I’m getting close to the end of Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf
One problem is that he has no ear for poetry, but he can’t help that. He would have done better to just translate for sense and effect, ignoring the verse forms, but he wanted to go whole hog, so he winds up with un-English phrasings like “By the way, all go to hell” or (in another poem) “Hung like sticking-out earlobe/ Weightless crescent.” But even within those parameters, there are a couple of big problems. The poem focuses on one of the main themes of the novel, the difficulty of telling X from Y. It’s right there in the title: “between dog and wolf” translates inter canem et lupum, a Latin phrase referring to twilight, when you can’t tell one canid from the other. One of the subsidiary characters is called sometimes Fyodor, sometimes Pyotr, and sometimes Yegor. And in this poem we have a difficulty in distinguishing between two trees, a неклен [neklen] (Acer tataricum, the Tatar maple) and a клен [klyon] (the regular old maple); there are half a dozen variants of this couplet:
Неклен. А в сущности – клен.
Клен. А прищуришься – неклен.Tatar maple. But in essence a maple.
Maple. But if you squint, a Tatar maple.
The last four lines of the poem are:
Неклен. Наклюкался – клен.
Клен. Оклемаешься – неклен.
Сумерками ослеплен,
Медленной тлею облеплен.Tatar maple. When you get really drunk, a maple.
Maple. When you recover, a Tatar maple.
Blinded by twilight,
Swarming with slow plant lice.
This shows both Sokolov’s magical way with sounds (kl-n, kl-m, sl-pl-n, dl-n, tl, l-pl-n) and the importance of booze in the novel. Now, of course English has no equivalent of the close-but-no-cigar клен and неклен (which looks like ‘not-maple’ and is etymologically probably just that), so Boguslawski has chosen to go with apple and crab(apple):
Apple. But in essence — crab.
Crab. But look closer — apple.
I don’t think this works, not least because “crab” and “apple” don’t sound anything alike, but I can’t do any better, so I won’t give him a hard time. No, what I’m complaining about is the way he translates the title, “Spackle.” He uses the same word later to render “Рвань по фамилии Паклин?”: “The trash nicknamed Spackle?” In the first place, a фамилия is a surname, not a nickname, and there is in fact a surname Paklin, derived from пакля ‘oakum, tow (bundle of fibers).’ But never mind, if he wants to call it a nickname and render it Spackle on a phonetic basis, let him. The problem is that the title of the poem is an entirely different (though similar-looking) word, паклен, which happens to be a synonym of неклен ‘Tatar maple.’ I don’t know whether he didn’t know the word or was simply seduced by the similarity into mashing the two together, but the outcome is awful: a brilliant synthesynonym that sums up the poem is turned into a mystifying pseudo-nickname that delivers nothing to the eager reader.
And the worst of it is that паклен is a really interesting word! For some reason it’s not included in Vasmer even though it’s in Dahl, but it looks to me like it must be another example of the nominal prefix па-, so that паклен has the same relation to клен ‘maple’ as пасынок ‘stepson’ does to сын ‘son.’ Isn’t that neat? Though I speak, as always, under correction; I am merely an enthusiastic amateur, and it may be that a genuine etymologist will have good reasons for rejecting this pretty hypothesis.
Addendum. I’ve finished the novel, and instead of doing a summary post I think I’ll quote the description provided by Olga Matich in her “Саша Соколов. Три поразительных и очень разных романа” [Sasha Sokolov: Three striking and very different novels] (Новый Журнал, номер 300, 2020); the translation is mine, and you can see the original Russian at that link (beginning “Если «Школа» в каком-то отношении вытекает”):
If School [for Fools] in some respects has its source in youth prose [e.g., Vasily Aksyonov], Dog can be correlated with so-called village prose [e.g., Valentin Rasputin]. But it is alien to the moralizing of the village writers; its emotional focus is the doomed existence of its unhappy characters. As I wrote over twenty years ago, the novel brings to mind rather the modernist prose of Pilnyak in the 1920s, which described village life as filled with violence. Take his novella Mother Earth (1925), which has the howl of the wolf as a leitmotiv, as well as the woman tanner Arina, doomed to death. Sokolov also has a heroine Arina (Orina), and the wolf and dog flow together inter canem et lupum – the time of day when it is impossible to distinguish a dog from a wolf – in a single image.
The novel’s action takes place in an intermediate space along the two shores of the Itil/Wolf river [the fictional Volga] in the villages Gorodnishche, Bydogoshch, and others. The characters of Dog are hunters, grinders, beggars, cripples, and thieves; some of them transform from one to another. In terms of genre, Dog is in part an epistolary novel in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The narrative is characterized by a plaiting and replaiting of words […] Dog abounds in paronomasia and repetition of sounds, often punning, founded on coincidences in meaning and sound.
[…] The novel’s reader often gets lost in its storytelling and verbal labyrinths; on one hand, trying to understand their meaning, on the other, seeking an exit from them. Leona Toker calls the book “a spiderweb of words” […]
Yes! I don’t have anything useful to contribute on the etymological questions, but this same issue came up when I last taught the novel. One of my students noticed this strange passage, so we had to compare it to the original and, ultimately, we both felt the same frustration as you.
Good to know I’m not alone!
but it looks to me like it must be another example of the nominal prefix па-, so that паклен has the same relation to клен ‘maple’ as пасынок ‘stepson’ does to сын ‘son.’
I’m not familiar with паклен, but it appears to be an exact parallel to падуб “holly”.
(Random vaguely relevant anecdote: Russian translators of Pratchett’s Soul Music couldn’t think of a good way to translate the meaning of the name “Imp y Celyn”, and ended up going with a simpler pun and calling him Dion Celyn [Дион Селин – a surprisingly plausibly Llamedosian-sounding name]. OTOH, the title of the book itself was a stroke of genius: Ро́ковая музыка.)
Note that неклен, at least in the poem, has initial stress: не́клен (thus also in Russian Wiktionary); the traditional orthography (where ё is optional) hides this. Russian Wikipedia says Неклён [sic], probably incorrectly.
I’m not familiar with паклен, but it appears to be an exact parallel to падуб “holly”.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s an even better example — thanks!
Note that неклен, at least in the poem, has initial stress: не́клен (thus also in Russian Wiktionary); the traditional orthography (where ё is optional) hides this. Russian Wikipedia says Неклён [sic], probably incorrectly.
Both exist; the former is more common.
when you can’t tell one canid from the other
I always understood the point to be that dogs are active in the day, whereas wolves are generally active at night, so ‘between dog-time and wolf-time’.
That too is a possibility!
When i first saw the title paklen, i thought Languagehat had gone nefarious and started writing about hell.
Paklen means hellish in Croatian, while pakao (final O is a vocalised L) means hell.
Paklina means resin and pitch.
According to the Croatian Encyclopedic Dictionary, this comes from PIE *pik- with the samd meaning, cognate to Latin pix. There is also a reconstructed Slavic form, but i dont have the yers on this keyboard to write it.
I’m unsure I’ve ever met a Tatar maple, and if I did we weren’t introduced. But thinking of a pair of easily confused trees immediately brought back childhood memories of ippocastano, the avenue-lining tree that isn’t actually a castagno. I’ll submit that pair as a better translation than apple and crab, even if I find “horse chestnut” annoyingly pedestrian relative to ippocastano.
“Horse chestnut. When you get really drunk, a chestnut” is too clever by half, both because that’s a (or the?) traditional tree shading a beer garden, and because a chestnut is good eating while a horse chestnut is slightly poisonous.
I agree, that’s a better pair!
I’m unsure I’ve ever met a Tatar maple, and if I did we weren’t introduced.
I think I only know it (in the черноклён spelling) as a honey ingredient; this means I know it’s a flowering plant and not much else. I have no idea what they look like.
As for horse chestnuts, in Moscow, at least, конский каштан is the fancy smart-folk name for what approximately everyone just calls каштан because it’s the only kind they know.
(Non-horse chestnuts show up occasionally in shops and/or markets, under the same name; it’s tacitly understood that they’re presumably an edible variety.)
I have no idea what they look like.
Just click on the “Acer tataricum” link in the post.
There is a nice review of rare / living fossil prefix па
https://rus-et.ru/sovremennyj-russkij-yazyk/pristavka-pa-redkost-v-russkom-yazyke/
Пакля in relation to the verb рвать is probably a reference to the classic childhood book, Know-Nothing’s Adventures ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno ) from the chapters where the title character learns to rhyme poetry (creating many objectionable couplets about everybody around) but can’t find a rhyme for Пакля
Gotta add that I never heard either word about Tatar maple, possibly because they are endemic to Russia’s South?
Thanks!
In Turin, everyone calls the conkers “chestnuts,” to the extent that the municipality has put up silly danger signs (famous enough for Wikipedia: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castagna#/media/File:Panneau_castagna.JPG) warning of “Falling chestnuts during the Fall,” possibly after being sued by some American-minded car owner for conker damage to their parked vehicle. On the other hand, in my circle at least the trees have always been given their proper name of ippocastani. I believe there are actual chestnut trees in the countryside pretty close by, but I’m much less familiar with them myself, if at all.
Tochigi-ken, the Buckeye Prefecture
Tochigi Prefecture, in which Ashikaga is located, is named after 栃の木 (tochi-no-ki), the Japanese horse chestnut, Aesculus turbinata Blume, a close relative of the Ohio buckeye, Aesculus glabra, and the European horse chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum L. Marronnier, the French name for horse chestnut shows up in would-be glamorous commercial names here and there in the prefecture.
https://faroutliers.blogspot.com/2005/08/tochigi-ken-buckeye-prefecture.html
By the way, both неклен and паклен can also refer to Acer campestre, the field maple.
You’ve just blown my mind. That certainly adds to the effect of the words in the poem!
неклен and паклен
Since nobody else seems to have asked yet, and since I’m too la…busy to try to dechiffer the Russian myself: Are these to be understood as “unmaple” and “bymaple”?
Also, klen is obviously related to the Germanic names, Norw. lønn, ON hlynr etc., all “maple”, but the correspondences are off.
Pretty much, as I understand it.
@trond
γλεῖνος
is a Cretan maple with a citation in Theophrastus. No etymology. All I can offer is “sticky” (cf. PIE *gleybʰ) based on a common feature of the leaves, if your tree has aphids…
@PlasticPaddy: All maples that I am familiar with have rather sticky sap, compared with that of most other trees. I assume that this is due to higher sugar content, even for species that are not suitable for syrup production.
I checked Paul Friedrich’s excellent Proto-Indo-European Trees: The Arboreal System of a Prehistoric People. He doesn’t mention paklen either, though he does discuss *klen maples and (likely unrelated) *pwḱ-/*pyk- conifers.
Are these to be understood as “unmaple” and “bymaple”?
This does indeed appear to be a very good analogy.
PP: γλεῖνος
That’s not mentioned as a possible cognate in any of the sources I’ve seen, no doubt because of the initial consonant. But I agree that it’s interesting.
Decided to look up the etymology for vaahtera:
Finnish
Alternative forms
vahtera (dialectal)
Etymology
From Proto-Finnic *vahtera, from Proto-Finno-Permic [Term?]. Cognate with Estonian vaher, Ingrian vaaher, Karelian voahteri, Livonian vō’ḑõr, Veps vahtaŕ, Votic vaahtõra, Erzya укштор (ukštor), Moksha [script needed] (uštәr) and Eastern Mari ваштар (vaštar).
I guess I must have seen vashtar somewhere else.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sredni_Vashtar
I know, I know; it’s just that the coincidence seems funny.
“Sredni” happens to be Russian for “middle” (as in the adjective), so overall “Sredni Vashtar” is a very realistic name for a village somewhere in… Mari El, probably, but really could be anywhere in the Finno-Ugric parts of Russia. (And wouldn’t look too much out of place for the formerly-Ottoman-but-now-Slavic parts of the Balkans.)
I wonder where the author of the story got that particular sound sequence from; the Wikipedia article doesn’t say anything on the subject.
[EDIT: though, having spend several years as a foreign correspondent in St. Petersburg, he had to know what the word meant.]
Another Vashtar:
Ваштар – река в республике Чечня; правый приток р.Шароаргун; берет начало на северных склонах г.Барзиарлам (2214м); впадает в р.Шароаргун ниже селения Улус-Керт. Название реки, вероятно, дано жителями Улус-Керта в память о своем селении Вашандарой, откуда они переселились
http://budetinteresno.info/toponim/tverdiy/perevod_572.html
Паклин and паклен are perfect omophones.
Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/avorъ
P.S. Speaking of maples, why is it that Lönnrot is always Лёнрот/Лённрот rather than Лёнрут/Лённрут?
Ah, the “agricultural substrate” in western Uralic.
Thanks for that. Protouralic has been on a roll since I last visited a couple of weeks ago.
Thanks for that.
Seconded. Way to go!
Commenting to mention the Addendum I stuck on this post in lieu of a final post about the book.
Волк… Волга… that’s neat.
Yes, Sokolov has a wonderful sense of linguistic play.
For quite some time José Vergara has been leading a dedicated crew of literary analysts in producing an annotated bilingual text of the novel, and Encyclopedia of the Dog has finally gone live online:
What a great resource!