Voynich euro-miscellany...

Some European Voynichy things that have caught my eye recently: make of them what you will...

A 3-part Spanish-language documentary on the VMs written by Eric Frattini, and viewable online (just click the big green buttons). Voynich News regulars will recognize him as the author of Voynich-themed novel "El Quinto Mandamiento" (the fifth commandment), which I touched upon here.

Here's some Italian poetry, including a couple of poems apparently on the Voynich (hence the image of the VMs' nine-rosette page at the top). The first of the two starts something like "I have a strange form of nausea": yup, that's the VMs, alright. :-)

On Tuesday (19th February 2008), there's a program scheduled on German radio WDR 5/530 at 16:05 about our old friend Beinecke MS 408 (A.K.A. the Voynich Manuscript), presented by Sven Preger.

You might reasonably wonder whether this is all part of a diffuse European interest in the VMs: and I think you'd be right. According to Google Trends, the primary languages of people who Google for "Voynich" is (in descending order): French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Portuguese. Though I should also note that over the last 12 months (probably thanks to the novels by Enrique Joven and Eric Frattini) Spaniards searched for "Voynich" slightly more than the French. Anglophone interest in the VMs would appear to be practically nil (apart from Melvyn Bragg): which is either a really good thing or a really bad thing. I'm not sure which... you'll have to decide for yourself.

Voynich & the non-English-speaking world...

The French Voynich mailing list I half-remembered and mentioned before turned out to be an online discussion forum on François Almaleh's website (his main Voynich site is here, which I guess is the skeleton of the Voynich book he was writing back in 2003). However, this died in 2004: you can see a copy in the Wayback Machine here. And therefore I don't think there is an active French Voynich mailing list at the moment, which is a shame after all the publicity gained there by the launch of the [near-]facsimile edition of the VMs "Le Code Voynich". You can even see this in the Google Trends curve for "Voynich": the big spike in the middle was the book release, and France remains at the top of the list of countries Googling for "Voynich".

Some people have posted bilingual Voynich websites: but even if your French is excellent (as Dennis Stallings' plainly is), this is a hard path to take and stick to, and one that removes a lot of the spontaneity of posting and updating web-pages.

Perhaps the simplest modern way to get ideas across to non-native-language readers would be to add a [Translate this page] button to your blog (as I've just done). Recently, I was even pleasantly surprised by the quality of Google's automatic translation from Chinese into English (though admittedly I was expecting it to come out like a mangled shopping list): and doubtless this will keep being improved. But given that quality issues remain, I'd really like to be able to embed translation hints in my text, particularly so that I can continue to post in my polyglot oral tongue stylee: but I somehow doubt that this is on Blogger's radar. I'm probably too early to this ball: but in 10 years' time, who knows...?

PS: I think a link to this blog was posted to the voynich.de Yahoo mailing list: a big Guten Tag to you all there!