The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.1
While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds.2
– Walter Benjamin
On the first of May this year it snowed, blighting the blossoms of the cornelian cherry trees for the second year running.1 I had never heard of cornelian cherries before I came to Armenia, and when our host family in Goris first pressed them on us (‘They’re healthy: eat!’), in the fall of 2008, I was hesitant. I of course ran to the dictionary (who wouldn’t?), which told me that հոն (hon) meant: ‘cornelian cherry’.2 This was not very helpful. Even though they are roughly the size of a cherry, and are a fleshy fruit with a pit, the հոն taste more like a cranberry, and physically resemble a bright red olive, rather than the more familiar sweet or sour cherries:3
cornus mas (1796)
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the cornelian cherry, a member of the dogwood family, has a rich history, which you can read about in a clear and concise article [pdf!] from the Arnold Arboretum. Though of course it is worth mentioning that the seeds of cornelian cherries turned up at the Neolithic settlements at Makriyalos, in northern Greece,4 They also make a less appealing appearance in the Odyssey as pig fodder:
τοῖσι δὲ Κίρκη
πάρ ῥ᾽ ἄκυλον βάλανόν τε βάλεν καρπόν τε κρανείης
ἔδμεναι, οἷα σύες χαμαιευνάδες αἰὲν ἔδουσιν.Circe threw them acorns and cornel fruit to gnaw, which the grunting swine ate thereafter. (10.241–3)5
Right around the time I was reading that fibers from the cornel tree were used to make the Gordian knot, I realized that I was losing track of what I was interested in: how the cornels are used in Armenia.
cornus mas (1885).6
If you catch a cold in the winter and your neighbors hear you coughing, they will bring you a jar of cornelian cherries in syrup (also known as մուրաբա (muraba), which some people like to translate as jam, but it isn’t, it’s fruit preserved in syrup); you are to drop at least one big spoonful in a cup of hot tea and drink it right down, chewing the flesh off the fruit and swallowing the pits: it will cure what ails you.7 Given the high levels of vitamin C in them, it might indeed – though hot tea and lots of rest will probably do more to improve your health. They also make vodka from it, and the resulting liquor is more delicate and flavorful than the diesel-odored, 70% alcohol8 թթի օղի (mulberry vodka) and much more rare.
From Imagined Communities:
It is always a mistake to treat languages in the way that certain nationalist ideologues treat them – as emblems of nation-ness, like flags, costumes, folk-dances, and the rest. Much the most important thing about languages is their capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities. (133)
But also:
If every language is acquirable, its acquisition requires a real portion of a person’s life: each new conquest is measured against shortening days. What limits one’s access to other language is not their imperviousness but one’s own mortality. Hence a certain privacy to all languages. (148)
Even today, the majority of people in poor countries learn all their language skills without any paid tutorship, without any attempt whatsoever to teach them how to speak. And they learn to speak in a way that nowhere compares with the self-conscious, self-important, colorless mumbling that, after a long stay in villages in South America and Southeast Asia, always shocks me when I visit an American college. I feel sorrow for those students whom education has made tone deaf; they have lost the faculty of hearing the difference between the desiccated utterance of standard television English and the living speech of the unschooled. What else can I expect, though, from people who are not brought up at a mother’s breast, but on formula? On canned milk, if they are from poor families, and on a brew prepared under the nose of Ralph Nader if they are born among the enlightened?
– Ivan Illich, ‘The War Against Subsistence’
(in Shadow Work, p. 66)
You reach a point in learning a language – usually sometime shortly after you can successfully ask and understand the way to the lavatory – when one word, usually a little word, will trip you up in supposed subtleties, tumble you into an ecstasy of confusion out of all proportion to its importance in actual use.1 The mention of this word in conversation, the delicate proportions of its appearance on the page, you greet with perturbation mingled with inexpressible2 delight. Oh these little words, of clear and unclear meaning, these adverbs, these prepositions, these postpositions, these nebulous, numinous specks upon the (in)certitude of syntax!
The current irritating particle is the Armenian էլի (eli), which one dictionary helpfully glosses as ‘adv. 1) again. 2) more.’3 A more helpful dictionary observed that eli also means ‘again, anew, more, some more, still, now, well’.4 This is not the half of it. For instance, when someone asks you what you’re eating, you can say: կաբտռֆիլ էլի (kartofil eli) which doesn’t mean just ‘more potatoes’ or ‘potatoes again’, but seems to mean something more like, ‘potatoes of course, as you can see by looking at my plate, numbskull’. գնում ես էլի (gnûm es eli) which isn’t ‘you’re going again’ but is rather ‘you’re going aren’t you’ or ‘so you’re going, huh’. One speaker seemed to use eli in every sentence, much as an English speaker might say ‘like’, ‘well’ or ‘y’know’. Between the dictionary and what I was hearing I became a bit confused, so I looked in our textbook and found the following:
The ‘colloquial հա էլի (ha eli)expression is translated into English as Oh, yes, that’s right. The particle էլի softens the tone of the speech especially in the imperative sentences and could be translated with the word please. It has some other meanings, too. The expression լավ էլի makes a request stronger.5
This was a step in the right direction. I also checked A.V. Gevorkian’s East Armenian Course, but as it has no index and my Armenian browsing skills aren’t particularly good, I couldn’t find an entry on eli, though I did find several pages on էլ (el), which set me to thinking about the stress of eli. Most Armenian words (or all, depending on who you ask or what dialect you’re dealing with) are stressed on the ultima (unless the final syllable is a written or unwritten schwa), but eli is stressed on the penult. This might mean nothing at all, but it could also mean that eli was formed from el i, with the friendly modal word el meaning ‘also, too, as well’ and i being an archaic form of ‘to be’. It’s a comfort to speculate, anyhow.
Frankly I don’t know anything at all about eli and do not have sufficient language to ask the question and understand the answer even if I did know someone who would be able to answer.6 Someday I am sure I shall understand it, and be able to use it correctly and instinctively. For now, though, the Armenian I speak will sound a little odd, eli.
I no longer have conversations – I have grammatical encounters.
We had mock language proficiency interviews the other day, just so our instructors could get a better sense of where we were in our language interview and whether they need to panic about our chances of passing the actual language proficiency interview at the end of training.1 The format was simple, the first part being recorded: tell us about yourself, tell us about your host family, tell us about your plans, ask us some questions, do this role-play.
After the formal interview was complete, the interviewers reviewed our errors. Most of my errors were fairly stupid, and I was aware of them when I made them, but there was one rather consistent error that set me thinking: I was leaving off auxiliary verbs. This is not an uncommon learner error, but what troubled me about it was I was completely unaware that I was saying, for instance: ես ուզում իմանալ… (yes uzum imanal…: I want know.)2 instead of ես ուզում եմ իմանալ… (yes uzum em imanal…: I want to know). I am not unaware that the auxiliary is required in certain tenses and if asked to read or listen or write, would notice or include it without fail. So why was it disappearing (or failing to appear) when I spoke? Assimilation is partly to blame, I think, especially in the phrase I used as an example: too many /m/ sounds. Otherwise, I leave it to theorists of language learning to sound clever about my confusion.
Another thing: so at the end of the interview, when the examiner was reviewing my errors, she said to me, ‘I understand that you’re thinking in English and then translating…’ and that got me thinking, because I didn’t think it was quite accurate. I wasn’t thinking in English so much as I had a mess of meaning (apart from language) that I wanted to communicate; the thought itself (or the meaning) was not in any particular language, and when Armenian failed, my brain supplied German,3 and when German failed, only then did my brain revert to English. It felt like I was dipping into my pool of language knowledge to find the means of communication, and due to the limits of what I have been able to learn, was coming back dry, in Armenian at least. Thus if I were asked, ‘what do want to say,’ I would have an English response, not because the original thought was in English but because English was the means by which I was able to express it.4
Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
Robert Musil, ‘The Paintspreader’,
in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, p. 67
Started reading The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić. The novel proper begins as follows:
1. ‘Ich bin müde,’ I say to Fred. His sorrowful, pale face stretches into a grin. Ich bin müde is the only German sentence I know at the moment (3).*
I note this only because ‘Ich bin müde’ was also the first German sentence I was ever able to recall on the spur of the moment, without a pause for parsing. This amuses me now – as it amused me then – because it is curious to approach a new language with expressions of fatigue.
* translated by Celia Hawkesworth.
When reading, I don’t always look up the words I don’t know the meaning of – usually because context is enough, but often just because of laziness. This habitual sloth set me on a false scent with the following passage:
Nobody, probably not even Kathy, need ever be aware of his spiritual child Katherine Volkov; unless some tittuping archivist picked up a scent on a scholarly ramble and thought to enliven scholarship with muck.
‘Tittuping’ is the word in question, and I assumed a meaning of uppity or impertinent or trespassing. Fear of error hounded me, nagged at my conscience for twenty minutes or more until at last I turned to the dictionary:
tittuping, ppl. a. That tittups*; bouncing, cantering, prancing; transf., rollicking, lively; also, unsteady, rickety.
1796 Campaigns 1793-4 II. vii. 44 My pen glances off into titupping strains. 1809 Theo. Jones Hist. Breckn. II. 542 The poem concludes in such galloping tittuping rhymes as almost compel the reader to forget the merits the author certainly possesses. 1824 Scott St. Ronan’s xiii, The ‘Dear me’s’ and ‘O laa’s’ titupping misses, and the oaths of the pantalooned or buckskinned beaux. 1833 New Monthly Mag. XXXVIII. 300 The appropriateness of the harmony itself sinks before the tittuping of an arpeggio bass. 1868 Morn. Star 30 Jan., For such poetic cantering, such tit-tupping of Pegasus in a rhythmic Rotten Row. 1895 Mrs. B. M. Croker Village Tales (1896) 76 They kept up a steady tittuping canter, raising a cloud of dust.
I mention this only because the equine/hunting overtones make the sentence from White that much richer than it might otherwise have been – the scholar a huntsman pursuing a quarry rather than a nosy rambler peeping through hedges.
‘Tittuping’ is also (just by the way) a participle favored by arts reviewers in UK dailies; see, e.g. The Guardian:
She has a wonderful habit, while trying to hide the escaped prisoner, of hitching up her skirt and tittuping across the stage in high heels.
and Telegraph:
Fragmented and episodic, it starts arrestingly with ghostly shushing sounds and moving searchlights picking out a lone dancer in black tittuping nervily on the balls of her feet.
Such usage defies comment.
* tittup, Chiefly dial. [app. echoic, from the sound of the horse’s feet.]
Postcard (from the editor of the text to his godmother)
found in a copy of ‘Urne Buriall’
and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’
… according to the notion I have of reason, neither the written treatises of the learned nor the set discourses of the eloquent are able of themselves to teach the use of it. It is the habit alone of reasoning which can make a reasoner. And men can never be better invited to the habit than when they find pleasure in it. A freedom of raillery, a liberty of decent language to question everything, and an allowance of unraveling or refuting any argument without offence to the arguer, are the only terms which can render such speculative conversations any way agreeable. For to say truth, they have been rendered burdensome to mankind by the strictness of the laws prescribed to them and by the prevailing pedantry and bigotry of those who reign in them and assume to themselves to be dictators in these provinces.
Lately I’ve been thinking (very slowly) about the word choir and, in particular, its appearance in two familiar poems. The first is Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth‘, and the relevant passage (ll.5–8) runs as follows:
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
I like the reversal of expectations; one assumes that the choir will be composed of boys singing dirges, but instead – with the emphasis of repetition – the choir is composed of the shells hissing over no-man’s land. Owen relegates the expected boys to silence in the next stanza (ll. 10–11). Equally silent, but in a different context, are the choirs in Shakespeare’s seventy-third sonnet (ll. 1–4):
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In this metaphorical application to the empty branches of a tree in winter, choir is used in the (quite common) sense of the place in a church where the choristers stand. Again, as in the Owen poem, one senses the failure (or emptiness) of organized religious expression to capture the emotions the author wishes to communicate. But that is not what I want to talk about. Rather, I’m interested in homonymy – in particular, the word quire. In addition to being an alternate (and archaizing) spelling ‘choir’, a quire is:
1. A set of four sheets of parchment or paper doubled so as to form eight leaves, a common unit in mediæval manuscripts; hence, any collection or gathering of leaves, one within the other, in a manuscript or printed book.
2. A small pamphlet or book, consisting of a single quire; a short poem, treatise, etc., which is or might be contained in a quire. Obs.1
In a bound book, the text-block is composed of quires.2 In the case the ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ it adds to the tone of the shells a second quire, a second voice of mourning: the poet’s own; but I do not think this formal parallel was conscious for Owen. For Shakespeare, though, it’s almost impossible to deny the pun. The yellow leaves lingering on the branches might just as well be the leaves of a book – pages which must be unwritten, of course, when the poet dies (just as the branches ‘where late the sweet birds sang’ become ‘bare ruin’d choirs’).3 The full quires containing the sonnets, however, will continue their serenade (dare I say, ‘twittering’?) despite the changing seasons, despite death, in a typical declaration of immortality. I could go on. But I won’t. It is enough that in the printed editions of these poems the words within the quires sing tunefully, recited through the passing years in many voices, despite the silent or demented choirs mentioned.
The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
8. Philaletheia, the disinterested love of scholarly truth, can lead one into some strange places. The connection of the two marginalia is the urge to recover the sense of an ancient text in full and accurately; to probe past the obscurity of poet and translator alike, to what Lycophron’s persona thought was to happen in those beds.
9. Now as the expositor of all this I begin to feel the onset of fixation myself…
11. Or to put that another way, emendation was more than a hunt for the words of an ancient author, done by rummaging through dictionaries. It was a hunt for the things observed or imagined by that ancient author, and lying behind those words: the life of antiquity, actual or imaginative. Not only is this philology in the broad, continental sense (Altertumswissenschaft) rather than the narrower, lexical English one. It launches him on a search into strange folkways of the Greek mind, that unreason which gave rise to their more admired life of reason…
The boundary between academic diction and obscure fiction is at times precariously thin.1
The news which We desire are not of that nasty species.
The hipster (who aspires to archeologist street-cred because she worked one summer at Petra) was talking about a scandal involving the Met Museum, a fracas she had heard about while working as a law clerk in New York. An eccentric gentleman had, it seems, written a book pointing out that many of the ancient artifacts in said museum ‘have no provenience’ and that the trustees, curators, & co. were, if not actually hushing the matter up, at least not proclaiming this ‘truth’ in large letters on billboards for the edification of the public.1 Museological shenanigans are nothing new (cf. Elgin Marbles), but the word provenience, which I had never heard before, gave me pause: pro-VEE-nyehns? what about provenance (PROH-veh-nehns)?
That I am frequently ignorant and often mistaken, I willingly acknowledge; in this instance, awed perhaps by her sartorial excesses (which, as we know, infallably signify correct English usage), I assumed – with true faith in my capacity for folly – that provenience was a highly specialized museo-/archeo-logical term, similar but not identical to the more familiar provenance. Just to be sure, though, I referred to my good friend the OED, which said:
provenience, n.
= provenance. Now chiefly U.S. (and to some extent Canad.).
[L. provenient-em, pr. pple. of provenire to provene: see -ence. Preferred to provenance by those who object to the French form of the latter: cf. convenance, convenience.]
I will eschew jokes about freedom-findsites and tell you plainly this entry did not content me. Nor, indeed, did that of the American Heritage Dictionary4 & M-W: ‘Alteration of provenance.’ So I did what any self-respecting idiot would do: I checked usage.
As per Google: Provenience – 26,000 results, the most amusing of which was:
…despite his lack of academic connections and his provenience in the often ideological left…
Other results included:
Provenance returned 704,000 results (see notes), none of which made me laugh.
Lack of amusement aside, these results seem to confirm two suspicions: 1) most people say provenance – provenience is a word used by acheologists and their ilk;2 2) Lewis Lapham likes to make snide jokes his audience really can’t be expected to find amusing. Speaking of Lewis Lapham, I decided to search magazines and, since Harper’s doesn’t put anything online except the index, I searched the The Atlantic: provenience — 0, provenance — 31. Finally, there was this helpful on an archaeology info page:
Provenience is another word which has a slightly different meaning when used archaeologically. The dictionary defines provenience (a variant of the more common provenance) as ‘origin’ or ‘derivation.’ In the art world, provenance means the history of an object, where it came from and who owned it. It is sometimes used this way in archaeology as well, when referring loosely to the origin of an object. More technically, in archaeology the term refers to the actual position of the object in three dimensions. Thus, an object’s provenience can be stated as being 30m north, 22m east, and 3.5m down from an arbitrary fixed point on the site (called the datum point).
Venturing, then, into the depths of archeological jargon, I searched the relevant journals with JSTOR where, not surprising, the results were much closer: provenience — 1252, provenance — 1481, provenance+provenience — 112. Interestingly, the two earliest entries give provenance in italics (that is, as a French word; see JHS No. 2 (1881): 100, & No. 3 (1882): 285). The first JSTOR entry for ‘provenience’ is in an article written by the English archeologist Percy Gardner, in his article ‘A Sepulchral Relief from Tarentum’ (JHS 5 (1884): 112):
…as to their provenience, it seems to be established that in some cases at all events they come from cemetaries…
Only the year before, Gardner had used provenance (without italics) in his article ‘A Statuette of Eros’ (JHS 4 (1883): 266 — 274):
…on grounds of style this provenance would seem scarcely probable…
I would guess that Gardner, in using provenience, was trying separate the origin of the object from its art-historical provenance and, precisely because the word provenance has cultural baggage, turned to the relative neologism, provenience. Around this time – viz., when I should be drawing conclusions – I became a bit bored with the entire enquiry, and though hipsters exist solely to be mocked, there is only so much effort I wish to expend in the process. Besides, it might seem as though I were trying to score points off the young woman’s false diction, which isn’t the case at all. If she had been nit-pickingly accurate in all other details, it would make sense to fault her for saying provenience – which taken as narrowly as possible should perhaps just refer to the findspot – for very few items spring miraculously out of the ether: they have a provenience, even if it is unknown. That items in the Met should be without a clear history of ownership and origin is, of course, deplorable;3 but it is not much of a surprise and I find it difficult to imagine why anyone would make a fuss about it. Scholars will argue about the dates of objects, about the craftsman who made it, about its role in history, which suggests that the primary characteristic of such facts is their mutability. Solipsism is, however, the refuge of the uninspired and, having found my haven, I will at last be quiet.
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.