The Death of Imagination

Last week, out of the blue, I got a message from the Rabbi asking to set up another lesson. When he greeted me at Lyfe Kitchen this evening, he said it had been year. I doubted that. He may be right that it's been a year since the last lesson, but I remembered running into him at Touché a while back. He'd forgotten. The Frenchman he was with is tutoring him now, and he'd completely forgotten that we'd met, however briefly.

As expected, he's forgotten a great deal, but not so much we couldn't make simple conversation. Unfortunately, I was stuck with an inferior pocket dictionary checked out from work, having forgotten my old reliable at home this morning. The only time this really threw us off the rails was when it came to finding the proper equivalent for "marry". I had vague memories of being here before and having look up the distinction between heiraten and verheiraten, neither of which was appropriate for the officiant. (Sure enough, I looked it up in Farrell and the only verb he lists as appropriate for the person performing the ceremony is trauen.)

I told him we'd talk about money later. Things are tough for him now. His synagogue shut down some time ago and I know he'd been gigging for a hospital after that, but he's been out of work for some time now. He's got one child in college and another flunking out of highschool. He tells me that he's "not freaking out" but that he has his days. I can't imagine.

The other day someone from the German Department dropped off a load of books they didn't want or need. I was invited to look them over and pick what I wanted, and I did. Mostly older stuff I had no real interest in, but one title did leap out at me: Das eherne Schwert by Andreas Brandhorst. Published by Knaur, the back cover blurb identifies it as being set in the fantasy world of the RPG Das Schwarze Auge.

A mid-80s German answer to D&D? It can't possibly still be a going concern. So wrong: According to Wikipedia, it's outsold D&D in Germany and is also on its fourth edition and 30+ years of development has lent remarkable depth to the setting, Aventurien ("Arkania" in the English translation). From the description of the rules, it sounds like a system I would've loved had I only encountred it sooner, with far more flexibility and verisimilitude than what TSR produced. Most intriguing to me is that only four of the five classes in the first edition had the equivalent of prime requisites. All other characters used a generic "Adventurer" template.

The setting, however, seems to take the colonialist racial issues inherent to D&D and only compound them. The analog-Europe is to some extent superimposed on an analog-Americas, so not only does the analog-Spain border on analog-Arabia, but on analog-Mesoamerica as well. It's also counterevidence to the claim that sloppy handling of the mediaeval European setting is primarily an American sin. The naming, for instance, is just as bad if not worse than what I've found in domestic products.

But what about the book itself? It's a standard quest plot. The protagonists--two novice thieves--bear a passing resemblance to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, only with less personality so it's presumably easier for fledgling players to insert their own. They flit from one well-worn trope to the other: right now they're fleeing a death cult run by an evil high priest set on world domination.

The surprise for me are that the themes and the language are both more mature than I'd've expected from an RPG-tie-in. Even allowing for different mores in the decadent Old World, I don't think this was aimed at children. When we first meet the high priest, he's naked. And while there's no outright mention of sex, there's a nude woman in his bed and repeated references to warmth in his "Lendengegend".

The vocabulary is actually giving me problems. I may have read a lot of German, but not much in way of mediaeval romances or historical novels, so there's a lot of technical terminology D&D taught me in my teens that I still have to look up. Zinne, for instance, which strictly speaking is a merlon but in the plural means "battlements" or--in reference to a cityscape--stuff poking up in general. For all that, the diction isn't particularly archaic. Polite forms of address were pretty elaborate in earlier German--look no further than Hofmannsthal for proof--yet I haven't come across them at all in the first quarter of the book, despite conversations between a novice and a master or the high priest and his servitors.

It's a fast read and somehow appropriate to these days of storms and fog. I'm neglecting both Faulkner and Stifter to read it, and feeling only a twinge of regret at it. I also checked for copies of the book on Amazon and found the cheapest is being offered at over $50, so there's that.

Over the weekend I finished La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote and found it a bit disappointing. It ends up being merely a cautionary tale: Young ladies of the bourgeoisie, don't even think about trying to snag an aristocratic husband! Still, even Balzac on an off day is better than most writers at their best, so it was time well spent, even if I persist in thinking it shouldn't take me a couple weeks for a hundred pages of literary French. I also question whether my French is really to the stage that I benefit more from reading in the original than I would from reading a first-class translation. Of course, the only way to reach that stage is...to read more literature in French. (Plus how do you tell if your translation is "first-class" anyway?)

I also lost interest in Albanian extraordinarily quickly, so I've laid aside the short story collection and picked up Lodge's Out of the shelter again. I'm what, 70 pages or so in, so it seems a shame not to finish it. So far it doesn't have the humour of his later works, but it seems very well-observed. The vignette of the mother running after a departing train to give her son a fruit pie he didn't really want in the first place was rather touching (and makes me ponder that I recall basically nothing at all of my own departure for Germany).

Meanwhile, I've been missing German, but I waited to see that my Asian kick was spent before turning back to it. Of the three Fontane novellas on my shelf, Mathilde Möhring seemed the most promising. It's a work so mature it's posthumous, which seemed a better place to start than with his first society novel. So far, some fun new words (notably Budiker) but nothing which has frustrated my ready resources--yet.

Part of the motivation for reading a novel in German, incidentally, it the creeping realisation that my hold on the language is slipping. I mean, I'm still conversational in it and--barring unforeseen tragedy--probably always will be. But some of the more arbitrary bits have been bedeviling me late, chief among them noun gender. Languages are full of patterns, but there are always certain aspects which can only be mastered by brute force memorisation and gobs of reinforcement. And since I've neglected reinforcement, I'm having to resort to force again.

Usually I have the most difficult distinguishing masculines and neuters, because morphologically they're quite similar. (They often form their plurals in the same ways, for instance.) But recently I'm stumbling more over the "stealth feminines", those words with feminine gender that lack one of the characteristic endings such as -ung, -heit, or -e. Angst, for instance, or Gefahr. In fact, I'm considering making my own list for self-study. (Doubtless something like this already exists, but in cases like this the process is often as important as the result.)

Foreign borrowings in particular are a minefield. So it was comforting to come across this excellent website and see that even the Germans themselves can't agree whether it should be das Cola or die Cola (although bizarrely they seem to have settled on das Sofa but die Couch). And that's before we even entertain the question of regional usages. (The Swabians, for instance, insist on dr Sofa, because that's the gender it has in French, whereas for their part the Badener prefer to call it a Chaiselongue.)

On a linguistic note: Between acts and after the opera, there was some discussion of the proper translation of Flieder in Wagner's libretto. The word is old--so old that the first element is obscure, though the -der is considered cognate with English tree. Originally it designated the elder (Sambucus nigra). But in the mid-16th century, the common lilac[*] (Syringa vulgaris) was introduced to Central Europe, probably via a Hapsburg ambassador to the Ottomans of Flemish origin.

On account of the similarities between the species, the name Flieder became applied to both, albeit with some qualifier for the upstart such as "Spanish", "Turkish", or welscher. (Nothing to do with Wales; this was an adjective applied indiscriminately by the mediaeval Germans to all non-Germanic, non-Slavic peoples they came into contact with.) The standard language has dispensed with this, taking advantage of its ability to borrow from multiple dialects by reserving the synonymous Holunder (formerly subject to the same ambiguity) for elders.

The mid-16th century also happens to be the time the opera is set. So I think two facts speak against a lilac: First, that seems a bit soon for the trees to have made it out of the gardens of the rich and well-connected and into the yard of a simple cobbler like Hans Sachs. Second--and more importantly--the action takes place on the eve and the day of Midsummer, i.e. the 23rd and 24th of June. At that latitude, lilacs blossom in April and May; it would be damn unusual for one to still be in bloom that late. (Although perhaps this would've been much less unusual during the Little Ice Age.) But elders flower from May into July. So, on the whole, it was most likely correct of the Lyric to use "elder" in the supertitles.

(The actual phrase is "the scent of elder", which made me titter. At the next intermission, I told Nuphy, "They must've meant Old Spice.")

[*] In case you're wondering, the common English name comes from Arabic ليلك līlak via Romance intermediation. Cf. French lilas, Italian lillà.

Vor kurzem hab ich den Drang verspürt, den Online Uni-Shop von der deutschen Universität, an der ich für ein Jahr Student war, aufzutreiben. Ich behalte noch ein beliebtes Sweatshirt, das ich kurz vor meiner Abreise gekauft hab, aber das Siegelbild darauf ist total verschossen und es franst an den Ränden aus. Früher hätte ich es nicht gewagt, mir ein Ersatzstück zu kaufen von wegen den hohen Kosten, aber verdammt noch mal, ich bin längst kein hungernder Student mehr. Ich hab gerade mehrere hundert Dollar für Weihnachtsgeschenken ausgegeben, ich kann mir's doch leisten, oder?

Mit Lieferung in die USA: 82,50 €. Noch dazu: Das vorige Muster gibt es nicht mehr. Und es sind keine Sweatshirts vorhanden, nur Hoodies, und die mag ich überhaupt nicht. Es wäre wahrscheinlich günstiger und beglückender, mein Eigenes auszulegen und drucken zu lassen.

Today's German mystery word from Fontane: Juchtenkoffer. Juchten turns out to be a (Low Saxon?) adaptation of Russian юфть, a kind of treated calf leather that was particularly resistant to insect damage. (The leather originated in Russia along with the name; in the novel, it is considered as prima facie evidence for a Slavic origin for the bag's owner as well.)

Today's German assignment: Draw up a list of common verbs discussed in the lessons so far but not included in the basic vocabulary at the end of the chapters we've covered. Today we went through German synonyms for "meet" including kennenlernen, treffen, and verabreden. Previously we covered how to translate "marry" and on the way home my Rabbi friend asked me for equivalents of "finish", which means dealing with adverbials like fertig and zu Ende. Also, I've got to find some way to work reißen into his vocab so he'll stop confusing it with reisen.

I'm back to reading Doris Dörrie again after a pause to finish up The siege of Krishnapur and it reminded me that there's a word she used which I meant to post about before: bonnieren. At first I took this for an aphetic variant of abonnieren "subscribe", but that didn't fit the context, which was of a fast-food worker punching in an order. Even Googling wasn't turning up anything useful so I decided to try a different tack and look up German equivalents for "ring up".

And that's where I started to hit a wall. Phrasal verbs are famously one of the most challenging aspects of English for foreigners, and one of the reason is that they are more polysemous than even native speakers are wont to realise. Find "ring up" in a typical dictionary, and what you'll see is the translation for "call [s.o.] up". I'm aware of this meaning and--even though it's primarily British--I've even been known to use it myself sometimes. But it's not remotely close in meaning.

Another challenging aspect of English is the proliferation of near-synonyms, but the plus side of that is that it means there's often a (usually more formal) alternative which I can look up instead. For "ring up" in the one sense there is--as just mentioned--"call [up]", "telephone", and others. But I couldn't think of a less ambiguous verb with the meaning I wanted. Fortunately, with the help of the LEO discussion forum, I was able to track down that I was dealing with a misspelled variant of "bonieren", which does have the sense I ascribed to it (although it doesn't seem to be nearly as widely-used in German as "ring up" in English).

I had a similar problem going the other way when I attempted to chat up a Polish bear online. At first I thought he was coming on to me since his reply contained the word "połapać" which my dictionary glossed as "make out". Only after I'd pondered the entire sentence for a bit did it occur to me that this meant "make out" in the sense of "discern" and what he was trying to "make out" was what this site which he had only just joined was really good for. (Luckily I figured this out before sending my response!)

The whole language of getting acquainted is fraught with this problems. Mind you, I'm not even talking about slang particularly. It's just that this is an informal activity (who gets "presented" to a potential love interest any more?) and therefore so is much of the associated vocabulary. On one of my language boards, a learner couldn't think of the German for "stand [somebody] up" and so simply left this in English.

I thought that a good equivalent would be "jemandem einen Korb geben" (lit. "give someone a basket"), but upon investigation this turned out to apply to getting turned down (again, try looking that up!) rather than accepted and then blown off. Turns out the word he wanted was versetzen (which also has a range of technical meanings such as "dislocate", "misalign", and "stagger"). Again, it was the LEO forum which set me straight in this case, which shows how lexicography is adapting in the Internet age to solve this problem.

Seems like forever since I've had any linguistic content here and there's a charming macaronic German expression I'm dying to share. The Rabbi asked me how one would say "Chacun à son goût" in German and I--without a shred of sarcasm--said, "Chacun à son goût". But I knew I'd heard some native equivalent, so I went on the hunt and found "Jedem das Seine" ("To each his own" [lit. "the his"].)

Nuphy confirmed that this was a match, but I still went ahead and asked my Thuringian coworker all the same. And I'm glad I did, since the version she produced was "Jeder nach seinem chacun." This is a linguistic joke, a play on both the original expression and the literally German translation, "Jeder nach seinem Geschmack." Where the craziness comes in is in picking the most flagrantly wrong word to replace Geschmack--not goût, which has the same meaning ("taste") but chacun, which corresponds to jeder ("each").

Furthermore, this wasn't just the in-joke of an erudite elite but, according to her, the most common way of expressing this sentiment where she's from. I'm reminded of other petrified linguistic jokes like, "bass-ackwards" or ['sweɪ̯v] for suave. (She was greatly amused by the latter and declared her intention to start using both it and its stepsibling "debboner".)

I ran it past another, younger speaker from further east, however, and he didn't recognise it. But he did give me the valuable advice that "Jedem das Seine" is--like "Arbeit macht frei"--tainted by its abuse under National Socialism and, thus, must be deployed with care. Which only confirms my suspicion that this is something cosmopolitan modern Germans would prefer to express in French.

Apfelbeeren chokeberries
Blaubeeren blueberries
Boysenbeeren boysenberries
Brombeeren blackberries
Elsbeeren serviceberry
Erdbeeren strawberries
Heidelbeeren bilberries
Himbeeren raspberries
Holunderbeeren elderberries
Rote/Schwarze Johannisbeeren red/blackcurrants
Kapstachelbeeren[*] groundcherry
Kermesbeeren pokeberries
Klabusterbeeren dingleberries
Krähenbeeren crowberries
Kranbeeren = Moosbeeren
Kratzbeeren dewberries
Kronsbeeren = Preiselbeeren
Maulbeeren mulberries
Moltebeeren cloudberries
Moosbeeren cranberries
Prachthimbeeren salmonberry
Preiselbeeren lingonberry
Scheinbeeren wintergreen berries
Stachelbeeren gooseberry
Stechpalmenbeeren holly berries
Wachholderbeeren juniper berries

[*] also called Judenkirschen "Jew cherries".