Joseph Carter’s review of Rakes of the Old Court, by Mateiu Caragiale, opens with a bang:
Tenebrous, mollitious, superal, advigilating, encoursive, orgulous, salubrious, appanage, siccicate, phanariot, inquination, schickster, seneschal, decretory, voivodes, bijouterie, uncinctured, deturpation, internunciary, noctambulant, autochthonous, urticated.
These are all words that appear in Sean Cotter’s translation of Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court. You’ll have difficulty finding the definition of some of them. Google the word “imbrumated,” which appears on page 25 of the book in the clause “he lived imbrumated with thick smoke,” and you will be taken directly to… excerpts from this translation of Rakes of the Old Court. I believe “imbrumated” to be a neologism of Cotter’s, and it is meant, as far as I can tell, as something of a portmanteau of “imbricated” and “inundated.”¹ Thrown into all this is the occasional not-even-italicized loan from another language, such as “saugrenu” – bizarre in French.
Such a vocabulary would be unorthodox for an English-language novelist to use; for a translation, it is borderline heretical.
I relish the heresy. In his introduction, Cotter describes The Rakes of the Old Court as having an “ornate style, filled with archaic Romanian and base street language, saturated with Turkish, Roma, German, and Greek vocabulary.” To read Cotter’s rendering of The Rakes of the Old Court is to encounter the rare work where both author and translator find euphoria in an unbounded display of language; it is among the finest works of translated prose I’ve ever read. It is certainly among the noblest and most ambitious recent attempts to render a unique piece of foreign-language literature into English.
Click through to the review to find more about the novel itself (“a novel of friendship […] centered around a circle of four dissolute men”); I’ll proceed to the final passage, which returns to language and translation:
Though Romanian is a romance language and many of the very unusual words used in this translation are latinate, Cotter tells us in his introduction that Caragiale sought to emphasize the non-European features of Romania through his prose – and thus his primary source of arcane vocabulary was not Greek or Latin but Turkish. However, due to the English language’s paucity of Turkish-derived vocabulary, Cotter has substituted mostly Latin-derived words for Turkish ones. His decision likely approximates Caragiale’s baroque style, but it may serve the opposite effect. A novel littered with arcane Latinisms seems all too European, creating prose that looks like it could have come from Paris or Vienna. I get the sense we are missing something essential to the novel, something that can only be grasped in the original Romanian. […] I wonder what this book would have looked like had Cotter gone the opposite route and looked for Old English, Scots, Gaelic, Welsh, and other Celtic words. I hope one day to see another translation of Rakes of the Old Court that does just that.
An intriguing suggestion, and one that will doubtless appeal to David Eddyshaw. Of the opening list of words, or “words,” Google Books is unable to find superal, encoursive, siccicate, and schickster in its digitized version, and I can’t help but wonder if one or more has been miscopied (“encoursive” in particular seems suspicious). As for imbrumated, I think I can help; I submit that it’s based on brume ‘mist, fog, vapor,’ from French brume < Latin brūma; I note that the Latin word has another descendant in Romanian brumă ‘(hoar)frost.’ Everything is imbricated!
I feel like I would take seven or eight of those words in stride, including the two particularly likely to be relevant when writing about Romanian history (phanariot and voivodes, although I guess I might have accepted “voivods” as an equally cromulent plural), whereas the rest might throw me a bit off my stride unless the meaning was blindingly obvious from context. I guess come to think of it “uncinctured” is transparent enough in meaning (at least assuming that I’ve guessed the meaning correctly!) that it might not slow me down in the middle of a sentence where it was a sensible word to use.
But I don’t see how having a bunch of Turkish-origin loanwords gives Romanian “non-European features.” A rather sizable chunk of Europe was for some centuries politically subject to Turkish-speakers, and that left all sorts of traces, linguistic and otherwise, that are still visible. That’s an important thing to know about the history of Europe! Saying that that quirk of regional history makes that region partially non- (or less) European than the parts that avoided that particular historical fate seems peculiar, and likely to imply a view of the “real” Europe that will rapidly contract to something like “wogs begin at Calais.”
Separately, you might take from the review’s parting wish to see another translation that takes another approach that this is the first translation of the work into English, which per the internet is not the case. Another English edition from around a decade ago (by a Romanianly-named translator) renders the title as “Gallants of the Old Court.”
I should supplement one of the parenthetical remarks in my first comment with the note that per the google n-gram viewer “voivode” has apparently always been a more common spelling than “voivod” in the singular in English. I was probably wrong to subconsciously take the name of the ’80’s Quebecois metal band Voivod as orthographically normative.
(1) surprised these are considered obscure:
salubrious, tenebrous, autochthonous, seneschal, noctambulant
(2) not so surprised these are considered obscure but I understand them:
appanage, bijouterie, voivodes, uncinctured
(3) suspect these are neologisms whose meanings I can make an educated guess at:
advigilating, orgulous, schickster, internunciary
(4) feel like these are obscure words I have met before somewhere:
phanariot, decretory, urticated
(5) probably neologisms; with some context I could maybe hazard a guess at the meaning:
mollitious, superal, encoursive, siccicate, inquination, deturpation
I put “imbrumated” in (3) with the same gloss as LH
“ I believe “imbrumated” to be a neologism of Cotter’s, and it is meant, as far as I can tell, as something of a portmanteau of “imbricated” and “inundated.” —Mr. Hat
On the other hand, it might be based on “bruma”, Spanish for mist, fog, or haze. Hence
imbrumate ~ befog
A spot check suggests that some or all of the supposed neologisms are just obsolete/rare: siccicate = ‘desiccate’, shickster = shiksa (non-Jewish woman; hired maid).
Saying that that quirk of regional history makes that region partially non- (or less) European than the parts that avoided that particular historical fate seems peculiar
It may be historically and culturally wrongheaded, but it is an attitude that is very widely held in the parts of Europe that were not subject to Turkish rule (and often in regions that were subject to “less” Turkish rule than others).
“ I believe “imbrumated” to be a neologism of Cotter’s, and it is meant, as far as I can tell, as something of a portmanteau of “imbricated” and “inundated.” —Mr. Hat
That’s not Mr. Hat, it’s Mr. Carter. I made the same suggestion you did at the end of my post.
My version of mollymooly’s classification…
(1) surprised these are considered obscure:
appanage, seneschal, decretory, bijouterie, autochthonous
(2) not so surprised these are considered obscure but I understand them:
voivodes, noctambulant, urticated
(3) suspect these are neologisms whose meanings I can make an educated guess at:
advigilating, encoursive, deturpation
(4) feel like these are obscure words I have met before somewhere:
tenebrous, salubrious, phanariot, internunciary
(5) probably neologisms; with some context I could maybe hazard a guess at the meaning:
mollitious, superal, orgulous, siccicate, inquination, schickster, uncinctured
It would not surprise me if some of the “neologisms” are real but obscure words (my spellchecker doesn’t underline “orgulous”, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before), and/or if some of my educated guesses in 3 are completely wrong.
It was hard to place “phanariot”, which I know is a real word and could fairly confidently match to a relatively narrow category of meaning (“a member of a particular religiously-themed group of people”) but don’t know anything else about; it could easily go into 2 or 4, but doesn’t really belong in either.
However, due to the English language’s paucity of Turkish-derived vocabulary, Cotter has substituted mostly Latin-derived words for Turkish ones.
“That’s not the odd thing I’ve done. Maybe ideological, but not odd. The odd thing is, I wanted to render the occasional code switches into Turkish of the Muslims with some English equivalent: a language familiar to English-speakers, but clearly foreign.
So my Muslim Cretans lapse into French.”
– Nick Nicholas, in his author’s note to his translation of How the village turned Christian by Ioannis Kondylakis
Here is the occurrence of imbrumated in Cotter’s translation:
This renders
Cotter’s lived imbrumated with thick smoke translates trăia într-un aer închegat, împâclit de fum. Is the use of the bizarre Latinate imbrumate is perhaps meant to render, by transference, a slight Ottoman flavor to zaharisit “candied, lacking vigor or mental acuity” (apparently not a rare word at all), from Greek ζαχαριάζω “to candy”?
“ That’s not Mr. Hat, it’s Mr. Carter. I made the same suggestion you did at the end of my post.”
My apologies. I got lost between Cotter and Carter and ended up in a fog (well imbrumated)!
One question I now have is whether Caragiale’s Romanian text includes neologisms of his own invention (albeit maybe combining morphemes that someone with a good vocabulary would recognize), which I suppose might justify a translator in following suit.
Separately, unlike the situation with “voivode,” Phanariot seems to be more common than Phanariote in English texts per the google n-gram viewer, although both seem to be in respectable use. In Romanian, by contrast, I expect the difference between fanariot and fanariote, not to mention fanariot-X for various other X’s, is inflectionally meaningful rather than a matter of semi-random orthographic variation.
Your vocabularies impress me if words such as “seneschal” and “phanariot” are not obscure to you.
I get the impression that some of the Latinate neologisms are malformed.
What does “encoursive” mean? As English has the Latinate “discursive”, this suggests that “encoursive” should be “incursive”, which suggests a relation to “incursion”. And what should “superal” be if not “supernal”?
The last “ic” in “siccicate” is bogus; and if it really does mean “desiccate” then the whole word was bogus, as “desiccate” should’ve been used instead. Pondering the lack of initial “de-” made me realise that “desiccate” means “to dry into a state of ‘de'” just as, to quote J E Littlewood, “unloose” means “to loose into a state of ‘un'”.
Yes, I have the same questions you do. I hadn’t thought of “supernal,” but it’s a plausible emendation.
‘Salubrious’ is part of my normal vocabulary (mainly as ‘X is not very salubrious’). I knew ‘seneschal’ from Sir Kay in the Arthurian legends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Kay
Semi-surprised these are considered obscure: autochthonous, seneschal, phanariote, appanage
Would have been surprised that’s loaned in English, if I had not read Thomas Pynchon: voivode (literally “war-leader”). I was not surprised it was on of the Bulgarian loanwords not purged from Romanian in the 19th century. They were either words related to the history of the Ottoman period, or words that have a different meaning in Romanian, like закуска (breakfast, literally “taste-start”), which in Romanian is the name for the ubiquitous vegetable spread Lyutenitsa/Ajvar.
Not surprised but know them: decretory
Encountered them but don’t remember the meaning: urticated
Haven’t encountered them but can guess at the meaning: orgulous
urticated — covered in urticaria, maybe?
urticated = nettled ?
In answer to J.W. Brewer’s question upthread: if this Romanian-French translator (whose remarks on the difficulties of translating Caragiale certainly echo Joseph Carter’s remarks on the topic in his review: her remarks on how difficult the title alone is to translate does give a glimpse of how challenging the book as a whole must be to any translator) is to be believed-
https://laurehinckel.com/4719-2/
-it seems that Caragiale used plenty of obscure words, and relished using them, but did not create any significant number of new ones.
urticated = nettled ?
On further recollection, I know what the root means, but I can’t quite figure out what the -ed is supposed to represent; I might have been thinking of “urticating”.
Thinking of plausible contexts that don’t explicitly involve specific parts of nettles, maybe it’s just supposed to be the past tense – i.e. “stung”.
It’s an interesting point in Etienne’s link that Cotter (and predecessor) may have erred in handling the title, since “old court” is simply a calque of the name of a Bucharest toponym that had not housed an actually-functioning court for centuries. Rendering it as “in the Old Court” would perhaps be like rendering the London toponym Newgate as “the New Gate.” So do you go with Oldcourt (the toponym Newcourt does exist in the Anglophone world) or just leave it untranslated as a Romanian toponym whose literal etymology will be distraction to the reader? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtea_Veche
That strikes me as linguistic nerdview. The people who are interested in the success of the translation among the public, as opposed to the success of the title as a literal rendition, presumably figure that Rakes of the Old Court will be more attractive to potential readers than either “Rakes of Oldcourt” or “Rakes of Curtea Veche,” and I can’t disagree.
Note that Naguib Mahfouz’s بين القصرين is translated as Palace Walk, not “Bayn al-qasrayn” or “Between Two Palaces.”
Okay, well if we want to get potential readers excited by a vaguely glamorous Ruritanian vibe, I might go with “Rakes of the Old Palace.” Using “court” seems unnecessarily influenced by the fact that “curtea” is cognate with “court,” or I guess more technically with the French word that got borrowed into Middle English as “court”. Or maybe “courtyard” (rather than “court” as an abstraction for the sort of immaterial quasi-institution that tends to be located in a physical palace?) would actually be a more idiomatic translation of what sense of the word would seem most prominent in Romanian? But “Old Courtyard” would cut down the Ruritanian-glamor vibe considerably.
True, true.
Not unsurprising that the name Curtea Veche contrasts with the subsequently-built Curtea Nouă, but interesting that that came to be known instead as Curtea Arsă when it was abandoned after a catastrophic fire in the early 19th century. English loanwords whose Romance predecessors are cognate with that latter adjective include “ardor” and “arson.” The CN was built by a fellow who was both a Phanariote AND a voivode, as well as the grandfather of the fellow for whom Ypsilanti, Michigan was named. (Is that the only Phanariote-related toponym in the U.S.? I can’t think of another one off-hand.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtea_Nou%C4%83
I can’t either, but anyone with a yen to investigate can use as a starting point the list of Phanariot families here. (Cantacuzino and Rosetti seem like possible candidates.)
the list of Phanariot families
…oh, so that‘s what it means. I was way wrong, then; I thought it was probably one of them heresies.
(No points for getting “member of a group of people” correctly, the -iot part is a dead giveaway.)
John Crowley is fond of “orgulous.” Also “operose.”
Like many people, I have a couple of junk email accounts that I use when I need to sign up for things online. I use them for a while, and after they are sold and resold enough times, and the volume of spam becomes too great, I delete them and create new ones. One of my old junk accounts (since retired) was “princeorgulous@gmail.com” — taken from the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which is where I first encountered the word:
“In Troy there lies the scene. From isles of Greece
the princes orgulous, their high blood chafed,
have to the port of Athens sent their ships
fraught with the ministers and instruments
of cruel war.”
It’s a resonant and useful word that my wife and I still use occasionally when one of us gets into especially high dudgeon about something.
Semantic shifts are curious things, like silly ‘fortunate, blessed’ and yelp ‘boast’. Bruma/brume seems to mean ‘mist/fog’ in all the Romance languages, but in Latin it was ‘winter cold’ < ‘winter’ < ‘winter solstice, the shortest day’ < old superlative of brevis ‘short’.
The people who are interested in the success of the translation among the public, as opposed to the success of the title as a literal rendition, presumably figure that Rakes of the Old Court will be more attractive to potential readers than either “Rakes of Oldcourt” or “Rakes of Curtea Veche,” and I can’t disagree.
OK, I’m hoist by my own petard. I just came across a review of a book called Long Peace Street: A Walk in Modern China that focuses on Chang’an Avenue in Beijing. The review says: “Early in the book, Chatwin comments on the irony of Long Peace Street’s bloody history–it is not a street that deserves its name.” My reaction was outrage: no Chinese person thinks of any Long Peace when they see or hear the name, it’s named after Chang’an, the ancient capital of China, and it’s bare-faced orientalism to dissect the morphemes of the name and pretend it has some poetic impact! And then I thought “The people who are interested in the success of the translation among the public, as opposed to the success of the title as a literal rendition, presumably figure that Long Peace Street will be more attractive to potential readers than ‘Chang’an Avenue’,” and what could I say? I was right, and I hated myself for it.