The Translatologist

Translation, languages and unrelated stuff

[translatologist]

I wrote an article for The Snarkologist, a journal dedicated to The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. My article was about Louis Aragon, Nancy Cunard, a small printery in Normandy, Lewis Carroll, the first French Snark, the Surrealists and a couple of other things, and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to hear some of the music Aragon would have listened to in the Parisian clubs he frequented at the time he worked on his translation of the Snark? So I made a playlist of music that you could hear in Paris in the 1920s/1930s. Enjoy! 

[translatologist]

Concorde Lunch

It is July 19, 1989.

You're on the Concorde. You left New York 20 minutes ago, and you are now flying at twice the speed of sound. You'll be in Paris in three hours.

You heard a new song on your ride to the airport, and you cannot get it out of your head. It's called Wicked Game.

What are you having for lunch? And more importantly, what are you drinking?

Credits | Concorde: Alexander Jonsson via Wikimedia Commons / Menu: New York Public Library.

[translatologist]

Lunch on Le France

It is July 24, 1963. 

You’re on the ocean liner Le France, the longest passenger ship on the seas, on your way to New York.

It is a little overcast, but seasonably warm, and you’ve just caught a glimpse of Alain Delon on the promenade deck. 

What are you having for lunch?

Credits | Le France: ND44 via Wikimedia Commons / Menu: New York Public Library

[translatologist]

Lazy Sunday walk in Mons.

[brightwanderer]

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

[translatologist]

Efteling, again.

[translatologist]

I visited a small 18th-century castle in Belgium recently, and I’m obsessed with the wallpaper.

[translatologist]

“...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion.”

(Edith Wharton)

[translatologist]

Oostende

[translatologist]

This is for one (1) project.

I DON’T HAVE A NOTEBOOK PROBLEM YOU HAVE A NOTEBOOK PROBLEM

[translatologist]

Château de Seneffe, Belgium, March 2022.

[translatologist]

Went to a butterfly conservation farm. It was a nice escape from the real world.

[translatologist]

Alice au pays des merveilles (1930)

This is one of my favourite editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in my collection. The translation, by Marie-Madeleine Fayet, is by no means the best French translation of Alice ever to be produced, but it is incredibly charming. It’s also the first translation of Alice produced in France (Bué’s 1869 translation was made in England) by a translator whose authorship is clearly attributed (there were a couple of anonymous translations and adaptations before). It is also the first combined edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There published in France.

The illustrations are gouache paintings by famous children’s books illustrator Jean Hée. Last year, I spent some time digging through the archives of Les Œuvres représentatives in Normandy, and I found some very amusing letters between Georges Crès (the publisher) and the illustrator as the latter was insanely late on all of his deadlines, as well as the original paintings, which were the same size as those presented in the book, and very, very pretty. 

[translatologist]

There’s a rock that looks like a face near where I live and we’re all generally content with its existence.

[translatologist]

I love the Efteling so damn much.

[banquest]

“I teach a class called ‘Decolonize Your Diet,’ and I talk about the Spaniards arriving in Mesoamerica. One of the first things they tried to change—in addition to religion— was the way people ate. They introduced wheat and tried to make eating bread something that was seen as more valuable than eating corn. They outlawed amaranth, and in South America they outlawed quinoa. I tell my students to think about how the dominant powers are invested in controlling what their subjects eat, and then to take that concept from the 1500s to our contemporary era and ask themselves, ‘What are the powers that be wanting us to eat right now? Where are all the food subsidies going? How is that influencing what we’re eating? Who’s benefiting and who’s suffering because of that?’ For students, drawing those connections is really powerful, and it gives them a tangible way to analyze relations of power.”

— Dr. Catrióna Esquibel

[linguisten]

Linguistics without anthropology is sterile; anthropology without linguistics is blind.

Charles Hockett (via linguisten)