An Esperanto Nightingale

The nightingale

She sang topical songs in Esperanto, but how did they know they were topical?

It’s just a short item in the San Francisco Call of April 14, 1906 under the title “Here Is a Quartet of the Most-Talked-Of Women in the Domain of the Czar.” The article makes brief comment on four women, only one of whom is referred to with a full name. The four women are Mlle Vera Delaroziere, Mlle Slavin, Mlle Tcherniaskaia, and Mlle Tamara. That’s not a lot to go on.

The first, Ms. Delaroziere (I’ll go for a more contemporary means of referring to these women), is said to have “announced her divorce from the stage of the Strelna Winter Gardens” after which she “proceeded to read the amorous letters she had received.” It’s probably a safe assumption that the letters weren’t from her soon-to-be-ex husband. Ms. Slavin was described as trying to get the “smart set” (presumably just the women) to adopt her style of elaborate head ornamentation she wore. The third was a dancer suing her doctor for a botched cosmetic surgery job (artificial knee dimples). Finally, Ms. Tamara sang topical songs in Esperanto.

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Not to Badmouth the Pope’s Mother

Careful what you say
about his mother!

I have no intention of saying anything bad about the Pope’s mother. I’m sure she was a perfectly nice Argentinean woman.[1] I will say nothing bad about her. I know nothing bad about her, and it would be the sheer caddishness to invent scandal. That said, her son is dead wrong in some recent statements.

Even the Pope has jumped on the Charlie Hedbo bandwagon with an opinion.[2] The Pope feels that there should be a limitation to free speech. No criticizing religions. He compares criticizing religion to a friend speaking ill of the Pope’s mother. This is such a surprise: the leader of one of the world’s largest denominations feels that religions should be above criticism. Excuse me, your Holiness, but are you fucking kidding me?

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Lustful Thoughts About Merkel

Safe for work

The attacks on Charlie Hebdo and their aftermath continue to make the news. We're moved from the news, to the reactions to the news, and now we're on to reactions to the reactions to the news. You are no doubt aware that there was a massive rally in support of freedom of expression Charlie Hebdo in Paris and that world leaders gathered together in a staged photograph solidarity. (No surprise, really. Does anyone think their security details would have let them mingle with 1.5 million people?)

In the front of the group, are the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, Frederica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris. I'm not going to name anyone else in the group, because it's a little off topic. Back to Merkel.

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The Broader Battle of the WCTU

Diana by Augustus
Saint-Gaudens. Thirteen
feet of smut!

If the Women’s Christian Temperance Union got everything they wanted, the United States would be a different place today.[1] A much more repressive place. We have the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to thank for Prohibition (thanks a lot, ladies), but it looks like we got off easy. An article in the September 30, 1894, New York Sun makes it clear that their ambitions went far beyond just alcohol. There doesn’t seem to be anything that they wouldn’t complain about.

It’s a long article, but in the end, I decided to include the whole thing, mainly to get the smug statements of Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Martin seems (by her own statements, at least) to have been quite involved in the late nineteenth century reform movements. The WTCU was active in the suffrage moment, and found that the United States Brewers Association was funding the anti-suffrage side.[0] [0]: As noted in the Wikipedia article on the WCTU.

As the article shows, politics (even the politics of temperance) can make strange bedfellows, particularly when there’s mission creep involved.

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I’ll See Your Catullus and Raise You a Priapeia

This wasn't shocking
in 79 AD

Yesterday, my neighbor dropped by with a mid–19th-century Latin textbook. While she was in my study, she made note of my copy of the Carmina Burana. Had she kept looking, she would have seen various other Latin texts in the room, including a 1999 edition and translation of the Priapeia.

Later that night, I was looking at the blog io9 and saw the article “A Latin Poem So Filthy, It Wasn’t Translated Until The 20th Century.” Now, the twentieth century is a span of time that saw a hell of a lot of changes. Technological and social change has only accelerated through human history, and what was unprintable in 1904, is legal to publish in 1994, (and showing up on blogs in 2014, but that’s another century).

So, yes, the poem by Catullus that starts “Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” (for a translation, I’m offering “I’ll ass-rape and face-fuck you”) didn’t get translated in nineteenth-century editions. Lots of things didn’t, especially since many of the editions were printed with the thought that they’d be going into the hands of sixteen-year-olds (let’s be serious: this poem is not going into a poetry anthology intended for high school juniors).

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