The art of book translation becomes even more challenging when you translate a book that hasn’t been updated since the Cold War. At Asymptote, Jacek Dehnel discusses how much changed from Ariadna Demkowska’s 1962 translation of The Great Gatsby to his current work. “Demkowska was working under very different circumstances: behind the Iron Curtain and without access to Google. It was, therefore, more difficult for her to track down various details, such as those concerning well-known financiers or popular culture starlets of the 1920s.”
Translating After the Iron Curtain
Smoking Knausgaard
“[E]ach video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria.” The Paris Review has a new video series called “My First Time,” in which big-name authors talk about getting their start. Helen DeWitt, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sheila Heti, a chain-smoking Karl Ove Knausgaard – what more could anyone want? More origin stories, that’s what! Six writers – Colum McCann, Alexander Chee, Jami Attenberg, Emily St. John Mandel, Justin Taylor, and Anthony Marra – look back on their first books for us.
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Marlon James Interviewed
“There used to be a time when people read literature to confront stuff. To experience things vicariously—whether it’s a forbidden scene or a forbidden idea. I think now we’re looking to literature for an escape from that. I’m not sure why that is.” Guernica interviews Marlon James, whose most recent novel A Brief History of Seven Killings was reviewed on the Book Report.
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Profanity in Book Titles
Out this week is Marcy Roznick’s If You Give a Kid a Cookie, Will He Shut the —- Up?, a parody aimed at adults of the 1985 children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie… What’s up with all the profanity in book titles lately?
What’s In A Name?
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The Animated ‘Aeneid’
Mark Robinson makes a case for the Aeneid in a vivid animated video that explains how the epic poem was published despite Virgil's wishes.
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Alfred Kazin’s Brownsville
While reviewing Alfred Kazin‘s Journals, Christopher Byrd pays a visit to Brownsville and Kazin’s boyhood home.
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