From the National Center for Missing and Exploited Stanzas: Thou, O my Grief, be wise and tranquil still, The eve is thine which even now drops down, To carry peace or care to human will, And in a misty veil enfolds the town.

There's a book with the title Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. There are some valuable chapters in it, and I teach from it occasionally. But nothing there quite covers the odd position I got myself into the other day, which to me reflects the painfully ethical bit about translation.

While I don’t think it has acquired the viral oomph of “Dick in a Box,” the following outtakes from the “original” Japanese version of “The Office” are essential viewing for printculture types always on the look-out for high-carb fusions of popular culture and East-West discourse.

Reading over yesterday’s post, it occurred to me that the dilemma of the foreigner abroad has to do with how much of one’s core subjectivity one feels can survive the slings and arrows of cultural difference. We all have stories about people whose subject position, we feel, provides us with a bad example of how to behave when abroad. My favorite is that of Dan, my roommate for a semester at Peking University in Beijing in 1997-98.

The Artic Monkeys showed up in the news today in a place I didn't expect to see them. Again. I had just been talking to EH recently about how the search-and-sort practices of search-engine edited news sites (that I believe he's discussed on printculture before) landed the Artic Monkeys, after the release of their first single, under “Pet/Animal News” on the YahooScienceNews page that I skim most mornings. Today, it happened again.

An article in the New York Times this week reported on the recent linguistic history of the former Yugoslavia, where what were formerly known as regional accents or dialects are now being taught in the school as formal languages, largely as an attempt to ground ethnic or national identity. This includes the production of new textbooks: The authors of the new textbooks say such responses show how the region's culture has been splintered along...