Una lezione di traduzione

Ce la dà Tim Parks. "Now imagine that, having a poet friend who wishes to translate these authors, you offer a literal translation of their poems in your second language. Maybe you read The Four Quartets out loud, line by line, to give him the cadence. But does our translator friend, who doesn’t know our language well, hear what we hear when we read aloud? The onomatopoeia, perhaps. But a dying fall in one tongue may not be the same in another, not to mention the echoes of other texts, or simply of voices in the air in our language. Over my thirty years in Italy I have often been told by uninitiated English friends what a beautiful and harmonious language Italian is; but that is Italian as heard by an ear accustomed to English sound patterns. To the Italian ear, and to mine these days, much of what is said in Italian grates. One hears the language differently when one knows it". nybooks.

The New Inquiry

Thinkers and writers of our generation face an unprecedented set of cultural realities. The growing supply of career academics has flooded the university job market, and 21^st century technologies have thrown traditional media into crisis. Although the future of higher education and print remains obscure, these cultural sea changes have yielded one definite side effect: an abundance of young writers and thinkers resolved to pursue a public intellectual life for its own sake—a pursuit ordered and enabled by Internet technology.

The New Inquiry is a space for discussion that aspires to enrich cultural and public life by putting all available resources—both digital and material—toward the promotion and exploration of ideas. thenewinquiry. Interessante, no?

Haikus for Safer Streets

"Curbside Haiku," a DOT safety education and public art campaign launched in November 2011, is a set of twelve bright, eye-catching designs by artist John Morse that mimic the style of traditional street safety signs.  Each sign is accompanied by a haiku poem. The "Curbside Haiku" installation can be seen citywide on 144 signs to promote road safety. Each design and haiku delivers a safety message by focusing on a transportation mode.

Placed near eye level in high-crash locations near cultural institutions and schools, the colorful signs draw attention to the critical importance of shared responsibility among pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists in keeping New York City's streets safe. L'haiku dell'immagine è il seguente: Cars  crossing  sidewalk/ Worst New York City hotspot/ To run into friends. cliccare qui per vedere tutti i segnali haiku.

Le menorah di Maurice Sendak

Il Jewish Museum di New York ha invitato Maurice Sendak a scegliere delle menorah dalla sua collezione da esibire per Hanukkah. Nella mostra sono anche esposti due disegni originali di Sendak (uno è In Grandpa's House della foto). La mostra inizia oggi e finisce il 29 gennaio. jewishmuseum.

Pettegolezzi di qualità

E' uscita una raccolta di saggi critici di John Updike, con il titolo di Higher Gossip, a cura di Christopher Carduff (Knopf). Michiko Kakutani dice: "Updike was that rare creature: an all-around man of letters, a literary decathlete who brought to his criticism an insider’s understanding of craft and technique; a first-class appreciator of talent, capable of describing other artists’ work with nimble, pictorial brilliance; an ebullient observer, who could bring to essays about dinosaurs or golf or even the theory of relativity a contagious, boyish sense of wonder". nyt.

Neil Gaiman va dai Simpsons

Lo scrittore e fumettista inglese Neil Gaiman è entrato a far parte dell'episodio dei Simpsons in onda domenica su Fox. "So Neil Gaiman's gone yellow. After winning the Newbery medal, the Carnegie award, as many Hugos as you can shake a stick at and – of course – the Nax Und Moritz Award for Best Foreign Writer, on Sunday he'll finally win the only literary award that really matters: an appearance on The Simpsons". guardian.

Squeezed Middle

Compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary have declared 2011's Word of the Year to be "squeezed middle".

The term was originally coined by Ed Miliband when speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme presenter John Humphrys.

The full OED definition reads: "Squeezed Middle: the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes and cuts in public spending during a time of economic difficulty, consisting principally of those on low or middle incomes". independent.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Il luogo migliore di passare il Thanksgiving sarebbe un qualsiasi paesino del New England, in mezzo a boschi colorati. Ma anche a Milano si stanno cucinando tacchini, con succulenti ripieni, patate dolci e pies. Qui berremo vini delle Langhe.

Ancora sulla noia

Pare che negli anni Settanta negli Stati Uniti ci fosse una battaglia per combattere la noia su vari fronti, tra cui quello del lavoro. Ma la noia non è solo noiosa, sostiene Jordan Grant, graduate student all'American University,  in un paper intitolato  "Meaning in the Malaise: Boredom and the Remaking of the American Mind in the Seventies",  presentato a un convegno di Intellectual History al Graduate Center of the City University di New York. "Boredom is also a window into important shifts in American intellectual life — not to mention a new research frontier for the sometimes-embattled scholars who study it". A proposito di noia, e di "intellectual history": negli USA questa disciplina sta tornando in auge. nyt.

The Prague Cemetery

Il cimitero di Praga di Umberto Eco è stato tradotto in inglese da Richard Dixon, pubblicato da Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, recensito su Haaretz da Benjamin Balint, che poco lo apprezza: "But The Prague Cemetery is ungainly and disjointed as fiction and sometimes pedantic as history. It doesn't stay on a single course long enough for a narrative wind to fill its sails. It is strong on atmospherics but weak on character.

Simonini, the Forrest Gump of anti-Semitism, intersects with a dizzying array of historical episodes ‏(Eco even has him forge the memo that got Captain Dreyfus convicted of treason in 1894‏), but he never quite comes alive. In other words, if the 'Protocols' is a fiction that could not resist being taken as fact, The Prague Cemetery, a different sort of collage, is fact that resists rising to fiction". haaretz.