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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

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De Ultieme Hallucinatie in Brussels was closed when I turned up on a tram. But on attempting to alight I completely forgot whether the passengers getting off or the passengers getting on went first. There was an impasse until the people on the street pushed past. I only left the tram as the doors were closing.

posted at: 14:52 | path: /leplatpays | permanent link to this entry

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Here's an odd thing: the intended implication of "Can you name ten famous Belgians?" is always one of the supposed shortcomings of a small country with a comic name. But I always hear it as "I'm so incurious, ill-read and uninterested in the visual arts that I don't know the first thing about a country that's closer to London by train than much of England."

If you haven't heard of at least half of the following people:

• René Magritte, painter
• Django Reinhardt, guitarist
• Adolphe Sax, inventor of musical instruments
• Jacques Brel, singer
• Georges Simenon, crime novelist
• King Leopold II, king responsible for millions of deaths in the Belgian Congo
• Marc Dutroux, a somewhat more notorious serial killer these days, but on a scale five or six orders of magnitude smaller
• Hergé (Georges Remi), cartoonist
• Maurice Maeterlinck, poet and playwright
• Jean-Claude Van Damme, actor

then it's your fault. I deliberately haven't listed anyone whose career was before the foundation of Belgium in 1840. What would your list of famous Britons look like if you excluded everyone before the foundation of the UK in 1801 or when it gained its present borders in the 1920s? I deliberately haven't included any present-day politicians or people who are well known in their own field but less so outside it, like Ensor, Horta, Broodthaers, Prigogine, Merckx, Audrey Hepburn, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin-Hardenne, Jacques Tits (sic), Georges Lemaître, Solvay, Delvaux or Panamarenko.

This reminds me that I haven't been to Belgium since January. I must go again, and soon.

posted at: 13:43 | path: /leplatpays | permanent link to this entry