Russian

Dancing with the czars

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A few days ago, an Australian news website stated that Trump’s border tsar was going to Minneapolis. Another stated that Trump’s ‘border czar’ was going to Minneapolis.

I am far more familiar with the spelling tsar, and would only ever use either to refer to eastern European monarchs (tsar for Russian and czar for south Slavic), not people holding positions of power in US politics or public life. 

Czar is the earlier spelling (from Latin caesar (classically pronounced with a /k/, compare German kaiser)) and was more used until about 1900. The two spellings traded usage for most of the 20th century, then tsar has been the most common since about 1990. If anything tsar refers to Russian monarchs (compare Russian Царь) and czar refers those people in US politics or public life. With the resources I have access to, I can’t find when when czar was first used in that way. US industrial magnates and the Russian monarchy overlapped by several decades (compare also ‘barons of industry’).

I have never knowingly encounteredczar in reference to Australia or any other country. (Wikipedia says US and UK.) The second website saw fit to use inverted commas around the phrase. I can’t immediately think what term we would use in Australia to refer to a person of equivalent power. Maybe, fortunately, we don’t have (m)any, as the Australian prime minister has less power to make such appointments. Intriguingly, most similar words come from other languages: boss (Dutch), supremo (Italian or Spanish), honcho (Japanese) and mogul (Persian or Arabic). ‘White House Border Czar’ seems to be Tom Homan’s actual title (Wikipedia, citing the Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel, 1 July 2025). The first news source has a further article in which the commentator writes “The ‘White House Border Tsar’ (yes, that is his actual title)”. 

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Plums

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I love a good digression, and my colleagues and I had one today. A colleague informed us that it was Plum Pudding Day. The linked page doesn’t explain why a foodstuff associated with Christmas is celebrated in February. Another colleague wondered why they were called that when they don’t have any plums in them. I had always assumed that they originally did but now don’t, but found this in Wikipedia’s article on Christmas pudding:

The word “plum” was used then for what has been called a “raisin” since the 18th century, and the pudding does not in fact contain plums in the modern sense of the word.

(It is unlikely that a lot of fresh fruit was available in England in the middle of winter.) (On the other hand, figgy pudding contained figs (or contains, if people still make it.)

She then wondered what sugar plums, enjoyed by so many children in English books, are. Similarly:

A sugar plum originated as a piece of dragée or hard candy made of hardened sugar in a small round or oval shape.

“Plum” in the name of this confection does not always mean plum in the sense of the fruit of the same name, but commonly refers to small size and spherical or oval shape. Traditional sugar plums often contained no fruit, but were instead hardened sugar balls.

A third colleague then informed us that her local fruit shop sells a variety of fruit called sugar plums. Wikipedia’s list of three species which go by that name (actually sugarplum) includes two native to the USA and one to central Europe, so I don’t know which one she is referring to.

(I interspersed that my grandmother used to make ‘cherry plum and raspberry jam’, being cherry plum + raspberry, and not cherry + plum + raspberry.)

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Edison Denisov

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I chanced on a reference to a Russian composer named Edison Denisov, about whom I know nothing other than his name, which is … almost an anagram. In fact, his middle name (patronymic) is Vasilievich, so Edison V Denisov is an anagram. (Vasili Denisov was a scientist.) As far I understand Cyrillic, it doesn’t work in Russian: the Э of his first name and the е of his second are different letters – Эдисо́н В Дени́сов. (The acute accent on a different letter in each name serves to mark stress, and doesn’t make a different letter.)

I must listen to some of his music sometime.

‘The Bells’

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In 1849, the American poet Edgar Allan Poe died and his poem ‘The Bells’ was published.

Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, the Russian poet and translator Konstantin Balmont “very freely” translated it into Russian.

In 1913, the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote a setting for soprano, tenor and baritone soloists, choir and orchestra, originally titled (in Russian) Колокола, Kolokola (Russian Wikipedia, English Wikipedia).

Some years ago (first guess 2001-2003) I bought a CD of this work. The booklet calls Balmont’s translation “more precisely, a re-interpretation” and includes his text transliterated into the Latin/‘English’ alphabet and translated into German, English and French. Whether the unnamed translator was equally free in translating Balmont’s Russian back into English or not, the result is very different from Poe’s original. Continue reading →