The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
Robert Pinsky reviews a translation of Adam Zagajewski’s poetry in the NYT. Among other things, he says: The Polish pronunciation and spelling Lvov has been replaced by the Ukrainian Lviv, and behind it the linguistic and cultural echoes of Lwow…
Alexander Van der Bellen has been re-elected President of Austria. As I wrote in 2016, when he won his first term, Van der Bellen’s ancestors had moved from the Netherlands to Russia in the 18th century. They lived in Pskov…
Emmanuel Macron reportedly said this to Joe Biden a couple of days ago: I had a call with MbZ [UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan]… He told me two things. I’m at a maximum, maximum (production capacity). This is…
Tyler Cowen wrote in his Bloomberg column last week: Two questions are of particular concern: Is he [Putin] rational? And can he be deterred? …The answers, unfortunately, are: Yes and no. That is, he is probably rational and cannot easily…
The pine forest on the left grows in the Pskov region of European Russia, not far from Pushkin’s ancestral estate. The climate there is moderately cold and rather wet, with more than 700 mm of precipitation per year. Winters are…
“We liked how Actress X played her part – we just didn’t like Director Y’s production.” Every now and then, critics write this – without noticing the contradiction within. More often than not, it turns out that Actress X excelled…
The Bayreuth Festival opened last Sunday with a performance of The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Holländer). The first thing that meets the eye is the roster of the artists who created this production. Most of the key names are Eastern…
How did R. L. Stevenson intend Olalla to be pronounced – in English, since he wrote in English? (The Spanish pronunciation is discussed in the comments to Baia, the post at Language Hat’s that inspired this and the previous one.)…
On Independence Day, Language Hat wrote: Reading The Recognitions… involves encountering a whole lot of allusions, and one of them was to a Saint Olalla. Wanting to make sure I was pronouncing that right (/oˈlayə/, in Americanized form), I looked…
From Britannica’s entry on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground: The views and actions of Dostoyevsky’s underground man demonstrate that in asserting free will humans often act against self-interest… When he turns to reason for salvation, it fails him, and he…
This past Wednesday, AP reported from Moscow on Putin’s 2021 state of the nation address: In an apparent reference to the U.S. allies, he compared them to Tabaqui, a cowardly golden jackal kowtowing to Shere Khan, the tiger in Rudyard…
The Associated Press reported from Prague yesterday: The Czech Republic announced Saturday that it was expelling 18 Russian diplomats who it has identified as spies in a case related to a huge ammunition depot explosion in 2014. Prime Minister Andrej…