The “Russian” Civil Wars 1916-1926, Jonathan D. Smele, presents a fascinating subject. But it seems written in a language that has endings for specific congregations for its verbs and with many declensions for its nouns – languages like Russian, German or Latin.
The strength of English prose is verbs, actions directing nouns. Most well-written books and articles recognize this rule. Verbs are close to subjects; no one ever loses sight of that combination, or the purpose for which noun-verb was used. If a writer likes to discourse in a sentence, go on and on for 70 – 100 -120 words, an English sentence better have parallel structures. Logic dictates it. (It’s not the logic of the language, but logic – premise, minor premise, conclusion)
In Mein Kampf the translator observes,
…mixed metaphors are just as mixed in one language as in the other
other. A lapse of grammatical logic can occur in any language. An
English language Title might be just a redundant as the German one;…
No non-German would write such labyrinthine sentences…I have
cut down the sentences only when the length made them unintelligible
in English…
The substantives are a different matter. Here it has been necessary
to make greater changes, because in many cases the use of verbal nouns
is singly incompatible with the English language…Hitler’s piling up of
substances is bad German, but the fact remains that numerous German
writers do the same thing, while this failing is almost non-existence in
English.
…much German prose, some not of thee worst quality, around in…
useless little words: wohl, ja, denn, schon, noch, eigentlich, etc. Hitler’s
sentences are …clogged with particles, not to mention such private
favorites as besonders and damals which he strews about…needlessly.
His particles have a certain political significance, for in the petit
bourgeois mind they are, like carved furniture, an embodiment of the
home-grown German virtues, while their avoidance is viewed with
suspicion as foreign and modernistic.
[Translator’s note, Mein Kampf, Boston, Mariner Books, 1999, p. xi-xii.]
Parenthetical words and terms at the beginning of an English sentence, or at the end, or sometimes the middle indicated by the use of parentheses indicate a lack of writing skills.
Let’s observe one demonstration:
On the contrary, the events that took place in the period from
around 1989 to 1991 and their volcanic reverberations across
the former Soviet space have very greatly enriched, necessitated
and energized historical investigations, as they have made it
unchallengeably clear that any approach to the “Russian” Civil
War that places the Red and White struggle within the matrix too
starkly in its foreground is missing the point.
[Smele, The “Russian” Civil War 1916-1926, N.Y. Oxford, 2017, p. 6]
There’s a lot to chew on in that one sentence. The following sentences present a lot of gristle and fat, also. I noted this sentence was in the INTRODUCTION, and believed getting to Chapter One would break up and provide good sailing.
Alas, the first sentence of Chapter One reads,
Despite what has already been noted above, the is also a very
strong case for the dating of outbreak of the “Russian” Civil War
on the extensive anti-Russian uprising in Central Asia during the
summer of 1916, as a large number of the tsar’s Muslim subjects,
in a rebellion that anticipated the Basmachi movement, resisted
the forced mobilization into labor battalions to serve the Russian
army and the armaments industry (although this was the most
overt assault on local sensibilities that had been repeatedly
affronted by the waves of non-Muslim settlers that had been moving
into the region for a half century.)
[IBID, p. 17.]
Note the hesitancy to tell anything in the text which is further emphasized by the third sentence of that same paragraph beginning with Moreover and goes on for 100 words or so; the last sentence begins with Thus. Blue pencil it all! Also note, the book defines the Busmachi movement as a term for Muslim bandits during Soviet times. This sentence attempts to expand and explain incidences in the nineteenth century as well as those occurring, perhaps at late as 1980.
The usual manner of writing history or even fiction is for a non-writer to write chronologically. This writer decides to put a flashback into parentheses while using Soviet terms indicating more recent events. The outcome is a whole series of unexplained events of one hundred fifty years.
I wanted to learn of the “Russian” Civil War, its battles, the philosophy, its politics, and how its effects might survive today. But reading such diversion makes the story overly complicated, suggests portions of that war arose from local circumstances, and demonstrates the historian does not have a the big picture in his head clearly. He could not communicate much. The writing reminded me of translator’s note from Mein Kampf.
P.S. One way Hermann Boell was taught to write was editing Mein Kampf, editing to a third of its length. The text was readable. I believe The “Russian” Civil War could benefit from the same treatment and be vastly improved.
muymue 