David Bellos
Biographic Data
| ID | 960154 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Bellos |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Bellos |
| SIGNATURE | BELLOS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Émigrés: French Words That Turned English
Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word …
Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law
Copyright gives creators a monopoly on most uses of their work throughout their lives and for seventy years post mortem. Copyfraud, in Mazzone's striking but far from unjustified usage, is a claim of ownership made by institutions and individuals that do not possess it. To discover how prevalent such frauds are (and the degree to which they constrain and contort writers, musicians, filmmakers, and others) is truly amazing. Mazzone deals only with…
Impostures
An eye-opener and a head-scratcher, this set of fifty exercices de style offers an oblique and learned introduction to a great classic of ludic literature dating from the twelfth century, the Maqamat of al-Hariri. Each of the fifty tales of the trickster Abu Zayid, some or perhaps all of which contain or are constituted by one or more formal restrictions, is here presented in the form of a pastiche of some familiar or exotic register of writing i…
Why Should We Read Ismail Kadare
Reading Kadare, David Bellos finds the whole world in literary form: a masterful blend of myth and folklore with portraits of modern minds and local realities—plus a cunning, wry kind of humor
Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France by Roger Pearson
Review Article| January 01 2020 Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France by Roger Pearson Pearson, Roger, Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 624 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2020) 26 (1): 147. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7899748 Cite Icon Cite Sh…
French Style: L'accent français de la prose anglaise by Gilles Philippe
Book Review| August 01 2018 French Style: L’accent français de la prose anglaise by Gilles Philippe Philippe, Gilles, French Style: L’accent français de la prose anglaise (Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2016), 255 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (3): 448. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-6940378 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailT…
Milk, Game or Grain for a Manchurian Outpost: Providing for Hulun Buir’s Multi-Environmental Garrison in an Eighteenth-Century Borderland
The long record of imperial China's Inner Asian borderland relations is not simply multi-ethnic, but 'multi-environmental'. Human dependencies on livestock, wild animals and cereal cultivars were the prerequisite environmental relations for borderland incorporation. This paper examines such dependencies during the Qing Dynasty's (1644-1912) establishment of the Manchurian garrison of Hulun Buir near the Qing border with Russia. Garrison logistics…
Fournel’s Headache
Fournel’s Headache David Bellos (bio) Fournel’s Headache is an excruciating condition that puts grumbles about migraine to shame. It is not located in any particular part of the brain, but wanders from cortex to cortex and halfway down the spine. Its cause is clear: translating constraint. And as in an attempt to ride a bicycle to the top of a col, the only cure is to keep right on to the end. Paul Fournel’s La Liseuse is a short first-person nov…
Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator
Book Review| September 01 2015 Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator Findlay, Jean, Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 368 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2015) 21 (3): 519–520. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3131231 Cite Icon Cite S…
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
Book Review| January 01 2015 Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability Apter, Emily, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. (London: Verso, 2013), 240 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2015) 21 (1): 110–111. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2818201 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search…
Multiples: An Anthology of Stories in an Assortment of Languages and Literary Styles
Book Review| August 01 2014 Multiples: An Anthology of Stories in an Assortment of Languages and Literary Styles Thirlwell, Adam, Multiples: An Anthology of Stories in an Assortment of Languages and Literary Styles. (London: Portobello Books, 2013), 379 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2014) 20 (3): 493–494. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2732832 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon…
Appendix: Versions and Variants
Two decades after it was first published, a powerful oral epic from Madagascar is once again available to a global readership, in print and online.How to Read a Folktale: The Ibonia Epic from Madagascar is the story of a story; a compelling Malagasy tale of love and power, brought to life by Lee Haring.Throughout this carefully updated text, Haring is our expert guide and witness.He provides helpful historical background and deep exegesis; but he…
New Translations from Four Corners of the World
8 1WorldLiterature Today I N ? *' ! n 11! s îaî 101 1s in ) 111 THE ART jQi p s~' rj ; ^^^^^^S"^^^H DREAMS lÉfllH ASKING ^^^^^EBNH^^^H YOUR BOSS I ^^^^^HEElfl^^^H FOR ^^^^^^B^^^^^H ARAISE I ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^1 GEORGES PEREC ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B Buddhadeva Bose /Arunava Sinha,tr. (Archipelago Books) InthisBengali novella,fourstrangersstranded overnight ina trainstationshare theirstoriesofunrequited love. India Todaycalled it"a magical and totallyentertaini…
Jumping over the language barrier
Cousin Bette
Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed backdrop of a post-Napoleonic France struggling with massive industrial and economic change, Balzac's characters span many classes of society, from impoverished workers and wealthy courte…
How Many Identities Make One? The Curious Case of Romain Gary
Romain Gary was born in Lithuania, moved to France at age 14, and spent much of his adult life in Britain and America. He represents an unusually extreme case of multiple identity in a transnational context. Despite this, Gary's literary œuvre is not much concerned with the problem of identity. It exhibits instead a tension between protest at the inhumanity of men and the need to adapt to changing historical circumstances. The dialectic between o…
The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century
The opium-smuggling trade that britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers' advent on the Chi…
Tati and America: Jour de fête and the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of 1946
Leo Spitzer: Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Literary Quotations in Perec's La Vie Mode d'EMPLOI
LITERARY QUOTATIONS IN PEREC'S LA VIE MODE D'EMPLOI DAVID BELLOS DAVID BELLOS MANCHESTER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLI, Issue 2, April 1987, Pages 181–194, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLI.2.181 Published: 01 April 1987
The knowledge of ignorance. From Genesis to Jules Verne
The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century
The opium-smuggling trade that britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers' advent on the Chi…
Tati and America: Jour de fête and the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of 1946
Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator
Book Review| September 01 2015 Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator Findlay, Jean, Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 368 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2015) 21 (3): 519–520. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3131231 Cite Icon Cite S…
Jumping over the language barrier
The knowledge of ignorance. From Genesis to Jules Verne
Leo Spitzer: Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Literary Quotations in Perec's La Vie Mode d'EMPLOI
LITERARY QUOTATIONS IN PEREC'S LA VIE MODE D'EMPLOI DAVID BELLOS DAVID BELLOS MANCHESTER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLI, Issue 2, April 1987, Pages 181–194, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLI.2.181 Published: 01 April 1987
Tati and America: Jour de fête and the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of 1946
The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century
The opium-smuggling trade that britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers' advent on the Chi…
How Many Identities Make One? The Curious Case of Romain Gary
Romain Gary was born in Lithuania, moved to France at age 14, and spent much of his adult life in Britain and America. He represents an unusually extreme case of multiple identity in a transnational context. Despite this, Gary's literary œuvre is not much concerned with the problem of identity. It exhibits instead a tension between protest at the inhumanity of men and the need to adapt to changing historical circumstances. The dialectic between o…
Cousin Bette
Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed backdrop of a post-Napoleonic France struggling with massive industrial and economic change, Balzac's characters span many classes of society, from impoverished workers and wealthy courte…
Jumping over the language barrier
New Translations from Four Corners of the World
8 1WorldLiterature Today I N ? *' ! n 11! s îaî 101 1s in ) 111 THE ART jQi p s~' rj ; ^^^^^^S"^^^H DREAMS lÉfllH ASKING ^^^^^EBNH^^^H YOUR BOSS I ^^^^^HEElfl^^^H FOR ^^^^^^B^^^^^H ARAISE I ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^1 GEORGES PEREC ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B Buddhadeva Bose /Arunava Sinha,tr. (Archipelago Books) InthisBengali novella,fourstrangersstranded overnight ina trainstationshare theirstoriesofunrequited love. India Todaycalled it"a magical and totallyentertaini…
Appendix: Versions and Variants
Two decades after it was first published, a powerful oral epic from Madagascar is once again available to a global readership, in print and online.How to Read a Folktale: The Ibonia Epic from Madagascar is the story of a story; a compelling Malagasy tale of love and power, brought to life by Lee Haring.Throughout this carefully updated text, Haring is our expert guide and witness.He provides helpful historical background and deep exegesis; but he…
Multiples: An Anthology of Stories in an Assortment of Languages and Literary Styles
Book Review| August 01 2014 Multiples: An Anthology of Stories in an Assortment of Languages and Literary Styles Thirlwell, Adam, Multiples: An Anthology of Stories in an Assortment of Languages and Literary Styles. (London: Portobello Books, 2013), 379 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2014) 20 (3): 493–494. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2732832 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon…
Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator
Book Review| September 01 2015 Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator Findlay, Jean, Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 368 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2015) 21 (3): 519–520. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3131231 Cite Icon Cite S…
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
Book Review| January 01 2015 Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability Apter, Emily, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. (London: Verso, 2013), 240 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2015) 21 (1): 110–111. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2818201 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search…
Fournel’s Headache
Fournel’s Headache David Bellos (bio) Fournel’s Headache is an excruciating condition that puts grumbles about migraine to shame. It is not located in any particular part of the brain, but wanders from cortex to cortex and halfway down the spine. Its cause is clear: translating constraint. And as in an attempt to ride a bicycle to the top of a col, the only cure is to keep right on to the end. Paul Fournel’s La Liseuse is a short first-person nov…
Milk, Game or Grain for a Manchurian Outpost: Providing for Hulun Buir’s Multi-Environmental Garrison in an Eighteenth-Century Borderland
The long record of imperial China's Inner Asian borderland relations is not simply multi-ethnic, but 'multi-environmental'. Human dependencies on livestock, wild animals and cereal cultivars were the prerequisite environmental relations for borderland incorporation. This paper examines such dependencies during the Qing Dynasty's (1644-1912) establishment of the Manchurian garrison of Hulun Buir near the Qing border with Russia. Garrison logistics…
French Style: L'accent français de la prose anglaise by Gilles Philippe
Book Review| August 01 2018 French Style: L’accent français de la prose anglaise by Gilles Philippe Philippe, Gilles, French Style: L’accent français de la prose anglaise (Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2016), 255 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (3): 448. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-6940378 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailT…
Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France by Roger Pearson
Review Article| January 01 2020 Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France by Roger Pearson Pearson, Roger, Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 624 pp. David Bellos David Bellos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2020) 26 (1): 147. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7899748 Cite Icon Cite Sh…
Why Should We Read Ismail Kadare
Reading Kadare, David Bellos finds the whole world in literary form: a masterful blend of myth and folklore with portraits of modern minds and local realities—plus a cunning, wry kind of humor
Émigrés: French Words That Turned English
Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word …
Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law
Copyright gives creators a monopoly on most uses of their work throughout their lives and for seventy years post mortem. Copyfraud, in Mazzone's striking but far from unjustified usage, is a claim of ownership made by institutions and individuals that do not possess it. To discover how prevalent such frauds are (and the degree to which they constrain and contort writers, musicians, filmmakers, and others) is truly amazing. Mazzone deals only with…
Impostures
An eye-opener and a head-scratcher, this set of fifty exercices de style offers an oblique and learned introduction to a great classic of ludic literature dating from the twelfth century, the Maqamat of al-Hariri. Each of the fifty tales of the trickster Abu Zayid, some or perhaps all of which contain or are constituted by one or more formal restrictions, is here presented in the form of a pastiche of some familiar or exotic register of writing i…
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