Last week when I read an article in the New York Times discussing the first full-length Hebrew translation of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan—a translation which appeared only last month. “While the first two parts have long been available in translation, the third and fourth parts — in which Hobbes addresses religion and the state — had not appeared in Hebrew.”

I’m not a philosopher, but I have read parts of Leviathan, arguably one of the most important works of Western philosophy, so I was definitely intrigued by the discussion launched by several of the leading U.S. and Israeli scholars on the translation. Fania Oz-Salzberger, professor at the University of Haifa, at Monash University in Australia, and a distinguished visiting professor at Princeton University, correlates the lack of a complete translation of Leviathan to a lack of funds. In 1962, the Hebrew University Magnes Press published the first Hebrew translation of Leviathan, but the press “was not a rich publishing house, and neither were its customers.” The edition featured only sections Parts I and II and cut out, in addition to the more Hebrew-oriented sections, the wordier and more heavily footnoted sections.

Oz-Salzberger makes an interesting point regarding the new translation that concerns all areas of translation:

Times have changed. Since 1962, the Hebrew reading public has grown at least sevenfold. No other language has ascended, during modern times, from under a million speakers and readers to well over seven million. The new and full Hebrew edition of Leviathan shows how Israeli culture has come into its own: it can now afford, both financially and intellectually, a full Hebrew rendering of this whale of a text.

My question regarding translation at large is this, how much revisionism has occurred over the years in translated texts? Certainly the population swell of Hebrew readers makes this particular translation issue pertinent, but how many other languages and cultures have been slighted over the year due to simple problems like funding or an available market? While some regions like the Arabic region, face tremendous hurdles in regard to translation, others can afford to revisit key texts and clean house if necessary.

In some ways, translation is curation. Like an art curator, a translator’s job is never done. While the artist (author) may be long gone, or at least unable to translate (not everyone is Samuel Beckett!), the work still remains, and over time it may show wear and tear, inconsistencies—it may even be missing huge chunks of texts as in the case of the 1962 Hebrew translation of Leviathan. Like a curator, the translator then revisits the text and reworks it, restoring the text as accurately as possible to the original language version. So maybe dissertations and panel discussions don’t need to focus on strange topics like television and popular culture (although there’s nothing wrong with that)—you never know when the classics might resurface and need a whole new set of eyes to read, translate, and interpret.

Yesterday, November 29, 2009, marked the beginning of Advent, the first day in the year of liturgical Western Christian churches. Falling on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, the holiday was celebrated around the world in churches by the lighting of candles, the recitation of certain Biblical verses pertaining to the birth of Christ, the liturgical color of purple (on the priest’s vestments or on the tabernacle), and, in some cases, fasting.

One of the more humorous, but now extinct, traditions is that of Norman farmers who had children run through their fields with lit torches. The children set fire to bundles of straw as a gesture to drive out rats and other vermin that might destroy the crops. it doesn’t seem like the safest or holiest of traditions, but it went on for some time. More common today are the Advent candles or Advent calendars found in many households. During each day of the Advent month (starting four weeks before Christmas), one section of the candle is burned or one door/box/piece of the advent calendar is opened/removed to mark the passing of Advent.

The etymology of Advent is fairly straight forward—the English word stems from the Old French advent which is from the literary form auvent. The French, of course, stems from the Latin adventus for “arrival.” In French, however, the only meaning of the word is that of the sense applied in Christian tradition, the coming of the Savior, nowadays, the period of the Nativity beginning four weeks before Christmas. In English, however, it has passed into the generic sense of any important arrival. This generic meaning did not arrive in the English language until perhaps 1742, but it was not recognized in English dictionaries as such until the mid-nineteenth century. The religious sense of the word stretches back to the tenth or eleventh century.

With Hanukkah starting on December 11, Kwanza around the same time as Christmas, and, most importantly, Festivus on December 23, it’s certainly the advent of the holiday season no matter what faith or cultural upbringing.

A picture may say a thousand words, but what about a flower? Last week in Singapore, while the world leaders convened to discuss politics, global climate change, and humanitarian efforts at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, volunteers took to the streets to hand out 45,000 long-stemmed gerber daisies (photo to the left). The daisies were meant to symbolize the ideal of personal kindness, something Singapore’s leaders feel is in short supply.

Using flowers as an expression of a word or ideal is nothing new. Red poppies are still used to symbolize remembrance for the victims of WWI, and in Victorian times, flowers symbolized everything from love to hate to death. The fact that we still give flowers as a sign of affection is just one hint of such history.

Can flowers substitute for words? In the Singapore kindness campaign, the answer is yes. Even though some people were wary of the free flower, others happily accepted one, and, hopefully (or at least as the Singapore Kindness Movement is hoping) realized the meaning behind it — random acts of kindness, giving freely to others.

In case you’re planning to mix a bouquet with a specific meaning for someone near or dear to you (or, an enemy), here are a few of my favorite flower meanings (of which most of my favorite flowers mean something awful — hydrangea signifies heartlessness? I suppose I am pretty heartless…):

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While my friend and I were driving through the mountains to a small Appalachian town in southwestern Virginia for their weekly bluegrass jamboree, we passed the turn-off to Green’s Garage. I explained to him that Green’s is a small food cooperative where there are no employees—everything is purchased on the honor system, faith that you’ll leave the correct change in the box or write each item down on your tab. The store is a meeting place of sorts where folks find each other and stand around and talk about the news or town gossip.

That’s when the linguistic conundrum hit—is there a word that means a gathering of individuals who chat and gossip? What I needed was an online dictionary in which you could type in a string of key words of the definition you’re thinking of and then the dictionary would pop out a string of possible words that fit the definition. Each combination of key words would go through an algorithm to find the closest fit. There should be a phone app that does that, which got me researching the available dictionary apps for the iphone.

It turns out that there are quite a few English dictionary apps out there.

• Mirriam-Webster put out their Collegiate Dictionary for iPhone last year. It contains over 225,000 entries as well as suggestive search, history, wildcard search, similar word search, and pronunciation. However, the app cost $25, which is a little ridiculous in my mind.
• If you’re willing to swing it, the full American Heritage Dictionary app will set you back $30. With approximately 300,000 terms, it beats out the Mirriam-Webster app, it also features “partial matches,” different font sizes, and an audio pronunciation guide. There is also a bookmarks and search history tab.
• For significantly less, you can download the Advanced English Dictionary & Thesaurus for $4. The app review fails to mention how many words the dictionary contains or any specific features—just that it has “every feature you would expect from a dictionary application on the iPhone.”
• In the Thesaurus department, Roget’s has a thesaurus app for $13. The Roget’s II Thesaurus features suggestive search options and bookmarking.
• The general Thesaurus app costs only $1, and, given the cost, is fairly basic. Enter a search term, get a result.
• For free, you can download the Dictionary.com app which contains 275,000 definitions and 80,000 synonyms. It also features audio pronunciations, similarly spelled words and Word of the Day. As with the website, the app also contains alphabetical indexing, synonyms example sentences, non-standard uses, word origin and history.
• If you’re in the mood for playing some Scrabble—and cheating at it since I thought looking up words in a dictionary while playing scrabble was illegal—Turon Technologies, Inc., has the app for you: Scrappy, “the ultimate Scrabble dictionary.” While allowing you to look up over 250,000 words from the official SOWPODS tournament list of legal English words, Scrappy also works as a general word browser that can be applied for other word games. For $1, it’s not the biggest investment, but it’s not a dictionary either.

So as far as I can tell, no reverse word search dictionaries exist on the iPhone, which is something some developer should get on. After a quick Google search, I did come up with the OneLook Dictionary Search Reverse Dictionary, but, honestly, after typing in a few concepts, I came up with paltry results.

It looks like our plan of reversing the online OED is still open though. Any developers want to go in on this with us?

The last week of October and the beginning of November brings together some fairly disparate events, holidays, and emotions. For one, especially here in the U.S., October 31 is Halloween, that strange co-opted holiday where kids dress up in cute or ghoulish costumes and beg for candy from their neighbors. The following day, November 1, however, is All Saints Day—the day of remembrance and celebration of the saints, and the day after that, November 2, is All Souls Day—the day of remembrance for those who have died in the previous year or years before. Just a few days later, depending on the calendar, is Election Day in the U.S. which ushers in a new period of government policies and action. While this particular Election Day isn’t as exciting or grand as the Presidential one last year, for some states who will elect governors and House representatives, it’s all-important.

Given this strange mash-up of events, it seems that nothing would be able to bind them together. Two words, however, can—spirit and conspiracy. What might seem obvious to some, the etymological link between the two words, came as a surprise to me, a surprise that was a little bit delightful, I’ll admit.

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In honor of Blog Action Day 2009, here is an exploration of the language used in the climate debates:

Today there exist an impressive number of environmental publications, blogs, and websites dedicated to tracking and, possibly helping solve, global climate change. Grist.org , for example, prides itself on “making lemonade out of looming climate apocalypse.” The website has monitored and reported on various environmental action news items since 1999, but today it is 100% devoted to global climate change. Its articles address transportation, politics, agriculture, and various other “green stories” as a way to examine climate change from every possible angle. Small blogs like Fred First’s, Fragments from Floyd, chronicle both the global and extremely local aspects of climate change. His focus on the small mountain town of Floyd, Virginia, separates the blog from others, although his science journalism is on par with any major newspaper or magazine.

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There are few things that I love more than finding out that two seemingly very different words share the same root. Like the shared history of pomegranate and hand grenade, these connections between word origins sometimes surface in decidedly non-linguistic places. Today’s strange linguistic history comes from Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. McGee’s 700 page tome of food science, history, and myth covers everything from the difference between curds and whey to the development of the French sauce families to the chemical explanation of the affect of cooking on meat pigments. It’s a wildly interesting book for any serious cook or connoisseur, but probably boring for people who don’t share that passion for food.

In his chapter on dairy, McGee discusses the various chemical and physical components of milk, cream, cheese, ice cream, and yogurt (among other products). His section on cream opens with the sentence, “The word cream comes from the Greek chriein, which means ‘to anoint,’ and which is also the root word of Christ (‘the anointed one’).” No, this isn’t a dream that Dan Brown had after falling asleep with a half-eaten pint of Ben and Jerry’s—the cream Christ connection is real. McGee goes on to explain that,

The link between ancient ritual and rich food is oil, the substance used to anoint the chosen, and the defining element of cream. Cream is a form of milk in which the fat globules have become more concentrated than usual, whether by rising to the top in a bottle or spinning off from the heavier water phase in a centrifuge.

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On October 8, Britain celebrated National Poetry Day. The theme was “Heroes and Heroines” and various newspapers, blogs, and websites celebrated the word mastery of thousands of popular and more obscure poets. Although I’m a few days late and perhaps a few dollars short, I’d like to take some time to celebrate my favorite genre and follow up my post from some weeks ago (Can Poetry be Translated?) to continue the debate on poetry in translation.

Thanks to Moira Weigel at the Wall Street Journal , I discovered that today, a definitive edition of the collected poems of Rainer Maria Rilke will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The collection is being translated by Edward Snow, a professor of English at Rice University (who I’m fairly certain I had the pleasure of meeting two weeks ago when I was there for a conference). Snow, who has won the Academy of American Poets Award (twice) and the PEN Award for Translation, has been translating Rilke for over twenty-five years. This new collection of Rilke’s work begins with a “suite of new translations from Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours,’” a group of poems that Snow felt uneasy about translating due to the fact that translations tend to oversimplify the spiritual nature of the prayers spoken by a Russian monk. He describes the process of translating “Book of Hours” as one of “distilling” before translating, reworking Rilke’s intricate rhyme patterns because “rhyming translations would prove impossible.” Although the translated poems do not rhyme, Snow has worked to “approximate Rilke’s German meters, using equal numbers of beats per line and lines per stanza.” The collection then closes with a group of uncollected poems, the lyrics which Rilke refused to publish during his lifetime but which now comprise over a quarter of the book.

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By now everyone has heard the announcement that the United States’ president Barack Obama is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The announcement, which was made at 5 am Eastern Standard time, even surprised President Obama. Of course, criticism from conservatives in the U.S. has already reached fever pitch levels.

Defending their choice, the Peace Prize committee cited Obama’s efforts to create a “a world free from nuclear arms…[Obama] has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.” NYTimes

This led me to do a little digging on the etymology of “peace.” The word is steeped in strong images and connotations, it is historically and culturally significant to all peoples in all societies. So what is in the word that brings us all to the same ideas of well-being, harmony, and quietude?

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