A modern-day Odysseus?

Crunching tyres and parched rock, nothing but an anonymous horizon for mile after prodigious mile. We're at the head of a convoy of half a dozen beaten-up, beefed-up Land Rovers cruising south into the Sahara, far beyond the Tuareg outpost of Tamanrasset, and south, always southwards, towards Niger and beyond.  I'm in the backseat, my head lolling from side-to-side, tottering into sleep, barely able to resist the feverish heat, when Beni does something stupid.

A covenant with death

For the first decade of its existence, Culturissima was commissioned largely to write and research in the fields of the fine arts and architecture, music and the theatre, as well as archaeology and the natural world.

More recently, however, we've been asked to broaden our portfolio, to embrace the history of the First and Second World Wars, with one of our latest pieces appearing under the title of The Battle of The Atlantic and British Bunkers.

In this anniversary year, of course, the First World War still resonates deeply in the British psyche, and we've just finished putting the finishing touches to an article on the Somme for a British client; here's a taste:

The detonating of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge on the morning of July 1, 1916 marked the advent of the darkest day in the history of the British Army, a covenant with death that saw 58,000 British troops killed or wounded before nightfall. 

By the time the Somme offensive came to an end four and half months later, the lives of more than a million men - British, Commonwealth, French and German - were shattered. 

As well as treading lightly over the physical relics of the Somme battlefields - the trenches, shell holes and mine craters - our journey to northern France echoed to the musical strains of the Great War, from the 1914 recruiting refrain "Oh, we don't want to lose you but we think you ought to go" to Ivor Novello's Keep the Home-Fires Burning:

They were summoned from the hill-side; 
They were called in from the glen, 
And the Country found them ready
At the stirring call for men.

Harraga and Hittistes III

The coast of Annaba in Algeria, from where
  harraga try to reach France or Spain.

AnAnd even worse (see Harraga and Hittistes II).

Today's El Watan (an Algerian newspaper published in French) reports:

Des harraga âgés de 10 ans en Espagne

Several harraga (African immigrants who try to smuggle themselves into Europe by boat) were intercepted earlier this week by the Spanish authorities as they tried to flee across the Mediterranean on "un petit bateau pneumatique" - that is, a small rubber dinghy.  This time,  it was neither a woman nor a grandfather who was fleeing to the West for a "better life"... but five boys aged 10 and one aged 16. 

The children were found on board alone, with no adults accompanying them.

The Guardian newspaper strikes again with "les fuck-offs"

It's all here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/19/britain-france-troubled-alliance

Knowing French makes you more intelligent (allegedly)!

Irregular verbs, unlikely agreements between words, arbitrary genders - every grammarian says the same thing: French is a difficult language to master. But what if this very complexity accounts for the success of French-speaking mathematicians?

French is a "dreadfully difficult and complicated language, full of knots", so says the writer Claude Duneton in his column in Figaro Littéraire. Look at all "its irregular verbs, its participles that don't agree, its out-of-control adjectives, its singular plurals and its old-fashioned tenses" - not to mention its totally arbitrary genders. Why is "table" feminine and "desk" masculine, and why is it la rose but le lily?

Even grammarians complain about how difficult French is. Claude Duneton, who takes delight in opposing this widely held view, puts forward what he calls a "perfectly gratuitous hypothesis": "What if this very subtlety and these niceties were one of the secret strengths of French? What if the French language encouraged the development of a mathematical way of thinking?" That would help to explain a great mystery:  that "French mathematicians and mathematicians who speak French are at the head of world research".


This article, translated by Culturissima's Dr David Winter, first appeared in the literature section of the French daily newspaper, Le Figaro.

Walid the blasphemer

Walid the blasphemer embarrasses Palestine

For months he was one of the most hated internet users in the Muslim world. His Facebook page, which went by the name Ana Allah ("I am God"), was full of blasphemous sallies and barefaced arguments in favour of apostasy. But when the mystery poster was arrested at the start of the month, to everyone's surprise he turned out to be a shy young barber from Qalqilya, a small town in the West Bank.

Fear of the Outsider

Fear of the Outsider: Part One

One of the most compelling themes of New England literature – and a recurrent motif of the region’s films, too – is “outsider-phobia”.

Fear of the outsider or stranger, one might reasonably argue, is part of the literary landscape the world over (in Europe, of course, one immediately thinks of Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger). 

Nowhere, however, is suspicion – even hatred – of the foreign object more prevalent than in the literary tradition of New England. 

"There are children starving in Africa. Eat your peas"

A very quick post to an interesting blog on Africa that has just been published in the Harvard Business Review. Jonathan Berman's article challenges the stereotypes that so many of us have about the continent and makes refreshing reading for Culturissima, as so much of our work and so many of our clients are based in countries such as Libya, Algeria and Tunisia.

More to follow!

Two very useful English words that don't exist in French...

Delphine Autret, a Meribel-based translator, has emailed Culturissima the following humorous take on why English language is littered with so many French words... we particularly enjoyed the last paragraph.

It’s magnifical!

Further proof, if proof were needed, of two self-evident facts from the world of translation, namely:

i. translators are a waste of money because anyone can translate;

ii. every French man or woman that the Good Lord has so graciously bequeathed to us speaks perfect English.

Or maybe not...