Star Trek

Since I am soon going to the big country in the East, I kind of felt like I should write a couple of posts here first, just in case I don't get the time to do so this fall. St. Petersburg is after all St. Petersburg so it needs to be visited, we will have lots of homework and the alcohol will be practically free compared to what we're used to.

But I wanted to talk about Star Trek today.

Star Trek seems to be a rather popular way of getting some instant immersion. I know of at least two other people/bloggers who have used Star Trek to practice their understanding of their target languages. It's quite easy to understand why; there are tons and tons of episodes, each episode is 40 minutes or so and contains some sort of adventure, making them very easy to watch. Since I am on episode 23 of season one of Star Trek Enterprise dubbed in Russian I can affirm this :-) What is so great about having this amount of episodes is that you grow accustomed to the voices of the actors, to the manner of speaking and the rhythm, so the progress in understanding can be very motivating.

For Scandinavians in general, dubbing is quite close to being a mortal sin. I don't think I know anyone who can watch anything dubbed without cringing, but it only takes some breaking in, and then you're good to go. The Star Trek I am watching has kept the English voices and only added the Russian ones on top, which can be rather disturbing at first. The Russians speech is always a bit delayed, so you get the two or three first English words as well, and then there is no real illusion about the Russian voices somehow being the real voices. Dubbing in Swedish is awful. This may have something to do with Swedish being rather chopped up in the kind of movies were dubbing is used (children's movies), making it look absolutely ridiculous as the actors voices move completely out of sync with the way too perky Swedish speech. I somehow imagine this could be less of a problem with a language that has less clear boundaries, such as Danish, but I'm not sure. I also watched the Star Trek movie (I love it, I do, Spock is pure perfection), and it was done very professionally, without English voices, but I hardly even noticed that it was actually dubbed. This is a major motion picture though, and I guess the budget is somewhat bigger for those...

Has anyone else tried watching Star Trek? Any favorite series? :-)

Per Petterson and the gang.

I have always had something of a problem when it comes to keeping up with modern literature. There are just so many classics left to read, so I have never really understood when I am supposed to find time for modern prose. Especially when I started reading in multiple languages, and often quite slowly, this became an even bigger problem. Therefore I am quite proud of how much modern Norwegian literature I have been reading lately. Yesterday I started reading (and read half of) Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I curse the river of time, supposedly a line from a poem by Mao, but I don't know what the "official" translation of the phrase is) by Per Petterson. Funnily enough, this book makes me think of a couple of other brilliant Scandinavian books, and I think it embodies exactly what I like about Scandinavian literature. This particular author uses a rather simple language and some of the forms feel rather like spoken language to me, something I'm not sure I appreciated at first, but then this is Norwegian and Norwegian abides by like 10 different sets of rules. What makes it rather typically Scandinavian, at least for me, is the general sadness that prevails throughout the entire book. There's a sort of weight placed on top of every word, adding a depressing tone to even the happy recollections, but sad books don't bring me down, quite the opposite.

The topic of this book is the life of the narrator, who is now an elderly man. Throughout the book you get to follow different episodes from his life, cut up into different chapters and intertwined with each other, ranging from when he was a child to his divorce and the cancer his mother suffered from as an old woman. Absolutely everything in this book feels typical for me. Since I am very familiar with Oslo now, I recognize all the places he speaks about and I have even lived and worked in them, something that doubtlessly brings me closer to the story, but the people he describes also feel extremely real. His mother, the weird distance she keeps between herself and her son, her constant shortness, her apparent indifference and self-sacrifice do not appear strange at all, nor the weakness (male) of the main character and his father. I get the impression it could have been anyone. His wife, who is divorcing him and whom he cannot look at anymore, and who tells him to stop being so ridiculous, also feels... right.

Other books or authors this one reminds me of are Elisabeth Rynell (Till Mervas especially), Mare Kandre (Aliide, Aliide) and Herbjørg Wassmo (Tora Trilogy). These are the kind of books I enjoy studying foreign languages for. You can certainly read quite a lot of books translated, but there is always a big part of literature that never gets translated, and when it comes to Swedish literature, detective stories seems to be what gets translated and sold abroad. The good literature stays in Sweden.


Jeg forbanner tidens elv has, by the way, won the literary award of the Nordic Council and has been called the best Norwegian book of 2008. In 2003 he wrote another book that became absolutely huge, not only in Norway but abroad as well. So I think that's what I'm going to read once I get back from Russia.

Jens Bjørneboe.

I have almost finished Bjørneboe’s trilogy Bestialitetens historia, and I thought I would provide you with an extract from the end of it, just like I chose one from the beginning when I started reading the book. The books are great, by the way. For me it's the essence of literature, this is what it should be all about.



Jeg ser meget annet også inne i meg, når jeg ligger sammenkrøllet under teppet, full av sovepiller og alkohol, mens jeg kjenner den milde varmen i kroppen, og vet at bevisstheten ikke lenger er av piggtråd og smerte. Jeg ser meg selv som barn, da jeg drakk vin for første gang og visste at dette, det var min drikk... at den hjalp... lindret... at den var levende vann... tryllevann... Da jeg var eldre, ti år gammel, drakk jeg opp et helt vinanker, mens mine foreldre var bortreist. Jeg hadde mine første hallusinasjoner da; jeg så en løve sitte i min fars lenestol, en stor, gul og prektig løve. Og ved siden av den satt en ung mann i blå skjorte og grå bukser. Stolsetet bøyet seg under vekten av løven. Jeg følte ingen angst hverken for dyret eller for mennesket. Det var tvert imot slik at min vanlige angst var borte, og blodet rant ikke langs vinduspostene og ned på gulvet, og alt var mykt og varmt og stille. Luften mellom gutten og løven og meg var full av blomster og ranker, og når jeg la meg om nettene alene og full, da var jeg ikke redd for mørket, og hylingen fra kattene ute i de våte høstnettene trodde jeg ikke lenger kom fra barn som ble pint. Jeg la meg som nu, med varme og likegladhet i kroppen, med det indre fylt av gode bilder, jeg trakk føttene opp under meg, slik som nu – i fosterstilling – og flettet armene om hverandre, med hendene under armhulene eller i skrittet, og alt var mykhet og mørke og alt var godt, men jeg visste at oppvåkningen kunne bli ond, hvis jeg ikke satte en krukke med avtappet vin ved siden av sengen. Jeg gikk ikke på skole, og jeg ga satan i alle kameratene jeg var redd for og i lærerne som jeg hatet. Jeg drakk av vinen med en gang jeg våknet, og alt var godt.

Hva som skjedde, vet jeg ikke. Men etterpå kom det en tid av den vanlige sorten, hvor mørket var vendt tilbake og hvor skolebøkene var klistret sammen av blod, hvor jeg gråt om natten og drømte at jeg ble jaget ut på bryggen av pøbelen og kastet i oet svarte vannet, som drev av kordonger og fiskekadavere og slim. Det hjalp ikke å holde hendene i skrittet eller under armhulene; kattene i den kalde, svarte haven var ikke lenger katter, men lemlestede bam som gråt... allikevel gikk det forbi, da jeg igjen kom over et større lager med alkohol; jeg blomstret opp og levet igjen som et vanlig bam. Bare da det tok slutt, opplevet jeg noe nytt: for første gang drakk jeg opp min fars barbervann, og han skjønte ikke hvorfor det var blitt borte.

1 Month Until St. Petersburg.

This summer hasn't really been my most productive one. I am slowly getting back into some sort of routine, and that will soon be disrupted again as I leave this country for three months. I am finally going to Russia for a longer period of time, but I'm too much of a worrying type to be able to enjoy the thought of it before I know all the practical details are sorted out (we still don't know exactly where we are going to live, we haven't paid the fees, and so on...) I have read the only course book we have that is not all about grammar, Мы похожи, но мы разные (I'm not entirely sure that's the title of the entire book, it may just be the first chapter), so I do feel like I have done at least something. Fortunately, I found the book extremely easy to read and I finished it very quickly. I have added all the unknown words I could find to Anki, so I should know them all before I even leave.

After having thought about it for quite some time, I did finally start rereading The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and I'm loving it just as much as I did the first time, eight or so years ago. I am a bit puzzled as to how so many language enthusiasts have managed to miss this book. Seriously, it should be a rather natural book to read for anyone who is overly interested in some language. When I read a really good book I always want to read more, and even though I want to read more Russian before I leave, I also have some very interesting books on Russia and I would really have liked to read at least one of them before leaving. Naturally, this doesn't make it any easier to squeeze in any German and Hungarian, especially since I have a final essay to write for my women's history class as well.

And I think Yandex fixed that problem dealing with automatically starting to type in the search field after a search! :D

Yandex, WTF?

I've been wanting to write this post for a couple of days now, but I've never gotten around to doing it. Sometime ago, Yandex all of a sudden became a little bit prettier, and way more useless. Yandex used to be my absolute favorite Russian online dictionary, it was more or less perfect. The only thing it lacked was accent marks, but you can find those by clicking the middle box in the translation field, instead of the box to the right (I no longer remember what that box said). Now I have a couple of things to complain about though.

1) By changing from "только перевод" to "только энциклопедии" when doing your search, you can sometimes get accent marks, if there happens to be one in one of the articles that you get as results for your search, but that is not always the case. Actually, I've only managed to find accent marks for a couple of words... for a Russian dictionary, this is very bad. (Can you somehow find stress marks on Rambler?) You need to be able to see stress changes from singular to plural, stress patterns in the past tense, irregular stress patterns for short form adjectives, and so on... and this used to be possible on Yandex.

2) I really have the impression that with the older version, you could just start typing after you had made your search, whereas you now have to click the search field again in order to be able to type. The only positive thing is that the entire word is marked as soon as you click the typing field, but it still makes for way too much clicking.

These are small things, but incredibly important if you want to get anywhere with Russian.

Are there any other good Russian dictionaries that provide plenty of examples as well as a user-friendly interface? I absolutely need a dictionary that will auto-complete as I type, that's the number one criterium, and at least that is still working on Yandex...

The other Russian dictionaries I use are The Russian Dictionary Tree and Multitran, but none of them are good enough. Oh, and this one, which is excellent for all the details.

Happy reading days.

You are supposed to read in the summer, aren't you? I have recently finished three books: La vie devant soi by Romain Gary, Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and Frihetens øyeblikk by Jens Bjørneboe (part one of the trilogy). I recommend all three. The French book is very sweet (see quotes from it in this post), and I really enjoyed it all the way through. It's a lovely book about the "difficult variant" of life seen from the eyes of a child. When he finds out that he isn't really that young, he accordingly starts viewing things differently, just because, and throughout the book you get these wise little insights about just sucking it up and accepting things as they are. When you are used to living in a certain way, you don't perceive yourself as a victim even though others may do so, and I think you should be rather careful about patronizing other people just because you wouldn't be able to handle what they handle daily.

Cat's cradle is a rather absurd book, an insane story about the end of the world, or about two ends of the world. I really like how Vonnegut has just abandoned all rules of probability of such things and has gone ahead and written something that is truly fiction, where anything is allowed. It's a really quick read, and very amusing, and I guess a class on literature could analyze this book to bits. I'm rather curious about Vonnegut's view on religion, because this could be seen as a satire on religion, illustrating how random they are, and how weak human beings are. I guess it could be many things though. I won't speculate any further.

"One of the oldest games there is, cat’s cradle. Even the Eskimos know it.”
“You don’t say.”
“For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces. “
“Um.”
Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look апd look at all those X’s …”
“And?”
“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

I also wanted to provide those who understand any Scandinavian language with an extract from Frihetens Øyeblikk. The book is rather hard to describe, but it's kind of the autobiography of a man who is writing... the history of man, seen in a different light. He keeps a "protocol" (on everything) when he is sober enough to know what he is doing while traveling around the world (or Europe) - he sees things and he notes things down. The book is mostly just bits and pieces of his experience of the world, of his alcoholism, of the people he meets, of the stories he hears and in general bits and pieces of the awful nature of men. This extract is from the beginning of the book, and I find it absolutely excellent. It really illustrates the rest of the book.

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Folket her i dalen kan neppe sies å være oppfylt av Den Hellige Ånd. Under synet av de umåtelige fjelltoppene og de evige snebreene har de ikke vokset til storhet. De tenker ikke vidsynte og klare tanker. Folket her, i landsbyene, i dalen eller nede på vertshuset hvor jeg vanker og drikker mine daglige glemselens glass,- det er et folk uten sang, uten folklore, musikk, dans. De har sine kapeller, men ingen religion. Samtidig er de på sin måte skarpsindige, nesten intelligente. De er listige. De bor i sin dal, og de har fjellene og evigheten omkring seg. Av og til tenker de. Man kan se det på øynene deres. Da regner de. De legger sammen eller subtraherer i hodet. De aller listigste multipliserer eller kan til og med dividere. Folket her er sant å si – ja, for å si sannheten: på sett og vis, delvis, på sin måte, og til en viss grad, temmelig lemurisk.
Når de leser, da er det ikke Kabbala eller Vedaene eller salmer de studerer. De leser sine bankbøker. Eller til nød sine lover, - for å vite hva de kan tillate seg mot sin nabo. Alle er i strid med alle, men allikevel holder de på en underlig måte sammen. Det er et lemurisk samhold. De har frembragt dommere og til og med leger. For ikke å nevne overingeniører. Men de hviler ikke ut ved å lese Dante.

Som sagt har de ingen folklore.

Allikevel – de er med på å opprettholde verdens likevekt og be- stand. De er en flokk små, lodne bjørner.

Det finnes absolutt ingen uskyld i dem. De er istand til å gjøre hva som helst mot et medmenneske. Samtidig er de veldige skiløpere, og om vinteren lar de seg trekke oppfor fjellsidene med stålwirer, høyt opp, - derpå sklir de nedfor fjellsidene helt til bunnen av dalen. Dette gjør de om igjen og om igjen. De holder på i uker og måneder – opp og ned – opp og ned. Og de har sin glede av det, men de er ikke glade.

---

I also thought I should provide a quote from the German book I'm reading, Feuchtgebiete by Charlotte Roche, just to illustrate the difference in genre.

Ich würde mit jedem Idioten ins Bett gehen, damit ich nicht alleine im Bett sein oder sogar eine ganze lange Nacht alleine schlafen muss. Jeder ist besser als keiner.

Women and literature.

In discussions with people about literature, I have often encountered the question, or the remark followed by a question, that women have played a very small role in world literature, and why is this? There is often an implication of women's lack of literary quality or talent. We needn't even mention the fact that differences in education and upbringing are extremely influential here (oddly enough, most people I have spoken to seem to have very little knowledge about such matters in the past), we can just jump to the forgotten women. The number of productive women was naturally much smaller than that of productive men since most women were busy giving birth to children and raising those children, but those women that did actually produce something are often not even mentioned. Even I haven't heard about many of the women I am now reading about for my summer class in Women's History, which perhaps stresses the importance of this branch of history (which is often questioned and made out to be irrelevant and uninteresting).

Reading the books I am supposed to read, listening to the lectures from the University, I have all of a sudden been seized by the desire to learn Latin! Latin has never before interested me, but I would very much enjoy being able to read texts from the middle ages written by women who were successful enough to actually be remembered up until this day, even though they may often be neglected, but that is another matter. I did not know for example, that the nun Hrotsvitha was the one who reintroduced the drama in the West in the 10th century, and that she didn't only write one play, but that actually three books have been preserved to this day. I had no idea that she was also the one who reintroduced the Faust myth!

Another interesting woman was Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), another nun (back in those days, being a nun was a good alternative to getting married, since you could then educate yourself and actually become someone, but this was made more and more difficult from the ninth century onwards when misogyny started kicking in, and up until this point, there were several very important women that helped build up Christianity) wrote the world's first opera, as well as numerous plays, but also books on medicine, zoology, botany, geology, all in all 14 works that belonged to the most important scientific writings of the middle age.

A woman that is sometimes given the role of having written the world's first novel is a Japanese noblewoman, the author of The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (early 11th century). This lady is not part of my class it seems like, at least not yet, and that may have something to do with Eurocentrism...

Troubadours could also be mentioned, because there were actually quite a number of female ones. All in all, approximately 400 troubadours are known today (by name that is), and among those there is for example Marie de France, the Countess of Dia, Lombarda, Castelloza and Bieris of Romans, etc, (and a bunch of nameless women). While studying French, we went through troubadours, but the only female name that sounds familiar to me is Marie de France. As one of my books point out, the female troubadours never wrote anything about man's bravery in honor of ladies, which was otherwise a popular theme. Their depictions of love is considered to be more realistic and sensual, even though in many aspects their works are similar to their male colleagues' works. I was trying to find an English version of a poem from my book, the name of it should be "Alais, Iselda and Carenza", but I wasn't very successful. I wanted to share it because I found it rather amusing, but there is probably little point in sharing it in Swedish... However, in searching for it, I found this page which may be of interest to anyone interested in female troubadours. I am intent on reading it clear when I have finished the things I actually have to read for my class. It's in French.

Most people probably recognize the name Christine de Pizan (1365-1434), who made a living out of writing and who was the only person who wrote about Joan of Arc at that time, besides from her writings the only things that are preserved about Joan are protocols from the trials. Christine also instigated a debate about women that would last for 200 years, la Querelle des Femmes.

What I am also learning, and which is very interesting, is that the Renaissance isn't necessarily a positive period of time in all aspects. From a male perspective, it is, but for women it generally meant reduced freedom and being dumbed down, and we mustn't forget the witch hunts (in which 40,000 to 100,000 women were executed, at least according to Wikipedia), which could either be said to belong in the middle ages, or in the Renaissance. The "Hammer of witches" was written in 1487 by two monks from the Dominican Inquisition, and following this any woman who did not meekly sit by and act chastely could be considered by witch. I'm thinking that this is no point in time when you choose to raise your voice as a woman (even though Christine de Pizan actually did this earlier, protesting that if woman was as vile as she was made out to be by some of the men of the church, then why on earth would God have made her?). The Reformation and counterreformation weren't either all that positive for women.

To sum things up, we could go back even to the time before Christianity and nuns, and remember Sapho, who wrote a large number of poems and who was actually famous in her own time (she lived around 650 B.C., and 300 living conditions for women in the antique world started getting more restrictive). Not Sapho is actually one of those women who are mentioned today, so I won't say anything more about her.

I better stop now, but there are many more individuals that could be mentioned. And I find all of this very fascinating! If women had nothing to do in literature in earlier times, then why do they constantly pop up as the instigators of this and that genre?