Proust and the Squid: Book Review
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, London: Icon 2008. It is a great title! In the end, though, I decided the title applied — lightly — to just...
Category: language
Reading Genesis: book review
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, London: Virago, 2024. Can the writer of this very closely-argued, scholarly study be the same Marilynne Robinson we’ve some to know and, at least in my own case, to profoundly...
Book Review: Black Elk Speaks
Rating books is always reductive, unfair: it flattens a full-fledged, 3D experience into a less than a line…just 5 dots! Rating this one is particularly absurd, like passing judgement on the New Testament or...
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 Cultural Toolbox: Book Review
Anton Treuer, The Cultural ToolBox: Traditional Ojibwe Living in the Modern World, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2021 I am not Ojibwe. That is, I’m not one of the readers this book explicitly addresses. Still,...
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...