World in a Word

My friend Nikola, who hails from Sveti Filip i Jakov, to the south of Zadar, Croatia, tells me that in his local Dalmatian dialect there is a word for “open sea” that only applies to the Adriatic: kùlaf. When I first heard him pronounce it and looked at the spelling he provided, I thought it… Continue reading World in a Word

Kaplan’s Adriatic

I’m about 60 pages into Robert D. Kaplan’s Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Era and am still uncertain about it. With such a big sounding title, in such a nice new cloth bound edition from Random House, it seems it should be more substantial than it is so far.… Continue reading Kaplan’s Adriatic

Sei More

Getting this song off my desktop and out into the summer, which is what is feels like to me. Lows and highs, rhythm and movement.

Teaching Translation Postscript

Last semester’s course “How to Translate Anything” went well but not as well as I would have liked. I had it basically divided into three parts, readings and discussions at the start, then a middle section on computer assisted translation, using SDL Trados, in the middle, then. a workshop segment at the end. These are… Continue reading Teaching Translation Postscript

The Thaw

During two winters of Covid lock-down, I looked out a window onto the January snow and ice and wondered what it would be like when we all emerged, a little like the spring thaw, and I started working on this piece. At first it was just atmosphere, then it started to feel rhythmic, a little… Continue reading The Thaw

Ukraine Film Series and “Ukrainian Fury”

My colleague Sofiya Asher worked together with the Ryder in Bloomington to put together a series of films last month. The series, “Stand With Ukraine,” featured seven recent Ukrainian films (10 if you count the four shorts collected around the “I Love Mariupol” screenings) and an insert in the Ryder magazine, which is here. The… Continue reading Ukraine Film Series and “Ukrainian Fury”

Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass and the Senses of Provocation

When news broke that Russian forces had launched, on April 8, 2022, a missile attack on the Kramatorsk train station, which was filled with thousands of fleeing women and children at the time, the Russian Ministry of Defense issued a statement calling it a “provocation.” The Russian Foreign Ministry took the same line earlier with… Continue reading Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass and the Senses of Provocation

Russia’s Special Operation on English

Language learners know about false friends. Slavic languages have some doozies. For instance, riječ in Croatian means a word, while реч in Ukrainian means a thing; запомніць in Bulgarian means to memorize, while zapomenout in Czech means to forget; proud Serbs might write понос (pride) on the side of a building, while their Russian brothers… Continue reading Russia’s Special Operation on English

Translators on Book Covers, Reading Habits, and Translation Practice

I’ve been following the latest efforts to advocate for translators’ names to appear on the covers of the books they’ve worked on with great interest. I admire this effort and think that every little bit helps in improving the working conditions of translators. There are other good things about this effort, but that’s not what… Continue reading Translators on Book Covers, Reading Habits, and Translation Practice