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Sneaky, but I'll give credit. Shakespeare Holds Up You Are a Dog Japanese (huh?)
Shakespeare Holds Up You Are a Dog Japanese on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
When I go to a site like Technorati looking for Shakespeare stories, a bunch of Flickr photos that have also been tagged as Shakespeare show up down the side. So when I saw this one entitled "Shakespeare Holds Up You Are a Dog Japanese", I said "huh? What?" I had to click it. Was it some weird translation from Japanese to English?
Nope. It's the author of a book entitled "You are a dog" who has taken a picture of her (his?) book leaning up against a Shakespeare book. It's a silly joke about the position of her book in classic literature (kindof an updated "Shakespeare's not fit to shine my shoes", the way I read it), which she recognizes is silly. What she did do wonderfully though, and the reason she earns a link from me, is that with some creative tagging she's getting a bunch of people like me to go check her book out on Amazon. I like creative ways to generate traffic that aren't misleading, and technically there's nothing misleading about this. I may not have understood what it was, but when you look at it, everything is right there.
2 comments:
My wife and son read Japanese fluently. I'll ask them for their take on the title page.
My spouse here reads the front of the book as follows. The verticle Kana forms in yellow, first right then left, says, "We are dogs." The lettering below the photo translates essentially, "The wonderful world [though the] eyes of dogs." I asked her about the "You are a dog," translation and she says that it is specifically "We are dogs." 'Wah-re, Wah-re, Wa' is the pronunciation for the pronoun 'we.'
We're surprised to see that it's a NorthWest bestseller. We'll have to check at Kinokuniya for a copy.
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