Word of the day: lucubration

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is lucubration:

noun : laborious or intensive study; also : the product of such study — usually used in plural

The word comes with a helpful explanation:

Imagine someone studying through the night by the light of a dim candle or lamp. That image demonstrates perfectly the most literal sense of “lucubration.” Our English word derives from the Latin verb “lucubrare,” meaning “to work by lamplight.” (Yes, that Latin root is related to “lux,” the Latin word for “light.”) In its earliest known English uses in the late 1500s and early 1600s, “lucubration” named both nocturnal study itself and a written product thereof.

I immediately think of lines from John Milton’s Il Penseroso: “Or let my Lamp at midnight hour, / Be seen in som high lonely Towr.” That was grad school: up late, reading, writing, typing by the light of a desk lamp.

“Your Best Buy’s Mongol” (and other buys)

[Life, March 19, 1956. Click for a larger, even better buy.]

A full-page advertisement for my favorite pencil. I lIke the claim: “writers say it actually stimulates flow of thoughts.” So I am here to say, Yes, the Mongol actually stimulates flow of thoughts. Yes I say yes it does Yes.

The Mongol ad appears on page 64 in Life. Across from it:


[Life, March 19, 1956. Click for a larger view.]

Not all rubber bands are full of life. But these are. I will use one of them to secure a Mongol to my thinking cap. Flow, thoughts, flow!

And now that thoughts are flowing, I would like to say that I have never dabbled in psychedelics (I have trouble even spelling the word), but I’m sure that if I were so to dabble, I would see Pink Pearl erasers sprout little hands and feet and run with glee.



My attention to these matters is prompted by news of an illustrated history of Faber-Castell, as reported by Contrapuntalism and Lexikaliker. The Mongol ad is reproduced in the book, as I learned while Looking Inside at amazon.de. Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for providing that link.

Other Mongol posts: Harry Truman with pencil : Jimmy Hoffa’s Mongol : Molly Dodd, Mongol user : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Naked City Mongol : “Sound-testing a MONGOL” : Stolen Mongols

[Some years ago, I wrote (briefly) about the Mongol ad in a piece for Pencil Revolution.]

Whither Wheaties?

Suddenly, neither of the two “real” (not store-brand) supermarkets in my town sells Wheaties. Not only are there no Wheaties: there is no slot on the shelf for Wheaties. And now I see this news:

If brands get too small, retailers may drop them from the store shelves. So General Mills has good reason to devote attention to what it calls “brands that we haven’t supported as much over the recent past” — such as Wheaties, which enlisted Vikings running back Adrian Peterson to appear on the cover.

Cover? That would be the front of the box, no? Maybe in the cereal biz it’s called the cover. Either way, I want my Wheaties — or yours.

Other cereal posts
“Fancy-pants cereal” : Rewriting a Grape-Nuts box : Rewriting a Shredded Wheat box

Obviating elaboration

Claire Kehrwald Cook:

Long sentences aren’t necessarily wordy, not if every word counts. As good writers know, leisurely sentences have their purposes — to contrast with short ones, say, or to establish a desired tone. A sentence can be too tight. Sometimes you need a clause instead of a phrase, a phrase instead of a word. What you’re after is a supple style; you don’t want to compact your language, trading looseness for density. But you’re not likely to run that risk unless you’re a compulsive polisher. Condensing to a fault is so rare a failing that it needs only passing mention. Of course, if you'd like to change the last sentence to The rarity of overtightness obviates elaboration, you have something to worry about.

Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985)

A 2005 New York Times death notice describes Claire Kehrwald Cook as “A brilliant editor and teacher whose devotion to clear thinking and clear writing inspired everyone who was lucky enough to work with her.” I believe it. Line by Line is smart, witty, and likely to prove enormously helpful to a reader with the patience to follow along as Cook sorts out tangled sentence after tangled sentence. (It’s hard work.) The book is still in print, now subtitled How to Edit Your Own Writing.

Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Mitchell

In the September 23 New Yorker : an excerpt from Stephen Mitchell’s forthcoming Odyssey, a passage from book 17 with the title “The Death of Argos.” The passage is a celebrated moment from the poem, as Odysseus’s long-suffering hunting dog hears His Master’s Voice and dies an easy death.

A translation of a poem as vast as the Odyssey rises or falls not in its treatment of great, memorable lines — such as those that describe Argos, lying neglected and bug-ridden on a pile of dung — but in its treatment of what might be called ordinary lines, those that go by in a way that invites no special attention from a reader. Someone walks into town; someone offers a greeting; someone serves a meal: the translator must attend to it all. Three lines from Mitchell got me making comparisons to my favorite translations of the Odyssey, those of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Stanley Lombardo (2000).

The scene: Odysseus, returned to Ithaca and disguised as an itinerant beggar, has been staying out in the country with the swineherd Eumaeus. Eumaeus is one of the most appealing characters in the poem; Homer even addresses him directly as a mark of affection. Eumaeus is something of an avatar of Odysseus himself: the swineherd is the son of a king and queen, a displaced person who lost his noble home in childhood. He was raised by Laertes and Anticleia alongside Odysseus’s sister and and has lived as a slave in Ithaca for many years. In book 16, Eumaeus welcomes Telemachus (who has returned from searching for news of Odysseus) in what looks like a father-son reunion (Telemachus even calls Eumaeus atta, father). Eumaeus is pious, loyal, righteously indignant, and stealthy (in 16 he speaks quietly to Penelope about her son’s return). And like Odysseus, Eumaeus is a figure of great versatility: though he seems never to have fought before, he will soon join Odysseus, Telemachus, and the cowherd Philoetius in a Special Forces unit to deal out doom to the suitors.

As our scene begins, Odysseus and Eumaeus stand before Odysseus’s palace. Odysseus has commented on the palace at length, praising its design and construction, and noting from smell (roasting meat) and sound (a lyre) that men are inside feasting. Eumaeus compliments Odysseus on his perceptiveness and, for a brief moment, shapes the story by posing the question of who should enter the palace first. Eumaeus is in distinguished company: Athena, Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus all work on the story, giving another character a role to play or setting up the course of events.

Here is Fitzgerald’s Eumaeus:



Numbskull is a wonderful touch, and it’s not twentieth-century slang either: the Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to 1697. “This action” is military in its sound, fitting in light of what is to come.

Here is Lombardo’s Eumaeus:



The rhetorical question is a good touch: the beggar’s intelligence is no surprise to Eumaeus. In 14, Odysseus told a story so as to finagle a cloak from Eumaeus: Eumaeus figured out what Odysseus was up to and was happy to oblige him.

And here are the lines from Mitchell’s Eumaeus that got me making comparisons:



I cannot hear Eumaeus’s voice — or anyone’s voice — in these lines, which sound to me like the translationese of bad subtitles. I’m sticking with Fitzgerald and Lombardo.

Some related posts
Gilgamesh in translation (Stephen Mitchell and N.K. Sandars)
Whose Homer? (the Big Four: Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo)
Translators at work and play (another line by the Big Four)
Three Virgils (Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Fagles)
Translations, mules, briars (Guy Davenport on Lattimore)
New from Homer (Mitchell’s Iliad)

[Does Mitchell know Homeric Greek? It seems a reasonable question. He has said that he never read the Iliad before translating it because he could never get through book 1 in a translation. Did Mitchell thus learn Homeric Greek to translate a poem he had never read? It’s all very puzzling. See the discussion beginning here.]

Domestic comedy

“‘Gadding about’?”

“Yes,‘gadding about.’”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Kubrick remake

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

From 2013: A Space Odyssey.

A related post
Officemates

Duke Ellington in Afghanistan

From the BBC: When Duke Ellington played Kabul, with a brief clip from a 1973 interview. The Ellington band visited Afghanistan in 1963 while on tour for the United States State Department. Impressions from the tour prompted the Ellington-Billy Strayhorn collaboration The Far East Suite (1967).

Related reading
All Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)

The worst sentence in Salinger so far

I’m up to page 137 in David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger, “the interminable official book of the acclaimed documentary film.” The following sentence, from Shields, appears on page 133. It is the worst sentence I have read so far:

This is the moment at which — amid war, champagne, and male bonding — Salinger revealed his anatomical deformity to Hemingway, according to Kleeman.

The “deformity,” as explained elsewhere, was an undescended testicle. Yes, a great secret of the book is that Salinger had an undescended testicle. Which supposedly explains his (Salinger’s, not the testicle’s) choice to avoid “the media glare.”

Revealed is an awkward word here. I hope that Salinger told Hemingway about it and didn’t — what with all the bonding — drop trou. And that closing “according to Kleeman”: not the way to end a sentence.

That a writer should shun publication and daunt biographers for years on end, only to fall into these hands: karma must indeed be a bitch. I remain on the lookout for a sentence still worse: I’m trying to get my money’s worth from this book.

Related reading
All J. D. Salinger posts (Pinboard)

[“Acclaimed documentary film”? The film was just recut after unfavorable reviews.]

Lands’ End misspelling

As seen on this page. Sheesh.

*

September 26: It’s been fixed.

Related reading
All misspelling posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, the company name has a misplaced apostrophe.]