Monthly Archives: October 2017

What songbirds could teach us about constructive tweeting

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https://scroll.in/article/852792/what-songbirds-could-teach-us-about-constructive-tweeting

What mechanisms allow birdsong cultures to accumulate, instead of collapsing into either high conformity or chaos? In the lab, the emergence of song culture can be studied by establishing a new songbird colony, starting with an isolated bird that never had an opportunity to learn a song from an adult tutor. This new song will be abnormal: isolated songs are often not even recognisable as belonging to the species. Juvenile birds, however, will readily imitate the abnormal song of their isolated colony founder, as will their offspring. But with each generation, the songs become slightly more similar to the typical species ‘format’, and within four generations a culture of wild-type songs will emerge de novo. This is because birds have an innate sense of aesthetics: while imitating a song, the bird modifies it a little to make it sound ‘right’.

Sholeh Wolpé: If I Do Not Translate, It’s A Sin – Guernica

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https://www.guernicamag.com/sholeh-wolpe-not-translate-sin/

In 2007, she translated the twentieth-century Iranian poet and feminist Forugh Farrokhzad in the collection Sin.

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Sholeh Wolpé: I didn’t know it was going to be my next translation project. I was invited by San Jose State University to give a talk on Farīd Ud-Dīn Attar. I said OK, fantastic, because I love this poet and I’m happy to talk about his work, and I looked for representative poems from Conference. I noticed, first of all, that in a language where we don’t have gendered pronouns, no “he” or “she,” the translated poetry I was picking up had genders. All the birds were “he.” And God is a “He.” [The translator had] already decided that it’s all male. That didn’t sit right with me. And I just did not feel the spirit of the poem spoke to me in those translations as it did in Persian.