Budget Night: The Wisest Fools who Lie About Truth

"As my muse, I had those prisoners of Stalag Luft III. Their ingenuity and courage was outrageous. So you escape a prison camp, you escape obscurity, you escape genre and convention. It’s a prisoner’s duty to attempt escape. Most of us are prisoners of something."
—Andrew Steinmetz on This Great Escape (Montreal Gazette) via 5 year old blog - Whispering Gums as at May MMXIV AD

A man [a person!] only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people. – Will Rogers

Joe Hockey has sought to head off voters’ anger about higher petrol taxes and the deficit levy, arguing that his first budget would not break any promises because the Coalition had not said it would “never change a tax”.

Budget will not break any promises on taxes;  Axing of jobs another certainty in life

Everything that’s not you wants you dead. Outlaws, corrupt pollies, angry gamblers, disgruntled prostitutes, wild animals, the weather, disease—hell, even a trip to the dentist means taking your f****** life in your hands...

We are reading for confirmation of ourselves rather than to challenge ourselves and I think that is a real danger.

For those of you who aren't yet in the habit of checking in every Tuesday for weekly updates on the newly revampedBITSblog, we had a pretty cool feature this week. We teamed up with Chad Post from Open Letter and Three Percent to showcase single iconic or otherwise representative sentences from all 25 books longlisted for the2014 Best Translated Book Award. The sentences were posted unattributed, with embedded links to the books from which they were culled, so that readers could judge the quality of the writing and perhaps be moved to seek out a title they otherwise would not have gravitated towards. To read the compiled sentences click here. And if that wasn't cool enough, we were very pleased to learn in the immediate wake of the post that The Best Translated Book Award had just won the LBF International Book Industry Excellence Award! 

"As my muse, I had those prisoners of Stalag Luft III. Their ingenuity and courage was outrageous. So you escape a prison camp, you escape obscurity, you escape genre and convention. It’s a prisoner’s duty to attempt escape. Most of us are prisoners of something ..."
—Andrew Steinmetz on This Great Escape (Montreal Gazette)
The history of translation is full of big, bizarre ventures. Behold The Dictionary of Untranslatables – 150 contributors, 400 entries, 11 years in the making.  Grand translation schemes always flirt with absurdity. The mighty Septuagint—the first-ever translation of the Hebrew Bible, into Greek—is named for the 70 (or possibly 72) learned Alexandrian Jews allegedly pressed into service by King Ptolemy II back in the third century BCE. The King James Bible, named for its cagey sponsor (“the wisest fool in Christendom”), was the work of the 47 forgotten Anglican churchmen he deputized. The urge lives on today in Google Translate, whose gurus crunch their algorithmic way through endless error; the Phraselator folks, whose handheld gizmo is mainly used by the U.S. military and by Native American tribes; and SIL International, with its 5,000-plus missionary linguists busy rendering scripture into every human language. Absurdity