While normally I approve strongly of translating books in foreign into English, I was disappointed to see reprinted the Englishing of Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte earlier this year.

I only found out it existed the day after spotting my partner's doppelgängerin across the concourse at Brussel-Zuid, and it would be mine all mine if it hadn't been reprinted.

Fuzzy black and white photographs to follow.

posted at: 21:48 | path: /leplatpays | permanent link to this entry

I don't want to suggest that the considerable age of some of my Latin and Greek textbooks meant that I learnt either language properly. I've just tried to guess the length of the vowels in vir, femina, canis and feles and got half of them wrong. And the short -a in femina I only managed because it was nominative, not ablative, a fact I picked up at university.

posted at: 21:42 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

If you had school textbooks with introductions referring to the "Four Concords" and "boys" to the exclusion of "girls", then you'll be as disappointed as I was to learn that the Latvian words for "sailor", jūrnieks and matrozis, are masculine in form as well as masculine in gender.

Mathiassen's A Short Grammar of Latvian got my hopes up by declining māsa, "sister" (fourth declension), and then saying

Care should, however, be taken for nouns designating males. They are of masculine gender (cf. p. 40) and have the ending -am (not *-ai) in the dative sg., e.g. puika : puikam boy...

The fifth declension is better value, though. Bende, a hangman, is epicene.

posted at: 21:30 | path: /baltism/redwhitered | permanent link to this entry

Not so long ago, the press was speculating about when Tony Blair would hand over to Gordon Brown. Now they're expecting him to last until the possibly anti-constitutional German elections in September, hence the interest in how well he gets on with Angela Merkel.

The case of Gordon Brown is more interesting, though. How will the dour, academic son of the manse get on with the dour, academic daughter of the manse?

posted at: 11:37 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

Amadigi was almost all aria, but much less indigestible than that makes it sound. I only found myself drifting off and thinking about chairs once, specifically that Pina Bausch piece with one figure stumbling about unable to see on a stage covered in chairs while another figure removes the chairs from harm's way, a bit like a bullfighter.

One of the strings in the Britten Sinfonia once had the back legs of their chair up on bricks, but I don't think it was for tax reasons.

posted at: 14:48 | path: /Q | permanent link to this entry

No chairs were harmed in yesterday's staged performance of Handel's Amadigi, I think because it wasn't on the radio and didn't need to prove that it wasn't four women in comfortable clothing standing at lecterns.

posted at: 13:45 | path: /Q | permanent link to this entry

As if to prove me wrong, there's a preview for a Radio Four programme this week beginning "The fine structure constant..." Maybe it'll be a New Scientist-style edition based on some intrinsically unverifiable predictions published in the Journal of We Publish Anything, illustrated on the front cover with a naked woman.

posted at: 18:15 | path: /N | permanent link to this entry