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...
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...
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...
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...