Berfrois

May 2017

The Second Annual Queer Translations Issue from Queen Mob’s Teahouse

The Second Annual Queer Translations Issue from Queen Mob’s Teahouse

The word translation itself contains the prefix trans, signifying movement rather than stability. Instead of thinking of translation as an exchange of “this” for “that” we are looking for pieces that somehow seek to retain the quality of movement and motion and change between languages and cultures.

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Read the Air

Read the Air

Amaro says that success in BotW depends on an important skill in Japanese culture and society: the ability to “read the air”. This means understanding body language, facial expressions and subtle hints, often used to convey information.

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His face goes ashen…

His face goes ashen…

The opening scene of Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things to Me” is, by now, a familiar one, not only because it’s repeated so often whenever Solnit is written about

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Robert L. Kehoe III on Robert Silvers

Robert L. Kehoe III on Robert Silvers

I was not raised on fancy magazines. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw or heard of The Atlantic Monthly until my older brother came home with a copy after his first semester of college.

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Eric D. Lehman: Macbeth as Zen Stick

Eric D. Lehman: Macbeth as Zen Stick

When I was a college freshman, I took a Shakespeare class with a very old-fashioned professor. It was a fun class for someone like me, who loved the Bard, didn’t mind memorizing sonnets

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Denise Goh Hui Jun: Hospitality and the Rohingya Refugee

Denise Goh Hui Jun: Hospitality and the Rohingya Refugee

by Denise Goh Hui Jun May 2015. A smuggler boat of Rohingya passengers dared to entertain the first inklings of hope, as the Malaysian coast guard spotted them and began fixing a tow to their boat. It had been months of unimaginable stresses, living in highly cramped quarters and...

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Rebuilding Cities

Rebuilding Cities

What is a lost city? The vanished metropolises of myth and history are one sort: Atlantis plunged into the sea, Troy razed, ghost towns littered across the American West.

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The Pirate’s Tale

The Pirate’s Tale

In front of me were three pamphlets of poetry by Tennyson: two titled The Lover’s Tale (both dated 1870) and another called The New Timon and the Poets (dated 1876).

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‘Seth Abramson wants you to know that he is not a conspiracy theorist’

‘Seth Abramson wants you to know that he is not a conspiracy theorist’

Since November, Abramson — professor, experimental poet, onetime lawyer — has been building a case against Trump’s administration in the court of public opinion.

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Ed Simon on More’s Map

Ed Simon on More’s Map

The sixteenth-century humanist polymath and martyr Thomas More’s neologism “Utopia” literally translates to “No Place,” and yet the author had a detailed and concrete conception of the invented kingdom which bore that name.

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