Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Notes on ъ

In Old Church Slavonic there were two letters representing short vowels. These were called ‘yer’, and there were two species of them: the ‘front yer’, ‘ь’, and the ‘back yer’, ‘ъ’

These were reduced into ultra-short vowels in the modern Slavic languages, and eventually into signs that can’t really be called vowels at all. In Russian the ь became a мягкий знак or ‘soft sign’; while the ъ became a твёрдый знак or ‘hard sign’.

The soft sign is generally transliterated into the Latin alphabet with a single apostrophe: ’. It tells you more about how to pronounce the consonant that precedes it, than about a further distinct sound that needs to be made. When in The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann drops in a few Russian phrases, he prefers to use a ‘j’ for the soft sign: potselovatj rather than potselovat’ (infinitive of ’to kiss’). I like the ‘j’; it is, after all, an orthographic variant of ‘i’, just as the soft sign is a descendant of it. And indeed, historically, at least into the early 18th century, it would have been an ‘i’: potselovati. The letter ‘i’ continues to play a role in Romanian similar to the soft sign, e.g., the local name for Bucharest, București, or for the Moldavian cities of Huși or Iași (pronounced, roughly, ‘Hush’ and ‘Yash’, with a little hint of a vowel at the end).

There are not a few jokes about the soft sign, as of the Soviet tour guide who is walking under a massive sequence of iron letters bearing the name of the city of Tver’ (Tverj, Тверь). A letter falls and hits him on the head. Was he injured? No, it was a soft sign. (There is a variant of this joke, told by my friend Abbas, in which his wife throws a can of Coke at his head. Was he hurt? No, it was a soft drink.)

It is a different story all together with the hard sign (ordinarily transliterated by two apostrophes), at least in the East Slavic languages. It went from being a generic back vowel in Old Church Slavonic, to being an ultra-short vowel in early Russian, to simply ceasing to do anything at all by the time of the Bolshevik (Bol’shevik, Boljshevik, Большевик) Revolution. It was, accordingly, purged in an early Soviet spelling reform. Now, as it had previously stood by convention at the end of every word that did not otherwise terminate in a vowel or in a soft sign, this made many, many words at least one sign shorter. It is said that the post-reform editions of War and Peace were 100 pages shorter than the original as a result of the loss of the hard sign, but this is an exaggeration.

Or rather it is not that it was there as a mere convention, and the Bolsheviks were not entirely fair in judging it by the principle of ‘From each according to his work’. It was there as a reminder of an earlier stage in the history of the Slavic languages when every consonant had to have a vowel following it, and so, if there was to be any exception to this, it had to be marked. Languages that place vowels by default after consonants are numerous (after all, what it is to be a consonant is to be with-sound), including, familiarly, Spanish and Italian. In Sanskrit a consonant standing alone is presumed to be followed by a generic vowel, unless another vowel is explicitly indicated or unless one puts down a so-called foot: thus त is ta while त् is simply t. What the Russians realised is that the absence of a sign can in some cases do the job just as well as its presence: if nothing explicitly tells you that a word ends in a consonant, then you can simply take the consonant at the end as, well, the end. 

But what I really wanted to talk about is the fate of these signs in Bulgarian, and how this can shine some light on the character of the Balkan Sprachbund, a beautiful example of the common linguistic phenomenon in which unrelated languages that overlap in a geographical region come to have significant syntactic and grammatical similarities. Bulgarian (along with Macedonian, which is often classified as on a dialect continuum with Bulgarian) is the only Slavic language with definite articles; as in Romanian and in Albanian, they are suffixed to the noun. Bulgarian is the only Slavic language to have entirely lost its nominal declensions; while Romanian is the only Romance language to have preserved cases, they are significantly reduced and, existing alongside a modern-Romance prepositional system, appear vestigial.

In phonetics, too, there is important cross-Danube influence of Romanian on Bulgarian, and vice versa. In Bulgarian the hard sign, curiously, evolved in exactly the opposite direction than in Russian: rather than withering into non-existence, it grew into a full-fledged, healthy vowel. It is not called a hard sign at all, but rather a ер голям or ‘big sign’. It is as it were the most basic vowel sound possible: just what you get when you open your mouth and make sound, something between an ‘u’ and an ‘a’, or, more precisely, an ‘ə’. It is the first vowel in the word for ‘Bulgaria’ itself: България. When I come across it in Bulgarian I tend to read it as if it were Russian, I see it as a sort of blank or interruption in a word, as if България were ‘Bxlgaria’ or ‘B-lgaria’. But it’s not, of course, and my mistake is to take Russian as the model of all Slavic languages.

Romanian was commonly written in Cyrillic into the late 19th century (Moldovan still is), and when it was the Romanian vowel ă, the so called ‘A-breve’, was rendered as ъ. Moldovan preserves Cyrillic because of its historical-cultural contact with the Russian and Soviet world, and thus linguistically with the East Slavic world. But the historical contact with Cyrillic of the Romanian written in, say, Giurgiu, is trans-Danubian, linguistically South Slavic, and culturally Orthodox. The ə is a Romano-Bulgarian vowel, and the evolution of the ъ to accommodate it has much more to do with the soundscape of the Balkans than with any distinctly or narrowly Slavic legacy.

I would like to go on and discuss the yat' (ѣ), the yus, both little (Ѧ) and big (Ѫ), and so many other transitional fossils from the history of Slavic phonetics and of the always imperfect effort to render traces of sound by visible inscription, but this will be for another day.

--Ruse (Русе, Russe, Rousse, Rusciuc, Русчук), Bulgaria, 26 August 2017.

(The image is from the typography studio of Artem Lebedev, and is a tribute to all of the Russian letters that fell victim to the 1918 purge.)

A Conversation With Steph Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, The Nation's New Poetry Editors

Originally posted at 3 Quarks Daily.

On August 7, The Nation announced the appointment of Steph Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith as its new poetry editors. Beginning in the Fall, they will be soliciting and commissioning a wide range of American and international poetry, and will begin accepting submissions on September 15.

Steph Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University, and the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including The Poem Is You (Harvard University Press, 2016). 

Carmen Giménez Smith is Professor of English at Virginia Tech, a CantoMundo fellow, and the author of a memoir and four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.

On August 15, Carmen and Steph joined Justin E. H. Smith by Skype to talk about their work to come at The Nation, and about poetry in America. 

* * *

Justin E. H. Smith: What is poetry doing in The Nation? Does it fit within a unified mission that the magazine has, or is it something more like a breath of fresh air that one can take while absorbing all the difficult news? How do you see it?

Steph Burt: That's a good question. There are a couple of answers I'd want to give to that. The first is that different poems do different things. Carmen and I are only going to print poems we like a lot. But we're not going to like them all for the same reasons. I assume that you like more than one kind of food and my guess is that you listen to more than one kind of music, and that you like different foods and different kinds of music for different reasons. This is sort of the argument of the book about how to read poetry that I'm working on now, so we're talking about that at the same time as we're talking about poetry at The Nation. Different poems do different things. We might print a poem that is a breath of fresh air and a break from thinking abut the struggle against white supremacy; and then we might print a poem whose subtle, careful way of examining language and history shows us how complicated the roots of the problem of white supremacy are; and then we might print a third poem that is a turning-it-up-to-eleven, articulate expression of the need to stay outraged. Those are three good kinds of poem. Three poems in one issue might be a bit much, though if they're short we could do that. Take another urgent problem of politics and culture that The Nation frequently addresses: we might print a poem about the delights of a fruit orchard; we might then print another poem that is a very cold, scientific look at how the earth has changed; and we might print another poem whose emotional undercurrent is, Holy cow! Miami's going to be underwater really soon. Those are three poems that all address the same urgent issue, that's a political issue, but in three different ways, one of which might seem non-political if you're looking at it in a certain way. It is true that in some sense everything is political. It is true in another sense that if the only question you ask about something in your life is, How can I address this as a matter of public policy? Or, How can I address this as a community activist? that's not a life, as someone who is concerned with public policy and with communities, that I want anyone in my community to have to live. So poetry in general can speak to what we need to do together, and it can speak to the lives and the experiences that it is the job of politics to make possible.

Carmen Giménez Smith: I think poetry has always had a role in social-justice movements, and I think rhetorically that there is a way in which theoretical approaches and descriptions, and reportage-based work is vital to changing the world. But I also think that there's a kind of new world-building, a kind of optimistic possibility that gets expressed in art that sometimes can't get expressed in journalism. I also think, again rhetorically --and I think of all writing as having a rhetorical purpose--, that art can say a lot of things and have a tone that cannot be expressed in journalism. So my goal as an editor is to bring works that complement the rigorous journalistic work in the same pages, that add nuance to it, that deepen it, that humanize it. That's how I imagine the curatorial work that Steph and I will be doing for The Nation. I wouldn't necessarily dichotomize poetry into political and apolitical, because in some countries merely expressing the gaze is transgressive, writing a poem is transgressive. I think that having the liberty to look into the world and describe it in itself can be a highly transgressive mode. Having subjectivity isn't a guarantee, no one is guaranteed a subjectivity, and so any kind of expression in art, I think, is implicitly resistant. It's not the way we talk, it's not the way we think, yet we're still moved to be in the world in that way. So I do think that there's a kind of political charge in every expression of poetry, whether it's about just the changing of the seasons or, whether it's about the change of seasons representing the coming of the apocalypse. Which it sure feels like these days.

Punching Down

From the most recent issue of The Point Magazine. To read the whole piece, go here. 

I recently found myself at an academic conference that featured a presentation by graduate students on “combating racism with humor.” We were made to watch a video clip of a theater piece they had performed in connection with an anti-racism event. The skit depicted corporate executives planning an ad campaign associating the efficacy of soap products with their power to make people of color white. I found myself pitying the students. They had obviously overestimated their ability to change the world. But they were also, it seemed to me, tragically unaware of what humor is. They were mistaking it for a tool to be deployed in the pursuit of real-world ends: closing the gap between the powerful and the powerless, ensuring payback time for the fat cats, sticking it to the man.

It is hard to blame them. They were under the grip of a widespread illusion, expressed by Garry Trudeau along with countless others after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, that humor only achieves its highest purpose when it “punches up”—that is, when it involves the powerless kicking back against the powerful. But to insist that a joke is not funny because it punches down is a category mistake. It is to deploy standards of justice where justice is not at issue. We see an analogous mistake when philistines judge that, say, a crucifix photographed in a jar of urine is, to the extent that it is offensive, not art. “That’s not funny” is the comedic equivalent of “that’s not art”—both are statements that can be made only by people who don’t understand the thing they are talking about.

I am entering the silverback stage of life, and at this point it is surely a variety of punching down—or, as we used to say, it is undignified—to berate graduate students. It is getting to be time for me to cede my place to them, I know, and to acknowledge that other meaning of “humor,” according to which young people’s internal passages are coursing with fluids, while the old, as Robert Burton said in The Anatomy of Melancholy, are quite dry. We have different humoral constitutions than the young, and so it is fitting that we should also have a different sense of humor. I happen to be dessicating moreover in a critical moment of history that has compelled me to rethink everything I long took for granted about humor: what it is, what it is for and whom it should target...

Continued here.