From the Oxford English Dictionary:

A. adjective - At the point of death; in a dying state.
1886 E. L. Bynner “A tangle of brambles and moribund herbs.”

figurative - On the point of coming to an end.
1837 Carlyle Fr. Rev. “The wail of a moribund world.”

B. noun - A person in a dying state.
1835 C. A. Bowles in Corr. w. Southey (1881) “Another person was mortally wounded and his death hourly expected. Every day the moribund’s door was besieged by crowds of anxious inquirers.”

Oh, how I love words. Not to mention the OED (”The definitive record of the English language” it says on their website. Oooooooooow, how exciting!!! Now you see why I got beat up so much in school.) Don’t miss their Word of the Day available by RSS and e-mail.

Okay, I’m one martini into it, but this is my blog dammit and I can rant about Tolstoy again if I want to!

So he’s popping up everywhere. I’m so thrilled. The world can’t be completely going to hell if Leo is getting this kind of column space.

The New York Times has gone even more mad than me. This is like a fantasy. Here’s a screenshot (of page one of three), just in case it disappears one day and we want to relive it (please tilt your head to the left):

I also just discovered this New Yorker article but I am way too overstimulated to read calmly. How can they not give more info on the photo? I know Tolstoy’s wife was big into photography — was this one of hers? It looks like an autochrome… is it? What year?

I was in my local English-language bookshop (one of two! Help! Please send English language books to: …) and saw the British edition of the Pevear and Volokhonsky War and Peace translation in person and fell in love. In the online photo it doesn’t look like much, but in person it’s beautiful: grey cloth, red text… I wanted desperately to buy it, but the only copy they had (?!?) had been in the window and had somehow gotten horribly water damaged.

Cruel, cruel fate…

But I think I’ll order a copy (ISBN-10: 0099512238 / ISBN-13: 978-0099512233). What the hell, it’s gonna be Xmas soon. I’m tired of counting centimes. After all, this isn’t something useless like rent or food — this is a book.

I sat down tonight to take a few minutes for myself. It’s been a long and very stressful week and it’s still Thursday. God knows what apocalyptic events might yet happen. A gentle spontaneous combustion, perhaps?

This was going to be a post on a delightful bookish-blog discovery: theserialcomma.com. Funny, intelligent and written by a gentleman who lives in Rome — what more could you ask for?

I guess I found the answer to that one: “longevity”.

After an all-too-brief existence, we are left with a white screen and the simple message: “(The Serial Comma blog is closed)”. Life is too damn ephemeral.

Good-bye, you will be missed!

I suppose you’ve guessed what this post is about.

I’m so excited!!! I’m not sure when I’ll get it here, maybe late October, early November. Time to call in sick at work! Too bad I’m self-employed.

When Brigg’s translation came out I was devastated. I’d been hoping and waiting for eons for my favorite Russian-to-English translators to get to War and Peace. I thought surely no publisher would release another translation of it for at least for a few years. How happy I am to be wrong.

While we’re all waiting, I found a wonderful article (reproduced in full) about Russian-to-English translators, translations and translating issues. It includes interesting details about V and P’s technique and the rather astounding fact that D.H. Lawrence and Constance Garnett were friends. (Somehow I can’t possibly imagine them in the same room together, let alone speaking.) There’s a lot of wonderful information in it, but I must say that I did find the writing of the article itself a bit uneven. Not that that stopped me — I devoured it in minutes!

I copied the text from the comments of this post on Prufrock’s Page (thank you!) and pasted them into a word processing program, then printed it out. I think if I’d read all 17 pages of it in that teeny text on my dreadful screen I would have gone blind (”…or insane!” Remember that from Love and Death? Ah, how I miss the early Woody Allen films…)