Today, translators who are not content to toil in obscurity fight for their rights with the nearest weapon to hand: social media. They promote the authors they’ve translated, and they promote themselves. They muse about the nature of translation, post teasers from their latest projects, and share details of their private lives. Some post flattering selfies in states of undress. Like everyone else on social media, they try to be famous. The most energetic translator-activist on social media in recent years has been Jennifer Croft, an American who in 2021 organized a successful open letter from writers and translators demanding that translators’ names appear on book covers. As the translator of Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Croft had unusual authority. When she translated Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (2022), her name was on the cover and she received royalties, unusual for translators.
Croft was right: translators’ names should always appear on the book cover. The quality of their work can make the difference between joy and bafflement, though the reader may never be certain what share of pleasure or irritation can be attributed to their efforts. There is a tragic surfeit of ham-handed translations that make it impossible to lose oneself in what was once a smooth-flowing text, and a quiet canon of excellent translations that go unrecognized. Some eager translators improve sloppy, repetitious originals. This kind of editing in translation is a crime for those who cherish “fidelity” above all else. But isn’t translation always a kind of threesome?
Instead, we are always expected to reassure strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the social order. We do this by conforming to all manner of invisible rules, governing, for example, the distance we maintain from one another, where we direct our eyes and how we carry ourselves. These complex rules help us understand ourselves and one another. Break such a rule, and you threaten a ‘jointly maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility’.
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle (2024), by media scholar Anna Shechtman (a former editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and currently an editor at large), is both a memoir and a cultural analysis of American crosswords from the 1910s through the 2010s. The book is also itself a kind of crossword, bringing together worlds that might not otherwise exist in the same place at the same time. Shechtman is a longtime crossword constructor, and constructors love answers that are 15 letters long because they traverse a standard American-sized puzzle grid. These answers, called grid-spanners, also often illuminate a larger theme or serve as seed entries from which the puzzle grows. Shechtman’s book has its own reveals and surprises too: one is CROSSWORD PUZZLE (15); another is ANOREXIA NERVOSA (15). Shechtman’s exploration of puzzle logic and anorexic thinking—and how she learned, physically and psychologically, to tease them apart—is the real enigma of her book-as-crossword.
Eula Biss wants me to be better and I’m not sure I’m up for that. When I refer to the quick several page essays that build up to her book Having and Being Had as prose poems, I do so to praise and not blame, warn, not scare. Her jewel-like essays are pristine and precise, exciting and exacting. They ask of you as reader to weigh every word for there’s always a bit more there (and it has to do with you). It’s as if the space between each period and the first letter of her next sentence is a silent accusation of your life.
His lessons – about love, family and connection – are “nothing more than a handful of useful, if not particularly original platitudes that I should have known all along”. This is the strength of Goldsworthy’s memoir: he doesn’t insist on his own uniqueness but offers himself as a vessel to examine something more universal.
We know from literature that if anyone is ever surprisingly unavailable for work, it is because they have turned into an enormous bug. Obviously this is the first and best theory regarding the whereabouts of Catherine, Princess of Wales: She is exercising her Kafka privileges and has turned into an insect, as a metaphor.