Translations of plays into English can often sound fussy or academic. Now there is a “growing movement to take the job of translating foreign-language classics away from scholars and linguists and hand it over to dramatists – whether or not they speak the original language.” – The Globe & Mail (Canada)
Author: Douglas McLennan
BRITISH MUSEUM GREAT COURT OPENS
The Queen opens the British Museum’s new Great Court. “She hailed the £100m development, with its sweeping roof designed by Lord Foster, as a landmark of the millennium.” – BBC
- BIG SPACE: “The £100 million development has transformed the world-famous museum’s two-acre inner courtyard – hidden for 150 years – into Europe’s largest covered square, the size of Wembley football pitch.” – London Evening Standard
LESS REJECTION
Performance artists are moving out of the museums and performing arts centers and into nightclubs. These nightspots are far from the galleries, museums and other art spaces that historically hosted performance art, and they attract a different crowd. The clubs, in need of performers, are embracing the artists. – Los Angeles Times
ALL THAT JAZZ
“At least 50 books about jazz were published in the last few months or are scheduled to arrive in bookstores in the next several months.” Why now? – New York Times
RECORD ST. LOUIS GIFT
“The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will receive a record-breaking $40 million gift, it was announced Wednesday morning. The money, from the Jack Taylor family, owners of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, is in the form of a four-year challenge grant, and is the largest single personal contribution ever made to an American orchestra for its operations and endowment.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
OLDEST LOVE SONG
“Archaeologists excavating a 4,300 year-old Egyptian tomb at Abu Sir near Cairo have found what they believe is the world’s oldest known written music — a love song.” – Discovery.com
NOBEL HANDICAP
Korean writers wonder about the chances of a Korean winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Although the possibility of receiving a Nobel Prize for Literature seems to be growing stronger we still have a long way to go. First of all, we have to translate our literature into Western languages, so the judges and the readers from the Western culture can read it.” – Korea Times
NOT LONG ON LONGFELLOW
Drop Longfellow into a literary conversation nowadays and you will get some odd looks. The exchanges that follow will include words and phrases like “mawkish,” “shallow,” “trite,” “mechanical,” “unadventurous,” “tame,” “jingles,” “slave to conventional modes and diction,” “the innocence of America’s literary youth,” and so on. For all that, Longfellow has been a continuous presence in our language since Voices of the Night was published in 1839, and his lines are still familiar today, though many who know them could not tell you who wrote them. – New Criterion
DISTRESS SALE
Margot Fonteyn’s personal effects, costumes and clothes are to be auctioned off next week, but her friends and the dance community are protesting. – Sydney Morning Herald
WHO NEEDS ART CRITICS?
Here and there in a few major periodicals one can find art critics who realize they are writing for a mass medium and general audience, and not for a rarefied elite of cultural academics, museum docents and fellow critics. But then there are those who conduct themselves as though the masses who have lined up in such volume for recent Vermeer, Monet and Cezanne exhibitions were beneath contempt for their lack of art history degrees. – Chicago Tribune 12/07/00