“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
Who Tells Your Story
“A couple of years ago I attended a British Council discussion about the state of contemporary writing and the creative future in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. When someone brought up the dearth of memoirs in the Nigerian literary landscape, almost everyone in the room laughed ruefully. Someone joked aloud, ‘We can’t write memoirs. We’d have to wait for parents to die. Not just parents – everyone who knows us, even!’ This concern is not limited to nonfiction.” Bim Adewunmi writes for BuzzFeed on African immigrants’ stories.
Proto-Stalin
The world isn’t exactly wanting for character studies of Captain Ahab, but Chris Power manages to come up with a novel analysis of the character in this essay about the Moby-Dick antagonist. In Power’s telling, Ahab was valuable in part for what he told us about the 20th century -- namely, he foreshadowed the dictators and despots to come. You could also read Hester Blum’s contribution to this essay about the best American novels.
●
●
“The Lennon Letters” Due Out October 2012
Yoko Ono has permitted the publication of a book of John Lennon's personal letters "to his friends, family, strangers, newspapers, organizations, lawyers and the laundry." The Lennon Letters is due out October 2012, and will be edited by Hunter Davies, author of the authorized biography The Beatles.
●
●
Google to launch e-reader
Google will launch the iriver Story HD this weekend. It will be the first e-reader built to be fully integrated with Google Books.
Labyrinths
Recommended recommendations: "Five books that are also labyrinths," including Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Lily Hoang's Changing.
●
●