Diacritiques

Some time ago, on the occasion of doing other editing/proofreading work, I reconnected with Project Gutenberg, and in particular the excellent network of distributed proofreaders — the folks who bring you the wonderful Project Gutenberg eBooks. Poking around among the current projects, I came across a curious Victorian novel written by Jessie Fothergill and called The First Violin. It is set in Germany, the main characters are musicians, and much of the dialogue is in a mixture of German and English — obviously to add local colour, because you’d expect the characters to talk in German anyway, and their speech to be rendered in English in a book in English.

An even stranger kind of multilingualism is the use of fake French in this passage (emphasis mine):

Karl Linders gave his opinion freely upon the men in authority. He had nothing to do with them, nothing to hope or fear from them; he filled a quiet place among the violoncellists, and had attained his twenty-eighth year without displaying any violent talent or tendency to distinguish himself, otherwise than by getting as much mirth out of life as possible and living in a perpetual state of “carlesse contente.”

I’m quite sure a non-English-speaking French native speaker would have problems with carlesse (TLFi doesn’t know it either.) And content (fem.: contente) is supposed to be an adjective.

Jessie Fothergill, who was born in Manchester (England) in 1851 and died in Switzerland in 1891, was the daughter of one of the founders of a large English textile company. I don’t know much about her life, except that The First Violin was also published by various houses in the U.S., and that an 1898 Broadway play was based on this novel. There are also links between The First Violin and the now almost obscure German composer Joachim Raff’s fifth symphony.

Via Bystander, a blogging English magistrate judge: A youth from Kent has been issued a £80 (about 117.139019€, if you ask Google) on-the-spot fine for using “the F-word”, as they put it. Here’s the BBC news report:

Kurt Walker, 18, from Deal, Kent, said he would go to court rather than pay the fine handed out in a town park.

He said he received the fixed-penalty notice after he used the F-word to a group of friends he met in the park.

Kent Police said fixed penalty notices were just one tool to help them to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Student Mr Walker was on his way to a youth centre where he works as a volunteer when he stopped to talk to friends.

“One of my mates said, ‘What have you been up to’, and I swore when I replied,” he said. […]

“In my eyes I have not committed any crime whatsoever,” he said, adding that swearing was a normal part of the language he and his friends use.

Dover District Council’s anti-social behaviour unit works closely with Kent Police to tackle bad behaviour.

“Swearing and abusive behaviour certainly is not normal behaviour and I feel it should never be used in a public place,” said councillor Julie Rook.

A Kent Police spokeswoman said: “The public expect us to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Bystander quotes a different press report, one I can’t find online, in which a police spokesman draws a perilous comparison:

A Kent Police spokesman confirmed: “He didn’t swear at the police, he was talking to his mates [but] it was close enough to the police officer.

“It’s an offence under the Public Order Act. It’s quite reasonable to give someone a fixed penalty notice and if someone doesn’t want to pay it they can go to court.

“Some people think it [the fine] is over the top, some people think it’s perfectly reasonable.

“It’s one of those things that divides people, like Marmite.”

Now do we have to defend the honour of Marmite or the use of taboo language within one’s own social circle, be it in a public venue?

Marmite, the word, is of course a borrowing from French, where the noun marmite ([maʁ’mit]) denotes a cauldron or large cooking pot.

A small addendum, penned a few hours later: The Guardian is a paper on whose very sensible attitude towards taboo language I’ve already commented. Still, it was surprising to see in a book review by Natasha Walter (dated February 18, 2006) the word fuck employed outside a direct quote:

As Erica Jong, erstwhile celebrator of the zipless fuck, tells Levy: “Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven’t come.”

The book is Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy.

Over at Crooked Timber, they are hosting a seminar on Susanna Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (book via Amazon.fr). The link goes to the introductory post, from which you can jump to individual articles, including one from the author.

It must be the very wintry autumn we’ve been having here in Paris that has me thrown more seriously into novels and sustained reading in general than I usually am. Be that as it may, I’m about a third way through with JS&MN, and it’s an intriguing, compelling book. It isn’t easy to classify, even beyond the question whether or not it’s “fantasy”. Even though the it is set in the early 19th century, I’m leaning more and more towards the opinion that it is not a historical novel: Clarke doesn’t borrow so much the England of the epoch she purports to describe, but the Victorian novel’s take on this England.

Belle Waring takes up the question that has been bugging me — who is this footnote-loving, scholarly, and most probably female narrator? — and Susanna Clarke replies in the fashion of an author: providing fascinating insight, but leaving the question ultimately open.

P.S. : I copied the pretty ampersand sign from the book’s web site.

I just posted about how several French translations of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women are wretchedly bowdlerised, pale reflections of the original, and that there is indeed an entire editorial history of a) removing all references to religion (the entire Pilgrim’s Progress dimension, the profession of the girls’ father, the Catholicism of the maid […]

Pascal de chez Finis Africae découvre que la lecture de Little Women (titre français : Les quatre filles du Docteur March), le roman de formation de Louisa May Alcott, en version française appelle quelques interrogations critiques. Principale mise en cause : la traduction, dans son cas celle de Anne Joba pour Le Livre de […]

I imagine Geoffrey Pullum has a file on his computer named “Strunk and White adjectives”, and every time he posts about The Elements of Style he chooses a new one and ticks it off as “used”. He’s called the opus a horrid little notebook of nonsense, a stupid little book, a poisonous little collection of […]

New entries in the 2005 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary. I was slightly surprised about the new sense of neoconservative. There must have been some semantic variation over the last few years.

Ian Rankin is one of a small handful of mystery writers whose work I particularly enjoy. And since, let’s face it, I read faster than he can write new novels, I had postponed reading the latest one of his Detective Inspector John Rebus series, Fleshmarket Close. It’s as good as all the others — the plot […]

On Culture Vulture, the Guardian’s cultural news blog, Sarah Crown reports on the difficulties of turning Philip Pullman’s excellent and complex His Dark Materials trilogy into a film. The putative director, Chris Weitz, has just resigned from the job. A little further on, there’s a paragraph on something I’d heard about before: Weitz, who […]

If this had been posted on about any other day of the year, I’d have loved to check out the C++ version of The Mill on the Floss. (Yet another Victorian novel I never finished. Not yet anyway. Don’t take me wrong, I am very fond of Jude the Obscure and liked Wuthering Heights quite […]