Category: words

“A new generation of young European writers is reinventing political literature—and people are listening. Some of the brightest new voices on the continent are making their names through overtly political books, showing that literature, even books of poetry, can still play a significant role in shaping public discourse.”

New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins recounts some of the countless surprises she experienced with French after she relocated to Geneva with her husband, Olivier.

“According to the Turkish Publishers Association, the decree means that all goods, assets, rights, documents and papers belonging to the publishers will be transferred free of charge to the Turkish treasury, with no appeal to be made, and the prospect of further publishers being shut down in the future.”

Many literary works today do not appear in translation, but are written for translation from the beginning. They are “born translated.” Adapted from “born digital,” the term used to designate artworks produced by and for the computer, “born-translated literature approaches translation as medium and origin rather than as afterthought. Translation is not secondary or incidental to these works. It is a condition of their production.”

Charles McGrath suggests that it’s “a novelistic weariness with America and Americans, a sense that our native ground is not too thin, as Henry James would have it, but too played out.” Siddhartha Deb thinks perhaps they shouldn’t bother: “Can a novel set abroad be anything other than the Grand Tour novel or its successor, the imperial novel?”

“Roughly 4,500 years old, they describe the daily routines of workers during the Fourth Dynasty reign of King Khufu as they worked on national projects, highlighting in particular the physical labor of constructing the pharaoh’s Great Pyramid of Giza.”

Well, it was rational, systematic, and taxonomically orderly. If only that were the way humans actually think.