rats

Finally a new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and it's worse than the first. 

There are things that are glaringly wrong:

"In a discussion of male sexuality, Beauvoir points out that men can get pleasure from just about any woman. As evidence she mentions ‘la prospérité de certaines “maisons d’abattage”’, which Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translate as ‘the success of certain “slaughter-houses”’. But for a prostitute, faire de l’abattage is to get through customers quickly; as the context makes abundantly clear, a maison d’abattage is not an abattoir, but a brothel specialising in a quick turnover."

 and more subtle problems:

"The translators fail to recognise many of Beauvoir’s references. Adler’s ‘masculine protest’ becomes ‘virile protest’; the ‘sexual division of labour’ becomes, on the same page, ‘the division of labour by sex’ and the ‘division of labour based on sex’; Bachofen’s ‘mother right’ becomes ‘maternal right’; and Byron’s epigram, ‘Man’s love is of his life a thing apart; ’Tis woman’s whole existence,’ loses all its wit on the round trip from English to French and back again: ‘Byron rightly said that love is merely an occupation in the life of the man, while it is life itself for the woman.’" [emphasis mine]

How frustrating and unnecessary for this to have happened to a work so deeply studied.

I've got to get around to getting a copy in French.

a syllabus

I've always found syllabi interesting.

I've seen some that were better than the course they introduced.

Here's an interesting one with reading list from Donald Barthelme.

Looks good for modern modern, if you know what I mean.  A rather weak point in my reading.

Blogiversary

6 years, if my math is right.  Haven't paid much attention to the anniversaries, but it's starting to be a while.

Oddly, my blogger profiles says I've been a member since April 2009.

Huh?

Must have been one of those changes/upgrades/re-profilings I've done.  Weird, though.  I don't even have any entries from April 2009.

And does it have anything to do with looking for something in the search engine that I know is there and still getting no results?

So, the requisite 6 favorite posts:

1. A love letter to Alan Bennett
2. Soliloquy on the Metro
3. Birds do not lead epic lives...
   
4. the Metaphysical implications of a toaster
5. Modern art at the BMA
6. Why I can't do math
   
 

Celebrating Alan Bennett

As we all should do.  This week on BBC4.

Worthies

Finally, a book of the month club I can believe in.

Dime a dozen

I have a fundamental belief: people don't change.

People who lived in 1850 are very much like the people who lived in 1950.

Circumstances change.  Perspectives change.  Realities change.  People don't change.

Nowadays, it's video games that are making our youth violent.  In 1909, it was dime novels.

Yes

"Most people don't associate anythin' - their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere..."

Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy Leigh Sayers's classic "Whose Body?"

Yes

From a brilliant article about Alan Bennett:

His surname might not have spawned an adjective (Bennettish? Bennettesque? Benettonian?), but he is unique.

Who to compare him with? One unlikely but interesting analogy is with Harold Pinter. Though artistically worlds apart, both have acted in plays as well as written them. And they share a love of poetry, especially Philip Larkin's. I remember the two of them onstage together, taking turns at the mic, at a commemorative reading in 1986, shortly after Larkin's death. Each brought something of himself to the task, Pinter's voice stentorian and militaristic, Bennett's gently eliciting a response that he says he first heard when reading Larkin to an audience in Settle - "part-sigh, part-affirmation".

That response - recognition - matters hugely to him. If not to connect, why else would one bother to write?  Hector in The History Boys puts it like this: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."

 Yes.