“We are all singing from the same hymn sheet,” remarked the pioneer of Translation Studies at the end of our conference; among young translators particularly, there was a “fervor,” a “zealotry,” that was admirable and encouraging.
This desire for unanimity and solidarity is understandable, and no doubt, at a deep level, we do all share a passion for literary translation and a wish that the practice thrive. This is why we invest so much time in learning our languages and working on our writing—so that our translations will be better. It is the logic behind every course that teaches translation: that one can improve. If someone is not happy with the hymn sheet, or with hymn sheets in general, let’s hear them.
The first fiction about Mars arose from speculation about its moons. Although Mars was one of five planets known to the ancients (along with Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn) nothing was known about it except for its fast and often erratic movement about the heavens—the very word “planet” comes from the ancient Greek for wanderer. But no details could be discerned of any of these planets until the invention of the telescope. When Galileo focused his telescope on the planet Jupiter in 1610 he saw four attendant satellites. The first of Saturn’s moons, Titan, was discovered in 1655, with four more over the next 30 years. Astronomers suspected there were further moons to find, many of which, as the natural philosopher William Derham surmised in Astro-Theology (1714), would be too small to see with the strength of the telescopes at the time. Nevertheless, at the time he was writing, it was known that since the Earth had one moon, Jupiter four and Saturn five, it seemed logical that Mars must have at least one and more likely two. So while it seemed remarkable when Jonathan Swift revealed in Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 that the astronomers of Laputa had discovered the two moons of Mars, Swift was only repeating what many already suspected.
Why do we universalize the experience of half the world and obscure, deny and control that of the other? And why is it that when the obscured half speaks up to assert her experience, she is so often met with annihilating rage? “No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own,” Woolf wrote, citing as proof the library, which contained thousands of books by men on the topic of women and none by women on the topic of men. “The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion.” And when one is challenged, she concluded, “one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively.”
She knew what the Angel demanded of women — “purity” above all, and a childlike, trusting innocence, of which “experience” was the enemy. But we are experienced now. We speak from experience. Why accept a system that depends on its denial?
Cleansed of its abstract mathematics, the paper is an ode to memory, loss and the oldest of human yearnings, the desire for transcendence. As the doomed figure in Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” sings, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”
Dr. Hawking was the manifestation of perseverance; stricken by Lou Gehrig’s disease, he managed to conquer the universe from a wheelchair. The fate of matter or information caught in a black hole is one that defined his career, and it has become one of the deepest issues in physics.
Legitimate scientific questions can be asked about specific foods—their nutrient content or digestibility, for example—but most such issues were addressed ages ago. Foods are not drugs. To ask whether one single food has special health benefits defies common sense. We do not eat just one food. We eat many different foods in combinations that differ from day to day; varying our food intake takes care of nutrient needs. But when marketing imperatives are at work, sellers want research to claim that their products are “superfoods,” a nutritionally meaningless term. “Superfoods” is an advertising concept.
Up until about five years ago, I didn’t have much experience being black outside the United States.
What I mean is, with the exception of a few family vacations in the Caribbean and Mexico, I didn’t know what it might feel like to travel while black abroad.
Then I decided to spend the fall semester of my junior year abroad in Florence, Italy.
In her introduction to the second volume of Plath’s collected letters, Frieda Hughes marvels that her mother and her father, the poet Ted Hughes, were able to work and start a family in such tight quarters. The “stifling proximity” is her partial explanation for why the marriage so famously imploded — Hughes went off with another woman and Plath, left to fend for two small children, killed herself.
To write about the House of Hughes is to share that feeling of constriction — of standing in the middle of a cramped flat. There is little room to maneuver, few possible steps to take. Everything seems to have been said in the poems, journals, biographies and snowdrift of scholarship — and now these volumes of letters, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, totaling more than 2,000 pages.
When I first started The Travelling Cat Chronicles — by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel -- I was admittedly skeptical. I am a cat lover, obsessed with my own kitties as well as the myriad cat memes and wholesome videos that pepper my social media, but I wasn't sure how to react to what seemed, at first, like a schmaltzy novel partially voiced by a proud male stray. But soon I realized what the trouble was — and it wasn't with the book, but with me. My busy, cynical, constantly enraged mind didn't know what to do with a book that was, at its core, joyful. As a book critic, I tend to engage with so-called Serious Books that take on Big Issues. But The Travelling Cat Chronicles is no less valuable for facing issues of friendship, family, loss, and grief with an optimistic and loving outlook. In fact, the book's greatest strength is that it allows its readers to experience vicarious happiness even as a sense of impending loss begins to creep through the pages.