The Finno-Ugrian student conference IFUSCO was held in Russia’s Perm Krai in 2010. Madis Tuuder, a student at the Estonian Art Academy, reported her impressions and subsequently a Finnish translation by Sonja Laitinen appeared in the University of Helsinki’s Alkukoti magazine (2010 no. 12, online version here). Here follows my English translation of a report that [...]
Sheldon Pollock, one of the most prominent scholars of Sanskrit literature today, has contributed a jeremiad entitled ‘Crisis in the Classics’ to the journal Social Research Vol. 78 No. 1 (Spring 2011) on the decline of classical philology in India. The article is available as a PDF and its 28 pages have so much good material that [...]
During the evening service on Easter (the so-called Agape Vespers), the Orthodox Church has a tradition of reading the gospel passage for that day (John 20:19–25) in many different languages. In Greece, one of the versions sung is a rendering by St Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749–1809) which casts the passage in the Homeric Greek and [...]
I used to be unhappy with the limited range of Chuvash publications available in the bookshops on Leninsky prospekt, but on my most recent trip I discovered a shop with a fantastic selection. Located on Egerskij bul’var near the intersection with prospekt 9-j Pjatiletki (just across the street from the Šupaškar shopping mall and McDonalds), [...]
One Tatar book being prominently displayed in Kazan bookshops is a slim volume of poems by the Tatar national poet Ğabdulla Tuqay: Габдулла Тукай, Стихотворение (Казань: Татарское книжное издательство, 2011), ISBN 9785298020398. Remarkably, the 20 poems in this volume appear not only in Tatar and Russian translation, but also in Bashkir, Mari, Chuvash and Udmurt. [...]
If you visit Kazan and want to buy books in Tatar, the place to go is the intersection of Bauman (ул. Баумана) and Astronimičeskaja (ул. Астрономическая) streets. It’s unassuming from the outside, but if you open the door and walk down a flight of stairs, you’ll encounter a large selection of Tatar poetry, prose, school [...]