13 October 2025
There were a number of letters in The Times earlier this month describing butterflies that the authors had witnessed turning up at funerals and even settling on the coffin. The point was that people found it mysterious and strangely comforting, as though it were a sort of sign from the beyond, or a ‘second presence’. I had discussed this well attested phenomenon (in one case, a couple of barn owls flew in and perched on the coffin) with John Polkinghorne in our dialogathon published as What Can We Hope For? in 2019:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
On 6 October the newspaper printed a brief letter from me drawing attention to the relevant pages (50-52), but they cut the page reference. I then discovered that butterflies weren’t specifically indexed (the phenomenon comes under ‘animism’), so I don’t know how Times readers could be expected to find the subject in a 90-page book. I hope they weren’t disappointed. But when we looked yesterday at the sales for our books through Amazon, there was a conspicuous spike for What Can We Hope For? after 6 October!
(Ol’ga Leonardovna was unsettled by the fact that a ‘large black moth’ flew into the hotel room at Badenweiler where Chekhov had just died and beat itself against lights.)
30 October
It is, of course, very good news that Trump has at last sanctioned Russia’s biggest oil companies and that the Coalition of the Willing is getting its act together to inject Russia’s frozen overseas assets into the Ukrainian war economy. Even so, there is relatively little in our newspapers these days about the war and yesterday Roger Boyes wrote in The Times of the ‘rotten heart of European war fatigue’ under the headline ‘I hate to say it, but Kyiv won’t last till spring: for all the EU’s rousing words, there just isn’t the money or the will to keep defending Ukraine’. Surprisingly for Boyes, who is a very respectable commentator, I think he has muddled cause and effect in this article. I still maintain that the will to help Ukraine defeat Putin remains firm both in Britain and Europe. The will isn’t fatigued. But if the money literally isn’t there, then of course it won’t be possible to implement the will. However, it is going to be to Europe’s everlasting shame if it doesn’t come up with the money to match the existing will (which Boyes brands ‘rhetoric’). So it is a question now not of the will but of the determination. Nor do I personally underestimate Trump’s increasing impatience with Putin. In his own eyes, Trump is not ‘a loser’.
13 November
A qualified subscriber has jocularly asked: ‘Why on earth did you bring that stuffed seagull into the first line of your translation of Brodsky’s “October madrigal”, as though you were Shamraev in Act 4 of Chekhov’s play? There is no “gull” in Brodsky’s poem, or faintest whiff of one, just a “stuffed female quail on the mantelpiece”!’
Quite so. Actually the two lines translate literally as ‘a stuffing [chuchelo] of a female quail/stands on the mantelpiece’. That is how you say in Russian what we say in English as ‘a stuffed female quail’. Except that in English you can’t say ‘stuffed’ here of the bird as it would suggest a culinary delicacy involving shallots, herbs etc. (There is another meaning of ‘stuffed’, of course, and that too could interfere here; there’s definitely a sense in the play that by Act 4 Nina is a ‘stuffed seagull’.) So how do you not say ‘a stuffed female quail’? Well, these days perhaps a chuchelo is more a solid ‘model’ of a female quail? We can’t tell which Joseph Brodsky saw/meant in 1971, as he is not here to tell us.
The solution I hit on was to get the adjectival participle ‘stuffed’ away from qualifying ‘female quail’: by saying first that a stuffed seagull did not grace the mantelpiece, I could convey that a stuffed female quail did without having to repeat ‘stuffed’ to qualify ‘quail’. I liked this solution (a) because it was a solution, (b) because you might well expect a stuffed seagull in a cottage by the sea, not a quail, (c) it is a joke, alluding to the hilarious stuffed seagull appearing upstage in Act 4 of the play, and Joseph Brodsky loved ‘allusions’.
But there is another problem: ‘female quail’. Yes, perepelka is the feminine form of perepel, a quail. The female is perhaps more attractive, with her speckledy breast, but it is too late to ask Joseph whether he knew it was a hen bird, or just needed the extra syllable and rhyme. In any case, the -elka ending could equally well be a diminutive/affectionate form; the accepted affectionate form of perepel, perepelochka, would have had too many syllables and anyway have sounded tautological, since the bird is tiny in the first place. So I chose to take perepelka as an affectionate form; a ‘darling’ quail to the lovers.
I don’t like ‘explaining’ a translation — they either work for the reader or they don’t — but equally I feel a reader’s gauntlet deserves to be picked up. Who said translation was easy?
20 October
I can imagine the mirth triggered in some subscribers by the communication on the Goathead Press’s new website that my book of twenty short stories ‘will be published in early 2026’. They doubtless recall more vividly than I do the trail of missed publication dates for this book that has been laid by announcements on Calderonia over the past year!
‘Going forward’, yes, it is so. If I am honest with myself, the main reason is that the last story in the collection, ‘Pouring Out’, has taken me far longer to write than I was expecting. Maybe it will completed before Christmas. But I should also say that the unplanned turmoil with Sam&Sam has taken up a great deal of our time since 16 June. Getting a basic website like the Goathead Press’s up and running may not look very complicated, but as well as the new ‘Who We Are’ it included checking all our stock figures connecting directly with PayPal, updating all three postage rates for every one of our available books after weighing them, adding new books, compiling the new list of secondhand books, buying the website name etc etc. Well, it’s done and we have already had some nice feedback.
What it means, though, for this blog is that I shall probably be posting only once a month from now until February 2026. My name really would be mud if I didn’t get The White Bow/Ghoune out when I said this time! I will try to post things seasonal, of course.
30 November
As I write, Ukraine’s delegation (now led by Rustem Umerov) is in the U.S. to discuss Steve Witkoff’s 28-point peace plan. Witkoff has come in for a lot of mockery for his apparent amateurism and I think that using only Putin’s interpreters in his three-day Miami discussions with Dmitriev was probably unconstitutional (treasonous). Witkoff appears simply to have swallowed Russia’s maximalist wish-list. But nothing less than that would have got the Russians on board. Whether it was a conscious bait or not, it has succeeded in at last hooking Putin onto serious negotiations. It will now be difficult for Putin to ditch the peace process — although he promptly rejected the Europeans’ rewriting of Witkoff’s plan, of course. Putin lost his war long ago, he knows it, and is now entangled in a Trumpian ‘deal’. That’s about as positively as one can put it. Ukraine has not won the war and looks as though it is going to lose the peace. Sorry, I mean ‘peace’.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
The diary of a writer-publisher: 35
13 October 2025
There were a number of letters in The Times earlier this month describing butterflies that the authors had witnessed turning up at funerals and even settling on the coffin. The point was that people found it mysterious and strangely comforting, as though it were a sort of sign from the beyond, or a ‘second presence’. I had discussed this well attested phenomenon (in one case, a couple of barn owls flew in and perched on the coffin) with John Polkinghorne in our dialogathon published as What Can We Hope For? in 2019:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
On 6 October the newspaper printed a brief letter from me drawing attention to the relevant pages (50-52), but they cut the page reference. I then discovered that butterflies weren’t specifically indexed (the phenomenon comes under ‘animism’), so I don’t know how Times readers could be expected to find the subject in a 90-page book. I hope they weren’t disappointed. But when we looked yesterday at the sales for our books through Amazon, there was a conspicuous spike for What Can We Hope For? after 6 October!
(Ol’ga Leonardovna was unsettled by the fact that a ‘large black moth’ flew into the hotel room at Badenweiler where Chekhov had just died and beat itself against lights.)
30 October
It is, of course, very good news that Trump has at last sanctioned Russia’s biggest oil companies and that the Coalition of the Willing is getting its act together to inject Russia’s frozen overseas assets into the Ukrainian war economy. Even so, there is relatively little in our newspapers these days about the war and yesterday Roger Boyes wrote in The Times of the ‘rotten heart of European war fatigue’ under the headline ‘I hate to say it, but Kyiv won’t last till spring: for all the EU’s rousing words, there just isn’t the money or the will to keep defending Ukraine’. Surprisingly for Boyes, who is a very respectable commentator, I think he has muddled cause and effect in this article. I still maintain that the will to help Ukraine defeat Putin remains firm both in Britain and Europe. The will isn’t fatigued. But if the money literally isn’t there, then of course it won’t be possible to implement the will. However, it is going to be to Europe’s everlasting shame if it doesn’t come up with the money to match the existing will (which Boyes brands ‘rhetoric’). So it is a question now not of the will but of the determination. Nor do I personally underestimate Trump’s increasing impatience with Putin. In his own eyes, Trump is not ‘a loser’.
13 November
A qualified subscriber has jocularly asked: ‘Why on earth did you bring that stuffed seagull into the first line of your translation of Brodsky’s “October madrigal”, as though you were Shamraev in Act 4 of Chekhov’s play? There is no “gull” in Brodsky’s poem, or faintest whiff of one, just a “stuffed female quail on the mantelpiece”!’
Quite so. Actually the two lines translate literally as ‘a stuffing [chuchelo] of a female quail/stands on the mantelpiece’. That is how you say in Russian what we say in English as ‘a stuffed female quail’. Except that in English you can’t say ‘stuffed’ here of the bird as it would suggest a culinary delicacy involving shallots, herbs etc. (There is another meaning of ‘stuffed’, of course, and that too could interfere here; there’s definitely a sense in the play that by Act 4 Nina is a ‘stuffed seagull’.) So how do you not say ‘a stuffed female quail’? Well, these days perhaps a chuchelo is more a solid ‘model’ of a female quail? We can’t tell which Joseph Brodsky saw/meant in 1971, as he is not here to tell us.
The solution I hit on was to get the adjectival participle ‘stuffed’ away from qualifying ‘female quail’: by saying first that a stuffed seagull did not grace the mantelpiece, I could convey that a stuffed female quail did without having to repeat ‘stuffed’ to qualify ‘quail’. I liked this solution (a) because it was a solution, (b) because you might well expect a stuffed seagull in a cottage by the sea, not a quail, (c) it is a joke, alluding to the hilarious stuffed seagull appearing upstage in Act 4 of the play, and Joseph Brodsky loved ‘allusions’.
But there is another problem: ‘female quail’. Yes, perepelka is the feminine form of perepel, a quail. The female is perhaps more attractive, with her speckledy breast, but it is too late to ask Joseph whether he knew it was a hen bird, or just needed the extra syllable and rhyme. In any case, the -elka ending could equally well be a diminutive/affectionate form; the accepted affectionate form of perepel, perepelochka, would have had too many syllables and anyway have sounded tautological, since the bird is tiny in the first place. So I chose to take perepelka as an affectionate form; a ‘darling’ quail to the lovers.
I don’t like ‘explaining’ a translation — they either work for the reader or they don’t — but equally I feel a reader’s gauntlet deserves to be picked up. Who said translation was easy?
20 October
I can imagine the mirth triggered in some subscribers by the communication on the Goathead Press’s new website that my book of twenty short stories ‘will be published in early 2026’. They doubtless recall more vividly than I do the trail of missed publication dates for this book that has been laid by announcements on Calderonia over the past year!
‘Going forward’, yes, it is so. If I am honest with myself, the main reason is that the last story in the collection, ‘Pouring Out’, has taken me far longer to write than I was expecting. Maybe it will completed before Christmas. But I should also say that the unplanned turmoil with Sam&Sam has taken up a great deal of our time since 16 June. Getting a basic website like the Goathead Press’s up and running may not look very complicated, but as well as the new ‘Who We Are’ it included checking all our stock figures connecting directly with PayPal, updating all three postage rates for every one of our available books after weighing them, adding new books, compiling the new list of secondhand books, buying the website name etc etc. Well, it’s done and we have already had some nice feedback.
What it means, though, for this blog is that I shall probably be posting only once a month from now until February 2026. My name really would be mud if I didn’t get The White Bow/Ghoune out when I said this time! I will try to post things seasonal, of course.
30 November
As I write, Ukraine’s delegation (now led by Rustem Umerov) is in the U.S. to discuss Steve Witkoff’s 28-point peace plan. Witkoff has come in for a lot of mockery for his apparent amateurism and I think that using only Putin’s interpreters in his three-day Miami discussions with Dmitriev was probably unconstitutional (treasonous). Witkoff appears simply to have swallowed Russia’s maximalist wish-list. But nothing less than that would have got the Russians on board. Whether it was a conscious bait or not, it has succeeded in at last hooking Putin onto serious negotiations. It will now be difficult for Putin to ditch the peace process — although he promptly rejected the Europeans’ rewriting of Witkoff’s plan, of course. Putin lost his war long ago, he knows it, and is now entangled in a Trumpian ‘deal’. That’s about as positively as one can put it. Ukraine has not won the war and looks as though it is going to lose the peace. Sorry, I mean ‘peace’.
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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