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Rara Avis illustrates an entry on the former hierarchy of languages in Finland with this photo of a trilingual street sign, which reminds me of my only visit to Helsinki, back in 1971. At that time nobody in the city seemed to speak English, and I spoke no Finnish or Swedish, so the only common language available was Russian—except that nobody in Finland wanted to speak Russian (except for the aged caretaker of the Russian Orthodox cathedral), so I was effectively cut off from verbal communication. A very strange experience. (When I say I spoke no Finnish, by the way, I exaggerate slightly. I had painstakingly taught myself one Finnish sentence, which still rolls easily off my tongue over 30 years later: Puhutteko englantilainen englantia? Do you speak English? [Thanks for the correction, Dmitri!] Alas, the response to my fluently produced query was invariably a flood of incomprehensible Finnish. Belatedly, it dawned on me that the only useful sentence in that context is “Do you speak English?” In English. Live and learn.)

In an entry today, incidentally, Rara refers to the Academic Bookstore, which is apparently the Foyles of Helsinki; I suspect it’s the huge bookstore where I found all the Russian books I’d been unable to find in Russia itself (these were the days when the only books available in Soviet bookstores were the complete works of Lenin and whatever books had just been published that week—unless they were of any interest, in which case they had vanished within minutes). Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Rara!

Update (Mar. 2021). I’ve gotten spoiled by the Wayback Machine; I feel bitter and resentful that they didn’t capture any Rara Avis links from this incarnation (though they do faithfully preserve the one trial post from a later blog at the same URL). Needless to say, the links in the post are dead. Bah.

From Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems:

Last, he with muscle as big as his voice, the strength of him
in that blizzard
to have pulled the trawl slack from the very bottom and released
his mate from the cod-hook had him out, and almost off,
into the snow. It wasn’t that there was so much sea. It was the cold,
and that white, until over the dory went and the two of them,
one still,
were in. The wild thing was, he made the vessel, three miles, and fetched her,
found that vessel in all that weather, with his fellow dead weight
on him. The sort of eye
which later knew the Peak of Brown’s
as though it were his own garden (as Bowditch brought the Eppie Sawyer
spot to her wharf a Christmas morning)

from Letter 2.

And the self-correction, in Letter 15:

It goes to show you. It was not the “Eppie Sawyer”. It was the ship “Putnam”. It wasn’t Christmas morning, it was Christmas night, after dark. And the violent north-easter, with snow, which we were all raised to believe did show Bowditch such a navigator, was a gale sprung up from W. hit them outside the Bay, and had blown itself out by the 23rd.

On the 25th it was fog Bowditch had to contend with. The wind was NE allright, but there is no mention of snow[…]

    1
He sd, “You go all around the subject.” And I sd, “I didn’t know it was a subject.” He sd, “You twist” and I sd, “I do.” He said other things. And I didn’t say anything.

(Exit Olson, enter Languagehat.) Facts are hard to come by, and we all twist, but it’s refreshing that he took the trouble to straighten it out, no? (Exit, pursued by a postmodernist.)

Anyone who, like me, has been inspired and energized by Shelley’s consistently excellent writing and thinking over at Burningbird should be aware that she’s in danger of losing her forum, her microphone, her virtual voice. Jonathon Delacour has set up a PayPal fund for her; you can click on the button below or go to his site if you want to contribute. Burn on, Shelley!

Update. The campaign has been very successful, and Jonathon has removed the PayPal button and asked others to do likewise. I’d like to join him and Shelley in thanking anyone who contributed to the fund; it’s heartening to see the oft-derided “internet community” act as a community. Kudos all around.

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Jonathon Delacour, at the heart of things, has a brilliant post about a genre of Japanese novel called shishōsetsu, the “I novel,” which uses “the techniques of essay, diary, confession, and other non-fictional forms to present the fiction of a faithfully recorded experience” and is apparently a basic component of the Japanese understanding of what a novel should be. After an analysis of the phenomenon itself, he ties it in to the truth in blogging issue that has been roiling a section of the community. Read it and think.

Go over to Laputan Logic and read today’s clear, illustrated entry (you may have to scroll and/or hit Stop; John’s trying out a stylesheet-based system, and it’s very slow and wonky). A sample:

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The literary journal Two Lines has been around since 1994, but I only recently discovered it (at the Fifteenth Annual Small Press Book Fair, March 29 and March 30, here in NYC). Each issue is organized around a theme (the three most recent are “Crossings,” “Cells,” “Ghosts”), and they present everything bilingually—completely in the case of poetry, usually only the first page in the original for prose. You can see the complete list of issues here, and clicking on the Contents link will tell you what’s in each (here, for example, is the 2002 issue); most of the actual content is not online, but it’s a venture worth shelling out to support. And if the theme of the next issue appeals to you, you might want to submit something; it’s too late for this year’s “Parties” issue, but I imagine they’ll have a theme for 2004 up soon.

In my perusal of the OED, I have run across the most extreme example I’ve seen of disparity between the weight of scholarly apparatus brought to bear on a word and the fugitive nature of the word itself, which occurs once in the 15th-century morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Ordinarily, I’d urge people to start putting the word back into use, to justify the labors of the OED’s etymologists, but since the word is an abusive term for a woman, that won’t do. At any rate, here’s the entry (warning: the following contains both misogynistic language and rank etymological speculation):

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Although entirely irrelegious myself, I often buy a bible or portion thereof in the languages I study, since the story and much of the wording is familiar, making it an easy read (and of course English translations are readily available if I need a trot). Thanks to Avva, I now have a fantastic resource: online audio bibles in Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Polish, Urdu, Hindi, Slovak, and Tagalog, and for lagniappe the Psalms in Arabic! They are mp3 files, broken into chunks for easy downloading; I just spent twenty minutes listening to the first few chapters of Shmot (Exodus) while following along in the New English Bible, and I was astonished at how different the experience was from comparing printed versions. I didn’t have to deal with the alphabet, vowel points, &c., I just let the language surround me, depending on the words I knew to serve as mileposts and keep me oriented. And to hear the Lord say to Moses the exact same phrase I hear from Israelis every day on the streets of New York (Ma zeh? ‘What’s that?’) was not only a kick, it gave me a real feel for the continuity of the Hebrew language. Thanks, Avva!

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If you’re engaged in an internet Easter egg hunt, you need look no further. Thanks to the endlessly creative taz, you are looking at the gorgeous Languagehat Egg. Enjoy!

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wood s lot celebrates the 45th anniversary of Ezra Pound’s release from confinement (“A US Federal Court decides since Ezra Pound is incurably, permanently insane, he can no longer be held for treason & can be set free”) by posting one of my favorite Pound poems, “The Return” (“See, they return; ah, see the tentative/ Movements, and the slow feet…”); it’s at the top of today’s entry [scroll down to 04.18.2003], just below the photo. Go, read it, and wonder at the perfect match of sound and sense, rhythm and riddle. Myself, I am going to post another of my favorites, “The Spring,” which is seasonally appropriate and does not seem to exist on the internet yet:

The Spring

ἦρι μὲν αἵ τε Κυδώνιαι—Ibycus

Cydonian spring with her attendant train,
Maelids and water-girls,
Stepping beneath a boisterous wind from Thrace,
Throughout this sylvan place
Spreads the bright tips,
And every vine-stock is
Clad in new brilliancies.
                And wild desire
Falls like black lightning.
O bewildered heart,
Though every branch have back what last year lost,
She, who moved here amid the cyclamen,
Moves only now a clinging tenuous ghost.

The epigraph (êri men hai te kydôniai ‘in the spring the Cydonian’) is from a famous poem by the Greek poet Ibycus (6th c. BC), and Pound’s poem begins as a loose translation but soon veers off into its own region of anguished longing, “though every branch have back what last year lost” a perfect line in a tradition going back through Landor to the Greek Anthology.

A couple of details. “Maelid” is not a word, but Pound liked it enough to use it again in Canto III (“Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,/ And from the apple, maelid”); he obviously derived it from Ibycus’s unusual word for ‘apple-tree,’ mêlis (for normal Greek mêlea), which is used in the second line of this poem (“Cydonian apples” was the Greek term for quinces, and the word “quince,” originally the plural of earlier “qu(o)yn,” is derived, via Middle French and Latin, from Greek kydônios ‘Cydonian’). And Cydonian means ‘from Cydonia,’ Cydonia being the ancient name for a town on the northwest coast of Crete that is now called Khaniá, where I spent several idly delighted days fifteen years ago. So let us welcome spring with Pound and his Cydonian maelids.