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Saturday, November 12, 2022

‘Alexander the Great’s library was the first step towards the internet’

  Dentists’ water lines linked to rare bacterial infections, CDC warns.


ABOUT

Big Band Concert presented by the Shoalhaven City Jazz Band. Featuring special guest Ed Wilson, Co-Leader of the Daly-Wilson Big Band.

DATE

Sat 12 Nov 2022 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (UTC+11)

LOCATION

Berry School of Arts
19 Alexandra Street, Berry NSW 2535

Splender in the Brass in Grassy Berry


The cover of Jim Davidson’s Emperors in Lilliput juxtaposes a photograph of Meanjin’s Clem Christesen smoking a pipe with a picture of Overland’s Stephen Murray-Smith lighting his.

The design conveys Davidson’s focus on the parallels between the two editors, each of whom founded and presided over a little magazine for a remarkable 34 years. But the mirrored images also highlight the gulf between a past in which Men of Letters might casually puff on their briars and a present in which pipe-smoking editors constitute a faintly risible cliché.

How the parallel lives of two influential editors shaped Australia’s literary culture


For the first time in a century daily prayer books have been issued to Sikh military personnel in the British forces.

Major Daljinder Singh Virdee is in the British Army and has spent two years campaigning for the change.


SEXUALLY EXPLICIT IMAGES WERE TUMBLR’S MAIN SELLING POINT BEFORE, AND THEY’VE NEVER RECOVERED:  Nudity comes back to Tumblr, but sexually explicit images still banned.

Know your platform, people.






       Czech Museum of Literature 


       What used to be -- for almost seven decades -- the National Literature Memorial has now moved and recently re-opened as the Czech Muzeum literatury, and at Radio Prague International Ruth Fraňková reports on it, in Museum of Literature opens in Prague    


Anasoft litera 

       They've announced the winner of this year's Anasoft Literary Prize, the leading Slovak prize for a work of prose, and it is Ľútostivosť by Stanislav Rakús -- who is only the second two-time winner of this prize. See also the KK Bagala publicity page


       Via I'm pointed to this recent study of Exploring Document-Level Literary Machine Translation with Parallel Paragraphs from World Literature (warning ! dreaded pdf format !)
       Gotta love the opening:
     Literary translation is a culturally significant task, but it is bottlenecked by the small number of qualified literary translators relative to the many untranslated works published around the world.
       Would that the small number of qualified translators were the only bottleneck ..... 
       Trying to utilize machine translation (MT) to help things along is, of course, a reasonable idea -- but it doesn't quite seem up to the task yet. Not entirely surprisingly they conclude:
A human evaluation experiment with professional literary translators reveals that commercial-grade MT systems are too literal in their translations and also suffer from discourse-level errors.
       Of course, these are things they can work on -- though it may be (quite) a while until MT gets closer to the mark. 

       In the Portuguese American Journal Carolina Matos has a Q & A with Almeida Maia: One of the most compelling Azorean writers of his generation
       Matos suggests: "Never before so many books have been published in the Azores, about the Azores by Azorean authors", but very little of it has made it into English so far. 


       The November/December issue of World Literature Todayis now available, so there's your weekend reading sorted. 
       Don't forget the extensive book review section. 


       In The Guardian John Self has a Q & A: with the author of PapyrusPhilologist Irene Vallejo: ‘Alexander the Great’s library was the first step towards the internet’