Language Log

‘Gilgamesh’ Review: Love and Death in Mesopotamia
The epic of Gilgamesh is more than 40 centuries old. Simon Armitage’s new translation feels thrillingly alive.
By William Giraldi, WSJApril 24, 2026

Much as I admire Simon Armitage's translation, I must say that I am overwhelmed by the excellence of the reviewer, William Giraldi.  He is much plauded for his fiction, literary criticism, and journalism.  Reading though this review, I often find myself celebrating his uncanny ability to find the mot juste at the very moment when I was wondering how he would extricate himself from a difficult, intricate sentence / thought.

There is something almost absurd about attempting to appraise “Gilgamesh,” as though one were asked to appraise wind, or love, or that first human thought that trembled toward language. And yet here comes Simon Armitage, the poet laureate of the U.K., with his stunning new verse translation, not as a vandal of antiquity but as a lucid accomplice to its endurance. As he does with his unimprovable versions of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2008) and “The Death of King Arthur” (2012), Mr. Armitage understands that the oldest stories are never old, only waiting for a new singer.  

‘If This Be Magic’ Review: A Great Feast of Languages
Shakespeare has resonated with audiences in Swedish, Swahili and beyond. But translating the Bard requires some difficult choices.
By Henry Hitchings, WSJ (April 22, 2026)

Transferring Shakespeare's works into another language is hard work:

Samuel Johnson complained, more than 250 years ago, that William Shakespeare’s style was “ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.” Many students and theatergoers since have shared that view. Yet even if we agree with Johnson, it has become customary to celebrate instead the playwright’s linguistic resourcefulness and dazzle: his flair for coining words and twisting old ones into new shapes, his taste for double meanings and calculated ambiguity.

The obscurity condemned by Johnson derives in part from Shakespeare’s readiness to draw on vocabulary that would have struck even his contemporaries as bewilderingly nonstandard. Today many of us are as likely to be disorientated by his fondness for folklore and myth, his assumptions about religion and social order, and his immersion in the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.

From "Everyday Politics in Russia", The Eurasian Knot 4/6/2026:

The podcast starts with a message from listener Amanda, who has been reading all of Dostoevsky for a workshop in Russia. In addressing the podcast's host Sean Guillory, she says (starting at 4:21.5):

I sympathize with you, Sean, that you just couldn't get into him,
but I've personally never felt that way about Dostoevsky.
I remember trying to read the Lord of the Rings series,
and I couldn't stand it.
I couldn't stand ten pages describing a meadow.
And ever since them I've thought of fiction writing in terms of
meadow-writing and non-meadow-writing.
No wonder I love Dostoevsky —
he has nothing whatsoever to say about meadows.

"It cannot read the human heart" by Yan Ge (b/1984), London Review of Books Blog (2/20/26)

New book in the Cambridge Elements Series
Yuanfei Wang and Victor H. Mair
Early Globalism and Chinese Literature
Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2026 

The entire book, richly illustrated in color, is available open access online.

Summary

Exploring 'early globalism and Chinese literature' through the lens of 'literary diffusion,' this Element analyzes two primary forms. The first is Buddhist literary diffusion, whose revolutionary impact on Chinese language and literature is illustrated through scriptural translation, transformation texts, and 'journey to the West' stories. The second, facilitated diffusion, engages with the maritime world, traced through the seafaring journey of Cinderella stories and the totalizing worldview in literature on Zheng He's voyages. The authors contend that early global literary diffusion left a lasting imprint on Chinese language, literature, and culture.

Scholarly paper:

Timothy Glover, "The Original Text, Recipient, and Manuscript Presentation of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae", Mediaeval Studies, 85 (August 29, 2025), érudit, 163-238.

Easier to assimilate and attractively prepared with striking illustrations:

Tom Almeroth-Williams, "The hermit’s best-seller:  The only surviving original version of one of late medieval England’s most popular works of literature reveals its secrets", University of Cambridge (1/5/26).

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-eighth issue:

“A Study of Dunhuang Manuscript S.2614V, Mahāmaudgalyāyana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld: Revisions and Textual Transmission,” by Ryu Takai.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventieth issue:

“The Patriarch of Empty Lies,” by Wilt L. Idema. (free pdf)

A pathbreaking, new book from Brill:

The Vernacular World of Pu Songling
Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China
Series:  Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 173 (2025).  xix, 312 pp.
By Zhenzhen Lu 

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-seventh issue:

“Bai Xingjian and His Dream World of Sex and Love,” by Qianheng Jiang. 

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp367_Bai_Xingjian_Sex_Love.pdf

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-fourth issue:

“Mythologies, Religions, and Peoples Outside Ancient China in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” by Xiaofeng He.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp364_Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas.pdf

A Sino-Indo-Iranian literary-religious-mythic nexus, with a focus on J. C. Coyajee

Für Professor Patrick Dewes Hanan, meinen Doktorvater

People often ask me what the meaning of the morpheme biàn 變 in the disyllabic term biànwén 變文 is.  The reason they come to me is because I spent the first two decades of my Sinological career focusing on this genre of medieval popular Buddhist prosimetric (shuōchàng 說唱) narrative.  

Wén 文, of course, means "writing; text".  No sweat there.  But biàn 變 is a thorny problem.  It has the following basic meanings:    

1. 1. (intransitive) to change (by itself); to transform
   2. (transitive) to change (something in some way); to alter; to transform
   3. (intransitive) to become; to turn into; to change into
   4. (transitive) to sell off (one's property)
   5. (intransitive) to be flexible (when dealing with matters); to accommodate to circumstances
   6. to perform a magic trick
   7. sudden major change; unexpected change of events
   8. changeable; changing
   9. grotesque thing
   10. (Buddhism) bianwen (form of narrative literature from the Tang dynasty)
   11. (Hokkien) to do (bad things)

       Lí tī pìⁿ sím-mi̍h khang-khùi? [Pe̍h-ōe-jī]

       What [bad thing] are you doing?

(Wiktionary)

A common meaning for hen 變 in Japanese is "strange"

Before I introduce what to me is one of the most stupendous humanities discoveries I have encountered in the last six decades, I have to explain briefly why it is so exciting.   Namely, here we get to witness the emergence of a few bits of vernacular English in a religiously imbued medieval Latin matrix.  This is exactly how medieval vernacular Sinitic started to appear in the framework of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic during the heyday of medieval Buddhism.  Just as in the medieval Christian homilies of Peterhouse MS 255, we see the common (sú 俗) preachers of Dunhuang resorting to vernacular language and popular "memes" in their "transformation texts" (biàn[wén] 變[文]) to keep the attention of their auditors / readers.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer's (d. 1400) Troilus and Criseyde.  That was a long time ago, sixty years, in fact.  Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times yesterday and discovered that this medieval romance was back in the news.

900-Year-Old Copyist's Error May Unravel a Chaucer Mystery
The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it.
Stephen Castle, NYT (7/15/25)