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I’m reading Bunin’s “В саду” [In the orchard], in which a canny old merchant stops by to visit some peasants who are working for him and starts complaining about various people of his acquaintance. His wife is always suffering from some ailment or other, his daughter is dissatisfied with her life for no good reason (“горе от ума Грибоедова, видимое дело” [grief from the mind of Griboyedov, that’s what it is]), a servant not only can’t cook but can’t even mix swill for swine (“сама как мясопотам какой” [she’s like some mesopotamus] — that folk-etymologized mashup of мясо ‘meat,’ гиппопотам ‘hippopotamus,’ and Месопотамия ‘Mesopotamia’ made me laugh out loud), and a rich shopkeeper named Shurinov has gone completely around the bend with religious mania, telling everyone they should stop thinking about money and start worrying about the grave, using the rhyming expressions Russians love (“нонче ты с дружьями, а завтра с червями, нынче в порфире, а завтра в могиле” [today you’re with friends, and tomorrow with worms, today in purple, and tomorrow in the grave]). He continues:

Теперь, говорят, одно твердит: амигдал да онагрь, велбуд да тля, скимен да вретище…

Now, they say, he keeps repeating the same things: almond tree and wild ass, camel and aphid, schema and sackcloth…

The rest of them were clear enough, but what was the almond tree about? (He uses the Church Slavic word амѵгдалъ/амигдалъ rather than the normal Russian миндаль.) It turned out to be a reference to Ecclesiastes 12:5:

Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets

The Church Slavic version of “and the almond tree shall flourish” is “и процвѣтетъ амѵгдалъ.” Which is well and good, but what is so ominous about an almond tree flourishing? So I dug deeper and found that the original Hebrew has וְיִסְתַּבֵּ֣ל הַשָּׁקֵד֙ ‘and the almond tree is a burden.’ Well, which is it, flourishing or a burden? [I got this entirely wrong; see comments below.] Anybody know what’s going on here?

John Self at the Graun shares some good news:

There was a buzz in the room at this year’s International Booker prize ceremony in May, as some eye-opening – and encouraging – numbers were shared by the organisers. The figures, from a broad survey of book buyers, showed that sales of translated fiction increased 22% last year, compared to 2021 – and that it is most popular among readers under 35, who account for almost 50% of translated fiction sales. This is much higher than the 31% share of overall fiction sales bought by these readers – and the figures have grown year on year. For translated fiction, the future looks bright. So much so that in some cases books by certain publishers have become a “cultural accessory”. So how did it become cool, and which are the names to watch out for?

Undoubtedly the International Booker prize itself has boosted the profile of fiction from around the world published in English. Fiammetta Rocco has been the prize’s administrator from its launch as an annual award in 2016, and since then its winners have enjoyed enormous attention and sales boosts. […]

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Having effectively reached the end of my Long March through Russian literature with Marina Stepnova’s 2020 Сад [The orchard] (I have a couple of later books but am saving them for some other time), I turned back almost a century and resumed my reading of Ivan Bunin, which I left off in 1925. I immediately felt as if I were home again, swimming in familiar waters under familiar skies; yes, Bunin is a great writer, but for me he is also what Russians call родной: native, one’s very own. I don’t even care what he’s writing about, I just love the sound of his sentences and tend to mutter them aloud as I read. To quote the translator Graham Hettlinger:

Many of his most famous works […] focus on the themes of love, sex, death, and memory—topics with an undeniably universal appeal. But the importance of theme in Bunin’s prose is never completely equal to the importance of style. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the meaning of Bunin’s stories often derives from the movement and unfolding of their language. Whereas Tolstoy could be said to reveal important philosophical truths that are capable of surviving, at least to some degree, the inevitable disfigurements of translation, Bunin’s most important accomplishments are invariably linked to form: how he says something is usually as important as what he says. For this reason he is widely ranked among the greatest Russian stylists of the twentieth century. His often elaborate sentences move with a rhythmic, fluid grace that few have matched, and his accounts of sensory experience are sometimes staggering in their musicality, their detail, and their sheer intensity.

[After quoting a passage from Sukhodol:] This passage is typical of Bunin’s style. All the reader’s senses are engaged—smell, sight, sound, touch, even taste by association with the frost that resembles salt on the grass. […] In the original these nuances are delivered with an easy grace; they emerge in a series of rhythmic sentences, each detail slightly recasting those that preceded it. The author’s language operates almost like a camera lens being focused with increasing precision.

It is this fluid, nuanced style that often suffers badly in translation. How does one preserve the music of a Russian text when one can no longer use Russian words? How does one replicate the elaborate structure of a Russian sentence when rebuilding it within the confines of English grammar? Struggling to preserve Bunin’s style, one understands all too well Werner Winter’s statement that “We may compare the work of a translator to that of an artist who is asked to create an exact replica of a marble statue, but who cannot secure any marble.”

(See my similar complaints on the occasion of my attempt to translate his Книга [Book] back in 2009.)
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I happened on the extremely obscure word badelaire, which the OED defines as “A short cutting sword or dagger with a broad, slightly curving blade” (with cites from 1693 to 1980: “I heard the ring of steel on stone, as if someone had struck one of the grave markers with a badelaire,” G. Wolfe, Shadow of Torturer i. 12), and on checking the etymology found:

< French badelaire, baudelaire (1300 in Old French; now only in heraldry), of uncertain origin. Compare baselard n. and discussion at that entry.

So of course I compared baselard and found:

Now historical.

A type of long dagger or short sword with a hilt shaped like a capital H on its side (becoming more like a capital I over time), usually worn at the girdle by civilians.
The baselard was particularly popular in the 14th and 15th centuries in north and northwest Europe.

c1390 Now is non worþ a fart, But he bere a baselart I-honget bi his syde. in C. Horstmann, Minor Poems of Vernon Manuscript (1892) i. 336 (Middle English Dictionary)
…
2003 ‘Well, I have my dagger,’ Ulric said, patting his belt. Juliana saw a flash as if an old baselard hung there, but then it disappeared. E. Holly, Hunting Midnight 41

And the etymology was satisfyingly chatty:

Probably < post-classical Latin basalardus, baselardus, basilardus, bazalardus (from c1349 in British sources) and its probable etymon Anglo-Norman baslard, baslarde, baselard, baselarde, basillard (1388 or earlier: see below) and Middle French basalart (1388), of unknown origin (compare -ard suffix); a derivation ultimately < the place name Basel in Switzerland is perhaps possible (see C. Blair in Jrnl. Arms & Armour Soc. vol. 11 (1983–5) 193–206); it is uncertain whether there is any connection with post-classical Latin baselardus base coin (see baseling n.¹). The relationship with Middle French badelaire, badelare, baselaire type of short sword (14th cent.) is also uncertain; for borrowing of this word into Older Scots see Dict. Older Sc. Tongue at Baslar(e, Baislar n.; it was probably also borrowed into Middle Low German as bēseler, bāseler.

There’s a discussion, with an illustration, at The Gentleman’s Magazine: Or, Monthly Intelligencer of July 1858, pp. 558ff; while I probably wouldn’t have the chutzpah to write “as if someone had struck one of the grave markers with a badelaire” myself, I’m glad Gene Wolfe did.

Francis Gooding’s LRB review (archived) of Wild Thought: A New Translation of ‘La Pensée sauvage’ by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt, is full of good stuff and gives me a better understanding of Lévi-Strauss than I have heretofore had; I’ll quote some passages of Hattic interest:

That word sauvage has been the cause of a lot of trouble when it comes to translating Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological masterwork. The first English translators went for ‘savage’, giving the book a real facepalm of a title: The Savage Mind. The original French has the primary sense of wild or untamed thought, but it also plays on the name of the flower – la pensée, pansy – whose image appeared on the cover. The connection was also made through the epigraph from Hamlet that Lévi-Strauss placed in a later edition: Ophelia’s ‘and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’ Both pun and quotation were gentle invocations of the book’s main theme: for Lévi-Strauss, human thought in all its complexity is as natural a thing as a wild flower, and La Pensée sauvage tried to show how its garden grows.

The play on words doesn’t carry into English (this new translation has a bouquet of pansies on the cover in lieu), but calling it The Savage Mind butchered the primary sense too, suggesting the brutal and witless natives of the colonial imagination – a reversal of the book’s intention. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt generously suggest that the choice of ‘savage’ might have been an ironic reference to the anthropological vocabulary of an earlier generation, whose theories Lévi-Strauss had set himself to overturn. Maybe, but if so it didn’t come off, and in any case it was only the most obvious symptom of a deeper malaise. ‘“Wild thought” and not “the thought of wild men”,’ Lévi-Strauss explained, to no avail. The new title is much better.

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I was having a nostalgic look through the blog of the late lamented Ray Girvan, a valued contributor to the Hattery back in the day, when I hit on this post about an obscure but apparently real expression:

I remember from childhood a cowboy comic where an Indian character shouted “Onhey!” as he attacked. If I ever recalled it, I just assumed it was made up. To my surprise, it turns out to be authentic (or at least sourceable to period accounts). It turns up in a number of accounts of the Battle of Little Big Horn, as in that reportedly told by White Bull to Stanley Vestal:

White Bull said, “I saw a mounted soldier waver in his saddle. I quirted my pony and raced up to strike him and count the first coup on this enemy. Before I could reach him, he fell dying from his saddle. I reined up my pony, jumped down and struck the body with my quirt. I yelled, ‘Onhey! I have overcome this one.’ I took the man’s revolver and cartridge belt.

He gives another example of use and continues:

It all sounds plausible enough for closure for the moment, though both of these sources come via Stanley Vestal; it’d be nice to see independent confirmation. I don’t know what language it would be; “Sioux” covers three main languages (Lakota, Western Dakota and Easten Dakota) with multiple dialects.

So I thought I’d bring it here and ask if anyone knows anything about it; I’m sure Ray’s shade would appreciate answers.

I got an e-mail from rozele alerting me to Zora Neale Hurston’s nine-page typescript titled “Harlem Slanguage,” available online at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library site; rozele says:

as you might expect, it’s much more than a simple lexicon – there are idioms, proverbs, usage notes, illustrative citations from songs and folklore, and a full-on narrative. plus, as you’d expect, it’s funny as hell.

sadly, it’s not dated, and i don’t know my hurstonania well enough to match the address she gives to a year (but it would definitely be possible).

there are at least a few items that’ve been of interest to the hattery, including “29. GUT-BUCKET, low dive, type of music or expression from same”, which is a professional folklorist’s vote for the place coming first in the semantic development.

An item that struck my eye was this, on p. 3:

JOOKING, playing the piano, guitar, or any musical instrument in the manner of the Jooks. (pronounced like “took”) (2) dancing and “schronching” in the manner. A player may be “getting low-down” at the piano and his listeners may yell out in admiration, “Jook it, papa! Jook!”

I was surprised at the “pronounced like ‘took,'” since I would have guessed it would have a long u (as in juke joint), but no, the OED has an entry for it (from 2008):
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I wish Alex Foreman were blogging rather than casting his seeds on the stony soil of Facebook, but I will rescue a couple of thought-provoking recent posts from there:

1) You can see phonemic vowel length disappearing in real time over the course of the 20th century in Korean. It’s really well documented. It’s fascinating, and suggests a lot about what analogous processes in languages like Latin or Greek must have looked like. The loss of the length-system is preceded by a period of length instability, during which length is strongly subject to frequency effects and analogy, and all kinds of other interesting stuff happens. Speakers may retain the ability to produce length contrasts consciously for at least a generation after they stop producing them under normal conditions.
Like other sound changes, it did not happen all at once.

2) My favorite example of how versification does not simply flow inexorably from the aurally perceptible, innate rhythmic properties of language is Hindi vs. Urdu.
Urdu and Hindi are, phonologically, basically the same language, and yet their versification systems are really quite different. Hindi meters are basically moraic, whereas Urdu versification draws on Persian metrics and so is much less so.
The result is that Urdu speakers have a hard time sensing the rhythm of a Hindi poem, or figuring out how to scan its lines.
To the “Urdu ear” unaccustomed to Hindi poetry, the verses are often bizarrely long, and the syllable pattern can feel alarmingly erratic. The Urdu listener must get the “feel” of it, learn to hear all over again. Even though the phonology is identical.
It is of course possible to use Hindi meters in Urdu and vice versa. Experimenters have done so. But the difference in rhythmic sensibility is real and stark.

(I have quoted the entirety of each post, so in case they are private on FB you aren’t missing anything.)

I had been looking forward to Marina Stepnova’s 2020 novel Сад [The orchard] (the word сад can mean either ‘garden’ or ‘orchard,’ but since this one is full of apple trees I have preferred the latter), because it’s set in Russia in the late 19th century and I am especially interested in that period these days; now that I’ve finished it, I have mixed feelings, which (as usual) I will try to disentangle here. In brief, I started out enchanted and ended up disenchanted; my discussion will (as usual) include spoilers.

There are five chapters, whose titles translate to Mother, Father, Daughter, Brother, and Son; the first, which makes up almost a quarter of the book, is to my mind far and away the best. It focuses on a rich aristocratic woman, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Boryatinskaya (née von Stenbok), in her early forties, who is leading a pleasant life with her older husband Vladimir, a military man — their two children, one of each sex, are grown and living their own lives. They live in Petersburg but are visiting their recently acquired (third) estate near Voronezh, called Anna, when the novel opens; the first line is “Что за прелесть эта Наташа!” [What a delight this Natasha is!], and it turns out Nadezhda is reading the hot-off-the-presses novel by Count Tolstoy, War and Peace — it is 1869. Her husband makes gruff but loving fun of her addiction to reading (which she does in French, German, and “even Russian”; all of their estates are chock full of books). After describing the mute, hopeless passion of the “boring German youth” hired to catalogue her library (he moons over a pair of pink ball slippers he finds in a closet, unaware that they have never been worn by his employer but belong to one of her nieces), Stepnova has the one-sentence paragraph:

Россия, Лета, Лорелея.
[Russia, Lethe, Lorelei.]

Which is the last line of Mandelstam’s 1917 poem Декабрист [The Decembrist]; reading it, I found myself falling for the book as hopelessly as the poor pimply German fell for his boss.
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The Internet Surname Database says of the surname Threadgold:

This unusual and interesting name is of early medieval English origin, and derives from an occupational nickname for an embroiderer, specifically one who embroidered fine clothes with gold thread. The name derives from the Middle English “thred(en)”, to thread, from the Olde English pre 7th Century “thraed”, thread, with “gold”, gold. Occupational surnames were originally acquired by those who were employed in that specific occupation, but later became hereditary. The development of the surname include Walterus Tredegold (1273, Kent), Robert Dredegold (1328, Somerset), Edmund Thredgall (1674, Suffolk), Daniel Thredkill (ibid.), and John Thridgale (1681, Suffolk). The modern surname has forms ranging from Threadgold, Threadgould, Threadgill and Threadgall to Threadkell, Tridgould and Tre(a)dgold.

And thus we learn that one of my favorite Byzantine historians, Warren Treadgold, and one of my favorite jazz musicians, Henry Threadgill, have what is originally the same family name.