motivation

Thinking of applying for a residency in France. They want a 'letter of motivation'. I look around online and find a site with 50 exa...

lexicity

 Through the incomparable Languagehat , I discover that there is a new website, Lexicity , with resources for learning a wide range of ancie...

always the last to know

Reading an interview of Christopher Tolkien which appeared in le Monde last month. French readers, it seems, meet Bilbo and Frodo Baggins o...

possible worlds

In learning languages, at first everything is repulsive and burdensome. If one were not encouraged by the hope that, after having accustom...

Found in Translation

“I read foreign novels because they’re better,” was a remark I began to expect (surprisingly, a senior member of the Dutch Fund for Literat...

dutch day 3

Our teacher explains today that Dutch is much fonder than German of Verbalisierung.  (Our teacher switched happily back and forth between Ge...

be on the one hand good, and do not on the other hand be bad

Rich Beck has a terrific discussion of The Last Samurai on Emily Books , of which this is my favourite line: DeWitt, working at a time when ...

Anne Tyler

She went on to study Russian at Columbia, because "that was one of the most outrageous things you could do in America in the 1950s...

Quand j'entends Sarkozy qui fait des fautes d'accord du participe passé, je me dis que, moi l'Algérien, fier de posséder le fran...

ese oscuro objeto del deseo

Javier Moreno's Spanish translation of 'That Obscure Object of Desire' has just gone up on Hermano Cerdo . What a wonderful stor...

tomato tomato?

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their Western devotees tended to substitute Arab for Middle Eastern histo...

Feliz Navidad

Javier Moreno has translated That Obscure Object of Desire (published in a recent edition of Bullett Magazine) into Spanish - the language i...

nomina nuda tenemus

Went to Paris at the beginning of the month to give a talk at the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University in Paris.  E...

Lee Konstantinou, author of Pop Apocalypse, has a review of Lightning Rods and slightly mad interview of me over at the LA Review of Books...

The Winter issue of Bullett magazine has a story, That Obscure Object of Desire, of which my editor, Henry Giardina, says: The Turkish speak...

hm

The Electric Literature blog has a post by Nora Fussner on a new iPad app of The Waste Land, which includes the poem read by Eliot, Ted Hug...

Languagehat has a post which includes a quotation from the Autobiography of the Protopope Avvakum. "Protopope" in Cyrillic: прото...

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters," Safar replied. "But nothing good ever came of it. They took a...

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 an...

Sapir-Whorf and ggplot2

To some degree, we are constrained in our ability to solve problems if we only know a single language. This situation has been recognized di...