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Most strategies for fighting climate change aim to reduce demand. They want to get people to burn less fossil fuel, either through increasing technological efficiency or by introducing Pigovian carbon-pricing schemes.

Last week, a number of writers advocated ways to limit supply—that is, limiting the amount of coal and natural gas that gets taken out of the ground in the first place. The first was Vox’s Dave Roberts, who covered a new paper which says such strategies might be more effective as a way of reducing global emissions.

Roberts frames supply-side tactics in elite/grassroots terms. Climate activists and protesters tend to rally around supply problems: Think of how stridently environmentalists in North America oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. But climate-concerned technocrats, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the power of innovation or demand-side schemes.


That tension, then, makes an interesting pair with my appeal, which also ran last week: that climate-anxious billionaires (or non-profits) should buy coal and keep it in the ground.

My story doubles as a last-ditch strategy for sleepless oligarchs and as a potentially politically feasible U.S. coal policy. It leans hard on the ideas of two men: Matt Frost, a friend (and subscriber, hi!) who works in natural resource management; and Bård Harstad, a Norwegian economist who thinks supply-side schemes are in fact the most efficient way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide.

(I also get into land rights, which to my eye is maybe the closest that U.S. statute comes to magic—it’s where saying something on paper changes the shape, texture, and potential of a mindless plot of Earth far away—but anyway just go read the story.)

But what would a supply-side policy look like in action? Look to the Pacific Northwest, where a recent study from the Sightline Institute found that more than 20 gigatons of carbon would be unleashed into the atmosphere if Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver permitted coal exports. Sightline terms the coastal ports—which are successfully fighting the terminals, pipelines, and railroads that would allow Western coal exporting—a kind of “thin green line.” By one estimate, those 20 gigatons of carbon could cause $8,800,000,000,000 worth of climate damage.

But I’ll have more to say about estimates of climate change’s damage next week.


* * *

The Macro-Trends

The atmosphere is filling with greenhouse gases. The Mauna Loa Observatory measured an average of 398.48 CO2 molecules per million in the atmosphere this week. A year ago, it measured 397.01 ppm. Ten years ago, it measured 377.48 ppm.

Renewable energy costs are plunging faster than anyone anticipated. A parable of American green energy use in 2015: Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the U.S. by a factor of four, is now also “the single biggest commercial solar generator in the country.” It generates a quarter of the energy it uses from renewables, much of that coming from solar panels on store roofs. Its mechanism for funding solar installations is wow-you-are-really-big-and-good-at-capitalism levels of ingenious:

[Wal-mart] gives access to its roof space to SolarCity or other installers, which pay to put up the panels (at a cost of about $1.2 million for the average array). SolarCity then sells the power generated to Wal-Mart under a long-term deal–at a price often cheaper than what the local electric utility would charge.
It’s also allowing Tesla to install some of its first household-sized batteries to store power during the day.

+ A new study finds that solar panels can cause some local climatic warming, especially when placed together in a desert. (But it’s not nearly as much as global warming as would be caused by sticking with fossil fuels.)

The U.S. greenhouse gas regulations start ambling down the long road to implementation. Vox’s Roberts highlights that (as previously reported here) even the states that are fighting the White House’s Clean Power Plan are drafting plans to comply with it. And he takes this one step further, arguing the quasi-consensus position that the regulation will decarbonize U.S. utilities even if it’s repealed by the Supreme Court or President Rubio:

The utility business is capital-intensive and slow-moving. It wants a predictable path ahead. If a coal-friendly utility in the heart of Appalachia has come to terms with the decline of coal, you can bet other utilities have as well. But right now, at least in conservative states, they are in a weird and uncomfortable position, stuck between unambiguous market trends on one side and posturing local politicians on the other.

In the end, having been prompted by (at least the threat of) the Clean Power Plan to begin grappling with these trends in earnest, utilities are unlikely to return to their head-in-the-sand posture.
+ For international readers curious as to what Republican-friendly coverage of the plan looks like, here’s the Fox News report on the rules’ publication. “The Clean Air Act was not designed as a tool for climate negotiations.”


China is planning a cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions. Since China announced its carbon pricing scheme, skeptics have said that the country simply did not keep enough accurate data about itself to make cap-and-trade work. “We’re not even sure just how much energy we consume, so how can you go ahead with trading?,” a Beijing University scholar told The New York Times’s Chris Buckley.

Here is just how inaccurate that data is: In the last month, China quietly revised its coal use upward by 17 percent for every year going back to the new millennium. Because China is so big, and already burns so much coal, the annual emissions accounted for solely by the revision exceed Germany’s total yearly emissions. They also equate to about 70 percent of annual American coal emissions.

What stood out to me, though, is that this statistical change doesn’t adjust scientists’ larger estimates of the state of the climate. That’s because we measure carbon levels in the atmosphere directly—at Mauna Loa Observatory, of course, with the number near the top of this newsletter. So as science accounts for this upward emissions correction, it will have to examine what else might be absorbing all the carbon that should have shown up in the atmosphere. Is it forests, oceans, or something else?

Before Paris

There are four weeks until the most significant UN climate talks since 2009.

China and France have agreed that, if the talks produce a deal, signatories should meet every five years to review mutual compliance. The Obama administration wants to review and revise whatever emerges from the talks every five years as well.


Eric Holthaus of Slate summarizes what will likely be the legacy of the negotiations:
+ that it will be impossible to avoid two degrees Celsius of climatic warming, i.e., that the world will warm significantly;
+ and that it will be unlikely that the world warms more than 4.5 degrees Celsius, the absolute worst case scenario.

Brad Plumer, of Vox, does the math on why two degrees is looking so hard to avoid. Other mainstream press accounts (like the sidebar in this New Republic primer) have called for the world to drop the two-degree target at the Paris talks and set a more realistic one.

This week in the Earth system

+  The fires in Borneo and Sumatra continue, emitting more carbon than the U.S. every single day. “Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?” The Wall Street Journal reports on how the fires are choking the palm oil, rubber and paper industries.

+  Mount Rinjani, on the Indonesian island Lombok well south of the fires, began erupting Tuesday. Ash and smoke from the volcano has covered hundreds of miles, and it’s delaying flights on the nearby island and tourist destination Bali.

+ The eruption as captured by Himawari-8, Japan’s weather satellite. Notice also the convection off the rainforest, the flash of the ocean (it looks like thunder) at midday:

+ In the Horn of Africa, millions of people depend on two seasonal rains for food. The first is the belg, in the spring; the second is the kiremt, in the summer. The heavy kiremt storms are especially important: They feed between 80 and 85 percent of Ethiopians. (They are important elsewhere, too, but data is best from Ethiopia.) This year, the belg failed, and then the arrival of El Niño greatly weakened the kiremt. 8.2 million people now need food assistance, and the UN is urgently requesting additional funding.

+ Last time there were food insecurity issues in the Horn, in 2011, at least 258,000 people died. Half of them were children younger than 5. This year’s famine is forecast to be worse.

+ The Economist, in globalist glamour, has my favorite map so far of El Niño.

+ Some evidence that a region’s climate and topography can affect the languages used and  developed there, an effect previously observed in birds and bats:

Languages in hotter, more forested regions such as the tropics tended to be “sonorous,” employing lower frequency sounds and using fewer distinct consonants, whereas languages in colder, drier, more mountainous places were consonant-heavy.” […] One possible explanation for why vowel-rich languages appear more frequently in the tropics is that they travel farther than languages dominated by rapid-fire, high-frequency consonants, which lose their fidelity in humid, forested environments, he says. Heat and humidity interrupt sound, as do solid tree branches and leaves, he adds.

A vowel sound like "e" can still sound clear through the dense vegetation in Hawaii.
DANIEL RAMIREZ/FLICKR
Originally published on November 6, 2015 3:27 pm

English bursts with consonants. We have words that string one after another, like angst, diphthong and catchphrase. But other languages keep more vowels and open sounds. And that variability might be because they evolved in different habitats.

Consonant-heavy syllables don't carry very well in places like windy mountain ranges or dense rainforests, researchers say. "If you have a lot of tree cover, for example, [sound] will reflect off the surface of leaves and trunks. That will break up the coherence of the transmitted sound," says Ian Maddieson, a linguist at the University of New Mexico.



That can be a real problem for complicated consonant-rich sounds like "spl" in "splice" because of the series of high-frequency noises. In this case, there's a hiss, a sudden stop and then a pop. Where a simple, steady vowel sound like "e" or "a" can cut through thick foliage or the cacophony of wildlife, these consonant-heavy sounds tend to get scrambled.

Hot climates might wreck a word's coherence as well, since sunny days create pockets of warm air that can punch into a sound wave. "You disrupt the way it was originally produced, and it becomes much harder to recognize what sound it was," Maddieson says. "In a more open, temperate landscape, prairies in the Midwest of the United States [or in Georgia] for example, you wouldn't have that. So the sound would be transmitted with fewer modifications."

Other scientists have noticed that habitats can affect the way different bird species sing. "Say you're a bird in a forest, and some guy's going 'Stree! Stree! Stree!' But because of the environment, what you hear is 'Ree! Ree! Ree!' " says Tecumseh Fitch, a linguist at the University of Vienna in Austria who was not involved in the study. "Well, because you're learning the song, you'll sing 'Ree! Ree! Ree!' "

Since bird species living in rain forests tend to sing songs with fewer consonant-like sounds, Maddieson thought maybe the same would apply to human languages. Over time, people living in different climates would adapt their speech to communicate more efficiently.

In a presentation on Wednesday at the Acoustical Society of America fall meeting, Maddieson showed that consonant-thick languages like Georgian are more likely to develop in open, temperate environments. Meanwhile, consonant-light languages like Hawaiian are more likely to be found in lush, hot ecologies.

Fitch says it's a tantalizing hypothesis, but still unproven. People who live nearby are usually related, so their languages could be too. Hawaiian and Maori are light on consonants and developed in hot, tropical climates, but they also both came from an ancestor Eastern Polynesian language. That could confound the results of Maddieson's study. Until that's sorted out, Fitch says, it's hard to know how strong the data are.

And the environmental effect only accounts for some of the variation in birdsongs. That's probably true for our tongues too. "There are many reasons why some languages have more vowels or more consonants, and this is just one of them," Fitch says.

Other researchers say this is just the beginning of a line of research into how nature rules our speech. "This is the first of its kind, and there are several others coming now. It's becoming increasingly clear that the way we speak is shaped by external forces," says Sean Roberts, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study.

In his own work, Roberts found that arid, desertlike places are less likely to have tonal languages like Mandarin or Vietnamese. And he once analyzed a decades' worth of Larry King transcripts. "I carried the proportion of consonants to vowels that he was using and matched that to the actual humidity on the day he recorded those things," Roberts says. The longtime TV pundit used a few more consonants on dry days.

And the language you're reading now evolved in a cold, gloomy climate prone to light mist and drizzle. Fitch says: "English is quite a consonant-heavy language, and of course it didn't develop in a rain forest."

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Universities looking to ensure their students have the skills to succeed in a 21st century workforce should take a look at their foreign language departments as one means of accomplishing this objective.

Our first NIU Dialogue on Global Competitiveness, released this month, highlights the emphasis employers in the Northern Illinois region place on a college graduate's ability to communicate in a language other than English -- and how this emphasis will change in the future.

Graduates who are truly bilingual may ultimately have a leg up on those who communicate only in English. In fact, in five years, almost half of our regional employers (49 percent) say they will actively seek employees with bilingual backgrounds, up from roughly one-third today. Over half -- 54.2 percent -- of the 143 not-for-profit organizations that participated in the survey indicated they would actively seek bilingual applicants, as well. While this is only one region in one state, the Northern Illinois region encompasses Chicago and is one of the most vibrant economies in the United States. Further, almost nine out of 10 respondents (89.3 percent) see benefits that bilingual employees can deliver today.

We at NIU have long considered diversity, understanding and respect for different cultures to be integral to the college experience and key to students taking their place as culturally literate citizens in an increasingly globalized economy. And, after surveying 244 regional employers, we know that this is a premise that not only intuitively makes sense, but also can lead to career success.

What's the most important second language in our region? Not surprisingly, our survey found it to be Spanish, given the rising number of Hispanic residents in Illinois -- reflected in the high growth rate of Hispanic high school graduates. The focus on Spanish may be due to the representation of not-for-profits in our sample, as many of these organizations serve Hispanic communities. Other languages cited as important include Polish (again not a surprise given the large Polish population in Chicago) and Mandarin (increasingly relevant to those regional businesses looking for closer trade relationships with China).

Employers are looking to us -- college educators -- to help them source bilingual employment candidates and prepare them for the world of work. More than half of our respondents want us to put a greater emphasis on learning foreign languages. Employers are looking for more direct engagement from universities -- almost 40 percent of respondents cited the need for greater university outreach to employers looking for bilingual job candidates. This fits well into NIU's "triangle model" of linking faculty and students with the outside world.

Our school launched a program called Celebrating Bilingualism, through which truly bilingual students have an opportunity to pick up 12 credit hours in a rigorous certification process. The program works on several levels -- and it helps accelerate graduation, thereby reducing the cost of college. Our survey shows that more than two out of five employers believe it is important that universities provide this kind of certification process. Further, more than three-fourths of respondents (77.1 percent) would be more favorably disposed toward hiring an individual who has university certification in a language, rather than hiring an individual with no university certification.

The 21st century workforce is already causing universities to rethink course offerings to align with the need for global citizenship. We must get beyond "Only English Spoken Here".

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A bus ferrying migrant farmworkers from Michigan to Texas ran off a highway and hit an overpass in Arkansas on Friday, ripping off the roof and ejecting passengers onto the interstate. Six people were killed and six injured; the driver survived.

The crash on Interstate 40 in North Little Rock happened at about 1 a.m., in light rain and fog following a heavy storm, but it wasn't immediately known whether weather played a role. The National Transportation Safety Board investigation is initially focusing on the possibility of driver fatigue, though investigators may focus on other issues once they're on the scene, spokesman Eric Weiss said.

Roberto Vasquez, 28, was behind the wheel when the bus ran off the right side of the highway, struck a wall and hit the bridge. Vasquez told investigators his residence is in Arcadia, Florida, but his driver's license listed his address as Monroe, Michigan, Arkansas State Police spokesman Bill Sadler said.

Of those who died, three were thrown from the bus, one was partially ejected and the other two died inside, said Col. Bill Bryant, the head of the Arkansas State Police.

Vasquez has agreed to routine drug and alcohol tests, but there's no indication he was intoxicated, state police Maj. Mike Foster said.

The driver and two other employees of Vasquez Citrus and Hauling, a provider of foreign farm labor through the federal H-2A visa program, had been transporting 19 workers from Monroe, Michigan, to Laredo, Texas. The Mexican government said all 19 workers were from Mexico and that they were headed back to their home country. The other three people on the bus, including the driver, were from Florida, according to Arkansas State Police.

Mexico's Foreign Relations Department issued a statement expressing condolences to the families of those killed and saying it's committed to providing assistance to those affected through the Little Rock consulate.

A woman who answered the phone Friday at the Lake Placid, Florida-based company hung up as The Associated Press sought more information.

Arkansas State Police released a list of the survivors of the crash, but said the names of those killed were being withheld until all families have been notified. Survivors' ages ranged from 19 to 43.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were called in, but only to help local authorities communicate with the Spanish-speaking survivors, according to ICE spokesman Bryan Cox. He said his agency was not pursuing any kind of criminal investigation of the people involved.

The bus had just been sold by Jeff Lawson, who owns Continental Charters in Detroit. Lawson told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the buyer "said he needed a second bus to haul people from (Detroit) to Texas... and Florida." The bill of sale and title to the bus, both dated Oct. 31, declared its value to be $8,000.

Michigan Department of Transportation spokesman Michael Frezell said the 1997 Van Hool bus had passed all of its annual inspections since 2009, as required under state law. Frezell said the bus was last inspected in April and that transportation officials did not know what condition it was in when it was sold.

The American Red Cross was providing mental health services to those who escaped injury. "As you can imagine, people are pretty shaken by this," Regional Communications Director Brigette Williams said.

Highway officials said the span remained structurally sound, even though the impact tore off much of the roof, mostly toward the rear of the bus. Traffic was snarled for hours, but the scene was cleared before daybreak.

___

Associated Press writers Corey Williams in Detroit and Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Florida, contributed to this report.

By Yun Suh-young

The winners of the 13th Korean Literature Translation Awards and the 14th Korean Literature Translation Awards for New Career Translators gathered Wednesday before the award ceremony and spoke of the difficulties of translating Korean literature into other languages.

"It's always difficult to translate dialects. It sounds awkward when we translate it, so sometimes we have to get rid of it," said Andrea de Benedittis, one of the winners of the 13th Korean Literature Translation Awards. He translated author Kim Young-ha's "I Have the Right to Destroy Myself" into Italian, "Ho Il Diritto di Distruggermi" and is a seasoned translator of 10 years who has translated other noted Korean novels into Italian.

"Also, in order to properly deliver the cultural context, we need to explain the historical background, but local publishers won't allow us to add footnotes. Properly delivering the tone of the writing itself is another difficulty," he said.

Four teams of professional translators were awarded Wednesday with the Korean Literature Translation Awards. Other award winners include Lee Tae-yeon and Genevieve Roux-Faucard who translated author Han Kang's "Breath Fighting" into French, "Pars, le Vent se Leve"; Kwon Eun-hee and Seong Cho-lim who translated Bae Suah's "Sunday Sukiyaki Restaurant" into Spanish, "El Restaurante de Sukiyaki"; and Vu Kim Ngan who translated author Jeong Yu-jeong's "Seven Years of Darkness" into Vietnamese, "7 Nam Bong Toi."

The awarded works were books which have already been translated and published by local publishing companies overseas. Of the 76 works submitted in 19 languages, a total of 14 made it to the finals and four were selected as winners. Judging criteria included how faithful the translation was to the original work, how well-refined the works were in terms of literary perfection, and how smooth the style of writing was. Judges consisted of foreign publishers and professors of Korean literature.

"It was difficult to translate the abundant usages of onomatopoeic and mimetic words. Because our publishers don't allow footnotes, I had to explain terms such as hanbok. The French don't like repetitive expressions so I tried to get rid of those," said Lee one of the winners.

This year was also the 14th year of the Korean Literature Translation Award for New Career Translators given to novice translators, an event which began in 2001. Among the 192 works from seven countries, a total of eight award winners were announced. They were Julianne Kelso and Jennifer Cho An for English, Na Eun-joo for French, Cho Young-eun for German, Daniel Rodríguez Cornejo for Spanish, Anna Dudinova for Russian, Azumi Junko for Japanese and Zhang Lili for Chinese.

"It was difficult to read between the lines. I wasn't quite sure what the author really wanted to deliver to the readers," said Zhang Li Li, who translated Young Young's "Summer" into Chinese. She works as a simultaneous interpreter and translator in Korea and was the only person who lives in Korea among the rookie award winners.

"What was difficult about translating Korean into English was to transfer informal and formal tone of speeches that exist due to social hierarchy. Also, certain titles such as unni which can be used in different contexts or translating chonsoo, the degree of relationship in the family tree, were difficult," said Julianne Kelso from Canada, a graduate of East Asian Studies at Toronto University. She translated Eun Hee-kyung's "Venus Girl."

Azumi Zunko from Japan, who works as a high school administrator, said, "People think Korean and Japanese are similar so it would be easy to translate, but there are of course difficulties. Japanese novels have a clear distinction in speeches between men and women while Koreans' don't. Also, it was difficult to distinguish the hapnida and haeyo styles of speech."

The translation awards are awarded by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea and are the only government-sponsored literature awards in Korea.

Language expert to be adjunct professor at Mangalore varsity
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Udaya Narayana Singh, chairman, Centre for Endangered Languages, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, speaking at the Vishwa Konkani Sahitya Samaroh in Mangaluru on Thursday.—Photo: H.S. Manjunath
Two-day Vishwa Konkani Samaroh begins

Mangalore University has decided to appoint Udaya Narayana Singh, Chair, Centre for Endangered Languages, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, as its adjunct professor.

University Vice-Chancellor K. Byrappa extended an invitation to Mr. Singh at the inauguration of Vishwa Konkani Sahitya Samaroh 2015, a two-day literary festival organised by World Konkani Centre here on Thursday. Mr. Singh, who inaugurated the festival, accepted the invitation.

Mr. Singh said barriers of language disciplines would have to be broken for the growth of any language.

There was an imminent need to go beyond the limits of language discipline. There was no rule that only scholars should undertake writing literature. Experts in various disciplines, namely, law, science etc., should come out with their experiences and contribute to the growth of the language, he said.

Mr. Singh said it was the writers who make a language big and any language per se could not be considered big or small. At the same time, every language should make new connections. It is heartening that Konkani is establishing contacts with European languages, such as German and Latin, he said.

Kiran Budkuley, Dean, Faculty of Languages, Goa University, said programmes like the literary festival were essential to recognise new and budding writers. It is high time that young writers took over.

Mr. Byrappa said Kannadigas remember Dr. Singh not just because he was the Director of Central Institute of Indian Languages, but also because his report made the Centre to grant Kannada classical language status.

He said the State government had allocated Rs. 2 crore for the Konkani Study Centre of Mangalore University, which was the unique and biggest chair among 17 language chairs of the University. He urged World Konkani Centre to collaborate with the University for the growth of the Study Centre.

Konkani Centre president Basti Vaman Shenoy was present.

Their beneficiaries are hundreds of miles from Bloomington, but the Language Conservancy still put on a fundraising gala at Deer Park Manor for the preservation of indigenous languages Thursday evening.

Yuliya Manyakina, an event manager with the nonprofit, rushed between rooms Thursday as she made sure all finishing touches were in order — food laid out, artwork, shawls and books set for a silent auction.

“We are expecting at least 50 people so far,” Manyakina said. “We’ve had kind of a low profile in Bloomington, but we’ve been here for at least a decade.”

Manyakina said the Language Conservancy serves communities in Montana and North and South Dakatoa and helps Native American tribes maintain their endangered languages by creating websites, workbooks and dictionaries for school-aged children.

“Bloomington is the headquarters,” Manyakina said. “We do all of the print work here.”

On Thursday, the conservancy chose to focus on their efforts to preserve the Lakota language. They sold tickets to the gala and displayed books on tables.

Language Conservancy Director Wil Meya emphasized the importance of native languages for young Native Americans.

“If they have access to their tribe’s language, they’re healthier psychologically, they’re more productive and the communities are healthier,” Maya said. “We start doing work with certain languages when the tribes come to us and say, ‘our kids want to learn the language.’”

Meya said he could think of at least three Native American communities that were severely endangered and had only one fluent speaker left.

“All of our communities are endangered,” Meya said. “Bloomington is a great place to do this work. We’re only three hours from South Dakota by plane — that’s like driving to South Bend.”

The conservancy invited Native American flutist and dancer Kevin Locke to perform. Manyakina said she heard he had just come from Turkey for the event.

“It seems like he’s been to more countries than the Pope,” Meya said.

Locke told a narrative before each story, emulating the way the songs would have been performed hundreds of years ago.

When he played the flute, the instrument was husky and trilling. Sometimes he would break into song.

“The songs are very moody and are their own literary form,” Locke said. “One verse will say something cryptic, and the second verse will explain it. Like this one, ‘In the heavens beyond, everything will be okay.’”

Clara Perry wandered between the room with music and a room with more guests and refreshments. She said someone had told her about the event and she decided to come.

“I paid $25 for my ticket at the door,” Perry said. “I don’t have ties to anyone Native American — I’m from Colombia. But I like the music, and I like the dancing. I support what they’re doing tonight.”

La messe est (presque) dite pour le « Notre Père » nouveau
Les catholiques ne diront bientôt plus « ne nous soumets pas à la tentation », mais « ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation »: cette nuance dans le « Notre Père » a fait couler beaucoup d’encre et devrait finalement entrer en vigueur à la messe en mars 2017.
La première traduction intégrale en français de la Bible liturgique a été validée par le Vatican à l’été 2013. Sans effet à ce jour sur la manière de réciter la plus célèbre prière chrétienne, notamment à l’église, où c’est le missel romain (livre de messe) qui a cours.
Or ce missel doit encore obtenir le feu vert de Rome. « Normalement, il n’y aura pas de problème. On a pris soin de faire quelques allers-retours », précise Mgr Bernard-Nicolas Aubertin, archevêque de Tours et président de la Conférence épiscopale francophone pour les traductions liturgiques. « Nous prévoyons une mise en oeuvre lors du 1er dimanche de carême 2017 (5 mars, NDLR) », a-t-il confié à l’AFP à Lourdes, où le sujet a été à l’ordre du jour de l’assemblée des évêques de France, qui s’achève dimanche.
La traduction se veut globalement plus fidèle à la langue latine et n’a guère fait débat, à l’exception de l’avant-dernier verset du « Notre Père ». Exit « ne nous soumets pas à la tentation », qui laissait penser que Dieu pouvait pousser ses fidèles sur la pente glissante du péché, ce qui est difficilement concevable pour un croyant. Place à « ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation », qui érige plutôt le Créateur en protecteur bienveillant.
Qu’en pensent les autres Églises chrétiennes, sachant que la version actuelle avait été adoptée après un compromis oecuménique passé en 1966, juste après le concile Vatican II? « C’est une traduction qui nous paraît aller plutôt dans le bon sens, même si elle édulcore l’idée d’un Dieu souverain: +ne nous laisse pas entrer+, c’est un peu +Dieu fait ce qu’il peut+ », a expliqué le pasteur baptiste (protestant) Étienne Lhermenault, président du Conseil national des évangéliques de France (Cnef). Pour les orthodoxes, qui prient souvent en slavon ou en grec à la « divine liturgie », « la question se pose moins », a souligné Mgr Aubertin.
« Ne créons pas de problème là où il n’y en a pas », a ajouté l’archevêque de Tours, qui pense toutefois qu’une pédagogie du nouveau texte sera nécessaire pour les fidèles catholiques. « Il y aura un changement d’habitude qu’il faudra accompagner. »

© 2015 AFP

JEROME | Sergio Garcia leaves for his dairy job long before the sun comes up.

The undocumented immigrant living in Jerome's Stoney Ridge subdivision has been a loader at a dairy near Shoshone more than 20 years. He works 12-hour shifts, starting at 5 a.m., six days a week.


Still, Garcia struggles to pay the mortgage on his 1,408-square-foot home and sees no opportunity for higher pay or more family time. His future looks like his past: the dairy loading job.

“He’s been there his whole adult life,” his wife, Guadalupe Eudabe, said through an interpreter in late September.

Language barriers and legal status keep many of Stoney Ridge's immigrants in dairy and agricultural jobs, where some employers are willing to hire undocumented workers. But long hours and low pay take a toll on family life.

Many residents in the neighborhood — along 21st and 22nd Avenues East — have young children and one-income households. That's not unusual in Jerome, where a third of the city's population is younger than 18 thanks to an influx of young Hispanic families.

Eudabe hardly sees her husband. If he had the chance to work at a different job, she said, his hours would improve. They'd go fishing as a family more often, a teen son said.

“The doors that would be opened would be more family time," Eudabe said.

That's a typical sentiment in Stoney Ridge.




JOY PRUITT, FOR THE TIMES-NEWS Buy Now
Faviola Jimenez hands her husband, Raul Martinez, his lunch for the workday early Monday morning, Oct. 12, in Stoney Ridge. She’s an onion packer at Magic Valley Growers in Wendell, and he works at a dairy.

Around this neighborhood, you won't meet many people working office hours.

Potato handler Jesus Ceballos was in his garage on 21st Avenue East with the overhead door open on a late-September afternoon. Ceballos — who's originally from Michoacan, Mexico, but said he’s a U.S. citizen — moved to Jerome about seven years ago after living in Washington and Glenns Ferry. He lives with his wife and his youngest son and works overnight shifts at Rite Stuff Foods in Jerome.

“We work too much, but they don’t pay much,” Ceballos said through an interpreter.

He didn't want to name his wage. But in south-central Idaho, the typical entry wage for graders and sorters of agricultural products is $16,870 per year, and their average wage is $19,640, according to the Idaho Department of Labor’s 2014 Occupational Employment and Wage Survey.

Ceballos works five days a week, starting at 5 p.m. and getting off between 1 and 3 a.m. Around Stoney Ridge, work schedules like his explain why children answered reporters' knocks on summer mornings while their parents slept.

A block away, onion packer Faviola Jimenez lives with her husband and two sons. The family came from Ucareo, a small town in Michoacan, two years ago and moved into its 21st Avenue East home in June.


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Raul Martinez ties son Raul Martinez Jimenez's shoes before leaving for work early on the morning of Oct. 12 in Jerome's Stoney Ridge neighborhood. Martinez works at a dairy six days a week, and he rises at 5 a.m. to get ready.

All four were home one early-October afternoon. In a living room displaying a statue of Mary, Jimenez sat next to her 8-year-old son, who helped translate and occasionally giggled nervously. The door to his bedroom was open, displaying a Ninja Turtle poster and Spiderman curtains.

Jimenez's shifts at Magic Valley Growers in Wendell are generally eight hours, but the schedule is unpredictable.

“Sometimes they call, sometimes they don’t,” she said through an interpreter. But she likes the flexibility.

Her husband, Raul Martinez, sat at the kitchen table. Nearby, his younger son played a game on an electronic tablet.


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David Avila watches his niece Emily Hernandez, 5, draw in her notebook at home Oct. 13 in Jerome’s Stoney Ridge neighborhood. Avila, a dairy worker, aspires to be a truck driver but lacks legal authorization to work in the U.S.

Martinez works at a dairy six days a week. His shifts are typically 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., he said, and he rises at 5 a.m. to get ready.

Another neighbor originally from Michoacan, David Avila, moved to Jerome four years ago from North Carolina. The undocumented immigrant works in the maternity area of a dairy, helping to deliver and feed calves. His 12-hour days start at 5 a.m., five days a week.

Other neighbors are also dairy or agricultural workers, including Ana Hurtado’s husband, who delivers milk.

Vanessa Diaz — a Jerome High School alumna — is a stay-at-home mother whose husband works 12-hour shifts, six days a week, as a feeder at a dairy.


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Jerome driver Ricardo Rivas does the pre-check on his Glanbia truck before heading to a dairy.

Neighbor Ricardo Rivas is a truck driver for Glanbia, driving for 12-hour shifts around the Magic Valley. He works for a few days and then has a couple off.



For immigrants who are undocumented or don't speak English, job options are limited. And working conditions aren't always ideal.

Ceballos — who's in his 60s — works night shifts, but he’s running out of energy. And he says there’s no room for advancement.

Jimenez wants to see more ventilation in her workplace, and there are areas without heat.

The bathroom facilities aren’t adequate at Martinez's dairy job, he said.

Garcia's pay has improved because he has stayed at his job for years. But his wage is capped at $12 per hour, and he can’t work extra hours.

To supplement the family’s income, Eudabe runs a party planning business. During summer, she often has several events each weekend, such as birthday parties and weddings. But demand drops off in winter.


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College of Southern Idaho student Brayan Garcia, who works at La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant in Twin Falls to pay for his tuition, cleans and sets tables Oct. 17. His parents, both undocumented immigrants, bought their home in Jerome’s Stoney Ridge subdivision under a nephew’s name.

Their son Brayan Garcia, who started full-time at College of Southern Idaho this fall to study business administration, works at La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant in Twin Falls to pay for his tuition. He’s managing to juggle work and classes.

“So far, the experience has been pretty good,” he said.

To save money, the 19-year-old lives with his parents in Stoney Ridge. His parents bought the home under a nephew’s name, which is on the mortgage documents.

“We send a check to him so he gets compensated for what he’s paid,” Eudabe said.

She and her husband are considering selling the house because the $1,200 monthly mortgage obligation is hard to pay. And they don’t have health insurance.

Eudabe had two surgeries, including one to remove her appendix at St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center. She told the hospital she couldn’t pay more than $120 per month toward her bill.


“The rule of thumb is we can’t seek medical services unless we can’t bear the pain,” she said.

Eudabe said her husband is doing what he must to put food on the table and provide for the family. So he stays at his dairy job.

“At the end of the day,” she said, “he has no choice.”

Eudabe and her husband entered the U.S. undocumented two decades ago and haven’t gained legal standing. Sergio Garcia used networking to get his job, she said; his brother worked at the dairy. The couple wants to apply for citizenship, but Eudabe called it “impossible.” 

The reason for her fear? The 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act imposes penalties on undocumented immigrants who want to re-enter the U.S. For those who stayed illegally from 180 days to a year, it bars re-entry for three years. If they’ve been here longer than a year, they’re barred for 10 years.

Now, Eudabe and her husband hope to gain security through their children.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, established in 2012 through President Barack Obama’s executive order, defers prosecution for qualifying undocumented students, allowing them to remain in the U.S. while pursuing education. Deferred Action doesn't provide a path to citizenship or give students legal immigration status. Instead, it labels qualifying individuals as low-priority cases, preventing them from being deported for a period of two years. Students must apply for renewal.

In November 2014, Obama announced expansion of the DACA program, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Also, parents of U.S. citizens or permanent residents can request deferred action and the ability to gain work authorization for three years. It’s open to those who have lived in the U.S. continuously since January 2010, and they must pass a background check.

Eudabe wants more. Idaho is home to a lot of undocumented workers who are doing milking and hard labor, she said, and those in power should create a pathway to permanent legalization.



Some Stoney Ridge residents aspire to more comfortable jobs with better pay.


DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS photos Buy Now
ABOVE: David Avila watches his niece (not shown) play at home Oct. 13 in Jerome’s Stoney Ridge subdivision. The undocumented immigrant starts his 12-hour shifts at a dairy at 5 a.m., five days a week. LEFT: Avila watches niece Emily Hernandez, 5, draw in her notebook. Avila, a dairy worker, aspires to be a truck driver but lacks legal authorization to work in the U.S.

Dairies are “always hiring people,” Avila said through an interpreter. He doesn’t like his job, but it’s a paycheck, and it’s a job he can get as an undocumented immigrant. But Avila wants to become a truck driver.

The problem? At Glanbia, for instance, potential hires — including applicants for truck driving jobs — are run through the federal government's E-Verify system to make sure they have legal authorization to work in the United States.

Jimenez — who said she has a green card — isn't dissatisfied with her onion job for now. But she wants to learn English so she can get a better, less physical job eventually.

A Permanent Resident Card, also known as a green card, allows a noncitizen to live and work in the U.S. legally.


JOY PRUITT, FOR THE TIMES-NEWSBuy Now
FAR LEFT: Stoney Ridge resident Raul Martinez hugs son Raul Martinez Jimenez before leaving for work in early morning.

left

: Faviola Jimenez hands her husband, Raul Martinez, his lunch for the workday early Monday morning, Oct. 12, in Stoney Ridge. She’s an onion packer at Magic Valley Growers in Wendell, and he works at a dairy. BELOW: Raul Martinez ties son Raul Martinez Jimenez’s shoes before leaving for work. Martinez works at a dairy six days a week, and he rises at 5 a.m. to get ready.

Some of Jimenez's neighbors feel stuck in their jobs, but others have found better options.

Esmeralda Gonzalez — a stay-at-home mother and longtime Magic Valley resident who grew up in the U.S. — used to watch her husband work long hours at a dairy. Rigoberto Gonzalez, originally from Michoacan, has been in Jerome for eight years after moving from California. He still speaks limited English but said he's a U.S. citizen. So when a chance for shorter hours came, he could take it.

Now, he does insulation work in Twin Falls five days a week — a job he heard about through his wife's brother. He helps his daughters with homework and spends holidays with his family — something he never could do before, Esmeralda Gonzalez said.

“He’s just here more.”

Desarrollan algoritmo para traducir la lengua maya
Investigadores de la Escuela Politécnica Federal de Laussane, en Suiza, y expertos en escritura maya han desarrollado un algoritmo que ayudará a los historiadores a traducir la lengua que se ...
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Investigadores de la Escuela Politécnica Federal de Laussane (EPFL), en Suiza, y expertos en escritura maya han desarrollado un algoritmo que ayudará a los historiadores a traducir la lengua que se utilizaba en esa civilización precolombina.

Tras el trabajo de los investigadores del Centro de Investigaciones suizo Idiap, afiliado a la EPFL, y de especialistas en escritura maya de la Universidad de Bonn, en Alemania, se creará un catálogo digital que contendrá representaciones de alta calidad de los jeroglíficos hasta ahora conocidos, según un comunicado remitido por la escuela. Esta herramienta agilizará la identificación del significado y permitirá la posterior creación de una base de datos virtual que podrá ser utilizada por el conjunto de la comunidad científica, similar a "la herramienta de traducción de Google pero para historiadores".

Actualmente cinco millones de personas en Sudamérica hablan lenguas que tienen su origen en la civilización maya, pero entre un 10 y un 15 % de la simbología escrita sigue siendo desconocida para los expertos.

Asimismo, la mayoría de los documentos escritos en lengua maya se perdieron en el siglo XVI con la conquista española y sólo tres códices se preservan en museos de París, Dresde (Alemania) y Madrid. Este hecho, sumado a la compleja construcción del lenguaje maya, dificulta la labor de traducción de los investigadores, puesto que cada símbolo representa un sonido o un significado. Además, la escritura maya se estructura en bloques, por lo que el significado de un mismo símbolo puede cambiar según qué otras imágenes le acompañen.

Los expertos se sirven de la ayuda de hablantes mayas activos, así como de glosarios para la identificación y contextualización de los significados correctos.

Pasión y casualidad pero también trabajo de carpintería, albañilería, relojería, jardinería, electricidad, plomería –en una palabra: industria verbal. La traducción poética exige el empleo de recursos análogos a los de la creación, sólo que en dirección distinta.

Octavio Paz, Versiones y diversiones

 

De todos los límites franqueables en el universo del lenguaje, la poesía es quizá uno de los más aventurados. Para algunos, en efecto, la traducción de la poesía es una tarea imposible, una lucha destinada a perderse desde el primer momento: un poema nunca puede ser del todo traducido. Pero existe gente que pasa la vida intentándolo.

Traducir un poema es, en muchos sentidos, volverlo a escribir, hacer uno nuevo; no solamente se trata de trasladar su significado de un idioma a otro, se trata de volver a hacerlo conservando, o más bien reinventando, elementos esenciales de la lírica: su forma, su ritmo y su sonoridad. Así la traducción brillante de un mal poema puede ciertamente resultar en una buena pieza lírica y, por supuesto, viceversa. Finalmente, el traductor de poesía, el buen traductor de poesía, es también un poeta.

Ningún poema significa una sola cosa, existe solamente en la sensibilidad y la subjetividad de cada persona que lo lee. Existen tantas versiones de un solo poema como lectores, y este es otro de los retos que enfrenta el traductor de poesía: tomar decisiones unas veces más otras veces menos radicales sobre el significado de un poema, sobre lo que quien lo escribió “quiso decir”. En este sentido, el traductor de poesía es también un gran valiente.

Algunos notables ejemplos de poetas-traductores son: Ezra Pound, que hizo traducciones al inglés del poeta chino Li Po, de Confucio, de un buen número de poetas latinos y de algunos poemas anglosajones, entre muchos otros; Octavio Paz, que tradujo a Apollinaire, al gran Gerard de Nerval, a Pessoa y a Mallarmé; Ted Hughes, que tradujo a Ovidio y a Esquilo; y Seamus Heaney, que hizo una bella traducción del poema épico anglosajón Beowulf.

En México existe una editorial joven, MaNgOs de HaChA, que dedica una gran parte de sus ediciones a la traducción de poetas innovadores o poco traducidos al español. Este 2015 la editorial cumple 5 años y festeja con la presentación de cinco libros, de los cuales tres son ediciones bilingües de poesía. Esta clase de proyectos enriquecen el mundo editorial de un país y ponen a disposición de un público amplio poesía que de otra manera sería muy difícil conocer.

 

*      *      *

 

El 5o aniversario de la editorial MaNgOs de HaChA, presentación y coctel, se celebrará el miércoles 11 de noviembre a las 19:00hrs en el Cine Tonalá (Calle Tonalá #261, colonia Roma Sur).

Los libros que se presentarán en el aniversario de MaNgOs de HaChA son:

La crisis de los medios de Peter Watkins, ensayo del cineasta inglés sobre los medios de comunicación en la actualidad, será presentado por Eduardo Milán.

Descripción de Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, una antología bilingüe de la obra de uno de los más importantes poetas contemporáneos rusos, será presentado por Rodrigo Flores.

Trece entrevistas a cineastas contemporáneos + 8 de Tatiana Lipkes, colección de entrevistas a realizadores cinematográficos contemporáneos, será presentado por Ricardo Pohlenz.

Poemas de Maximus IV, V, VI de Charles Olson, edición bilingüe del volumen de poesía de uno de los poetas más importantes de la segunda mitad del siglo XX en Estados Unidos, será presentado por Jorge Solís.

Renacimiento de la poesía inglesa. Antología poética, autores varios, una antología de la escuela poética inglesa conocida como el British Poetry Revival, será presentado por Julio Trujillo.

 

BOONE—William M. Hutchins, a professor in Appalachian State University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, has received the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association in the prose category. The award recognizes his Arabic to English translation of “The New Waw: Saharan Oasis” by Ibrahim al-Koni.


“William M. Hutchins’ translation of ‘New Waw: Saharan Oasis’ masterfully channels the poetic rhythms of Ibrahim al-Koni’s tale of a group of Tuareg, struggling with their evolution from a nomadic tribe to a settled community and the tensions that inevitably arise,” said NTA judges Jason Grunebaum, Anne Magnan-Park and Pamela Carmell. “Legends, fables, prophecies and tribal laws, expressed in lyrical, metaphorical language, give a glimpse into the group’s traditions and the Tuareg mythical paradise oasis, Waw.”

Hutchins’ work was supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, one of two he has received during his career.

Hutchins is known for his translation of the Cairo Trilogy by Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz. This trio of novels is widely regarded as one of the finest works of fiction in Arabic literature, and Hutchins’ translation is the principal version available in English.

In addition, he has translated a variety of Arabic authors, including Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ibrahim Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Muhammad Salmawy, Nawal El-Saadawi, Ibrahim al-Koni, and others.

Hutchins was co-winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2013 for his work on Wajdi al-Ahdal’s “A Land Without Jasmine.”

"I'm actually thinking about moving out of Minnesota. I'm scared for my life. I don't feel comfortable here anymore."

An Applebee's customer was violently assaulted by another diner last week for not speaking English.

The incident occurred October 30 at a restaurant in Coon Rapids, Minn., reports Minnesota Public Radio. The victim, a woman named Asma Jama, was seated with her family waiting for their food and conversing in Swahili; a couple in the booth next to them grew upset at hearing a foreign language being spoken and told Jama to "go home," reportedly saying, "When you're in America you should speak English."

Jama, who is Somali, emigrated to Minnesota from Kenya in 2000 and speaks three languages. She says she told the couple, "I can speak English, but we choose to speak whatever language we want," at which point the woman, Jodie Burchard-Risch, smashed a beer mug into her face and fled the restaurant.

Jama sustained multiple cuts on her face and had to get 17 stitches in her lip. A crowdfunding campaign set up for the victim by a friend has raised more than $10,000 for her medical bills. Jama says she has been traumatized by the incident; she tells the Associated Press, "I'm actually thinking about moving out of Minnesota. I'm scared for my life. I don't feel comfortable here anymore."

Burchard-Risch has been charged with third-degree assault; meanwhile, the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling for hate-crime charges to be filed against her.

Reached for comment by Eater, an Applebee's spokesperson issued the following statement: "Applebee’s is cooperating with authorities regarding this unfortunate incident, but does not discuss ongoing investigations."

Hate crimes happen everywhere, but restaurants appear to be a frequent setting for minor, more passive-aggressive scenarios: Earlier this year two Pizza Hut employees in Arkansas were fired for scrawling swastikas on a customer's order, and last month, Wendy's workers in Colorado slipped a racist note into a seven-year-old's kids meal.

A few months ago, I wrote about phrases that had piqued (or is that peaked?) my interest, in a column on malapropisms that show us fossilized words found in phrases frozen in time. Call what I was doing linguistic paleontology.

Now, as I contemplate a new collection of frozen phrases, caught earlier in the process of change, I see that their analysis might better be described as linguistic glaciology. Language moves much in the way of a glacier: slowly, constantly, and with a force impossible for any human intervention to halt. One man's malapropism is another's innovation. (And a third man's source of humor — read this review of Robert Alden Rudin's new collection of language errors, Going to Hell in a Hen Basket for more.)

But for all intents and purposes, and no matter that you might think language change represents the collective dumbing down of our culture (I don't), we can't stop it. What we can do, as linguistic glaciologists, is strap on our crampons, drill for an ice core, and get down to marveling at what is changing and why.

And what better place to begin than with a phrase I just had the pleasure of using, "for all intents and purposes," which, according to Google searches and grammar columns, seems poised to morph into "intensive purposes" any decade now.

The phrase is old; it's a shortened form of an English legal formulation that dates all the way back to the mid-16th century's "to all intents, constructions and purposes." The "constructions" has long been dropped, and now you might be just as likely to hear "for all intensive purposes" instead of "intents and."

Whether "intensive purposes" is merely a matter of the running together of sounds or the fact that the word intent is rarely used in the plural form in everyday speech, the collocation is supported by the easy logic of the adapted phrase's meaning. One who is "focused, full of purpose" is likely to be intense as well.

Like intents, whet in "whet your appetite" is often taken as another, more familiar word, wet. Again, semantically, it is easy to put together a rationale for why some people think the phrase uses the homonym wet. Imagine being hungry, smells wafting in from a kitchen, and suddenly you're salivating at the thought of digging in. Wet's referring to saliva production is plausible. Add to that the fact that whet is all but obsolete, and it's enough to convince many of the accuracy of the "wet your appetite" interpretation.

But it is not accurate. Whet is an Old English word which means "to sharpen" and, figuratively, "to encourage or incite," and this is the sense of whet in "whet your appetite." Linguists would call the whet/wet confusion an eggcorn.

To make whet even more confusing is that the other place one may have encountered whet is also connected to water. The whetstone, used for sharpening metal things such as knives, is a tool that will quickly light things on fire if they are not constantly made wet.

The old children's song "There's a Hole in the Bucket" can actually help differentiate between the two members of the homophonic pair: Henry, the man who notices the titular hole in the bucket, has to wet the stone before he can whet the knife with the stone. (Of course, he can do neither of these because of that tragically malfunctioning bucket!)

Alas, whet seems not long for this world, but one case where those who stand for historical accuracy in linguistic expression (H.A.L.E. is not a bad acronym for a group, actually) that might have more of a fighting chance is the case of the "sleight of hand" — often misheard as the homophone slight. "Sleight of hand" dates to the early 15th century and denotes "a cunning trick requiring nimbleness" whereas slight originated about three hundred years later, and is more about intentional neglect than outright trickery.

When the waiter won't refill your water glass because you made him recite the specials three times just for laughs, you are being slighted. When the amateur card shark on the corner takes all your money in a game of three-card monte, you've been sleighted. Both of these words are perfectly useful, and they exist in realms that are different enough that both might survive.

And speaking of card sharks, debate rages about whether that someone who cheated you with a deck of 52 is a card sharp or card shark. Unlike slight and sleight, shark and sharp's meanings seem to have merged, with card sharp being preferred in England, and card shark also meaning simply someone good at cards, with no implication of cheating.

Perhaps the only card you carry is the one attesting to your membership in the H.A.L.E. society. Or perhaps you maintain a glaciologist-paleontologist-insert-name-of-metaphorically-appropriate-scientist's position of professional neutrality. Either way, like a core sample taken from a glacier, much information about the workings of language are contained in the stories of these phrases, which provide a fascinating window into the process of language change overall.

« Prévoir avec l’Afrique, agir dans le monde qui vient » Revue de(s) générations, Jean-Pierre Huguet Éditeur. Numéro 23, 96 pages, 12,50 euros.
L’ambition de la Revue de(s) générations est de contribuer à fédérer les nécessaires luttes d’émancipation. « Comment ­reconstituer une force où convergeraient les questions de classe (l’esclave, le ­prolétaire), de races (l’occidentalo-centrisme…), de sexes (la violence faite aux femmes, aux homosexuels…) ? ». Dans sa dernière ­livraison superbement illustrée, la revue entend lutter contre les crispations identitaires et la méconnaissance des rapports entre les continents africain et européen. L’anthropologue Jean-Loup Amselle revient dans un entretien sur sa critique du concept d’ethnie et sa dénonciation de la discrimination de l’islam en France. Il invite à « politiser notre compréhension du monde ». Entre autres contributions, Saïd Bouamama s’intéresse aux penseurs de la révolution africaine, de N’Krumah à Thomas Sankara. Quant au philosophe ghanéen Kwasi Wiredu, il appelle à une décolonisation conceptuelle qui impose de penser en langue africaine, de rejeter enfin toute évangélisation et tutelle coloniales. N. M.

New York City leads the nation in the number of languages spoken at home: a remarkable 192 or more, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report this week.

"In the New York metro area alone, more than a third of the population speaks a language other than English at home, and close to 200 different languages are spoken," Erik Vickstrom, a Census Bureau statistician, said in a statement.

"Knowing the number of languages and how many speak these languages in a particular area provides valuable information to policymakers, planners and researchers.”

Indeed, in the country's largest metro areas, New York leads the pack in the number of languages spoken.

Also, 38 percent of the city's population age 5 and over speak a language other than English at home, the Census Bureau found. That's about 5.5 million people.

Leading the languages was 2.7 million people who speak Spanish, followed by 336,000 who speak Chinese, 226,000 who speak Russian and 192,000 who speak Italian.

Yiddish was spoken by nearly 129,000 city dwellers.

Second in the nation was the Los Angeles metro area, where at least 185 languages are spoken at home and 54 percent of population speaks a language other than English at home, the Census Bureau said.

Here's the full list of languages for New York.

New York languages.pdf by jspector

If you had hours of free time every day and thousands of dollars to spend on tutors and classes, of course you could learn a new language.
Unfortunately, that's not the situation most adults find themselves in. As a result, many people assume they've got no chance of ever mastering a foreign tongue.
But that's where they're wrong. Just ask opera singer Gabriel Wyner, who achieved fluency in four languages — Italian, German, French, and Russian — in the span of just a few years. (He's currently learning more.)
In his book "Fluent Forever," Wyner shares the techniques that helped him maximize his time and resources on the route to polyglotism.
We checked out the book and highlighted three must-know strategies for anyone hoping to learn a new language — and never forget it. 1. Practice recalling words, not reading them.
Wyner cites a growing body of research that suggests the best way to remember something forever is to practice remembering it.
In one study, for example, students either read a list of 40 words five times or read it once and practiced recalling the words several times.
Results showed something fascinating. Although the students who read the text five times remembered more than the other group did five minutes later, the students who read the text once and then were tested remembered significantly more one week later.
The takeaway is that, if you want to cement your memory of a series of foreign words, you should read through it once and then test yourself multiple times, instead of reading and re-reading the list.
Ulrich Baumgarten/Getty 2. Use spaced repetition.
"At its most basic level," Wyner writes, "a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is a to-do list that changes according to your performance."
Here's Wyner's example of how it works: If you can remember that "trabajo" is the Spanish word for work two months after learning it, the SRS will wait another four to six months before putting it back on your to-do list. But if you're having trouble remembering that "computadora" means "computer" for more than two weeks, the system will put that word back on your to-list more often until you can finally remember it.
You can either create your own SRS or use one available online. (Wyner recommends Anki's.) If you're going the DIY route, you can construct what's known as a "Leitner Box," in which you move index cards to different parts of the box depending on whether you remember them after a specified time period. (Wyner shows you how to create a Leitner Box on his website.)
The SRS is designed to make language-learning considerably more efficient. Instead of wasting time reviewing words you've already committed to memory, you get straight to the tric

Readers and book stores everywhere will be excited by the 160-title strong announcement of the 2016 long list for the Dublin International Literary Award. Now in its 21st year, though for the first time without the familiar IMPAC, the name is shorter but the long list is among the lengthiest in its already distinguished history.
An impressive number of 53 titles in translation have been nominated, fittingly for an award which had done so much to champion the range, diversity and flair of international fiction in translation.
Two previous winners, Norway’s Per Petterson (2007) and the 2006 winner Colm Toibin are again nominated.

Dublin, what a character
Thomas Merton: the hermit who never was, his young lover and mysterious death
Toibin who is one of the seven Irish writers nominated has become one of the constants on award shortlists and his novel Nora Webster is likely to make the short list.
His literary world domination seems set to continue while another short list veteran, Sebastian Barry is represented this time by The Temporary Gentleman. Mary Costello’s debut novel, Academy Street, bearing the Toibin period influence, is also nominated. Petterson has been nominated for I Refuse.
Many familiar titles feature including the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings.
A Man Booker long listed contender that failed to reach that short list, Laila Lalami’s thrilling historical novel, The Moor’s Account, has been nominated and it will be interesting to see how it fares.
In common with Toibin, Ali Smith invariably features on award shortlists and she is nominated for her 2014 Man Booker runner up How to be both. As is Neel Mukherjee’s intriguing, if somewhat pompous, The Lives of Others. Ian McEwan’s unconvincing foray into the mind and conscience of a female judge The Children’s Act, is also nominated.
Several outstanding, less high profiled works that have yet to be fully acknowledged by award juries have been noted by keen-eyed library readers and are here nominated. The remarkable Canadian writer Miriam Toews has a dedicated following and All My Puny Sorrows, based on the suicide of a beloved sister, is deserving of the widest audience. It should make the short list.
Wonderful to see Brazilian writer Michel Laub’s powerful and profound cross-generational story Diary of the Fall, translated by Margaret Jull Costa included. What begins with a schoolboy prank which ends in tragedy looks further back to a guilt rooted in survival.
Always contentious yet seldom able to catch a panel’s favour is Martin Amis. Nominated here for The Zone of Interest, an original and daring narrative which managed to impress many and irritate others.
Much the same could be written about Swiss writer Joel Dicker’s block buster Twin Peaks-influenced thriller The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair, translated from the French by Sam Taylor.
The inclusion of Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back, translated by Jamie Bulloch a black comedy about the re-appearance of Adolf Hitler will either amuse or outrage or probably both.
The American challenge is gracefully led by the magisterial presence of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, which inexplicably failed to reach the Man Booker short list but should feature here.
The prize could, finally, witness the long over due emergence of Richard Powers nominated here for a dazzling puzzle, Orfeo.
Library readers are certainly aware of his genius. Orfeo is his 11th novel in a career which began as long ago as 1985 with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. He has a cult following and Orfeo could well be his finest novel to date.
There should be huge support for the Catalan writer Jaume Cabré’s ambitious masterwork Confessions, translated by Mara Faye Lethem. Confessions spans history from the Inquisition to the Nazi death camps, as seen through the imagination of a man attempting to make sense of his life through memories which are distorted and insistent.
It is quite a journey which tests the senses, never mind logic, yet seldom falters although it is defiantly long.
It would be a daring winner. Also taking risks if largely stylistic which don’t always succeed yet this seems almost irrelevant such is the importance of the book is Serbian writer Aleksander Gatalica’s The Great War.
This is an immensely important, layered narrative looking at the First World War from the Serbian viewpoint.
A huge bestseller in the Balkans, Will Firth’s translation is no less than heroic. The sheer weight of history and the author’s ambition make this a demanding book yet it is also rewarding and insightful, a characteristic piece of bold publishing from the independent Istros press.
Yet even at first glance an obvious winner must be the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, previously nominated for Visitation, this time she towers over the field with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winning The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky who has already been honoured for her brilliant translation of Erpenbeck’s stern if beautiful prose, on a quick tot it seems I’ve only read 97 of the 160 books, but of them The End of Days about lives not lived is unforgettable, an inspired work.
Erpenbeck, the daughter of a philosopher, is a daunting original. Her fiction is brilliant, and metaphysical, it is lyrical and oddly confrontational. It is a form of philosophical speculation which also draws on the resonance of history.
It could well be the year of a German-language presence. Of the eleven nominated books translated from German, the Berlin-born Erpenbeck is joined by the outstanding Judith Schalansky whose second novel The Giraffe’s Neck explores the hidden secret of a science teacher who has lived by the rules, not emotion. It is a very touching book, heartbreaking, eloquent and erudite yet also funny and rendered into subtle English by the always superb Shaun Whiteside.
Munich-born Daniel Kehlmann is internationally established, his fifth novel, Measuring the World (2005; English translation 2007) has been translated into more than 40 languages.
Nominated for F, the story about a father and his damaged sons, Kehlmann could teach the overrated Jonathan Franzen a great deal about dysfunctional families.
F is a terrific yarn, very human and fully of empathy. It would be a popular winner as Kehlmann has mastered lightness of touch and in Carol Brown Janeway he has an ideal English-language translator.
The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s harrowing morality play All Days Are Night is translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, while it is fascinating to see the inclusion of Liechtenstein writer Patrick Boltshauser nominated for Rapids which has been translated from the German by Peter Arnds who worked on it while staying in the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island.
It is a coming of age novel which then opens out in a campus narrative as well as a love story.
Also a coming of age, if very different, is Stefanie de Velasco’s lively Tiger Milk in which teenage girls wander about multi-cultural a sweltering summer’s Berlin attempting to shed their virginity. Tim Mohr’s translation conveys the defiance of children hovering on the edges of adult realities.
Of the books from the Netherlands, Peter Buwalda’s sophisticated and harsh family saga Bonita Avenue, translated by Jonathan Reeder, has the edge over Herman Koch’s Summer House with Swimming Pool, translated by Sam Garrett which is nowhere as convincing as Koch’s The Dinner.
Nor is Otto de Kat’s News from Berlin, translated by Ina Rilke as good as de Kat’s previous novel Julia, a beguiling slow burn of a story which really does make one catch one’s breath.
In this the earliest moment of the announcement, the signs appear to be pointing towards a German win.
Not since Romanian Herta Muller won in 1998 with The Land of Green Plums - among the finest victors to date - has a German language work taken this award. Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days would be a magnificent choice. It is a long journey until the short list in April, but there is no better way to pass the winter than travelling the world through reading a long list compiled by readers who value their libraries.
Mon, Nov 9, 2015, 14:08

WorldStage Newsonline-- The Freedom of Information Unit of Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Justice (FMOJ)  has sought collaboration with the National Orientation Agency (NOA) to enhance implementation of the Freedom of Information Act by public institutions in the country.

Director General of NOA, Mike Omeri  disclosed this when the Deputy Director FOI Unit of the Ministry of Justice, Mrs. Stella Anukam visited him in Abuja to fine tune areas of partnership between the two organizations, said the agency had translated the FOI Act in twenty-eight Nigerian languages and has distributed same to various Ministries, Departments and Agencies.

The DG NOA urged the FOI Unit of FMOJ to step up efforts in making the implementation a reality by encouraging the disclosure of information and educating the MDAs on  the type of information to be disclosed, adding that 3,000 personnel of the Agency have been deployed in continuous public sensitization about the act using the various platforms

He said: "The FOI act is timely, the right to know is a fundamental right of every citizen and the Act could be used to fight the ills of the society."

Earlier, the Director, FOIA Unit of Ministry of Justice, Mrs Stella Anukam said the unit was concerned about the implementation of the FOIA and that public servant should not be afraid to disclose information when necessary.

Anukam said the FOIA is about transparency and accountability in running the affairs of government, keeping records properly for the development of the country and is not a witch hunting effort.

She solicited the Agency's support for nationwide sensitization using its platforms.

I met Pablo Medina during my first semester as an MFA candidate at Emerson College back in 2012. I’d scheduled a meeting with him despite not being in any of his classes—I was looking for some guidance. Upon learning that Spanish was my first language, Pablo gave me a list of poets I should be reading, in the original Spanish. I didn’t mention that his bilingual poetry collection Points of Balance / Puntos de Apoyo was one of the main reasons I’d applied for the program. I went on to take two courses with him during my time at Emerson: a translation seminar on theory and practice and a literature course aptly titled “The Poet, the Daemon, the Craftsman.” I should note that I was also his assistant as the Graduate Program Director, and a research assistant for his translation project of The Weight of the Island by Virgilio Piñera. All this is to say, I got to know Pablo well during those two years, not only as a professor, but also as a poet, translator, and great thinker. 


Sixteen books of poetry, fiction, memoir and translation since his first book, Pork Rind and Cuban Songs, he comes to us with his newest collection The Island Kingdom. I spoke with Pablo at a cafe in Boston’s South End neighborhood before he embarked on a one-year sabbatical from teaching. Our conversation, from mentor to pupil, on his writing process, language, and new-found obsessions continued through e-mail correspondence. 

Eloisa Amezcua (Rail): Your books seem to be in conversation with one another, spanning from the first collection Pork Rind and Cuban Songs to The Island Kingdom. Cuba, your home until the age of twelve, is at the center of those two books specifically. What draws you to the island?

Pablo Medina: Do you mean the cursed condition of being surrounded by water on all sides, as Virgilio Piñera put it? The island was where I first came to light, I first walked, first talked. The island is in me and surrounds me, a sort of water of the imagination. It might be a cursed condition, but it’s all I’ve got. 

Rail: You said recently, in an interview with Cubaencuentro, “I define myself in Spanish. I manifest (myself) in English.” (my translation). You’ve published collections of poetry in both languages, as well as your bilingual edition of Points of Balance / Puntos de Apoyo. What draws you to one language over the other? 

Medina: Circumstances. When I am with Spanish speakers I speak Spanish, and I speak English with English speakers. When I’m with someone who speaks both, I code-switch, though I am not terribly comfortable with Spanglish, a particular form of code switching. Someone just told me that Robert Lado, the great linguist who taught at Georgetown for many years, called me the perfect bilingual. I don’t remember him saying that, but I’m bilingual all right. I don’t speak with forked tongue but with two tongues.

Rail: Any writing, regardless of the initial written language, is already a translation—of experience, history, reality, etc.—into written word. Do you stick with the initial written language (i.e. Spanish or English) with which you begin a piece? If not, what is your process of self-translation like? 

Medina: The language that underlies what I write is Spanish. I naturally define myself in that language. I’ll give a brief example: whenever I think of someone laughing, I say to myself “Je je.”When I write it in English it comes out as “Ha ha.” In other words, much of my work in English, whether poetry or prose, is translated from that first language, generally private and unspoken, into a second language, public and voiced. Translation is basic to what I do, to how I think, to how I manifest myself.

Rail: Speaking of manifestations, The Island Kingdom is full of characters—the Island itself, the Blue-Faced Man, Lady Babel, the Wild Dog, and many more. They, like the poems in the collection, are both wildly imaginative yet contained and refined. Can you speak to the use of creating characters in the writing of this book?

Medina: They’re emblematic. I am not after the shading of those characters in the way of modern fiction. When the wild dog howls, it is my howl he is embodying, but the cause of the howl is not psychological. It is the nature of the wild dog to howl, just as it is the nature of the Blue-Faced Man to look out the window to the meadowlands of Northern New Jersey.

Rail: What then would you say is the nature of the poet?

Medina: I can’t really speak about the poet’s nature, except to say that it is human. I can, however, speak to the nature of poetry, which is a foundational way of engaging with the world and trying to understand it, using the most basic tools we possess—language, and its handmaiden, music.

Rail: You have a series of “Saint” poems in The Man Who Wrote on Water, as well as in your latest collection The Island Kingdom. How did these poems come about? What specifically about “sainthood” draws these poems out?

Medina: The word “saint” in the title of those poems refers not to Christian belief, at least not directly, but to the word santo as it is used in santería. I believe that all things perceptible have a spirit or a santo, an essence if you will, which allows us to perceive them and interact with them. Whether that perception is imposed by us, the perceivers, or is in the object a priori our perceiving it, is not my concern in those poems. I leave that up to the philosophers.

Rail: Funny you should mention philosophers. There are numerous poems that reference or are in conversation with writers and thinkers of the past, including Friedrich Nietzsche in “Nietzsche’s Eyes.”  The book also contains epigraphs from Huidobro, Cavalcanti, Basho, and others. Alan Michael Parker refers to them as your “ghosts.” How do you envision this collection as being in conversation with the broader literary landscape, that is, the writing of these “ghosts”? 

Medina: I suppose they are ghosts, but they’ve also been my companions and my masters. To paraphrase Basho, they sought what I have been seeking.

Rail: I’m intrigued by the idea that they are both companions and masters. It certainly comes through in your writing—you find a way to emulate and expand on their style, in turn creating your own aesthetic. It’s beautiful. How did you envision The Island Kingdom coming together when writing poems for/about/in conversation with your companions and masters?

Medina: I didn’t sit down to write a collection of poems titled The Island Kingdom. The book coalesced, as do most of my books, after a period of four years, when I became aware of several themes that ran through the poems, precisely as a result of those conversations, threading them together in a chaotic but not meaningless fashion, as an archipelago is threaded together by islands in proximity to one another.

Rail: The final section of The Island Kingdom, “The Elementaries,” is made up of nine sections, nine tercets each, that are very tight syllabically. This makes sense given the title of the series—the poem aims to address elemental matters of life—sex, desire, reason, love, death. Did you go into the writing of this poem with these restraints in mind, or did they arise organically during the composition?

Medina: I like to play with form. In The Man Who Wrote on Water there are a number of sonnet-like contraptions (pseudo-sonnets, if you like), where I broke up the stanzaic patterns in ways I thought might be more palatable to contemporary sensibilities, while in “The Elementaries” I was exploring the haiku form. Most of those stanzas are seventeen syllables, in a five-seven-five pattern. Did I mention that I am intrigued by numerology?

Rail: Tell me more about this interest in numerology.

Medina: I am intrigued by numbers and their relationships. Two plus two equals four, but it could be just as true that two plus two equals five, given the right set of assumptions. Why are some numbers culturally more significant than others? I like prime numbers (I almost said primal) but I cannot say why. I like set theory. I like the paradox of the Grand Hotel. 

Rail: In the fifth section of “The Elementaries,” you write very candidly, “I’ve done three thousand/ poems, the oak has grown ten/ thousand leaves. Who cares?” And later, “What I say and what/ I mean are clusters of grapes/ from a twisted vine.” These lines, this series, feels like an ars poetica. If the answer to your [rhetorical] question is “no one,” why do you keep writing? What drives your work?  Is it simply a means of untwisting the grape vines?

Medina: I allude to Walter Benjamin’s statement: “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.” And then say that, yes, you're right, to a point. I am trying to untwist those vines but only in my mind's eye. Poetry is written in solitude, plumbing the depths of the possible in relation to the actual. The possible and actual are always present, sometimes in contrast, sometimes as complements. The intent of the poem remains as a way of connecting with an other, though that other is not always in my consciousness at the moment the poem is being composed.

Rail: In closing, it must be very special for you that your son, Pablo Medina Jr., does much of your cover design, including for The Island Kingdom as well as the Virgilio Piñera translations The Weight of the Island (Lavender Ink Press, 2015). How does this collaboration work between the two of you? Do you find similarities between the mediums you each work in respectively?

Medina: P Jr. is a typographer as well as a fine artist, so he deals with words as well as pictures. It's always a wonder to me how his visual imagination captures what is essential in my work. Some day when time allows we will do a real collaboration, with his work and mine in counterpoint. Until then I feel blessed that he does such marvelous covers.