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I somehow missed wood s lot yesterday, and now I find that he consecrated the day in large measure to one of my favorite modernist poets, Blaise Cendrars (self-chosen name; he was born Frédéric-Louis Sauser). He wrote quite a bit, but the poem you need to know (if you don’t already) is Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (“Trans-Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne from France”), which reflects his trip across Russia during the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) and the Russian Revolution of 1905; a full translation by Ekaterina Likhtik is online here, beginning:

I was in my adolescence at the time
Scarcely sixteen and already I no longer remembered my childhood

I was 16,000 leagues from my birthplace
I was in Moscow, in the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroad stations
And they weren’t enough for me, the seven railroad stations and the thousand and three towers
For my adolescence was so blazing and so mad
That my heart burned in turns as the temple of Epheseus, or as Red Square in Moscow
When the sun sinks.
And my eyes shone upon the ancient routes
And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn’t know how to go all the way to the end.

The Kremlin was like an immense Tatar cake
Crusted with gold,
With great almonds of cathedrals all done in white
And the honeyed gold of the bells…

An old monk was reading to me the legend of Novgorod
I was thirsty
And I was deciphering cuneiform characters
Then, suddenly, the pigeons of the Holy Spirit soared above the square…

The original French is here, and you can see an image of the exceedingly rare first edition (multicolored, printed on a single sheet of paper that unfolded is two meters long) here. The whole last century is contained therein. All aboard!

I had known that the complicated etymology of the word “ginger” took it back to the Indian subcontinent; it’s from Middle English gingivere, borrowed (like Old English gingifer, which may itself be a source of the Middle English word) from Old French gingivre, which is from Medieval Latin gingiber, from Latin zingiberi, from Greek zingiberis, from a Middle Indic form (my Ayto Dictionary of Word Origins says “Prakrit singabera“) akin to Pali singiveram, which has been said to come from Sanskrit s’rngaveram, a compound of s’rngam ‘horn’ + vera- ‘body’ (supposedly applied to ginger because of the shape of the root). But I learn from the American Heritage Dictionary that the Middle Indic form is “from Dravidian : akin to Tamil iñci, ginger (of southeast Asian origin) + Tamil ver, root.” Now, although I Am Not a Dravidianist, I happen to know that the South Dravidian languages, including Tamil, lost Proto-Dravidian *c- (e.g. il ‘not be’ from *cil-, iy- ‘give’ from *ciy-, aRu ‘six’ from *caRu), so I wonder if the protoform was *cinci-, which would account for the initial s- in the Middle Indic form. In any event, I am pleased to see a Dravidian etymology for an English word. Nancy, this one’s for you!

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Anyone with a flair for the lyric might mosey on over to Open Brackets and try their hand at Englishing this little will-o’-the-wisp by Victor Hugo:

On doute
La nuit …
J’écoute:
Tout fuit,
Tout passe;
L’espace
Efface
Le bruit.

My attempt is in the comment section there, as are a growing number of others. What have you got to lose?

Payvand means ‘joining, link, connection’ in Farsi; it is also the name of an excellent website that promotes the Persian internet. It has news, stichomancy (or Sortes Hafezianae if you prefer; in Farsi it’s faal-e Haafez), HTML help, a web directory, and (closest to my heart) a page of books, a couple of which I have and most of which I want to read. One that immediately caught my eye is The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric, a collection of essays edited by Kamran Talattof et al; Nizami is one of the great figures of Persian literature. From an online bio:

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I could have sworn this moldy hipsterism was a Beat saying, dating back certainly no earlier than the late ’40s, but it turns out it was used as the title of a song in Pal Joey in 1940, meaning it dates back at least to the ’30s. Now I’m wondering how far back it goes, and in what social circle it was coined. Anybody know?

Alisa, at Alisa in Wonderland, says in this entry: “This blog is in Yiddish, and it provides an extesive linkage to other sites in and on Yiddish, as well as to some other blogs in Yiddish. I hope it can disprove the common wisdom that this is a dying language.” Mind you, I can’t see it, any more than I could the Vedic site in the previous entry; I guess this is my day for taking things on faith. But I like the idea of Yiddish blogs so much I had to tell the world about them. (Now, are there any Ladino blogs?)

If you’ve ever had a yen to hear the Vedas chanted, there are eighteen hours of it available at vedamu.org, not to mention Sanskrit texts of the Vedas with commentary by Sayanacharya. I’m taking this on faith because I can’t actually access the site at the moment, but here‘s a story about it, and it’s recommended by Nancy at under the fire star [25.6.03], so my faith is strong.

That’s my condition this week; I have no idea where it came from, and it turns out we don’t know where the word comes from either (OED: “Relationship to other Teutonic roots is uncertain, and no outside cognates have been traced”). At any rate, I have not the mental energy to come up with a clever and enlightening entry, so here’s one of my favorite short Charles Reznikoff poems (and I must immediately qualify this by saying that most Reznikoff poems are quite long):

TE DEUM

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.
Not for victory
but for the day’s work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

(From Inscriptions 1944 -1956.)

Diglossia is a situation in which one form of a language (the H variety) is used for formal purposes (writing, speeches, &c.) and another (L) is used for conversation (and is rarely if ever written down); a typical example is Arabic in those countries where a dialect of it is the vernacular. The classic article is by Charles Ferguson (1959), but much work has been done since, and Nancy Gandhi has turned up a useful summary by Harold F. Schiffman. A couple of points:

Difference between Diglossia and Standard-with-dialects. In diglossia, no-one speaks the H-variety as a mother tongue, only the L-variety. In the Standard-with-dialects situation, some speakers speak H as a mother tongue, while others speak L-varieties as a mother tongue and acquire H as a second system.

What engenders diglossia and under what conditions.

(a) Existence of an ancient or prestigious literature, composed in the H-variety, which the linguistic culture wishes to preserve as such.
(b) Literacy is usually a condition, but is usually restricted to a small elite. When conditions require universal literacy in H, pedagogical problems ensue.
(c) Diglossias do not spring up overnight; they take time to develop
These three factors, perhaps linked with religion, make diglossia extremely stable in Arabic and other linguistic cultures such as South Asia.

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In the nature
of flesh, these clown gods
are words, blown
in the winters, thou
windows, lacking
sun.
      In the nature,
of ideas, in the nature of
words, these
clown gods are
winter. Are blown
thru our windows.
           The flesh
& bone
of the season. Each
dead thing
hustled
across the pavement. Each
dead word
drowned
in a winter wind. Are
in the nature
of flesh. These
liars, clown
gods
–Amiri Baraka (from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note)

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