“It is impossible to ignore the ways in which [Pauline] Kael’s gender makes her a target,” writes Amanda Shubert as she reviews the oft-criticized movie critic, subject of the new book Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark.
On Pauline
What a Gas!
Anatoly Liberman unwinds the etymology of “fart,” a word that, despite seeming modern, was used in the original legend of Thor and has been with us since the birth of the Indo-European ur-language.
When Literary Praise Goes Too Far
More amusement has been prompted by The History of Love author Nicole Krauss’s arguably over-the-top blurb for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land: “To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.” Following Guardian’s subsequent contest for who can write the most absurdly laudatory blurb for a Dan Brown novel, Laura Miller at Salon dissects why author endorsements are so unreliable.
Translation by the Numbers
Three Percent crunches the numbers on all the translated fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in 2009. The overall numbers were down in 2009 from 2008. The top language to be translated? Spanish, followed by French, German, Arabic, and Italian. (Thanks, Laurie)
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Hemingway’s Beef
We know Ernest Hemingway could drink, but he also could make an excellent burger. At The Paris Review blog, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan cooked up Papa’s famous patty. “The burger was delicious: each bit of it oozed a complex and textured umami, earthy and deep,” she writes. In other Hemingway news, Harper’s will publish a forgotten story, “My Life in the Bull Ring With Donald Ogden,” in its October issue, but only because Hemingway’s estate wouldn’t let Vanity Fair print it. The magazine rejected the story in 1924 and as his son put it, “I’m not a great fan of Vanity Fair. It’s a sort of luxury thinker’s magazine, for people who get their satisfaction out of driving a Jaguar instead of a Mini.”
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Women in Translation
“Between 2008 and 2014 there were 2,471 fiction translations published in the U.S. for the first time ever. Of those, 1,775 were written by men, compared to 657 by women, and 39 by men & women. In terms of percentages, female authors make up 26.6% of all the fiction translations published over the past seven years. I suspected going into this that there would be significantly more male authors published in translation than women, but I figured it would be more like a 60-40 split, not 71-27. That’s brutal.” Chad Post on the gender gap in literary translation.
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Anxiety or Discipline?
Recommended Viewing: This installment of The Paris Review’s “My First Time” series, in which poet Ben Lerner remembers “working under the sign of crisis” and attempting to find a publisher for his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures. A couple of Lerner-related pieces from The Millions: a review of his newest novel, 10:04, and a Year in Reading from back in 2014.