Schwarzkopf and the harpsichord

Quirks of a translator's life – sitrep

In the course of my translation work (towards the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation mentioned before in some recent posts to this blog), I've come across a word with a fascinating cluster of meanings. I've also started to use a new function of Google Sheets – a function that provides a Google Translate version (one word) on the fly.

The syntax of the new function is

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(<cell-to-translate>"<source->","<target>")

for example

 =GOOGLETRANSLATE(A4,"pt","en")

(This function call tells Google Translate to look at the Portuguese word in cell A4 and translate it into English.).

As anyone involved with language knows, meanings of words depend almost entirely on context. So the disembodied words thrown up by Google Translate in its Google Sheets incarnation  can be a bit off-the-wall.

I rather forced that incarnation into the last sentence, as it provides a link to one of the meanings of the keyword, the Portuguese cravo. This can mean "carnation", a meaning that possibly has a more than accidental link with "incarnation", if the derivation for that word (Etymonline lists several possibilities) is the Latin for flesh:

...Or it might be called for its pinkness and derive from Middle French carnation "person's color or complexion" (15c.), which probably is from Italian dialectal carnagione "flesh color," from Late Latin carnationem (nominative carnatio) "fleshiness," from Latin caro "flesh" (originally "a piece of flesh," from PIE root *sker- (1) "to cut"). OED points out that not all the flowers are this color. 

More here

Another possible meaning of cravo is (my source here is the Collins Portuguese Dictionary) "harpsichord". But these language1-to-language2 dictionaries often raise more questions than answers in a translator's mind; I suspect that the equivalent instrument might rather be a clavichord which doesn't sound or behave the same.

<example>
A strangely neglected album has Oscar Peterson playing with Joe Pass in an arrangement of excerpts from Porgy and Bess for clavichord and guitar, exploiting this unique quality of the clavichord: that the thing that strikes the string also defines its length. 

<aside subject="defines">
A deliciously apposite word. The word "determines the length" would be similarly appropriate for those of an etymological bent, as the tangent (that's what the doofer inside a clavichord is called) provides the terminus ad quem the string vibrates.
</aside>

This lets the keyboard  player bend a note, as does a blues guitarist.
</example>

In a harpsichord, on the other hand,  the strings are plucked.

<maybe_though>
(On the other hand, the clavi- bit of the word just means key [as in clef, clavicle, or the French clé] so any keyboard instrument might have been called a "clavi<something>". The makers of the Clavinova were the second (after whoever named the clavichord)  to exploit this neologizing open goal.)
</maybe_though>

Yet another possible meaning of cravo is "nail" or "stud", which – if you think of a nail driven home so that only its head is visible – accounts for the metaphorical use which for reasons best known to Google is the meaning fixed on by Google Translate (try putting that function call 

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A4,"pt","en")

into a Google Sheets spreadsheet and you'll see what I mean: hint – Schwarzkopf.)

b

Update: 2019.05.28.08:55 – Added PS

PS In my rush to hit the <Publish> button yesterday I left out the one meaning of cravo that applied to the passage I'm translating. Again, it's metaphorical, but unlike blackhead (aha – THAT was it, Schwarzkopf, geddit?) which is animal, this meaning is vegetable: clove.

Knowing when to fold

I just heard Terry Wogan on Desert Island Discs Revisited using the expression (when talking about ending his career) "I'll fold up my tent".

I wrote about metaphors for arriving and leaving over 3 years ago (here) but I think it's due for a new outing. As so often in this context, I quote The Man:

Elcock explains: 

While VENĪRE remained everywhere the usual verb for 'to come', two new terms conveying a more visual image were  borrowed from maritime language. The older of these, which prevailed in Spain, was PLĬCARE, first used with reference to the folding of sails (cf Port. chegar, Sicilian chicari). In Rumanian a pleca means inversely 'to go, to depart'; this is because the metaphor there was military, and referred to the folding up of tents  (cf. Eng. 'to decamp').  AD-RIPARE, 'to  come to shore', was a somewhat later creation which found favour in Gaul (cf Prov. arribá [HD: Elcock does not mention plegar here, but he has already mentioned it in another context]. From Provence it spread to Catalonia, and during the Middle Ages was carried thence to Sardinia, as arribare.   

The Romance Language (I've given this source more than once, but make no apology for that: it's very good.)

So, whereas I had hitherto relied on the decamp example as a metaphor for leaving in English, I can now add to my body of examples (in that Terry Wogan quote) the explicit metaphor of folding a tent.

<temporal_paradox>
As it happens, as that edition of Desert Island Discs dates from before the beginning of the Harmless Drudgery blog, in fact the example was already there, waiting for me to hear the repeat. But anyway...
</temporal_paradox>

But, I was thinking of the spoken language. As I said in that earlier post

<digression>
Catalan often straddles the French/Spanish camps, so I expected a pair like the Provençal ones. But Cat. plegar has a different metaphorical use: stop work, knock off  – reminiscent of primary school teachers' instructions: When you've finished, FOLD your arms on the desk in front of you.
</digression>

And the arm-folding image as a sign of work done is unequivocal ...

<digression>
(not the most apt of words in this context, considering the last two syllables...

<word_formation_speculation>
Hmm. There's something to be said on each side of that argument. If all the arguments were on the same side, it'd be univocal. 

<univocal_thought>
[The metaphor that evokes univocality is "singing from the same hymn-sheet" {unless harmony's involved, of course, but this is getting silly {Getting?}}]
<univocal_thought>

</word_formation_speculation> 

... but you know what I mean – clearly meaningful)
</digression>

...  in an English context (and I imagine in many others).

<rant>
And apropos of nothing (I just happened to see it in a fruitless quest for information just now)...

The dates of these restrictions 

may be subject to change.

No, no  no.  They ARE subject to change. What they MAY be is changed, in which case they would be subjected to change.

I do wish people wouldn't toss the subjunctive around willy-nilly with some vague it's-not-my-fault-guv "meaning".  But I must take a deep breath and ignore it. There are worse things, I know...
</rant>

Anyway, I think it's time I folded my arms.

b

More power to you

A CXL blog post does what it announces (but I suggest that you don't spend too long there, or prepare to repel "free" offers):

Error Messages: Common Mistakes, Best Practices,
and Lots of Examples

Your users will make mistakes. It’s inevitable. That’s what error messages are for – but so many companies
fail to follow best practices, and they’re pissing off potential customers in the process...

Error messages can be so frustrating. How many times have you went [HD sic] to fill out a form to create an account, only to receive a message like this:

But computers aren't the only source of error messages.

My rechargeable  radio, for instance,  has an annoying drawback (among many – it  was a Bad Buy). When it runs down, with its dying breath it remembers its current state (On, of course). I then recharge it, and when it's done this a helpful message appears on its screen "Fully charged – unplug charger".

But secretly – I don't have the headphones on at this stage – it remembers that it's On; so that  when I go to switch it on again it's already  flat.  But, to the cognoscente of engineer-speak, there is a clue to this  annoying behaviour: the expression Powering off.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1984-1998>
When I began working for DEC, in the mid-'80s, I noticed what I at the time took to be a barbarism in the books I was editing; it kept telling the user to "power off" the computer. Being something of a chauvinist I thought things like "Now hold on a moment my good fellow, "powering off" may be something that goes on in the colonies, but here in dear old Blighty we switch off, turn off, cut the power, unplug... – there are many options, but "power off" isn't one of them."

That's what I thought. But there were other more pressing and more significant battles to be fought, and I often turned a blind eye.

<trivial_nitpicking>
"Americanisms" often provoke in me a yawn reflex. Some people get het up about them (my grandfather did: he avoided even the most useful imports, words such as boyfriend). But there's a lot to be said for American English. Words get borrowed, first by younger people, and ultimately they become part of the scenery. I have bugbears, as any opinionated old curmudgeon will – words such as attendee and sentence-defining hopefully – but what will be will be.

There aren't many British English dictionaries that recognize "power off" (as a phrasal verb),  but usage is gradually winning. Onelook lists only one General Dictionary – the Johnny-come-lately Wordnik, but look on Google and you will find millions (even if you use the searchstring power off :uk). Of course, many of the hits are for accidental collocation: "he turned the power  off", for example. But many of them are for the phrasal verb (and by now I think it's OK to write "the" there, rather than some mealy-mouthed circumlocution like "a supposed new 'verb'".
</trivial_nitpicking>

Another feature of a technical writer's life (this was a few years later,  and I now wrote the stuff, is that engineers blithely say (when questioned about what the user sees when something goes wrong) "Oh, in that case I just generate an error message".

Error messages can vary in quality and usefulness; and in literacy. A writer learns to keep an eye on what appears on a screen the  user sees.
</autobiographical_note>

Another of the annoying features of my radio is  the care one must use when switching off. There is a multi-function switch, which – if given too short a press – doesn't switch anything off, but simply toggles between DAB and FM (another cause of flat batteries at the next time of use). To switch off, you need to press the button for about two seconds; the exact time is probably documented somewhere. But there's a helpful message that reads "Switching off", so you wait for that to appear and then release the button. 

<possible_experiment value="0">
The radio doesn't switch off after a long press (if the button is still held down). Theoretically, one could hold the switch down and pour withering scorn on the silly thing. "'Switching off', you say, but you're not switching off, are you? How long can you keep up this pretence?"

Possibly after some time (a minute? 5?...) it would give up the attempt to switch off and do something else.
</possible_experiment>

But a curious thing happens when the battery runs down in normal use. Just before it gives up the ghost it generates a different error message: Powering off.

There are two possible explanations for this apparent inconsistency:

1. It's not inconsistent, but rather subtle: Switching off is something a person does, whereas Powering off is something that the device does.
2. The developer produced the words Powering off in both cases.  The writer – taking into account what the user needed – saw only the case that involved the user, and required the change to Switching off. This left Powering off in the other case (which the user typically doesn't see).

I'm inclined to suspect the latter.

b

English tests as part of the 'hostile environment'

A Guardian article last week quoted Stephen Timms, the Labour MP for East Ham:

“Panorama established that a few dozen people cheated, but the way the government has responded has blighted the lives of thousands and thousands who did not cheat. All the people I’ve met feel mortified that anyone would think they would cheat."
Source

My attention was drawn to the article by this tweet:

And the writer also wrote a blog post; "rather angry" she said:

Not very angry – bit of a shame really for a fan of (written) blood sports; I'm partial to a literary hatchet job.  But there's a lot to be angry about:

I knew there had been problems with some of the centres running tests of English, but it now turns out overseas applicants and some who are already studying in the UK for whom there is no evidence of cheating are having their visas cancelled, denied or - in extreme cases - being forcibly removed from the UK.  Many have asked to sit tests again to prove their proficiency and therefore eligibility to study in the UK. This has fallen on deaf ears. 

Source

A few days later the Guardian upped the ante:

The Guardian has learned that a special team overseen by the Home Office was established in January 2017 to deal with the growing backlog of legal actions related to a Home Office decision in 2014 to revoke or curtail the visas of around 34,000 students whom they accused of cheating in a government-approved English language test. 

Guardian

The Indy came late to the party

The Home Office is to be investigated over its decision to cancel the visas of tens of thousands of foreign students and remove more than 1,000 people from the country as a result of cheating allegations in English language tests... 

On Friday, Mr Timms, MP for East Ham, said the treatment of the students had been “a disgrace”, telling the BBC: “They trusted Britain to provide them with a decent education. Instead, they've been falsely accused of cheating and been given no chance to appeal. They've been left in limbo for years.” 

Independent

In truth though that came "late to the party" needs qualifying.  As the same Indy article said:

The Independent revealed in February that some students were still being detained and were living in “terror” despite not being involved in the scandal.

This is a disgrace  – in the fullest sense of the word (was the creation of the "hostile environment" gracious?) Amid all this Brexit nonsense, the last thing we need to  do is alienate well--intentioned visitors (visitors, incidentally, who pay good money to contribute to the educational experience of domestic students). There is a  path to be navigated  between "a hostile environment" and the wielding of soft power; and this shabby episode represents an ugly deviation away from the side of the angels.

b

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.

That's that

I have referred many times to the problems thrown up by the relative adjective/pronoun that.

<digression>
Incidentally, this relative  that, though spelt the same as the subordinating conjunction, is phonologically distinct as it's always pronounced /ðæt/: examples – "I want thAt one"; "Don't give me thAt"), with the vowel never reduced to /ə/. The subordinating conjunction is often reduced to /ðət/: examples – "She told me that she had gone" (/ðət/) but "She told me that (/ðæt/) she had gone, not why".  My guess is that the /ðət/ form is the more often used, and that the chief exception is when there's contrastive ...

<aside>
Ho-ho. The infernal machine has given that word a red underline, and helpfully suggested I might mean contraceptive.
</aside>

...stress (as in my second example). Machine-generated speech often gets this wrong. The latest example I've noticed  was in the first of the new series of Ability.
</digression>

I've  mentioned the which/that controversy here :

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth"> 

Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one ... is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom*'s blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.' 

</grammar_point>

And earlier I had written here about the grammatical inflexibility, as a relative, of THAT in contrast to WHO and WHICH:

The mower that is in the garage is red 

The mower thats power source is petrol... 

The mower on that you can sit while mowing...

To sum it up, here's a table: (I'm not proud of the layout, but still...)

Case	THAT	WHO	WHICH
Subject	that	who	which
Object	that	whom (with or without preposition)	which  (with or without preposition)
Possessive	–	whose	whose (a rather old fashioned-sounding borrowing from WHO; most speakers today – especially younger ones – say of which)

This area of syntactical inflexibility  causes much grief. One can forgive Paul McCartney for "this cold and hungry world in which we live in"; in fact for years I gave him the benefit of the doubt and heard it as "... in which we're livin'". But people with a more thoughtful (if less creative) approach to the language are often left with egg on their faces. In a recent BBC News interview Jacob Rees-Mogg said (right at the start of that recording, about 14 seconds in) that "the EU should be careful for what it wishes for".

<possible_extenuation>
When I first heard it on the radio I thought he had just changed horses in mid-stream; the linguist's word for this is anacoluthon (mentioned before in early posts, here for example: the song I  mentioned in the last para of that post starts like this: [to the tune of Anna*, of course] 

Ana... [backing vocals continue: "...coluthon"] 

Is when a sentence starts one way

But then it begins to stray; 

You start out with one sentence structure 

But it's really different 

In the end  

[Some critics may notice that "structure" and "different" don't rhyme; delivery of this non-rhyme is a matter of performance: a degree of self-editing may be suggested.]

). He started out with the Mrs Thistlebottom version ("for what it wishes"), realized it sounded prissy, and went for the more demotic "what it wishes for"; so that what he said was "be careful f... (thinks: "no, that sounds like a caricature of an Old-Etonian prig") what it wishes for". 

But on a second hearing (recycled on the TV news) I decided my initial generosity of spirit was misplaced; he just got it wrong.
</possible_extenuation>

Enough for now.

b

* Incidentally, the attribution of the song to "J.P. McCartney" on that clip is wrong. This track was on the Beatles' first album, before they had settled on their default setting of <all-songs-home-grown>. In fact the idea of singers writing their own songs was so out of the ordinary that the pop media of the early '60s were full of the word "self-penned", new to me at the time (although, as so often with suspected neologisms, it had a long history before the 1960s – more than 100 years, according to Merriam-Webster). Some of their promotional literature at the time gushed  that Lennon and McCartney had written enough new material to keep them in the charts until 1975!!! (HD: as Wikipedia might say, "citation needed").

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).