Category: words

“Sixty years ago, the Swedish Academy awarded the Russian author Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature, but less than a week later, under pressure from the Soviet government, Pasternak rejected the award. The story, which had more twists and turns than a Cold War-era spy novel, played out in The New York Times with one front-page story after another.”

Anyone who’s flipped back and forth between the texts and the maps in books by J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert Louis Stevenson knows how much help they can be to the reader. But authors themselves find their maps to be a tremendous help, too.

Literature in translation has never been a priority in the Anglo-Saxon world. While, in a country like Italy, more than half of fiction titles published will be translated, in the US the share of the market is much smaller, somewhere around three percent. Translators are poorly paid and, for the most part, unsung. How encouraging, then, to see a growing advocacy for translated literature and a spirited defense of those who practice this art.

“It’s the challenge of the seemingly unadorned sentence or expression that passes so naturally it seems to ‘write itself.’ While the translation of these sentences can sometimes occur just as naturally, more often than not it requires vast amounts of hairpulling. Few things are as difficult as ease.” Mark Polizzotti offers some examples from his work translating the Nobel winner Patrick Modiano.

“Literature — the top-shelf, award-winning stuff — is positively ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haints and wraiths of every stripe and disposition. These ghosts can be nosy and lubricious, as in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo … [or] confused by their fates, as in Martin Riker’s new novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return … They terrify, instruct and enchant — sometimes all in the same book.” For instance, Lauren Groff’s Florida, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Parul Sehgal looks at the genre’s hold on writers and readers alike.

Erica Eisen tells the story of the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra, a Chinese block-printed scroll dated 868 CE that was bricked up in a cave for eight centuries and ended up at the British Library (which the Chinese government is not happy about).

The Los Angeles Library Foundation on Wednesday announced the hiring of a new programming director, weeks after the organization became enmeshed in a controversy over the firings of two previous longtime directors at the library, Louise Steinman and Maureen Moore.

The day that Patti Smith and Sam Shepard met, she didn’t even know his real name (nor did she for a very long time afterward), but their meeting changed theatre, poetry, and punk.

The British poet says that “Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler teaches me what a book of poetry can look like. In form, heart, focus and humility it’s everything I hope to give to the reader. Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.”