#Repost @blackwellbooks
• • • • •
In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary – widely used in schools around the world – was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these “lost words” included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions – the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual – became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.

Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a “spell book” that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. The Lost Words is that book – a work that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grass-roots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Lost-Words-by-Robert-Macfarlane-Jackie-Morris-illustrator/9781487005382

#blackwells #blackwellbooks #blackwellsbooks #blackwellsbookshop #bookstagram #lostwords #thelostwords #nature #dictionary #words #nature

Ending 2017 how I want to begin 2018 writing pages and pages… #amwriting #MrTumnal #TheImaginaryWife #fairymagic #creativity #words

This a spell book of words. It is a book that you have to curl up in the armchair and pour over. It is a book that you can’t just just read, but touch and feel, and trace your fingers over the pages to reveal the hidden words. And when you find the hidden words, there is a poem behind each of them that reveals yet more forgotten words.

It is impossible to just read this book. You have to live this book; read the words out loud to yourself as you touch the letters on the pages and marvel at the beautiful, revealing, illustrations.

This isn’t a problem because it’s not as if I’m ever going to be able to read the original, but it does make me think that I simply cannot imagine how you go about translating a novel with all the nuance and subtlety that exists in the language.

I find it hard enough to comprehend how one goes about translating short, simple documents (although a friend of mine who is a translator will probably tell me that there is no such thing as a short, simple document), let along something that has metaphor, story, and emotion involved…

Anyone who has watched a film with subtitles will know that the half of the audience who can speak the language will be chuckling along with the laughter in the lines awkwardly ahead of those of us waiting for the subtitles. And dubbed films can be worse, with words that just don’t fit – all because sentences have to be reordered. How does anyone go about doing that? And where do you start? Presumably sometimes whole chapters have to be completely restructured so that in translation they work the same as in the original. It just blows my mind.

And in short, however much I read and enjoy War & Peace, I will never actually read the real War & Peace.