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Another quote that struck me, this time from Andre Bazin via Matt Zoller Seitz in NY Press:

…I found myself trying to recall an Andre Bazin observation. When I got home, I found it in Bazin’s What is Cinema? Vol. II. In Umberto D., writes Bazin, “The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis.”

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 1960

Via wood s lot, where you will find a number of Bachelard links. I don’t really know anything about him, but I like this quote a lot. (There’s a long section from the French original, La Poétique de la Rêverie, here.)

Dick Davis’s On Not Translating Hafez is perhaps the best thing I’ve ever read on the differences between poetic traditions and the implications of such differences for translation. I’ve read a fair amount of Persian poetry (almost always in translation), and Davis helps me understand both the unaccustomed pleasures it affords and the vague embarrassment it can produce. He moves from specific examples (“Only in Persian will the pun in the medieval poet Mas’ud Sa’d’s line ‘Nalam bedel chu nai man andar hesar-e nai’ be evocative: the pun is on the word nai, which means a reed, and by extension a reed flute, and also alludes to the name of a fortress used as a prison”) to broader distinctions:

A subdivision of this mystical problem is the set of ideas metaphorically expressed in Persian poetry by wine, drunkenness, the opposition of the rend (approximately “libertine”) and the zahed (“ascetic”), and so forth. None of these notions have any force whatsoever in the Western literary tradition. It would never occur to a Western poet to express the forbidden intoxications of mysticism by alluding to the forbidden intoxications of wine, for the simple fact that the intoxications of wine have never (if we exclude the brief and local moment of prohibition in the United States) been forbidden in the West. The whole topos of winebibbing and the flouting of sober outward convention, so dear to Persian Sufi poetry, can seem in earlier translators’ work to be little more than a kind of rowdy undergraduate hijinks, and in more recent versions it can take on the ethos of Haight-Ashbury in the late sixties. But in both cases the deeper resonances of the topos are not obvious for a Western audience: they have to be explained—and to explain a resonance is like explaining a joke; when the explanation is over, no one laughs, except out of pained politeness, and no one is moved.

And he brings in comparisons to other art forms with brilliant effect:

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A couple of news items of linguistic interest:
1) The NY Times yesterday had an interesting article by Michael Erard about kids’ slips of the tongue:

“Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,” the three little pigs taunted the big bad wolf. When Anna Van Valin was 4 years old, she pronounced the phrase “not by the chair of my hinny hin hin” and unwittingly advanced the study of children’s language when she did.
Anna’s talk was often observed. Her mother, Dr. Jeri Jaeger, is a linguist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who collects the speech slips that children make in order to understand how they learn language. For two decades Dr. Jaeger has collected data wherever she found available children…
…Dr. Jaeger said: “Many parents get freaked out and think their child is making mistakes. But these slips of the tongue are entirely normal. In fact, they show that a child is acquiring language as they should be.”

2) BBC News says Learning languages ‘boosts brain’:

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AESOPICA.NET: Aesop’s Fables Online presents “1418 English fables, 646 Latin fables and 780 Greek fables (translations provided), as well as links to French (La Fontaine) and Spanish,” in the words of aldiboronti at Wordorigins, who once more has dug up treasure from the midden heap that is the internet. The Perry index lists all the fables; clicking on any one of them (eg, Perry 1: Eagle and Fox) gets you links to all available versions. Do you know how long I’ve been looking for Aesop in Greek? Thanks yet again, aldi!

This sentence from Mark Liberman’s (very interesting) Language Log post on the history of sentence diagramming (which I, like Mark, had to learn as a lad) is a good example of why I dislike the culture of MIT linguistics (the linguistics itself is a whole other issue): “And there was not a great deal of respect for earlier traditions of analysis—the required ‘History of Linguistics’ course at MIT was familiarly known as ‘Bad Guys’.”

Here at LH, those pre-Chomsky linguists are known as the Good Guys.

As a follow-up to my earlier Kropotkin entry, I want to quote another section (Russian here) from the Corps of Pages chapter, this time on talking with peasants:

Later, when we were spreading socialist doctrines amongst the peasants, I could not but wonder why some of my friends, who had received a seemingly far more democratic education than myself, did not know how to talk to the peasants or to the factory workers from the country. They tried to imitate the “peasants’ talk” by introducing a profusion of so-called “popular phrases,” but they only rendered themselves the more incomprehensible.

Nothing of the sort is needed, either in talking to peasants or in writing for them. The Great Russian peasant perfectly well understands the educated man’s talk, provided it is not stuffed with words taken from foreign languages. What the peasant does not understand is abstract notions when they are not illustrated by concrete examples. But my experience is that when you speak to the Russian peasant plainly, and start from concrete facts,—and the same is true with regard to village folk of all nationalities,—there is no generalization from the whole world of science, social or natural, which cannot be conveyed to a man of average intelligence, if you yourself understand it concretely. The chief difference between the educated and the uneducated man is, I should say, that the latter is not able to follow a chain of conclusions. He grasps the first of them, and maybe the second, but he gets tired at the third, if he does not see what you are driving at. But how often do we meet the same difficulty in educated people.

How often indeed.

Jeff Allen’s new web page aims at providing links to existing evaluations/reviews of language technology:

This is a list of review articles concerning translation software and systems, content authoring tools, and translation project management tools. It also includes information about the evaluation of translation system text output, authoring and translation tool tutorials / training, translation assessment, etc.

No, not the rubbery emulsion, the typesetting program LaTeX. Christopher Culver, proprietor of the late and much-lamented classical weblog Nephelokokkygia, says “I retained on my personal website the introductions to LaTeX, which I am sure many former readers will be happy about.” I am glad to have the opportunity to link to his introduction for classicists (“LaTeX is incredibly useful for the classicist, for it supports, among many other languages, Latin and Greek, and even provides the correct hyphenation of text in those languages”) [and for Slavicists]; I hope many readers will find them useful.

A list of Vegetarian Phrases In Other Languages, via Incoming Signals [10/11/04], where you will find an unhinged rant about it:

I imagine it must be very important to have those phrases handy in that part of the world since the phrasebook gives so many options for making your wishes known. Perhaps they have a habit of forcing fish on the unwary traveler, and only a quick response will stop them. Perhaps just at the very last second, before they cram the fish down your throat, live and wriggling, according to their custom. But they will understand. They will sigh dejectedly…

The Russian sentences are given in a virtually unintelligible transcription, which may be a good thing, considering the in-your-face wording of “Yah lyublyu gihvahtnihh poehtahmuh yah nye yem eeh (I love animals, so I don’t eat them).” Might be more sensible to just ask for potatoes and skip the propaganda.