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Browsing my parents’ bookshelves recently, in the dog days that followed sending Anna Karenina off to press, I found myself staring at a row of small hardback volumes all the same size. One in particular, with the words Romola and George Eliot embossed in gold on the dark green spine, caught my attention. It was an Oxford World’s Classics pocket edition – a present to my grandmother from her younger sister, who wrote an affectionate inscription in curling black ink (“with Best Love to Dellie on her 20^th birthday from Mabel, July 3^rd 1917”), and forgot to rub out the price of 1 shilling and 3 pence pencilled inside the front cover. Inside the back cover, meanwhile, towards the bottom of a long list of World’s Classics titles, my heart missed a beat when I espied “Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: in preparation”: Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation was first published only in 1918.

As I drove homethat night with Romola in my bag, I thought about my grandmother reading Eliot’s novel (unusually set in Florence during the Renaissance, rather than in 19^th-century England), and I also thought about the seismic changes taking place in Russia at the time of her birthday in 1917. I wondered whether she was given the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Anna Karenina for her 21^st birthday, and was disappointed on a later visit to my parents to be presented with her copy of Nathan Haskell Dole’s pioneering but wholly inadequate translation, reprinted in the inexpensive Nelson Classics series. I pictured my grandmother struggling with sentences such as those describing Anna’s hostile engagement with her husband. After Karenin has begun upbraiding Anna for consorting too openly with Vronsky at the beginning of the novel (Part 2, chapter 9), we read, for example: ‘“Nu-s! I hear you,” she said, in a calm tone of banter’. The Maudes later translated this sentence into English (“Well, I’m listening! What next?” said she quietly and mockingly”), but they also changed Tolstoy’s punctuation, and the sarcastically deferential tone of Anna’s voice (Nu-s, ya slushayu, chto budet, – progovorila ona spokoino i nasmeshlivo – “Well, I’m ready to hear what is next,” she said coolly and derisively”).

Back in 1917, Oxford Word’s Classics “pocket editions” featured a line-drawn portrait of the author, but no other illustration. These days, nearly every edition of Anna Karenina has a picture of a woman on the cover, even if Tolstoy’s bearded face is absent opposite the title page. More often than not it will be a Russian woman, painted by a Russian artist, and while we know this is not Anna, it is as if the limits of our imagination are somehow curbed before we even start reading. The dust-jacket for the new hardback Oxford World’s Classics edition of Anna Karenina reproduces Sir John Everett Millais’ portrait of Louise Jopling. The fact that this is an English painting of an English woman already mitigates against identifying her too closely with Anna, but this particular portrait is an inspired choice for other reasons, as I began to understand when I researched its history. To begin with, it was painted in 1879, just one year after Anna Karenina was first published as a complete novel. And the meticulous notes compiled by Vladimir Nabokov which anchor the events of the narrative between 1872 and 1876 also enable us to infer that the fictional Anna Karenina was about the same age as the real-life Louise Jopling, who was 36 when she sat for Millais. Their very different life paths, meanwhile, throw an interesting light on the theme at the centre of Tolstoy’s novel: the predicament of women.

Louise Jopling was one of the nine children born into the family of a railway contractor in Manchester in 1843. After getting married for the first time in 1861 at the age of 17 to Frank Romer, who was secretary to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, she studied painting in Paris, but returned to London at the end of the decade when her husband was fired. By 1874, her first husband (a compulsive gambler) and two of her three children were dead, she had married for the second time, to the watercolour painter Joseph Jopling, exhibited at the Royal Academy, and become a fixture in London’s artistic life. To enjoy any kind of success as a female painter at that time in Victorian Britain was an achievement, but even more remarkable was Louise Jopling’s lifelong campaign to improve women’s rights. She founded a professional art school for women in 1887, was a vigorous supporter of women’s suffrage, won voting rights for women at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters after being elected, fought for women to be able to paint from nude models, and became the first woman member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1902. None of these doors were open to Anna Karenina as a member of St. Petersburg high society, although we learn in the course of the novel that she has a keen artistic sense, is a discerning reader, writes children’s fiction, and has a serious interest in education. Tolstoy’s wife Sofya similarly was never given the opportunity to fulfil her potential as a writer, photographer, and painter.

Louise Jopling was a beautiful woman, as is immediately apparent from Millais’ portrait. In her memoirs she describes posing for him in a carefully chosen embroidered black gown made in Paris, and consciously donning a charming and typically feminine expression to match. On the third day she came to sit for Millais, however, the two friends chanced to talk about something which made her feel indignant, and she forgot to wear her “designedly beautiful expression”. What was finally fixed in the portrait was a defiant and “rather hard” look, which, as she acknowledges, ultimately endowed her face with greater character. This peculiar combination of beauty and defiance is perhaps what most recalls the character of Anna Karenina, who in Part 5 of the novel confronts social prejudice and hypocrisy head-on by daring to attend the Imperial Opera in the full glare of the high society grandes dames who have rejected her.

Louise Jopling’s concern with how she is represented in her portrait, as a professional artist in her own right, as a painter’s model, and as a woman, also speaks to Tolstoy’s detailed exploration of the commodification and objectification of women in society and in art (as discussed by Amy Mandelker in her important study Framing Anna Karenina). It is for this reason that we encounter women in a variety of different situations (ranging from the unhappily married Anna, to the betrayed and careworn housewife Dolly, the young bride Kitty, the unmarried companion Varenka, and the former prostitute Marya), and three separate portraits of the heroine, seen from different points of view. Ernest Rhys interestingly compares Anna Karenina to “a woman’s Iliad” in his introduction to the 1914 Everyman’s Library edition of the novel. Another kind of woman’s Iliad could also be woven from the differing stories of some of Tolstoy’s intrepid early translators, amongst them Clara Bell, Isabel Hapgood, Rochelle S. Townsend, Constance Garnett, Louise Maude, Rosemary Edmonds, and Ann Dunnigan, to whom we owe a debt for paving the way.

The post A Woman’s Iliad? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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No, it's not a delicious frozen treat for when you settle in with a good book.

I'm talking about Giovanni Gelati. Maybe you've heard of him? Trestle Press front man, anchor of the Author's Lab collaboration series, social media and internet marketing whiz. I wrote "A Prince in Trenton, Seriously?" with the guy. Yeah, that's him.

He has also started a series on his own about...............Bocce?

It actually sounds fun and could easily be played in the backyard, the community park, the beach, or most anywhere.

Gelati (the man, not the ice cream) has taken Bocce to the next level. He has created larger than life characters and thrust them into outrageous situations. In "I Have Chrome Balls, Don't You?", he introduces us to two members his team: Giovanni "The G-Man" Gelati and Dan "Big Balls" Cannoli (he gets his name due to the maximum size of his regulation Bocce equipment). The two friends are pitted in a duel against each other to determine the greatest Bocce player in the world.

In "Holy Chrome Bocce Balls on Fire", things go global. Giovanni and Dan are whisked away to an international tournament in Djibouti of all places. There, they face off against the Chinese and Russian teams. Things quickly escalate into an outlandish competition, and of course, flaming Bocce balls.

I love that the outcome of these stories is a foregone conclusion. The G-Man is always the unquestionable winner. Like all good stories, you know the "good guy" is going to win, but you relish seeing how it goes down. The humor is sharp and the puns are thick.

I look forward to the next adventure, which will be part of Trestle's Harbinger of Horror Halloween Month: "Holy Chrome Bocce Ball Beach Bloodbath - A Zombedy"

Good morning! This short animated film by Théodore Ushev is like an animated shot of adrenaline. (More films by Théodore Ushev)

Nothing like a little Russian constructivism to get you pumped up for your day. Enjoy!

Also check out Ushev’s blog.

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Animation, NFB, Russian, Theodore Ushev

By Anatoly Liberman

There is no way one can stop folk etymologies from spreading. Whatever dictionaries may say, people will repeat anecdotes like the one current about the origin of posh, for example (supposedly, an acronym: port out, starboard home). Nonsense is quick-paced, whereas true knowledge stays at home Cinderella-like and no good fairy comes to the rescue. Although I have nothing new to say about bistro, another rebuttal of a popular version may be of some use. But first some table talk.

I have heard a story that is a little too good to be true, but its witty message outweighs its questionable veracity. When the great physiologist Ivan Pavlov, so the story goes, received an honorary degree from Cambridge, he had a speech written for him in English, a language he did not know. After he delivered it, someone from the audience approached him and said: “I have read that Russian is related to English, but I did not realize they were so close.” As a matter of fact, English (a Germanic language with a strong infusion of French and Latin words) and Russian (a Slavic language that absorbed numerous words from its eastern neighbors) are not too close, and in oral communication a heavy Russian accent makes English nearly unintelligible. The number of common Russian words in English is negligible (for how often does one mention samovar, pogrom, or the short-lived sputnik and perestroika?), and those that have broken through tend to appear in garbled form. One such borrowing is babushka “a woman’s headscarf,” usually stressed on the second (instead of the first) syllable. Piroshki ~ pirozhki “small meat pies” is also stressed on the second syllable (instead of the last; audio-Webster recommends final stress but to no avail), and the often-heard names (Borodin, the composer; Gorbachev, and others) are invariably mispronounced in the media). I do not know who taught the West the Russian toast na zdorov’e. Perhaps it existed in the past, but today it is a formula used in response to “Thank you!” at table (the hostess answers: “Na zdorov’e,” that is, “You are welcome”). The toast should be (Za) Vashe zdorov’e “(To) your health!” Time and again have I been told that the word bistro came to French with the Russian Cossacks after the defeat of Napoleon. The thirsty customers, who were not allowed to consume alcoholic beverages, allegedly rushed the owners of small drinking establishments shouting: “Bystro, bystro!” (“Quick, Quick!”). The French heard it so often that they began to call small cheap cafés bistro. The date of the episode and the exact identification of the invaders change from version to version, but the core of the anecdote is stable.

The implausibility of this etymology should have become obvious even to non-specialists long ago. First, perhaps the uniformed Russians, while in Paris, really suffered from the effects of the dry law, but why did the story single out the Cossacks? At that time, most soldiers in the Russian army were serfs. Second, any sensible person staying in a foreign country tries to learn a few phrases needed for the most elementary communication and refrains from giving a waiter orders he won’t understand. Third, an offensive command used by the soldiers of an occupying army hardly has a chance of becoming popular. Who in Paris would have adopted a meaningless Russian word for the designation of a local café? Hated foreigners are mocked, not imitated. Finally, if the command “be quick!” had been pronounced surreptitiously, the thirsty “Cossacks” would have whispered rather than shouted it, for fear of being overheard by an officer.

The other arguments against this folk etymology are of a more special nature. The Russian for quick, quick! is not bystro, bystro (stress on the first syllable) but at best the comparative degree of this adverb “bystrei, bystrei!” (stress on ei). The French may perhaps have identified the “mixed” (central) Russian vowel transliterated as y with their front i, but stress, as noted, falls on the first syllable of bystro, and its unstressed o resembles a in Engl. tuna. Consequently, the result would have been something like bistra. In French printed sources, the word bistro surfaced only in 1789, too late for the Cossack theory, whereas in Russia the Western legend of the origin of bistro is unknown, and those who are conversant with French life (even if only from literature) never associate bistro with bystro.

The allure of folk etymology is irresistible: it explains the origin of words in a way anyone can understand: no exposure to linguistics, with its pedantic insistence on sound correspondents and semantic verisimilitude, is required. Paste shines like diamonds and costs almost nothing, but its price is commensurate with its value. The real story behind French bistro remains unknown. French words whose beginning sounds like bistro are rather many: bistouille “a mixture of cheap wine and alcohol” (was this swill served in the first bistros?), bistre “a brown pigment made from the mixture of wood soot and water” (the color of the walls in the earliest bistros?), bistraud (an Anjou or Poitou dialectal word for a boy guarding herds; from “a little shepherd” to “a wine merchant’s aide,” apparently, a recorded sense, and “a place where wine is served”?), and bistingo “a bad cabaret” or bistringue “cabaret.” None of these putative etymons inspires confidence. Bistro seems to have emerged from the depths of street slang (like Engl. slum, for example), and, as often in such cases, the word’s origin is lost. I would add only one comment to what has been said above. Most, if not all, correct etymologies are simple and, while looking at them, one has the feeling that yes, the truth has indeed been found. Devious ways (from dirty walls to the name of a filthy place, from “a wine merchant’s helper” to “saloon,” and so forth) need not be avoided, for incredible semantic bridges have been discovered, but it is better to choose straighter paths. In defiance of the meaning of Russian bystro, French bistro is slow to reveal its (cheap? dirty?) secret.

The long-out-of-print book of drawings by Russian surrealist Boris Artzybasheff, As I See, has finally made it back it to print thanks to Titan Books, and it’s one of the coolest books that’s made it into my collection this year. As I See is a real visual treat of surrealism–a look at human progress and technology that lies somewhere between where Jim Henson and Salvador Dali meet, or perhaps an unlikely collaboration between Dr. Seuss and H.R. Giger. It’s the perfect blend of cartoon silliness and unsettling social commentary.

See more of Artzybasheff’s work online at The American Art Archives.

I stopped getting my haircut at Flor's because I couldn't take the constant barrage of Fox News on the television there. I hate the rabid and wrong information. I wonder how so many people have been taken in. And now I've been given the opportunity to "do something." (Not much, but something.)



Please join me.

And for all the teachers out there, for all those who want to become teachers, and for all those who put down the teaching profession with sayings like, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."--Watch this!



From the same guy who brought us "The Impotence of Prof-Reading" (featured earlier at blog post #104); Taylor Mali. Wow!


Thanks to Move-On and Fuse 8 Productions for the video heads-up.