THIS IS A REAL GOOD MOVIE.. FOR ADULTS & CHILDREN!!!
I want to be Carraba the Sorceress.
Utterly visually stunning. A delight.
#france
Aliette de Bodard » Imaginales report »
Aliette de Bodard reports back on Imaginales, a fantasy convention in Épinal, France.
Imaginales is pretty much the event of the weekend in May: you arrive at the train station and face the first of many billboards advertising the festival, listing all the authors. Unlike Anglophone cons, which are often put together and run by dedicated fans, Imaginales has the support of the town hall (and area council, …), and they put on quite an amazing show. They have strong ties to the restaurants, hotels and high schools of the area (teachers organise visits; authors drop by for chats, and every year artists paint a fresco which is later donated to a high school); and entrance to the event is free for everyone, which insures a very steady flow of local people curious to see the wares. There’s even a special Imaginales vintage (repackaged wine probably, but still cool).
Pretty much the centrepiece is the book tent, which is a ginormous space with a looooong set of tables, where each author has a spot: you sit there behind your books and sign stuff for whoever feels like buying. It helps if you think of it as a cross between a book fair (a Salon du Livre, if you’ve ever been) and an Anglophone con: there are a few events on programming (2-3 tracks), a gaming tent, and a café area, but the heart of the show is the book tent…
Aristocrat's anger at Versailles Murakami 'manga' show »
A French aristocrat descended from Louis XIV is seeking a court order to stop a Japanese artist exhibiting his work at the Palace of Versailles.
Work by Takashi Murakami, who blends Japanese classical art with manga-style modernity, is on show until December.
But Prince Sixte-Henri de Bourbon-Parme believes Murakami’s brightly coloured work dishonours the memory of his ancestors.
The prince and fellow protesters say Murakami “denatures” French culture.
“By exhibiting at Versailles, artists benefit from an added value,” he told the AFP news agency.
“We’re not against the modernity of art but against a way of thinking that denatures and does French culture no good,” the prince said.
(read the rest at the link)
Eish, I’m really not understanding what all the fuss is about.
i don’t get it. sorry. i don’t see in any way at all how this is offensive to French culture. but i do think that France is one of several European countries that seems so panicky about defending their culture these days that i suspect his aristocrat’s “problem” has a larger meaning. called xenophobia.
Yeah, me neither. Some European cultures seem to increasingly fear the porosity of borders, that their “pure” culture will be penetrated by those dastardly foreigners.
Amusingly, I will boldly say that is no such thing as a “pure” culture in the first place. Trolololololol!
As far as I can understand, this aristocratic prick thinks the very existence of Takashi Murakami pollutes French culture? Fuck him and the horse he undoubtedly rode in on.
Via the World SF Blog, Shauna Roberts interviews sf/f translator Edward Gauvin, who has recently translated a collection of stories by acclaimed French fantasist Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud. He discusses the French sf/f tradition and Châteaureynaud’s place in it; his work as a translator; and his own fantasy writing (under the name H. V. Chao). Do read the whole thing. Here’s Gauvin on the art of translation:
Translation is close adaptation. Adaptation is the art form of our time. Which makes fidelity one of the era’s major issues.
Translation has also been spoken of as close reading. For better or for worse, translation engages the critical faculty more than pure creation. Much has been made of late about translation being a species of performance, like a musician’s of a score: translation as interpretation.
One thinks of castles and abbeys, like the Cloisters in New York, that were bought by robber barons and dismantled, shipped stone by stone across the Atlantic to be recreated in a New World setting. If the masons have done their job, the work is a perfect replica, but what, really, is the same about it? The mortar is new, like the view out the windows whose stained glass will receive a different sunlight during different hours of the day, and in the autumn different leaves will fall into the courtyard. Again, context is everything. As in Châteaureynaud’s tale about King Guita and his pavilion, one has the simultaneous and irreconcilable impression of sameness and difference. And yet something stands, where once there was nothing, which can be visited by people who could not otherwise have visited the original. Is this, then, a translation?
