As I said back in 2014, John Berryman is one of my favorite American poets, and I welcome the imminent appearance of Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs; Shane McCrae, who edited it and wrote the introduction, has a Paris Review essay about it from which I offer a few excerpts:
It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic.
But The Dream Songs also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do—Henry. […] Henry, of course, is no Odysseus, though he more closely resembles Odysseus than all other epic heroes, with the exception of the unnamed protagonist of Dante’s Commedia (indeed, Henry strikes me as a combination of both heroes, but sitting in an armchair, sometimes a desk chair, at the end of a long day, talking, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, in an otherwise empty room). Henry is an unheroic hero—a heroic hero has in-narrative effects upon the physical world and the people in it; Henry, for the most part, does not. When he does, the reader must take his word for it that he does; he, rather than the narrative of the epic, describes the effects he has. He is, in other words, a twentieth-century white American male, not especially remarkable, the sort of person who doesn’t establish or recover a nation, or parley with angels, or explore hell, but the sort of common person of whom nations are constituted, to whom angels were once commonly believed to minister in small ways, of whom hell was once commonly believed to be full. Henry is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled. He does not mourn the disappearance of those beliefs; he has held on to the beliefs he could. […]
In a 1968 interview with Berryman, Catherine Watson wrote, “Not all the songs about Henry are in the books, Berryman said, but ‘if there is a third volume, it will not take him further. It will be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.’ ” Berryman understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form—although his remark does suggest that it has an established beginning and end; note the phrase, “fit those poems in among.” Only Sing collects 152 possible additions to the epic, each of which is worth reading for its own merits. […]
In November of 2023—on the anniversary, although I didn’t know it at the time, of the date on which Berryman wrote Dream Song 29—I flew to Minneapolis for a daylong visit to the Andersen Library Reading Room at the University of Minnesota. There, Erin McBrien, then the interim curator, located the boxes of Berryman’s unpublished material and patiently answered all my questions, and I photographed each of the manuscripts of the unpublished Dream Songs. The next day, I flew home and began transcribing the Songs. Doing so, I made no effort to Americanize Berryman’s spelling—he studied for two years at Clare College, Cambridge, and often favored British spelling—and I left the entirely idiosyncratic spellings and words untouched (one example of the latter: the word sieteus in the poem beginning “Hearkened Henry,” which perhaps ought to be she tells, but is, in fact, sieteus in Berryman’s typescript). I corrected only obvious typos. Once the Songs were transcribed, I had to determine how to arrange them, and I settled upon ordering them alphabetically according to first line. I could not organize them chronologically, because most of them hadn’t been dated by the poet and I didn’t want to guess—my goal was to impose as little of my own will as possible upon the organization of the Songs. […] Although it was Berryman’s practice, when collecting the Dream Songs into books, to group the Songs in numbered sections, I haven’t done so, as to do so would be to impose the will I’m trying to minimize. These Songs are put together in the way that I hope best allows—or at least allows as well as any other way—readers to “fit [them] in among” the already existing Songs, so that each reader might expand the epic according to their own wishes, thereby laying claim to their particular sense of what The Dream Songs is.
I’m trying not to add to my mountain range of physical books, but I may have to get a copy of this one. (I linked to a clip of Berryman reading Dream Song 29 here.)
Me too. (Perhaps I’ll put it on my Christmas list …)
I’m not sold on this “the Dream Songs are an Epic” thing, though. Not unless you redefine “epic” to mean something so vague as to convey no real information.
And the Dream Songs have no need to be called an “epic” to be both sui generis and great (with a capital G.)
I figured if anyone was lured to comment, it would be you.
I’m not sold on this “the Dream Songs are an Epic” thing, though. Not unless you redefine “epic” to mean something so vague as to convey no real information.
Yeah, same here, but I’ve gotten blasé about these things — I figure literary scholars are gonna scholar, and that tends to mean coming up with vaguely plausible approaches that can be presented as a hot new take that can add to one’s list of publications. (My go-to example of how bad that can get is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s reanalysis of Stalin’s purges as a vehicle of upward social mobility. This, by comparison, is pretty benign.)
I’ve only read one epic in the original language: La Chanson de Roland, with a modern French version en regard, and having previously read Dorothy Sayers’s translation. I don’t recall that the terser parts struck me as relaxed from compression and loaded with the possibility of future compression, but of course that might be my lack of skill at Old French and of sensitivity. Have people noticed that in traditional epics? Edit: Or is that comment no more worth considering than that the “Dream Songs” constitute an epic? Which I didn’t consider very long.
Of course, if any verbal creation has more and less compressed parts, readers might expect that alternation to continue.
I don’t understand what the “compression” bit is about either. Doesn’t epic poetry rather go for the opposite – padding lines with largely predictable epithets and such?
(That’s not a criticism. Repetition can have all sorts of interesting effects, and having a default epithet for a character allows you to use a rarer one for all sorts of emphasis or other special effects. But I wouldn’t call that compression either.)
…lots of sudden job openings…?
Horace would have been amused at this ill-advised attempt to claim that epic diction is particularly close to lyric verse … well, it’s all poetry, I suppose.
The “compression” stuff is pretty much formulated in a way that makes it unfalsifiable: “always either compressed or suggestive of compression” – i.e. always either compressed … or not.
…lots of sudden job openings…?
Exactly!
That the Black Death led to a dramatic increase in social mobility is a commonplace observation among historians of the period, practically a cliche. I suppose the only question about the USSR in the 1930’s was whether Stalin killed a high enough percentage of the preexisting population to ensure that the same mechanisms would operate.
Count me as another one who doesn’t understand what the “compression” bit is supposed to mean. As David Marjanović says, (originally) oral verse epics are renown for their repetition—particularly the use and reuse of fixed formulas and sobriquets.
@JWB: From what I read, there seem to have been a lot of people denouncing others who were in their career path in order to advance, so the mechanism may have kind of worked; I guess what Hat finds ridiculous here is the idea that furthering upward social mobility was the / a purpose of the terror*), not just an unintended side effect that may or may not have happened.
*) Which still wouldn’t justify it, of course.
I came here to make a cheap joke about purges causing upward mobility only if we think their victims went heavenward, but in the process was sidetracked by a remark that the Black Death increased social mobility. I went on a hunt and found this gem. Is this supposed to be … serious?
Seems very prescient mutatis mutandis (change ‘antisemitic’ to ‘antihispanic’ in USA, ‘anti-muslim’ in Europe)
Dream Song 18: A Strut for Roethke
by John Berryman
Westward, hit a low note, for a roarer lost
across the Sound but north from Bremerton,
hit a way down note.
And never cadenza again of flowers, or cost.
Him who could really do that cleared his throat
& staggered on.
The bluebells, pool-shallows, saluted his over-needs,
while the clouds growled, heh-heh, & snapped, & crashed.
No stunt he’ll ever unflinch once more will fail
(O lucky fellow, eh Bones?)–drifted off upstairs,
downstairs, somewheres.
No more daily, trying to hit the head on the nail:
thirstless: without a think in his head:
back from wherever, with it said.
Hit a high long note, for a lover found
needing a lower into friendlier ground
to bug among worms no more
around um jungles where ah blurt ‘What for?’
Weeds, too, he favoured as most men don’t favour men.
The Garden Master’s gone.
As I recall, I heard John Berryman read that poem at Brandeis not long before his death.
He was invited and introduced by another poet, Prof. Allen Grossman, a fine teacher and reader himself.
When I were but a wee stripling of a college freshman, the English department took the position that “epic” was a literary genre covering both poems and prose narratives and indeed that half (spring semester) of the year-long class I took seems to still be around these many decades later as a freestanding one-semester class, whose readings “include Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Joyce’s Ulysses.” We had all five of those and one or two others. (The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost may qualify as epics, but they were on the syllabus for a *different* suitable-for-freshmen English class.)
I have never particularly gotten into Berryman but perhaps did not give him a fair enough chance and should put him on the longish list for potential revisiting and reconsideration. Although I generally don’t dig most other poets he is conventionally grouped with and e.g. I think I gave Robert Lowell a fair enough chance that I don’t feel any interest in reconsideration there. But maybe the groupings are stereotypical and reductive and Berryman might stand on his own.
The wikibio of Berryman’s first ex-wife contains the sentence “Berryman, like other poets of his generation, would continue to earn his living through academic postings.” Which is unsurprising enough but also has a certain feel of “see, there’s the problem right there.” Not enough American poets after WW2 followed Wallace Stevens’ useful example of competently holding down a day job in the insurance industry or some spiritual equivalent thereof.
I guess what Hat finds ridiculous here is the idea that furthering upward social mobility was the / a purpose of the terror*), not just an unintended side effect that may or may not have happened.
It’s not the idea as such, which is perfectly anodyne (of course killing/exiling a lot of people will open up career opportunities), it’s how it worked in context: “I’m coming to demolish the pathetically one-sided view of Stalin as a monster and the USSR as a bad place, and I’ll show you that it was a bog-standard society in which a dearth of social mobility created a mechanism by which it was remedied.” I exaggerate for rhetorical effect, obviously, but it really was an explicit counter to the anti-Soviet attitudes then regnant in academe, and opened up the field to a different approach, which was very good for Fitzpatrick’s career and for the careers of her students. You might compare it to Chomsky’s effect on linguistics. You might also compare the very different reaction to historians who tried to soften the image of Hitler and Nazi Germany around the same time.
Although I generally don’t dig most other poets he is conventionally grouped with and e.g. I think I gave Robert Lowell a fair enough chance that I don’t feel any interest in reconsideration there. But maybe the groupings are stereotypical and reductive and Berryman might stand on his own.
As far as I can see, the only thing the two have in common is chronology (unless you believe that “self-revelation” or whatever has anything to do with poetry). I like a few of Lowell’s poems but could perfectly well live the rest of my life without rereading him; Berryman’s linguistic exuberance is a constant source of pleasure and mental refreshment to me.
You might also compare the very different reaction to historians who tried to soften the image of Hitler and Nazi Germany around the same time
But see, Hitler only built highways, but Stalin created upward mobility…
Все выше, и выше, и выше
Стремим мы полет наших птиц…
Huh, and from the Wikipedia article I learn:
It’s a funny old world.
That sort of tune-borrowing used to be quite common. One comical highlight of showings of _Casablanca_ in New Haven used to be audience confusion when the Nazis at Rick’s all start singing the Yale alma mater, albeit with inscrutable German words — this because the alma mater had simply reused the tune of a pre-existing German song of patriotic or “nationalist” content, albeit dating well before the 3d Reich to the 1848 era* when “nationalism” in the German context was often viewed as a “liberal” thing.
*Wiki says that the German words date to 1840 but the tune to 1854, the composer and lyricist having not actually collaborated in real time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wacht_am_Rhein
That’s hilarious!
i had the luck to be introduced to the Dream Songs in high school, but i haven’t reread them in quite a while.
i think the “compression” thing is mostly about a (i believe, ultimately, poundian) idea that lyric poetry is all about “compressed language” (which i think is a pretty meaningless phrase), and trying to make epic poetry (under some definition or other) fit into that framework. so, as our host said, basically about publication and career rather than the works being discussed.
Elsewhere in the Ivy League, Penn’s alma mater uses a tune associated with the Czarist regime (still in power when it was written), which also now doubles as the official municipal anthem of Scranton. But I don’t know if an unexpected encounter with the original Russian version has ever led to confusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail,_Pennsylvania!
The school song at my brother’s high school in SE Pennsylvania was to the tune of the Deutschlandlied.
Given the subsequent political history of the German-speaking peoples it is particularly unfortunately that the so-called Deutschlandlied is many people’s first association with the tune Haydn wrote for a paean of loyalty to the Hapsburg regime.* To be fair, lots and lots of different texts have been set to that tune: the wiki article about it has a whole section headed “Use in national anthems, alma maters, and hymns.”
Which isn’t German at all, but Austrian: Gott! erhalte Franz, den Kaiser, written by Joseph Haydn, who reused the melody for the second movement of his string quartet op. 76,3.
The honor society of the Boy Scouts of America, the Order of the Arrow, uses the tune of tsarist national anthem for their song. It was weird, as a teenager, that I knew the tune was not original, because it cropped up occasionally in works by Tchaikovsky, but it wasn’t until I was adult that I learned what the origin of the melody was.
Some people have argued that singing Die Wacht am Rhein is an odd choice for German officers in 1941 in Casablanca since it is primarily an anti-French song and is a particularly inflammatory song if you are trying to keep general order and some Vichy goodwill. That has led those same people to argue that such an anomalous song choice was actually a deliberate dig at Yale.
Those people are generally Harvard graduates and we can probably discount their thesis. In reality Max Steiner probably chose a German song he was familiar with from WWI and he may well have thought an anti-French song worked better dramatically in the movie (I would agree with that).
I’m interested to learn that many Yale students didn’t know their school song was Die Wacht am Rhein till they encountered it in Casablanca. The one Harvard student with whom the subject of the Harvard song came up knew that it was “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms”. (For some that brings up a memory of Bugs Bunny playing the wrong note on the piano.) He didn’t know, though, that an earlier title was “My Lodging it is in the Cold Ground”.
Which isn’t German at all, but Austrian: Gott! erhalte Franz, den Kaiser, written by Joseph Haydn, who reused the melody for the second movement of his string quartet op. 76,3.
Well, strictly speaking, when that song was written Austrians were a subset of Germans and the Emperor to be preserved by God was still Holy Roman Emperor (of Germany), not just Emperor in Austria.
Simpsons fans will know that Springfield used to have the same anthem as Tuscaloosa, Austin, Oakland, Calgary, Provo, Ulaanbaatar and Area 51.
Haydn didn’t compose the anthem from scratch. I don’t dare open YouTube when I have a phylogenetic analysis running, but some of the Burgenland Croatian originals he used are still extant. They’re a bit simpler musically, start with jutro rano se ja stanem ~ jutro se ja rano stanem (plus further word orders) and end in things like oj, Marico, dušo moja.
School songs? *shaking head* What next? School sportsball te— …oh.
@Vanya: Supposedly, they used Die Wacht am Rhein in Casablanca because it was in the public domain. The original plan was to use a more explicitly Nazi song, but that would have caused problems for the release of the film in neutral countries (something that the studio wanted, for commercial and political reasons) that recognized German copyrights.
the release of the film in neutral countries
Eamon de Valera’s interpretation of neutrality required films like Casablanca to be banned in Ireland as propaganda until the war ended. My father was surprised to learn 60 years later that it had been made while the war was in full swing.
I have sometimes wondered whether de Valera ever renounced his American citizenship. I suppose probably not, since at the time of the Irish War of Independence, voluntarily taking arms under another sovereign state was considered substantive renunciation. Much more recently (although perhaps not today), after dual citizenship was no longer deemed pathological, it was decided that plain reading of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment did not allow for anyone to be involuntarily deprived of their American citizenship.
The United States did not recognise the sovereignty of the 1919–22 Irish Republic; only the USSR did.
Dev hadn’t renounced US citizenship by 1946. He was President in 1963 during JFK’s Irish visit, before which the Irish government proposed to give JFK Irish citizenship. US DOS said even honorary citizenship was impossible, but the plan suggests Dev felt no need to renounce his US citizenship.
I doubt the IRS ever took the position that as an American citizen Dev should pay US income tax on the salary he was paid by the Irish taxpayers, although I suppose if they had that might have conveniently procured a renunciation. At some point or other (I believe before he was PM?) the US-born Boris Johnson formally disavowed his US citizenship because it had apparently become too awkward for him not to do so.
Wikipedia FWIW links to a recent article claiming that the birth certificate attesting to de Valera’s nativity in NYC is an obvious forgery, concocted in 1916 at a time when it was hoped that proof of U.S. citizenship would prevent de Valera from being executed for treason against George V. Although I don’t *think* the author is affirmatively claiming he really wasn’t a U.S. citizen, just that (as was not too inherently surprising given his year of birth) his birth in the U.S. had not been contemporaneously documented in official records.
Which at that time was hardly a proper state at all, “das durch so viele Pergamente, Papiere und Bücher beinah verschüttete deutsche Reich” is how Goethe describes it in Dichtung und Wahrheit, referring to the coronation of Joseph II (as “römischer König”, not “deutscher Kaiser”) which witnessed as an adolescent.
Haydn’s anthem for the Hapsburg Kaiser made its debut in early 1797, just as the War of the First Coalition was drawing to an unsatisfactory result for the Hapsburgs and the Hapsburgs were about to agree to let the French annex all of their territory on the left bank of the Rhine, thus nicely setting up the backstory for the subsequent composition of “Die Wacht am Rhein.” I do not have a good sense of whether as of 1796-97 most folks in central-or-southern Germany (and rulers and common people of course might have been out of sync with each other in any given place) thought of themselves as good subjects of the old Empire joining with the Hapsburgs to resist French aggression and invasion versus already looking to the future and the opportunistic benefits they might reap by allying with the French against the Hapsburgs, as then became formalized within the next decade.
@ulr: Sure, the HRE at that point hadn’t been a real state already for centuries, but geographically its parts still counted as Germany. And when the HRE was finally dissolved a couple of years after Haydn wrote his piece, it was a wake-up call for German nationalism in which German-Austrians participated like Germans from other parts of the country, including sending delegates to the revolutionary parliament in 1848. The real rupture only came with the foundation of the Kleindeutsches Empire in 1870, and it took the Austrians two World Wars to get rid of their own German nationalism and developing their own national consciousness.
@Hans: sure, but the question might be whether Haydn’s tune and the associated words were understood by German-Austrians as emblematic of that overall German identity versus a more specific German-Austrian identity compatible with that (just as a more specific Bavarian identity might be) versus some third thing. And I guess ditto for other Germans kind of in reverse, although the anthem was less than a decade old when ethnic-Germans outside Hapsburg-ruled territory ceased to be even nominal subjects of the Hapsburg kaiser.
As far as I can tell from brief googling (and not looking at German-language sources), the post-1815 German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) did not have an inspiring patriotic anthem of its own, although the dangerously “liberal” fellow who wrote the Deutschlandlied’s lyrics had apparently written an earlier set of lyrics (intended to be set to Haydn’s preexisting Hapsburg-praising melody) in praise of the Zollverein.
I do not have a good sense of whether as of 1796-97 most folks in central-or-southern Germany (and rulers and common people of course might have been out of sync with each other in any given place) thought of themselves as good subjects of the old Empire
A somewhat forgotten historic fact is that a number of folks in South-Western Germany/Alsatia in 1796-7 were subjects of the House of Habsburg directly, so presumably felt it was their anthem as well. In addition to Upper and Lower Austria, which still exist, for many centuries the somewhat scattered Habsburg domains between the Rhine and the far end of the Danube (mostly “Swabia” and composing a lot of what ended up being in Baden) were collectively known as “Further Austria” (Vorderösterreich). These were some of the oldest Habsburg holdings (the Habsburg “Caladan” if you like). These territories were all lost over the course of the Napoleonic wars and the Habsburgs were only able to reclaim Vorarlberg at the Congress of Vienna.
“Austria”, certainly prior to the Congress of Vienna, was arguably any domain included in the hereditary lands of Casa Austria/Haus Habsburg, not an ethnic/geographical grouping like “Germany”. So in that sense contemporaries probably would have certainly understood the anthem as an “Austrian” anthem, just not in the sense we understand “Austrian”.
Another interesting tidbit – it was mostly Germans speakers from this region who were invited/forced to repopulate Transylvania after the Turkish wars devastated that region in the 17th century. Hence “Danube Swabians”. Since they were Habsburg subjects, Maria Teresia had some ability to compel migration.
What with the fortunes of war, I don’t know how much occasion folks who lived in z.B. the Breisgau had to hear Haydn’s new anthem between its 1797 debut and the 1805 deal that permanently dumped them into the new Grossherzogtum Baden. Nor do I have a sense for how many, if any of them, chafed under their new Zähringen rulers and pined after the good old Hapsburg days.
OTOH, given that the liberal-reformist-unificationist words of the Deutschlandlied were deliberately written to be set to Haydn’s tune, that might imply it was a well-known tune throughout not-yet-unified Germany. I guess it’s not immediately obvious whether it was well-known specifically with accompanying Habsburg baggage that the liberals might be self-consciously trying to supersede or appropriate or it was more a matter of “say what you like about his politics, that Haydn could come up with memorable tunes.”
It wasn’t a national anthem. It was a personal anthem for the emperor: Gott erhalte Franz, den Kaiser, unsern guten Kaiser Franz! Under his successors it was amended to Gott beschütze, Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser, unser Land, so there’s a country mentioned, but that country must be the k.u.k. one, not an abstract idea of Germany.
Denmark today has both a national anthem and a royal anthem.
I never noticed that further is the obvious cognate. So maybe the intended meaning wasn’t “Front Austria” after all (implying a “Rear Austria”).
As I’ve said before, the point of Austrofascism (1934–1938) was to tell the Nazis: “no, you’re doing fascism wrong, and you’re doing German nationalism wrong; here’s how to do them right”.
Nor do I have a sense for how many, if any of them, chafed under their new Zähringen rulers and pined after the good old Hapsburg days.
Quite a few, if Wikipedia is to be believed. A number of town/cities in the region still proudly display the Habsburg eagle on their city gates, including Freiburg, Breisach and Endlingen a.K. The good burghers of Günzburg had to be forced by the Bavarians during the 19th century to swap out the Habsburg colors for Bavarian blue/white on their city seal.
Apparently Breisgau even sent a delegation to the Congress of Vienna pleading to be given back to the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs were offered a choice of Breisgau or Salzburg and chose Salzburg. So there is an alternate time line where Mozart is no more “Austrian” than Beethoven, but is proudly displayed next to Franz Beckenbauer in the pantheon of Bavarian greats.
No, the Donauschwaben didn’t settle in Transsylvania, but in other regions, along the Militärgrenze; see the map with the settlement areas of the Donauschwaben in German Wikipedia. Transsylvania had its own population speaking German dialects since the 12th century – the Siebenbürger Sachsen, who btw came from quite different areas of Germany (and Flanders).
The Alsation possessions of the Habsburgs were lost to France in the 17th century.
Haydn was ahead of the curve in the anthem business more generally, apparently because his time in London had exposed him to the even more ahead-of-the-curve “God Save the King” which apparently had no analogue in most continental monarchies although such anthems then increasingly became a standard feature over the course of the 19th century. According to wikipedia it was about six decades after the Zähringen dynasty consolidated their more expanded Baden before the arrival of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badnerlied. The lyrics as given have nothing about personal allegiance to the (former) ruling dynasty as opposed to affection for the region-as-such although perhaps there were other verses that were abandoned after 1918? I did like the note that “Many additional verses have been written. Particularly popular are those dealing with specific regions or cities, as well as those disparaging Swabia.”
Two quite different versions (in different dialects, too, but both from Croatia, not the Burgenland).
That would have been totally worth it.
Indeed. This was a wholly feudal thing. German was largely a term for woolly intellectuals and revolutionaries at the time. I just looked through Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe, and even in the 1820/30s Goethe uses “deutsch” only in cultural contexts, but in political contexts it is always “ein/der Fürst”. Pre-1866 Germany and Austria were still largely feudal states.
No, the Donauschwaben didn’t settle in Transsylvania, but in other regions, along the Militärgrenze;
You’re right, lazy typing on my part. The horrors of life in 18th century Banat were apparently what sent a lot of those colonists home as quickly as possible (according to the bio of Maria Theresia I was reading). A lot of the female Donauschwaben were women arrested on prostitution charges or other crimes and then transported. The Militärgrenze was the Habsburg’s Australia for a while.
That would have been totally worth it.
Also The Sound of Music in that time line is set in Linz, and was not as succesful for some reason. “The mills are alive, with the sound of …”
Oh, plenty of hills in sight of Linz, even in the city itself. And you can see the Alps in the distance. ^_^
Anyway: Badnerlied with lyrics (not the anti-Württemberg ones).
They even have a cable train from central Linz to an old castle on a hill, and a terrace with a nice view and acceptable coffee (as I remember). My only exposure to Austrian ‘lect was a guy there asking my friends for a light. I had to ask them what language it was he spoke… Shop and restaurant staff in the city would speak Standard German German when provoked, at least close enough for my 5 years of school learning to cope with. If they didn’t switch to English, this was a few (4+) years ago and I don’t recall precisely.
I don’t know if The Sound of Music could have been filmed there, but why not.
Donauschwaben is come to think of it sort of an odd way to specify the ones that ended up way downstream in the Banat given that the uppermost course of the Danube starts off with “regular” Swabians living on both banks until maybe around Neuberg a.d. Donau, by which point you have transitioned from the Swabian part of present-day Bavaria to the ethnically- Bavarian part of ditto. I’m not looking close enough at topographic maps to see how many if any Swabians-living-in-Swabia-proper live outside the drainage basin of the Danube, but it can’t be too high a percentage. (Okay, if you live around Stuttgart, water flows downhill toward the Rhine instead. But still.)
@JWB: My issue was mainly with ulr’s assertion that the melody “isn’t German at all, but Austrian”, and especiallywith the “at all”; as I said, back then Austrians were a subset of Germans and the Emperor in the lyrics was Emperor of all Germany, so it’s very unlikely that Haydn had intended it to be sung only by Franz’s Austrian subjects.
Donauschwaben is come to think of it sort of an odd way to specify the ones that ended up way downstream in the Banat
Apparently the name refers more to the route the settlers took. The majority of Maria Theresia and Joseph’s new colonists made their way to Ulm and then would travel the rest of the way to southern Hungary down the Danube by boat. Hence “Donauschwaben”.
I said, back then Austrians were a subset of Germans
But back then they were not a subset of Germans. “Austrians” referred to people of various ethnicities who lived in the hereditary lands of the Habsburgs. Some of them were what we would now call Slovenians and some were Italian. Just as “Bohemian” was not a defined ethnic group, but people speaking various languages who lived in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Tyrolians, Linzer, Grazer, even Viennese may have been subsets of Germans but “Austrians” were not.
Given that “Austria” was synomous with the Habsburg family, even a Prussian in 1797 would probably have thought of “Gott! erhalte Franz den Kaiser” as an “Austrian” anthem written by a German (Haydn) who had spent much of his life living in Hungary.
The one I met said Banater Schwaben.
@Vanya: I sometimes wish German and English would distinguish between designations for ethnicity and for inhabitants of a country like Russian does. Things would be simpler then.
Does Russian have any more pairs than русский vs. россиянин?
You could do it in Kusaal completely regularly, e.g.
Mɔɔs “Mossi people”
Mɔɔg dim “Mossi-landers”
Nobody does, though. Ethnonationalism is not part of the traditional culture.
Couple quick thoughts:
– I love Berryman’s poetry and look forward to this, thanks for sharing!
– Agree with the general befuddlement at the category of “epic” being assigned to the Dream Songs, as well as to the “compression of language” thing. Surely the most obvious genre marker of epics is that they tell a long and often very repetitive and formulaic story, while the Dream Songs are the opposite – they tell no overall story with almost no predictability in content.
– I’m not surprised to see Berryman preferred to Lowell here – his linguistic, er, exuberance and idiosyncrasy is definitely something Robert Lowell lacked, and is why I would also personally prefer to reread Berryman of the two.
– Finally, and this is very much a side topic, it’s very hard for me to hear mention of either Berryman or Lowell without thinking of their personal lives and how things have changed in US academia. They used to hand out elite and well-paying professorships to incredibly mentally ill and drunk white men like they were tic-tacs. I know current adjunct professors on social media who have to sleep in their cars and work three or four jobs just to pay bills.
Yes, I often think of that as well.
Does Russian have any more pairs than русский vs. россиянин?
Not that I know of. Usually if ethnicity/citizenship is salient, it is “ethnically X” or “citizen of Y/lives in Y”. Even русский/россиянин is somewhat artificial. But given a very sensitive nature of “multinational people of Russian Federation” something had to be done.
Does Russian have any more pairs than русский vs. россиянин?
“kazakh” vs “kazakhstanets” also exists, although if you google those terms you will discover there seems to be some feeling that the latter term implies second class citizenship and all citizens of Kazakhstan should have the right to be “kazakhi”.
There is definitely a destinction between the adjective “kazakhskii” – which is used as to describe ethnic creations like cuisine, Kazakh-language literature, facial features, etc. – and “kazakhstanskii” which is used for products of the state like agricultural policy, laws, passports, and so on.
At least when I lived in Kazakhstan in the mid-1990s no ethnic Russian, Chechen or German citizen of Kazakhstan would have said “ya Kazakh”, it would have sounded foolish. But to D.O.s point, I can’t say that I heard “kazakhstanets” in the wild, people would have been more likely to say “Ya grazhdanin Kazakhstana”.
@D.O
I came here to make a cheap joke about purges causing upward mobility only if we think their victims went heavenward, but in the process was sidetracked by a remark that the Black Death increased social mobility. I went on a hunt and found this gem. Is this supposed to be … serious?
Yes! This is well established in economic history scholarship (to the extent that any medieval economics can be totally reconstructed, I suppose). There’s no moral claim attached but it seems fairly clear that it raised wages (of, well, survivors) and massively improved their bargaining position as against society’s upper strata.
The more contested claim is Robert Allen’s argument that this divergence persisted, was part of the reason the UK (which was particularly hard hit) had a long-term higher-wage economy, and that such an equilibrium incentivised employers to invest in labour-saving technologies — ergo Black Death -> Industrial Revolution.
(I was taught economic history by a man who hated Allen and shuddered every time he said his name, but nonetheless the thesis feels broadly convincing to me. But YMMV.)
Re compression and the epic; I suppose that the bounds of the poetic form requires you to tell a story in a much more constrained way than allowed by a novel? But that seems a little anachronistic.
Finally it’s nice to consider that a non-zero number of people may have been introduced to Dream Song 29 in particular and Berryman in general by Succession, which must’ve made it just about as high-profile a poem as there’s been in popular culture lately.
I agree with V that the distinction between ethnic and national designation is more salient in everyday language for the adjective than the noun, but even for the noun it’s not uncommon, e.g., in journalism; I came across Kazakhstanec just today. Judging by the name of the good Samaritan, he’s an ethnic Russian, so Kazakh wouldn’t have been appropriate.
FWIW the new martyrs (modal year of death: 1937) described on the English version of this webpage as “Saints of Kazakhstan” are Казахстанские святые in the Russian version and Қазақстан әулиелері in the Kazakh version. I suspect that virtually none of them were ethnic Kazakhs, but at least from the English version of the website it looks like the proprietors are generally trying to present themselves as an authentically Kazakhstani (see, you can do it in English, sometimes) church that is an integral part of independent Kazakhstan rather than a mere branch office of the foreign-sounding Moscow Patriarchate.
https://pck.kz/en/saints-and-shrines/1-kazahstanskie-svyatye/
Recent article on de Valera’s certificate of Irish citizenship, signed by his own justice minister in 1959
Interesting (in the piece mollymooly linked) that the supporter of Seán Mac Eoin thought he could “prove he was an Irishman.” How hard could it be for someone reputedly born in County Longford to do so? I suppose, however, that the birth certificate or equivalent probably evidenced the birth of John McKeon and decisions to take on a more Gaelicized version of a name may have been informal and not bureaucratically documented back in those days.
I take it no one pressed the minister of justice as to what his “personal knowledge” as to de Valera’s basis for Irish citizenship was and how lawyerly he was being in his use of the phrase. It is probably true that he had known de Valera back into the early 1920’s if not further and knew that the Irish birth of de Valera’s mother was one of those things “everyone knew” in the relevant social circles. Whether he would have known more than that is not immediately obvious. Although of course government-generated records were not always as ubiquitous as we have come to think they now are and there are good historical reasons why, even to this day “A reputation among a person’s family by blood, adoption, or marriage — or among a person’s associates or in the community — concerning the person’s birth, adoption, legitimacy, ancestry, marriage, divorce, death, relationship by blood, adoption, or marriage, or similar facts of personal or family history” is admissible evidence* in U.S. federal court of the alleged facts the reputation suggests to be true.
*and the same for a “statement of fact about personal or family history contained in a family record, such as a Bible, genealogy, chart, engraving on a ring, inscription on a portrait, or engraving on an urn or burial marker.”
I suspect that virtually none of them were ethnic Kazakhs
Judging by their names, you can safely drop the “virtually”.
The overwhelming majority have Russian worldly names, and there are a few that sound Georgian, Ukrainian, and perhaps one Tatar. This is not surprising; ethnic Kazakhs used to be almost exclusively Sunni Muslims before (and into) Soviet times, so they would be very unlikely to be found among the Orthodox victims of Soviet terror.
@Hans, by the time the Romanovs were moving deep enough into Central Asia to acquire a significant number of ethnic-Kazakh subjects they had decided as a matter of realpolitik not to encourage any evangelization of Muslims. So there are no pre-Communist Orthodox saints distinguished for missionary endeavors in what’s now Kazakhstan. Attitudes toward Buddhism and “shamanism” were different, so e.g. St. Innocent of Irkutsk could and did try to enlighten the Buryats with the Orthodox faith, as his successors did with the Aleuts et al. even further east.
Interesting … that the supporter of Seán Mac Eoin thought he could “prove he was an Irishman.”
I think you misunderstand. The supporter was saying that everybody knows good old Mac Eoin can prove he is an Irishman, which is more than can be said for certain other candidates (cough de Valera cough).
As regards the issuing of a certificate of citizenship, Sec.28 of the relevant 1956 statute says anyone can apply to the Minister, who will grant one “if satisfied that … the applicant is an Irish citizen”; no specific grounds for satisfaction were specified. [Sec.28A does provide some relevant specifics but was not added until 2004]
@mollymooly: but exactly how was good old Mac Eoin to prove it to a hypothetical doubter? Like most-to-all people, I have no direct memory of my own birth, so I just assume that what my parents told me about it is true, but that’s an assumption. (There’s a birth certificate consistent with the story, but that would have likely been pretty easy to forge given the lax-in-hindsight security protocols of the time.* Other official-looking documents I have, like a soon-to-expire U.S. passport specifying date and place of birth, almost certainly trace back to that birth certificate with no other authentication.)
*Plus at certain times and places in the U.S. the authorities have been willing to subsequently phony-up backdated birth certificates in order to create a paper trail supporting the pretense than an adopted child was not, in fact, adopted. Which however well-intentioned seems a bad idea and not least because it undercuts the integrity and reliability of the relevant public records.
русский vs. россиянин
yiddish, having different priorities as well as geographies, has some vocabulary to mark the difference between, for example, a litvak (who is “lithuanian”* and jewish) and a litviner/litvinke (who is “lithuanian”** and non-jewish).
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* i.e. from the northeastern section of yidishland
** i.e. lithuanian-speaking, or/and lithuanian in an ethnic/national sense
There are further complications when borders change (or were ill-defined to begin with). I have mentioned that my great-grandfather’s family were originally Katznelsons from Bobrusk. These days, the name of the city transliterated as “Babruysk” and lies in Belarus. However, Frank Altschul thought of the family as having come from Ukraine, not Byelorussia. I don’t know what the legal status of these internal divisions was in late tsarist Russia. (My great-grandfather, his father, and his four siblings, came over to America in the the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905—although they didn’t come all together, just one or two at a time, over the course of about a year.) So I don’t know whether it was sensible to think of Bobrusk as being the Ukraine at the time or not.
Of course, Effraim (as he was in the old country) would not have considered himself Ukrainian, since he was a Jew. Moreover, he, along with his sister and three brothers, were natively* fluent in both Yiddish and their local version of the East Slavic dialect continuum, but I have no idea what Frank would have called the Slavic language they spoke. “Russian”? “Ukrainian”? Something else? While my grandfather learned some Yiddish (Frank’s family being actively involved in Chicago Yiddish culture, with Frank as president of the local chapter of the Yiddishe Arbeterring for many years), I don’t think he learned any Slavic from his father or other family members,** so there was no help to be had there.
* Strictly speaking, I don’t know when in childhood they actually learned the local Slavic tongue. They might have learned it at home alongside Yiddish, or perhaps a few years later from their interactions with peers.
** He definitely didn’t learn any Estonian, either. However, while my great-grandmother Lena was from Estonia, I do not actually know how fluent she was in Estonian. I suspect that it was a lot easier to get by in the Baltic states without knowing the indigenous language—just something Germanic like Yiddish—than in the East Slavic parts of the Russian Empire.
@Brett: per wiki, “At the time of the Russian Empire Census of 1897, Bobruysky Uyezd had a population of 255,935. Of these, 67.4% spoke Belarusian, 19.4% Yiddish, 10.0% Russian, 2.0% Polish, 0.5% Ukrainian, 0.3% German, 0.2% Latvian and 0.1% Tatar as their native language.” I don’t think the boundaries between the various internal subdivisions (guberniyas) of the late Czarist regime perfectly tracked the current Belarus-Ukraine border, but present-day Babryusk looks to have been too far north for ambiguity.
When my first father-in-law was an Ashkenazic kid in Havana in the Forties and Fifties everyone in the extended family was bilingual in Spanish and Yiddish but no effort was made to teach anything Slavic to the Cuba-born kids, which meant that Polish was the language adults would use when they did not wish to be understood by the kids, which incentivized one of his cousins to try to learn Polish … (His father is said by family tradition to have been fluent in six-and-a-half languages, with last-acquired English being the “half”; I’m confident I can ID five of the first set of six, but there’s one I’m unsure of which could have plausibly been either Belarusian or Lithuanian but I doubt anyone still alive could say for sure since by the time he was in the U.S. he had very little occasion to use anything other than Yiddish/Spanish/English.)
@J.W. Brewer: I have long been puzzled why Frank (and presumably the rest of the family) thought of Bobrusk as being in the Ukraine. Of course, I only have it second hand, but I doubt that my grandfather could have been mistaken about something like that. I asked one of my grandfather’s first cousins (the son of Frank’s eldest brother) about it a while back, and he didn’t remember any further details, although he knew that now Babruysk is well inside Belarus.
Well, it is true that the terms “Belarus/Belorossiya”, just like “Ukraina/Malorossiya”, were only used as geographic/cultural/ethnic descriptions in the late 19th century and were not applied to legal administrative entities in the Russian empire. Technically Bobrusk was in the Minsk Governorate, a district of the Russian Empire. There was no “Belarus” entity into which Minsk was incorporated. Six governorates in the Northwest (basically modern Belarus and Lithuania) informally comprised the “Northwestern Krai” for statistical and probably military purposes, but that grouping had no formal independent administrative reality as far as I know.
So it is quite possible that Frank had no real idea what the borders of “Ukraine” were since they didn’t formally exist. It may be that a lot of Jews in the Pale considered themselves to be living in “Ukraine” since the meaning “border area” is fairly clear to East Slavic speakers. It may well not have been synonomous in his mind with “Malorossiya” – the geographic area inhabited by “Ruthenians”, “Little Russians”.
It is also likely that Yiddish speakers didn’t really pay much attention to ethnic distinctions between East Slavic speakers, since in that period a lot of East Slavic speakers couldn’t have told you what language they were speaking.
That makes sense to me. Anything in the “borderlands” of Russia, vaguely conceived, could have been seen as “Ukraine.”
If you believe what they say on the internet, “Litvak” as an endonym used by a subset of Ashkenazim, didn’t/doesn’t mean “from Lithuania narrowly-construed, i.e. where Lithuanian is or was the most common L1 of the local gentiles” but instead indicates “from the much larger territory of the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania, most of whose territory was even back then almost entirely devoid of Lithuanian-speakers.” Interestingly enough, the geographical scope of that larger Lithuania (according to a map I saw online mostly defined by isoglosses within Yiddish) comprehends almost all of present-day Belarus but virtually none of present-day Ukraine.* That said, matching up a “natural” territorial distinction within the Askhenazic world to a parallel one within the gentile-East-Slavic world may not have seemed intuitive to the Frank under discussion. And many Litvaks from present-day Belarus may have described themselves when speaking English in a U.S. context as “Polish Jews” rather than “Lithuanian Jews.”
*I think the Ukrainian territory not already under Muscovite rule by the early 17th century belonged to the Polish component of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.
A 1590s map of “Lithuania and adjoining territories” by Tomasz Makowski uses the term “Ukraine” for the territories on the right bank of the Dnipro between Kyiv and Kaniv.(south of Kaniv are campi deserti). So already in the sixteenth century “Ukraine” explicitly designated the southern borderlands, the steppe frontier.
I greatly doubt that in Jewish world it is more clear who counts as Litvak than in East Slavic world it is clear who counts as Ukrainian. One of the clearest distinctions is between hasidim (mostly not Litvaks) and misnagdim (lots of Litvaks). But it doesn’t give a neat geographic distinction and Bobruisk had them both.