" 'white' sleep"

[Chris Waigl]

Alice Faber wrote:

>---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
>Organization: Haskins Laboratories
>Subject:      Re: " 'white' sleep"
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>
>Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>
>>In his 1957 novel _A Death in the Family_, James Agee uses the term "a ' white ' sleep" [Agee's single quotes] to describe the very troubled sleep of an anxious character. The story is set in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1916.
>>
>>Is anybody familiar with this phrase?  The quotation marks seem to imply that Agee regarded it as idiomatic, but I can find no other reference to it.
>>
>>
>>
>
>I'm wondering if it isn't a translation from some European language. The
>first thing that comes to mind for me is "white nights", with similar
>meaning, in a Hebrew novel by Aharon Megged (I believe it might be _The
>Lover_).
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>
>
In French, _nuit blanche_ ("white night") means a sleepless night in
both the insomnia and the partying sense. In German, the plural "weiße
Nächte" is much more literary and I think usually recognized as a
reference to Dostoevsky's novel(la), the title of which is translated as
"White Nights".

Chris Waigl

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