littleworkpage

Hey all, just checking-in to wish everyone happiness, joy and 'kupa kasa' for 2012. Whatever you're doing right, keep doing it, and let's meet again in January for more tune-ups, tweaks and spot-checks of our work. :)

In their day Browning and Dylan Thomas were considered notoriously obscure. Poets more recently associated with obscurity include Geoffrey Hill and Prynne. Except for their supposed obscurity these poets have little in common, and according to their proponents, their poetry may merely be difficult rather than obscure. This article covers some issues arising from the terms "difficulty" and "obscurity", looking at how the terms are used by theorists and readers. In documentation the terms "difficulty" and "obscurity" are often conflated even if initially distinctions are drawn. Let's first consider some common usages of the concept of "obscurity" because they influence the meaning of the literary term. If the moon is obscured by clouds, both the cause of the obscurity and the solution to it (i.e. waiting) are known An obscure fact, or mentions of someone who "fades into obscurity", are hard to find These usages suggest a...

In some types of prose, the author needs to know their characters well, so well that the author might recognise them if they saw them in the street. Today we'll try some workshop exercises on character development. We won't have time to produce any finished work, but maybe one or two of the characters created today will walk into your next story. We'll first look at a simple way to create viable characters, then look at character development in more detail. First impressions, habits and surprises Exercise 1 - Hi! When new characters appear in some novels they're immediately described. Here are a few shortened examples from "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" by P.D. James Leaming - "wearing a grey suit with a small stand-away collar which showed a narrow band of white cotton at the throat ... She was tall and her hair, prematurely white, was cut short and moulded to her head like a cap. Her face was pale and long" (p.17) Lunn - "stockily built you...

Little is known about the education of Sherlock Holmes. It's assumed from references to "the university" in "The Gloria Scott", "The Musgrave Ritual", and to some extent "The Adventure of the Three Students", that Holmes attended Oxford or Cambridge, although the question of which one remains a topic of eternal debate. Baring-Gould [1] believed textual evidence indicated that Holmes attended both, though Dorothy L. Sayers [2] thought he was a chemistry student at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, which would fit in with his evident knowledge of forensics. He was born on January 6, 1854, which would put his student years in the 1870s, but there's no evidence of a Sherlock Holmes at the college then, though a photograph from 1878 (one of the earliest college photos ever taken) has several blanks amongst the captions, and several faces smeared by the long exposure, one of them suspiciously Holmesian. During his detective career he visited Cambr...

  I am shocked by your remarks! But I am not surprised with them. Whether you study translating at school or teach yourself from books, you will find that it is a  necessarily detailed and highly technical subject. Non-linguists are often shocked when I show them a Baker, Newmark or Owens. So I like to think that the Bad Article is an oasis of simplicity in a desert of complications and nested problems. This is why I try to present everything in a more off-the-cuff way - if you want the full explanation, you can ask one of your teachers, or dive into a textbook. If you want a wider overview of the problem, illustrated with lots of real-life examples of it, then I'm your man. It’s not completely ‘gut instinct’, as someone once asked me, but it is verifiable information, based on years of solid examples, and also the biggest reason for my not posting more often here – I’ve got tons of notes and half-written articles, which await only the light bulb of understanding to click on ...

Books are harder to publish nowadays, and paper magazines are struggling to survive. Competition for publication is fiercer, thanks to all the budding poets produced by creative writing courses. If you're going to be published you'll need be professional and stubborn. Here are some suggestions. New Possibilities Perhaps there was a time when budding poets got published in ever better magazines until they were finally ready to send a book manuscript to a publisher. You can still pursue that route (details at the end) but the times they are achangin'. There's a world beyond paper. It can replace paper for some people. For others it's a way to make progress towards book publication Performance - Venues continue to open Festivals - In summer there's a string of festivals - a chance to see and be seen. Creative Writing - Opportunities have emerged around Creative Writing courses and education in general - residencies, schools, etc. Once you'r...

So, I wouldn’t necessarily call this the “larger article” threatened last month, more a sort rambling continuation in the same general direction. Yes, we’re talking about repetition again, and over the last four weeks I’ve been collecting some more examples. The problem is that often, something that looks bad today looks innocent tomorrow, so these ones today have been distilling down to the essence of pure badness! All of them are (as always) actual Pl>En translations. Now at this point, you might be thinking one of several things. One is that you don’t have time for all this editing and tidying and removal of repetitious segments. To that I say, fair enough. As always, you must take from this blog what you will. My aim is always to provide you with insight into what, ultimately, makes for good, smooth, flowing English – within the context of translations, and therefore within the context of the time and practical constraints that translators face. Sometimes you’ll have the luxur...