Recommended Reading: Helen Vendler on John Berryman. You could also read Stephen Akey on Berryman’s collection The Dream Songs.
Tragicomic
On Not Getting Lost in Translation
“I sense how hard we’ve all worked… It’s not easy. Even a not-so-good translation is not easy to produce.” How Edith Grossman and Lydia Davis manage not to get lost in translation.
Imre Kertész Retires
Hungarian author and 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész announced his retirement, reports Nicolas Gary in the French publication ActuaLitté. (Link to Google’s translation into English.) As a “gesture of reconciliation” the Fatelessness author and Holocaust survivor has decided to give nearly 35,000 of his papers to the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Meanwhile, Kertész has recently had several of his shorter works released in handsome Melville House editions. (h/t Hari Kunzru)
Coates: A Public Intellectual
The New York Times profiles MacArthur Genius and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates as one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. His book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (which we have been anticipating for months) is released this Tuesday.
Yankee Spinach Foxtrot
Wilco appeared in a Popeye comic strip, and they also released an animated music video featuring the sailor, Olive Oyl, and Bluto.
Whoreallyknows?
“There are two extreme views about punctuation … the first is that you don’t actually need it because it’s perfectly possible to write down what you want to say without any punctuation marks or capital letters and people can still read it youdontevenneedspacesbetweenwordsreally. The second view is that punctuation is essential, not only to avoid ambiguity but also because it ‘shows our identity as educated people.’” Here is Adrienne Raphel from The New Yorker with a history of punctuation in the internet age.
Tracy Morgan’s Brother From Another Mother
Scrutinizing Letters from Sylvia Plath
Anwen Crawford reflects on newly published letters from Sylvia Plath; “The belief among many of Plath’s devotees seems to be that if we can get clear of other people’s fingerprints on her texts, allowing Plath to ‘fully narrate her own autobiography,’ as the editors here describe it, we will at last solve the riddle of her. The extremities of her poetry will balance against the circumstances of her life; the latter will equal the former. But her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t. Plath turned her common sorrows—dead father, mental illness, cheating husband—into something like an origin story for pain itself, as if her own pain preceded the world.” In the New Yorker