Posts - Page 5 of 20 - Ponying the Slovos

Posted on May 14, 2021December 12, 2021 by Benet Vincent · 4 Comments

Three versions of Nadsat: English, French & Spanish

Most of us are accustomed to thinking of Nadsat in one way only. After all, most of us only read the novel in one language, whether Burgess’s original, or else in one of the more than fifty extant translations. But of course, each of those translations represents a variant of Nadsat. Some languages have hosted multiple Nadsats, sometimes even by the same translator, as our colleague Patrick Corness has noted in relation to Robert Stiller’s multiple Polish-Nadsats.

Posted on April 26, 2021January 26, 2022 by Jim Clarke

Welcome, all 10,000 of you

Sometime last week, we had our 10 thousandth visitor to Ponying the Slovos. We believe they (you?) were from Liverpool in England, but it might have been Sweden or Malaysia or the United States or any of over sixty different places.

Posted on April 22, 2021April 28, 2021 by Jim Clarke · 1 Comment

Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 8: Macaronic Muggers and Nazi Newspeak

And so we approach the end of Burgess’s extensive writing career and his surprisingly prolific foray into invented languages in his literature. I promised at the outset that we’d end up with Nazi Newspeak, and we shall.

Anthony Burgess’s curious compendium novel, The End of the World News, did not emerge until 1982, though most of its contents had been created in some form during the late 1970s. A tripartite narrative, it features the story of the dying Sigmund Freud, alongside a musical version of Leon Trotsky’s visit to New York. All of this is hastily glued together via a frame narrative which leads out of a disaster movie scenario in which an asteroid is set to collide with Earth. If this sounds like three separate stories that don’t belong together, that’s because they don’t.