I am a totalitarian Martian black hole
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Portraits in profile are for Ancient Egyptians. As Master of the Universe, I was talking the other day to the giraffe from Madagascar about flea circuses. He wants one, but said that using real fleas was cruel. Wait, said his cat, I represent the true animal kingdom, and I think they deserve it. Yeah, said…
The London Magazine, 1734: Verses occasioned by Mr. Budgel’s modest Proposal, in the Daily Post-Boy of Aug. 31. to give the Publick a new and accurate Translation of a late celebrated French Treatise, on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, and which has been already translated. Dulness, good goddess, chanc’d to…
The Vocabulaire européen des philosophies has now been versioned in English as Dictionary of untranslatables and Spanish as Diccionario de intraducibles. Here Mark Liberman cites Adam Gopnik, who seems to think the book is self-refuting Sapir-Whorfism, and here Jacques Lezra, coordinator of the English-language version, seems to be indulging the following incoherence: linguistic relativism is…
Between thieves, who profit from mistranslation, and fools, who know no better (and no profit), there lurks an intriguing class: lunatics, whose often considerable mind is whisked off to unexpected places by absurd fancies as to the nature of their task. The bigot Barnaby Rich writes in The Irish Hubbub (1617): And as the irish…
Spain may be about to be saved by Pablo Iglesias, a dead syndicalist whose name has passed to the political toyboy of media tycoon Jaume Roures. But a small band has risen to defend to the death (of Twitter) traditional Spanish orthography against revolutionary revisionism: Camarada #Vox@Castiel_Stinson Por ulima vez, es Stanli, no Estanli, comunistas…
I recently read Edmund Morris’ great biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and someone suggested that for some continuity as well as change I segue into the collected works of Zane Grey. Grey is the great romancier of the American West, and his theme – the forging of the American Nation – is that of Roosevelt: birth…
What’s the point in translating stuff correctly when most of Anglophonia wallows in a post-literate swamp? (H/t AG)
Over at JMG’s.
Sie tun die Taten und wir übersetzen die Erzählungen davon ins Deutsche. Who’s Lichtenberg?
This morning someone rather unusual said something to me along the lines of: Hice tres footin(g)(s) pero se me rompió el tendón(g), entonces dos liftin(g)(s) y ya me ves la cara, y luego en el hospital me metieron un dopin(g) tremendo y ahora estoy en una relación con la farmacéutica y lo llamo la ley…
Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians