Books

2020-08-04

The Black book club has, over time, served as a space of critical study, leisure and fellowship. In the 19th century, free Black Americans in the North saw literary societies and the organized literary activities that they sponsored as one way to arrest the attention of the public, assert their racial and American identities, and give voice to their belief in the promises of democracy, Elizabeth McHenry wrote in Forgotten Readers Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies.

— Black Book Clubs From Oprah to Noname, Iman Stevenson in The New York Times

Murakami's Translationese

#books #literature #japan

2020-07-15

What I was seeking by writing first in English and then “translating” into Japanese was no less than the creation of an unadorned “neutral” style that would allow me freer movement. My interest was not in creating a watered-down form of Japanese. I wanted to deploy a type of Japanese as far removed as possible from so-called literary language in order to write in my own natural voice.

— On Translationese, Masatsugu Ono in The Paris Review

Wasps

2019-10-01

I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It’s a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what’s happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But all of that is explained in a very quick note at the beginning of the edition.

William Carlos Williams on love and cruelty

2019-07-24

I’ve been reading The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson and there’s tons of great extracts and references. One that caught me in particular was this excerpt from The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams, which (I think) disputes the rosy typical notions about love but reaffirms it as a wilder, more brutal thing:

It’s a nice disputation of the oft-quoted 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

controlled descent, forced landing

Brixton

2018-08-12