Toast to jube jube

My son had set the toaster to “2” which merely warms the bread, in my opinion. Maybe he doesn’t want butter to melt in his mouth… When I noticed this I turned it up full. The toaster got confused, or did both settings at the same time and the toast came out burnt. As I looked at the black edges the word “carbonised” tip-toed across my mind in slippers. We are carbon-based creatures. I had never made the connection before! When we say someone “is toast” we mean they are finished (the complete opposite of saying they are “the toast of”…) but we are all the product of cosmic combustion, so we actually start out as toast. We could well be the black bits scraped off the breakfast of some mysterious greater entity…

The village of Catrine. Cotton mill built 1787, demolished 1963

Catrine was a hamlet of eleven houses when a cotton mill was built there in 1787. The mill burnt down in 1963. When I was growing up, my father worked in the nearby Barony pit and my mother worked in the textile industry. The shops in the village included a fish monger and an ironmonger, where you could find everything from nails to washing machines. Today, most of the shops are boarded up, except for five or six pubs. The coal mines have closed down and the cotton industry has been delocalised. Wikipedia says Catrine is now “a picturesque village”.

Someone asked me where the cotton came from to run the mill, and I replied America. Glasgow also flourished as a port importing American tobacco. I am currently taking a drug called Champix to stop smoking. It makes me field weird, depressed one day, elated the next.

The first word that caught my attention since my last post is “inadvertently”.

[Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin inadvertentia]

I just like the word, as I also like jeopardy, which, who would have guessed, comes from the French ‘jeu parti”

1. Risk of loss or injury; peril or danger.
2. Law. A defendant's risk or danger of conviction when put on trial.

[Middle English juperti, from Old French jeu parti, even game, uncertainty : jeu, game (from Latin iocus, joke, game) + parti, past participle of partir, to divide (from Latin partīre, from pars, part-, part; see part).]

Phonetically so close to leopard, no doubt some Martian trying to decipher English would think the meanings were related. Not so, not even the origins of the word:

“In Antiquity, it was believed that a leopard was a hybrid between a lion and a panther, as is reflected in its name, a Greek compound word derived from λέων léon ("lion") and πάρδος párdos ("male panther")”.

Another single letter change takes us to leotard, as in tutu (jube jube...)

“Writing is a performance art, so expect to experience performance anxiety, almost every time you write. Think of it as page-fright. :-)”

One of my favourite artists in one of my favourite newspapers:

I was reading in the aforementioned news-paper about arms being shipped to Mugabe via South Africa and the wooden language of diplomacy clunking out “we don’t have the authority” to not deliver this cargo when all of a sudden the sun came out:

“Dockers in Durban were refusing last night to unload the ship. The SA Transport and Allied Workers Union's general secretary, Randall Howard, said: "Satawu does not agree with the position of the government not to intervene with this shipment of weapons. Our members will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road."

Phew. There are still some people alive in the world.

Fulcrum
n., pl. -crums or -cra (-krə).

1. The point or support on which a lever pivots.
2. Zoology. An anatomical structure that acts as a hinge or a point of support.
3. An agent through which vital powers are exercised.

[Latin, bedpost, from fulcīre, to support.]
(point d’appui, pivot.)

“Pivot” in French is also the name of the presenter of the longest-running book programme, and so his name has become synonymous with literature.

I had never heard of an “Interest-only mortgage” before. The mind boggles.

And the last word of today is allay:-

“Research allays fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels”

Oh, I’m so relieved. I think of the little Dutch boy determined to save his community by sticking his finger in the hole in the dyke, but the adults can’t decide where the hole is, or there are so many holes they can’t decide which one he should be allowed to try to dam with his finger, and meanwhile the tsunami approaches...

And the myth isn’t based on true, European experience. There was no little Hans the Dutch boy. The Americans made it up.

A straightforward subset

Like Humpty-Dumpty, I sat on a wall and was amazed to see flowers growing out of the stone. I had seen these flowers before, I knew they were called Giroflée, but I didn’t know what they were called in English. The words “Wall, flower!” came floating into my mind and the feeling was like something dawning on me. I mentally clapped my hands. I told my French friends that in English, the first meaning of “wallflower” that comes to mind is a girl left leaning against the wall at a dance, when the boys or men come to pick their partners. In French the expression is “faire tapisserie” – to act as wallpaper. When I got the chance to look up Giroflée in the dictionary, I was delighted to find that sure enough, they are wallflowers. Intrigued, I googled around a bit and found a pleasing passage to the effect that the figurative usage is the same in German, and the “coincidence is purely coincidental”.

When wall & flower were juxtaposed in my mind, just after the pleasure of the dawning that I was seeing wallflowers for the first time, I felt downhearted, as if the word was reminding me of unpleasant experiences. The ‘poor me’ syndrome. But as I thought about the dancing classes at school, and the Sunday school parties you could be invited to or had to invite a partner to, I remembered some of my “cavaliers” (horseman, flippant, dancing partner…) Alasdair Cairns, Ian Niven (both of whom were butchers’ sons) and Jimmy Logan… I didn't feel particularly beautiful, but I wasn’t downright ugly either. There is no sacrosanct “past” – we re-write it every time we think about it, depending on the frame of mind we are in at the moment. And if My Story is open to interpretation, what about His Story?

Giroflée of course reminded me of girofle and the Body Shop mistranslation of Clover (Trèfle) as clou de girofle (cloves). Which took me to trèfles, one of the four suits in playing cards. Darn me if I could work out how they got “club” from “clover".

I eventually found the answer:
club, n., a suit in a standard deck of cards, from a translation of either the Spanish basto or the Italian baston (both are cognates of baton). Use of the term in English dates to 1563. The origin is not obvious because over the years the symbol on English decks of cards changed. English cards adopted the symbol used in French decks, where it is called a trèfle, or trefoil, but kept the old name club.

Listening to radio 4 I heard the word ‘flaccid’ - I know what it means, but it is not a word I have ever used - it is one of those words I lay no claim to. Not mine.

English is a language I use, but I don’t use all of it. My English is a subset of “English” – as I suppose your English is, too. In fact, nobody actually uses - passively or actively – the whole language. And yet we manage to communicate.

And if My English is a straightforward subset, what could I say about My French? I feel somehow “entitled” to use English as I please, because I was born in the British Isles, but I have no such sense of entitlement in French – I am a humble borrower, a mere uninvited guest… Which reminds me how impressed I was the first time I read Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent. I found his use of language wonderful and was gobsmacked to read on the cover that English was not his native language.

Food scarcity and Zimbabwe are the main worries in the news at the moment.

Quantum entanglement

Here is Françoise Guerlin singing Que reste-t-il de nos amours… I hope to put my own version of this song online, in French and English, with Bertil Sylvander au piano, within the next ten years.
I have tagged it as Françoise Guerlin, Trenet. Ah, the joys of French polysémie!!! (traînée = vapour trail, among other things).

I came across an article in the Guardian the other day that reminded me of The Prestige, and Todd McGowan's article:

“[…] teleportation is actually already being done by physicists. It relies on a deeply strange phenomenon called quantum entanglement, which physicists have already used to "teleport" a photon 89 miles between La Palma and Tenerife in the Canary Island group. […] "You are not actually moving the photons from one place to another because you are destroying the original. What materialises at the other end is your twin which has all the information of the previous object."

Car pictures by J.W. Vraets.

Cumnock Pool

My paternal grandfather worked as an ostler in a coalmine. Or was it my great-grandfather? He cut grass for the horses on the way to work. He was kicked by one of the horses and eventually died of complications from the wound. My maternal grandfather also worked with horses at one time, carrying bricks for the building of Cumnock swimming pool.
My mother lived in Kier Hardie Hill, within earshot of the pool, and when they needed her they used to play “In the mood” over the tannoy. They laid a wooden dance floor on the tennis courts just next to the pool, and used the pool’s loudspeakers system for the music. At that time, my granny used to sing in Alex Cairn’s skiffle band at Cumnock dance. My mother told me she stopped smoking two weeks ahead of each gig.

There were Free French soldiers stationed at Pennylands camp between Auchinleck and Cumnock. Some of them were very young, they lied about their age to fight with De Gaulle, and my grandparents used to invite them home. Two of them were called Max. One of the Maxes jumped off the balcony at Cumnock town hall dance in tribute to my granny’s singing – well, they were parachutists.
Anyway, in a round-about way, I believe that’s how I ended up in France, because there was a deep love of things French in my family… among other things, they taught each other songs. "J'attendrai le jour et la nuit..."

Hostelry. Revelry. Ribald (gosh, more sex! Who would have thought... (written after jostle)). “He’s a rastler” was always spoken with contempt, so it probably meant someone who was not quite réglo but I can’t find it in the dictionary. Connotations of rascal, leading to “rogue”. I had a problem with “rogue” and "foliage” at primary school. When I came across the word “rogue” for the first time – probably in Enid Blyton – I pronounced it “rogue-you” (like argue and Montesquieu). Then I heard a teacher use the word and realised I had been pronouncing it wrong. It took me a long time to accept the new pronunciation, correct or not. The other word was “foliage”. I don’t know what went wrong but I had it stitched as “foilage” and I was loath to change to the proper pronunciation.

There is seemingly no connection to ostentation:

Originated 1425–75 from late Middle English ostentacioun, from Middle French ostentation, from Latin ostentātiōn (singular of ostentātiō), equivalent to ostentātus (past participle of ostentāre, to display or exhibit), frequentative of ostendere (to present, display) + -iōn.

Or to Jostle:

1. A rough shove or push.
2. The condition of being crowded together.

[Middle English justilen, to have sexual relations with, frequentative of justen, to joust, from Old French juster; see joust.]

jostler n.

Many a true word is spoken in _____.

I then tried to find out what “craven image” means – and I can’t. I can find Craven (adj. Characterized by abject fear; cowardly.) [Middle English cravant, perhaps from Old French crevant, present participle of crever, to burst, from Latin crepāre, to break.] cravenly cra'ven·ly adv. cravenness cra'ven·ness n.

But I don't see how that could apply to images. You cowardly picture, you!

I like the word vicarious (adjective) - taking the place of another; felt, received or done in place of another; indirect.

The Pool was a big part of my own childhood. I learnt to swim there and spent many a long summer's day oblivious to the crinkling of my toes and thumbs. My mother’s experience of the pool and my experience of the pool were both absolutely magical; the sparkly blue water (when the sun was shining), the latest records played while you swim, the pool attendants in their white shirts and plimsolls – Sammy Blackwood, David Garven, etc., – they all looked like Greek Gods to my prepubescent heart - so I feel kind of sad for the local children today that they don’t have that kind of excitement in their lives. It's the mixture of fresh air and people and music...
I know that the memory embroiders on the past and makes it seem more interesting than it actually was, but the present really does look awfully dull…

Ars Longa

When I chose the title of this blog, I thought “Vita Brevis Ars Longa” meant life is short and art is long – i.e. takes a long time and lasts a long time. The whole motto is:

VITABREVISARSLONGA

OCCASIOCELERISEXPE

RIMENTUMPERICOLOS

UMJUDICIUMDIFFICILE

Life is short, Professionalism takes long, Occasion arises unexpectedly, Trusting experience is perilous, Good judgement remains difficult. (The famous Latin version of the first lines of the book on medicine by the Greek physician Hippocrates, 460 - 377 B.C.)

According to Phrase finder.

"This can be rendered into English as 'life is short, the art (craft/skill) long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult'.

That would lead us to interpret the meaning as 'it takes a long time to acquire and perfect one's expertise (in, say, medicine) and one has but a short time in which to do it'."

How did the phrase get turned round, which is the “true” version, Vita Brevis Ars Longa or Ars Longa Vita Brevis? We know it originally comes from Greek, but it is known to us in Latin. Did the original translator switch the order? What else did they switch?

So much of what we are adamantly certain about is in fact steeped in à peu près,

approximation: an inexact result adequate for a given purpose.

To be able to translate you have to make split second choices about what a source text means and how it would best be rendered in the target language. Working slowly does not always improve quality because on a leisurely stroll through the garden you can stumble onto forking paths that will open up avenues but take you too far from the case in point. To make a living, speed is an important parameter. In a rough draft I often accept a translation I am not happy with, or even transpose the French literally, to be able to make progress, but when I re-read the final version I find it is not so bad... the trap is that the mind is influenced by the written word. As a translator, I have to like what I write, or I wouldn't be able to do the job, but I also have to be willing to improve, to evolve along with the language which is living.

I know that how I feel about my translation is not always a true reflection of its value, just as, on a wider level, my force of conviction is not always a true reflection of my state of enlightenment. Sometimes I am so convinced of something I succeed in convincing other people, to everyone’s detriment when it turns out I was wrong all along… Ubending intent somehow got configured into my survival strategy. The trick would be to make it more flexible!

Translation is certainly grist for my mill. The following quotation reminded me how great it is to have role models and people we can admire:

“Handel is the only person I would wish to see before I die, and the only person I would wish to be were I not Bach.”

Johann Sebastian Bach

In the same text, I found “Ad libitum” Latin ad libitum (freely, as desired). I noticed a French “À volonté” floating around which unfortunately is linked in my mind to a Bistro Romain restaurant chain I once went to with work colleagues in Paris which offers unlimited amounts of salmon carpaccio and/or chocolate mousse.

As I read it, I was aware that the “freely, as desired” doesn’t mean fay ce que voudras.

Musical improvisation is not arbitrary, absolute freedom, but relative freedom of one parameter in relation to others that must be obeyed - but what of John Cage's silence?

Libitum takes me via liberty to libido and Lacan’s “ne pas céder sur son désir” - “do not give up on your desire”. Unbending desire.

Talking about libido, I was struck by this nice description of jouissance from Zizek:

"Although jouissance can be translated as "enjoyment," translators of Lacan often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly traumatic character: we are not dealing with simple pleasures, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasure. This is how we usually perceive the Freudian superego, the cruel and sadistic ethical agency which bombards us with impossible demands and then gleefully observes our failure to meet them. No wonder, then, that Lacan posited an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one's spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty."

Like playing the fiddle as the Titanic sinks. Quoted by Laura Gonzalez :
“Analysis is like the Titanic and all the analyst can do is arrange deck chairs to get a better view of the iceberg. A beautiful twist on a deja-vu metaphor.”

I enjoyed Laura’s latest post on the gaze, and had never heard of Cranach the Elder before.

And from deck chairs to peer reviews via Pier culture