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Not many people know this about me (because it hardly ever has occasion to come up), but I can actually read Yiddish at a reasonably competent level. This despite the fact that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish heritage or other connexions to Yiddish culture. I have decided that I should talk more about it, though, because the language is in bad shape these days, and I find that sad. So I thought a few remarks were in order on why I, a non-Jew, find it worthwhile, fulfilling, and rewarding to study Yiddish, and why putting time and effort into the appreciation and preservation of this unique and fascinating language is a worthwhile endeavour for anyone to get involved with.

Yiddish was until recently the language spoken by the majority of the world's Jews, and as such was the language of an international culture (this was before the creation of a Jewish state in Israel), a culture that prized learning and literacy and which therefore produced many great cultural fruits, in music, theatre, literature, etc.

Today Yiddish is spoken by only a tiny minority of the world's Jews, and were it not for a few religious sects that cling to it as an article of faith (such as the Satmar hasidim), it's future survival beyond the 21st century would be in great doubt. In any event, though, the language is a shell of its former self: before World War II, Yiddish had 12 million speakers. Now there are around 300,000 and the overwhelming majority of these are quite elderly. At one time Yiddish theatres in New York put on productions of a quality and attendance that equaled those put on in English, and the Forward, then a daily paper, had a circulation of 275,000.

It is now a weekly paper whose circulation hovers around 5,000—every Yiddish-speaking man, woman, and child on the planet would have to subscribe for it to rival its former glory; the paper's original building in Manhattan (pictured here) has been converted into appartments.

There were three key reasons for Yiddish's rapid decline. First and most obviously, the massacre of the holocaust led to the murder of six million Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were Yiddish speakers. But still, one may legitimately ask why the remaining Jews abandoned the language. After all, if Hitler and the Nazis failed in their quest to exterminate all Jews, should not Jews have fought to restore their culture? If Yiddish culture (the only Jewish culture the Nazis knew about, to the extent they knew anything about Jews) were allowed to perish, would not that be allowing the holocaust to wreak still more destruction, even after the Nazis themselves were stopped?

Of course the Jewish nation did re-assert its identity in the wake of the holocaust, re-taking the Holy Land in 1948 and creating the Jewish state of Israel. But the new state took as its language Modern Hebrew—and the use of Yiddish was actively discouraged. This effort to eradicate Yiddish from Israel is the second major reason for the language's decline.

It may seem paradoxical to replace a language with such a vibrant intellectual heritage with one that, in its modern incarnation at least, had little past—although of course Ancient Hebrew has through the Bible one of the most important literary heritages in the history of the world, it was produced some two thousand years before the modern state of Israel or the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

But the fact is that Yiddish culture was very much out of style following World War II: the founders of Israel wanted to make a new beginning, in a strong and independent state, and the image of the ghetto Jew, discriminated against and persecuted in Europe for so long, was something that the Jewish people were now eager to distance themselves from. And Yiddish was for many too closely tied to these images of the ghetto to be allowed to continue in "Eretz Israel". It was a past they were ashamed of.

Another, more practical reason for Hebrew to be used in place of Yiddish in Israel was that the holocaust had changed the demographics of world jewry. Whereas before most Jews were European and Yiddish-speaking, the slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis made these Jews, called Ashkenazi, less numerically dominant. Middle Eastern Jews, called Sephardi, had no knowledge of Yiddish, but if the state of Israel was to survive it would have to have as many Jews as possible on board to build it. Hebrew was a neutral language and a link to the common heritage of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi; Yiddish was not. Thus Modern Hebrew, a spoken language less than a century old, became the official language of Israel.

The third reason for Yiddish's decline lay with the diaspora. Not all Jews live in Israel, obviously; many millions continue to reside in other countries all over the world. Here too, though, modernity and a desire to fight the anti-semitism seen in the ghetto have led Jews to abandon Yiddish. American Jews now most often speak English at home, French Jews speak French, etc. The older generation, eager to see their children better integrated, simply did not teach them Yiddish, and as their generation dies out, a large percentage of the remaining Yiddish speakers in the world will go with them.

So far I have laid out what Yiddish is, and how it once flourished, and how it came to be that it is now becoming endangered. However now that I have traced the reasons for Yiddish's decline I want to get back to my main topic, which is why, despite all this, one might still get a heck of a lot out of knowing Yiddish.

Cultural Charm—the Joys of Yiddish

There is no other language like Yiddish. It is a Germanic language (it shares a common ancestor with German), written with Hebrew letters, and with a large amount of borrowings from other languages, mostly Hebrew and Slavic. It has a wealth of idiomatic expressions, which combine to give it a character and personality that are completely unique. Many Yiddish words have come into English, such as klutz, chutzpah, and tukhes—and the fact that these are some of the most colourful words in English should give you a taste of what sort of personality Yiddish has as a language. This makes Yiddish a fascinating language to study for linguists and those interested in quirky languages. For those with a more casual interest in this side of Yiddish, all of this is explored in Leo Rosten's book The Joys of Yiddish, which provides an accessible look at Yiddish as a language of humour and personality that is aimed at those who are not big on learning languages.

The Language of Literary Heavyweights

Yiddish was once the language of an international intelligentsia whose literary works have gained international acclaim. As a language that is highly idiomatic, and with its own personality and character, it should be obvious that Yiddish literature is best appreciated in the original. Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer provide a wealth of literary classics in Yiddish that are not read often enough by students of world literature today. Admirers of world literature have a lot to gain by reading Yiddish; in this light the objection "but I'm not Jewish" seems as absurd as avoiding Victor Hugo because one is not French, or Dostoyevski when one is not Russian.

Preserving What has Nearly Been Wiped Out

I try to avoid talking about politics in my posts on this blog, however I am willing to go so far as to say that I am not in favour of Nazism. Dead set against it, as a matter of fact. It is not for me to judge, living in another time and place and not being Jewish, the feelings of those who decided that Yiddish culture was something to be ashamed of. However, with the perspective that distance does bring, I can see this much: the Nazis wanted to eliminate Yiddish culture, and in light of the events of the last 65 years, they have been largely succesful. Learning Yiddish and appreciating its culture is one small way to, symbolically at least, refuse them that success.

There are religious communities within Judaism that feel the same way, and more strongly than I do. I am confident that because of their existence, Yiddishkeit is not really in danger of extinction. Yiddish-speaking communities exist in the United States and Israel who are not persecuted (and have phenomenally high birth rates), and some still remain in Europe as well, so the language will not be allowed to die out. Secular Yiddish culture, though, such as that embodied in the Forward, has clearly seen its glory days come and go.

Still, there is nothing like the connexion one feels through a first-hand knowledge of Yiddish with the world of pre-war European Jewry, the vibrant world of intellectual debate and artistic achievement that lives on in their writings, music—and cinema. The most poignant illustration of this for me is the 1936 movie Yidl Mitn Fidl (a film that is as charming as the name sounds), filmed on location in Poland (then home to hundreds of thousands of Jews; now home to barely any). Many of the extras in the film were inhabitants of the local shtetls (Jewish villages). In other words, the faces of many of the extras in this movie are those of the very people who would soon be rounded up into concentration camps. To me, hearing the songs of this film gives us a connexion to what happened in the holocaust that makes Schindler's List pale in comparison—so much so that I feel it is unfortunate that for so many people, holocaust awareness pretty much begins and ends with that movie. A far cry from cold memorials and remembrances, learning Yiddish gives one the opportunity to connect directly with the past and to know those who lived and died in it through their own voices.

(Posted on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2009. Move ahead a few minutes in the clip above to see an extract of the movie Yidl Mitn Fidl.)

When I bought my Playstation 3, I bought four games, Metal Gear Solid 4, Grand Theft Auto 4, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. All of these games have something in common: they are realistic, movie-like adventures filled with guns, explosions, and plot twists and turns. They also have violence and language that make them inappropriate for children.

LittleBigPlanet is something completely different for the PS3. It's as cute and fun as it looks, but rather than try to drum up some florid prose, I'd rather just embed a video to give you the idea:

With that out of the way, there are three points that I would like to comment on here: the controls, the sound, and the appeal of LittleBigPlanet.

Whenever an exclusive-to-PS3 game comes out, message board trolls who are 360 fans will come out and try to lower the game's reputation by harping on some minor flaw until it seems as though it were a major flaw. With LittleBigPlanet, these internet troglodytes love to harp on the 'floaty' controls. All I can say is that if that is the best criticism you can come up with about LittleBigPlanet, there must not be much to complain about. The controls are great. (A precision-based level like the ninja training one would be no fun otherwise—whereas in fact it happens to be my favourite out of the single player game)

Another thing which one does not necessarily pick up on right away when reading about this game, is just how amazing the sound track is. LittleBigPlanet has one of the best video game soundtracks ever, and although that is not in itself a reason to buy the game, it does mean that the game is great on a level beyond what you can see at first glance.

Finally, I want to say a word about the impact LittleBigPlanet has had on our house. Up until now, my wife has never touched the Playstation 3 controller. Not only did LittleBigPlanet draw her in, though: now she won't put the thing down. From having LittleBigPlanet dreams to complaining that she can't get the music out of her head in the morning, she has LittleBigPlanet on the brain! Best of all for her as well as for me, we can play together, cooperatively at the same time. So early on, when she was still coming to grips with the controls, I was able to help her get through difficult levels she wouldn't have been able to do on her own (although I must admit that she now has more stickers collected than me!). It's a huge hit in our house. (For context, this is not the first time that a video game has captivated her to such an extent—but the only other time I ever saw it happen was with New Super Mario Bros., so it is in some very good company!)

It is no coincidence that when you beat the single-player game, the trophy you receive is a silver—not a gold—and that its name is "Just Beginning". Some of the user-created levels (hundreds of thousands of new levels that people create that you can play online for free) are amazing—some are as good if not better than the ones that come on the disk. Others are creative masterpieces that you can't believe someone actually made using LittleBigPlanet. At the end of the day, LittleBigPlanet is not just a game, it's a platform, and its possibilities are something we will be exploring for years to come.

Since antiquity, Greek rhetoric has been viewed as having three schools: the grand style, associated with Thucydides, the plain style, represented by Lysias, and the middle style, epitomised by Demosthenes.

In this very humourous passage from Herodotus (III.46), however, we have evidence of a fourth, Laconic, school of rhetoric:

Ἐπείτε δὲ οἱ ἐξελασθέντες Σαμίων ὑπὸ Πολυκράτεος ἀπίκοντο ἐς τὴν Σπάρτην, καταστάντες ἐπὶ τοὺς ἄρχοντας ἔλεγον πολλὰ οἷα κάρτα δεόμενοι· οἳ δέ σφι τῇ πρώτῃ καταστάσι ὑπεκρίναντο τὰ μὲν πρῶτα λεχθέντα ἐπιλελῆσθαι, τὰ δὲ ὕστατα οὐ συνιέναι. Μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα δεύτερα καταστάντες ἄλλο μὲν εἶπον οὐδέν, θύλακον δὲ φέροντες ἔφασαν τὸν θύλακον ἀλφίτων δέεσθαι. Οἳ δέ σφι ὑπεκρίναντο "τῷ θυλάκῳ" περιεργάσθαι· βοηθέειν δ᾽ ὦν ἔδοξε αὐτοῖσι.

Apparently, the Spartans weren't big on oratory :-)

While I hope that no one other than me was ever aware of it, there was a bug on this website a few months ago that started when I added an Adobe Flash object to the page (the Nike+ widget over on the right). If you kept the page open for a long time (like twenty minutes or more), it would suddenly prompt you for a password! (Which, whether you entered one or just hit cancel, didn't do anything.)

Besides looking unprofessional, this worried me for another reason: many of the websites on craven.fr are not open to the public and require passwords, while other sites are public and don't. The default policy is to close addresses to the public, as this is a standard security policy. So, if you just enter "www.craven.fr/" followed by something random (like www.craven.fr/somethingRandom, then it will ask you for a password too (and only if you have one will you then be informed that no such page exists.)

So what was going on? Why was Nike's flash widget seemingly trying to take browsers onto parts of my site they have no business going to?

With a little sleuthing courtesy of Firebug, which besides being the best tool in the world for debugging website development, also lets you monitor all the HTTP requests your browser is making, I was finally able to find the answer:

It's actually a quite innocent, if somewhat poorly thought-out, facet of Flash: although each <object> can define whether cross-site scripting is allowed, you can also have a global configuration file called crossdomain.xml. This can be handy, for instance, on sites like twitter or blogspot where individual clients may add their own Flash objects, if you want to enforce a global policy. (NB I am no Flash expert, so this is a vague description that might contain inaccuaracies, so if you plan on doing something with this file for your site, find proper documentation!) The hiccup is that since I do not have a file called crossdomain.xml, the server considers it an unauthorised access and asks unsuspecting users for a password.

In the end therefore I ended up putting a dummy (non-functional) crossdomain.xml file marking it public, so this random password dialog will no longer turn up. But boo to Adobe for requiring webmasters to add a file to their servers and penalise end-users who simply visit the site if they don't. This isn't like robots.txt which 404s graciously since it is only requested by bots; in this case a 401 actually bothers the user, due to a poor assumption on the part of Adobe's engineers (viz. that if the page didn't exist, there would be a 404; they did not take the legitimate possibility of a 401 into account). And thank goodness my default security is set to BASIC authorization: had I used FORM, the user would actually have been redirected to a new page!

Amateur astronomy is one of the most rewarding scientific hobbies out there, although when one becomes serious enough to be ready to buy a telescope, it can also be quite expensive. It is a fortunate thing, then, that one can purchase a quite satisfactory astronomical bookshelf with only five volumes—and get decades of use and enjoyment out of them. So, in this article, I outline the five books that make up my astronomy bookshelf, and explain why (supplemented with magazines and the internet) I think that they are all I will ever need to own.

1. The National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky. If you only buy one book about astronomy, this should be it. Contained in this handy volume is everything the beginning or binocular astronomer needs: star charts (both comprehensive and according to the month and which way you're looking—very useful when you are just learning your way around the sky), data on the planets and eclipses, as well as an overview of all that the night sky contains (what open cluster, globular clusters, planetary nebulæ, etc. all are), and even a great deal of historical information about the constellations, important stars, and planets. For a long time this was the only astronomical book I owned, and it served me well, and continues to do so even now. It is an excellent one-volume source for all things astronomical.

2. Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas. Where the Audubon Society's guide can let you down, is when you are hunting for an elusive binary star or Messier object in your telescope. Its charts are only intended for naked eye or binocular star gazers, and don't provide the level of detail that it takes to really get your bearings in a telescope. In consequence, finding deep sky objects that were too far removed from brighter landmarks was pretty hit or miss.

This is where the Pocket Sky Atlas comes in. It is a brilliant, astoundingly economical little star chart, that is perfect for amateurs with small or mid-sized telescopes, and wire bound for easy use in the field. Until the day when I get that 12" Dobsonian, this is all the star chart I will ever need, and it makes finding one's way around the night sky with a telescope so much easier. (More and more, telescope's are being sold with motorised computers that promise to direct you automatically towards any object in the night sky. To me, this is "cheating"—knowing one's way around the night sky, oneself, is to me one of the primary goals of amateur astronomy. I would sooner just look at pictures of the Messier objects than resort to using one of these devices.)

3-5. Burnham's Celestial Handbook in three volumes. Just as the Pocket Sky Atlas deepens and improves the maps in the Audubon field guide, Burnham's Celestial Handbook gives deeper insight into the encyclopædic information. Indeed, one might best describe these books as a three volume encyclopædia of astronomy. Information about constellations, stars, and deep sky objects is given in much deeper detail than in the field guide, and it provides the perfect resource for reading up on a night's observations.

Beyond the bookshelf. These books provide me with all the reference material I think I will ever need. But regular contact with Sky & Telescope magazine, or their website skyandtelescope.com, provides the necessary link with current happenings in astronomy and astrophysics. Nebulæ, galaxies, and globular clusters are only interesting if we are aware of the physics involved in their functioning, and the mysteries science has yet to explain about them. Hence it is essential to keep in touch with modern science in order for amateur astronomy to remain interesting.

In addition, software programs provide us with an important "astronomical clock"—showing what is in the night sky, and allowing us to better plan an evening's observation. ("Oh look, I didn't realise that Saturn was visible again.") For me, living just off the English channel with what seems like nine out of ten nights being overcast, this is essential for keeping track of the night sky over time. I can by no means refer you to an exhaustive list of what's out there, but the best astronomy software I have personally used is KStars for Linux; on the Mac I use the Starry Night widget, which sits on the dashboard.

Astronomy is one of the only hobbies I have where I am now satisfied with the 'completeness' of my bookshelf; it is very satisfying to feel that one has all the material one needs on a given subject at hand.

I was reading Cæsar and came across this obscure bit that I would have been completely unable to understand had I not just happened to have read in another book a description of the Roman class system, so I thought I'd pass on the info in the hope that it might someday connect with a confused reader and be helpful.

Ariovistus postulavit 'ne quem peditem ad colloquium Cæsar adduceret: vereri se ne per insidias ab eo circumveniretur; uterque cum equitatu veniret: alià ratione sese non esse venturum.' Cæsar, quòd neque colloquium interpositâ causâ tolli volebat neque salutem suam Gallorum equitatui committere audebat, commodissimum esse statuit omnibus equis Gallis equitibus detractis eò legionarios milites legionis decimæ, cui quàm maximè confidebat, imponere.

(De Bello Gallico, I, XLII). Why does Cæsar have to borrow horses from the Gauls in order to take his legionnaires to the parley? The fascinating thing that one must know in order to comprehend this passage is that the Romans had no mounted cavalry of their own! So Cæsar's army only had Roman footsoldiers, and all the mounted knights were supplied by his Gaulish allies. Which strikes me as so strange, because throughout history knights are always held in higher prestige than footsoldiers—and weirder still, knights were also held in prestige in Rome itself! One of Cæsar's soldiers even jokes about being promoted to knightood:

Quod quum fieret, non irridiculè quidam ex militibus decimæ legionis dixit, 'plus, quàm pollicitus esset, Cæsarem ei facere: pollicitum se in cohortis prætoriæ loco decimam legionem habiturum, nunc ad equum rescribere.'

The equites in Cæsar's time formed the second estate of Roman society, between the lower class populus and the noble, senatorial class. (By this time, the older Republican division between plebians and patricians had ceased to exist—although those rare senatorial families with patracian roots were proud of the fact—most nobles had their roots in the plebs.) To be a knight required great wealth, just as in so many other times in history, since being able to supply a horse and the necessary equipment for mounted warfare to the state was the original prerequisite for the status. In earlier centuries of the Republic, the equites were the Roman cavalry force. Moreover, since the nobility were barred from trade and business, the equites came to be a very powerful class in their own right: they were Rome's economic élite in contrast to the senatorial political élite (whose wealth could only come from inheritence or corruption).

What happened, then, over the course of time, was that knighthood came to be in Rome something completely honorary and status-related. And so the equites rode their horses in parades and other ceremonial occasions, but were not expected to actually fight—not any more than we would expect some one who gets a British knighthood today to ride out in battle!

I find it fascinating that this could take place in a time when actual mounted fighting was still going on, though. (And would continue to be for another 1900+ years.) I had always assumed that Sir Elton John (e.g.) is not expected to ride onto the field of battle today because warfare has evolved away from that kind of thing—but here Cæsar actually has to borrow the horses from his Gaulish allies to give to his legionnaires, because he trusts the latter more with his life! It's amazing that such a military juggernaut as the Roman Empire would have fully entrusted its cavalry—one of the most essential arms of its military force—to outsourcing. And yet that's the way it was.

UPDATE 14.05.2009—I have written a follow-up article to this one that addresses further aspects of the Roman use of cavalry under Cæsar.

My iPod is in mourning this week as most of the people behind many of my favourite podcasts (including what had been my current number one favourite, "1up Yours"), were laid off yesterday as Hearst Corporation bought the 1up Network from the long-struggling Ziff-Davis.

Along with the podcasts, also axed was the illustrious video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly—although I cannot mourn it in the same way that I mourn the podcasts' passing. This is not because I am without nostalgia—in fact I'm probably one of the few gamers still around who can say that I bought Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue #1 (with the Mega-Man 2 cover) from the newstand. But print media, especially an enthusiast magazine focused on a multi-media realm such as video gaming, has long had a bleak outlook. Like most gamers nowadays, I have long gotten my gaming information through the internet. In fact the only times I've bought EGM in recent years were when I was in an airport, and that isn't often enough to feel too bad about the magazine going away.

If print is the past, though, the things 1up was doing in terms of online media were clearly the future. I subscribed to four of their regular podcasts (Broken Pixels and Review Crew were a bit too irregular for me to include them with the rest): The 1up Show, 1up Yours, 1up FM, and Sports Anomaly. Of these, the video podcast the 1up Show was produced at a standard that exceeds most television programs, and it deservedly got top billing on the iTunes store. In terms of new media, that is a coveted achievement.

Even so, one can see from a business perspective, that the 1up Show took a lot of people to make, and that is very expensive. In the face of that, and the few advertisements they were able to include, I am willing to admit the possibility that they might not have been able to continue with the 1up Show. (Although I should think that they could have done a better job in including advertisers—enthusiast-oriented programs like this are great for advertisers, where the topical ads are more interesting and less annoying to viewers, so it seems to me that there was a lot of untapped opportunity there.) But the audio podcasts were cheap to produce and cheaper to host—and they also had almost no advertising. I definitely feel that their potential was untapped by Ziff Davis—but for Hearst to axe them means that they have let go of the best part of the property that they bought. These shows made their contributers celebrities among gamers—who then read the articles on the website chiefly because they were written by these personalities. With no personalities and no shows left, Hearst is missing out on a lot of potential value.

One of the other "enthusiast" (in a way) podcasts I listen to, is the Wall Street-oriented "The Real Story" from theStreet.com. It never ceases to amaze me how consistently they are able to get advertisers—often ones like BP that are not even directly related to the show topic. Revision3 and TWiT may have to work harder to find sponsors, but they have been able to do so. This is why, despite not being on the business side, I cannot believe that such widely circulated and respected gaming podcasts—who have an obvious bank of potential sponsors in the game publishers and console manufacturers—could not be more succesful from a business standpoint.

But I digress. Although I take some solace in the fact that (podcasts being so easy to produce), most of my other favourite enthusiast podcasts ("The Java Posse", "Geeks On", and "The HDTV Podcast") are run by enthusiasts as hobbies, with no thought of monetary return. From this, and from the encouraging Twitter posts by the fired 1up-ers (the first episode of "Rebel FM" is already up!), I am confident that more podcasts will still be coming.

But, with the personalities that make these shows what they are being scattered to the four winds, I do worry about how long this will be able to continue, as they progressively find jobs elsewhere. Some may be able to continue, as John Davison continued to appear on 1up Yours even after leaving the company to found whatTheyPlay.com, but others, like past greats Shawn Elliott or Mark MacDonald, will not. The prospect of so many leaving at once makes me worry for the future, and while I look forward to listening to what they put out, the end of 1up as we know it is a very sad thing.

Mielke's blog of EGM's final day is a must-read if you've ever followed this magazine or its podcasts before.

While we're on the subject of books, I've recently gotten around to finally reading a random find I picked up in a used bookstore in Montreal, a gem of a book called The Translator's Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice. What was so curious about this book was that it was in the Penguin classics series: one of the most mainstream, widespread series of paperback translations out there. A collection of essays by the translators seemed like a fascinating 'behind the scenes' glimpse into what for me had seemed like a very impersonal, corporate series of paperbacks—especially since this book's reason for existing—a tribute to one of the series' long-time editors who had died suddenly—was so personal and 'in-house'. I was amazed that Penguin would even have put out such an obviously non-commercially viable book, and since I was able to pick it up in the bargain bin for nearly nothing, I didn't hesitate to buy it, even though I knew I wouldn't have time to read it anytime soon.

So The Translator's Art has come with me across two continents, sitting unread but always cherished as a prized find. I knew I had found a rare treasure with this book, but I was saving reading it until I could savour it properly, the way an œnophile saves an old bottle of a fine wine until just the right occasion. I mean, just a quick glance over the table of contents was sufficient to see how far up my alley this book was going to be: "On Translating Sanskrit Myths" by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, "Classical Prose at its Extremes" by Walter Hamilton, "Translating 'the Sound of Water': Different Versions of a Hokku by Bashō" by Noriyuki Yuasa, "Translating the Mabinogion and Early Irish Tales" by Jeffrey Gantz... I don't know what they were smoking when they decided to publish this as a Penguin paperback, but I sure love that they did!

At last the time has come for me to read this book, and although I couldn't have known it, this was the most perfect time imaginable in my life for me to have read it. Not only the essays, but the story of Betty Radice's life itself was just as edifying (to be clear, I had never heard of this person beforehand). It is rather like an episode of 'This American Life'—only in this case focusing on an English housewife who kept her translation of Pliny under her bed and worked on it any time she had a spare moment for a period of over ten years as she balanced her love of the classics and Oxford education with the challenges of cooking, cleaning, and changing diapers. There do not seem to be many people who, after university, continue to read the Latin and Greek classics out of a love for them, and so in reading her story I could relate quite a bit.

The same is true of many of the essayists. By and large the essays were smart insightful treatises on translation—some of the most erudite stuff I've read in a long while, in fact. But they also provided glimpses here and there into the translators' lives. Literary translators are pretty much exclusively working out of love for their subject matter. Many are teachers and academics, but others, like myself, had unrelated careers while still cultivating their love for literature and language on the side: W.G. Shepherd makes only one oblique reference to ""my job (I mean that by which I make a living)", when writing about his translation of Horace. I could just picture Betty Radice's doctor, seeing her reading the Odyssey in the original Greek while nine months pregnant, suggesting that she read something 'a little lighter'. Or Barbara Reynolds, who always kept a few pages of the Italian epic Orlando Furioso on a clipboard with her, so she could work on it on the bus, while standing in line—any time she had a spare minute. ("Ask me some questions, love" offered one bus driver, who mistook her for a pollster!)

Many of their attitudes, too, were ones I could relate to. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, in particular, remarked that she once felt as I often do, "I don't want to write a translation for anyone stupid/lazy/uneducated enough to make use of a translation." Peter Green's essay on translating Ovid is a must read for anyone thinking about translating Latin poetry. And Trever Saunders and Walter Hamilton's tales of translating from Latin and Greek were wonderful insights into the kind of life that I sometimes daydream about. And more than one author acknowledged Roy Campbell's aphorism that "translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive" :-) I was lucky in that most of the essays are about translating Latin and Greek, so this fell in perfectly with my recent enthusiasm for improving in these languages.

In sum, this rare little ultra-niche book was even more than I had hoped it would be. A real case of just the right book finding its way to just the right person to be read at just the right time.

My Christmas haul this year was pretty humbling, in that I got a lot of great stuff. I'm lucky to have such generous friends and family! Looking over it, though, one thing was striking for me: my video game presents consisted of two, third-party Wii games.

This is pretty shocking for those who follow video games closely, for two reasons: 1) There are no good Wii games that have come out in the last six months, and 2) all good Wii games are first-party, while the third-party games are all terrible.

At least, that is the conventional wisdom. Number 2, however, is often heard with the qualifier attached "except Guitar Hero", and indeed one of my two Wii games was Guitar Hero World Tour. Already having the Wii plastic guitar for Guitar Hero III meant that this was a no-brainer over the PS3 version, especially since the Wii version finally has DLC. Guitar Hero is the game I have sunk the most hours into on the Wii, and so having this next volume, with about 80 songs plus more downloadable all the time, means that my Wii will be seeing a lot of use in '09, dearth of new games or not.

Most gamers will grant that as normal, but what could my second third-party Wii game possibly be? Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, of course! This is not as acknowledged by "gamerz" as Guitar Hero, but I find sports games ten times more fun on the Wii than on the HD consoles (where they might look better, but are less fun to play), and golf in particular I could not even imagine playing with a DualShock controller. (Most self-proclaimed hard-core gamers don't play sports games, which is probably why this point is so rarely conceded to the Wii.) In Wii Sports, golf was one of my favourites, but it only had nine holes and no real progression. Now I can play every course on the PGA tour, with multiple elements to give a real sense of progression. I'm still mastering the gameplay but I do find it to give a good enough sense of control that I'm not disappointed. I do find it kind of lame that the grass textures look worse than Wii Sports, but I waited out the '07 and '08 games for them to upgrade the graphics, so I'll take these as good enough.

Both of these are games that I see myself playing all year long, so I think they were great ones to get. When I look at the year ahead though, all the games I'm excited about are on the PS3—nothing on the Wii. Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV, Uncharted 2, Final Fantasy XIII are all games I'm really looking forward to, and I just bought LittleBigPlanet with my gift certificates. (Other older games I might yet pick up are Fallout 3, Valkyria Chronicles, and Assassin's Creed.) The Wii has nothing promising coming up, and that is a disappointment. After seeing what they could do with the controls in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, it's too bad that there aren't more serious games for the system. (Or at least, they aren't announcing them.)

Even so, I'm glad to have both a PS3 and a Wii, and will be sinking a lot of hours on both in the year ahead!

I'm finally getting old enough to realise that there is no point in me making a New Year's resolution, since experience shows it will have no chance of success beyond the first couple weeks, or at the most, months. However, this year I'm trying a different tactic: instead of resolving to change some habit like I did before, this year my resolutions are going to be based on goals: projects that I'm giving myself until the end of the year to complete. This should greatly improve my chances of success. Not only that, but I'm going to set the bar pretty low—low enough that in theory I should be done by June. But then, taking into account how easily I am easily distracted, factoring in a six month buffer is probably a good idea!

So, without further ado, here are my two 'resolution' projects for 2009:

Finish reading Cæsar's de Bello Gallico. I've already read book I and more than half of book II, so that leaves five and a half books for next year, which is quite doable, but will require me to keep at it. Ideally I'd like to also read all of Nepos' Vitæ this year too, and get started on Cicero, but I doubt that that is realistic.

Finish reading Books I & II of the Iliad. I'm near the end of Book I already, so this really amounts to Book II over most of next year, which I don't think will be too burdensome. Ideally I'd also like to read Lysias XII and Demosthenes' On the Crown, but Greek has to take a backseat to Latin for me (because my Latin needs more work), so I know it's almost surely not going to happen.

There's plenty more I could challenge myself with, like running a certain number of miles, having a more succesful garden, finally getting around to reading Двенадцать стульев, or getting through the second volume of my Chinese textbook; but I know that these are closer to things that I wish I was doing rather than things I can confidently say I will do. So in the interest of setting achievable goals, I'm only going to hold myself accountable for those two 'resolutions'.