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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.

I must have been introduced to the Parable of the Tares in Sunday School (when I was a wee lad and had such experiences imposed on me); my vague memory jibes with Wikipedia’s summary: “The parable relates how servants eager to pull up weeds were warned that in so doing they would root out the wheat as well and were told to let both grow together until the harvest.” But that’s not actually what’s going on, as I learned from this Facebook post by Rebecca Stanton, a Russianist who lives in New Zealand and sings in a choir:

I’ve always wondered what the reference was for this window at St Mary of the Angels, Wellington, which is toward the back of the church on the Mary chapel side, right where the sopranos can stare at it. Who are these sleeping people? Who is the cartoonishly malicious “baddie” in the middle and what is he holding/throwing? Finally today I found out, when the Gospel reading centered on the parable it illustrates — commonly known as the Parable of the Tares (Mt. 13:24-43), though the translation used at SMotA rendered the latter word as “darnel,” leaving me absolutely none the wiser…..either way, it is apparently a translation of the Greek ζιζάνια, which “is thought to mean darnel (Lolium temulentum), a ryegrass which looks much like wheat in its early stages of growth.”* (Most modern translations render it as “weeds,” which though more immediately understandable to the non-botanists in the congregation, misses the nuance that the “weeds” resemble the actual crop, and the historical context that this sort of thing was apparently enough of a problem that Roman law explicitly forbade sowing darnel in someone else’s wheat field — making this parable a particularly plausible and topical one for its original audience.)

The point, anyway, is that the sleeping people are the farm workers who have just planted a field of wheat, and the mean baddie is sneaking into the field to spoil their work by sowing a whole shitload of darnel — which looks like wheat but is toxic, apparently — and will be impossible to weed out. What a bastard!

(Her footnote is to the Wikipedia article I linked.) What a bastard indeed, and thanks to that lively account, I’m unlikely to forget how the parable works. And of course I had to look up the unfamiliar word darnel ‘Any of several ryegrasses, especially Lolium temulentum’:

[Middle English, of Old North French origin; akin to French dialectal darnelle, from darne, dizzy, dazed (darnel being so called because L. temulentum, a common weed of wheat fields, is often rendered toxic by a fungal infection similar to ergot, and consumption of bread made from flour contaminated with toxic darnel causes dizziness and lethargy), of Germanic origin; akin to -daert in Middle Dutch verdaert, dazed, and -turni in Old High German biturni, dazed, both perhaps akin to Middle Dutch deren, and Old High German tarēn, tarōn, to harm, ultimately of unknown origin.]

Tare ‘Any of several vetches native to Europe; any of several weedy plants that grow in grain fields,’ however, has no etymology beyond “[Middle English.]”

Jonathan Taylor’s TLS review (archived) of Peter Brooks’ Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative makes it sound worth reading; I was particularly taken with this passage:

Better storytelling, then, does not necessarily make the listeners or readers better people. While we cling to the age-old assumption that storytelling might be a good in itself – that stories are “improving”, making people more empathetic and wiser – twenty-first-century storytelling might just make some people richer, others poorer. Storytelling is incredibly powerful, as Simmons claims, but this is an amoral power that can be used for good or ill, for profit or loss, in the name of self-interest or selflessness, conservatism or radicalism: “There is nothing inherently worthy or unworthy about narrative”, Brooks states. “It’s the uses it is put to that count.” Narrative has “no special privilege” and is by no means

immunise[d] … from unethical uses. On the contrary, because it is intended as an act of communication, narrative is subject to all the abuses of language itself. Language was given to man in order to lie, said Machiavelli; and the ability of language to use counterfactuals inhabits narrative as well.

Of course, lying is fundamental to many of our culture’s principal modes of narrative. By definition the novel – our culture’s “dominant form” of storytelling for Brooks – is counterfactual. There is a key difference, though, between a novel’s fiction and a brand’s, politician’s or lawyer’s lie: that is, a novel brings attention to its own fictionality, while the others do not. They have to efface any counterfactuality, pretending to their audiences that their stories are the whole truth and nothing but the truth. By contrast, a reader reads a novel – even a nineteenth-century realist novel – with a sort of double consciousness, somehow both suspending disbelief and being aware that what they are reading is fiction, both immersed in the “novelistic illusion” and standing outside it. Just as a child playing “make-believe” or “let’s pretend” is “capable of holding simultaneously belief in the fiction and awareness of reality”, so an adult reader brings a “willing suspension of disbelief” to the novel “not … from naiveté or stupidity but because that is part of the intellectual and emotional pleasure of reading … Even though you know it to be fiction you need to submit to its simulations of the real”. For Brooks it is precisely this double consciousness on the part of the reader that makes the novel so valuable. It means that novels exist in the playful world of “half-belief”, a “space in which the human mind can deal with reality, speak of it, reshape it imaginatively, ask ‘what if’ questions about it”.

Serious problems arise, Brooks argues, when half belief becomes full belief – when readers lose sight of the fictionality of fiction. “One must use fictions always with the awareness of their fictionality”, he warns. “They are ‘as if’ constructions of reality that we need, that we have to use creatively in order not to die of the chaos of reality – but they are not reality itself.” In Seduced by Story Brooks explores various fields – including psychoanalysis, legal practice and modern political discourse – in which the distinction between narrative and “reality” has been eroded, or even collapsed. He warns us that: “the universe is not our stories about the universe, even if those stories are all we have. Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing”.

Those are important distinctions that are too often lost sight of. (We’ve discussed Dostoevsky’s thoughts about the importance of lies more than once, e.g. here and here.)