In the United States, it’s estimated that about three per cent of books published annually are translations, and less than five per cent of the titles reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, according to one study, were originally written in languages other than English. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have become literary celebrities for their translations of the Russian classics, as has Ann Goldstein for her Elena Ferrante, and Edith Grossman for her “Don Quixote.” Emily Wilson, the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, was profiled in this magazine, and in just about every other media outlet. Translators have become more vocal, too. In 2021, Jennifer Croft, the English-language translator of the Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk, declared that she wouldn’t agree to translate a book unless her name was printed on the cover. “Not only is it disrespectful to me,” she wrote on Twitter, “but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they’re going to read.”
One balmy evening this past summer, I was hanging out in the bustling courtyard of a bar under the Williamsburg Bridge, celebrating a friend’s thirtieth birthday. I was having a nice enough time making small talk with various partygoers—until a stranger asked what new music I had been listening to. The trains above screeched to a halt. Everyone at the party fell silent and looked my way. I racked my brain. Surely there was something cool and obscure I could turn this person on to. And … I had nothing. The truth was that most of what I’d been enjoying fell into two categories: Old Dad (Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Simon & Garfunkel) or New Dad (Vampire Weekend, Sturgill Simpson, Solange).
There’s a technical term for what was happening to me. I was becoming washed.
At Grantley Hall, a rural Yorkshire hotel so fancy they pipe jazz around the car park, there are various food offerings this Christmas Day. One of them, from the much-admired chef Shaun Rankin, is entitled the Taste of Home menu. It’s an interesting title, because it acknowledges something: that despite our growing comfort with paying others to cook for us, choosing to eat out on 25 December is still regarded as subversive and decadent. Christmas dinner is the one remaining domestic feast. It’s the one day of the year when we strap ourselves to the stove and cook a complex multistage meal, packed full of adored convention and cliche. And yet amazingly, some people choose to get out the credit card and leave the house.