languagehat.com

My wife and I are reading The Betrothed, Michael F. Moore’s translation of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, and I liked this description (from the end of chapter 4) of Padre Cristoforo, who had become a Capuchin monk after killing a man:

Tutto il suo contegno, come l’aspetto, annunziava una lunga guerra tra un’indole subita, risentita, e una volontà opposta, abitualmente vittoriosa, sempre all’erta e diretta da motivi e da ispirazioni superiori. Un suo confratello ed amico, che lo conosceva bene, lo aveva una volta paragonato a quelle parole troppo espressive nella loro forma naturale, che alcuni, anche ben educati, quando la passione trabocca, pronunziano smozzicate, con qualche lettera mutata, parole che in quel travisamento fanno però ricordare della loro energia primitiva.

His whole demeanor, like his appearance, betrayed a long war between a fiery, resentful disposition and the opposite desire, which usually prevailed, always alert and guided by higher motives and inspiration. A fellow friar and friend, who knew him well, once compared him to words that are overly colorful in their natural form, which some people, even the educated, utter when passion overflows, but in a fractured form, with a couple of letters changed for the sake of propriety. Words that, despite this disguise, maintain their original energy.

Moore chooses “original” for primitiva, but I prefer the more primitive “primitive.” I was struck by the word smozzicate: smozzicare ‘to crumble; to mumble, to slur (words)’ is derived from mozzo ‘cut off, docked,’ which is (according to Wiktionary) “From Vulgar Latin *mutius, from Latin mutilus [of unknown origin]. Cf. also French mousse, Spanish mocho.” The only French mousse I knew was the noun meaning ‘moss; foam,’ but this turns out to be an adjective meaning ‘blunt.’

I recently ran across a usage issue that astonished me, because I don’t remember having encountered it before. AHD (s.v. behalf) gives a good summary:

Usage Note: A traditional rule holds that in behalf of and on behalf of have distinct meanings. According to this rule, in behalf of means “for the benefit of,” as in We raised money in behalf of the earthquake victims, while its counterpart on behalf of means “as the agent of, on the part of,” as in The guardian signed the contract on behalf of the child. But as the two meanings are quite close, the phrases are often used interchangeably, even by reputable writers. Statistically, on behalf of is used far more frequently than in behalf of, and in fact the Usage Panel prefers on behalf of for both meanings. In our 2004 survey, 87 percent of the Panel preferred on behalf of in the sentence The lawyer spoke to the media (in behalf of/on behalf of) his client, conforming to the traditional rule for using on behalf of. But some 75 percent also preferred on behalf of in the sentence After sitting silently as one complaint after another was raised, he finally spoke up (in behalf of/on behalf of) his kid’s coach, where the speaker is less of a spokesperson than an ad-hoc defender, and so the meaning “in defense of, for the benefit of” is a better fit, and the traditional rule therefore would require in behalf of. All this suggests that on behalf of may be generally supplanting in behalf of.

I thought I knew all the usage battles, but this was new to me. As far as I can recall, I’ve never even seem “in behalf of” (though I must have on occasion, and simply not registered it); I was certainly unfamiliar with the purported distinction. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage has a section on it, ending:

Conclusion: the OED shows that the “agent” sense is older; the “benefit” sense — presumably because your agent should be working for your benefit — developed from it in Shakespeare’s time. But Shakespeare himself used both in and on, in this sense, and since in had earlier been used in the “agent” sense, there never was a distinction in meaning based on the choice of preposition. Modern British usage appears to favor on in all instances, but both in and on are used interchangeably in American English.

I doubt that last assertion, even as of 1989 when MWDEU was published, but of course one would have to do a statistical analysis that I’m not about to undertake. At any rate, I’m curious about other people’s sense of this: do you use one or both forms, and are you aware of the alleged difference in meaning?

Kathleen Maris Paltrineri has a very illuminating LARB interview with Damion Searls, the translator of new Nobel laureate Jon Fosse [ˈjʊn ˈfɔssɛ] — in fact, he learned Norwegian in order to read Fosse. I like his responses very much, both the ones where he expands on a topic and the ones where he sensibly ducks the question. Some excerpts:

How do differences between Nynorsk (the version of Norwegian Fosse writes in) and English — for example, the lack of present continuous verb tense in Nynorsk — shape your translations? How do Nynorsk and English enter into a dialogue in your versions?

That’s an interesting question, because I’ve never really thought about Nynorsk and English as being in dialogue. I might even go so far as to say that if the languages are in dialogue, that’s the sign of a bad translation. Isn’t that what “translatorese” is? When English is speaking a little bit in Norwegian (or whatever the language pair is)? Fosse is the writer who gets to use Norwegian — I have to use English, the whole English, and nothing but the English.

You mention the present continuous verb tense: “I am standing” instead of “I stand,” for example. This is crucial for Fosse, who writes a lot in the grammatical present tense but about overlapping time frames and levels of reality. You might be tempted to think that “I stand” is the correct translation of the Nynorsk eg står and “I am standing” is “looser,” but actually both are equally faithful and correct, because Nynorsk has only the one form; using the same English form every time would not be correct, even though the Nynorsk repeats, because English has two forms. The opening of Aliss at the Fire, for example, uses both forms this way: “I see Signe lying there on the bench in the room and she’s looking at all the usual things, the old table, the stove, the woodbox, the old paneling on the walls, the big window facing out onto the fjord, she looks at it all without seeing it…” (leaving aside the participles “facing” and “seeing,” which in Nynorsk correspond to “the window onto the fjord” and “without to see [anything]”). The original uses the same form every time, and it’s even more repetitive in Nynorsk because “to look” is the same verb as “to see” with a preposition added (basically “to see at,” so this short passage has the same verb ser for “see/sees/looks” three times). But I have to write clear and forceful English without clinging too closely to the Nynorsk, and that means availing myself of the subtle difference between whether she sees or is seeing.

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Laura Simmons writes about language loss for IFLScience:

Is it possible for someone who is bilingual or multilingual to unlearn their first language? The short answer is… kind of. It’s certainly possible to forget a lot of the vocabulary and grammar that once came naturally, through a process known as language attrition.

One leading researcher in this area is Professor Monika S. Schmid, a linguist from the University of York in the UK. A native German speaker, Schmid describes her own experiences with language attrition on her website. Some of the common signs of this include forgetting specific words, using odd expressions or putting words together incorrectly, and becoming more hesitant when speaking.

It’s very common for people who spend long periods of time learning and speaking a new language to start to have difficulty with their native language – in linguist-speak, the L1. But while this can be distressing, it is unlikely that an adult will completely forget a language they once spoke fluently.

For young children, however, it’s a different story. Children’s brains are much more flexible when it comes to language acquisition, but that also leaves them more vulnerable to completely losing their L1 if they’re in an environment where they’re no longer exposed to it. […]

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Andrew Higgins (“Reporting from Comrat, Moldova” — there’s a dateline you don’t often see!) explains the difficult situation of Gagauz for the NY Times (archived):

He has published collections of poetry, written more than 20 books, as well as plays, translated works by foreign literary giants like Moliere and is rated as a master of his native language. His prodigious output, however, is not matched by the size of his readership. His children can’t understand a word he has written.

Todur Zanet writes in Gagauz, an obscure Turkic tongue used by so few people that, the writer worries, the main value of his literary output probably lies with future scholars interested in dead languages. “At least they will have something interesting to study,” he said. “Our language is dying and within two or three generations it will be dead,” Mr. Zanet, 65, said in an interview in Comrat, the capital of his home region of Gagauzia, an autonomous ethnic enclave in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.

Others are less pessimistic and note that while used routinely at home and work by only a few thousand people, Gagauz is similar to Turkish and several other Turkic languages widely used in parts of the former Soviet Union like Azerbaijan and Central Asia. […]

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I know there’s a ton of blathering about AI and ChatGPT out there, and I have no desire to overload LH with it, but I found this discussion by Andrew Deck interesting (and cheering) enough to share:

Training an AI tool to generate high-quality literary writing, like poetry, is no small challenge. Many large language models (LLMs) are not trained to be creative. One of the criteria used by AI researchers to judge creativity is novelty — how different the writing generated by a model is from what already exists in the world. But tools like ChatGPT were built to mimic human writing, not to innovate on it. […]

ChatGPT, for example, even struggles to imitate the structure and rhythm of well-established poets in English, especially when the poets are famous for breaking literary norms. A recent study found ChatGPT largely fails to produce English-language poems in the style of Walt Whitman, one of the more easily accessible poetry catalogs in the American canon. Whitman’s style features fluid and unstructured verse, but ChatGPT often wrongly defaulted to the rigid norm of four-line stanzas. It continued to do this even when prompted not to.

These issues are often exacerbated when ChatGPT is asked to produce poetic writing in languages other than English. The same researchers struggled to imitate common Polish styles of poetry, according to Goes. Earlier this year, researchers attempted to refine models to address shortcomings in AI-generated Japanese poetry, such as haiku and waka.

Rest of World observed similar problems when we tested ChatGPT’s ability to write a poem in Tamil. The poems were incoherent at best.

I know, I know, they’ll probably get better at it as more bushels of money are thrown at the problem, but one can hope. (And speaking of money: “Telugu-speaking contractors, for example, can only earn $1.43 per hour.” I try not to dream of guillotines, but they make it so hard…) Thanks, Trevor!

As a Nabokovian of long standing, I really should have read his novel Transparent Things (1972), but I think I was put off by the reviews at the time and besides was beginning my doomed trek through graduate school. I’ll read it eventually, VV! At any rate, once Nabokov became acceptable reading in Russia, it was immediately translated (by Dolinin and Meilakh) as Просвечивающие предметы [Translucent objects] (1991); a few years later it was rendered by S. Ilyin as Прозрачные вещи [Transparent things] (1996). Now there’s a new translation by Andrei Babikov with a completely different title, «Сквозняк из прошлого» [A draft from the past]; this is from the last stanza of his 1930 poem “Ты, светлый житель будущих веков…” (the whole poem is quoted here):

Я здесь с тобой. Укрыться ты не волен.
К тебе на грудь я прянул через мрак.
Вот холодок ты чувствуешь: сквозняк
из прошлого… Прощай же. Я доволен.

I’m here with you. You are not free to hide.
Across the dark I pounced upon your chest.
And now you feel a chilly breeze: a draft
out of the past… Goodbye. I am content.

As Babikov explains here (and as is mentioned in English in the previous link), Nabokov’s widow Vera told Gennady Barabtarlo that a Russian translation should be called by that title; Babikov says “Буквальный русский перевод английского названия не передаёт всего многообразия заложенных в нём значений, поскольку английское things — это не только предметы, но и существа, и духи” [A literal Russian translation of the English name doesn’t convey the full variety of meanings inherent in it, since English “things” are not only objects, but also beings and spirits].

What strikes me is that A Draft from the Past would be an awkward title in English because of the polysemy of draft: the ‘current of air’ sense is probably not foremost in most people’s minds. (In the poem, of course, it’s clear from context.)

Back in 2017 I posted about Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, and now her version of the Iliad has come out, to mixed reviews. Conveniently, I have been sent links to one rave (thanks, Songdog!) and one pan (thanks, Eduardo!), so I will present bits from both. First, Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s praise in the Washington Post (archived):

Wilson has forged a poetic style in English that captures the essence of Homeric Greek, a style that she explains in her helpful “Translator’s Note.” Eschewing rhyme, she has arranged her verse into a loose iambic pentameter, allowing it to spill over to occupy some 4,000 more lines than the original poem. On the page the metricality of Wilson’s verse is lost — the rhythm comes alive only when you read aloud, the words whistling up the windpipe, animating the tongue and striking the ear. No other translation communicates the oral nature of the poem so brilliantly.

Another key element in Wilson’s style is the register, poised between the high epic and the everyday. Her tone manages a sweeping grandeur without pomposity, and is both refreshingly modern and largely free of the jarring chattiness of contemporary colloquialisms. (There are a few exceptions where Wilson’s choice of vocabulary is somewhat incongruous: Achilles leaves his guests “flabbergasted,” for example; Paris is labeled a “sleazy flirt”; and Odysseus threatens to expose another man’s “private parts” when he is angry with him.) The resulting text is — and I mean this in the best possible way — highly readable. Wilson’s “Iliad” is a genuine page-turner, and it is all too easy to gallop through it as one would a beach read.

Wilson’s style is like the proverbial mountain stream — clean and clear, and bubbling along at pace. Reading hundreds of lines listing one violent death after another can, in some translations of the epic, feel somewhat tiresome, but in Wilson’s hands it is more like watching a tightly edited movie, the scenes slick and bloodily compelling. In her “Odyssey,” Wilson restricted herself to the same number of lines as the original poem, meaning that some sections came across as somewhat abrupt in English. In her “Iliad,” she has set herself free from this constraint, with some of the poem’s 24 books running hundreds of lines longer than in the original, and the verse breathes more easily as a result.

As counterpoint, Valerie Stivers bashes it for Compact. After calling it “the most readable Iliad I’ve encountered” and saying “many of her turns of phrase are direct and beautiful,” she goes on the attack:
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Composer Abie Rotenberg enjoys the potpourri that is Yeshivish Yiddish, and so will you. The start:

VERSE 1:
To originate a language, a new way to talk and speak,
is a most imposing challenge, a monumental feat.
It takes a special talent, ’tis not for the faint of heart,
and most are doomed to failure before they even start.

But in the hallowed halls of yeshivos far and wide,
our young men have discovered a new way to verbalize.
With Yiddish, English, Hebrew, it’s a mixture of all three,
and a dash of Aramaic- A linguistic potpourri!

CHORUS 1:
Yeshivishe reid, Yeshivishe shprach!
Takeh, Epis, Gradeh, ah gevaldige zach!
It’s called Yeshivishe reid, Yeshivishe shprach,
it’s the talk of the town, Mamesh tug un nacht!

It gets increasingly Hebrew/Yiddish-laden, with lines like:

I said “Then it’s an Onus if to Seder I’ll be late”,
“No”, he said, “I’m Makpid- Ein Somchin Al Hanes!”

(Calling rozele…)

It occurred to me to wonder how far back the titular cliché went. Needless to say, I started by googling, and I found a remarkable unanimity among the websites that aimed to assist the eager seeker after truth; this Check English Words page is representative:

“My work here is done” is a popular phrase that originates from a piece of media called The Lone Ranger. There are countless examples of the phrase being used in pop culture, but The Lone Ranger is the earliest example of it being used. The Lone Ranger came out in 1938, and as the years went by, more and more pop culture movies and shows used the phrase.

I even found a site that gave a specific episode that used it, but I won’t bother to try to find it again, because it’s all a lot of hooey. The Lone Ranger used it for the same reason people use it now: it’s a memorable meme. And it started long before the Ranger ever ranged. A Google Books search easily turned up examples like these:

“Oh yes, my work here is done, and well done.” –Fergus Hume, A Traitor in London (1900), p. 158.

“My work here is done; and I am only going at my Father’s summons.” –T.S. Arthur, “The Story-Teller: Deborah Norman,” Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine, Vol. 43 (1875), p. 665.

“But my work here is done.” — George E. Fisher, Declaring all the Counsel of God (1852), p. 16.

“My work here is done. I am going to dwell in a world I am wholly unworthy of.” — David Stowell, Sermon […] (1836), p. 12.

I’m sure I could turn up earlier examples, but I think I’ve proved my point, so my work… well, you know.