Theme: Translation

In what Alain Badiou calls his "hyper-translation" of Plato's Republic, we are taken into the world of Plato's classic dialogue on politics and justice, sped up to the pace of a 21st century New York street corner. Socrates and his sophist interlocutors speak a gritty street talk that is both accessible and familiar, despite the fact they invoke intellectual figures from St. Paul to Jacques Lacan to the mathematician Paul Cohen.Read more

Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure.Read more

I've been reading Thomas de Quincey's 1827 essay, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, which is really little more than a massively long quotation, in English translation, of Ehregott Andreas Wasianski's 1804 work, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren. In fact, Wasianski's entire work is cited, after a few paragraphs of framing from de Quincey, and with a few additional footnotes here and there. I am not really certain why this work is attributed to the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater at all. De Quincey is at most the editor. Read more

The lone survivor of traditional Western European ‘scientific’ culture is science. It has survived because it is now the handmaid of technology, without which contemporary civilization would collapse utterly. Anyone who doubts this should try to get a research grant for genuinely “pure” research.Read more

What is there? There is God. What else is there? There are the things that God created.The essences of created and possible things have always been. Essences are composed of 'Monads'. The 'Monads' are of such a fineness that they are imperceptible to our senses.Read more

When it comes to texts in foreign languages, I find the closest reading I can give them is by translating them into my native idiom. Texts in English can't be translated any further, but I can at least transcribe them: already a sort of translatio, a bringing-over from page to screen. There are few authors who inspire me to undertake such a close reading. I've acknowledged before that James Agee is one of them. Joan Didion is another.Read more

It is not my intention to offer the following notes pertaining to one part of the series Narration d’équilibre [Narrative of equilibrium], written by the poet, translator, photographer, encyclopedist, and radio maker Jean Daive (1941), as a meticulous overview of the different themes, lines, and figures traversing such a voluminous oeuvre. Read more

From its breast the mountain now shakes its misty khalat. With morning namaz the field, spiked golden, roars. The forest bows and from its May-tresses pours, As from a khalifah's rosary, ruby and garnet.Read more

A selection of Philip K. Dick book covers from around the world.Read more

It was. It passed. It was, so it passed. In an always irreversible order, because that's the rule in this loser's game.Read more

Good day my love, my dear, my other half I hope our children get good grades and laugh. My Junior’s still the king of basketball? Read more

Many years ago, when there were still second-hand bookshops in which to skulk, I found a leather-bound volume with ‘BENTLEY’S HORACE’ on its spine. It was only twenty quid, so I dropped into the standard routine for bagging a bargain. Read more

Adios Amerika w/ all your star-spangled ideas Turned us into idiots Read more

What did Chinese poetry sound like in 1914 to speakers of English who knew nothing about the Chinese language and had to rely exclusively on translations?Read more

The first modern French novel I read — the one that introduced terms like “avant-garde” and “surrealism” to my tongue — was “Les Enfants Terribles,” by Jean Cocteau. Read more

Read more

Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. His latest novel, three-volume, 1600-page 1Q84, was an instant success: the first print sold out on the day it was released, and the first two volumes reached one million sales within one month.Read more

It is often said that one is either a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person, in the same way that one is either a cat person or a dog person. I used to want to be a Dostoevsky person, just as I wanted to be a dog person.Read more

In Yeskov's retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science "destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!" Read more

Jorge Luis Borges was an eminently portable writer. He favoured various forms, but everything he produced was brief. He once claimed that his reluctance to publish novels was due to laziness, and that his works of short fiction were summaries of imagined longer works. Read more