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Jack Morava sent me a clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language; it was on Instagram, and looking around for a more accessible place to send people, I found Jordan M. Poss’s blog post, which has not only the clip (it turns out to be from a 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line”) but a partial transcript and Poss’s thoughts on it all. The transcript starts:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

The whole thing is transcribed, if in a rebarbative format, here. Of course it’s easy to poke holes in his linguistic analysis, but he’s not a linguist, he’s a writer talking enthusiastically about a language he loves, and I enjoy it — not to mention that it’s great to hear him speak. (I met him back in 1969, but my memory is not like Funes’s.) Thanks, Jack!

Katherine J. Igoe writes about this week’s special issue of the New York Times Book Review (archived):

The art of translation was on Gregory Cowles’s mind. It was the beginning of 2023, and Mr. Cowles, a senior editor on The New York Times Book Review, noticed the section was assigning more reviews of translated books than usual. […] He approached Juliana Barbassa, the deputy editor for news and features on the Books desk. “There’s this whole question: What is translated? Who decides that? Are we getting a full picture of what’s out there?” Mr. Cowles said.

Both editors saw the potential for a project that would bring attention to the craft in a new way. The first part of their monthslong effort appears as a special issue of The New York Times Book Review this weekend. In it, readers get a glimpse of the world of literary translation.

“For a very long time, translators were very much secondary characters. Their names weren’t on the cover, there was little recognition, they had few rights over the work. The pay was, and remains, not great,” Ms. Barbassa said.

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Language Documentation and Description (LDD) “is an international journal that publishes peer-reviewed research on language documentation, language description, and language support, broadly conceived”; at a Nick Nicholas Facebook post, Peter Austin commented:

There’s a bunch of interesting papers in this issue of LDD about the social lives of linguistic materials and the need to study the various “versions” of published “final” documents.

It does indeed look interesting, with titles such as “Philology in the folklore archive: Interpreting past documentation of the Kraasna dialect of Estonian” (Tobias Weber) and “Legacy materials and cultural facework: Obscenity and bad words in Siouan language documentation” (Saul Schwartz).

A public service notice: Globus Books is having a two-day online sale (20% off on orders of $40+) on July 3rd and 4th. If you want to buy some Russian books, now’s a good time.

And a personal note: today is my birthday, and I’ve already gotten some presents of Hattic interest, notably (from my generous wife) Keys to the “Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, by Yuri Leving, which I’m extremely excited about — it’s my favorite Nabokov novel, which means it’s one of my favorite novels, period. On the sf front, I got This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which got great reviews, and on the cop-show front, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, by Jonathan Abrams, which comes at the perfect time, since I just finished the fifth and final season of The Wire, which I continue to think of as the best TV show in existence. (Some people think the last season is the best, others the worst; I can understand both points of view, because the development of the earlier story arcs and characters was fantastic, whereas the newspaper stuff was disappointing by comparison to the general excellence of the show: dogged reporter Alma and honest, professional editor Gus vs. bad editors whose names I don’t even remember, which shows you how cardboard they are.) Tonight I’ll be dining on the traditional chicken curry, with lemon meringue pie for dessert. My wife knows how to keep me purring contentedly.

Helen DeWitt writes me as follows:

A reader, Scott Prater, bought me some coffees and wrote me a nice email about my latest book, and he also added the following:

I offer you a linguistic curiosity: the Valencian/Spanish expression, “me la bufa la gamba”. It’s only used in the Valencian region of Spain (the verb “bufar” is Spanish, but it has some additional connotations in Valencian), and its provenance seems to be murky, as is its literal meaning and grammatical construction. It means “I couldn’t care less”, a close relative to the more widespread Spanish “me importa un comino”; one could imagine Rhett Butler, at the end of Gone With the Wind, telling Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, me la bufa la gamba”.

I can’t figure out the role of “la gamba” in the expression, nor what the direct object “la” refers to in “me la bufa”. Does “la” refer to “la gamba”, in which case, who is doing the bufa-ing? Or is “la gamba” the subject of the sentence, and the “la” direct object refers to some (possibly pornographic) entity off-screen, one closely linked to “me”, the indirect object? And why a gamba? I’ve asked my Spanish linguist friends, it makes for great party conversation, but no one has been able to shed any light on either the etymology or the syntax of the expression.

I thought the knowledgeable readers of languagehat might have some ideas (Scott has agreed to my passing this on to you).

So: thoughts?

Fond as I am of Georges Perec (whose name, despite what many believe, does not have an accent aigu, even though it is pronounced as if it had one, [peʁɛk] — Perec is the Polish spelling of the name usually anglicized as Peretz, and once the family moved to France it got Frenchified in pronunciation), I was unaware of his “grand palindrome” of 1,247 words (5,566 letters), which you can read here (note once again that his name does not have an accent aigu, even though it is pronounced as if it had one). I suppose someone could translate the whole thing, but apparently only the beginning and end have been rendered into English, by David Bellos (his biographer) and Harry Mathews (his friend and fellow Oulipian), as quoted in this 2011 blog post by Stephen Saperstein Frug. The former begins:

Trace the uneven palindrome. Snow. A trifle, says Hercules. Unadorned repentance, this piece born [of] Perec. [If] the bow of reading is too heavy, read back-to-front.

The latter (and better):

Trace the unequal palindrome. Snow. A trifle, Hercules would say. Rough penitence, this writing born as Perec. The read arch is too heavy: read vice-versa….

For the renditions of the ending, as well as some jovial discussion, follow the link to Frug’s post. Thanks, David!

Erik at Sententiae Antiquae takes down the Aeneid:

The Aeneid had the supreme good fortune to become immediately canonical, assigned in schools as the equivalent of a “modern classic” in those early imperial days. Well, what else were kids going to study? Livius Andronicus? Ennius? Cicero’s de Consulatu suo? The Aeneid is a marked aesthetic improvement over all of these, but one must also bear in mind that Augustus’ imprimatur must have counted for something. One would not be surprised to find that any monarch’s pet poetic project had received substantial attention, especially when free and outspoken critical judgment became a dangerous luxury. It’s hard to overlook the fact that the Aeneid’s ringing endorsement of Roman empire and the (prophetically foreshadowed) personal lineage/divine right of the Julio-Claudians had something to do with its inclusion in the school curriculum at such an early date.

Why do we have all of Vergil but just a few insignificant scraps of Cornelius Gallus? Their relations to power may have some small part in this. Naturally, they objection arises: what about Ovid? Was he not on the outs? I’d venture to suggest that his survival in the face not only of imperial hostility but also of his manifest unsuitability to Christian sentiment is a testament to his tremendous aesthetic and literary merits.

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Simeon Tegel has a good Washington Post story (archived) about a linguist and his informant:

It’s a ritual that Roberto Zariquiey and Nelita Campos have engaged in for more than a decade. The odd couple — Zariquiey, a university linguist conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard; Campos, the last lucid speaker of her Indigenous language — sit at the roughhewn kitchen table of her raised cabin, overlooking a muddy stream in the village of Callería, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

“You complain a lot,” Zariquiey teases Campos.

“No, you’re the one that never stops complaining,” cracks back Campos, barefoot, with long jet-black hair that defies her 75 or so years.

Zariquiey, a 44-year-old professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, is slowly extracting the Iskonawa language from Campos. He fires off questions, listens attentively to the answers and meticulously writes down all the details Campos can share: The vocabulary, grammar and syntax of one of the world’s most endangered languages. Throughout, the pair, who have built an unlikely mother-son relationship, joke incessantly.

Over time, Campos, who communicates with Zariquiey in both Iskonawa and Spanish, has managed to share much of this frequently onomatopoeic tongue from the Panoan family of languages of the Western Amazon. It’s heavy with polysemy — words with multiple meanings — and notable for allowing users to stack multiple verbs one atop the other. […]

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We’ve discussed various foreign-flavored varieties of English over the years, but never the Thai-based version known as Tinglish; in fact, I never thought of such a thing, even though I lived in Thailand for several years and must have heard a lot of it (this was long before linguistics swam into my ken, of course). Now you can hear a few samples, along with a useful pointer about how a flavored variety can help you get the hang of the foreign original, in this TikTok video, though the final example — “toilet” for what in my native dialect we call “toilet” — was a surprise. (Thanks, Ariel!)

This must be “impenetrable French philosophical vocabulary” week here at the Hattery, because I’ve got another one (cf. Bergson’s élan vital). I’m finally reading the copy of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory I got a couple of years ago, and I ran into the sentence “Some things leaped into my memory ticketless, like a kid on a streetcar, usually a legend or a curiosity, the narrative equivalent of Barthes’s punctum” [Что-то заскакивало в память само, на правах трамвайного зайца, как правило, это была байка или курьез — словесный эквивалент бартовского punctum’a]. I remembered having come across this mysterious punctum before, and I decided to get to the bottom of it. Some googling turned up the useful Roland Barthes: studium and punctum, which says:

Barthes’ Camera Lucida, first published in 1980, assumes that the automaticity of the camera distinguishes photography from traditional media and has significant implications for how we experience photographs. To address the apparently uncoded level of photographs, which troubles the semiological approach Barthes himself adopted in the early 1960s, Camera Lucida advances a theory of photographic meaning that makes a distinction between the studium and the punctum and highlights the punctum as photography-specific.

The studium indicates historical, social or cultural meanings extracted via semiotic analysis. […] The punctum points to those features of a photograph that seem to produce or convey a meaning without invoking any recognizable symbolic system. This kind of meaning is unique to the response of the individual viewer of the image. The punctum punctuates the studium and as a result pierces its viewer. To allow the punctum effect, the viewer must repudiate all knowledge. Barthes insists that the punctum is not simply the sum of desires projected into the photograph. Instead, it arises from details that are unintended or uncontrolled by the photographer. Photography can be distinguished from painting or drawing in that its apparatus visualizes the world automatically rather than being wholly informed by the interventions of the photographer. The theory of the punctum speaks the indexical nature of the photographic medium. It also accounts for the importance of emotion and subjectivity in interacting with photographs. […]

It should be noted that presenting examples of punctum is an impossible mission. The punctum always turns into the studium when expressed in language. That is also why we may perceive that his examples do not support his theory. […] Barthes cannot dismiss knowledge as he claims. Nonetheless, he is fully aware that a theory of the punctum is not possible in language, “to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up” (p. 43).

Now, I started off nodding my head as I read: yes, I agree that “historical, social or cultural meanings” are not at the heart of any artistic creation, and I’m on board with any attempt to define what remains. But the further I read the more confused I got, and that last paragraph sent me into a tailspin (“That is also why we may perceive that his examples do not support his theory”). I was hoping the OED might provide a nice concise definition, but even though the entry was updated in September 2007 they don’t include this sense (too specialized?); the TLFi, French though it is, also ignores it. Wikipedia calls it “a term used by Roland Barthes to refer to an incidental but personally poignant detail in a photograph,” which is concise but I suspect deeply inaccurate. If anyone has anything to contribute, I’m all ears.

From Liam Shaw’s LRB review of Slime: A Natural History by Susanne Wedlich:

There does seem to be something universal about the feeling of disgust that slime provokes, even if its valences differ. That ‘slime’ is an easily translatable concept helps Wedlich’s case. She links it to the risk of contamination: our bodies use mucus as a barrier to soak up pathogens which are themselves slimy. Her translator, Ayça Türkoğlu, deploys an impressive and viscous vocabulary. Both German and English have slimy words for slimy things. The smack and suck of saliva make for squelching prose. Frogspawn looks like ‘slimy star snot’. Differences in translation do exist, however. German-speaking friends tell me that schleim is more neutral than in English; you can tuck into a warm bowl of Haferschleim, for example (‘oat slime’, or oatmeal). And even in English, slime has ebbed and flowed. Wycliffe’s 14th-century translation of the Bible has God creating Adam ‘of the sliym of erthe’. In most later versions, the first man emerges from ‘dust’. The imagery has stuck in modern Christianity. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ is an oddly desiccated summary of life’s viscous circle: a euphemism posing as a proverb.

It’s unclear why ‘sliym’ slipped out of the English Eden. Perhaps it made the account in Genesis too close to spontaneous generation.

From the next issue’s Letters column:
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