Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Dr. Bedřich Welfer is an episodic but memorable character in Jaroslav Hašek’s great novel, The Good Soldier Švejk. Welfer’s uncle left him a generous allowance in his will, enabling the lucky nephew to remain a student of medicine for as…
Madame de Genlis appears twice in War and Peace. First, as the author of books for children, “de nombreux ouvrages édifiants à l’usage de la jeunesse” to quote Wikipedia, much disliked by some of her involuntary readers for her oppressive…
Speaking of translations — after Sandie Shaw won the Eurovision contest in 1967 with Puppet on a String, she went on to record it in God knows how many languages. Actually, French, Italian, German and Spanish, if Wikipedia is to…
It is said that the 1967 song Comme d’habitude, the French precursor to My Way, was …a bleak reflection on the breakup of his [Claude François’s] affair with [France] Gall. François co-wrote the lyrics with Gilles Thibaut; Jacques Revaux composed…
The infamous Minnesota policeman shares a last name with Nicolas Chauvin, the “legendary, possibly apocryphal” French soldier who inspired the term “chauvinism.” In its turn, the surname Chauvin can be traced back to the French adjective chauve, “bald,” ultimately from…
Not that I know much about Joseph Beuys‘s work but this episode from his younger years – perhaps invented – keeps interjecting itself into my random thoughts. Actually, I’m pretty sure he did invent it now. Here’s the deal: When…
Here’s Christine Smallwood in Harper’s Magazine on Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas in a new English translation by Michael Hofmann (use the Wayback Machine if inaccessible): Here is how Kohlhaas ends: We learn, more or less out of nowhere, that the horse-dealer…
Even before I saw The Favourite, I knew from an outline of the plot that I had heard some of the characters’ names at an early age – thanks to a performance of Le Verre d’eau by Eugène Scribe. Neither…
Christopher Bray on Louis Althusser: …[S]ince in French “Louis” is pronounced exactly the same as the word for “he”, he had never thought of himself as an individual proper. Not exactly: the diphthongs in lui and Louis are supposed to…
Jonathan Gaisman writes of Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg’s early work (1899) based on a poem by Richard Dehmel: Looking at the poem on its purely literary merits, it is indeed difficult not to wince, or, at the mention of the man…
Seeing that Himadri has a new post up discussing The Catcher in the Rye, I feel it’s time to wrap up my Japrisot and Salinger mini-series. A brief recap: The first and best-known Russian translation of The Catcher (1960) had…
Mateusz Mazzini argues in Foreign Policy: The revisionist politics of the current Polish government plays right into Moscow’s hands. A rejection of multilateralism, strife with the EU, and growing antagonism with neighbors, notably Germany and Ukraine—all these features of Polish…