To begin to translate a book, you need to hone your knowledge of the language in which it’s written. To write a great essay about translating a book, you need a backstory, an interesting format and two or three foreign parables. At The Rumpus, Brian Oliu writes about translating his grandfather’s book from the Catalan.
Un Bon Dia
From Musician to Collagist
Musician and Super Bowl bird-flipper M.I.A. will release a 192-page hardcover book this October. M.I.A. will be “an autobiographical monograph in collages.” P.S. How good is the “Bad Girls” video?
Say My Name
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Into the Abyss
“The day is spent for the most part in a glorious solitude. Like the hunter who moves silently through the woods to check his traps, she moves through the library, cautiously avoiding those whom she knows. A single conversation would ruin the beauty and vastness of her silence. Today no such conversation occurs and she is happy.” Good luck not reading this narration of a graduate student’s life in the voice of director Werner Herzog, now. Here’s a great Herzog Millions piece, as well.
Hot Amish Romance
Is it hot in here, or is that my Amish friendship bread? New York calls our attention to a new genre: the bonnet-ripper.
Fighting the Taxman
Neighbor and sometime Millions humorist Jacob Lambert has published a piece in Philly Weekly on our street’s travails with the Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT). I was there and it was a stirring mix of city politics and journalism in action.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Pamuk, Zambreno, Wickersham, Vonnegut, Achebe, Egan
New this week is Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House. Also hitting bookshelves are Heroines by Kate Zambreno, The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham, and more posthumously published work by Kurt Vonnegut. In non-fiction, there’s There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winner Timothy Egan’s biography of Edward Curtis.
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Take Shelter
“I found it hard to escape the sensation that I’d be teaching inside a giant metaphor.” Rachel Kadish once taught a creative writing class in a bomb shelter, but rather than stifling her students’ work, it allowed her to see how writing can act as a shelter, too.
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