“The Google Translate results feel less and less lucky as the sentence progresses, and with each new roll of the search engine dice.” Over the six years that Esther Allen was translating Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto‘s classic, Zama, she would occasionally run lines through Google translate as an experiment in the ersatz. Pair with translator Alison Anderson on “Ferrante Fever” and what a great translation adds to the original work.
Lost and Found in Translation
Noble Things
Recommended Reading: A Public Space has new fiction from Roxane Gay, whose novel An Untamed State was recently reviewed for our site by Aboubacar Ndiaye.
Greene Family Biography
Jeremy Lewis introduces his new biography of Graham Greene and his remarkable family, Shades of Greene, for the Telegraph.
Byron-ness
Which Lord Byron is the most Byron-y? Let Mallory Ortberg tell you in her rankings of Byron portraits.
Crossed Lines
In the latest issue of the LRB, Jenny Diski comes to the defense of Liz Jones, a Daily Mail columnist and spiritual sibling to the far-too-beautiful-to-live Samantha Brick. Her takeaway after reading a column that got Jones into hot water? Diski “couldn’t see” what the pilloried writer had done wrong.
Barbie Bodies
Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls and Sex, writes at Mother Jones about “hotness,” commodification, and women’s bodies.
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A Bookstore of Common Prayer
Common dreams, common bookstores: “I went home with…the BookWoman bumper sticker, which reads: ‘Support Your Feminist Bookstore — She Supports You.'”
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