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Margaret Marks, of the excellent legal translation blog Transblawg, has posted an appeal on behalf of Peter Griffin‘s bilingual edition of the Catalan novel Tocats pel foc (Touched by Fire) by Manuel de Pedrolo. Apparently the novel has received practically no advertising, and the remaining 500 or so copies may be pulped unless it starts selling. It’s a little pricey ($29.95), but if you know anyone interested in Catalan literature and/or bilingual editions you’d be doing a mitzvah to tell them about it.

While I’m sending you to Transblawg, let me also mention the post Bavarian dialect dying out / Das https://transblawg.co.uk/2003/07/22/bavarian-dialect-dying-out-das-bairische-stirbt-aus/, which discusses the decay of German regional dialects:

In the 1970s, the use of dialect was discouraged in schools because it was believed to hinder education. Now it appears that speaking dialect and writing standard German makes people express themselves more flexibly and makes it easier for them to learn a foreign language.

Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
Have the staff without the banner.
Like a fire in a dry thicket
Rising within women’s eyes
Is the love men must return.
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
What a marvel to be wise,
To love never in this manner!
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still,
Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible, dissembling
Music in the granite hill.

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Marjorie Perloff devotes a long essay in Jacket 14 to teasing out the implications of what is on its face a strange statement of Wittgenstein’s:

Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten. Daraus muß sich, scheint mir, ergeben, wie weit mein Denken der Gegenwart, Zukunft, oder der Vergangenheit angehört. Denn ich habe mich damit auch als einen bekannt, der nicht ganz kann, was er zu können wünscht.

I think I summed up my position on philosophy when I said that philosophy really should be written only as a form of poetry. From this it should be clear to what extent my thinking belongs to the present, the future, or the past. For with this assertion, I have also revealed myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to do.

–Culture and Value, 1933-34

(Another analysis of this passage occurs in the final section, “The End of Philosophy,” of a Doro Franck essay on style; Franck translates the last sentence more accurately as “For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do [my emphasis].”) Perloff begins with a fascinating discussion of the problems involved in translating a line of Rilke:

We usually think of the ‘poetic’ as that which cannot fully translate, that which is uniquely embedded in its particular language. The poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke is a case in point. The opening line of the Duino Elegies —

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus den Engel Ordnungen? —

has been translated into English literally dozens of times, but, as William Gass points out in his recent Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, none of the translations seem satisfactory. Here are a few examples:

J. B. Leishman (1930) —
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the
angelic orders?

A. J. Poulin (1977) —
And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?

Stephen Cohn (1989) —
Who, if I cried out, would hear me — among the ranked Angels?

Gass is very critical of these, but his own is, to my ear, no better:
Who if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?

The difficulty, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that English syntax does not allow for the dramatic suspension of Wer, wenn ich schriee… and that the noun phrase Engel Ordnungen, which in German puts the stress, both phonically and semantically, on the angels themselves rather than their orders or hierarchies or dominions, defies effective translation. Moreover, Rilke’s line contains the crucial and heavily stressed word denn (literally ‘then’), which here has the force of ‘Well, then’ or, in contemporary idiom, ‘So,’ as in ‘So, who would hear me if I cried out…?’ But the translators cited above seem not to know what to do with denn and hence lose the immediacy of the question. Then, too, denn rhymes with wenn as well as the first two syllables of den Engel, creating a dense sonic network inevitably lost in translation.

She follows this with a discussion of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s translation of William Carlos Williams’s “Between Walls”; only then does she begin considering Wittgenstein. She finishes with two highly unliteral versions of the Rilke poem, the second of which begins: “I hate this place. If I were to throw a fit, who/ among the seven thousand starlets in Hollywood/ would give a flying fuck?” Much food for thought throughout.

Update (Aug. 2025). In freshening the links, I discover that Perloff died last year. זכונה לבֿרכה.

The Eudaemonist has a downright TDW-like investigation of the variant spelling “flippertigibbet” (found by her first in the “rotten poetaster” Joyce Kilmer). And while you’re visiting, don’t miss her commentary on Seth Lerer’s Error and the Academic Self (downright Housman-like in its irritable insistence on accuracy) and her succinct demolition of an idiot reviewer (“Uh, Mr. Reviewer, sir? Socrates drinking the poison? Uh, that was submission to the mob…”).

Via Avva (who adds a Russian translation), this comparison (at Mike Snider’s Formal Blog) of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” (“La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers…”) with English versions by Bly, Howard, and Wilbur. I must say I’m disappointed in Richard Wilbur, who’s one of my favorite formalist poets but who I think does a terrible job here (“fresh as a child’s caress”??).

Today I went to Brighton Beach for the first time in months to pick up a copy of Dmitrii Bykov’s new novel Orfografiya (publisher’s page, in Russian). As soon as I read the review by Nikita Eliseev, I knew I had to have it; not only is it a historical novel about a period I’m fascinated by (the Russian Revolution and civil war), it focuses on the orthographic reform of 1918! (In the alternative history of the novel, the Bolsheviks abolish orthography rather than reforming it.) Indeed, the main character’s name is Yat’, the name of a prerevolutionary letter that was eliminated by the reform (and replaced by e). Other main characters are writers of the time, like Gorkii and Khodasevich. OK, it’s almost 700 pages long and the author calls it an “opera in three acts,” which in other circumstances would put me off, but this I can’t resist.

Ray’s comment on this post led me to this entry at snarkout, which in turn led me to first the Scél Mucci Mic Dathó (Story of Mac Dathó’s Pig), which was our main text in Old Irish class many years ago, and then the entire Táin Bó Cúalnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley), both of them in parallel Irish and English. The stories are great, and for anyone interested in the Irish language having the bilingual edition online is absolutely wonderful.

From Dale Keiger I have learned simultaneously of Jacobsen‘s existence and her passing. He quotes a very nice poem called “The Wind in the Sunporch”; here’s the only other work of hers I’ve been able to find online (from the Baltimore section of Poetry in Motion):

from Of Pairs

The mockingbirds, that pair, arrive,
one, and the other; glossily perch,
respond, respond, branch to branch.
One stops, and flies. The other flies.
Arrives, dips, in a blur of wings,
lights, is joined. Sings. Sings.

Actually, there are birds galore:
bowlegged blackbirds brassy as crows;
elegant ibises with inelegant cows;
hummingbirds’ stutter on air;
tilted over the sea, a man-of-war
in a long arc without a feather’s stir. […]

I’d say she deserves further investigation.

I was never a great fan of Shapiro‎’s, but today I ran across a wonderful couplet from his poem “Hospital”:

Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews
And actresses whose legs were always news.

For that, I’ll forgive a substantial quantity of polemical ranting.

Incidentally, I ran across it in the epigraph to this novel; I haven’t read Epstein, but I have to like anybody who had the wit to pick up that phrase, which makes for an unforgettable title.

Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufry [July 13] comes this glossary of blogging terms in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Galician, and German; Jez solicits your suggestions for additions and improvements. On the French front, La grande rousse not only links to Lexicoblogue, she has her own extensive (and, of course, fastidiously selected) list (en français, bien entendu). And speaking of French, this Globe and Mail story suggests the French are turning to Quebec for internet terminology, which should please La rousse (to be distinguished from Larousse):

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