translation

Book Review: “Translating Myself and Others” — The Air We Breathe

June 15, 2022
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The cumulative effect over the course of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book sharpens our view of what the imperfect art of translation can, in fact, do.

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Book Review: “The Notes” of Ludwig Hohl — “Everything Ever Created Was a Fragment.”

October 28, 2021
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Ludwig Hohl belongs in the line of such lucidly contentious thinkers as Karl Kraus, Pascal, and Lichtenberg, commentators whose writing oscillates between the traditions of literature and philosophy.

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Book Review: “Strange Beasts of China” — An Exuberant Chinese Fantasy

July 15, 2021
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The volume’s spirited imagination is strong enough to compensate for flaws in its translation.

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Book Review: “What You Can See From Here” – Hopefully Romantic

June 13, 2021
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There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Mariana Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling.

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Book Interview: Translator Brian Nelson on Finally Hearing Émile Zola’s Voice in English

May 12, 2021
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“Why read Zola now? Leaving aside sheer enjoyment of his narrative art, I’d say: because his representation of society’s impact on the individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.”

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Book Review: “Difficult Light” — Words Are Amazing Things

August 11, 2020
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A supple, evocative novel that meditates on family and loss and art.

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Book Review: “The Family Clause” — Tribulations of a Family with No Name

June 24, 2020
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Jonas Hassen Khemiri does little in The Family Clause to put his own spin on the usual domestic showdown of repression versus dreams of liberation.

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Book Review: “The Turncoat” and “Marrow and Bone” — Two Revealing Looks at World War II

June 12, 2020
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For each of these major, prize-honored writers — Siegfried Lenz and Walter Kempowski– birth = destiny = art.

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Book Review: “Necropolis” — A Book of the Russian Literary Dead

April 28, 2019
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This memoir offers an invaluable, broad look at intellectual Russia before and after the revolutions of 1917.

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Book Review: Ilan Stavans — Literature as Resistance

October 13, 2018
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Ilan Stavans’ latest book is an engrossing potpourri of this thinker’s continuing thoughts about language, culture, and the self.

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