Links
March 1, 2013
- Sarah J. Young’s seventh and eighth lectures on Russian thought, covering Lev Tolstoi and Vladimir Solov’ev, respectively, are out.
- I always like it when blogs I read on other subjects touch on Russian literary criticism, so here’s economist Tyler Cowen pointing us to a piece by libertarian commentator Will Wilkinson on Shklovskii and defamiliarization/making strange/остранение.
- Eliot Borenstein takes issue with the New York Times obituary of Aleksei German. Is it really fair to say that in the U.S. subtitling makes “foreign films only marginally more popular than opera or haggis”? I would have thought a massive domestic film industry was a bigger factor – are dubbed foreign films in high demand in India?
- Maksim Amelin has translated the beginning of The Odyssey into Russian, using pseudo-classical гексаметры and occasional obsolete forms along with syntax simple enough and words common enough to pack some punch. H/t Oleg Proskurin.
- A different Amelin shows up as a translator of The Lay of Igor’s Campaign into modern Russian at the site mentioned by Languagehat where you can compare any number of translations of it.
- Languagehat’s posts on minor Russian writers and rereading Pushkin are highly recommended, too!
One Comment
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It’s always nice to see Shklovsky given some love, but “an old Russian commisar named Viktor Shklovsky”? WTF, Will Wilkinson? Not only wasn’t he even a Bolshevik, he had two brothers shot by them. Don’t fall back on lazy cliches about Russians, dude (especially ironic when you’re writing about defamiliarization).