People have been sending me interesting links that I thought I’d pass on to y’all:
1) A Brief History of Blurbs, by Alan Levinovitz. You knew, of course, that the word blurb was coined in 1906 by Gelett Burgess, but did you know that quasi-blurbs (though not on the outside of books) can be traced back to ancient Rome and medieval Egypt, where authors and booksellers “were soliciting longer poems of praise (taqriz) from big-shot friends in the 1300s”? Read some truly loathsome examples of hyperbole, fakery, and shameless cronyism, and writhe in agony at the very idea of blaps and blovers.
2) If you read Russian, Mischa Gabowitsch has collected slogans of the current Russian demonstrations, at this blog, which features photos, links, and a corpus of hundreds of slogans in Russian and other languages, from Czech to Japanese. Mischa says, “It is part of a research project to document the role of the Internet in shaping the language of civil society in Russia.”
3) Avery Morrow has an very interesting page about “The Undecipherable Poem, No. 9 of the Manyoshu.” Not only has the poem never been deciphered, it’s omitted by all English translators; it’s not even in my heavy old 1940 Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai edition. I very much like the rendition “Wyrg gende acbire madentag wher myne Seko once stode, at the rootes of Itsukashi.” (Via the latest post at No-sword, about poem #1 of the Man’yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry.)
4) Aspiring young translators will want to know about the fourth annual Rossica Young Translators Award, which “is open to anyone who will be 24 or younger on the deadline for submissions, which is 15 March 2012. Entrants are required to translate 1 of 3 extracts from recent Russian novels.” If you’re interested, go here and download the brochure containing the extracts and terms and conditions.
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