Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
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.…
From Tuesday’s press release by the ECHR: In today’s Chamber judgment in the case of Navalnyy v. Russia… the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been: a violation of Article 5 (right to liberty and security),…
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…
The BBC reported this past Thursday: On Sunday Russian border guards fired on three Ukrainian ships and seized their crews off the Crimean Peninsula… German Chancellor Angela Merkel blamed the crisis “entirely” on Russia… Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has urged Nato…
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…
The ECHR’s Grand Chamber published its final judgment in Navalnyy v. Russia yesterday. The Russian opposition leader (whose last name is more often transliterated as Navalny, without the extra “y”) complained that his arrest, detention and administrative conviction on seven…
The German terms Cäsarenwahn and Cäsarenwahnsinn gained some currency in the second half of the 19th century thanks to a novel by Gustav Freytag, a psychiatric treatise by Friedrich Wiedermeister, and a historical study by Ludwig Quidde. In the last…
There was a show of James Ensor’s work at the Royal Academy in 2016, curated by Luc Tuymans, also a Belgian painter. Reviewing the exhibition, Laura Cumming wrote in The Guardian: His mother sold souvenirs, carnival masks, dolls and chinoiserie;…