So my kid loves The Mouse Mansion, a truly wonderful picture book by this woman Karina Schaapman, who not only wrote a nice story but also made felt mice, an enormous elaborate dollhouse for them and a zillion little props, which she then photographed to make what basically feels like a Dutch fairytale mouse version of Kowloon Walled City. It’s wildly charming, and it’s apparently based on an idealization of her 1960s childhood growing up as the children of immigrants in Leiden.
Anyway, I came to find out that this is a series of at least six books, of which only the first is readily available in English. So I guess I’m translating them. Here’s a raw for the fourth book in the series, The Mouse Mansion: Sam and Julia At The Fair. It’s pretty rough, as I started with Google translations of a Spanish edition and then edited as quickly as possible, but hey, I’m busy.
I don’t know why you come here, do you? You still use the same RSS reader since 2002, you are my father and I set Litwack.org as your Safari homepage…this is a one-horse ghost town and I have finally driven everything down into crickets and emptiness.
Doesn’t it feel like we’ve all lost something already? I would like to think about the jubilee, the reconstruction, the new society, but first is the operation and some eat it just because the anesthesiologist had a long night. Uncle Heinz did high school in a concentration camp in Trinidad, but his own uncle waited one more day to pick up his chlorinated dry cleaning and got taken. Uncle Heinz is dying right this instant of SARS-CoV-2. He would have soon been 100.
We all should have been asteroseismologists or at least born as Pythagoreans tuned for universal music. I am staying in, enrobed in streams, and I hope to see all of you and talk to you in that jubilee.
I put unfamiliar words in my phone when I find them and these are from 2018.
catallaxy – the spontaneous organization of the market
tendentious – promoting bias
trilemma – like dilemma, but three problems
pomander – perfume carried in a ball necklace
arrogate – claim
traducer – “one who maligns another by making malicious and false or defamatory statements”
theosis – Greek Orthodox – a way of personally participating in the energies of God (vs. ‘becoming godlike’)
speciate – form or become a new species
Fingerspitzengefühl – “fingertip feeling” – intuitive skill
poiesis – ποίησις – a person bringing something into being
ataraxia – A state of serene calmness
kenotic – empty
Pettifogger – shyster
militates – be a powerful or conclusive factor against some fact or circumstance
saudade – a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. µέλαινα χολή, mélaina cholē from which melancholy
nurungji – scorched rice (kr)
Hypothecated – financially pledged, as an asset
Threnody – A lament
consonance – together
canaille – the common people, it. pack of dogs
excipient – drug filler
vagitus – the cry of a newborn
Anteambulo – path-clearer
cortège – funeral procession
catchment – collection area
scienter – knowledge of wrongdoing
roundelay – a simple song with a refrain (medieval)
carceral – of relating to prison
deputation – party sent by a deputy
syncretism – melding of ideas
Epoché – “suspension of judgement about non-evident matters”
AAC with chapters, click the cover to download.
