Yesterday I picked up a copy of the 1935 Introduction to Scientific German — partly because I collect chrestomathies, but partly because it's full of fun Moderne illustrations. The first lesson begins with these instructions:
The instructor will read the first paragraph to the class. The students will ask questions concerning words or passages they did not understand. The instructor will answer these questions briefly. One of the students will reread the same paragraph. The whole calss will reread the paragraph in chorus.1. Elektrizität . . . Elektrizität . . . Elektrizität . . . elektrisch . . . elektrische Lampe . . . elektrisches Licht . . . elektrisches Piano . . . elektrische Eisenbahn . . . elektrische Straßsenbahn . . . elektrischer Strom . . . das elektrische Kabel . . . der elektrische Motor . . . die Elektricität . . . die elektrische Lampe . . . der elektrische Stuhl.
I don't know how I'd react to a class in which we all had to repeat "electricity" in unison on the first day.
In the Herodotus thread, Martha mentioned that she doesn't read Greek as a response to my question about which translation she recommended. There's an assumption behind her (no doubt throwaway) comment that I'd like to address: that the quality of a translation is a function of its faithfulness to the wording of a text. Certainly that can be the case — the euphemism of the Penguin translation of Suetonius completely obscures some scandalous gossip about Tiberius — but often that's not the case. Eusebius of Caeserea writes Greek as if it were a functional programming langauge, with clauses nested within other clauses, n-deep. Any translator who hopes to produce actual English will be forced to paraphrase him extensively.
Here is the same passage of Herodotus (4.143) in four different translations. Note especially how each handles the difficult passage in the middle, where Artabanus asks, "What would you like to have as many of as seeds in your pomegranate?" There's really no way to say that in one sentence in English without awkwardness.
The Rawlinson translation Martha's got can be found in a fragmentary state at MIT, but is also accessible at this UK website in a somewhat better condition (though note the missing subject of the third sentence).
Darius, having passed through Thrace, reached Sestos in the Chersonese, whence he crossed by the help of his fleet into Asia, leaving a Persian, named Megabazus, commander on the European side. This was the man on whom Darius once conferred special honour by a compliment which he paid him before all the Persians. was about to eat some pomegranates, and had opened the first, when his brother Artabanus asked him "what he would like to have in as great plenty as the seeds of the pomegranate?" Darius answered - "Had I as many men like Megabazus as there are seeds here, it would please me better than to be lord of Greece." Such was the compliment wherewith Darius honoured the general to whom at this time he gave the command of the troops left in Europe, amounting in all to some eighty thousand men.
My Loeb Classical Library volume of Herodotus contains D. D. Godley's 1921 translation. You can also find this version online, at the well-annotated Perseus Digital Library.
Darius marched through Thrace to Sestos on the Chersonesus; from there, he crossed over with his ships to Asia, leaving Megabazus as his commander in Europe, a Persian whom he once honored by saying among the Persians what I note here: [2] Darius was about to eat pomegranates, and no sooner had he opened the first of them than his brother Artabanus asked him what he would like to have as many of as there were seeds in his pomegranate; then Darius said that he would rather have that many men like Megabazus than make all Hellas subject to him. [3] By speaking thus among Persians, the king honored Megabazus; and now he left him behind as his commander, at the head of eighty thousand of his army.
Perseus also links to the Project Gutenberg version of Macauley's 1890 translation:
Dareios then marching through Thrace arrived at Sestos in the Chersonese; and from that place, he passed over himself in his ships to Asia, but to command his army in Europe he left Megabazos a Persian, to whom Dareios once gave honour by uttering in the land of Persia[126] this saying:--Dareios was beginning to eat pomegranates, and at once when he opened the first of them, Artabanos his brother asked him of what he would desire to have as many as there were seeds in the pomegranate: and Dareios said that he would desire to have men like Megabazos as many as that in number, rather than to have Hellas subject to him. In Persia, I say, he honoured him by saying these words, and at this time he left him in command with eight myriads[127] of his army.
The Penguin edition I managed to find last night contains a 1954 translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt.
Darius now marched through Thrace to Sestos in the Chersonese, where he took ship for Asia, leaving a distinguished Persian named Megabazus to command in Europe. Darus had once paid this man a high compliment: wishing to eat some pomegranates, he had just opened the first of them, when his brother Artabanus asked him whihch of his possessions he would like to be multiplied to a number as great as the seeds in a pomegranate. Darius' answer was "Megabazus": he would rather, he said, have such a number of men like Megabazus than be master of Greece. It was in Persia that Darius paid him this high compliment, and on the present occasion he left him in Europe wiht a corps of the army 80,000 strong.
It looks to me like Macauley is most faithful to the run-on sentences of the Greek, and his avoidance of the Latinized forms of proper names is also closer to the Greek originals. However, the "-aios" endings distract the reader, and "he would desire to have men like Megabazos as many as that in number" makes me want to pull my hair out.
One of my favorite singers, Elliott Smith, unfortunately killed himself not long ago. I was quite broken up by it, which is odd since I never met the guy. I guess these things happen.
Anyway, I was thrilled when I was introduced to the music of Sufjan Stevens recently. Probably the most innovative "pop" singer/composer I've heard since, oh, Brian Eno back in the 70s.
Lots of interesting things about him. His harmonies are complex and unusual, and as far as I know much of his sound is unique to pop music. He is a self-taught musician who plays most of the instruments that appear on his albums. He's played at Lincoln Center. He favors reed instruments, banjos, and is obviously a fan of Vince Guaraldi. He's also a devout Episcopalian, which might not seem worth comment, but in the hipster pop music scene this has caused quite a bit of consternation. And he's embarked on a project to produce an album for each of the 50 US states. He's finished two of those so far: Greetings from Michigan and Come On Feel the Illinoise.
The cute names are misleading. Stevens is a songwriter and musician of rare power and sophistication. Recently, I came across his song about the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy (whose story makes a fascinating read, let me tell you). I wonder if there's something to this? One of my favorite Elliott Smith songs was about the Son of Sam.
One of the things I find fascinating about the Gnostic/proto-orthodox controversies of the second and third centuries is that neither side spends much time actually refuting the other's claims. The recently-translated Gospel of Judas text has a nice example of the the Gnostic side of the rhetoric:
Jesus said to them, “Those you have seen receiving the offerings at the altar—that is who you are. That is the god you serve, and you are those twelve men you have seen. The cattle you have seen brought for sacrifice are the many people you lead astray [40] before that altar.
What's so interesting about this is that in the middle of a century's worth of debate over the criteria for ecclesiastical authenticity, the Gnostics are willing to grant the orthodox claim to apostolicity. Their polemic against the orthodox church portrays Jesus condemning the twelve apostles — which only makes sense for a reader who already accepts the orthodox doctrine of apostolic succession. It's fascinating to see a debate over authenticity in which one side is willing to yield the field to its opponents, and I'm not sure I can think of many modern parallels.
The opponents of the Gnostics, for their part, also partially avoided engaging the Gnostic claims. While they did deny Gnostic claims to special, secret teachings, the main rhetorical device of people like Irenaeus of Lyons was to describe Gnostic cosmology, then say "Man, isn't that stupid?" There is no shortage of modern examples.
Via Done With Mirrors comes this entry from Booker Rising:
About six weeks ago, I took a mitochondrial DNA test which traces the mother's mother's mother's line, etc. [. . .] The results represent only about 1 percent of my total genetic makeup, but identifies this matrilineal line. I'll take a little information, over none at all. Especially since my oldest known ancestor in my mother's mother's mother's etc. line, my great-great-great-grandmother C.D., was born in 1845 in Mississippi and the trail stops there.[I]t is very nice and exciting to have more specific information about at least one line in my family tree. It also made for very interesting conversations with family members over the weekend. More importantly, it provides concrete scientific information about my past and is a tangible reminder that our family's history did not begin with slavery. Although this question crossed my mind: have I now gone from African-American to Mafa-Kotoko-Masa American? Or is that Cameroonian-Chadian-Nigerian American? I have settled on American of Mafa, Kotoko, and Masa descent.
I'm on a Herodotus kick by way of that Victorian book, plus a Margaret Atwood character who writes a science fiction story-within-a-story from ideas partly out of Herodotus. Wonderful stuff, notably when he suggests the British Isles may be mythical and that
...I have never been able to get an assurance from an eyewitness that there is any sea on the further side of Europe. Nevertheless tin and amber do certainly come to us from the ends of the earth. The northern parts of Europe are very much richer in gold than any other region: but how it is procured I have no certain knowledge. The story runs, that the one-eyed Arimaspi purloin it from the griffins; but here too I am incredulous...There's this sense of wonder that I think only turns up in science fiction now. We need undiscovered territory, don't we, and when we run out of it we invent more.
The Gospel of Judas was launched last week, and reactions across the blogosphere have been pretty uniform. Most informed commenters have ranted about the stupidity of the news coverage, the commercial opportunism of the timing, and the shadiness of the antiquities trade. Regarding the document's contents, the consensus among diverse writers is that there's nothing really new here — it's just a typical second-century Gnostic gospel.
That's certainly true, but I think that's an excellent reason for reading the Gospel of Judas Because it's not really different from other Gnostic texts, and because the National Geographic Society has provided the translation for free (download it here.) , it makes a perfect introduction to the subject. Really, Judas has it all:
Best of all, it's only seven pages long. The only way in which the Gospel of Judas is unrepresentative is that it's a bit more readable than most of the Gnostic finds, which is not a difference to be regretted.
Just reading up on some incidental biographical details about Tom Harrisson (1911-1976), as Wikipedia puts it ornithologist, explorer, mass-observer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, film-maker, conservationist, and writer. Here are some bits from his ODNB entry. Crikey: he makes T.E. Lawrence look like a homebody. it's as if Cyril Connolly turned into Colonel Kurtz (then turned back into Cyril Connolly, then turned back into ... etc).
"Harrisson was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 26 September 1911, the elder of the two children of Brigadier-General Geoffry Harnett Harrisson (1881–1939) and his wife, Marie Ellen (Doll; 1886–1961) , daughter of William Eagle Cole, a Norfolk naturalist, and his wife, Rachel, a Liverpool heiress. He spent his early years in Concordia, Entre-Ríos, Argentina, a British railway-building community where his engineer father, who had gone to South America in 1907 to make his fortune, was now the manager. Young Harrisson spoke no Spanish, had no friends, and received virtually no parental attention. His brother, William Damer Harrisson, born in 1913, was his only playmate. In 1914 his father took the family back to England and joined the army; he earned the DSO for building light railways near the front at Gallipoli, and retired in 1918 with the honorary rank of brigadier-general. In the Itchin Valley, Hampshire, the boys' nanny, Kitty Asbury, took them for long walks and their naturalist grandfather sometimes went along; Harrisson became a keen walker and birdwatcher. Their mother, a hypochondriac, gradually degenerated into alcoholism.In 1919 Harrisson's parents returned to Argentina, leaving both boys at Eastacre junior preparatory school, Winchester, where their ignorance of ‘games’ made them pariahs. While at Eastacre, and later, at Winton House preparatory school, Winchester, they spent their holidays at down-at-heel vicarages with assorted Danes and other ‘foreign’ children. In 1922 the general took them back to Concordia, for the best year of Harrisson's childhood. He made an aviary and kept notes of bird behaviour. His father taught him to hunt with a gun, fly-fish, and climb mountains. This was the high point of his relations with his father. Back at Winton House in 1923, Harrisson felt more a foreigner than ever but later credited his ‘feeling of belonging to England and not belonging to it’ for helping him see his ‘home’ country clearly ...
At Harrow School (1925–30) Harrisson was allowed by an enlightened housemaster to wander for miles (on foot) to gather material for a monograph on birds of the Harrow district. He took part in several bird censuses and in 1930–31, with another public schoolboy, he enlisted 1300 volunteer birdwatchers in a census of the great crested grebe; updating this census afterwards became a fixture of British birdwatching.
Harrisson went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1930, where the pedestrian teaching of the natural sciences bored him. By then he was already recognized by the Oxford naturalists Charles Elton and Max Nicholson as a pioneering ornithologist, having served in that capacity on the Oxford University expedition to St Kilda in summer 1930. Before turning twenty-one he was ornithologist on two more Oxford expeditions: to Norwegian Lapland (1931), and, in 1932, to Sarawak, northern Borneo. He organized the Sarawak expedition and found, for once, that he liked and was liked immediately by a group of people, the longhouse dwellers of north-central Borneo. Ever after, he fitted in better with ‘primitive’ people abroad and with working-class people in England than with members of his own class.
Before leaving for Borneo, Harrisson had a final row with his father (who later disinherited him in favour of his brother). His father could not forgive him for quitting Cambridge (late in 1931), after more than a year of neglecting his studies and engaging in drunken escapades in the company of young literati (including the novelist Malcolm Lowry and the journalist John Davenport) as given to drinking and brawling as he. His failure to take a university degree proved a lifelong obstacle to obtaining the recognition which he craved and may have deserved. For the rest of his life he pioneered in various fields, full of fresh ideas, energy, and not always pent-up rage.
Harrisson's fourth Oxford expedition (1933–5) was to the New Hebrides. When the rest of the Oxford party left Santo Island for home in 1934, Harrisson got to Malekula, where cannibalism was still widespread. Unarmed, barefoot, with no money, he made friends with the cannibals and took censuses that helped to disprove the then popular thesis that the islanders were dying out from a morbid despair caused by culture shock; he found instead that their numbers were increasing. Harrisson's focus had shifted from birds to people. In his best-selling book, Savage Civilisation (1937), he defended the cannibals' way of life and their rights to their own land. He spoke before the Royal Geographical Society and appeared frequently in the press, and on BBC radio and television ...
In 1944 Harrisson was approached by Special Operations Executive, then looking to help its Australian equivalent obtain intelligence on Borneo in advance of an allied invasion. On 25 March 1945 Major Tom Harrisson and his seven seasoned Australian special operatives parachuted onto a hidden plateau in north-central Borneo. Harrisson's unit produced, in terms of damage to the enemy in relation to its own casualties, by far the best results of any Second World War Australian special operations unit. Harrisson provided behind-the-lines intelligence and recruited a thousand blow-piping headhunters who killed or captured 1500 Japanese, losing only a handful of Borneans. Harrisson won the DSO (1946) and dozens of his men received honours.
After the war, lacking credentials for a good job in Britain, Harrisson abandoned his English wife Biddy (Betha Wolferstan Clayton, née Pellatt (1907–1961)) and family, acquired, seriatim, two Kelabit tribeswomen as concubines, and made his home in Sarawak for the next twenty years. Biddy continued a trend towards alcoholism; she divorced Harrisson for desertion in 1954.
As government ethnographer and museum curator of Sarawak (1947–66) Harrisson defended, and recorded the details of, inland Bornean societies before outside influences had transformed them. In 1958 one of his television films about Borneo, Birds' Nest Soup, won the Cannes prize for documentaries. He wrote about Borneo in myriad scholarly journals and in the British press. The best-known of his dozen books, World Within (1959), describes pre-war life among his favourite tribespeople, the Kelabits, and gives an account of his wartime exploits.
Harrisson explored large portions of Borneo, receiving the prestigious founder's medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1962). In Sarawak's Great Cave of Niah, in 1958 his diggers found a skull of Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man), at a level carbon-dated to 40,000 years BP. Lacking stratigraphic methodology, Harrisson faced scepticism from many archaeologists. His reputation as an amateur and limelight seeker, and his violent quarrels with noted anthropologists, helped to keep the Niah skull from receiving the credence it may have deserved.
Harrisson pioneered techniques for saving endangered species, such as the green sea turtle and the Philippine tamaraw, which are still in use. His best collaborator was his next wife, Barbara Brunig, née Guttler (b. 1922), a German who had accompanied her first husband to Sarawak and divorced him to marry Harrisson. Married on 14 March 1956, they gained custody of Harrisson's son in 1957, and tried, unsuccessfully, to make a home for the boy in Kuching. The couple pioneered raising orphan orang-utans and reintroducing them to the wild, via a protected half-way house in the jungle. They continued to organize digs in Sarawak, Brunei, and Sabah, and made the Sarawak Museum in Kuching (founded in the nineteenth century by the second white rajah) a model of its kind.
After Harrisson's retirement from the British colonial service at the mandatory age of fifty-five, the couple went in 1967 to Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, where he was appointed senior research fellow. They were active in the species survival activities of the World Wildlife Fund and made annual trips to Brunei, as guests of the sultan. Tragically, Harrisson was permanently banned from Sarawak in 1967 because of rumours and press stories, never substantiated but spread by his many enemies, that he had misused his position in Sarawak to smuggle out Borneo treasures.
In the late 1960s, as US support for south-east Asian studies diminished, Harrisson sought work in Britain. The historian Asa Briggs, then vice-chancellor of Sussex University, invited him to install the Mass-Observation archive at Sussex, with Harrisson as visiting professor. There would be no salary, but Harrisson resolved his money problem by entering into a passionate affair with Christine Forani, née Madeleine Lucie Antoinette Bonnecompagnie (1916–1976), a Belgian heiress and Second World War heroine parachutist, widow of an Italian baron, who adopted Christine as her nom de guerre. In 1969 he left Barbara for Brussels and his baroness. After his divorce at the end of 1970, they married in London on 9 January 1971. Christine, a sculptor, could be as wild as Harrisson. When the two were not being thrown out of restaurants, or having a riotous good time, or travelling throughout the Far East and north Africa, he worked on the first book to emerge from the revived M-O. The result, Living through the Blitz (1976), was, according to Stephen Spender, ‘not quite the masterpiece by a man of immensely independent mind—Churchillian, Lawrentian—which one hoped it would be’ (The Guardian, 29 July 1976). It was, none the less, wrote C. P. Snow, ‘the best account of the 1940–41 Blitz ever written’ (Financial Times, 5 Aug 1976).
Before the book appeared, its author had been killed. Harrisson and his wife died on 16 January 1976, in a collision of their minibus with a timber lorry on a Thai road north of Bangkok. Cremation later that month at the That Thong wat in Bangkok was followed by interment of his ashes alongside Christine's in the cemetery of Uccle, Brussels, on 2 February, in the tomb of her first husband, Baron Antonio Forani. A memorial meeting for Harrisson at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 17 March 1976 brought together notables from British media, ornithology, and animal conservation, with sprinklings of politicians and literati.
Rarely able to control his temper or his drinking, Tom Harrisson made many enemies but was a sincere, effective advocate for, and protector of, the common people, whether in London's East End, Bolton, or the tropical bush. He bullied his subordinates but gave them interesting work, the training to do it and, behind the scenes, got them recognition and promotion. His museum staff stayed with him for twenty years. A dreadful husband, father, son, and brother, he was often a loyal friend. He brought fresh ideas to many fields: fauna conservation, ornithology, sociology, archaeology, and anthropology, through hundreds of articles, scholarly and popular. Despite careless editing, some of his books remained in print and readable decades after his death. He believed in transmitting knowledge in a form that anybody could use. Two words he hated were ‘obvious’—nothing is—and ‘vulgar’—everything should be.
Judith M. Heimann
Via The Valve, it's The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. No, not Primo Levi. Hardly. In fact, a little heavy on the cheap plot reversals. But fun. Got me through tax time here anyway.
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Excellent if depressing stuff at Margaret Soltan's University Diaries about the horrible goings-on at Duke. Much of what she says rings true me. I was particularly struck by this passage, which begins with a quote from a reader:
"I went to Landon's sister school and my sister was friends with some of the boys on Landon's lacrosse team. The cheating scandal discussed in this article, and the recent Duke scandal, don't really shock me. Yes, cheating was widespread at Landon and other local prep schools, as was heavy drinking to the point of alcoholism by age 18. But I don't think, as UD suggests in a later post, that either privilege or alcohol is the issue, per se. In many ways, I think it's the parents. In my experience, parents of prep school kids were more committed to their own work and social lives than parenting. I saw parents with very high expectations of their kids, but little commitment to teaching their children values. Money and socializing always seemed to come before family. Parents often turned a blind eye to drinking or even supplied the alcohol or the money for renting beach houses where kids spent unsupervised weeks drinking and having sex. There is only so much Landon, or Duke, can do when the parents exert enormous pressure on their children without teaching them values."I take issue only a little with this insightful remark. These parents have in fact taught their children values, values thoroughly internalized by some of the men on the Duke lacrosse team. These values are hyper-competitiveness, materialism as emotional compensation, neglect of non-instrumental human relationships, exclusivity and the fanatic small group bonding that accompanies it, and contempt for the less wealthy and less socially successful.
Very weird report on gendered taste in novels. I wonder if any of the difference has to do with what people think they're expected to like?
The folks over at Wikipedia are trying to figure out whether the Texas Revolution featured the first use of a steamboat in warfare. I've helped them out as much as I can, but military history really isn't my thing.