Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
In The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America (1975), R. Laurence Moore of Cornell wrote: In his journal, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson included the spiritualist medium among the new professions that he believed had emerged in America…
Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1790-1853) served as Nicholas I’s minister of education in 1850-53, during some of the darkest years of that reign. Disturbed by the European revolutions of 1848-9, Nicholas succumbed to a sort of reactionary paranoia that debilitated all…
In 1809, Byron wrote a friend from Lisbon : I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in Estramadura is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world. We also find an expression of this in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage: Lo! Cintra’s glorious…
Alfred de Vigny, the author of The Bottle to the Sea (La bouteille à la mer) and La frégate La Sérieuse, was not a man of the sea. He served in the French army – mostly with the royal guard…
Georges Barthouil on Leopardi’s attitude to travel: Leopardi was not a great traveller. In fact he imagined his foreign travels… Surely he had long wanted to escape his ancestral prison at Recanati in the Marches: However, escaping from a prison…
George Eaton’s dubious account, in the New Statesman, of his interview with Roger Scruton begins with this paragraph: It was in Paris in May 1968, as French workers and students revolted, that Roger Scruton became a conservative. “I was woken…
Neal Ascherson wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2017: The parliamentary sovereignty dogma was enshrined by the great Victorian jurist A.V. Dicey. But, funnily enough, Dicey changed his mind about referendums at the end of his life.…
More on M. Blanchard’s adventures in France and other European countries. (Part 1; part 2.) Here’s a brief recap: J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. Jean-Baptiste Rossi, later known as Sébastien Japrisot, translated it into…
In the New Statesman, Thomas Meaney reviews The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present by Gavriel D Rosenfeld. Meaney begins with this strong statement: No phrase more distinctly captures the millenarian yearnings ordinary…
This thread on StackExchange has a detailed enough explanation of Japrisot‘s (or Rossi‘s) arguably seminal translation error. I don’t quite agree, however, that it was a case of a rare idiom misunderstood. Rather, the phrasal verb to beat off was…
The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, 1951. A French version appeared two years later, perhaps the first translation into a major literary language. The translator was a young man, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, who had published his first…
Eimuntas Nekrošius, the great Lithuanian theater director, died in Vilnius on November 20 on the day before his 66th birthday. He was loved and revered by Russian theater-goers and theater-makers. He was one of the masters whose achievement made possible…