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I’ve mentioned my fondness for the serial comma before (and quoted a wonderful example of the unfortunate results of omitting it: “The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector”), but I ran across a sentence in the NY Times Circuits section yesterday (in the story “Aiming for Hit Games, Films Come Up Short,” by Seth Schiesel) that caused me real confusion: “On consoles, that means titans like Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo, Mario and Zelda, and relative newcomers like Grand Theft Auto and Halo.” Because of the lack of a serial comma, it looks as if there were a game called “Mario and Zelda,” and I initially assumed such was the case. But my obsessive editorial brain forced me to google it, and I discovered they were two separate games. This would have been clear if a comma had been placed after “Mario,” as the gods of grammar intended.

As I mentioned in a recent entry, I just bought Kornei Chukovsky’s Zhivoi kak zhizn’: o russkom yazyke (Alive as life: on the Russian language), and I am so pleased by his opening paragraphs on language change that I am going to translate them here.

Anatolii Fedorovich Koni [1844-1927], Honorary Academician and famous lawyer, was, as is well known, the kindliest of men. He gladly forgave those around him all sorts of mistakes and weaknesses. But woe betide anyone who, while conversing with him, distorted or disfigured the Russian language. Koni fell upon such a person with impassioned detestation.

His passion delighted me. And yet in his struggle for the purity of the language he often went too far. He insisted, for example, that the word obyazatel’no [‘obligatorily, without fail,’ from the verb obyazat’ ‘to oblige’] meant only ‘obligingly, courteously.’ But that meaning of the word has long since died out. Now, both in living speech and in literature, the word obyazatel’no has come to mean nepremenno [‘without fail, certainly’]. And that aroused the indignation of Academician Koni.

“Just imagine,” he would say, clutching at his heart, “today I was walking along Spasskaya and I heard: ‘On obyzatel’no nab’et tebe mordu!‘ [‘He’s definitely gonna smash your face in!’] How do you like that? One man tells another that someone is going to thrash him in a courteous manner!”

“But the word obyazatel’no doesn’t mean ‘courteous’ any more,” I tried to object, but Anatolii Fedorovich insisted on his point of view.

Meanwhile, in the entire Soviet Union you won’t find anyone for whom obyazatel’no means ‘courteous.’ Nowadays not everyone will understand what Aksakov meant when he said of a provincial doctor: “In his relations with us he acted obyazatel’no.” But no one will be puzzled by, for instance, this couplet of Isakovskii’s:

I kuda tebe zhelaetsya,
Obyazatel’no doidesh.
[‘And wherever you want to go, you’ll obyazatel’no get there.’]

Much is explained by the fact that Koni was by then old. He acted like most old men: he insisted on the norms of Russian speech as they existed in the time of his childhood and youth. Old men almost always think their children and grandchildren (especially the grandchildren) are disfiguring proper Russian speech.

I can easily imagine the grey-haired elder who in 1803 or 1805 angrily pounded his fist on the table when his grandchildren started chatting about razvitii uma i kharaktera [‘development of mind and character’].
“Where did you come upon that intolerable razvitiye uma? You should say prozyabenie [‘growth (of vegetation)].”…

A new epoch arrived. The former youths became fathers and grandfathers. And it was their turn to be indignant about the words that young people were bringing into use: darovityi [‘gifted’], otchetlivyi [‘distinct, intelligible’], golosovanie [‘voting, suffrage’], chelovechnyi [‘humane’], obshchestvennost’ [‘(the) public, public opinion’], khlyshch [‘fop’]. Now it seems to us that these words have existed in Russia from time out of mind and that we could never have done without them, but in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century they were novelty words with which the zealots of the purity of the language could not for a long time make their peace.

He continues with more examples, and I may translate more of it later. Meanwhile, let me just say that his combination of awareness of the inevitability of change (and the comedy of young innovators turning into old prescriptivists) with resentment of the changes occurring in his own day is very close to my heart.

An exceedingly strange BBC News story: Spike Milligan wanted his gravestone to read “I told you I was ill,” there was a long struggle with the Chichester Diocese, and they finally approved it… but only if it was written in Gaelic (Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite)! Can anyone explain this? (Thanks to Jeremy of READIN for the link.)

Mark Liberman at Language Log describes a construction that is both new and repellent to me, the use of “relative clauses with a present participle in place of a finite verb, whose subject is a partitive structure involving a relative pronoun.” That’s pretty indigestible, so let me give you some examples:

“Both of whom being influenced by Ellington, Rowles and Brown choose one Ellington tune for each of the two albums that comprise this two-CD set…”
“Ireland and Denmark, both of whom being heavily reliant on British trade, decided they would go wherever Britain went…”
“At present, personal injury cases are heard by many different Judges, some of whom having no experience in this field.”

I share Mark’s judgment that “every single one of these examples seems completely ungrammatical”; furthermore, even apart from questions of grammaticality, they are pointlessly wordy, since in every case the “of whom + participle” construction can be omitted with no alteration in meaning:

“Rowles and Brown, both influenced by…”
“Ireland and Denmark, both heavily reliant…”
“…many different Judges, some with no experience…”

But given the breadth of the examples Mark has googled up (and I’ll add another one: “…do they spread the risk across more players, some of whom having lower capital reserves and security rating?”), it can’t possibly be a chance convergence of individual mistakes; it’s clearly a Phenomenon (and another example of how the internet is revolutionizing the study of language). So I’ll do another LH poll: how many of you find the construction acceptable, whether or not you use it yourself?

Update. Mark has expanded on the subject in a new LL post, inter alia correcting one of my commenters’ misapprehensions on the subject of eunuchs. [N.b.: The mention of eunuchs later disappeared from his post.]

I’ve run into a couple of difficulties arising from my reading lately, and I thought I’d share them, since they affect more than the words in question.

1) This is what I think of as the “echelon” problem, because of a long and unfortunate tradition among translators from Russian of rendering the word eshelon ‘special train’ as “echelon,” simply because that English word corresponds in form and etymology to the Russian one. They overlook the slight problem that the English word has no meaning even remotely corresponding to the Russian; it means ‘a steplike troop formation; a level or grade in an organization or field of activity,’ and nothing else—except to specialists in Soviet literature, who have absorbed this peculiar bit of translationese to the point that I have had a hard time convincing them that it exists nowhere else and that the “translation” should be retired forthwith. A similar problem came up yesterday in reading a Boris Akunin story called Strast’ i dolg [Passion and duty], set in an alternate Russia which has revived tsardom, along with its Table of Ranks and all the rest of the imperial paraphernalia. The sentence in question reads: Pogibel’ deistvitel’nogo tainogo sovetnika prishla nazavtra, na raute u angliiskogo poslannika sera Endryu Vuda: ‘The ruin of the Active Privy Counselor came the next day, at a raut at the residence of the English ambassador Sir Andrew Wood.’ The dictionary translation of the word raut is “rout.” Now, this is a different case from eshelon because there actually is an English word rout meaning ‘a fashionable gathering or assembly, a large evening party or reception,’ but the word has been obsolete for over a century and it’s unlikely anyone but a devotee of Victorian literature would be familiar with it. (Side note: I learn from the OED that there are in fact ten different routs, ranging from ‘a company, assemblage, band, or troop of persons’ to ‘the act of searching, or of turning out something,’ including the hapax ‘some kind of horse’: 1697 Vanbrugh Æsop i. iv. ii, Your Worship has six Coach-Horses,.. besides Pads, Routs, and Dog-Horses.) To render the word “rout” would be unconscionable—I would say “at a reception”—but I’ll bet there are plenty of lazy translators who would do it.

2) I was reading a NY Times story yesterday called “Siberian Dam Generates Political Wrangle Over Power” when it occurred to me, not for the first time, to look up the Russian for ‘dam.’ The dictionary translation is plotina, but I can never remember it because I rarely see it in Russian texts. The story concerned the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam; I did a Russian search on the name and discovered the feminine gender is caused not by plotina but by GES, the Russian acronym for ‘hydroelectric station.’ That’s why I can’t remember plotina; what we call the Hoover Dam, the Russians would call the Hoover GES. GES does not mean ‘dam,’ but it is used where we use ‘dam’ in the usual contemporary context of large concrete structures for generating power. There must be other examples of this phenomenon—different terms used in similar contexts—but I can’t think of any right at the moment. Anyway, it’s an interesting test of a translator’s skill; if you don’t know the language well, you’ll wind up using a dictionary definition rather than the situationally appropriate word.

I made the mistake of dropping by the Donnell Branch of the NYPL on my lunch hour, where I found five Russian books I couldn’t resist in the sale bin. (The Donnell has the biggest foreign-language collection in the city, and they’ve been selling off chunks of it for years, presumably to make room for new books; I regret the depletion of the collection, but I’ve gotten a lot of good books for almost no money.) I got Arkadii Averchenko‘s Salat iz bulavok (Pin salad, a collection of short stories from the ’20s: sample in translation here), Mark Aldanov‘s Portrety (Portraits) (a collection of historico-biographical essays from the ’20s and ’30s), Kornei Chukovsky‘s book on the Russian language Zhivoi kak zhizn’ (Alive as life), Andrei Voznesensky‘s Antimiry (Antiworlds), and the journalist Feliks Medvedev’s 1992 collection of interviews with famous Russians (including Iosif Brodskii, Sasha Sokolov, Nina Berberova, and Andrei Sinyavskii) Posle Rossii (After Russia). All of this for a grand total of $1.60.

I have to confess a longstanding prejudice against Gregory Rabassa, who’s won just about every award he could win and is probably the translator whose name is most familiar to the general reader. I was reading Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) and using Rabassa’s translation to help me through the hard parts, and I began realizing Rabassa had misunderstood idioms, mistranslated words, even left out entire chunks of text. Of course no translator can escape the occasional lapse, and if he had been some unknown I would have been more inclined to forgive and forget, but this was the great Rabassa, and I was mightily disillusioned. Well, it turns out that was his first translation, and he hadn’t even read the novel when he started translating it, so I guess I should let it go; at any rate, I look forward to reading his forthcoming book If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, discussed in an interview with Andrew Bast published in the NY Times Book Review.

“My thesis in the book is that translation is impossible,” Mr. Rabassa said. “People expect reproduction, but you can’t turn a baby chick into a duckling. The best you can do is get close to it.”

He certainly seems to have had a good life:

[Read more…]

I am informed by wood s lot that today would have been Joseph Brodsky’s 64th birthday. (How could he not have made it to 56? Unbelievable.) There you will find many excellent links; I am simply going to reproduce his own self-translation “Elegy.”

About a year has passed. I’ve returned to the place of battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
—wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of stale bad blood.
Now the place is abuzz with trading in your ankles’ remnants, bronzes
of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises,
rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason,
laundered banners with imprints of the many who since have risen.
All’s overgrown with people. A ruin’s a rather stubborn
architectural style. And the heart’s distinction from a pitch-black cavern
isn’t that great; not great enough to fear
that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere.
At sunrise, when nobody stares at one’s face, I often
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth “Commander
in chief.” But it reads “in grief,” or “in brief,” or “in going under.”
(1985)

[Read more…]

I’m used to seeing words used oddly or wrongly; almost always, I can figure out what the writer meant to say, but in this brief New Yorker review of The Lucky Ones, by Rachel Cusk, I am at a loss:

The women in these five linked vignettes are all connected to a journalist named Serena Porter, either personally or as readers of the weekly column she writes about her family life. While they struggle to understand their painful and awkward responses to lovers and children, she spins the raw material of motherhood and marriage into witty and topical dispatches. Of course, much of what Serena writes is factitious, both in its details (she freely appropriates an acquaintance’s experience as her own) and in the breezy complacency that it projects; Cusk seems to suggest that our true thoughts about love and family defy articulation. Such is her gift for capturing women’s psychology and their sense of their place in the world that the novel achieves what Serena’s column cannot: a fresh and compassionate portrait of a generation’s feelings about motherhood.

(Emphasis added.) I don’t think factitious can mean ‘artificial’ in the context of that sentence, but I have no idea what it might be intended to mean. Suggestions?

Addendum. I was going to do a companion entry about a bizarre usage by (of all people) Susan Sontag in her essay “Regarding the Torture of Others” in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine: “An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither can be captured in digital photographs and on video”—but the offending “whither” has already been changed to “which” in the online version, so it was a simple typo, hardly worth the blogging except to lament for the thousandth time the execrable standards of proofreading now prevailing at the Newspaper of Record.

The most comprehensive interspecies dictionary available in paperback!

Over 5,000 references, 80,000 translations and hundreds of new expressions! Contains usage notes to avoid being bitten, and slang signals on a wide variety of subjects. Contains examples to show how sounds are used… Edges treated with bitter apple to deter chewing.

The sample page contains entries such as:
eee ee ee [iii:’ii:i] v. to go away; eee ee ee eep! get out of the hammock now, it’s my turn.
eee eee ee [iii:’iii:ii] v.tr. to explore; eee eee ee e ee eek, Let me out so I can explore behind the filing cabinet!
And there are carefully researched etymologies, for example for a word meaning ‘That’s my pea!’:

From high classic Rattus [1.75 million BCE]: eeeee, mine; + ee-e, small round; + ee-ee; give me, 2nd person singular, imperative mood of ee-e-e, to give, v.t.

Clearly a major advance in lexicography! (Via Language Log.)