Thursday, October 13, 2011

"Alan Eugene Jackson (born October 17, 1958) is an American country music singer..."

While in Shanghai last week, we visited Ikea. After we made our purchases, but before Tiffany had finished with hers, Emily and I ended up hanging out at a front showcase, where I blithely picked up this display book:


Emily, horrified by our discovery.


I opened it up, expecting to find McCarthy's articulate, resonant prose translated into incomprehensible Swedish gibberish, and instead found this:


Page after page after page of the same excerpt...


A book-page length portion of Alan Jackson's Wikipedia biography, copied+pasted with the footnote links left in.




We checked: all the rest of the books on display, including a Toni Morrison book, were actual Swedish translations of the real thing. Or, at least, some legitimate story -- I don't know, I don't read Swedish.

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