At Full Stop, the editors interview Susan Bernofsky, who directs the literary translation program at Columbia and has published translations of works by Robert Walser, among other writers. She talks about German phrases that rarely appear in English, as well as the ethics of translating a work faithfully: “I think it’s the translator’s responsibility to be so attuned to the requirements of a given text (and the universe of the author) that these inevitable interventions are always appropriate and never arbitrary or willful,” she says. You could also read Tanya Paperny on the translator Michael Henry Heim.
Weltschmerz
January Beaches
Recommended reading, perfect for dreary January weekends: David Sedaris writes about “ways to have fun at the beach” for The New Yorker.
Last of the Mohicans, First of the Republicans
At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir dubs Lincoln “a tremendous accomplishment.” (It probably doesn’t hurt that its director is Steven Spielberg.)
Marksonalia
Millions contributor Tyler Malone has created a Tumblr account dedicated to the marginalia of David Markson, whose novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress was famously passed up by 54 publishers before becoming a critical darling.
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Multiple Personas
If all you associate Ingmar Bergman with is moody chess games and dead doves, it’s time to add “novelist” to the list.
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Brooklyn Was Mine
Paula Fox‘s ostensible review of L.J. Davis‘ A Meaningful Life in the current New York Review of Books is really (pace N1BR) a transporting memoir of Brooklyn in the ’70s.
What’s That Type?
For all typography enthusiasts and lovers of browser plugins: Chrome has a new extension, FontFace Ninja, that will tell you the font of any text on any webpage.
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Needs More Pigs
The archives of the British Library have been digitized, and among many other gems is this rejection of George Orwell’s Animal Farm by none other than T.S. Eliot, himself: “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”