Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
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 Among other things, he says: The Polish pronunciation and spelling Lvov has been replaced by the Ukrainian Lviv, and behind it the linguistic and cultural echoes of Lwow…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…
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…
Here’s an extract from The Rainbow (1915) by D. H. Lawrence describing Will Brangwen’s infatuation with German religious art: These were the finest carvings, statues, he had ever seen. The book lay in his hands like a doorway. The world…
Almost six years ago, I wrote about Herztier — the title of Herta Müller’s famous novel — morphing into The Land of Green Plums in English. While some Romance language translators strove to stick to the meaning the author had…
The Congo, I Presume? is a sculpture group by Tom Frantzen in the garden of the AfricaMuseum in Brussels. Zoey Poll writes in Lapham’s Quarterly: It’s hard to imagine that a passerby would pick up on the work’s supposed anticolonial…
Apparently, one of the bigger Brexiteer bugbears has been the belief that a Briton could be criminally prosecuted for breaking the EU directive on the production and sale of marmalade, jam and other preserves (Council Directive 2001/113/EC) – and, crucially,…