French review & Yiddish fairy tales
Nov. 26th, 2010 12:05 pmJust found (via Twitter, of all things) this lovely & loving review of the French edition of my Thomas the Rhymer. In the online 'zine Yozone.fr, reviewer Nicolas Soffray concludes his review of Thomas le Rimeur with: "Ellen Kushner est une voix majeure de la fantasy merveilleuse, hélas bien rare en français...." --and adds something nice about « À la pointe de l’épée », as well (which their other reviewer really hated - oh, well... It got plenty of nice French reviews elsewhere. And that cover...!)
And in today's NYTimes, a big piece on KlezKamp ("a Yiddish Brigadoon" that meets annually to revive the language & folkways of the living culture the Nazis pretty successfully demolished) enlightens us as to the origins of a phrase I'd always translated as "old wives' tales":
Michael Wex, a Canadian author and philologist, taught one group about the derivation of the term bubbe mayse — literally “a grandmother’s fable” but an expression used for any implausible tale. It was, he revealed, based on a 16th-century chivalric story about a Christian knight named Bovo who improbably marries a princess under a chupah — a Jewish wedding canopy — and arranges a circumcision for twin sons. Over time, few Jews were familiar with Bovo, so the expression morphed into something said by a bubbe.
And in today's NYTimes, a big piece on KlezKamp ("a Yiddish Brigadoon" that meets annually to revive the language & folkways of the living culture the Nazis pretty successfully demolished) enlightens us as to the origins of a phrase I'd always translated as "old wives' tales":
Michael Wex, a Canadian author and philologist, taught one group about the derivation of the term bubbe mayse — literally “a grandmother’s fable” but an expression used for any implausible tale. It was, he revealed, based on a 16th-century chivalric story about a Christian knight named Bovo who improbably marries a princess under a chupah — a Jewish wedding canopy — and arranges a circumcision for twin sons. Over time, few Jews were familiar with Bovo, so the expression morphed into something said by a bubbe.