This is the second time I’ve read this kind of thing in the TLS in recent weeks. This time it’ll be online for a few days more, in a review of Ted Hughes, Selected Translations, edited by Daniel Weissbort:

Daniel Weissbort, who edited this selection, tells the story of Hughes taking another poet’s translation of a work by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhasz and, without any knowledge of the original language and no Hungarian speaker to advise him, turning that version into a thrilling poem that drives the existing versions off the map. It is as if there were, as the race has often dreamed, an ur-language, some fundamental human speech predating the Tower of Babel, to which true poets have visionary access.

I must remember to work on this. Just imagine: you need no dictionaries, no trips abroad to brush up the language.

(The reviewer, Clive Wilmer, does very much qualify this statement in the rest of the review, to be fair)

Someone just phoned to ask if I’m Metellus Scipio. I am not. Wikipedia says:

Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica – also known as Metellus Scipio, consul 52 BC, adopted son of Metellus Pius, with whom he campaigned against Sertorius. He became father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. He commanded the “Republican” army at Thapsus, and was killed in battle against Gaius Julius Caesar’s legions.

The new Metellus Scipio has published three book reviews on amazon.de. They all award between one and two gold stars out of five. So much for my reputation as a bearer of sweetness and light.

Metellus Scipio reviews

I must admit to some partial agreement with MS. On Fisher’s The German Legal System and Legal Language:

The writing is only relatively mediocre (unlike “German Legal System and Laws” from Oxford University Press, which is full of horrid Denglish). If you already know what he’s trying to say, you understand what he means. But if you already know how the German legal system is set up, why would you read this book?

I might have slipped such a comment in brackets in myself! I must say I possess Fisher, in one edition (it keeps being expanded and there’s a new edition), but I haven’t studied it in depth. I tend to disagree with some of its suggestions, but I don’t know it well enough to review it.

Zahn is great, but the criticism here is of the electronic version and in particular the software. Similarly with Herbst, which I find never contains what I want either, although I’m usually looking for Swiss or Austrian terms, and I would not make do with Schäfer either, unlike the reviewer – my Schäfer and Herbst are in a pretty pristine condition, for obvious reasons.

This van stands next door all day on Tuesdays. Not that I shall be giving it any custom tomorrow – I am making baked beans.

The Juristisches Internetprojekt Saarbrücken has a link of the week, and a year or two ago I used to look at these regularly. Now I have been back after a gap, and I have three useful links to pass on:

Portal des Fürstentums Liechtenstein – a Liechtenstein portal

Juriblogs – Le répertoire des blogs juridiques: a large annotated collection of French blog links – click on the second tab for a list

European Forum of Official Gazettes – click on the tab

Their latest link is to blawgs.

I also found another translation weblog, transubstantiation – can’t remember where.

Professor Salvatore Averna has kindly posted his legal translation bookmarks – Italian and English – on the legaltranslators group at yahoogroups. This looks like a blog with only one entry.

Professor Ulrich Noack’s blog Unternehmensrechtliche Notizen has frequent and interesting posts. Today he posts a link to an English PDF file, intended to introduce people who don’t read German to the current situation in German corporate law (87 pages).

Germany’s Corporate and Financial Law 2007: (Getting) Ready for Competition

ULRICH NOACK
Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf – Faculty of Law – Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
DIRK A. ZETZSCHE
Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf – Faculty of Law – Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC) May 2007

It looks excellent. I wouldn’t mind it in German, but I suspect from the footnotes that the whole thing is designed for English speakers (I wish I could switch off the EFL teacher in my head).