War and Peace

Anyone who has tried to read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Moscow: The Russian Messenger, 1869) or any other great novel in translation knows that translation is a creative process and requires the translator to reenter the work. Understand the author's design. Choose words that support that design. Give characters the lifelikeness the author gives them. And so on.

In trying to read War and Peace, for instance, I have given up because the translator had not solved the problem of Russian naming conventions. Each character in a Russian novel has a given name, a patronymic, and a family name. The practical translator picks one version of the person's name and pretty much sticks with it (if he or she expect me to keep reading, anyway).

Then, to make things worse, it's always somebody or other's name day.

Maybe you can tell by now that my irritation got the better of me, and more than once, at the two Natalyas' name day in Chapter 1.

I have also given up reading a translation because the writing sounded stilted, as if the translator just plodded along word by word, instead of choosing the best word for the job, and the publisher didn't know the difference.

Just go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble, search on "leo tolstoy war and peace," and take a peek inside different editions, and you will see what I mean. With War and Peace, the translator has a particularly difficult problem: the first sentence is in French and, to be true to the novel, must stay in French or somehow retain its French "flavor."

A word to the wise. If you are translating a work of fiction, be prepared truly to become the author's voice. If you are reading a work of fiction in translation, be picky and look for the integrity the work of art deserves.

Bartie and Me

I tell my Sheltie (Shetland Sheepdog) Bart that he rivals Marley for the title, "world's worst dog."

He jumps up on people. He poops in the house. He runs around the dining table so I can't catch him. He rummages through the trash. He barks continuously to call everyone's attention to his delight in going to his crate for a treat. He pulls on his leash and slips his collar so that he can greet oncoming dogs. And, for his latest trick, he eats through the sheetrock wall that I have shoved his doorless crate up against.

The astute dog person will note that Bart's and my many failures in training are really my problem, not his. And, in his defense, he is eating through the wall because he is nervous about the new dog.

Like parenting, training a dog requires selfless devotion and martial law (so to speak). A happy dog knows who the leader of the pack is: me. A happy toddler knows the answer to the question, Mama, can I get a candy bar? A happy teenager (if there can be said to be such a one) knows the answer to the question, Mom, can I stay out all night at Jared's party?

The question of training comes up with one dog, of course, but add another and you see the beauty of tough love. Practice sessions. Drills. KP (Kitchen Patrol). Physical training. Perfect, beautiful discipline.

When you are using an abbreviation, follow it immediately with the full name, in parentheses if your sentence structure is similar to mine. Sheltie (Shetland Sheepdog). KP (Kitchen Patrol). Otherwise you run the risk of confusing and irritating your reader.

Brewing Up Some Trouble

I'm the absent-minded-professor type. When I should be minding my p's and q's or making sure there are no obstacles in my path, I am thinking about the origin of the word coffee and its many wonderful synonyms. Well, yes, a cup of coffee would be good about now, and, as I told my historian friend, "More coffee, more Diane!"

Anyway, the etymology of coffee is in dispute (surprised?), but most sources agree that the word originated in Africa, where the Coffea plant grows, and came to us from the Arabic قهوة (qahwah), the Turkish kavfeh, and, through trade (ca. 1598) between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, the Italian caffè. (For another post, we got the concept of zero in much the same way.)

My favorite way to make coffee at home is right away, first thing in the morning.  Beyond that, I use a one-cup drip filter and cone. The problem here is that you have to take care of a lot of things, and without drinking any coffee first, I  might add. Find a clean cup. Boil water. Figure out where you are keeping the filters these days and fit filter paper into the cone. Measure out coffee. Pour boiling water over coffee into cup.

While my mind is in the ivory tower thinking about the origin of the word coffee, wondering if there are some lovely famous quotations about coffee like there are about tea, promising myself to look up the difference between moka and espresso, I discover that I forgot to buy coffee filters. And not for the first time, either!

What to do? Remember Harper, Paul Newman's detective character in a 1966 movie with Lauren Bacall playing his client. (Harper, directed by Jack Smight, performed by Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, and others, Warner Bros.) Harper wakes up, bleary-eyed, stumbles around the kitchen trying to make coffee, finds that he is out of Chemex filters, and goes through the trash until he finds one he can use, all the while thinking about his next move in solving the case.

Forgetfulness

One factor of aging is that old memories tend to return; hence, as I mentioned in the wicker-cage post, you may be fortunate enough to remember parts of famous passages you once memorized.

Another factor of aging is that some memories tend to slip away, old and new alike, a process aptly described in Billy Collins's "Forgetfulness." The poem first came to my attention on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, March 22, 2011, on National Public Radio (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/?date=2011%2F03%2F22).

Now, Billy Collins was born in 1941, in March, nearly eight months before Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). So before the United States entered World War II. As his poem suggests, he had to memorize the names of the nine muses in school (or maybe he did not have to, but was a very eager student who took it upon himself to do so).

I was born at the end of World War II, exactly nine months and two weeks after V-J, Victory over Japan, Day (August 15, 1945). And since memorization had become unfashionable in education, a discipline much swayed by fashion, I did not have to memorize the names of the nine muses, although I had to have read their names over at least once and learned where to look them up.

So, I think, as I hear the poem on the radio or read it over for myself, who are they, these nine muses? What are their names and what creative endeavor is each associated with? There is something to be learned here, and, since it's classical, probably something with some interesting follow-ups. Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse!

So we have Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Euterpe (song and elegaic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), Urania (astronomy). Soon enough, you will notice that I rarely pass up an opportunity to spoon up (or force feed) the classics.

And what of import did we learn here? Well, sadly, not much. But my faith in the knowledge of the classics remains unswerving, and, the next time I post, I will be sure to call upon my muse, Thalia.

The Wicker Cage

Suppose I am a prisoner of war being held by the Viet Cong. I have nothing to do. I have little to eat or drink. Worst of all, I have nothing to read. A little dramatic? Maybe. But as a word nerd I feel the need to plan for times like these.

When I was in grade school and high school, my teachers, who had had to memorize and perform set pieces like Chaucer's prologue, "whan that aprille with his shores soote," Shakespeare's Hamlet's speech "to be or not to be," or the last nine lines of Bryant's "Thanatopsis,"made an important change in American pedagogy, one of several changes which, to my mind, have not been for the better.

Students were no longer required to memorize famous passages.

Why? I don't know. Memorizing a famous passage is not easy and reciting it in front of people, at least for me, harder still. (Is it my turn yet? Oh, God, do I go now?) Maybe my teachers experienced this same kind of performance anxiety.

They also seemed to think that memorization was not a challenging mental activity. A parrot could do as much.

And they already had the shards of our civilization knocking around in their pockets and nobody was sure which ones were important and which ones were not and maybe it was time to let all that go.

But memorization is good practice, and of a different kind than other kinds of learning. (Give it a try, if you don't believe me.) As Sherlock says in "The Long Fuse" (Season 1, Episode 8, November 29, 2012, Elementary, CBS, Television) "The brain is a muscle, Watson, and needs to be exercised regularly, lest it turn flabby."

And the passages you learn by heart when you are young, will, if you are fortunate, stay with you. Or, as I have done with a scant few, can possibly be recovered if you study them again. Then you will have a little piece of beauty to take out and admire from time to time. For those times you find yourself suspended in a wicker cage in the middle of a jungle with nothing to read.

Queen of Hearts

Did you know that a free ticket is called an "Annie Oakley"? (I didn't either, and maybe, since ticket takers no longer punch holes in tickets, this usage is becoming outdated.)

When you get an admission ticket for free ahead of time, it is hole-punched just like it would have been had you used it to gain entry. And then it looks just like Annie's Ace of Hearts: one of her most famous sharpshooting tricks was a bullet through the center of a playing card, the Ace of Hearts, at 90 feet with a .22 caliber rifle. (She could also split the card edge-on.)

Annie was born to a poor Quaker family in Ohio in 1860. She taught herself to shoot when she was 8 years old and supported her family by selling the game she bagged to families, restaurants, and hotels in Southern Ohio. By the time she was 15, she had paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm.

For two of those years, 1870 to 1872, her mother could not take care of her and her sister and sent them to Darke County Infirmary, where she learned to sew and embroider. (Later, as a performer, she made her own costume, according to her idea of modesty: long-sleeved blouse, below-the-knee skirt, and leggings.) She was put out as an indentured servant to a couple she later called "the wolves"; they abused her physically and mentally and treated her like a slave.

When she was 15, she won a shooting contest with a traveling Irish marksman, Frank Butler, who had bet a hundred dollars that he could beat any local fancy shooter. They were married soon after, in 1876. In 1885, they joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, left the wild west show and toured Europe, and returned to the show. Her fellow performer Chief Sitting Bull named her Watanya Cicilla, or Little Sharpshooter.

In later years, Annie was injured in a train collision and a car accident and turned to acting. But she continued to set sharpshooting records. Although she did not think women should have the vote, she taught many women to shoot and occasionally supported young women who needed financial help. When she died, at age 66, her husband quit eating and died 18 days later: a real-life love story.

With much indebtedness to the Wikipedia article on Annie Oakley.

Spine Poetry

Think "spine poetry." Now close your eyes. What comes to mind? Turns out you're supposed to take book titles as printed on book spines and arrange them in a stack so that they can be read as poems.

Spine poetry is the creation of artist Nina Katchadourian, who began her "Sorted Books" project in 1993 and just published, with Brian Dillon, twenty years of her own images in Sorted Books (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013).

I first heard about spine poetry during National Poetry Month, April, when the local city library I volunteer at had a brief presentation introducing the "Spine Art" installation at the Library of Congress. (Although I would like very much to create timely posts, for example, a just-pre-April post to coincide with National Poetry Month or the "Spine Art" installation, I'm not sure I can commit to that. And then, where does it end? Do I write a themed post for every calendar event in the fields of Literature and Language? You see the dilemma.)

My musings on spine poetry: First note that a picture person, not a word person, came up with it. A lovely idea, very fun, according to which books become objects, just like they do when interior decorators arrange books on the coffee table by cover photo or on the bookshelf by color or size.

Objects as opposed to what?  Of course books are objects. But they are, and especially were, also the keepers and purveyors of civilization. And the more we are aware of that, as we are during a time of extreme change, the more books also become objects, whether to be collected, published in attractive series (like Penguin's modestly priced "Hardcover Classics'), cannibalized (as by publishers who depart from the 500-year-old principles of book design by placing an index, for example, with the front matter), or used as building blocks for structures or works of art.

We (civilization, such as it is at this point) are in the midst of a change of untold proportions in moving our print archives to the Internet. Assuming, that is, that we can keep track of the technology, a nagging problem for those of us who have lived through the transition from slides to celluloid film to digital "film" or records to tapes to dvds.