Tag: Translation

Recent Reads: Troubadour Verse Edition

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Though I was inspired to return to Provençal verse by a game—one run by the inimitable Jeremy Tolbert—I’ve been interested in Occitan culture and literature for a long time. Honestly, it was kind of dumb luck, because reading Pound had reawakened in my a craving to return to old Occitanian song and verse, and when I realized I hadn’t read any a decade or so, I decided to get my hands on some. Fortunately for my bank account, a request for a branch loan at school worked out and I got both of the books I asked for: Meg Bogin’s …

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Recent Reads

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It’s been awhile since I said anything about what I’ve read lately—I don’t think I’ve written a review post since this one I shared in September, in fact! One reason is that I haven’t managed to read as much as I’d like. Writing, a toddler, overtime at work… they all converge on me having less time to read, and even less to post about what I’m reading. Still, I have been reading, to be sure. I have also written a few specific posts on individual books, which got stalled out because of what a challenge it is to really do the …

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Engel Arkana Cards, in English

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UPDATE (5 Nov. 2017): Not that I’m any closer to running this game, but I did end up figuring out how to select a color range in Gimp, and updated the cards to look a little nicer. If you’re interested, pop down to the end of this post to see (and or download) the updated cards.  Original Post: I may be the only person still interested in this, but one never knows, so here goes: this post contains a set of cards from a defunct game that I adapted for use by English speakers. They’re not beautiful (the original scans I …

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Nimrod, in Translation

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Happy Chuseok, everyone. If you don’t know what that means, I’m talking about the Korean Autumn Harvest Festival. Some people mistranslate it as Korean Thanksgiving, but it’s not a great translation in my opinion. So… I’m going to geek out about a similar funny Korean-English translation glitch I ran across recently, mostly because it was fascinating. 

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Ze Art Off Traduction…

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Earlier this semester, I noticed a senior student had signed up for an intro-level conversation course. I asked her what she was doing there, and she just kind of shrugged. When I told her that she and I both knew she didn’t need the course, she told me it was a requirement for graduation. Now, a sensible administration would provide a simple test for students to qualify for a waiver on this particular course… which by definition makes it impossible for us to have such a system, because our administration is useless and intractable. So I told her, point blank, …

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박민규의 지구 영웅 전설과 카스테라

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This entry is part 34 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Park Min Gyu is a Korean author that has been recommended to me by several people, independent of one another. After hearing about my novella “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang,” Stephen Epstein recommended Park’s book 지구 영웅 전설, which I’ll render here sloppily as World Hero Legend or, a little less sloppily, as The Legend of the Earth’s Superheroes, a novel featuring a Korean supe who supposedly sets out to become a superhero and ends up calling himself “Banana-man” and ends up being a kind of gopher or page for American heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman (who sends …

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Random Snippets

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If I ever were to write an autobiographical account of my life in Korea, or a chapter on the same in a bigger autobiographical text (other than this blog), I would want to have all of the humor of the first twelve pages or so of Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakesh. That’s all I’ve read, but I’m sure the rest is funny too. Other Westerners I know have much better first-day-in-Korea stories than I do. One guy I know ended up on the bus to a totally different city, but, if I remember it right, didn’t know he was …

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My Research Plan Application (Argh!) and a New Korean SF Organization (Yay!)

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This entry is part 21 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

There are a couple of posts I could write about this, so I’m going to try and combine them, groggy-headed as I currently am, into one. Groggy-headed? Ah, well, you see, I was up late last night. Apparently Wednesday was the deadline for funding applications for publications for the coming year. Essentially, professors submit their research plans for the year, specifying one paper that they intend to research and publish, where they plan to do so, and so on. The problem is that nobody told me, and nobody told the one secretary who usually communicates this stuff to me. The …

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