Grumpy poet's complaint

How can it be *this* difficult to translate four lines of poetry? :-(

( Rhyme and reason )

(Meanwhile I'm listening to an interview with the lyricist, Leonid Derbenov, who is cheerfully talking about turning out four or five new songs in appropriate styles on command...)

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Translators' humour: https://russievirtuelle.com/textes/humour/traducteurs.htm
(from someone who has translated a *lot* of Russian lyrics, including the entirety of the musical Собака на сене featuring Mikhail Boyarsky's song -- but hasn't attempted this one!)

1. Donne-moi d'abord le contexte.

2. Il me faut le contexte.

3. Non, c'est pas possible de traduire ce mot-là sans le contexte, donne-le moi enfin!
( Read more... )

"The Ambassadors' Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance", John North

After finishing this book, I realised that I still have no idea what the "previously undetected central theme" of the painting, as trailed on the back cover, is actually claimed to be! The theorised existence of a set of geometrical figures superimposed on the images? The repeated encoding of a gradient of 1 in 2 in various increasingly esoteric interpretations? The author, John North, is certainly no Dan Brown, and he isn't attempting to make out a code to any world-shaking secrets or hidden treasures; his arguments appear to mainly hinge around geometry and relative angles, but having read them all I find myself unclear as to where they are actually supposed to lead.

And I can't help remembering that this is a picture of two human beings, one of whom presumably paid Holbein to paint it to commemorate his meeting with the other, and without seeking to encode any mystical knowledge (since by the author's own admission neither of the sitters was any sort of expert in the fields with which he is seeking to associate the portrait's content, and moreover neither was Holbein himself). So the whole theory seems to rest on the presumption that a *fourth party* -- identified by the author as the astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer, whom he points out is known to have collaborated with Holbein on at least one previous occasion -- calculated and asked Holbein to insert a lot of extra details into a painting that was already being produced for another purpose, and I don't really see what any of them would have got out of this.( Read more... )