Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Omar al-Bashir, the brutal Sudanese dictator, is under house arrest. The military has taken over. Protesters demand democratic reform. The uprising – apparently the third successful one in the country’s history – began in December and came close to toppling…
There’s no proper place for referenda in the British political system, other than – perhaps – as a people’s veto. A national poll in lieu of royal assent could work, but electors should not be able to give orders to…
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…
Andrew Higgins writes in The New York Times, reporting from Moscow: The president, speaking in the Kremlin in December, declared that prosecuting people for their religious affiliations was “a total nonsense” and had to stop. But instead of curbing a…
There’s a more obvious irony to Daniel Lavelle’s piece on accent softening in The Guardian. The author is a regular contributor to The Guardian; he received the 2017 Hugo Young award for his reporting. …since I moved from Manchester to London…
Daniel Lavelle, who writes on “on mental health, homelessness and social care” for The Guardian, describes his and other people’s efforts to “soften” their regional English accents: I am in central London, attending an “accent softening taster session” with the…
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…
A Russian saying goes, literally, “where it’s thin, it tears.” In his Outlandish Proverbs, published in 1640, George Herbert has a similar one: “The thread breakes, where it is weakest.” Turgenev used it as the title for an early play…
Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote in The Origins of Capitalism: The word ‘improve’ itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just ‘make better’ in a general sense but literally meant to do something for monetary profit, especially to cultivate land…
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…
In April 2017, Jehovah’s Witnesses were declared an extremist organization and outlawed by Russia’s top court. Their ordeal continues: A spokesperson for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, an organization that Russia labeled extremist in 2017, alleged that at least seven adherents of…