Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
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…
Everyone knows that, in 1968, David Bowie – or rather David Jones as he was known then – wrote English lyrics to the French melody that would later become a global hit with Paul Anka’s English text. My Way. Anthony…
There’s new evidence that an outbreak of an infectious disease closely and suspiciously resembling Covid-19 occurred in Wuhan months before the officially recognized beginning of the coronavirus epidemic. Satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as internet…
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…
Facebook moves to limit spread of ‘Boogaloo’ groups after charges, Reuters reports. What’s this boog-a-loo thing? Facebook Inc is making it harder to find user groups associated with the term “Boogaloo,” which refers to a potential U.S. civil war or…
To quote myself: Vietnam’s quarantine, I imagine, was much facilitated by the people’s apprehension of threats and dangers coming from the north. That is, from China. Back in 1979, China invaded Vietnam, devastated the borderlands and withdrew in the face…
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…
A riposte to Mandelshtam from the early 1970s: Like other Latin languages, Portuguese has a high number of perfect rhymes and frequent, inescapable assonances. The ease of rhyming in these languages has been envied, sometimes eyed with suspicion, by poets…
Osip Mandelstam wrote in 1933 in Conversation about Dante: Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to…
Earlier this week, Mikhail Tamm, a Russian physicist and statistician, explained (in Russian) why the number of deaths in Moscow in April is a far better estimate of coronavirus mortality than the official rate: Ten days ago [the number of…
Covid-19 data from Russia is a mixed bag: the number of new cases identified per day seems to have plateaued – well, almost – but the death count remains so suspiciously low that it’s impossible not to doubt the top…