translation – don't confuse the narrator

effervescent & irresolute

As I have no doubt said many times on the blog, I don’t really celebrate any of the popular festivals and holidays, religious or otherwise. Other people do, of course, and I get the impression that this year a lot of people decided to take extra time off to recoup after a difficult year. Certainly many of our clients have been very quiet over the Christmas period, which has meant that the last couple of weeks has seemed rather like yet another pandemic lockdown.

Or perhaps it actually is another lockdown.
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(not) visionary poetry

This week I failed to celebrate two fairly important days.

Wednesday, 30th of September was International Translation Day, and Thursday, 1st of October was National Poetry Day in the UK. (I’ve mentioned before that I don’t understand why the UK has a different Poetry Day and a different Book Day from other countries, but I’m not going to chase that red herring today.)
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(not very) centred

Apparently today is World Oceans Day, in honour of which, I have spent a stupidly long time researching things online. I started with the innocent question “How far am I from the sea?” and then fell down the rabbit hole of “What’s the centre of England?”

The answer to the latter question is by no means clear cut: according to the Wikipedia page on centre points of the UK, depending on the calculation method used, and on how much of Great Britain or the UK is included, you can even find a centre that is in the middle of Morecombe Bay. That would be a centroid point, the calculation of which is described by Rob Andrews from the Ordnance Survey in a BBC article as: “If you imagine cutting out the whole of the UK with a giant pair of scissors and balancing it on a church spire, it’s the balancing point.”
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hazy memories

According to Google, today is the 971st anniversary of the birth of Omar Khayyam, Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. It seems slightly strange to me that we would know the exact date of birth of someone born nearly 1000 years ago, and I wonder how eastern and western calendar differences and the change from the Julian to Gregorian calendar affect things.

But even if there were good reason to doubt the accuracy of the date, I have no objections to celebrating Khayaam; I may not be able to read the original, but I’ve loved Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat since I first came across it.
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a green scream

Undecided what to post today, I had a quick look on twitter, only to find that it is International Translation Day.

It’s actually been quite a while since I did any translation and nothing came to mind immediately as suitable for posting. But I remembered a long time ago using Google Translate to find inspiration for creativity and thought I’d have a dabble and see what happens.
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