Writing which responds to curious typographical constraints has a long and eccentric history. Hucbald (c. 850 - 930), Frankish monk and godfather of music theory, is best remembered (by those who remember such things) as the author of Ecloga de calvis, or 'In Praise...
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Express
In modern English, express is a verb meaning - broadly - to convey information, generally of a more personal nature, as well as an adjective meaning very fast. From the verb, we have formulas such as 'expression of regret', 'self-expression', 'expressing milk', whilst...
Criticising translators and their work
A translator's lot is not an easy one. There are some professions - heart surgeon, physicist, deep-sea diver - which generate a sense of impenetrable expertise; no-one would dream of offering a neurophysicist their ten cents' worth on the best way to go about thalamic...
Translating Arabic 2: Gaddafi and the Libyan dialect
As Linton Weeks observed on NPR recently, different English interpretations of Mubarak's 'resignation' speech gave very different ideas of what he was saying. Numerous other commentators have made similar observations regarding the slew of defiant or grovelling...
Facebook Digest 23/2/11
“The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.” Ezra Pound UNTRANSLATABLE WORDS #15: L'esprit de l'escalier (French)The act of thinking of a clever comeback...
Two reflections on literary translation
"The original is unfaithful to the translation." I came across this characteristically gnomic utterance in an essay by Borges on French writer William Beckford's Vathek (1782). For Borges, translation was both a primary literary act and a primary metaphor for the...
Verschlimmbessern
Thanks to guest blogger Irene Boa for this post! This word is as German as it gets - first of all, it is pleasantly long and contains a satisfactory number of single and double consonants, secondly it reflects a tendency that I (being a purebred German myself) would...
Fun with vowels 1: lipograms and Eunoia
'He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed decent levels...He prefers the perverse French esthetes: Verne, Peret, Genet, Perec...Relentless, the rebel peddles these theses, even when vexed peers deem the new precepts "mere dreck"'. A few weeks ago
From pidgin to creole
A creole language is one which arises from the fusion of two or more cultures, typically in a colonial context. It is distinct from a pidgin, which is the name given to the rough-and-ready dialect spoken when people of different language groups are obliged to...
Fairytale localisation 2: Rumpelstiltskin
Although Rumpelstiltskin is a fairy tale that originated in Germany, the same story pattern is globally extremely widespread: there is a similar creature in Icelandic folklore known as Gilitrutt; a Tom Tit Tot in England; a Whuppity Stoorie in Scotland; a Joaidane (he...