This week’s New Yorker reprints the following correction from the International Herald Tribune:
Because of a translation error, an article in some editions Thursday misquoted Monica Frassoni, a member of the European Parliament, as comparing Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, to Attila the Hun. Frassoni, who represents a Belgian constituency but who spoke in Italian, said Berlusconi had arrived “alla guida dell’unione.” This was translated as “at the tiller of the union” which was misheard as “Attila.”
Addendum (Jan. 2024). The original IHT story, with correction, was reprinted by the NY Times and is online here.
Funny. Didn’t Berlusconi compare some German delegate to the EU to Hitler?
That’s a relief. If I were a Hun, I’d have been pretty pissed.
We have Attila here for a response:
“Let me just say that I was truly offended to think that Ms. Frassoni would defame me in that manner. To compare me with that sleazeball Berlusconi would have been outright slander. The man buys up all the media he can find and blatantly covers up his own corruption and that of his buddies. Now, I’m not claiming I’m perfect. The looting and pillaging is in the past now, but I don’t hide from it. But I always kept my tent open and was willing to listen to anybody, and if my people felt I was going beyond the limit, taking more than my share, well, they could behead me any time. Buying legislators, suborning judges, that’s just not right. I’m glad the whole thing turned out to be a mistranslation, and I suggest we put the whole thing behind us.”
The Attila version has style…
Bush to Rove: “I’m not deaf, you are, Cheney is.”
My damn tilla won’t let me turn left. Which means sometimes I have to go the long way around.
Actually, the ex-prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban of the FIDESZ party used to voice his admiration of Berlusconi quite often. Given that FIDESZ were originally student liberals who turned into Evil Corrupt Yuppie Right Wing Nationalist Swine, I doubt that Attila would have gotten along well with them. Attila was a progressive leader with a well defined social program and a strong background in loot-and-pillage economics. No room for corruption. And if he had not invaded Italy and sacked Udine then there would have been no reason for the Udinese to flee to the marshes along the coast and found Venice.
Attila: Father of Venice!
Say, maybe that’s where the Venetians got the inspiration for all the looting and pillaging they did…
Without the Huns there would be no squid-ink pasta.
I thought the Venetians got others to do their looting and pillaging for them, as in the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople?
13th Century outsourcing? There’s probably some awful airport bookshop style management manual in there somewhere …
Priscus’ reports on Attila are online (Bury translation. There’s a new Blockley translation). Google “Priscus + Attila”. He wasn’t that bad a guy when he wasn’t pillaging, and isn’t that pretty much true of most of us?
language hat,
Not only did you make me laugh aloud in public, but I was forced to embarass myself further with my mangling of the Italian language, as I told my co-workers “You gotta listen to this!”
Thanks!
” Didn’t Berlusconi compare some German delegate to the EU to Hitler? ”
Yes to a KAPO …
Very funny
Wordplay, tyrants and literary references to titivate every Hatter
(Presumably the tune is G&S, but I don’t recognise it.)
Ah, A Heavy Dragoon from Patience, the first actual Savoy Theatre G&S.
Fascinating Aïda Speaks For England!
(Depressingly, some of the comments opine that the song should be about any MP, not merely Tory MPs. This “they’re all the same” attitude is deliberately promulgated by the International Rightwing Shitbag community, and will probably turn out in the long term to be the most damaging among their many poisonous “achievements.” I know, never read the comments …)
Twenty years later…
*sigh*
Lots and lots of extortion, though.
Udine? Aquileia, I thought?
It is clear that Dillie Keane has been waiting all these years for a masterful charismatic Conservative man to submit to. The problem is that Britain no longer produces such men in sufficient quantities, and with Brexit there is no longer any hope of recruitment from Eastern European or Muslim countries with a surplus of these men.
Well, she did once stand as a Liberal Democrat candidate, so you’re probably right. Tories with the capacity to walk without needing their knuckles (which is at least a step on the way to being charismatic.)
It’s interesting how some show business people who are household names in Britain are also known in America, although not as well, while some seem to be utterly unknown.
I dare say that the opposite may also be true, but of course ex hypothesi I wouldn’t know.
In theory, sure, but the world is so drenched in US cultural products it seems considerably less likely. And I admit I’d never heard of Fascinating Aïda or Dillie Keane.
True dat.
(As we say in Wales.)
I remember that the organizers of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles worked hard to have the opening and closing ceremonies include elements of the local culture that had not (yet) become world culture. In particular, the breakdancing show with L. A. teens showed off something that was not so well known internationally. The next two summer Olympics, in Seoul and Barcelona, had a much easier time showing off unique local popular culture, for obvious reasons. The giant puppets and torches at the 1992 closing ceremonies were particularly vivid. However, for the 1996 games, back in America, the organizers didn’t even seem to try to be really unique; driving twenty (pristinely mudless) heavy pickup trucks around the stadium was utterly pathetic.
Breakdance wasn’t local anymore by 1996 in any case.
In America, circa 1996, breakdancing wasn’t even a thing any more.
I admit I’d never heard of Fascinating Aïda or Dillie Keane.
I first heard Fascinating live in the ’80’s. (In the York Arts Festival staged around the Mystery Plays. Back when Britain had publicly-funded culture. Shakes cane.)
They did tour internationally — I saw them in NZ. But I suspect to not even all the cricket-playing nations. It’s a more witty form of wordplay very much in the tradition of G&S, not the anarchy/satire of Milligna or Monty Python.
Is G&S even a thing across the Pond?
In the never-sufficiently-to-be-praised series Babylon 5, the character Marcus Cole is from a place which is evidently a Planet of the English, and (IIRC) gets to spout G & S as appropriately stereotypical behaviour.
On the other hand, presumably this wouldn’t actually work unless Americans at least recognised G & S.
Doesn’t Sideshow Bob do this at one point, too?
I was not an ideal neighbour in my first year at university; so much so that I actually subsequently spontaneously apologised to my neighbour for my habit of playing the Stones at three o’clock in the morning. He was very gracious about it: “Oh, I didn’t really mind you so much. It was more [other neighbour] F_ singing Gilbert and Sullivan that got to me …”
[I think F_ is a High Court judge now …]
My impression is that I am the very model of a modern Major General is much more widely known than all the rest of G & S.
i’m pretty sure that i’ve been the one to introduce many of my friends and acquaintances to G&S, but as of 1990 there were still a reasonable number of junior-high and highschool productions happening in the u.s. (at least in some places: as a young cantabrigian i was in the chorus of Trial By Jury and saw an agemate in The Gondoliers), which means that there’s at least some familiarity in the 40s-50s set. mike leigh’s Topsy-Turvy may have extended that range a bit, but not by too much unless people brought a startling number of toddlers to see it.
Youngest Son tends to break out into Gilbert and Sullivan. I don’t think it’s the the taint in the blood; more environment and bad company. He was Point in Yeomen of the Guard at Cambridge. He’s probably beyond redemption now. But we still love him.
“On the other hand, presumably this wouldn’t actually work unless Americans at least recognised G & S.
Doesn’t Sideshow Bob do this at one point, too?”
Yes, it was in the Simpsons episode that parodies “Cape Fear”.
My impression is that I am the very model of a modern Major General is much more widely known than all the rest of G & S.
Very much seconded – at least unless you want to count “Grand Poobah” as technically from G&S even if it’s probably not commonly known as such. (Even then it’s probably close.)
IIRC a few of their other songs at least aren’t extremely obscure, though.
My earliest awareness of G&S is from Three Men in a Boat, wherein Harris thinks he is singing a comical song.
And, come to think of it, there’s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM
Not everyone in America is familiar with Gilbert and Sullivan, but not anyone is familiar with Fascinating Aida.
Well put.
Ah yeah, the one where Hah-vr-d rhymes with discah-vr-d. ^_^
I pronounce them rhotically as Harvard and discarvered.