Category: words

Breaking the Bulgarian structure out of the sentences and turning it into an equally strong and evocative phrase in English is a lot like doing 50 pushups. It’s painful and exalting. And one day, you get better. But sometimes you cry and swear, becoming haunted by Nabokov’s seminal, merciless essay, “The Art of Translation.”

“Conventional public discourse is boring, too familiar and brittle: the spray-on-tan blather of pundits on CNN, the coo of commerce, the drained, template-like rhetoric of political speech. That’s where poetry, that oft-forgotten form, comes in, a specific kind of verse called “civic poetry.” Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice.”

“I’m tired of cultural pompousness passing as a form of intelligence and moral superiority, whether we’re talking about television, book, movie or music preferences. I record “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” while my boyfriend records “Nova”—does that make him a better person? Is that really what we want to pass down to the next generation—a way of one-upping ourselves over something that should be entertaining?”

“A report Wednesday from the PEN American Center says translated versions of foreign books may be excised because of political sensitivities, like Taiwan, Tibet and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy protesters. But references to sexually explicit material and gay and lesbian issues are also frowned upon.”

“I don’t fear the long novel as much as pine for good editors. A book can be any length, if the words earn their keep on the page. I rarely see the point in huge chunks of prose that don’t serve the story: writing has to be mesmerisingly good before that doesn’t feel self-indulgent to me. I also worry that we might be overlooking short novels.”

“The Hungarian author, whose sentences roll out over paragraphs in what his translator George Szirtes has called a ‘slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type’, has won the Man Booker International prize for his ‘achievement in fiction on the world stage’.”

“With a population of 2.8 million people within the city limits, there are 25 bookstores for every 100,000 people … The closest [competitor] is Hong Kong, which has 22 bookstores per 100,000 people.” Says one bookstore manager, “Books represent us like [big hint redacted]. We have a culture very rooted in print.”

“Maybe it was ever thus? ‘I don’t think the long novel ever went away,’ says Jennifer Brehl, who edited Neal Stephenson’s forthcoming 880-page sci-fi story Seveneves. … But the notable thing about these books isn’t that their heft is unprecedented; it’s that all the forces Hallberg alluded to in 2010″ – basically, culture-wide gadget-induced ADD – “are exponentially stronger today.”

“In its abrupt closure of a small programme, City University has chosen to make the act of writing a political battle. For five years, we occupied a small and unique place: a learning environment in which there were no hard and fast dicta, but in which we cultivated the awareness that language is thinking. Language can diminish and language can enlarge. For our young people, to read and to be read matters.”

“The association, which represents more than 500 campus-based writing programs, as well as thousands of writers, acted after many members pushed for Place’s removal. They object to her Twitter account (below right), on which she is posting, line by line, the text of the novel Gone With the Wind. The Twitter feed also features a photograph of Hattie McDaniel as the profile picture. McDaniel was the actress who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mammy in the film version of the novel.”