Blast from the past
In 1997 I spent a year on a Government Study Fellowship investigating the possibility of moving the registration of titles to land from a paper based system to one which was online. It was a condition of the Fellowship that the research had to be international and in the course of the year I visited Ontario and New Brunswick in Canada, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia (Sydney) and New Zealand (Wellington). It was a tough year but someone had to do it…
Anyway I wrote a report on the subject which got published – it still gets a mention on Amazon here – and established a project to explore automated registration of title to land in Scotland. If you want to read what I wrote then you’ll find it online here (opens a pdf document).
This morning I went along to the formal launch of ARTL (reported briefly here) and listened to some speeches and reflected on something going live with a Ministerial launch which was the result of the work I did more than a decade ago. I left the project in 2000 to seek pastures new and so the hard work of taking it from idea to reality was done by others of course and I can claim no particular proprietary rights in how it has turned out – and nor would I want to. It was, as the title of this post suggests, a distinct blast from the past and as I listened to the assorted dignitaries I permitted myself a wee rub to the ego. A bit like my later work on eProcurement, the most gratifying thing was to reflect on how it had gone from sitting with a blank sheet trying to work out what was going on and how things might be done to seeing a room full of people enthusing about the benefits to them of the reality.
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I have been listening intently for the past couple of days to an album called Trespasser by Chris Wood. I had known of him tangentially through The Imagined Village and his work with Andy Cutting. I am enjoying the album a lot although it demands some listening on occasion. Although it is very English in its conception and execution it has, oddly enough, given me some pointers towards some worries I have been having with the very French Brassens.
At Welling last month I took from my encounter with Goun and appreciation for the ways in which Brassens’ songs can be presented in a very different way from the originals without them being damaged and that was playing in my mind when trying to work out what I am going to do with La Princesse et le Croque-Note which is an awkward song to interpret. However I had worries about that song and presenting it to an English speaking audience. What I have taken from Chris Woods is his uncompromising insistence in letting a song speak for itself and not getting between it and the listener to mediate its meaning.
This doesn’t in itself make the translation/adaptation of the song any easier but it does remind me that my responsibility is not to make the song easier for the listener but to make the best English version of the song that I can and let the intelligence of the listener work out what it is about.
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