Translation

The best way to confirm that translation isn’t just shifting sense from one word to another but wrestling with, and reflecting, cultures is to take a look at packaging. We’ve just picked up two fabulous new Bialetti pans from our local supermarket – yes, we collect the points – and I was reading the instructions. They’re what you’d expect. Prepare the cookware, cook over moderate heat, etc. There are seven of them and they’re presented in seven languages: Italian, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. Looking at them it’s clear that what we do with our cookware in all these countries is pretty much the same. With two exceptions, both of which appear in the English version.

The first, small but significant, is the instruction: DO NOT USE UNDER BROILER. This one isn’t that hard to explain, although there may be British cookware users who don’t know that grill and a broiler are the same thing. But it’s interesting that this should be the only instruction in CAPITAL LETTERS, as though English-speaking readers needed that kind of emphasis to grasp an essential point.

But the really interesting difference comes at the end of the English text. It starts CAUTION (also in CAPS) and continues: For safety, please keep pet birds out of the kitchen. Birds’ respiratory systems are sensitive to many kinds of household fumes, including the fumes from extremely overheated non-stick pans. This appears only in English. What can it mean? That allowing pet birds into a kitchen filled with excessively overheated non-stick pans is a practice so quintessentially English that the information needn’t be given in any other language? Who else but a Brit would have parakeets among the pots and pans? Or is it that the budgie lobby in Britain and the States is so powerful that Bialetti is obliged to add this warning?

PS The sad-looking bird in the picture won the Wet Budgie Contest. I know no more.

PPS I can’t not italicise cookware. I’m sorry.

Wakey wakey

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

My thanks to Katia and Susanna for this. I don’t know who did it. If you do, let me know.

Orwell blogs

George Orwell’s diaries are about to be posted, exactly seventy years after they were written, in blog form, starting in August. My thanks to Maud Newton for pointing me to the site.

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain: Wuthering Heights

http://www.youtube.com/v/NSed1K-QNMc&hl=en&fs=1
If you’ve never heard these people , as I hadn’t before today, go straight to Youtube – and I mean this very minute – and see what else they’ve done. They’re fantastic. And if you have heard them, why didn’t you tell me? What kind of friend are you?
And here’s a picture of them. And if you want to know more, go here. This is what friends are for.

Rule of thump

A misprint I came across in a report I’m editing today, about banana cultivation in atoll islands. It’s talking about how often banana plants should be fed with organic matter and suggests once a month as a rule of thump. Maybe I’m tired and bored (OK, I am tired and bored), but this has tickled me no end. It’s like a homelier more approximate version of the law of the jungle. The rule of thump. Let’s see if we can introduce into everyday speech. We could start with political discourse. As in: Gordon Brown KO’d by rule of thump.

"Alight with interest"

A lovely – and loving – essay by Julian Barnes on Penelope Fitzgerald in today’s Guardian. It’s fascinating to see how casually she was treated by the literary world, as though she were the writing equivalent of Grandma Moses rather than the most astute, technically audacious and wide-ranging English novelist of the past fifty years. I think Barnes is mistaken to dismiss The Bookshop as one of the minor novels before the big four, but the essay is a pleasure to read and a useful amuse-bouche as we wait for the letters.

The photograph is by Jane Bown.

Italian finger politics

Never one to miss a trick, Ryanair has recycled a photo of Northern League leader and Senator Umberto Bossi taken last weekend. His elegantly raised finger was directed then at the national anthem and the notion of Italian unity, something from which he and his green-shirted cronies have done extremely well in the past few years, preaching armed rebellion while enjoying the comforts, and salaries, of parliamentary life in the capital. In a political climate where epithets like piece of shit and shirt-lifter are all too frequent, the gesture barely raised an eyebrow at the time.

Now that naughty Mr O’Leary has turned it back on its perpetrator, though, the mood has changed. Massimo Poledri, a Northern League MP, has accused the Ryanair ad of being “offensive and in bad taste”, as though the original gesture were a model of seemliness and grace. Roberto Castelli, minister of justice with the previous Berlusconi circus, has announced an investigation to see whether this kind of advertising is ‘compatible’ with the use of Italian airports and says he’ll never use Ryanair flights again. Well, he didn’t actually say ‘again’. Given that Italian senators fly business class, he’s probably never set foot on one of O’Leary’s cheap and often cheerless vehicles. He’s more likely to avail himself of one of the hundreds of Alitalia flights which exist purely and simply for the convenience of members of parliament, regardless of profit or the lack of it.

Maurizio Borghezio, Euro MP (god help us), once convicted of trying to burn down some shacks with Romanian immigrants still inside them (two-month sentence, never served), says he’s ready to launch a boycott against the company. At least that means he won’t be disinfecting the seats used by duskier passengers, something he’s known for on Italian trains. As usual, it’s a win-win situation for Ryanair, a bit of nose-tweaking on a par with decorating the sides of its fleet with cheeky slogans directed against BA, Lufthansa, Alitalia, etc. You’d never guess it was the biggest airline in Europe…

PS. The Italian on the ad means: “Minister Bossi to Italian passengers: The Government… supports high Alitalia fares, supports the frequent Alitalia strikes and doesn’t give a damn about Italian passengers.” This is so obviously the truth that it would probably have been wiser to let the ad pass without comment.

His Life as the Beast

This is probably the only form in which my collected poems will ever see publication, so enjoy them while you can.

Word cloud

Call me a copycat, but after seeing one of these on Baroque in Hackney and The Truth About Lies, I couldn’t resist. This is the word cloud, made by Wordle, for The Scent of Cinnamon:

And this is the word cloud for Little Monsters:

Jouncing

I just found this photo on the Facebook page for Brokeback Mountain. It shows the motel where Jack and Ennis made love, or ‘jounced’ in 1969. Yes, I know. But why shouldn’t art bleed into life a little?