Mild Vertigo: Book Review
Mieko Kanai: Mild Vertigo (translator, Polly Barton), London: Fitzarraldo, 2023. I found many reasons to admire it. Prime among them was the consistency of language — and translation — that makes it possible for...
Category: translation
A name for something impossible, an “equivalence” that can never really be.
Translating and Transposing
It’s heartening to know that the celebrated translator Lydia Davis is open, in fact enthusiastic and curious about new, or inventive moves between levels and contexts and forms of language. She has taken a...
The Melody of Language
If language is like music, surely translators are in the best position to notice it, and to respond, whether with joy or foreboding. Probably all of us hear it. There’s a particular beat, a...
Translating as Play
Long ago — 1968, to be exact — Vilém Flusser proposed a model of human communication based on games (yes, Wittgenstein IS in the background). It may sound like trivialization, but it isn’t. The...
Code Talker (Book Review)
Chester Nez (with Judith Schiess Avila), Code Talker: The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of W.W.II, New York: Berkeley Caliber, 2011. Can an autobiography be “authorized”? This...
Technical Writing
I was recently surprised by a piece of writing that was, yes, technical without a doubt, but also really good -“good” being, for me, some combination of absorbing, accessible, illuminating, funny, and memorable. Why...