New Year, Old Books

One of my many resolutions for the New Year is to try to bring this blog back to life, even if in a slightly different form. I'm going to try (ah, hostage to fortune!) to write more, rather than simply posting pictures and links, although I suppose pictures and links are pretty and informative on certain levels. The blog died away a little bit in 2014 for two main reasons: first, because I've been doing a lot more work this last year, which has mean that I have had less time to post things, and secondly, my general postage and linkage has migrated almost entirely to Facebook. So from now on Trunt will try to have slightly longer posts with a little more effort put into them. Oh well, it's an experiment, and if it doesn't work then I'll think about something a little different later on down the line. Anyway, today is slightly cheating: one final post (pictures and links!) of the books I liked the most in 2014. Five books I'd never read before, plus one I reread with more pleasure than I read it the first time. Maybe the first few steps into longer-form writing will be to say a little bit more about why I liked these books so much. Promises, promises…

Jacqueline Harpman, The Mistress of Silence (Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes, 1995, trans. Ros Schwartz 1997). More about Harpman here (in French).

Sophie Calle, Fantômes (2013). More about Calle here (in French). 

Steve Ely, Oswald's Book of Hours (2013). More about Ely here.

Bengt Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky: A Biography (Med livet som insats, 2007, trans. Harry D. Watson 2014). More information about Jangfeldt here (in Swedish). My review of the book in the Literary Review here.

Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic, Ein Ghetto im Osten-Wilna (1931). More information about Raviv-Vorobeichic here.

Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian). More about Spicer here.

L'année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)

More information here.

Ivan Ivanovich Tkhorzhevsky (1878-1951)

More information here (in Russian).

Лёгкой жизни я просил у Бога:
Посмотри, как мрачно все кругом.
Бог ответил : — Подожди немного,
Ты ещё попросишь о другом.

Вот уже кончается дорога,
С каждым годом тоньше жизни нить.
Лёгкой жизни я просил у Бога,
Лёгкой смерти надо бы просить.

I asked God for an easy life: 'Look how dark everything is all around us.' God replied: 'Just you wait, you'll ask for something else.' The road is coming to its end, the thread of life is thinner every year. I asked God for an easy life, I should have asked him for an easy death.

Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

I've just been to see Zero Dark Thirty, and although I don't usually write reviews of things I read or see or listen to, beyond saying 'I liked it' or, more rarely, 'I didn't like it', I feel somehow compelled to say that I liked this movie a great deal, and that the whole furore (ah, that's why I'm compelled to write about it! A good wholesome furore!) about whether or not it 'endorses torture', or suggests that torture was a useful tool in finding and killing Osama Bin Laden, doesn't seem to me to be the point of the movie. It's a film about knowledge, about how we process information, and the moral uncertainty that arises from this process. It's about how the world (in this instance the political world, the world of spycraft, but I think this applies to the world in general) is never purely black and white.
Three moments:
1. Maya (Jessica Chastain), the protagonist, says at one point something along the lines of: 'I've lost a lot of friends, I feel that I've been left behind to get Osama for them'. In the context of the movie, this kind of eschatological understanding of the mission is quite clearly naive: it may be (it's not entirely clear that it is) what Maya thinks, but we are never given any kind of (with apologies) Hollywood-style implied statement that she is right.
2. CIA chief James Gandolfini asks people round a table to say, yes or no, whether they think Osama Bin Laden is in the house that he may have been tracked down to. Only Maya says, unequivocally, yes; everyone else gives generally positive numbers between 60% and 80%. James Gandolfini is naturally a little put out by this.
3. When they finally get Bin Laden, they find his archives. 'Give me ten minutes to get it all bagged up,' the head of the squad says. 'You've got four before the Pakistani airforce get there,' his commanding officer tells him over the radio. They end up leaving half the archive there.
Unless you can tie up every loose end to every question in every situation, which, given the fact that life is messy, you can't, then solutions to particular problems (from 'Where is Osama Bin Laden?' to 'What Happened Last Night?') will always be a matter of reconstructing possible paths through disorganised chaos, and if you arrive at the 'right' answer, then you are lucky. Quid est veritas, as someone once said.

Misunderstandings in the Translator's House

M.: Well, the normal word is grasa, or gordo if it's an adjective, but you might say tiene sobrepeso or lleva algunos kilos...
J.: No, how do you render fat, not how do you render 'fat'.

The Books I Read in 2012

My favourites. As always, if you asked me tomorrow, I might pick different titles. One point: I tried to reread all Dickens's novels this year. I got quite close, but still have Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood pending. Dickens is not included in this list, because a list that read Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, Barnaby Rudge, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, would look, to the untrained eye, a little monotonous.

Mambrú se fue a la guerra

Fascinating: information here.

She Was Poor But She Was Honest

The above is a 1965 reworking of the glorious original (the lyrics I remember are below): both are worth at least few minutes of your time.

She was poor but she was honest,
Victim of the squire's whim,
First he loved her, then he left her,
And she lost her honest name.

Then she ran away to London,
For to hide her grief and shame;
There she met a wealthy Captain,
And she lost her name again.

See her riding in a carriage,
In the Park and all so gay:
All the nibs and nobby persons
Come to pass the time of day.

See the little old-world village
Where her aged parents live,
Drinking the Champagne she sends them;
But they never can forgive.

In a rich man's arms she flutters,
Like a bird with broken wing:
First he loved her, then he left her,
And she hasn't got a ring.

See him in the splendid mansion,
Eating partridge with the best,
While the girl that he has ruined,
Entertains a sordid guest.

See him in the House of Commons,
Making laws to put down crime,
While the victim of his passions
Trails her way through mud and slime.

Standing on the bridge at midnight,
She says: 'Farewell, blighted Love.'
There's a scream, a splash — Good Heavens!
What is she a-doing of?

Then they dragged her from the river,
Water from her clothes they wrang,
For they thought that she was drownded;
But the corpse got up and sang:

'It's the same the whole world over;
It's the poor what gets the blame,
It's the rich what get the pleasure.
Ain't it all a blooming shame?'

Unexpected Insertions

This certificate (a bit too big for my scanner, so offered here in two halves), awarded for achievement in Socialist Competition between working groups, and with a space for you to fill in your own name, was folded up into the front cover of Volume One (of thirteen) of the Complete Works of Mayakovsky. I've spent a dedicated morning unpacking the six boxes of books that arrived from Cambridge last week, and surprises keep on appearing.

Mr Baptist - tea-pot!

They began to accommodate themselves to his level, calling him 'Mr Baptist,' but treating him like a baby, and laughing immoderately at his lively gestures and his childish English - more, because he didn't mind it, and laughed too. They spoke to him in very loud voices as if he were stone deaf. They constructed sentences, by way of teaching him the language in its purity, such as were addressed by the savages to Captain Cook, or by Friday to Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Plornish was particularly ingenious in this art; and attained so much celebrity for saying 'Me ope you leg well soon,' that it was considered in the Yard but a very short remove indeed from speaking Italian. Even Mrs Plornish herself began to think she had a natural call towards that language. As he became more popular, household objects were brought into requisition for his instruction in a copious vocabulary; and whenever he appeared in the Yard ladies would fly out at their doors crying 'Mr Baptist - tea-pot!' 'Mr Baptist - dust-pan!' 'Mr Baptist - flour-dredger!' 'Mr Baptist - coffee-biggin!' At the same time exhibiting those articles, and penetrating him with a sense of the appalling difficulties of the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

Meshullam Depiera (early C.13th - after 1260)

How Could You Press For Song

How could you press for song from me,
    when my tongue is tied and I'm unworthy,
and pleasure now is gone from poetry,
    until Time restores it to me.
And since my flute's music was halted,
    my mind was settled on the Talmud's mystery;
the Midrash is what I seek out instead,
    and the Mishnah's become a shelter to me:
I study the rules of prayer before standing,
    bequeathal's laws in the Order of Owning,
confronting the Book of Creation's secrets
    and probing the seven letters' doubling.
What good is the verb's declension and pattern?
    Do conjugations make things happen?
Can quadrilateral forms of the verb
    teach us of arcs and expanses of circles?
Has grammar ever made a man wise?
    Are pedants appointed to lead the people?
All their distinctions just weary the spirit.
    There's nothing of worth within their linguistics
(though morphology's known to the masters of Scripture),
    and so they come to the greatness of prophets
with the wisdom of letters - hard and soft -
    hoping that grammar might cut through their haze,
or the comments of Qimhi, of blessed memory,
    and the wise one of Fez, whom they all praise.
The fight over roots and the weaving of words
    is the sole achievement of the winged-one's age.
With dots and lines they live out their days;
    their hearts heavy, they labour in vain -
for seeing the word's form is sufficient
    to know its gender and how it should change.
What are those shifting verbs to me -
    full and hollow, weak and strong?
Only eternity, and with it my honour,
    moves through me with dance-like song.

Yedi'ot HaMakhnon leHeqer HaShira Ha'Ivrit 4, no. 16, ll. 32-end. From the great great anthology of Spanish Hebrew poetry, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492, translated and edited by Peter Cole. Look it out, you won't regret it.

The thing about clichés...

Caran d'Ache (1858-1909)

Pseudonym of Emmanuel Poiré, cartoonist. His pseudonym comes from the Russian word for pencil, карандаш. I'd always thought that the etymology worked the other way round, and that Russians didn't have pencils until the mid-nineteenth century. A little reflection should have made me realise that this was a foolish notion. Карандаш comes from Turkic.

Here's Terence Wade's Russian Etymological Dictionary on pencils:

КАРАНДАШ [karandáš] 'pencil'. 17th century, from Tkc., cf. Turk. qara 'black', taş 'stone', perhaps a reference to graphite shales or the gnesses from which graphite is mined (for increscent -н-, cf. каланчá 'watch-tower', also a Tkc. loan). Caran d'ache is used as a brand name by the well-known Swiss manufacturers of high-quality writing implements.

Wade doesn't mention the link between the cartoonist and the pencil company; the Wikipedia page for Poiré insists that the company was named after him. Anyway, here's a cartoon of his, sent me by my brother Ben:



In related (or almost related) etymological fun, here's Wade on railway stations:

ВОКЗАЛ [vokzál] 'mainline station'. From Eng. Vauxhall, a pleasure garden opened in 1661 and a favourite resort of the English metropolis until its closure in 1859. Similar gardens appeared in [the] 1770s in St. Petersburg and Moscow (as фоксал/воксал, with subsequent replacement of -с- by -з-, by analogy with зал 'hall'), described as 'illuminated garden[s] with pleasure pavilions, buffets, music, plays and comic operas', and later in the provinces. With the advent of railways the Pavlovsk terminus (вокзал) of the St. Petersburg-Pavlovsk line (opened in 1837) combined the functions of passenger hall and concert hall (with orchestra and gypsy singing and, from 1840, symphony concerts). As the prestige of вокзалы as leisure centres declined, the meaning 'railway station' (recorded in dictionaries late 19th century) emerged as the sole connotation of the word.

Griffins

From the etymological dictionary:

grifo (animal fabuloso), s. XIII. Tom. del lat. tardío gryphus, y este del gr. gryps, grypos, id. En la acepción 'llave de cañería', 1884, se explica por la costumbre de adornar con cabezas de personas o animales las bocas de agua de las fuentes.

That is, 'taps' in Spanish are called 'grifos', which is also the word for 'griffin'. This name arises because of the custom of decorating the mouths of springs or public fountains with ornate heads of people or animals.

Happy Festive Etymology to you all!

Iain Lom (c.1625-c.1710)

Scots Gaelic poet, author of the the resonant description of wicked John Menteith, the 'stripped tree of the false apples, Neil’s son of woeful Assynt'. More information here and here.

Santiago Paulós (1983- )

Abuela II con derrame (2003). More information about the artist here. I translated a text for a catalogue of his paintings, which I at first thought was a favour, but now I see was an honour.

Current Favourite Sentences

Fourthly, without regard of them, or of us, I say, that even in regard of Himselfe, Hoc erit Signum. Would there be a proportion between the Signe and the Signatum? There is so. This, holds good proportion with the ensuing course of his life, and death. And, (all considered), it is even Signum adaequatum. We may well begin with Christ in the Cratch: We must end with Christ on the Crosse. The Cratch is a Signe of the Crosse. They that write de rusticâ, describe the forme of making a Cratch Crosse-wise. The Scandal of the Cratch is a good preparative, to the Scandal of the Crosse. To be swadled thus, as a Child, doth that offend? What then, when ye shall see him pinion'd and bound as a Malefactor? To lye in a manger, is that so much? how then, when ye shall see Him hang on the Crosse? But so,-primo ne discrepet imum; that His beginning and His end may suit well and not disagree; Sic oportuit Christum nasci, thus ought Christ to be borne and this behoved to be His Signe.

Beauty and the Beast

Current Favourite Sentences

He translated Ulysses and Gulliver's Travels into Polish, he was the only person in the world to translate all the works of William Shakespeare. His translations of Shakespeare were, however, subjected to critique for the lack of clarity, faithfulness to the original or any literary value.

Current Favourite Sentence

Sin embargo, ¿por qué no decimos que un árbol es más tonto que otro árbol?