Now that, all over Spain, we’ve dutifully reflected without concentrating, and done our civic duty and voted for whoever we’ve voted for, abstained in protest, or blotted our ballots, the results are out. The Guardian website headline reads:
Which is all very well, but although popular can be correctly translated as ‘of the people’, the PP, the Partido Popular, is not what I would call a People’s party.
Continue reading “what’s in a name”
Visiting the Google page this morning, I discovered it was the anniverary of the birth of John James Audubon. Why Google had chosen to commemorate the 226th anniversary, I don’t know, but they had one of their doodles depicting a number of the birds drawn by Audubon.
(Incidentally, that link to the Google doodles page is worth a click – it appears to lead to an archive of the different logos they’ve used in all the different language and geographic versions of the Google page.)
Continue reading “for the birds”
Looking back through old notebooks at the weekend, I found some notes I must have made after talking to Joan Margarit back in 2002, I think. The conversation was in Spanish, and the notes (made later in English) are my personal interpretation of what he was trying to say.
There were two points about translation that I hadn’t remembered:
Form, metre, rhyme etc. are superficial elements of a poem. What gets translated is something more essential.
The abstracts have been published for the sessions at the It Gives Us the Other poetry and translation conference & workday to be held in Nottingham in April.
I suspect some people will wonder who on earth I am and what I’m doing leading a workshop there, so they’ll Google my name and some of them will end up here. (Although I don’t think there’s anything on this blog that explicitly says who I am, the Googlebots are cunning little spiders and have managed to make the connection.)
So, just so that things are made a little easier and a little clearer, I’m gathering together a few relevant posts here:
Continue reading “‘it gives us the other’”
For the last week, the skies have been almost solid grey and the drizzle has only been interrupted by intermittend torrential rain and the occasional thunder storm. This has all come while the plum trees have been in full bloom, so I imagine we may not get much fruit this year as there have been few insects around to pollinate.
Continue reading “pruning, ploughing and punning”
don't confuse the narrator 