Column by David in The Times.

Two things struck me watching the Oscars. First, pleased though I was that Tilda Swinton won for Best Supporting Actress, whenever I see her now I also hear a chorus of female columnists rushing to champion her ménage à trois with her older partner and younger lover as a shining example of a modern bohemian self-determined lifestyle. Which is all very well, but I cannot help but wonder what these same columnists would have made of a male film star coming out with the same information – I’d very much like to see what reaction, for example, Ralph Fiennes would have got, if, instead of leaving Francesca Annis, he’d announced that he was moving in Jessica Alba. And secondly, I wondered what happened to Good Book, Bad Movie.

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Column by David in The Times.

IN MY LAST COLUMN I wrote a piece about how I get a bit angsty, while reading novels not originally written in English, that, however good the translation, I’m missing out on the full Flaubert or Musil or García Márquez experience. This provoked a big old debate on the Times website and the publication last week of an outraged letter from a Mr Hugh Aplin: should Dostoevsky, therefore, Mr. Aplin railed, be left to the Russians and Cervantes to the Spaniards? How much poorer would world culture be if such an attitude prevailed.

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Column by David in The Times.

HERE’S A QUESTION FOR YOU: what is the German for “careers officer”? A quick dip into Babel Fish, the translation website, comes back with the immediate response Karriere-offizier. Sounds fine to me – I always like it when foreign languages give the impression that they are just actually English with a bit of an ‘Allo, ‘Allo spin. But should any of you make the unlikely decision to read my first novel in German, you will find this innocuous phrase translated as Wiedereingliederung-in-den-Arbeits-prozeß-Betruer. Put that into Babel Fish and it comes up as “Reintegration into the Working Process Responsible Person”. Which, even for German, is pushing the compound word thing a bit far, especially when just to hand is Karriereoffizier. There is an explanation for this. On a recent reading trip to Frankfurt, I asked my translator why “careers officer” had become such a long word in her languague; she replied, with that particular German smiling complacency: “Oh, I made up a word, to sound kind of sarcastic.”

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