“As for the charge that [Constance] Garnett writes in an outdated language, yes, here and there she uses words and phrases that no one uses today, but not many of them. We find the same sprinkling of outdated words and phrases in the novels of Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot. Should they, too, be rewritten for modern sensibilities? (Would u really want that?)” It’s shaping up to be a day of passionate defenses. Writing for the New York Review of Books, Janet Malcom urges readers to put down their Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Russian classics and pick Constance Garnett’s back up again.
An Industry of Translation
Miéville in Conversation
China Miéville recorded a podcast with Lapham’s Quarterly editor Aidan Flax-Clark.
On Wodehouse’s Other Writing
“For a novelist, writing letters is writing that is not writing,” Ed Park says of P.G. Wodehouse’s collected correspondence, A Life in Letters. The Year in Reading alum goes on to note that “a collection of letters is the unconscious narrative the author generates over the years.”
Manuscript Shopping
A new Dr. Seuss manuscript has been discovered “stuffed in a 1962 issue of TV Guide.” Ruben Bolling (of Tom the Dancing Bug) has What Pie Should I Buy?, a story based on the author’s shopping list, at Boing Boing.
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It Never Leaves You
The English major is more than just a common course of study, friends. The English major is a way of life. (via Arts and Letters Daily)
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Tweet to Win
Electric Literature and Colson Whitehead are holding a Twitter contest. Best tweet on the theme #stuffmymusesays wins a Sony Reader.
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