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I’ve frequently had occasion to complain about translators simply skipping passages they found difficult, and I’ve run across some in my latest reading. I decided to finally try one of Mark Aldanov’s historical novels, and I chose Истоки (‘Sources’) [Russian text: I, II], which I have a hard copy of — it’s set in the period leading up to the assassination of Alexander II, in which I have an interest at the moment — and I’m enjoying it; it’s easy reading compared to many of the modernist writers I’ve struggled with, and it’s good Tolstoyan fun to have historical personages show up to interact with the fictional characters. In the section I recently finished, a restless young painter named Mamontov leaves Russia with the vague plan of visiting Bakunin in Switzerland and Marx in London, partly to try to understand their ideas and partly with the hope of painting them. He learns in Zurich that Bakunin is living at the Villa Baronata on Lago Maggiore, and when he stops for a rest in nearby Locarno he discovers the great anarchist is actually in town giving a lecture, which of course he decides to attend. He meets Bakunin afterwards and is invited up to his rented room, where they eat, drink, and talk a great deal. At some point it occurred to me to wonder how Catherine Routsky had handled some of the material in her 1948 translation Before the Deluge; as I suggested above, it did not go well.

The first instance is minor and I wasn’t surprised at its being skipped; when Bakunin sizes up our hero, bedraggled from his long travels, he offers to treat him to dinner: “I have ten francs and dinner here only costs one and a half.” The embarrassed Mamontov insists on paying, producing this exchange:

— Ради Бога!.. Напротив, я прошу вас сделать мне удовольствие и честь быть моим гостем. Для меня будет величайшим удовольствием, если вы со мной пообедаете.

— Я могу сделать вам и это удовольствие, и эту честь, — благодушно ответил Бакунин. Он произносил «чешть». — Разве вы тоже при деньгах?

Routsky renders it:

‘On the contrary, I am asking you to give me the pleasure and the honour of being my guest. It will be a great pleasure for me if you will have dinner with me.’

‘I can give you that pleasure and that honour,’ Bakunin replied good-naturedly. ‘Are you, too, in funds?’

The substitution of Ради Бога! ‘For God’s sake!’ with “On the contrary” is pathetic, but I can’t blame her for skipping “Он произносил «чешть»” ‘he pronounced [chest′ ‘honor’] chesht′,’ since I can’t think of a good equivalent. But a few pages later, when Bakunin is complaining about Marx and his fellow Germans and their delight at the victory of Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, we get a whole chunk of text omitted:
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A recent Works in Progress post by Henry Oliver is far too long and repetitious (ironically, because his subject is style in English), but it has some useful thoughts and examples; if you’re good at skimming it might be worth taking a look at. (Warning: he quotes William Rees-Mogg approvingly. But then he quotes Helen de Witt approvingly, which redeems him to some extent.) This is the nub of it:

From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter. […]

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English.

Nothing earthshaking, but worth thinking about. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)

Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) posted on Facebook as follows:

It occurred to me the other day that almost all of my handful of publications on Selis-Ql’ispe (a.k.a. Montana Salish) are in Festschrifts and conference preprints and other not-widely-distributed volumes. So I just revised my website for the first time since 2012 (!!) (O.K., I admit it, I’m lazy) and added (almost) all the papers, plus a few additional non-Salish papers, like the one on editing Language (2020) and the autobiographical article (2022).

Needless to say, I was intrigued, and I followed the link to her Home Page and thence to Sarah Thomason’s Online Papers; even if you’re not interested in Salishan you might enjoy “On the ?joys? of editing Language“:

My seven years as editor involved an immense amount of paper. Those were still the dark ages before submissions, referee reports, and other official journal communications were all handled electronically. All the routine correspondence went into the LSA archives long ago, but copies of most of the interesting non-routine correspondence remain in my personal files: complaints about editorial bias, correspondence with authors who tried to engage in duplicate publication, the three lawsuits threatened by disgruntled book authors who hated the published reviews of their books, correspondence with authors who wouldn’t check their data properly, and miscellaneous complaints about this and that. […]

I will report on some of the lessons I learned in my editing days, focusing on five main areas: referees and referee reports (§2); how to interact effectively with journal editors (§3); how to handle data responsibly (§4); the sin of attempted duplicate publication (§5); and book reviews, book reviewers, and threatened lawsuits (§6).

I’m glad I didn’t have to try to do that job!

I saw a mention of a Boris Vian novel called Trouble dans les andains and was troubled by the fact that I had no idea what andains were. Wikipedia gave me an idea, with illustrations, and when I went to the English article I discovered that they were windrows. Ah (said I), now I not only know what andains are but I have a clearer idea of what windrows are! The OED (entry revised 2024) defines windrow thus:

1.a. A long line into which mown grass, hay, barley, etc., is raked before being gathered into heaps or cocks (cock n.³); a row of sheaves of corn, heaps of turf or peat, etc., set up to be dried by exposure to the wind. Also in extended use: a pile of dead branches, vegetation, etc., gathered to be burnt.

?1523 On the next day turne it agayne towarde night and make it in windrowes and than in small hey cockes.
J. Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry f. xv
[…]

2. Originally and chiefly North American.

2.a. A long line or elongated pile of something, formed by the wind, resulting from other natural processes, or gathered together by human intervention; spec. (a) a row or pile of trees blown down by the wind (cf. windfall n. A.1a); (b) a long pile of leaves, dust, etc., heaped up by, or as if by, the wind.

1829 Here and there a wind-row, along which trees had been uprooted, by the furious blasts that sometimes sweep off acres of our trees in a minute.
J. F. Cooper, Wept of Wish Ton-Wish vol. I. ii. 28
[…]

2.b. A long ridge of earth, gravel, etc., displaced by a grader or similar machine; esp. (chiefly Canadian) a ridge of snow heaped along the side of a road by a snowplough.

1907 The cross-town trolley-cars glided along between the windrows of the snow the big plow had whirled from the tracks.
Evening Mail (Halifax, Nova Scotia) 2 November 7/4
[…]

The etymology is boring (wind + row), but to make up for that the French one (from the above-linked Wikipedia article) is unexpected:

Latin ambitanus de ambire : aller des deux côtés (mouvement de la faux) : mesure équivalente à un pas, puis surface de céréale ou de fourrage abattue d’un coup de faux.

The Russian equivalent, валок, is a straightforward derivation from вал ‘rampart, dyke, wall.’

Incidentally, you may think, as I did, that the Fenimore Cooper novel quoted in the 1829 cite has a very odd title, and Wikipedia provides confirmation: “The title puzzled the public and did not satisfy them so it was only used in the United States.” It appears to mean ‘someone who was wept over’; from the novel: “The wept of my household is again with us.” He may have been wildly popular, but a competent wielder of the English language he was not.

Joel at Far Outliers posts excerpts from Aleksandra Jagielska’s Culture.pl article on entomological etymology:

The word pszczoła [‘bee’] has Proto-Slavic origins, probably even Proto-Indo-European – if we go back that far in the language, we will discover that the Polish pszczoła and the English bee most probably come from the same Proto-Indo-European form *bhiquelā! In Proto-Slavic, the proto-word was *bьčela or *bъčela (they differ in the quality of the yer – a Proto-Slavic vowel). If we wanted to discover the etymology of Polish pszczoła (bee), we’d discover that it is an onomatopoeic word: probably the Proto-Slavic root was an onomatopoeic *bъk-, *bъč-, related to the Proto-Slavic verb *bučati, brzęczeć – to buzz (about bugs). The suffix *-ela would indicate the meaning of *bъčela as ‘that which buzzes’.

The name of this bug was initially pczoła in Poland, with the consonant š (sz) eventually inserted. Language strives for economy, also in terms of articulation, hence the consonant group pč- (pcz-) was expanded to pšč- due to the desire to avoid excessive articulatory energy input. This also explains why the spelling of the word pszczoła is an orthographic exception, since there was never any ‘r’ in this word that could become a ‘rz’.

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Two trivial but entertaining items:

1) Ian Frazier’s NYRB review (archived) of Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science by Alicia Puglionesi, an account of the American Society for Psychical Research, includes this piquant bit:

The society also set up such Borgesian-sounding entities as the Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments, the Census of Hallucinations, and the Committee on Thought Transference.

Unfortunately, the archives of the ASPR turn out to be incredibly boring: “As the hours went by, Puglionesi found herself confronting a tedium requiring a ‘devotion to something beyond the self, something so vast that it can only be glimpsed through the labor of many human lifetimes.’”

2) Our old friend Conrad sent me this Guardian link with the comment that he “felt this was one for you”; after discussing the phenomenon of the apparently near-universal opinion in the UK that “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” (commonly sung at sporting events to the tune of the riff of the White Stripes’ 2003 “Seven Nation Army,” with which I was completely unfamiliar even though not only did it receive “widespread critical acclaim” but it is “arguably… the world’s most popular sports anthem” — I have to agree that the riff is catchy as hell), Jonathan Liew provides a semantic analysis that makes it Hattic material:

Let’s start with the word choice, which feels subtly telling in this case. If Boris Johnson was, as the darts crowd sang in late 2021 at the height of the Partygate scandal, a “cunt”, then somehow calling Starmer a “wanker” is altogether more piteously dismissive – insinuating not just degeneracy but a kind of bashful cowardice. The first word imputes a straightforward roguishness, perhaps even a grudging regard; the wanker, by contrast, is essentially beneath contempt.

Thanks, Conrad!

When I’m feeling low I like to pull a book off my poetry shelves and immerse myself in something completely different; as often as not it’s one of Trevor Joyce’s, and just now I was flipping through What’s in Store (see this post) when I was caught by his lovely version of the sorrowful old Irish ballad “Seán Ó Duibhir a’ Ghleanna” (sometimes Englished as “Seán Dwyer of the Glen”). You can see the whole thing in Irish with a literal translation (and some YouTube links) here; I’ll quote the first and last stanzas of Trevor’s version:

Through the early sunshine
of this summer morning
hounds raise up their howling
   while the sweet birds sing.
The small beasts and the badger
keep covert with the woodcock,
all lie low from the echo
   and the booming of the guns.
Fox red on rock keeps lookout
on the horsemen’s hurly-burly
and the woman by the wayside
   lamenting scattered geese.
But now the woods are levelled
let us leave familiar landmarks
since, Séan, my friend, it’s over,
   the game is up and gone.

[…]
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I recently looked up the word ipecac (an emetic), which turns out to be short for ipecacuanha, and found that although the OED’s ancient (published 1900) entry gives this etymology:

< Portuguese ipecacuanha /ipekaˈkwanja/ , < Tupi-Guarani ipe-kaa-guéne.

Notes
According to Cavalcanti, cited by Skeat Trans. Philol. Soc. 1885, 91, the meaning of ipe-kaa-guene is ‘low or creeping plant causing vomit’. The word is said to be a descriptive appellation applied to several medicinal plants, the proper name of the Cephaëlis, which produces the ipecacuanha of commerce, being poaya.

…the currently accepted one is much more interesting; Wiktionary:

From Brazilian Portuguese ipecacuanha, from Old Tupi ypekakûãîa, from ypeka (“duck”) +‎ akûãîa (“penis”).

Also, my wife and I watched Sentimental Value last night; it’s a terrific movie, and all the acting is good, but Renate Reinsve is spectacularly good and should get all the prizes. My question, of course, is about her surname; this site says “The name is derived from the Old Norse elements reinn, meaning reindeer, and sve, which can be associated with to be or to dwell,” but there doesn’t appear to be an Old Norse sve, and I’m wondering if anybody has any better information.

The French writer and scholar Chloé Thomas has a remarkable essay in Arts of War and Peace called A Wilderness of Mirrors: Eliot, Max Frisch and the C.I.A. that starts:

In 1964, Swiss author Max Frisch published the novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein, commonly regarded as one of his greatest achievements. The title, using a form of subjunctive associated with reported speech, which knows no strict English or French equivalent, translates literally as Let’s pretend my name is Gantenbein. Although difficult to summarize, the novel revolves around an unnamed narrator who, after having been left by his wife, invents a number of fictitious characters to help him account for his experience, “trying out stories as if they were clothes” […]

The 1966 French translation of the book was published as Le Désert des miroirs […], a title that, at first glance, seems to be meant as an echo to the “mirroring” theme of the novel, with its interplay of identities, at least one explicit mirror scene (when Gantenbein actually tries out clothes in a shop), and an experiment with mirroring names in an Oriental tale made up by Gantenbein for Lila, with characters named Ali and Alil. Gantenbein’s French translator was André Coeuroy. […] The French title, however, stems directly, it seems, from the one that had been chosen for the English translation by Michael Bullock, which appeared in 1965, a year before the French version: The Wilderness of Mirrors […]. It was T. S. Eliot, obviously, who provided Frisch’s novel with both its English and, indirectly, French titles. Here is the passage from “Gerontion” from which it was taken, towards the end of the poem:

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? […] (Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 38)

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I was rereading one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Зеркало (Mirror) (that webpage has the original Russian alongside an abridged translation by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy), when I stuck on an unusual word I had hurried over before in my attempt to make sense of the whole thing: саднят [sádnyat]. I had scribbled ‘smart, burn’ above it in my copy, which was all I really needed in context, but what kind of verb was it, and where was it from? Before proceeding with those issues, though, I’ll quote the relevant section from Jean Marie Schultz, “Pasternak’s ‘Zerkalo’” (Russian Literature XIII [1983]: 81-100), as a sample of how much work it is to figure out what’s going on in his early poetry:

Here the verb “sadnit'” compacts two distinct sensations, one tactile and one olfactory. First, with its meaning of “to smart” or “to burn”, “sadnit'” indicates the feeling that an abrasion might produce; thus, the verb conveys the sensation the trees (if personified) might be expected to have as their sap flows out over the broken limbs. Second, that the trees burn the air with their sap relates possibly to the very pungent odor that pine resin from newly broken limbs has as it fills the air, particularly after a rain (VIII:iii) when all smells are intensified.⁴

fn 4: Sap is a tree’s natural antiseptic, and the burning sensation produced by the application of an antiseptic to a wound is well known. However, it must be remembered that this is a humanly perceived feeling so that we have here, as throughout the poem, the human experience imposed upon a seemingly impersonal description. Furthermore, the allusion to the “medicinal” function of sap prefigures the medicine, “lekarstvo”, introduced in the next stanza. Likewise, the underlying evocation of the sap’s odor here also works toward the development of a sub-motif revolving around scent (V:iii).

OK, so what’s the story with the verb? Well, Wiktionary provides help with its usage;
it occurs in collocations like но́гу са́днит [nógu sádnit] ‘my leg is sore’ and на се́рдце са́днит [na sérdce sádnit] ‘my heart hurts.’ But what’s really interesting is the etymology, given in Russian Wiktionary: it’s derived from Old Russian садьно ‘wound,’ which in turn goes back to Proto-Slavic *saditi, from Proto-Indo-European *sodéyeti, causative of *sed- ‘to sit.’ The English verb sit is from that root, but cast your eyes down that page and see how much else is! The thematic root present *séd-e-ti gives Proto-Celtic *sedeti, which with a couple of prefixes gives us Welsh eistedd and hence eisteddfod; the -ye- present *sédyeti gives Greek ἕζομαι (as well as sit); *séd-os ~ *séd-es gives Welsh hedd ‘peace’; *sod-ó- gives Proto-Slavic *xodъ and Greek ὁδός; *sōd-o- gives Proto-Germanic *sōtą ‘soot’ (“reflecting the nature of soot as accumulated particles that sit on surfaces”); *sōd-u-s gives Proto-Slavic *sadъ ‘grove; garden’ (hence Russian сад, which also features in the poem); *sod-yo-m ‘seat’ gives Old Irish suide and Latin solium; *sed-lo- ‘seat’ gives Proto-Germanic *setlaz; *ni-sd-ós ‘nest’ (with zero grade) gives Proto-Balto-Slavic *nísda (leading to Russian гнездо) and Proto-Germanic *nestą (leading to nest)… well, I could spend all day lost in the web of connections. In Russian alone, the root is the ultimate source of посадить/сажать ‘to seat, plant,’ сиделка ‘(sick-)nurse,’ седло ‘saddle,’ село ‘village,’ сажа ‘soot,’ досадный ‘annoying,’ наседка ‘brood-hen,’ население ‘population,’ осадки ‘precipitation,’ осада ‘siege,’ председатель ‘chairman, president,’ расселина ‘crevice, fissure,’ сосед ‘neighbor,’ ссадина ‘scratch,’ усадьба ‘farmstead, country estate,’ and всадник ‘rider, horseman’ (as well as many others). This is the kind of thing that made me want to be a historical linguist.