writing and translation
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,...
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...
The book is a collection of short pieces that are between or about or in addition to fiction, but not themselves fiction, the kind of book I always hope will illuminate the nuts and...
This book is hard to read. The language insists on calling attention to itself, so no stars for “ease” or “comfort”. But I can’t imagine a more effective way of insisting on the fragility,...