kilometer zero running eye blog

Today’s New York Times crossword puzzle was somewhat vexing. It was a Thursday puzzle, a day often given over to puzzle twists or innovations. The conceit of today’s puzzle was ‘Turn Turn Turn’, meaning that several answers were meant to be read by turning the puzzle 90, 180, or 270 degrees.

Some of the clues/answers were common for puzzles that use the upside-down word technique. For example, 43 Across was : Apollo 11 and 12 [180 degrees]. The answer, reading left to right, was ‘SNOISSIWNOOW’, with, for context, the last ‘W’ connecting to the word ‘GATEWAY’. And, of course, when you turn the puzzle 180 degrees, the word becomes ‘MOONMISSIONS’ or ‘moon missions.’

Completely acceptable, and a clever use of flexible letters like ‘O’ and ‘S’ that are read the same way upside down, and ‘W’ and ‘M’ that are still coherent letters when flipped. However, my problem came with the answers shifted 90 or 270 degrees. Take 61 Across : A specification on a burger order, [270 degrees]. The answer reading left-to-right was ‘ZOHZOOZ’. If you turn that 270 degrees, it supposedly reads ‘NOONION’ or ‘no onion’. But that’s only if you consider a sidways ‘H’ to be the same as an ‘I’. I don’t. In fact, I consider this a betrayal of crossword logic, but then I am a crossword fundamentalist. So, I turn to you once again: Is a sideways ‘H’ the same as a capital ‘I’?

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There is a scandal raging in Amercian sports circles at the moment because the basketball player Kevin Garnett allegedly told the basketball player Charlie Villanueva that he looked like a ‘cancer patient’. Now, this was during a heated moment in the game where players trash talk to try and unnerve opponents. In this context, I thought the barb was rather benign and half-humourous. The media world thinks not. Garnett is being attacked from all sides for being insensitive to a tragic community of cancer sufferers. In fact, he was forced to issue this clarification:

“My comment to Charlie Villanueva was in fact ‘You are cancerous to your team and our league,'” Garnett said. “I would never be insensitive to the brave struggle that cancer patients endure. I have lost loved ones to this deadly disease and have a family member currently undergoing treatment. I would never say anything that distasteful. The game of life is far bigger than the game of basketball.”

So, help me here: Am I terrible person for not seeing this as a despicable act? Is ‘cancer patient’ a slur of such hideous proportions that it needs to be policed?

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Charlie Villanueva

In the splendid Travels with a Tangerine, Tim MacKintosh-Smith touches briefly on a translation problem that has always preoccupied me: aesthetic vs literal.

In this case, he was looking at various translations for the title of Ibn Battutah’s accounts of his 14th century voyage to China and back. One literal translation is The Precious Gift of Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and the Wonders of Travel. However, MacKintosh-Smith prefers an aesthetic translation that maintains the rhythm and poetry of Arabic – the so-called ‘cooing of doves’ of the language. He suggests: An Armchair Traveller’s Treasure: the Mirabilia of Metropolises and the Wonders of Wandering.

Personally, I’ve always used a pop culture reference to describe the gulf between literal and aesthetic translation. In North America, there is a beloved animated character named ‘Dora the Explorer’ who travels the world, teaching kids about culture, geography, and self-sufficiency. In France, they have chosen a literal translation, ‘Dora l’exploratrice’, losing the charming rhyme. I would have preferred an aesthetic translation here, and named the character ‘Beatrice l’exploratrice’ in France.

So, what do you think? ‘Dora l’exporatrice’ or ‘Beatrice l’exploratrice’ ?

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