выра [Shade of a Russian branch: Nabokov’s Vyra], by Aleksandr Alexandrovich Semochkin (apparently there’s an English edition, Nabokov’s Paradise Lost: The Family Estates in Russia, whose description applies equally well to my Russian 2002 second edition: “This album consists of photographs from the family archive of the Nabokovs, as well as pictures of the family estates near St. Petersburg where Vladimir Nabokov spent the summers of his boyhood and youth. Together with the quotations from his works, they make a fascinating background to the novels based on his early experiences: Speak, Memory, The Defense, and The Gift”)—thanks, Tatyana!—and Anthology of Old Russian Literature by Adolf Stender-Petersen, which I owe to the generosity of Songdog and his lovely wife (and of course their excellent son, who at two years eight months may not have had much intellectual input into the choice of gift but whose affection is clearly attached to it); the Life of Archpriest Avvakum alone (excerpts here, in three languages) should give me hours of pleasure. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the LH readers who sent cards and other holiday communications, books, and (in one case) actual money—your words of encouragement and tokens of esteem mean more to me than I can say. If it weren’t for the enthusiasm and responsiveness of my readership, I’d have given up the blog long ago.
ZUKOFSKY AND POWERS.
In a 1997 essay, Joe Amato compares one of my favorite poets with one of my favorite novelists:
In what follows, I compare the work of a (very much alive) novelist with that of a (very much dead) poet. Specifically, I compare a recent (long) novel to a not-so-recent (long) poem. In doing so, I read what some will call “content” across two distinct literary genres. My reason for reading Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations over and against Louis Zukofsky’s “A” is to help bring into clearer focus why we might do well to turn more of our critical and creative attention to perhaps the most neglected literary form of this century in North America — the long poem (and I am not the first to make this observation). At the same time, I hope to give some indication of why we might do well to continue to turn our critical and creative attention to the ways in which the literary constitutes a valuable site through which to understand our works and days.
Richard Powers is an accomplished novelist whose five (soon to be six [nine as of 2006—LH] novels plumb the controversies, latent and teeming, inherent to our highly technological milieu. I daresay that, for most of my readers, Louis Zukofsky, though an equally accomplished poet, will be a somewhat less recognizable, and more inaccessible, figure. I hope to show why both authors warrant continued scrutiny, why the work of literature, and of reviewing literature as I propose, may be vital to sustaining our social ecologies…
There’s a certain amount of jargon, but it’s worth it for the quotes and insights, and I like the idea of breaking down the wall between criticism of prose and poetry. (Via wood s lot.)
GOOTS?
Every once in a while I run across some linguistic usage so bizarre that I have to poll my readership to see 1) if it’s used by more than the one person who brought it up, and 2) if so, whether anybody knows its history. Today I present to you elvissinatra in AskMetaFilter:
Anybody else grow up calling a pacifier, a “goots”? I’m not sure if I’m spelling it correctly, but that’s how it sounds (rhymes with boots). I’m not Jewish, but that word sounds Yiddish to me. Now I’ve got a kid of my own, and everybody thinks I’m crazy because I call it a goots. Is it a name brand? West Michigan Polish/Italian slang? Or what?
The Yiddish idea has been shot down in the comment thread (though I suppose it could be a dialect word); other terms mentioned are nookie, binkie, dummy, zooba, padiddle, geegee, bubble, and perhaps ish (if that person was serious). All suggestions, other words, thoughts, and jokes are, as always, welcome. Me, I’ve never called it anything but a pacifier.
THE ENTROPY OF HANUKKAH.
I’m using the spelling of the holiday given in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, but there are many, many more—Mark Liberman says “a new survey by Language Log labs has found that Hanukkah is second only to Muammar al-Gaddafi in public spelling uncertainty”; if you want to know the horrifying details (and the entropy of the distribution), visit his Language Log post on the subject. And I hope those of my readers who celebrate it are having the best of Christmases.
ON ALL FOURS.
Frankly, I’m not sure I’ve ever used the phrase on all fours except in its literal sense of ‘on hands and knees,’ but I was vaguely aware that it had a technical/metaphorical meaning, which Orin Kerr explains as follows in a post on the history of the phrase: “One of the legal profession’s stranger expressions is that a case is ‘on all fours’ with another case. It means that the former case raises the same facts and legal principles as the latter and is therefore highly relevant as a precedent.” He cites Michael Quinion’s explanation that “presumably the image is of two animals standing together, both on all four legs, hence in closely similar situations,” but he himself suggests “the visual image is more an animal running alongside the observer than two animals standing next to each other. If an animal is running on all four legs beside you, the thinking might be, it means that it remains close to you and goes where you go.” For much more on the subject, including copious citations, see Mark Liberman’s recent Language Log post, which is where I learned all I know about it.
CENTRAL ASIAN NAMES.
I have to return the Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution
THE EARLIEST PIDGIN?
Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has an intriguing post about “a Mauritanian Arabic-based pidgin recorded by the medieval geographer Al-Bakri” that he says “may well be the earliest attested passage in a pidgin, and certainly the earliest Arabic-based pidgin reported.”
The near-absence of morphology, the apparent presence of tense particles, and the simplification of the phonology are all suggestive of a pidgin, and a pidgin is exactly what one would expect given the nature of the trans-Sahara trade. Phonetically, the substitution of ’ for qāf is characteristic of lower Egypt and the Levant, but also of several city dialects in the Maghreb and of Maltese; the substitution of d for j is widespread in upper Egypt, but I know of no modern dialect that has both features.
See his post for the passage in Arabic, in Lameen’s suggested transcription, and in Thomason and Elgibali’s tentative translation (it’s a variation on the old joke about the man and his son trying to ride a camel with the least amount of flak from passersby), and for the frustrating facts of its publication. I hope the manuscript source turns up someday!
GOODBYE, POETRY TULIP.
A CNN story informs us that Georgia’s Department of Transportation has issued a new official map that’s been sadly simplified:
Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too…
Gone are such places as Dewy Rose, Hemp, Experiment, Retreat, Wooster, Sharp Top and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks.
“We’re not under obligation to show every single community,” department spokeswoman Karlene Barron said. “While we want to, there’s a balancing act. And the map was getting illegible.”
What you call illegible, I call a linguistic feast, dammit!
COMMISSAR.
I’m reading N. N. Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution 1917
TWO TAKES ON TRANSLATION.
In The Guardian, Simon Armitage discusses his new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
Naturally, to the trained medievalist the poem is perfectly readable in its original form; no translation necessary. And even for the non-specialist, certain lines, such as “Bot Arthure wolde not ete til al were served”, present little problem, especially when placed within the context of the narrative. Conversely, lines such as “Forthi, iwysse, bi zowre wylle, wende me bihoues” are incomprehensible to the general reader. But it is the lines that fall somewhere between those extremes – the majority of lines, in fact – which fascinate the most. They seem to make sense, though not quite. To the untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly blurred. To a contemporary poet, one interested in narrative and form, and to a northerner who not only recognises plenty of the poem’s dialect but detects an echo of his own speech rhythms within the original, the urge to blow a little warm breath across that layer of frosting eventually proved irresistible.
I’m not quite sure why he felt he needed to see the original manuscript in the British Library or to witness the actual gralloching of a deer (though I do love the word, which I wrote about here), but the sample at the end of the article is appealing, and I like his daring—he’s not afraid to toss in “never mind being minus his head!”
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