Over at Words Without Borders, Esther Allen considers how to translate a song. As she puts it, “A song that almost everyone in a given culture at a given moment knows is a unique cultural artifact, a crystallized collective experience, a profound trigger that sets off a complex string of shared emotions.” Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions essay on songs as triggers.
Said the Gramophone
Coming to a theater near Tokyo
First it was Pebble Beach, and now they want our movies. After years of bad Hollywood remakes of good Japanese movies, turnabout is fair play.
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How to Win
“If you read through all the citations, you’ll start to detect certain patterns. Any aspirant Nobel Prize–winner should take note—these may hold the key to victory.” The Paris Review has read through all of the Nobel Prize-winner citations and came to a couple of conclusions, such as “you should be great… but it also helps if you’re epic. Oh, and fresh!” Pair their piece with our own overview of newest laureate Patrick Modiano’s work, and The New Yorker‘s look into the translation of Nobel Prize-winning authors.
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To the Moon and Back
David Seed looks back on more than two millennia of the moon in literature, from Galileo to Jules Verne to Johannes Kepler to Edgar Allan Poe.
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Go to Sleep
If you’re the kind of person who might fall asleep while reading a page-turner, you’re not alone. For Read It Forward, Jonathan Russell Clark writes about the challenge of literary sleepiness. For more of his writing, check out his essay on the art of the final sentence for The Millions.
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