American life had changed him. Now he loved hand tools–oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.

-Ha Jin,* A Free Life

I’ve started writing in English about ten years ago, when I found that English was the only language my friends wanted to read in. Even the Russian ones, from whom in America, just like from me, our native language bled out slowly. We’d sing and stop mid-couplet because the next word was a word we no longer knew. Like a parasitic chick of a cuckoo, an English word lay in our minds instead.

Some of us sought treatment–a few daily doses of Babel, Gogol, Chekhov, Mandelshtam, Tsvetayeva, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin. Others let the mother tongue dry and shrivel. Me, I’ve spent years trying to treat English like another variety of Russian. But English can’t do the things that Russian can. Rhymes don’t come easy. Word order isn’t a matter of tone and style, but grammar. An ear for Russian rhythms is useless. Sometimes, I ditched English and wrote in Russian, knowing I wrote for no one and that I was completely alone. At other times, I just got angry–at English and its ways, at my readers for not understanding, and at myself for failing to make them.

Then yesterday, somewhere between reading Ha Jin and reading Thomas Hardy, I realized that I’ve fallen for this tongue, this Anglo-Saxon Latin bastard that swells and prospers by plundering the languages of this world and taking their best words. I stumbled on this line of Hardy’s in “Neutral Tones”–”And a few leaves lay on the starving sod”–and realized I didn’t know exactly what the word “sod” means. So I went down the Oxford English Dictionary rabbit hole. Sod. Peat. Turf. Greensward. The distinctions between them are the kind of details I would have never thought of (a peat is a slice of soil taken from a bog, but turf must be taken from a dry patch of land; a sod is brick-shaped, a greensward is thin). And, of course, for most of these, the origin might be Pixie, might be Frisian, might be Dutch–but is mostly unknown.

We are alike, English and I. I am Ukrainian by birth and upbringing, half-Russian, half-Jew by ethnic origin and culture, and now an American by choice. I, too, am a mongrel. What better language could I have hoped for to write in?

* In the interests of full disclosure, mentioning now that Ha Jin is my former teacher.

One of the few bright spots in Chris Weitz’s screenplay for the Golden Compass were the lines spoken by the villainous Tatars. Just before the final battle begins, Lyra walks up to the line of armed men with their daemon wolves and spits. The ringleader answers by saying to another man, “Дай волчонку полакомиться.” “Set your wolf on that child,” go the subtitles and that’s probably what Weitz wrote for someone to translate. The actual Russian: “Treat your cub to a snack.”

Business as usual in Hollywood is to render dialogue into dismal Russian the likes of which would be never uttered by a native speaker. I bet if you compared the actual Russian spoken in most American movies to machine translations, the machines might win. Then again, maybe the comparison is nonsensical. Maybe the machines have been doing the translations all along–what, with the studios skimping on paying the writers at every turn and now with the strike. You don’t have to go farther than the last season’s Heroes Odessa storyline to see what I mean (though I reserve the right to blog at length about this in the future). In any case, after years of twitching in my theater seat, when I heard Weitz’s Tatars, I was thrilled. That moment made the movie for me almost worth the price of admission.

But how evil the Russian Empire is in the story. In our world, Tatar is still a living language. In The Golden Compass, not even a trace remains. Between themselves, the Tatars speak only Russian.

Lest you think the problem is at its worst on this side of the Atlantic, here’s a site [ru] I’ve unearthed recently about the glitches of English going into Russian. One poster talks about the movie Fangs and the way the name of its town of Scottsville has been merely transliterated rather than translated into Russian. Ergo, instead of something like Scottish-Town, we are offered the city of Скотсвил–or Swineville.

Another user points out [ru] how thoroughly the trailer for Sweeney Todd has been–pardon the pun–butchered on one of his DVDs. “How about a shave?” becomes “Not bad for a name.” The translators came up completely short when they heard “about him” come out of Helena Boheme Carter’s mouth: the best they could do was turn the phrase into a proper name, Bakhim.

Bakhim, Google tells me, is a company based in Ufa, which, of course, is a city with a population roughly a quarter Tatar….

If conceptual concreteness may be measured by the density with which thought and articulation permeate each other, then Adorno’s style can be characterized by the constant striving to be concrete. It is, however, a concreteness which has no place within the intellectual horizons of English. In English what is concrete is what is immediate, tangible, visible. Whatever the historical causes of this empirical orientation may have been, contemporary English does not tolerate the notion that what is nearest at hand may in fact be most abstract, while that which is invisible, intangible, accessible only to the mind may in fact be more real than reality itself. “Aren’t there enough words for you in English?” Joyce was once asked: “Yes,” he replied, “there are enough, but they aren’t the right ones.”

I am interested in how he uses this information in teaching. I did once explain in a lecture some traditional stylistic guidelines like the recommendation to avoid adverbs, participles, and repetitions to my students in terms of the difference between English and other languages. There are few natural rhymes in English for example, whereas they are plentiful in Italian, French, and Russian. Thus repetitions–even of morphemes like -ly and -ing–can sound jarring to a sensitive ear. For the same reason, rhymes in prose mostly sound childish in English. Latin and Russian are both heavily inflected and can express thoughts in fewer words than English with greater flexibility in word order. Yet in English words like “to,” “the,” and “of” cannot be avoided; the contrast with the polysyllabic monsters some of my students like can give their sentences the appearance of monsters à Frankenstein. What English has on most other languages however is the richness and vastness of its vocabulary and the vigor of the constant tension between its Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words.

Kinney quotes Paul Auster, who said this much better in his introduction to the Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry:

Although English is in large part derived from French, it still holds fast to its Anglo-Saxon origins. Against the gravity and substantiality to be found in the work of our greatest poets (Milton, say, or Emily Dickinson), which embodies an awareness of the contrast between the thick emphasis of Anglo-Saxon and the nimble conceptuality of French/ Latin—and to play one repeatedly against the other—French poetry almost seems weightless to us, to be composed of ethereal puffs of lyricism and little else. French is necessarily a thinner medium than English. But that does not mean it is weaker. If English writing has staked out as its territory the world of tangibility, of concrete presence, of surface accident, French literary language has largely been a language of essences. Whereas Shakespeare, for example, names more than five hundred flowers in his plays, Racine sticks to the single word “flower.” In all, the French dramatist’s vocabulary consists of roughly fifteen hundred words, while the word count in Shakespeare’s plays runs upward of twenty-five thousand. The contrast, Lytton Strachey noted, is between “comprehension” and “concentration.” “Racine’s great aim,” Strachey wrote, “was to produce, not an extraordinary nor a complex work of art, but a flawless one; he wished to be all matter and no impertinency. His conception of drama was of something swift, inevitable; an action taken at the crisis, with no redundancies however interesting, no complications however suggestive, no irrelevances however beautiful—but plain, intense, vigorous, and splendid with nothing but its own essential force.” More recently, the poet Yves Bonnefoy has described English as a “mirror” and French as a “sphere,” the one Aristotelian in its acceptance of the given, the other Platonic in its readiness to hypothesize “a different reality, a different realm.”

My little lecture seemed to produce a lot of nodding heads in my class last spring, and I’d like to think it was fairly successful. Yet Kiteley seems to be using the question of how English is different from the other languages to discuss not only the (dis)advantages of English, but also to move towards a duscussion of how to infuse our language with some of the foreign tongues’ better traits. He quotes Jameson:

Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent…than in the widespread notion that the style of these works [Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno and Marcuse] is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract—or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools….What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, [these standards] were intended to speed the reader across the page in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence?

On a lighter note, elsewhere a Japanese major writes a guide to how to study the language:

I don’t care how many anime tapes you’ve watched, how many Japanese girlfriends you’ve had, or books you’ve read, You don’t know Japanese. Not only that, majoring in the godforsaken language is NOT fun or even remotely sensible. Iraqi war prisoners are often forced to major in Japanese. The term “Holocaust” comes from the Latin roots “Holi” and “Causm”, meaning “to major in Japanese”. You get the idea.

And so, sick of seeing so many lambs run eagerly to the slaughter, I have created This Guide to REAL TIPS for Studying Japanese. Or, as is actually the case, NOT studying it.

23D. Seven letters. Tight-bodiced dresses

“Dirndls,” Mrs. Cohen and Shortz? Really?

One of the most common ways to tease an Eastern European in America is to mention the number of consonants languages like Polish and Ukrainian string in a row. “How do you pronounce those names, anyway?” I’ll tell you how: say “dirndls” twenty times, then try reading a last name like Polarski. Something tells me three consonants in a row will suddenly seem like nothing.

All joking aside, the word is derived from the German dirne, or a girl, and its derivative, dirndlkleid. So at least the British, once the vogue for the dresses began, had the sense to skip some of those beautiful consonants.

Of particular note perhaps is a translation of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, an awe-inspiring Palestinian poet whom I once saw read at Swarthmore. (And considering the omnipresence of FBI and police on campus that day for a translation event, I probably should describe it at some later date.) The man left me wonder-struck by his poems–in any language–and you can enjoy one in both English and Arabic at the link above starting at about page 23 of the .pdf file.

Translation is the only art that is like writing. All of writing’s difficulties, obsessions, challenges, thrills, impulses and second thoughts apply—everything but what to say next. That free sample of content can make working on translation seem like heaven: an appealing illusion of supercharged ability that must be modified by the idea that all writing is translation, converting experience or emotion into language. At a certain point, when the goal is a work of art, the work of the translator and the work of composition are identical. All writing is translation; and conversely translation, after all, is writing.

The magazine is filled to the brims with great contemporary literature from around the world translated into English. I haven’t made it through the entire magazine yet, but it looks like a great volume to have around. Go read the whole thing.

*Besides being a former Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has published a translation of Dante’s Inferno. In interests of full disclosure, I should also mention that he also teaches poetry at the Boston University creative writing program, where I am a student in fiction.

His real name was Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich. Then he changed it to something even more Jewish for his nom de plume. Something tells me this guy was unafraid of anti-semitism. Based on his stories, he seems unafraid of a great deal of things. Towards the end of his life, he moved to New York and saw his stories turned into the small English-language musical called A Fiddler on the Roof. This 2002 New York Times article discusses his resurgence in Russia.

Wikipedia quotes the following passage to illustrate his style:

“Pinhas Pincus is of less than normal height, with one small eye and one bigger eye. When he talks, it seems as if the eyes talk to each other; the smaller eye asks for and seeks approval from the bigger eye; and the bigger eye gives its approval of every plan or undertaking. When he first came to Nuremberg, there was no limit to his sufferings; he had to endure starvation, misery and personal insults from his German brethren. In Nuremberg he was protected from massacres, but was not protected from starvation.” —from An Early Passover, translated by George Zinberg

Here’s another one, with my own (rough) translation by way of M. Shambadal’s Russian version of “One hundred and one”:

The beautiful ancient river Bug, flowing in the South between the Dnepr and the Dnestr and falling, just like them, into the Black Sea, crosses two provinces–Kherson and Podol–in the exact spot where, spread about, lie two Jewish towns–Golta and Bogopol. Both settlements comprise one town really, yet the river has divorced them, torn the whole into halves, and the people bound them together with a bridge, so that both the settlements again reunited to become a single town: there you are, as if Bogopol, but wait five minutes, and you are already in Golta. And if you turn back–the same thing: a moment ago you were in Golta, and before you even have time to look around, there you are again in Bogopol!

For many years, Golta was considered a village, while Bogopol–a town. That was why according to the May 3, 1882 law, Jews could not settle in Golta anew.

From that time, Golta became very attractive for the Bogopol Jews, who were suddenly burning with the desire to settle exactly in Golta and precisely after the 3rd of May.

From that day forward, Bogopol Jews began to move to Golta in secret. Though they did not succeed. They were asked to go back and cross the bridge back into Bogopol: “Gospodin Itzko, kindly return to the Bogopol rabbi!” The Jews would either silently turn around and сurse, smiling, “China to Berdichev!” or,

“For pity’s sake!” the immigrant would say, “I’m a Goltan; for years now, I have my own small town at the yeshiva! I have how many relatives at the cemetery!”

The China to Berdichev reference, by the way, mystifies me a great deal. If anyone has any insight, I’d love to hear about it. In Russian, it reads: “А форфор на Бердичев!”

The Kherson province in question is, of course, the place where I grew up.