writing and translation
A name for something impossible, an “equivalence” that can never really be.
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...