internet explorers club | lost in translation
DRONES. FLYING. OVER. LAVA. IN. ICELAND!!! (the actual video says “laval river” which: come on)
#sorrynotsorry that there are so many stories about volcanoes, but them’s the breaks. A few days ago, some rare photos surfaced of Mount St. Helens taken from the air while it was erupting, which is incredible:
Other cool things being discovered include a 71-million-year-old fossil trove in Antarctica which includes “ancient marine creatures…and birds that lived during the late Cretaceous Period,” and a sinkhole in Florida that contains artifacts (including a carved mastodon trunk!) from 1500 years before we thought humans arrived in North America!
Also underwater and now discovered is the Egyptian city of Thonis-Heracleion, which is part of an new exhibit at the British Museum.
Sarah Laskow talks about the unexpected side of spy work: expense reports. This is a deep dive into this weird bureaucratic side of things, from expensing bribes to recruiting operatives and more banal things, like transportation.
The Guardian looks into two Canadian-American brothers who found out that their parents were Russian spies. It’s very interesting, not the least of because is that there’s some disagreement as to whether or not the boys were recruited as potential spies themselves, and as they continue a campaign to regain their Canadian citizenship, that’s a question of paramount importance.
The Ravenmaster at the Tower of London has a Vine account and it’s ADORABLE (definitely click through to hear the sound!)
The Paris Review on the difficulty of translating Russian literature, and the husband-and-wife team who have dedicated their lives to it. (44 minutes, but worth it!)
Tolstoy was very aware of the means of Russian language. Rhetorical means. He used chiasmus, parallel constructions, repetition. He wrote long, long sentences. In one passage, Anna is seen through the eyes of Kitty. Seven times in one scene, Tolstoy uses the word прелестнa to describe Anna. It can mean “lovely,” “charming,” “enchanting.” But we had to choose. In Russian the word has a Slavonic etymology, which has the spiritual meaning of a seduction, of a magical spell. And it’s repeated seven times, very rhetorically. “Enchanting her firm neck with its string of pearls, enchanting her curly hair in disarray.” So Anna almost becomes like a witch.
Ancillary Justice is one of my favorite books that I’ve read recently, about a starship AI who becomes separated from her ship and must discover who “killed” her. The culture that Breq, the protagonist, is a part of has no term for gender, so everything uses feminine pronouns. This is tricky enough in English (but you get used to it) but I hadn’t thought about translating it into different languages. This piece goes into the work involved in translating it into Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian and Japanese and it’s fascinating.
Finally, astronomers have figured out when a certain poem by Sappho was written based on tracking the astronomical references in the poem—in this case, when the Pleiades were visible before midnight, which turns out to be Jan 25-April 6, 570 BCE:
Tonight I’ve watched
The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down
The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am
in bed alone
Today in Hamilton: How Leslie Odom Jr. Became Aaron Burr, Sir
Etcetera: Star Wars dogfights set to Danger Zone. There Is a Video Game Where You Just Take Care of Succulents. Marketing the Perfectly Colored Egg Yolk.
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emilyhummel.com | @hummeline
