Monday, 5 February 2024


 Have nothing to criticise in awkward translations. As someone said, people who speak broken English are people who speak more than one language. My French is usually grammatical but falls well short of fluency. Was better fifty years ago. And in Polish am more than pleased if I can make a simple request, quite regardless of tense and case. As for Turkish, a few words are all I have, though slightly better than Arabic where it’s down to no, thank you, mother and god. 


So the pleasure in English translations from Turkish is in no way judgmental. But there is often a delightful quirkiness. As in the story accompanying the photo from Gündem Kıbrıs (Agenda Cyprus) news site. It begins with “A sculpture has been found buried in a mind in Ulukışla” [their translation not mine] and continues with “2 people are arrested”. Leaving aside the arrests - the story does continue but in Turkish and well beyond my ability - or Google Translate’s - to pursue. The arrests are intriguing. Stolen artefacts or worse? But the sculpture buried in a mind is sheer poetry. Presumably a typo but a lovely one. Quite a few sculptures buried in my mind - from Rome, Cairo, Knossos, Xi’an. Beautiful.