A human quizmaster would have been a bit more flexible!

• Labour and immigration: Whatever the truth
  
  Nailing the lies (other British parties equally bad of course).
  (tags: ukpolitics migration )

• What It’s Like to Carry Your Nobel Prize through Airport Security
  
  “Who gave it to you?” “The King of Sweden.”
  (tags: nobelprize waronterror nobel )
• Azerbaijan: New Effort to Crush Independent Groups
  
  Getting worse.
  (tags: azerbaijan humanrights )
• Azerbaijan: Journalist and political analyst Arzu Geybullayeva threatened
  
  Another friend threatened.
  (tags: azerbaijan freespeech humanrights )

Your honour remembers with concern, said the corporal, the total rout and confusion of our camp and army at the affair of LandenWyndham, Lumley, and Galway, which covered the retreat over the bridge Neerspeeken, the king himself could scarce have gained it—he was press'd hard, as your honour knows, on every side of him—

So Corporal Trim begins one of the many rambling episodes of Tristram Shandy, which is framed by how he fell in love and diverts into whether groin or knee injuries are worse. But the Battle of Landen was no laughing matter; when the French defeated William III's army on 29 July 1693, and cam close to killing King Billy himself, around 27,000 soldiers were killed, which made it the bloodiest battle of the entire War of the League of Augsburg – which on a moderately generous reading includes both the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the fall of Barcelona in 1714.

In fact the battle happened not in Landen but at the nearby village of Neerwinden, which happens to be very close to where my daughter B lives, so I took her there this afternoon to have a look at it. And in a classic two-for-the-price-of-one deal, at Neerwinden you can inspect not only the site of the Battle of Neerwinden in 1693, but also the site of the Battle of Neerwinden on 18 March 1793, where the Austrians crushed a demoralised French force with the result that the defeated French commander unsuccessfully attempted a coup in Paris, and then (along with the future King Louis Philippe) defected to the Austrians who he had just been fighting. It was a smaller affair, though, with 7-8,000 casualties, less than a third of the death toll of a century earlier.

I found it really very difficult to translate the available maps of the two battles onto today's geography. These are my attempts to do so, maps found from the internet on the left, my attempts to interpret them on the right, French in blue and their opponents in red in both my maps, and in the orignal 1693 map (confusingly, the French are red and the Austrians yellow in the 1793 map):

1693
1793

The shaded contours on the older maps bear very little relevance to what's on the ground. What does become clear is that the triangular plateau to the north of Neerwinden, with the town at its apex, is the strategically important target; it was the territory that William III and his allies were defending in 1693, and was the contested ground between the French and Austrians a century later. At the same time it's interesting to see how the tides of history wash in different directions at different times – from south to north in 1693, from east to west in 1793.

It is a typically flat Flemish landscape ("mijn vlakke land") with a very few gentle rises. The only thing really worth photographing is the Chapel of the Holy Cross, on the eastern edge of the plateau.It has an explanatory noticeboard hinting at the enormity of what happened here.

There is a sheltered grove around the chapel demarcated by the Stations of the Cross, with a park bench in which B (who likes to wear her hood up in all weathers) sat happily, refusing to move.

Within the chapel (which I'm sorry to say has been repeatedly vandalised), worshippers have left votive offerings and intentions.

In the summer of 1694, Lord Perth travelled across the scene of the battle, and in a letter to his sister – later quoted by Macaulay – was the first person that I know of to use a simile that has become very familiar, 220 years before John McCrae:

In Neerwinden itself, an ancient standing stone has been moved to the front of the modern 1950s church, and although there is also an official somewhat brutal war memorial, it is the older obelisk that the locals have chosen to place their poppies at; perhaps because, here of all places, it was not only the wars of the twentieth century that marked the people and the land, and a monument without a date, which was erected by people long forgotten except in their attempt to express the inexpressible, is more appropriate to commemorate the trauma of past conflict than one whose initial reference point is 1914.

Peter Lorre (Ugarte): born László Löwenstein, in what is now Slovakia; became a film star in 1920s Berlin; being a Jew, moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power.	Conrad Veidt (Strasser) – started acting in films 1916, married a Jew and moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power.
Paul Henreid (Laszlo) – left Austria for England in 1935 after Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime came to power; left England for USA to avoid detention as enemy alien in England (though Conrad Veidt spoke out for him).	Curt Bois (Pickpocket) – Jewish, left Germany in 1934 after Nazis took power.
Madeleine LeBeau and Marcel Dalio (Yvonne and Emil the croupier) – married in 1940 and fled Paris after the German invasion; Dalio was Jewish. He filed for divorce during the filming of Casablanca. She is the only surviving member of the cast.
S.Z. Sakall (Carl the head waiter) – born a Hungarian Jew, became a Berlin film star in the 1920s, returned to Hungary in 1933 after Nazis took power, moved to America in 1940 after Hungary joined the Axis. All three of his sisters and his niece, as well as his wife's brother and sister, died in concentration camps.	Helmut Dantine (Jan the Bulgarian roulette player) – Austrian anti-Nazi activist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp after the Anschluss in 1938; his parents got him released and sent to America, but they themselves died in concentration camps.
Leonid Kinskey (Sascha) and Gregory Gaye (banker) – both born in St Petersburg, and fled the Russian revolution.

This all may help explain why this scene is quite so powerful:

(Incidentally, there is no truth whatsoever in the story that Ronald Reagan might have played the lead role.)

• 57% of Languages Do Not Have Gendered Pronouns
  
  Fascinating!
  (tags: linguistics sexandgenderandsexuality )

This story would look very different today. Smartphones and email have completely changed how we communicate. The scene where Laura’s parents are talking to each other, and Sherriff Truman arrves to tell Leland what has happened, is the most memorable of many framings which depend on land lines being the only method of telecommunication available. And the film of Donna and Laura dancing would now be recorded on one of their phones.

The sequence of the news of Laura’s death spreading in the schoolis very effective – the empty chair, the howls of anguish, the principal’s voice choking with emotion. It is then undermined in plot terms when we discover that Ronnette had also gone missing without the same fuss being made.

They are all rather beautiful, aren’t they! And the air crackles with sexual tension – Andy and Lucy appear to be the only couple with nothing to hide. But Audrey is surprisingly unlikeable at this early stage. And the bloke who plays Leo can’t act for toffee.

Best quote for me:

Agent Cooper: Who’s the lady with the log?
Sheriff Truman: We call her the log lady.

Current
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
δ2

Last books finished
β2
Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
γ2

Last week’s audios
Tom Baker at 80, interviewed by Nicholas Briggs
Mind Games, by Justin Richards

Next books
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick
Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose

• Same-Sex Marriage Is Now Legal For A Majority Of The U.S. Population!
  
  Slowly catching up with Belgium!
  (tags: uspolitics sexandgenderandsexuality )

• What to read on the Tory proposals for a “Bill of Rights”
  
  A handy guide.
  (tags: ukpolitics humanrights )

Picked this up ages ago under the impression that it was a first installment of a fantasy epic series. No such luck; it’s a gritty account of the 1340s war between England and France, with our dashing hero, whose humble birth belies his noble blood; the women who love him; the bad guy who attempts to thwart him at every stage; and his quest for a sacred relic which turns out to be just a piece of wood. There is a lot of sexual violence, and the gallant English win most of the battles. I don’t particularly recommend it.

• Five potential futures for Northern Ireland
  
  as revealed in science fiction.
  (tags: sf world: northern ireland )

I was moved to get this by Jo Walton’s review on Tor.com, five years ago I now realise; I had no idea that it was one of Dickinson’s best known books *“80% of my mail, almost all of it from the USA, is about this one book”The Green Gene and Annerton Pit and Tulku and King and Joker and The Changes (of which I saw the first episode again at Worldcon).

It is a good take on a familiar sfnal theme, of a human mind transplanted into another body – H.L. Gold had his hero transplanted into a dog in 1939, and there’s always I Will Fear No Evil, in which a rich man’s brain is transplanted into his secretary’s body and hilarity ensues. Dickinson’s teenage protagonist wakes up to find that to save her life, her parents have transplanted her mind into the body of one of her father’s experimental chimpanzees, in a near future world which is facing environmental disaster. She is caught up in the wider politics of what has happened to her, the actual ethics of the operation (and of repeating it) and the intersection of financial and political interests in what happens to the chimpanzees as the research money runs out, and has to find her own way between asserting her humanity and embracing her new chimpanzee nature, including sex and death. Some of it, of course, is a metaphor for growing up, but all of it is rather good, and I’m glad I followed up on this recommendation.

• A coup in North Korea
  
  A defector tells all.
  (tags: northkorea )
• An Occasional Guide to EU Politics: The Surprised Commissioner.
  
  Satire, of course. (An MEP in Brussels on Sunday??)
  (tags: eu ireland )
• Defending the unjustly persecuted
  
  Former Soviet dissidents speak out for Leyla Yunus.
  (tags: azerbaijan )
• The Guardian view on scrapping the Human Rights Act
  
  Stupid populist pandering.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics humanrights )
• The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson – NYTimes.com
  
  Interview with the writer.
  (tags: writing )
• IRA tried to kidnap the Prince of Wales
  
  (In 1922.)
  (tags: ireland )

• “…Baby One More Time”
  
  “a song of self-negating regret performed and choreographed as a statement of total confidence.”
  (tags: music )
• Flights re-routed to avoid walrus stampede on Alaska beach
  
  …as the ice melts…
  (tags: climatechange )

Current
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
β2
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

Last books finished
ψ1
ω1
Eva, by Peter Dickinson
Harlequin, by Bernard Cornwell
α2

Last week’s audios
Mask of Tragedy, by James Goss

Next books
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman

Books acquired in last week
Bételgeuse, Tome 2 : Les survivants, by Léo
Expo 58, by Jonathan Coe

• Congress (rightly) grills the Secret Service
  
  Serious problems brought to light by congressional scrutiny.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• What It’s like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class
  
  “As we finally landed at New York, a huge problem presented itself — I didn’t want to leave the plane.”
  (tags: travel )

Some chums and I have got together on Facebook to read Anna Karenina over the next few months, at a chapter a day (they are mostly quite short chapters, so this will take us a while). We are doing it in English, as not enough of us are sufficiently fluent i Russian to tackle the original. This useful page gives various different translations of the first chapter to compare, and I think it’s very helpful. For instance, the famous opening sentence, “Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему”, is done by the different versions as follows:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Constance Garnett, 1901)

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Louise and Aylmer Maude, 1918)

All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.
(Rosemary Edmonds, 1949-50)

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(The Maude translation revised)

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2008)

All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes, 2008)

No huge difference between any of those; the sentiment is pretty clear, and the fact that there are no actual verbs in the Russian sentence means that it cannot be translated with quite the same ring into languages that do use verbs in sentences like this.

But I was struck by the weirdness of my cheap Constance Garnett translation’s version of a phrase in the middle of the next paragraph, which describes what is happening in the Oblonsky household as a result of Dolly discovering Stiva’s affair, and comparison with other translations indicated that she had got it wrong:

Дети бегали по всему дому, как потерянные

The children ran wild all over the house
(Constance Garnett, 1901)

the children ran about all over the house uneasily
(Louise and Aylmer Maude, 1918)

The children strayed all over the house, not knowing what to do with themselves.
(Rosemary Edmonds, 1949-50)

the children ran restlessly about the house
(The Maude translation revised)

The children were running all over the house as if lost
(Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2008)

The children were wandering about the house like lost souls
(Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes, 2008)

There’s a tension here between бегать, imperfective of “to run”, and потерянный, “lost”, which goes back to the original text. (And also по всему дому, “through the whole house”, which shows that they are not lost but know where they are.) I think I end up with an image of the kids, both energised and emotionally uprooted by their parents’ row, running around the house as if they didn’t know where they were. I like Zinovieff and Hughes’ “lost souls”, but it maybe pushes it a bit far and they have toned down “running” to “wandering”. Edmonds goes in the same direction but not so far, and helpfully unpacks “lost”. Garnett’s “ran wild” is clearly much further from the original sense, though – “wild” brings in a whole new idea which simply isn’t in Tolstoy.

So I think I will switch to one of the more recent translations, though not quite sure which.