Gerry Studds was, as far as I know, the only Portuguese-speaking member of the US Congress. His name always made me think of that bit in “My old man’s a dustman” which goes “He wears gor-blimey trousers/With the studs sewn down the back.” Googling I find “He wears cor-blimey trousers/And he lives in a council…
Here‘s a good bunch of Pontevedra photos by Colin Davies chronicling the frenzied destruction of those not-particularly-interesting buildings that nevertheless make Spain look the way it looks. If your dwelling is in a pre-1850 zone, then the chance is that things will stay more or less the way they are, but most everything from the…
Here’s an old foreshadow–give or take the odd sacrifice–of a recent nocturnal trip in the English translation by Grace Frick of Yourcenar’s Hadrian: A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius. The ascent was made by night; just as for…
I’d like to see Guus Hiddink take over England asap, but then I was supporting Mark Oaten (go on, get me one for my birthday!) to run the Lib Dems until he started chasing the England job, leaving Boris Johnson as the LDs’ only potentially electable leader. (Apparently the Koreans gave Guus a villa on…
If I were a bit smarter I’d have tried a couple of alternative spellings before posting this. There’s a good chapter by Anthony Reid dealing among others with Sakender in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (ed Stuart B Schwartz) in which…
The other day I serendipited upon a review in Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië (1853) of Abraham Benjamin Cohen Stuart‘s translation of what sounds like an absolutely brilliant Javanese epic poem dealing with the life and loves of one Baron Sakendher, Geschiedenis van Baron Sakendher. Een Javaansch verhaal van vertaling, aanteekeningen…