All the cants they peddle
bellow entangled,
teeth for knots and
each other’s ankles,
to become stipendiary
in any wallow;
crow or weasel
each to his fellow.
Yet even these,
even these might
listen as crags
listen to light
and pause, uncertain
of the next beat,
each dancer alone
with his foolhardy feet.
Basil Bunting, 1969
Geoffrey Hosking, in his superb Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917
An integral part of Alexander‘s concept was the idea of making the scriptures available to all the peoples of the empire in their various languages. For this purpose he encouraged the establishment of the Imperial Russian Bible Society in December 1812, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, to undertake the work of translation, publication and distribution… The extent and coverage of the Society‘s work is demonstrated by the fact that in its first year it published or bought and distributed 37,700 New Testaments and 22,500 complete Bibles in Church Slavonic, French, German, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian, Georgian, Kalmyk and Tatar. For the purpose it set up new printing presses and imaginatively used retail outlets, such as apothecaries’ shops, which had never previously been used for selling books. By 1821 the New Testament and Prayer Book were starting to appear in modern Russian.
Significantly, the language which aroused the greatest opposition when it came to translation was none other than Russian itself. The Bible existed in a Church Slavonic version, and many churchmen felt that only the Slavonic tongue, consecrated by ancient usage, possessed the dignity to convey adequately the meaning of the scriptures. The Society’s view, on the contrary, was that the Slavonic text was readily understood only by those who had been brought up on it since childhood, and that it was therefore unsuitable for evangelism. At Alexander’s express wish, work was started on a translation into modern Russian, in order ‘to give Russians the means of reading the word of God in their native Russian tongue, which is more comprehensible to them than the Slavonic language in which the scriptures have hitherto been published.’
From the outset, some Orthodox clergymen had opposed the Society’s activities… The resistance reached its apogee in 1824 with a denunciation of the Society by the abbot of the Iur’ev Monastery in [Novgorod], Arkhimandrit Fotii… In a memorandum presented personally to the Emperor, Fotii warned of certain ‘Illuminists’ — Freemasons — who were plotting to install a new worldwide religion, having first destroyed ‘all empires, churches, religions, civil laws and all order’. The Bible Society, he maintained, was preparing the way for this revolution…
Alexander was certainly susceptible to Fotii’s insinuations… In the last years of his life, [his fears of sedition] were intensified by the growth of secret societies inside Russia. He naturally associated them with the societies in Germany, Italy and Spain which threatened European peace and stability as guaranteed by his cherished Holy Alliance… He had hoped that the Bible Society would arm the ordinary people against atheism and sedition. Now he was being warned that, on the contrary, the Bible Society was part of the conspiracy… In the event, he drew back from actually closing down the Bible Society, but he dismissed Golitsyn as head of it, replacing him with the irreproachably Orthodox Metropolitan of [Saint Petersburg], Seraphim…
He also appointed to the Ministry of Education… Admiral Shishkov, the principal protagonist of Church Slavonic. Shishkov lost no time in putting pressure on Seraphim to stop the Russian publication of the Bible. ‘What! Who among us does not understand the divine service? Only he who has broken with his fatherland and forgotten his own tongue… And can this supposed necessity [of publishing the Bible in modern Russian] do other than degrade the Holy Scriptures and thus implant heresies and schisms?’
Seraphim did not take much persuading. Publication of the catechism and the scriptures in ‘the vernacular’ (prostoe narechie) was terminated… Remarkably but characteristically, the continued publication of the scriptures in other ‘vernacular’ languages did not bother the Orthodox hierarchy, but the Holy Synod ordered the burning of thousands of copies of the Pentateuch, which were already being printed in Russian.
The halting of the Russian Bible was fateful. It delayed by a fatal half-century the moment when ordinary Russians could have access to the scriptures in a language which they could read and study with ease. Peter the Great had carried through a kind of Protestant revolution in the church, but a dangerously incomplete one, since it had never been supplemented by mass reading of the scriptures among the population. Without that the domination of the state within the church always threatened to hollow out its spiritual life. The situation had been created where the postman hero of Leskov’s story Odnodum (The One-Track Mind) could be seen as a laughable and possibly dangerous eccentric merely because he was in the habit of regularly reading the Bible for himself.
The Archimandrite’s attitude is still maintained in some Orthodox quarters; this page on the Elder Nilus says “Archimandrite Photius of the Yuriev Monastery… passed into history as a true confessor who battled with the enemies of the Orthodox Church: the Protestants, Masons and the ‘ecumenists’ of that time – the Bible Society.” And you can get a different perspective (from a Jehovah’s Witness point of view) on the history of the Russian Bible here.
Geoff Pullum has an excellent Language Log post analyzing a quoted passage in which the speaker moves between she and they while talking about the same person. I love his summary:
There is a subtle and beautiful system here. It is not to be dismissed with the idiotic sexist authoritarianism of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (p. 60: “Do not use they… Use the singular pronoun… he“).
John Emerson has put online (at Idiocentrism) a transcription and translation of a few passages from what sounds like a remarkable book, the sixteenth-century Portuguese Menina e Moça. Here is Emerson’s description:
The main narrator is doubly exiled, first from her childhood home, and then from the place where she was raised. Seemingly abandoned by her lover, she has come to a lonely place to live out her few remaining years. There she meets another exile, a mysterious older woman who refuses to tell her own tragic story but lets slip that it concerns her son. Most of the book consists of stories which the mystery woman had heard from her father and which she retells to the first narrator — stories of events happening at the desolate place of their exile, which had once been inhabited by noble knights and their ladies, of whom the relics were still occasionally uncovered by the simple shepherdesses who now inhabited the land.
The second narrator might be a ghost (the supernatural is evident throughout), and it is even possible that she and everything she says are projections of the first narrator’s disturbed mind: “In a strange way, I was transported to a place where my own pain was reenacted before my eyes in others’ lives”. The stories told by the second narrator are also all stories of doomed exiles, and when one character (Aonia) seems to end up attaining a mediocre happiness, that is not treated as a happy ending — and the first narrator occasionally reflects that she herself seems to be seeking and insisting on unhappiness, rather than trying to avoid it.
Bob Becker has put online a useful resource for pre-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe:
Chaim Finkelstein was the last editor of Haynt, the Jewish newspaper in Warsaw, Poland, before the Holocaust. His book, Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper, chronicles the history of Jewish life in Poland between 1908 and 1939. It contains articles from the leading writers on the world.
Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper was published in Israel in Yiddish, but never in English. This website makes Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper available to Yiddish readers and seeks volunteers to translate a few pages each… As I receive these translations, I will add them to this website and credit the translators for their contribution. All translations will be in the public domain.
So any Yiddish-speakers who’d like to contribute to such a project can go try their hand. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey; haynt, incidentally, is Yiddish for ‘today.’)
Céline of Naked Translations has an amusing post about her difficulties trying to translate English into French and being told that her versions are too… French:
Coordinator: “Please write your ideas on the flip-chart.”
Céline: “Veuillez noter vos idées sur le… le…”What’s flip-chart in French?? Don’t panic, don’t panic.
“Le… le…”
19 pairs of eyes are on me. I can feel drops of sweat slowing running down my cold forehead.
“Le… le…”
“TABLEAU DE CONFÉRENCE!”, I finally blurt out, a bit too loudly. I’m sure I can hear a crowd cheering and chanting my name in the distance.
French client: “Tableau de conférence? C’est marrant, nous on dit paperboard.” (That’s funny, we say paperboard).
I tell you, next time I can’t think of the proper way of saying something in French, I’ll just come out with a ridiculous made-up English word instead of risking brain meltdown.
There’s also a good story about translating “environmental stewardship,” and some thoughts on context.
From a comment in a previous entry I found a couple of very interesting blogs by zhwj: 化 境 神 思 (litserial) and Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy (both are in English, despite the name of the first, though with frequent use of Chinese). The first began with an introduction to “a short memoir called Journey to the West 西游记 by the American educated psychologist Shen Youqian 沈有乾,” which zhwj is translating in installments; the most recent entry is about onomatopoeia in a Chinese translation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The newest post in the sf blog is a discussion of the Chinese terms for fantasy, science fiction, and the like, with many quotes and examples. Both sites are highly recommended.
I have just learned (via a MetaFilter post) the word graticule, which is obscure enough that it’s not in the American Heritage Dictionary. The OED defines it thus:
1. A design or plan divided into squares to facilitate its proportionate enlargement or reduction; the style or pattern of such a division.
1887 GEN. WALKER in Encycl. Brit. XXII. 714/1 The graticule is sometimes rectangular, sometimes spherical, sometimes a combination of both.. Spherical graticules are constructed in various ways.
2. A transparent plate or cell bearing a grid, cross-wire, or scale, designed to be used with an optical instrument or cathode-ray oscilloscope for the purpose of positioning, measuring, or counting objects in the field of view; the scale, grid, etc., on such a plate. Hence graticuled ppl. a., fitted with a graticule.
1914 Handbk. Artill. Instrum. 42 In front of the eye-piece is fixed.. a diaphragm, with spider’s web graticules attached to it. 1919 Trans. Opt. Soc. XX. 277 Generally the graticules are on glass and it is usual to refer to the complete discs or plates with the measuring scales or marks on them, as ‘graticules’. Ibid. 286 Graticuled binoculars are not used much for peace purposes. […] 1971 Physics Bull. July 398/2 A graduation line is centred in the microscope eyepiece graticule.
If one were to be classically accurate, it should be “craticule”; the etymology is:
a. F. graticule, ad. med.L. grâtîcula, for crâtîcula gridiron, dim. of crâtis hurdle.
For meaning 2, the word reticle is also used; the words are unconnected, this one being from a diminutive of rête ‘net.’
A Boing Boing post describes the “curious censorship and intellectual property details of Microsoft’s new blogging tool MSN Spaces” as they affect Chinese sites; I was particularly struck by this (from Weizhong Yang in Taipei, Taiwan):
We found that the Traditional Chinese MSN Spaces censored words such as oral sex, anal sex and so on, by the way, they censored two important and common used words which make us feel unbelievable.
One is a word pronounced as cao which means fucking sometimes, however, it also means operating, handling, exercising or practicing, and there was a famous king/hero/tyrant in about the second century called Cao Cao. Therefore you cannot set certain derivations of that word (for instance Cao Cao and Yang Xiu, which is a famous traditional Chinese drama play) as the title of your MSN Space.
I can attest that Cao Cao (traditional transliteration Tsao Tsao) is an extremely famous figure in Chinese history, and it’s absurd that his name is censored because of homonymy! (Thanks to Songdog for the link.)
The Language Feed is a completely not-for-profit and free web site and email announcement list. Every Friday, the Language Feed is updated with the latest news stories found around the web that pertain to language and linguistics. Articles are selected with two criteria in mind – does this article have something to do with language? And does this article interest Sally? That’s it.
“Sally” is Sally Morrison, and she’s created a very useful website, which I found via Jessica Rett’s links page.
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