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I was reading an essay on Mark Aldanov in Georgii Adamovich’s collection of criticism Odinochestvo i svoboda (Solitude and freedom, 1955), and in a discussion of Aldanov’s novel Начало конца (1939, translated in 1943 as The Fifth Seal) he mentions a character, a “professional revolutionary,” called Вислиценус [Vislitsenus]. This very odd name certainly wasn’t Russian; could it be Lithuanian? Polish? I googled the transliteration and got one hit, but it provided a precious clue: “VISLITsENUS (Wislicenus).” So now I had the proper Latin-alphabet spelling, and quickly found this page, which told me everything I wanted to know about the name, which is German but of Polish origin, from the name of the town Wiślica: “Er leitet sich ab von dem Städtchen Wiślica in Polen (etwa 80 km nordöstlich von Krakau), aus dem Johannes Wislicenus I stammte.” I love the internet.

For those who are interested, there’s a thorough discussion of Adamovich’s complicated relations with Nabokov (who nastily referred to him as “Sodomovich”) here; there’s another piece by Adamovich about Aldanov, a personal reminiscence, here, for those who read Russian.

Looking up the word dives, divitis ‘rich’ (often contracted to dis, ditis) in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, I found the etymology “Pelignian des, deti, cogn. w. DIVVS…” Pelignian was new to me; on investigation I learned that the Paeligni were an Italic people east of the Romans and that their towns were Corfinium (slated to be the new capital of Italy if the good guys had won the Social War) and Sulmo (Ovid’s birthplace), but none of my print references mentioned their language. Now, the Wikipedia page has a fairly thorough discussion, saying the “dialect closely resembled the Oscan of Lucania and Samnium, though presenting some peculiarities of its own, which warrant, perhaps, the use of the name North Oscan” and quoting a number of inscriptions… but the Wiki page is based on the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, and I have a feeling more may have been learned since then. Do any of you know more about this? Is Pelignian still thought to be a dialect of Oscan? I always wanted to know more about Oscan and Umbrian (having a romantic attachment to the anti-Roman side in those wars), but it’s one of those things I never got around to.

Can’t think what it’s called? Enter the meaning you have in mind and the OneLook Reverse Dictionary will look for the appropriate word. (Via MonkeyFilter.)

I just ran across the information that the novelist Irwin Shaw was born, in New York to Russian-Jewish parents, Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff. This immediately struck me as an odd name, and sure enough, it does not seem to exist otherwise: a normal transliteration gets no Google hits, and the Cyrillic equivalent Шамфоров gets only a few references to Shaw. Is it just an incredibly obscure name, or is it an Ellis Island deformation of some name I’m not thinking of?

Also, this morning my wife showed me a reference to an actress named Q’Orianka Kilcher. Needless to say, I was intrigued; my first guess was that it was either self-invented or Klingon, but shame on me—it turns out “her mother is descent from the Huachipaeri and Quechua tribes of South America,” and the name is Quechua for ‘golden eagle.’ I checked my Quechua phrasebook (not yet entered in my catalog because it’s in the second row—there are even more books piled on the backs of the shelves than are visible), and sure enough, the vocabulary has “gold—qori.” But wait: q is a “guttural fricative similar to the ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch,'” and q’ is “Quechua ‘q’ with glottal stop.” So is there a typo in the vocabulary? Because presumably her parents wouldn’t have added the apostrophe just for the hell of it. But since they did, I feel obliged to point out that it’s not like Irish O’, and the following letter should not be capitalized, as IMDb and the newspaper had it; online sources are split, so I’m guessing she spells it Q’orianka and it gets changed by editors or computer programs. But who knows how she says it? (Ms. Kilcher, if you’re reading this, please leave a comment!)

The World Academy of Rusyn Culture has a good site on the language called Rusyn by its speakers and sometimes Ruthenian in English (or “western Ukrainian” by those who do not recognize it as a separate language):

The language territory where Carpatho-Rusyn dialects are spoken coincides with the historical territory of *Carpathian Rus’, which in terms of present-day boundaries is located within southeastern Poland (the *Lemko Region), northeastern Slovakia (the *Prešov Region), most of the *Transcarpathian oblast of Ukraine (*Subcarpathian Rus’), and a small corner of north-central Romania (the *Maramureş Region). Rusyn is also spoken in a few scattered communities in northeastern Hungary and among emigrants from Carpathian Rus’ who settled in the *Vojvodina and Srem regions of present-day Yugoslavia and far eastern Croatia and in the United States and Canada…

The difficulty in classifying Carpatho-Rusyn dialects stems largely from the fact that individual dialect territories experience an overlapping of numerous isoglosses. In other words, certain linguistic features typical of one area encroach into other areas; determining where to draw a boundary between these territories in the process of defining and classifying the dialects thus becomes difficult. Another difficulty in classification is related to the fact that the dialects have in the past and continue to be influenced by numerous sociolinguistic or extralinguistic factors from the larger world in which Rusyns live, whether in Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the United States, or Canada. When attempting a synchronic description of the language system of dialects and in classifying them, researchers must consider the larger linguistic and cultural worlds in which dialects function. The structure and function of the dialects must be described in connection with the languages with which they are in contact.

A nice find by Christopher Culver, who also posts about a projected Indogermanische Grammatik that was begun in 1968 by Kuryłowicz, “was subsequently continued by Watkins, Cowgill, and Mayrhofer, and is nowhere near completion… I wonder what the oldest perpetually unfinished project is in Indo-European linguistics.” So which will appear first, this or The Last Dangerous Visions?

While contemplating my ever-growing LibraryThing catalog (now at 1,000 books), I was suddenly struck by the odd name Gorgoniev belonging to the author of my Cambodian-Russian dictionary. I did some googling and discovered that this guy, whose name and patronymic turn out to be Yurii Aleksandrovich, is the only Gorgoniev known to the internet (furthermore, the name is not in any of my reference books). I found some discussion of him here; he sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant fellow:

Юрий Горгониев, высокий, худой, скучный и безжизненный, говорил о том, что я не захотел год назад поехать в колхоз, что, хотя с производственной стороны отдел и не имеет ко мне претензий, мой поступок вызвал осуждение парторганизации отдела…

Всё тот же Горгониев, из тверских крестьян. Мне всегда казалось, что он относится к науке, как селянин к своей парцелле: старается никого на неё не пускать. Раз он занимается кхмерским языком — конкурентов ему не надо.

‘Yuri Gorgoniev, tall, thin, boring, and lifeless, said that I had refused a year before to go to the kolkhoz and that even though from the point of view of production the department had no claim on me, my behavior called for condemnation from the Party organization of the department…

‘There was Gorgoniev again, of Tver peasant stock. It always seemed to me that he had the same attitude to science that a peasant does to his plot of land: he tries not to let anybody on to it. If he’s working on Cambodian, he doesn’t need any competitors.’

I’m extremely happy to learn that there there is an book of unpublished poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, The Revolutionary Art of the Future: Rediscovered Poems. ReadySteadyBook has a review:

By all accounts an irascible and rather forbidding character, MacDiarmid was a titanic figure in Scottish literature and should be seen as a major poet: to discount him is to give in to the mania of the chattering classes for middlebrow lyricists rather than to rise to the challenge of his complex work…

Macdiarmid isn’t all politics. His writing is sometimes quite lovely, unexpectedly tender – and there is a religiosity often forgotten. But the poems were primarily written in the 30s and should be understood in this context: a context in which MacDiarmid’s politics had a keener resonance than perhaps they do today.

And as an accompaniment, here‘s “An Introduction tae Metrics and Grammetrics exemplified by The Eemis Stane by Hugh Macdiarmid” (pdf file; here‘s an HTML cache):

Stress: we pit mair stress on some syllables that ithers… Listen to the stress patterns in exemplary and orchestra. (We dinnae need tae concern wirsels wi maitters o primary and secondary stress. Jist stick tae a binary description o mair nor less stress than the syllables roond aboot. Sae exemplary wad be x / x / whaur x is less stressed and / is mair stressed. Orchestra wad be / x /.

Yes, it’s a discussion of metrics in Scots, and a fine read it is. As promised in the title, it uses a MacDiarmid lyric as an example, and concludes:

This craftsmanlike yiss o metre and syntax combines wi his rich, varied and aften mystical imagery, nae tae mention his orra vocabulary, tae mak some o his poetry fell obscure. A gey few readers hae been content tae dook in the rare soond and jist be daein wi the bittockie o meanin that got through til them but the mair ye howk in McDiarmid, the better he gets. Ye’ll find that the mair ye look at the wark o the best poets, the mair ye find. Dinnae be pit aff if a poem luiks a bittie difficult at first glisk. Tyauve on!

If you need help, the Dictionary of the Scots Language is only a click away. (Both titular links via the always dependable wood s lot [09.06.2005].)

David Ball discusses the hazards and delights of translating Alfred Jarry’s notorious play Ubu roi:

Flatten the language into ordinary English and the play simply disappears. For just as the plot and characters of Ubu seem to be taken from Shakespeare—but Shakespeare all ground up and turned into sausage-meat—so the language itself is taken from French, but a French so chopped up and transformed that it becomes Jarry’s (or Ubu’s) own special, meaty idiolect. This, in the land of Corneille and Racine! The assault on art is, first, an assault on language; to the extent that Jarry helped to create a new form of theatre , he created a new language in this play. My class needed a new translation, and by my green candlestick I was going to give it to them. I translated Act One, and finished the job when my colleague John Hellweg wanted to direct the play in the Mendenhall Theater at Smith College. He accepted my version but made a few revisions for performance, as he inserted some contemporary references; since then, I have revised it back to the original, and beyond.

The first word of Ubu roi is, famously, Merdre. Not merde, for which there is really only one translation, but merd-re. It has been translated variously as “Shee-yit,” “Shite”…and it instantly unleashed pandemonium at the first public performance of the play. (After all, can anything be said in the theatre? You better believe it! says Jarry’s play, and today’s translator had better believe it, too.)…

[Read more…]

I know you’ve always wanted to read a translation of H.P. Lovecraft into Basque… No? Well, how about a Basque translation of an H.P. Lovecraft story about “the barbarous Vascones”? The story is “The Very Old Folk” (1927), and it’s here at après moi, le déluge, the Basque version (translated by “our friend Odei”) followed by the original. Enjoy… or rather tremble in eldritch horror!

Update (2018). The original link is dead; fortunately, Lazar kindly provided an archived one, which I have substituted. And for further security, here is the beginning of the text in both languages:

Pulp literatura: Antzinako jendea

H. P. Lovecraft-en ipuina, euskaraz argitaratugabea

1927ko azaroaren 3an, ostegunean, “Melmoth-i” (Donald Wandrei-ri) idatzitako gutunekoa

Ilunabar gartsu batean gertatu zen Pompaelum probintzi-hiri txikian, Pirinioen oinetan, Hispania Citeriorren. Urtea errepublika garaiko azkenetakoa bide zen, zeren probintzia oraindik senatu-prokonsul batek gobernatzen baitzuen eta ez Augustusen legatu pretorioak; eguna azaroko kalenden aurretiko lehena zen. Mendiak arrosa eta gorri jaikitzen ziren hiritik iparraldera, eta bitartean, eguzkia, hilzorian, mistiko eta gorri distiratzen zen hautseztatutako foruko igeltsuaren eta harri zakarrezko eraikin berrien gainean eta ekialdera zenbait distantziatara zegoen zirkuaren oholtzaren gainean. Hiritar talde batzuk –bekoki garbiko kolono erromatarrak eta adats kizkurreko erromatartutako bertakoak, denak berdin artilezko toga merkeez jantzita, eta, han-hemenka, kaskodun legionariak eta auzoko bizardun baskoi gutxi batzuk, beren janzki zakarrekin– firin-faran zebiltzan zolatutako kale bakanetan eta foruan, zenbait egonezin adierazgaitz eta zehazgabe batek mugituta.

The Very Old Folk
by H. P. Lovecraft
From a letter written to “Melmoth” (Donald Wandrei) on Thursday, November 3, 1927

It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo, at the foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the late republic, for the province was still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of a prætorian legate of Augustus, and the day was the first before the Kalends of November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the crude new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the wooden walls of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens – broad-browed Roman colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas – and sprinklings of helmeted legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient Vascones – all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-defined uneasiness.

I meant to post about LibraryThing hours ago, but I just can’t stop using it! A creation of Tim Spalding, it uses the Library of Congress catalog as a database of books to provide an easy means for users to catalog their own. You just enter a few words or an ISBN into the search box, hit Submit, and boom: either the book is entered automatically or a list of choices pops up. Or, of course, the system can’t find anything matching it and you have to enter it manually. You’ll probably want to tweak the entries in the various fields, and you’ll certainly want to add tags (when I’m done, I’ll be able to find out all the books I have relating to Central Asia just by clicking on that tag), but it makes cataloging (a task I always dreaded) supremely easy. You can see my catalog here; so far I’ve entered about 300 books, but there will be many times that before I’m done. I’m starting with the hardest sections, language and Russian, so that I’ll get most of the manual entering out of the way right off the bat; by the time I get to history, literature, and so on, it should be a breeze. Try it yourself!

(Many thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana, currently enjoying the beaches of Portugal, for the link!)