Weekly News Roundup, 12th February 2016: Circonflexing Muscles

Happy Friday, Asymptote people! Use the weekend to study for an up-to-date spelling test. This week witnessed a tragic end to that inexplicable squiggly line above (certain) vowels: the circonflexe mark (as in “î” or “û”) is going to be removed from official French orthography. And other weird French spellings (“oignon”) are going to be changed in the interest of logic (becoming “ognon”). Unsurprisingly, this #ReformeOrthographe has sparked quite the lively conversation… Diasporic fiction is a true literary genre, and its Iranian counterpart has some gems you haven’t heard of yet. At the Guardian, author Sanaz Fotouhi’s picked out four English-language diasporic books (since the Islamic Revolution) worth checking out. Translation talk: in case you were wondering, here’s what happens when poets (Indian, German, English) translate other poets. Among Angolophone countries, Australia apparently leads the way in delivering French-language translations. Speaking of poetic translations, Anthony Brigg’s latest retranslation of Russian epic Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin doesn’t anglicize its title character, as all previous translations  of the epic poem have done—and that’s only the beginning. Read the book, watch the series? Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (gush!) are set to be filmed and distributed on small screens across Italy (and, we hope, eventually Internet screens, too). We know it’s legit because the notoriously private author will allegedly be “working closely” with the producers to ensure a smooth book-to-screen transition. And if you can’t finish the tome alone, perhaps peer pressure will do the trick: Russian behemoth Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace will be marathon-read in cities all across the world, in an event organized by the writer’s great-great granddaughter. Prize time: this year’s shortlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction reveals a sadness and tragedy in the Middle East—but a celebration of literature all the same. Because computers can’t respond to crisis: in the Believer, novelist Tony Tulathimutte points toward the end of writing, or at least the end of user-generated (i.e. “human-generated”) content.