Cyprus, Part One: Limassol (Lemesos)

We spent a week in Cyprus with my parents. This was our first visit, while my father had visited Cyprus several times in the 1990s, and my mother had been there twice before. I'm going to start with some general information and impressions, and then focus on Limassol, where we stayed. I will write about other locations we visited in later posts.

Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean, and has been independent since 1960. The island has been divided since 1974, when the Turkish army invaded northern Cyprus. The history of population displacement and the unresolved status of the northern occupied area is constantly in the background of Cypriot consciousness, and reminded us in some ways of our own local conflict. Both seem difficult or impossible to resolve.

General information: Traffic drives on the left. Cyprus uses UK-style power sockets, so visitors may need adapters. The tap water is safe to drink, so you can refill water bottles instead of buying mineral water. Don't flush toilet paper, put it in the bins provided. Cyprus is considered a safe country with the lowest crime rate in Europe.

Weather: We visited in the second week of September and it was hotter than we expected, around 32-35C, or even more, and very humid. The exception to this was when we visited the Troodos mountains, where it was a much more comfortable 20-22C.

Food: The food is good and fresh, and the cuisine is similar to traditional Greek food, with some Turkish influences. Touristy places also serve standard international meals, such as pizza, pasta, and sandwiches. Vegetarians will find it easy, while vegans and the lactose intolerant may have to ask for salads or other dishes without the cheese, or similar adaptations.

Accessibility: My father uses a wheelchair, though he can walk a few steps with his walking stick when necessary. Some places we visited had wheelchair access, while in other places it was more difficult. Some pedestrian crossings had sloped curbs, but these were not always in good condition, and in other places he just had to stand up so we could get the wheelchair down onto the road and then back up the other side. Also, many waiters thought he would want to sit in his wheelchair and started removing a chair, when in fact he prefers to get out of the wheelchair and sit at a table in a normal chair. Perhaps people assume anyone in a wheelchair is paralyzed?

Accommodation: We stayed at the Limassol Crowne Plaza Hotel, on the sea. This was a more luxurious hotel than we would normally prefer, and it was chosen because it got good reviews for wheelchair access, and because my mother wanted to swim in the sea. We were very satisfied with the hotel and its staff.

Limassol (Lemesos in Greek) is the second largest city in Cyprus after the capital, Nicosia. It is quite centrally-located and convenient if you want to visit various parts of the island. It is currently experiencing unrestrained development, spreading out along the coastline. Although this was my first visit to the city, I thought to myself: "Oh, Limassol, what have they done to you?". It felt like a place I once knew was being ruined. Cyprus has a policy of encouraging foreign investment in real estate, and new housing, hotels, and offices are being built without much central planning, or so it seems. This felt unfortunate to me.

Limassol Castle is a small castle near the old port. From the roof we had good views of the area, and inside there was a Medieval Museum, displaying items from all over the island, such as armour, weapons, icons, stonework, and even a Menorah, with insufficient explanation.

We visited the Old Port and the new, gentrified Marina. There are shops and restaurants in this area.

Another day, we visited Limassol Archaeological Museum. To its credit, this museum had ramps and a lift to allow wheelchair access. It also had air conditioning. The displays contained finds from Cyprus' history and prehistory, as well as an exhibit focusing on Amathous, a site we didn't manage to visit during our trip. We were particularly fascinated by evidence of cat domestication long before the familiar evidence from Egypt.

We missed the annual Limassol Wine Festival held in the Municipal Park, as it ended the day we arrived. We visited the park itself, and found it a peaceful green area to rest and enjoy the sea breeze.

Among the restaurants we visited in Limassol: Fat Fish, Noa, Neon Phaliron, and La Brezza (in the Crowne Plaza Hotel).

We enjoyed our stay in Limassol, despite the sense that it was losing its spirit to rapid over-development.

Descriptions of other parts of Cyprus will follow in the next few blog posts.

Hannah Shaw, Tiny but Mighty

Hannah Shaw, Tiny but Mighty: Kitten Lady's Guide to Saving the Most Vulnerable Felines, Flume, 2019.

This book is both an enjoyable read for cat-lovers and a practical resource for cat-rescuers. The author, Hannah Shaw, has established herself as Kitten Lady on social media and in her educational work. Her popular videos show both the reality of rescue work and the entertaining side of life with kittens.

The book can be read from cover to cover, as I did. I recommend doing this when you first get the book. But it can also be dipped into later for information when required, and the charming stories of individual kittens can be read without context.

The chapters focus on various aspects of kitten rescue, its importance, its practical aspects from trapping to adoption, kitten development and health, and, importantly, caring for the rescuer to prevent compassion fatigue.

I can only disagree with the author on one point. She repeats the often quoted idea that feral kittens can't be socialized after they reach 12 weeks old. However, viewers of the TinyKittens webcam in Canada have witnessed the socialization of many older feral kittens and adult feral cats. It can be done, depending on the cat's personality and experience with humans, and the provision of the right sort of interactions.

The book is also full of delightful kitten photographs taken by the author and her photographer partner, Andrew Marttila. This is why I bought the physical book rather than an ebook.

Hannah's voice shines throughout the writing, with compassion, humour, and advice based on experience. While the book teaches, it never feels dry or didactic, and it provides inspiration for cat people to become involved in rescue in whatever way is most appropriate for them. As she says:

This book is an invitation for readers to join me on this journey and to add their own pieces to the puzzle... My hope is that you will see yourself in these pages, and feel supported in your own rescue journey... Movements are made up of individuals, and our small individual actions have the power to change everything (pp. 6-7).

I highly recommend this book to anyone actively involved in rescue, to anyone who loves cats and kittens, and to those wishing to see what compassion and positive action looks like.


https://amzn.to/34x9ZTR

Turning 50

Today is my 50th birthday. I remember writing a post ten years ago about turning 40, so I thought I would write another one at this round birthday.

I have always been open about my age. It's a fact, and I see no point in trying to hide it or pretending to be a different age. I don't feel that I'm any particular age, and people who want to categorize me as belonging to a stereotypical age-group are not seeing me as I really am. Just as I think that individual differences between people can be greater than any distinction between genders, I also think that individual differences can be greater than any expectations for people of particular ages.

Our society often seems to value youth over age and experience, but we are all aging. Sometimes there seems to be an unspoken conflict between the energy of young people, who are experiencing things enthusiastically for the first time, and the wisdom of older people, who have seen it all and can draw on their depth of experience and insight. To be ageless, you have to maintain the excitement and playfulness of youth along with the accumulated understanding of the world and of yourself.

I can look back on the life I have created for myself, my journey so far, with satisfaction. I have chosen what seems to be best for me, and to the extent that I can control certain things in my life, my happiness has been increasing. While in the world around me, things beyond my control seem to be getting worse, all I can do as an individual is continue to do what I can to be a good person with a positive influence. I refuse to become cynical and disillusioned as I age. I remind myself not to think in absolutes and to see the wide range of opinions and personalities out there.

I hope that I'm not yet half way through my life. I have some grounds to expect this: I'm female, women in my family on both sides tend to have long lives, and I live in a country with a relatively high life expectancy. If my health remains good and I manage to avoid wars, accidents, natural disasters, and the inevitable consequences of climate change, I think I have a good chance of reaching 100 years old. This means that I will be able to continue my happy life and my positive contribution to society for a long time.

On this "landmark" birthday, I'm reminding myself of everything I will be able to do and experience in years to come: love, friendship, creativity, compassion, and adventure. Here's to the future!

Lecture evening: In the Sea and In the Air

This week we attended the annual lecture event organized by our vet clinic, Medivet. Each year (more or less), they arrange a lecture event or film screening for their customers, focusing on animal and environment issues.

This year's event was entitled In the Sea and In the Air. There were about 80-100 people in the audience, including some children who asked good questions.

The first lecture was by underwater photographer Alon Zehngut of Flying Camel. He described various diving trips around the world, the marine wildlife he has photographed, and a bit about the equipment required. He showed many photos of manta rays, sharks, whales, dolphins, and some fish. Alongside the sense of wonder any encounter with the vast diversity of life on this planet awakens, there was the inevitable discussion of the destruction human beings have been causing.

Sharks have been vilified as dangerous predators, even though most species never attack humans, and there are fewer people killed by sharks each year than those killed by other animals. On average about 5 people die in shark attacks each year. In contrast, humans kill about 100,000,000 sharks per year, which means about 1,000 sharks every hour. Sharks are hunted for their fins in a despicable practice called shark finning. This is due to the consumption of shark fin soup, which has become a status symbol in Asia, and also for "traditional" remedies that have no scientific justification.

It is time for those of us who care about our planet and its animals to try to eliminate these cruel and destructive practices. I knew about shark hunting only in a general sense, but having been educated about the horrifying specifics, I'm doing my part by writing about it now, and I hope that every person who reads this can tell a few others about it and start a ripple effect.

Here are some of Alon's photos.

The second lecture was by Yigal Miller from the Carmel Hai-Bar Nature Reserve, not far from where we live. He's responsible for the vulture rehabilitation program. Vultures are highly endangered, and human factors have drastically reduced their population. Habitat loss, electrocution, shooting, poisoning, and even traffic accidents account for many deaths. Because vultures scavenge on carcasses, poison passes along the food chain and they can be killed by eating other animals that have been poisoned. They can also get lead poisoning from eating lead bullets as well as from having lead bullets lodged in their bodies if they are shot and manage to survive. 

Vultures lay one egg and both parents raise the chick together, taking turns to stay with the chick while the other parent flies off in search of food to bring back for the offspring. As a result, if one parent dies, the chick has little chance of survival. The Hai-Bar rescues such chicks and raises them in captivity, as well as conducting a captive breeding program. They take care not to let the chicks become used to humans and "imprint" on them. 

Eventually, the vultures are released into the wild. Yigal said that since they have been putting GPS trackers on the released birds, they can see how far they fly, ranging into our neighbouring countries, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, and even as far as Sudan.

The Hai-Bar has a controlled feeding station, where they receive dead livestock and test them before feeding them to the vultures. They ask the farmers who raised the animals about antibiotics and pain medications they might have received, to avoid passing these on to the vultures and making them ill, and in some cases they test the carcasses.

The lecture didn't directly address a sad case we learned about recently. In May this year, eight of the twenty vultures in the Golan died of poisoning. While this case received widespread media attention, Yigal said that vultures die or disappear almost every day, and the problem is wider than just one poisoning event.

Vultures are another species with a negative reputation, but their importance in the biosphere cannot be underestimated. People may find the scavenging of dead animals distasteful, but it is an essential part of the circle of life. I have come to appreciate vultures much more since watching SafariLive, a channel that livestreams African wildlife in an authentic and uncensored manner. While I don't consider them lovable and cuddly like the lions and leopards I enjoy watching, I have great respect for them and for all the species that make up the fabric of our planet's ecosphere. I wish the Hai-Bar's conservation efforts the best of luck.

2019 ITA Conference

On 13 March 2019, I attended the ITA's annual conference. This year it was a one-day event on a smaller scale than in previous years, and was named the I-Tea-A Party Seminar Day. While the organizers were reluctant to call it a conference, that's what it was, and a very enjoyable one at that.

The event was held at Kfar Maccabiah hotel, in their conference building. There were plenary sessions at the beginning and end of the day, with two parallel lecture tracks in between.

The first plenary speaker was Dr. Gabriel Birnbaum of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. He gave a survey of the Academy's Historical Dictionary of Hebrew project. Work on this dictionary started in 1959, and was one of the first dictionaries in the world to use computers. There are two stages to making the dictionary: first, creating the corpus of all the words in the Hebrew language, based on historical texts; and second, editing a dictionary with definitions and examples. The process of inputting the corpus of Hebrew started with work on all the words in the Mishnah, with all their roots and grammatical forms. Other ancient and medieval Hebrew texts were gradually added, and each time the best available manuscript was chosen. From 1964, they started adding modern Hebrew texts starting from about 1750, but in this case they sampled words rather than inputting all of them. Today they have reached some of the Hebrew authors of the early twentieth century, though with some of them issues of copyright complicate things. The public can search this database online and find all the examples of a word's appearances in the corpus. The actual dictionary, which began in 2004 and is available online, starts from the last letter in Hebrew, Tav, because so many dictionaries start at the beginning and are never completed, so this time they decided to start from the end and work backwards. So far, they have added about 600 entries of words starting with Tav, with word meanings, how frequent the word is in the corpus, when it was first documented in Hebrew, as well as examples from various sources within the corpus. This was a fascinating talk about an important project.

The next lecture was by Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, about cross-cultural translation. The examples she used were from the English subtitles of the documentary film "Hidden Face". This documentary tells the story of an Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi, and the subtitles had to be understandable by an audience who might know very little about Judaism. In this case, a balance had to be found between reflecting what was said and expressing the meaning in a way an audience could understand without prior knowledge.

Dr. Michal Fram-Cohen told the story of two nineteenth century Hebrew translations of the novel Vale of Cedars by Grace Aguilar, which came out in the same year. The first translation was quite close to the original story, while the second "translation" completely changed the story and one of the main characters, for ideological or educational reasons. Of course, modern translators would never do such a thing, and it was interesting to see what used to be acceptable.

Yael Valier described the difficult process of translating rhyming children's stories from Hebrew to English. Since word for word translation won't work for rhymes, the strategies include trying to recreate the sounds, reproducing the meter, turning it into a prose story to keep the meaning, or writing free verse that is still beautiful but without the formal poetic structures. It was interesting to realize that rhyming is very easy in Hebrew, which has grammatical endings that are easy to match, while the rhythm and meter tend to be less important. The translator has to find out the publisher or author's goal and target audience and choose a strategy that will suit this goal.

Tzivia MacLeod from the Society for Children's Books Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) gave a talk about helping Israeli authors of children's books get their work translated and marketed abroad. This involves defining the goals for the book, finding an agent (which is not required in Israeli publishing) or self-publishing, and adapting the book for an international audience while maintaining its specific cultural setting because publishers are seeking diversity.

After lunch, Stephen Rifkind discussed how to find translating work from abroad. Translators of Hebrew have an advantage, because it's a rare and "exotic" language. Of course, it's important to specialize. He recommended quoting an overall price rather than using a per-word or per-hour rate, and aiming to find a price level suitable for forming a long-term relationship with a customer. Cultural sensitivity is also necessary, for example: knowing which cultures like to negotiate terms and how to be polite.

Batia Buchnik-Epstein from Q-Lingua translation agency described the ISO 17100 standard for translations. This involves documenting the credentials of all professionals involved. They use teams of translator plus reviewer / reviser / proof-reader. This standard is useful in fields requiring great accuracy, such as life sciences, defense, automotive, and electronics. They use CAT (computer-assisted translation) rather than MT (machine translation). This gave me an interesting insight into a different type of work.

Finally, the last plenary session was given by Dory Manor, a poet and translator of French poetry into Hebrew. He discussed various aspects of translating poetry. He considers this very different to translating prose, and the translator of poetry basically has to be a poet and create poetry in the target language. One of the interesting aspects he brought up is that almost all the canonical Hebrew poets up to the middle-late twentieth century were writing in a language that was not their mother tongue, and in many cases not even their second or third language. This seems to be extremely rare in the world of poetry. He brought examples from his translations of Baudelaire into Hebrew, showing how he sometimes used alliteration or introduced concepts that would echo with Hebrew-speakers. In some cases, his translations drifted from the original in terms of meaning, in an attempt to convey similar associations in the target language.

I would like to thank the organizers and speakers. The lectures in this conference were all interesting, although not necessarily relevant to my own practice. I really enjoyed this event, and found it disappointing that it was attended by fewer translators than past conferences. I hope the coming years will see increased participation so that these annual events can grow and reach a larger audience. 

Guest post on ITA Blog

I was asked to contribute a guest post on the ITA Blog.

I wrote about how translators can help authors get their books published, beyond just translation.

You can read it here.

UK Pink Floyd Experience and Echoes

On Sunday we went to a Pink Floyd tribute concert by the British band UK Pink Floyd Experience and the Israeli band Echoes. The show at the Haifa Convention Center was the third and last in this tour of Israel, after Beersheba and Tel Aviv. The audience seemed to be mostly my age or older. I like Pink Floyd's music, both in itself and in its pervasive influence over so much of the progressive and alternative music I enjoy. However, I'm not enough of a fan to be familiar with their entire repertoire and the solo careers of each member.

I had mixed feelings about the idea of tribute bands. As a creative, I greatly value originality. I expect that many fans of any artist would consider the idea of listening to another band "imitate" their favourites anything from bizarre to offensive. But the model whereby music is played exclusively by its authors was not established until relatively recently. Classical composers were aware that their work would be played and conducted by other performers beyond their control. Perhaps they considered their role more like that of a playwright. In recent years, the talent shows that have become popular on television have featured many cover versions of well-known songs each week, and perhaps this has led the public to be more accepting of the idea of tribute bands. There are successful stage musicals and biopic films based on the music of various stars. I can also see the attraction to performers of recreating the songs they admire. Many musicians learn to play by practicing their favourite music, and imitation is a stage in learning. Not every good musician has to be a composer of great original music. Ultimately, I put my misgivings aside and enjoyed an evening of good music.

The show was originally planned to be by UK Pink Floyd Experience, and they added Echoes, apparently after seeing them on YouTube, for reasons discussed below. The combination of the two bands worked well. They played some pieces together on stage. In some songs, members of one band performed with the other band. And they performed many works separately. Each band had a different emphasis, at least in this show. UK Pink Floyd Experience focused on some less well-known material, including songs by Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, while Echoes performed many of the more popular Pink Floyd hits, focusing on the albums The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. The performance of both bands was impressive, with some improvised parts that showed their skills beyond mere imitation.

Because "we can't have nice things", the reasons for including Echoes in the concert and for the way the playlist was divided between the bands were largely political rather than artistic. It didn't come as a surprise to anyone that the Israel-hater Roger Waters tried to get UK Pink Floyd Experience to cancel their shows in Israel. As a compromise, they decided not to play the songs associated with Waters themselves and to delegate that task to Echoes. I think the Israeli audience appreciated their decision to appear in Israel despite the pressure, and the compromise allowed the show to be satisfying, with a combination of familiar and less familiar works. It was also a great opportunity for Echoes, and I'm sure they have benefitted from the cooperation and from the exposure to a wider audience.

I have written before about BDS and why I believe boycotting Israel is immoral and counterproductive. It seems ridiculous that there are artists who believe they can change the world not through their art itself but through depriving certain groups of people of access to their art! I see art, like love, as something that illuminates the world and should be shared as widely as possible. People who spread darkness, division, and hatred, especially those who feel so righteous about it, are misguided and actually contribute to the spread of evil in the world instead of uniting the whole human race by finding things everyone can enjoy in common, such as music and art.

I enjoyed the concert and was gratified that they found a way to make it happen despite attempts to prevent it. Let music and love win!