How does Karl Ove Knausgaard delve into some of the oldest parts of his memory for his writing? “I remember every single room that I have been in from the age of seven. What I did was to place myself in those rooms, and when I started to write about them it was like unlocking a thousand small doors, all leading further into childhood,” he told Cressida Leyshon at The New Yorker. Knausgaard also has a story, “Come Together” (behind the paywall), in the current issue. Pair with: Our essay on My Struggle.
Unlocking the Doors
Traduttori traditori (“translators traitors”)
“As energy loss is an unavoidable fact of mechanics — no mechanism can be 100% efficient, and the best a designer can do is manage the loss as productively as possible — so translation loss is similarly unavoidable,” explains Mark Davie, who recently translated Galileo’s Selected Writings. But what if the “energy loss” isn’t a failure of the work’s translator so much as a failure of the organization commissioning (or failing to commission) the translation? What if, as is the case for much Arabic literature, “the process [of selecting works for translation] is based on a political consideration” that deprives Western readers of the best Arabic literary work?
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Building Covers
Year in Reading alumnus Chris Ware drew the cover of this week’s New Yorker. (If you liked his latest, Building Stories, you might like reading our review.)
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Appearing Elsewhere
My review of Tom Bissell‘s Magic Hours appears in this Sunday’s NYTBR.
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Remembering Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa, literary translator and professor at Queens College, died this past week. Rabassa helped introduce Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, among others, to English-language readers. He was 94 years old.
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There’s Treasure Everywhere
In the mind of the ethical parent, one question overshadows all others: what’s the best way to get your kid to read Calvin and Hobbes? Unfortunately, there are no simple answers, only theories. (ICYMI: here’s a tribute to Calvin’s snow sculptures.)
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