Ever wonder how Google Translate works? Now you know. These two pieces (one and two) on Lydia Davis‘ translation of Madame Bovary are worth revisiting, too.
“Perfect translation … is of course impossible.”
From Wharton to Woolf
Did Virginia Woolf learn a bit of her modernism from Edith Wharton? John Colapinto argues so in The New Yorker, pointing out that the famous middle section of To the Lighthouse seems to mirror the innovative end of The Age of Innocence.
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Stellar Memoir
Maclean’s has an excerpt from Chris Hadfield’s forthcoming memoir, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.
This Could Be Big
After winning a $100,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, what do you do for an encore? How about staging "fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates" about what the future ought to look like? How about enlisting the likes of Laurie Anderson, Samuel Delany, Rachel Kushner, and Norman Rush as ringmasters? How about having the entire thing take place in structures designed by artists José León Cerrillo and Adrián Villar Rojas? Triple Canopy's "Speculations" occupies MoMA's P.S. 1 this summer
Read Yourself Civilized
In the latest issue of The Boston Review, Elaine Scarry reviews Steven Pinker's
The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues that literature, by bolstering man's empathy, has lead to huge reductions in worldwide violence, a thesis that sounds dangerously close to the absurd pop-science of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.
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Good Company
What do you get when you combine Jorge Louis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, and W.H. Auden? You get a list of the losers of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was won by the controversial Soviet author Mikhail Sholokhov, who had spoken out against granting the Nobel to Boris Pasternak a few years earlier. Not such bad company on the losing side, there.
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