Organ-grinding tweets for February
More untruths & idle opinions.
Tag: Flanders
Son of a broker
A Dutch compliment becomes a French insult.
Drunk and disorderly
A British soldier’s hazy recollections of civil war in Portugal.
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Surreal quote in this doc on personal adoptive languages, a typically absurd Belgian scheme to avoid civil war, appropriate EU funds, and inflict a tactical defeat on the Anglo-Saxons by having the Flemish learn French and the Walloons learn Dutch, instead of just letting everyone get on with their English classes: “An Le Nouail Marlière…
Exhibit 1 features Die Verdammte Spielerei and some blonde and was recorded in what will presumably be the Republic of Flanders by Monday. I suppose France will get Brussels. Exhibit 2 is Tango gitano, which “forms part of a group of field materials documenting Maria Garcia performing unaccompanied Spanish songs from Asturias, Spain on January…
This is a crucial element in what remains of French realist writing in the 1920s and 30s, which, for this reason and others, was more popular than praised. Based on some reading and no maths, I would venture that in a book of (x + y) pages (not counting the open letter of support from…
I’ve been translating quite a lot of elderly Flemish over the past few months. Here’s an excerpt from some manuscript memoirs found in the municipal archives of Ditverstaanzetochniet: An ivory trader on the Congo River has been suffering severe depression as a result of harrassment by an inquisitive steamboat captain speaking defective French. He decides…
It may not have worked, but nineteenth century medicine often sounds rather fun. This from An Epitome of Braithwaite’s Retrospect of practical medicine and surgery (1860): M. Lallemand, of Montpellier, has great confidence in aromatic bitters, to which a small portion of brandy has been added, followed by active friction of the loins… As internal…
The excerpt feature in Google Books sometimes delivers surreal gems, Escher stones. Here’s one from Advance Japan: A Nation Thoroughly in Earnest: “that the equivalent of the expression ‘not worth a button’ is, in Japanese, ‘not worth the head of a sardine.’ Mackerel also are extremely plentiful.” (I’m translating some mid-nineteenth century colloquial Flemish and…
Flemish jurisprudence dealing with relationships between potato coops and their tax-mitigating members. One new expression: tegensprekelijk debat, from the French débat contradictoire of réunion contradictoire, meaning basically (and slightly bizarrely to my mind) a meeting or hearing at which several or all parties are present. Due to some aspect of legal history with which I…
Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians