American Idiom Research Articles

UNIVERSITY ENGLISH COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING: A KAZAKHSTANI AND AMERICAN CO-TEACHING EXPERIENCE

The co-teaching experience of Kazakhstani and American university English as a Foreign Language Instructors is described. The instructors taught intermediate level integrated English at Zhangir Khan West Kazakhstan Agrarian-Technical University in Uralsk, Kazakhstan using communicative language methodology. The two teachers were able to tap into each other’s expertise. The students benefited by having two instructional professionals who could bring different perspectives and backgrounds to the classroom. Since Ms. Irgaliyeva was closer in age to the students and more in touch with their particular interests and concerns, she selected specific material to attract their attention. Dr. Bantel, as a native English speaker, could teach American idioms, provide pronunciation instruction and offer cultural information and a global perspective gleaned from having taught English at universities in the US and 10 other countries abroad.

Revisiting African American Idioms of Distress: Are We Speaking the Same Mental Health Language?

As a profession, social work emphasizes the importance of cultural competence in education, practice, and research. The ability to view the ways in which people understand, interpret, and communicate their distress through a cultural lens is paramount to being a culturally competent scholar and clinician. However, one’s view is only as sharp as the lens is clear. During the tasks of writing an article and updating the brochures in my university office on African American mental health, I noticed that there was a disconnect between the ways in which my respondents were naming and describing their distress and the language being used in the mental health publications. In this Viewpoint, I will note and discuss these stark differences and the implications for social work researchers and practitioners in mental health and their potential respondents and clients. As I took a break from working on an article using data I had collected with members of a large African American church in the Midwest on their thoughts about their church’s desire to expand their mental health counseling ministry into a fully operating mental health center, I started to rearrange a few things in my office, including the literature and brochures that I keep on African American mental health. I went to my computer and did a Google search on “information on African American mental health,” so that I could potentially update those items, and pulled up several resources. As I read through the brochures, I noticed the language being used to describe mental health in African Americans, particularly the reference to depression as “the blues.” My first reaction was, “Are we still saying that?” I thought back to the qualitative responses I was just exploring and could not recollect anyone using that language. I wanted to know for sure.

Surrealistically “glazed with” the American Idiom: Williams’s Translations from French Verse and Prose

This article reexamines Williams’s notion of the American idiom by means of his iconic 16-word poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” and through his translations of works by Soupault, Char and Éluard. Williams identifies a distinctive rhythmical characteristic of the “American turn of phrase”—a basic anapestic measure as opposed to an iambic pentameter. The poet’s determined attempt to render American English distinct from British English and to promote its poetic merits as equal to those of the traditional literary language is seen in his use of the American idiom when translating from French. The article concludes, with reference to theories of translation, that for Williams the act of translation signifies an endeavor to test and demonstrate the unconventional poetic potentiality of the language that he cherished and that his compatriots spoke.

Ellington under Glass

In November 1957 Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at IIT broke with convention when it became the venue for a jazz concert by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. This extraordinary event is reconstructed based on personal recollections, campus newspapers and other archival material. In the context of architectural pedagogy Crown Hall is appreciated as a supreme expression of Mies’s architectural philosophy, both for its spatial openness and its spiritual character. Here, influences from Mies’s own evolution as an architect intersected with developments in modern music and performance art it inspired. Parallels are uncovered between Ellington’s jazz and Mies’s steel and glass architecture, both distinctly American idioms that characterise post-war modernity. The Ellington concert at Crown Hall presented the perfect synthesis of people, space, light, music and nature. At the same time it attested to the disruptive potential that exists in jazz and modern architecture alike.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Intermezzo: Is There a Canadian Musical Theatre?

CTR asked several musical theatre writers the following question: “Musical theatre is, in its origins, an American idiom. As a Canadian working in this idiom, do you think there’s something unique about a Canadian musical, and is there anything that differentiates a Canadian musical or musical theatre writer from an American musical or musical theatre writer?” In this article, brief responses to this question are provided by Wesley J. Colford, Jay Turvey, Paul Sportelli, Barb Johnston, Britta Johnson, Neil Bartram, Brian Hill, and Amiel Gladstone.

Intermezzo: Is There a Canadian Musical Theatre?

CTR asked several musical theatre writers the following question: “Musical theatre is, in its origins, an American idiom. As a Canadian working in this idiom, do you think there’s something unique about a Canadian musical, and is there anything that differentiates a Canadian musical or musical theatre writer from an American musical or musical theatre writer?” In this article, brief responses to this question are provided by Kevin Wong, Veda Hille, Jonathan Munro, Scott Christian, Jim Betts.

BRITISH AND AMERICAN PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN THE ORIGINAL AND TRANSLATION (ON THE EXAMPLE OF ENGLISH LITERARY TEXTS)

Modern English phraseological expressions are various and every aspect of its study is worth of due regard. The problem of translation of phraseological units from English into Ukrainian, particularly English and American proverbs and idioms at the current stage, has been insufficiently studied. Therefore our research is urgent. The aim of this research is to explore the peculiarities of translation of English and American phraseological units in the context, to determine the efficient ways of translation.

Reading the Williams(-Amaral) Translations of Latin American Poetry: How to Appreciate the “Carlos” Personae of the Late Years

This article focuses on the inter-American friendship turned partnership between William Carlos Williams and José Vázquez-Amaral, and provides a comparative analysis of three translations they worked on together—Álvaro Figueredo’s “Naked”; Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Laziness”; and Silvino Ocampo’s “The Infinite Horses.” The article defines Williams’s translation poetics, with special attention given to his commitment to using the American idiom and its prosody, and demonstrates the debt owed to Vázquez-Amaral for his contribution. It further demonstrates the importance of both translation and the Spanish literary tradition to Williams.

“There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else”: The Onanistic Abstraction of Duchamp and Williams

My article links William Carlos Williams’s poetics to Marcel Duchamp’s conceptualism—the democratic idea that anything, even a factory-produced urinal, once framed as such, may be considered by viewers as art. I focus on Williams’s improvisational writing, Kora in Hell and read the author’s ambivalent relation to art as an expression of (auto)eroticism. I also deal with the role of abstraction in Williams’s poetics, and my interrogations read such a challengingly de-centered text as a reflection of the poet’s conflicted personality, focusing on Williams’s celebration of the body and especially the female form as source of pleasure, his guilt over his infidelities in his marriage, and his ambivalent views of sex as corruption and reproduction. I argue that both Duchamp and Williams engage in a fixation on the work of artistic reproduction as an onanisitic process, though I contend that Williams does so less consciously than Duchamp. Duchamp’s anti-retinal art and Williams’s American idiom, and later his variable foot, were new ways of looking to defamiliarize and reorient the logic of art production and the definition of the artist himself. However, unlike Duchamp, who found himself relatively removed from the animal desires he coded and enacted in his Roto-sculptures, Williams was consistently entangled in issues Duchamp may have dismissed as both too animal and too moral to concern truly radical art.

August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean: Translating Multilayered Sensory Experience

The powerful impact of the plays by African American playwright August Wilson largely relies on the way his words appeal to the senses, whether explicitly by calling upon the characters’ sensory experience or more indirectly through his use of syntactic rhythm, or indeed his specific modulation of AAVE. When we set out to translate Gem of the Ocean, the first of the ten plays in his Pittsburgh cycle, for the stage, we had to try and convey similar effects in French, first somehow finding a way of negotiating the specificity of the African American idiom. The article discusses the translating issues raised in the central scene in this play which is located at the very beginning of the twentieth century, so at a time when slavery is still very much present in people’s memories, and stages a hypnotic trance in which a young man who needs to have his “soul washed” is made to live the Middle Passage and reach the mythical City of Bones where the drowned slaves literally have “tongues on fire”; this can only happen because all his senses are called upon simultaneously, including through the collective singing of spiritual songs. The peculiar rhythms of August Wilson’s poetics, the AAVE accent and flow as well as the alliterative, anaphoric use of language channel the climactic, sensory experience depicted in that trance scene which leads to a reconnection with the spiritual forces of the submerged people. This article describes how the translators tried to create a French idiom that induces the same sensory impact on an audience and, at the same time, reflects the multilayered referentiality of the text.

“The mind / is listening”: Aurality and Noise Poetics in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

asks Williams in Orchestra, the third poem in his collection The Desert Music, we / or there a sound / to the (CP2 251).We half closeour We do nothear it through eyes.It is nota flute note either, it is the relationof a flute noteto a drum. am wideawake. The mindis listening. [ . . . ] (CP2 251)Amid the characteristic whirling polyrhythms of sticks, maracas, marimbas and other percussion instruments, this passage is vocalized by a chorus in Steve Reich's 1984 composition of the same name, The Desert Music. In that piece, Reich stretches these lines Williams among layers of rhythm that come to include pulsing strings and woodwinds. Though Reich's The Desert Music does employ audiotaped voices, the structure of Reich's score for voices achieves a sonic blurring similar to the phase shifting of works like Come Out and It's Gonna Rain, in which Reich modulates the speed of two identical tapeloops, causing short clips of recorded speech to slip further out of sync and turning speech into a complex of sounds. The bass section of the choir begins by sustaining Well over several seconds of the polyrhythmic sticks and marimba. Tenors enter at a faster tempo, articulating the remainder of the first three lines, we / or there a sound / to the ear. Alto and soprano voices sing the rest of the passage, competing with pulsing strings and woodwinds and with sustained vocalise syllables, through the climactic I am wide / awake. The mind / is listening, before trailing into more pulsing vocalise.In Reich's notes for the score, he writes, [t]hose at all familiar with my music will know how apt those words are for me and particularly this piece which, among other things, addresses that basic between what the text says, and its pure sensuous sounds (Reich). We could very say that Reich's words are apt for Williams. To return to lines 32 through 47 (quoted above) of Orchestra, the text begins with one of the primary elements of Williams's prosody, Well, shall we / or listen? Here is a very brief instance of Williams employing the direct address, the comfortable diction and cadence of the speech-based American idiom. The question is asked in the polite language (shall we?) of the casual invitation, the host gently shepherding guests into the dining room, and the well lends an even more informal friendliness to the language. The line break, however, and the following question work in characteristic fashion to strain the orality of Well, shall we, by enjambing the line to carry it over and break the sentence awkwardly at the juncture of subject and verb-in this case compound verbs think or listen. The enjambment, of course, is another primary element of Williams's prosody, which often serves to complicate the employment of the first element, the direct, idiomatic speech cadence and diction. The next lines (33-37) are indicative of this complication: Is there a sound / to the ear? / We half close / We do / hear it through eyes. Though the syntax of the question is precisely from the mouths of Polish mothers, the language continues to be simple, dominated by monosyllables (A 311). Yet the simplicity of the language is complicated by the line break and the triadic line spacing. The break between addressed and not wholly divides the sentence between the participial adjective and the adverb while line 36, our We do / hear it through eyes, severs the complete verb. The line breaks here seem capricious, as they do occur reliably between any particular units of grammar. The result is a visual fragmentation of the text. Williams is very much at play here, deep in the ambiguity of what the text says and its pure sensuous sounds.The middle of this passage continues the sense of playing among ambiguities: It is / a flute note either, it is the relation / of a flute note / to a drum. …

The Age of Anxiety: Patricia Highsmith, Existential Psychology, and the “Decline” Of American Naturalism

This essay charts the development of two entwined intellectual threads during the 1950s: the translation of European existentialism into an American idiom and what Nathan Hale describes as the “golden age of popularization” for psychoanalysis in the United States. I argue that, in concert, these two movements contributed to the erosion of the New Deal regulatory state by elevating psychological—rather than structural or socioeconomic—explanatory templates for social phenomena. In contrast to the literature of the long Progressive Era, in 1950s works the ego and its vicissitudes become the dominant template for understanding society and the self. Patricia Highsmith's novels provide a nodal point for this political and intellectual history as she recasts representations of violence, murder, alienation, class envy, and social mobility in ways that both represent and helped define the legitimation crisis of the regulatory state. Highsmith repudiates a narrative world governed by structural or environmental conditions and—in contrast to literary naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck—presents the darker corners of human experience as phenomena of the largely autonomous, internal arena of an existential psyche. These shifts in literary tastes, the essay argues, augmented the weakening intellectual purchase of an interventionist New Deal reform agenda during the 1950s.

The Sociological Usages of “Pure Sociology”: The Perpetual Quest to Establish Disciplinary Boundaries in the Pursuit of Academic Legitimacy

The term “pure sociology” reflects some of the most important disciplinary concerns that have helped shape the intellectual development of sociology in the United States, particularly in the effort to establish disciplinary boundaries and achieve academic legitimacy. To flesh out the thesis, the current paper recounts briefly the early discussions associated with pure sociology before examining the various usages in the U.S. since the establishment of the discipline. While selected classical theorists employed the concept in framing their discussions, pure sociology represents a distinctively American idiom. The etymological history coincides with the institutionalization of sociology in U.S. universities, while informing key debates about the nature of sociological analysis throughout the past 120 years. Drawing upon an electronic search of multiple databases, a content analysis highlights the prevalence of the different meanings that mainly U.S. social scientists have attached to the concept. The paper then traces the varying trajectories of the many different usages over time, concluding with a discussion of the ascendance of Donald Black’s theoretical paradigm that has appropriated the term with considerable success.

Black Light, White Revolution: Translation, Adaptation, and Appropriation in Galway Kinnell’s Cold War Writings on Iran

In 1959, the American poet Galway Kinnell won a Fulbright fellowship to live and teach for a year in Iran. Although he did not learn more than ‘500 or so words’ of Persian during his stay, he acknowledged the impact his fellowship year had on him, and set his only novel, Black Light (1966. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin), in Iran. In story and content, Black Light is almost certainly an imitation of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1957. New York: John Calder), although the poet has no memory of reading Hedayat’s masterwork, and indeed maintains that he never read it at all. The history of American practices of translation assumes new significance when considering the products of Kinnell’s time in Iran. This essay focuses on Black Light and Kinnell’s ethnographic travel writing, which appeared under the title ‘Persian Journals’ in a series in the Tehran Journal magazine, arguing that each of these texts is a translation into an American idiom of the different encounters Kinnell was having with Iran.

Jewish “Diasporic Humor” and Contemporary Jewish-American Identity

In their 1993 essay on diaspora and identity, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin reject “diaspora” as a site of persecution and fear and instead argue that “the [new] lesson of Diaspora, namely, that peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected . . . can teach us that it is possible for a people to maintain its distinctive culture, its difference, without controlling land, a fortiori without controlling other people.” I argue that the Boyarins’ new “diaspora” has been incorporated into contemporary Jewish American humor and provides assimilated Jews a way to create humor in a multicultural world. The Boyarins’ diasporic thinking can be applied to diverse contemporary Jewish comedic texts like Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews,” Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” and Auslander’s Hope, A Tragedy . Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David also reject traditional forms of Jewish comedy (the need for group identity and solidarity in the face of suffering, persecution, genocide, powerlessness) in favor of an emancipated diaspora that maintains identity while it is outer directed and engages the Other.

Review

Reviewed by: The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition trans. by Jack Zipes, and: The Original 1812 Grimm Fairy Tales: A New Translation of the 1812 First Edition Kinder- und Hausmärchen / Children’s and Household Tales, Collected Through the Brothers Grimm trans. by Oliver Loo Marc Pierce (bio) The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. xlv + 519 pp. The Original 1812 Grimm Fairy Tales: A New Translation of the 1812 First Edition Kinder- und Hausmärchen / Children’s and Household Tales, Collected Through the Brothers Grimm, Volume 1, 200 Year Anniversary Edition. Translated by Oliver Loo. Self-published, 2014. 607 pp. Although a number of English translations of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen are available, up to this point there has been no complete English translation of the first edition (volume 1, 1812; volume 2, 1815). This gap has now been filled with the appearance of the two books reviewed here, by Jack Zipes and Oliver Loo. These books are different in almost every way. For example, Zipes’s translation covers both volumes of the first edition, whereas Loo’s covers only the first volume; Zipes is one of the best-known scholars on the Brothers Grimm today, whereas Loo is an independent scholar; Zipes’s translation is published by a well-respected university press (Princeton), whereas Loo’s translation is self-published; and Zipes’s translation is (very nicely) illustrated (by Andrea Dezsö), whereas Loo’s is not. In addition, the two authors have quite different philosophies of translation. This last difference necessitates further commentary, because it directly affects the quality of the two translations. Zipes writes: I have endeavored to capture the tone and style of the different tales by translating them into a basic contemporary American idiom. My main objective was to render the frank and blunt qualities of the tales in a succinct American English. . . . The Grimm’s tales, though diverse and not their own, share an innocent and naïve morality that pervades their works. It is this quality that I have tried to communicate in my translation. (xlv) [End Page 356] In contrast to Zipes’s more idiomatic translation, Loo contends that other translators invariably deviate somehow from the originals. He rejects this approach in favor of a much more literal translation: What my translations aim to be are faithful translations of the first edition from 1812 translated as closely as possible from the original German text without additions, modifications, or removals of text. I really do mean faithful. I will say that they are accurate and authentic. My translations can be compared line by line with the original text. No words were added or deleted or changed from the text, except minor changes for clarity. Nothing was censored. Nothing was rewritten. The stories appear almost exactly as they were written in 1812. (xxi) To illustrate the results of these differing philosophies, consider the following passages, beginning with the very first sentence of the introduction. The German original reads, “Wir finden es wohl, wenn Sturm oder anderes Unglück, vom Himmel geschickt, eine ganze Saat zu Boden geschlagen, daß noch bein niedrigen Hecken oder Sträuchen, die am Wege stehen, ein kleiner Platz sich gesichert und einzelne Aehren aufrecht geblieben sind” (qtd. from Kinder- und Hausmärchen, gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm, vergrößerter Nachdruck der zweibändigen Erstausgabe von 1812 und 1815 . . . von Heinz Rölleke in Verbindung mit Ulrike Marquardt [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986], Band I, Seite V). Zipes translates this passage as “When a storm, or some other catastrophe sent from the heavens, levels an entire crop, we are relieved to find that a small patch, protected by tiny hedges of bushes, has been spared and that some solitary stalks remain standing” (3). Loo, on the other hand, translates it as, “We find it well, if storm or other misfortune, from heaven sent, a whole seed has strewn to ground, that still by low hedges or bushes, that stand at the way, a small place is secured and single ears still...

Speaking American: Popular Indian Fiction in English

A number of new popular writers have emerged in the last decade in India, of whom Chetan Bhagat is probably the best known, but there are many others who sell in unprecedented numbers. Appealing to that vast segment of readers for whom English may be a second language (unlike the literary successes of the last decades, who wrote for a global and local audience), this group of writers has their gaze and concerns focused on India. Yet, the new genres (such as chick lit and techie lit) reveal a striking reliance on an American (US) idiom. While the chick lit novels have a distinctly Indian flavor, they, and the other new genres, promote the valorization of entrepreneurship, easy urban relationships, and consumerism. My essay examines the language of Americanness used in these popular fictions.

Remembering William Carlos Williams: Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá (1917–2007)

Remembering William Carlos Williams:Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá (1917–2007) Paul Mariani On Tuesday afternoon, April 22, 1958, three men, two in their early forties, the third ten years younger, knocked on the front door of William Carlos Williams’s Victorian home at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, New Jersey, where the Williamses had lived for the past forty-six years. They were there to talk with Williams about a group of some twelve early and mid-twentieth century poems he had agreed to translate from the Spanish into a contemporary American idiom. The oldest of the three was José Vázquez Amaral, 44, a professor of Romance languages at Rutgers, where he had been teaching for the past eleven years. He was also a well-known member of Ezra Pound’s Ezraversity which held its peripatetic classes on the grounds of St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, DC. It was there that Pound had spent the past twelve and a half years for his wartime radio broadcasts from Rome, often excoriating the American banking system and the FDR administration (once telling Williams in a letter that Roosevelt was nothing if not “an ambulating dunghill”).1 Over the past eight years, the handsome, genial Amaral had become a regular visitor of Pound’s at the hospital and had already translated Pound’s Pisan Cantos into Spanish. (He would translate and publish all 120 Cantos as Cantares Completos into Spanish three years after Pound’s death). Amaral had been born in Los Reyes, Jalisco, Mexico, and had earned degrees from La Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, including a law degree. Back in December 1951, Pound had sent Amaral an “anonymous communication” telling him to get in touch with Dr. W. Carlos Williams at his home in Rutherford. Pound had described Williams as “an honest man, who has spent most of his life in Rutherford.” Moreover, he was “part spanish, and has for 50 years been meaning to translate MORE spanish [End Page 1] poetry into north-american.” Amaral would do well, he added, “to call on him, and Old Bill might help stir up some enthusiasm at Rutgers” for greater respect shown to Iberian languages and literatures, in particular Latin American. Earlier Amaral had taught a seminar at Swarthmore on Spanish American poetry, and had done some translations into English “of Neruda, Villaurrutia, Carlos Pellicer and Jose Gorostiza,” which the translator Dudley Fitts had thought “rather good.”2 He wondered if Dr. Williams would be interested in seeing them, and of course Williams was. Pound, Amaral added, quoting Williams, was surely “one of the very few products of American, especially US, culture of sufficient stature to interest anyone.”3 The trouble was that the authorities were keeping Pound “in a cage in Washington” so as not to let him “mingle with other U. S. bipeds,” a fact which “baffled and confused” his Mexican sensibilities a great deal. In any event, he did think it “would be a fruitful thing to me” if he and Williams were “to become acquainted,” even “on the slightest pretext.”4 Four years later, on February 1, 1956, Amaral sent Williams a sheaf of poems by various Latin American poets, explaining that “the work of cultural interpenetration between English and Spanish America seems to have arrived.”5 Finally, in the spring of 1958, Amaral received a Rockefeller Foundation grant which allowed him to put into action the plan he had been devising, one of whose chief objectives, as he wrote Williams on April 17, 1958, was “to encourage translations from Latin American literature by eminently qualified people like yourself.” Only in this way, Amaral felt, could “the cause of better knowledge of Latin American literature” be properly served. As part of his larger project, Amaral was editing a Latin American number for New World Writing, in which Williams’s translations would appear. Earlier he’d sent Williams a dozen Spanish poems, along with literal translations he himself had made “to save [Williams] some useless trouble.”6 Now it would be Williams’ job was to turn them into poems. “I have been handed a job which I let myself in for without suspecting how...

Reinventing the Wheel: Contextualizing Existing Innovations as a Path to Market Success

IntroductionOne of the truisms regarding innovation is that one should not try to “reinvent the wheel” or “discover how to do something that has already been discovered” (Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms, 2003). When business people fail to recognize the value of something “not invented here” or perhaps fail to recognize that an outside innovation exists at all, a great