Up the Gunners

Writing here back in 2013, initially about "magazine", I moved on to 

Another perfectly innocent storage word from Arabic has been... bellicosified (don't bother looking that up; it means 'given a martial meaning' ). The word in question derives from what looks to me like a phrase in Arabic: dār as-şinā‘ah (maybe Arabic can create composite nouns by joining smaller words together –  as indeed English does: Etymonline tells me dār means 'house' and as-şinā‘ah means 'art/craft/skill' –  a rather up-market sort of 'workshop'; come to think of it, English has borrowed from French le mot juste, an 'atelier').  

This spawned various words in Italian and its many dialects. In standard Italian the word is darsena – 'wet dock'. Moving north, the Venetian equivalent was arsenal, which was applied to a complex of naval dockyards and armouries, the Arsenale di Venezia. Various other languages got their foot in the door and borrowed that word, but shorn of its peaceable storage-and-work-related meaning. It wasn't until some workers from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich formed a football team ('The Gunners') that  swords were beaten into ploughshares and the word was rehabilitated.

So  the Venetian dialect has given us the word "arsenal". which referred originally to a particular complex of buildings devoted to war at sea but has come to be used to refer to any store of weaponry.

Venetian also gives us (and many other languages) the word "quarantine", mentioned in passing (I was talking about dozen at the time) here:

In French -aine is a suffix that can make any number approximate; in English, though, dozen is the only ...

<digression>
I was hoping that, in recognition of the fact that flowers are sold in 10s and 5s, the word dizen would evolve (French dixaine). Sadly. it hasn't happened.
<digression>

...such word we have; quarantine is related, but came via Italian quarantina giorni – the period that ships from plague-ridden countries had to wait in the offing [never thought I'd use that one, except in the song "Blow the Wind Southerly"] before putting in at 17TH-century Venice.

That reference to Venice agrees with the received etymological wisdom (Susie Dent mentioned it in a recent Radio Times). But more recently (here) I mentioned Dubrovnik as a possible locus for the coining – though the Venetian dialect would have been influential there at one time, as Dubrovnik was under Venetian rule at the time.

Another Venetian word that, like "arsenal" gave English a word with a general application based on a particular usage in Venice is that place where Shakespeare housed Shylock – in the ghetto:

The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jews were restricted to live and thus segregated from other people.
Source

But when Elvis used those words "in the ghetto" referred to 'a cold and grey ...

<parenthesis>
(Come to think of it, it was probably gray)
</parenthesis>

... Chicago morn'. In fact, many cities now have ghettos.

Another legacy of Venetian will have to wait for an update. It's time for tea.

b 

Update – 2020.07.06.13:55: Added  PS and fixed date in first line. 

PS

And here it is:

Another word that has come to us from Venice is "gazette". Here's what Etymonline has to say:

gazette (n.)

"newspaper," c. 1600, from French gazette (16c.), from Italian gazzetta, Venetian dialectal gazeta "newspaper," also the name of a small copper coin, literally "little magpie," from gazza; applied to the monthly newspaper (gazeta de la novità) published in Venice by the government, either from its price or its association with the bird (typical of false chatter), or both. First used in English 1665 for the paper issued at Oxford, whither the court had fled from the plague.

The coin may have been so called for its marking; ...The general story of the origin of the word is broadly accepted, but there are many variations:...

That page goes on to give details, which are many and varied, but the common threads are the bird (although one of them adds the rather sniffy "but it does not appear on any of the oldest Venetian specimens preserved at Florence") and the idea of idle chatter (Twitter comes to mind, a little anachronistically)...

<tangent subj="translation">
Speaking of anachronism, I am still fuming at the award-winning World's Classics translation of Os Lusíadas which sidesteps a rather tricky translation point by ignoring the original and inventing a 'heavy anchor chain' on a sixteenth century caravel, when the anchor chain was not invented until the nineteenth century – when ships started getting too heavy for hemp hawsers. And even then, a ship as light as a caravel wouldn't...

<inline-PPS>
This made sense when I wrote it, but probably needs a bit of explanation. I'm entering for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, as mentioned in a recent post. Part of my preparation involved looking at another translation, which

• Won an international prize 
• Is rubbish

</inline-PPS> 

But I must let it go.
</tangent>

...England had just such a coin , the farthing (a quarter of an old penny, so a 960th of a pound, about 00.01 oops, correction: .1 new pence, but the bird was not a gazza (thieving or otherwise). It was a wren:

Update – 2020.07.07.09:55:  Added inline PPS.

Heaven, I'm in heaven...

...When we're laid together rotting feet to feet.

This rather ghoulish image will be explained in the fullness of time. It's a long story:

<autobiographical_note date="Summer 1973">
After my first year of Portuguese I went to a summer school at the Universidade de Coimbra, which gave me both a tan and a useful addition to my stock of adjectives-turned-nouns, as every day I caught o eléctrico to the University.

<etymological_note>
I've mentioned this before. In short, one of the engines of word formation is that people get
used to dropping the noun in an <adjective-noun> pair. A peach is a Persian, and cheese is
formed or moulded in some languages. For the full story, see here.
</etymological_note>

Um elétrico is a tram. 

Every Saturday the students were  taken on a guided tour led by a little man who was a geographer, and obsessed with land reclamation. So everywhere we stopped he gave us a lecture on the particular sand of the area. There are several sorts of sand in Portugal, but more than that I couldn't say – as the Portuguese spoken by the students wasn't up to his patter. 

The one other recurring theme of his lectures was the tragic love affair of the prince dom Pedro and his mother‘s lady-in-waiting (Don't queens EVER learn?) Inêz de Castro. One Saturday we visited the Monastery of Alcobaça, where the lovers are buried. The Atlas Obscura recounts:

...King Afonso IV, Pedro’s father, finally had Inês murdered before her children’s eyes. Pedro, heartbroken and enraged, rose up in open rebellion against his father, but ultimately failed in his quest for revenge and justice.  

Two years after Inês’ death, Afonso died and Pedro became king; and here’s where things go a little sideways:  

The tomb at Alcobaça

Legend holds that Pedro ordered Inês’ body to be disinterred, her corpse dressed in finery and propped up in the throne room. Pedro then ordered his vassals to pledge their obedience and loyalty to this corpse he called his wife and queen, and further demanded that they kiss her dead hand. 

Formalities thus dispensed with, Pedro had his corpse bride installed in a lavish tomb...
 Source 

</autobiographical_note>

According to Camões (the author of the piece I‘m working on for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation) her burial place is no less weird – feet-to-feet with her prince, so that the lovers’ first sight (when ‘raised incorruptible’) would be each other....

<inline_ps>
Sounds odd to me (not that the whole thing is particularly unodd). I thought the God-fearing rules required the body to be buried a  particular way round. Besides, shouldn’t they have their minds on higher things? (If they had minds, of course).
</inline_ps>

...The notes to the World's Classics edition  say that the exhumation story "speaks of some derangement", going on

Yet his decree that they should be buried feet to feet... so that hers will  be the first face he sees at the resurrection, seems the action of a lover.

How old is this guy? Has he forgotten? Are passionate romantic love and derangement mutually exclusive?

I had come across the name Inêz de Castro in my study of Golden Age Spanish literature as the subject of a missing work by Lope de Vega (that 'missing' is shorthand for "well-we've-only-got-Lope's-word-for-it-that-it-ever-existed" – but he did write quite a lot of other stuff, so we've no reason to think he was just bumping up his cv by claiming to have written another work); but I thought no more of it at the time.

Interesting though this story is, it may not be suitable as an entry for the Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation. The rules restrict explanations to "a commentary of not more than 300 words". And as Os Lusíadas was first published when Shakespeare was only a

whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school

there are single phrases that call for 300 words of explanation. I've started the translation now though, so I'll finish.

b

Update: 2019.04.22.18:55 – Added inline PS.

It ain't over...

 ... till the fa... (Come to think of it, why did the coiner of that adage assume that prima donnas (whose big song tended to end the show) had to be fat; Brünnhilde maybe, but not Tosca...) ...till the fat lady sings

My inbox caught a whiff of musical history  last week:

Liszt began work on an Italian opera in 1845. He started composing in 1850 but abandoned the project after completing the first act. The score — written largely in shorthand — was known to only a small number of Liszt scholars who concluded that it could never be performed because the material was incomplete and largely indecipherable. [HD as Shaw (??*) said, it was not so much weighed in the balance and found wanting as found difficult and not tried at all.]

David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at Cambridge University, saw it differently, and spent three years deciphering the forgotten 115-page manuscript, decoding Liszt’s notes and supplying a 20-bar finale. The result is the complete first act of Sardanapalo, Liszt’s only mature opera, based on Lord Byron’s Assyrian tragedy of 1821, Sardanapalus.
Source

I'm not sure why this became newsworthy on 19 March 2019, as the same article goes on to say

Between April 2017 – July 2018 Dr Trippett orchestrated the opera according to Liszt’s cues...

<digression>
HD: I DO hate this pleonastic use of "between" and  "–" , but don't let my bugbears interfere with your understanding of something that, admittedly, is perfectly clear. And while we're here, should that be sic – for clues?
</digression>

...based on the scores on Liszt’s desk during the 1850s. 
Source

In a post on The Conversation on 11 February 2019 Dr Trippett wrote

I am a musicologist and so my interest is primarily in musical sketches. These can pose challenges of presentation that scraps of poetry or incomplete drawings do not. However beguiling incomplete art may be, what are we to do with unfinished music?

And his answer to that question is implied by the title of the piece:

Editing unfinished music by a great composer is controversial – but sometimes it needs to be done

And as Colonel Pickering might have said "He did it".

Notes from a New Enterprise

When this was posted, 29 March was due to be a date that would live in infamy, but that's changed; though HMG's attitude to the revocation of Article 50 is implied by their choice of a date for a petition-inspired debate: April Fools' Day. And if you can't make sense of this paragraph you've had the good fortune to avoid the three years of unseemly wrangling that will perhaps come to be known as Cameron's Folly.

Anyway, that gives me 3 and a bit months to put my money where my mouth is. It's about 40 years since I did any serious translating, and we've all passed a lot of water since then.

So far I've made a start – chosen my author (Camões, in a nod to former glories ...

<autobiographical_note>
[last translation I did won the Camões Award, back in the days when arts funding was less pitiful than it is now; the award has been discontinued]. 

<inline_PS>
Not to be confused with the Camões Prize, first awarded in 1989 and awarded annually thereafter by the Portuguese Direcção-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. The Camões Award was made by the Luso-Brazilian Society, Canning House, and I submitted my entry in 1974.
<-inline_PS>

</autobiographical_note>

...) and chosen my extract (the Rules say "translate a poem" but Os Lusíadas runs to nearly 300 pages in the original Portuguese; that's not the original original, which was first published in 1572). More anon, when the weather is less inviting...

b

Update: 2019.04.01.10:45 – Added footnote,  added to <inline_PS>, and added PPS.

*
Regardless of the date of this update, I really got it wrong; well, right era, wrong opinionated ideologue. It was Chesterton who wrote "The Christian ideal... [HD And if I'd remembered this bit of context I'd have had a better chance of placing the source.  Added to this, the Colonel Pickering thought brought Shaw to mind] ...has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."

PPS
Stop Press. My entry for the Stephen Spender Prize has met choppy  waters (quite appropriately,  given  the poem's subject matter: voyages of discovery). The Conditions of entry call for "a commentary of not more than 300 words", and – given that  Os Lusíadas was published when Shakespeare was still  a schoolboy – there are single phrases in it that would be quite meaningless to a 21st century English  reader without more than 300 words of explanation.

Update: 2019.07.01.13:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS
All is – if not well, exactly – at least settled. I chose another passage, less footnote-iferous, and submitted that. But the more interesting passage (discussed a few posts later than this one, with title Heaven, I'm in Heaven) wouldn't accept its suppression; so eventually I made a second submission (with a second entry fee – but hey, you're only old once).