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ONLINE TRANSLATOR
It's hard not to be excited by the thought of a web page which
can turn stilted English sentences into dazzling French, Italian,
Spanish, German, or Portuguese. Well, Altavista have exactly that
on their web site - a beta (trial) version of translation
software produced by the boffins at Systran.
There's a Press Release at http://altavista.digital.com/av/content/pr120997.htm. The Direct Translation Page is http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/.
It doesn't yet seem to be available at any of Altavista's mirror sites.
The service is cutely named after a creation of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. The babelfish was a small red fish which when placed in the outer ear would cause any speech that passed through it to be translated into the language of the ear's owner. Altavista's service can deliver prose which looks a bit like it's been swallowed by a red herring and has turned up on your dinner plate, but it is a lot less ticklish than a fish in the ear.
The facility is almost frighteningly good at humdrum epistolary prose, such as you might want to send to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish libraries or academic institutions. It obviously can't cope with old spelling, so you will need to help it out if you don't want some highly amusing creole to emerge:
Las! ne reverray-je plus ceste beaute parfaite,
Donc me faudra il mourir sans esperer aucun secours?
Mow! reverray I more ceste perfect beauty,
Therefore will be necessary for me it to die without expecting any
help?
Like anything else working on one of today's mainframes, the service operates at a speed you will not believe. We have seen the future and it employments.
VITTORIA COLONNA WEBSITE
So far there are translations of about 60 sonnets, and more to
come, along with other Colonna materials, at http://mason.gmu.edu/~emoody.
HELEN VENDLER'S SONNETS ONLINE
The first chapter of Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's
Sonnets can be found in the on-line Books pages of The
New York Times. The address is
http://search.nytimes.com/books/first/v/vendler-sonnets.html. You need to subscribe to get in; those in the US can do so for free.
FEMINIST APPROACHES TO MILTON
Milton Session, 1998 CNYCLL, State University of New York, Cortland
October 18-20, 1998, Abstracts due: June 1, 1998. Seeking
contributions (500 word abstract or complete 20 minute presentation
and brief description of research interests or CV) on the
revolution and Thermidorian reaction in gender studies of Milton.
Contact A. S. Weber, Department of English, The Pennsylvania
State University, Wilkes-Barre Campus, Lehman, PA 18627; email aweber@binghamton.edu.
THE SPACE OF THE STAGE
For an issue to be guest co-edited by Jeffrey Masten and Wendy
Wall, Renaissance Drama solicits essays that take up the question
of 'space' and the early modern stage. This topic could include:
the representation of space on stage; the representation of
particular kinds of spaces or locations, or geographic imaginaries
(domestic, urban, national, pastoral, undifferentiated space); the
space of acting/playing (e.g., locus/platea); the use of transit,
movement, exile, exit, entrance, procession; space as a created
effect or stage property; the space of the audience; the spaces of
staging outside theaters (the house, the court, etc.); the body
in/as theatrical space; the politics or ideologies of space and
particular spaces. Deadline for submissions is March 15, 1998. Please send a
self-addressed stamped envelope (if you wish to have the essay
returned to you) and three copies of your essay to either of the
following addresses:
Professor Jeffrey Masten, c/o Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 E.
Capitol Street, S.E., Washington, DC 20003, USA.
Professor Wendy Wall, Department of English, University Hall,
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
WOMEN WRITERS 1500-1700
'Disrupting the Discourses: Women Writers 1500-1700', a one-day
conference at South Bank University, London, England, Friday 31st
July 1998. This conference will explore women's writing across the genres,
1500-1700, taking as a starting point recent theoretical work on
the emergence of the woman author and the nature of the
relationship between women and texts. We are particularly
interested in focusing on the manner in which women authors, having
constructed a voice for themselves, negotiated through their
writing such dominant discourses as religion, the family, marriage,
creativity, education, language, gender, sexuality, authority,
politics. One-page proposals from both established scholars and those at the
beginning of their academic careers to be sent by 28th February
1998 to either M.J. Kidnie, School of Education, Politics, and
Social Science, South Bank University, 103 Borough Road, London,
England, SE1 0AA (e-mail: kidniem@sbu.ac.uk), or Rebecca D'Monte,
Department of Literature and Writing, University of Southampton New
College, The Avenue, Southampton, England, SO17 1BG.
RENAISSANCE ANTI-ARISTOTELIANISM
MLA Special Session, 1998 Modern Language Association Conference,
San Francisco, CA, December 27-30, 1998, Abstracts were due March 1,
1998. Contributions exploring European Anti-Aristotelianism in
natural philosophy, logic, ethics, and scholastic theology circa
1400-1650 were welcome; particularly interested in work on the
following topics: 1) the Neo-Stoic revival and the work of Justus
Lipsius; 2) pre-Gassendi Epicureanism and atomic and corpuscular
theories (particularly Nicholas Hill and Daniel Sennert); 3)
Ramism; 4) cosmological Anti-Aristotelianism - Copernicus, Tycho,
Galileo, Kepler; 5) Ancients versus Moderns; 6) Hermetic,
Neoplatonic, and occult challenges to De caelo, Physica,
Metaphysica-Agrippa, Bruno, Tyard, Telesio, Campanella, etc.
Further information can be obtained from A.S.
Weber, Department of English, The Pennsylvania State University,
Wilkes-Barre Campus, Lehman, PA 18627, aweber@binghamton.edu.
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