Tag: books

H is for Hawk

During the breaks at the ALTA conference in Tucson at the beginning of November, I found myself often answering questions about my Sea of Intimacy. This makes a lot of sense, as it was at the ALTA in Tucson in, I want to say 2021, that I first spoke about it with friends there, sitting… Continue reading H is for Hawk

My Roman History: A Review

Alizah Holstein’s 2024 book My Roman History: A Memoir (published by Viking Penguin) takes a long view of the author’s journey to a failed academic career as a historian of medieval Roman history. The journey is the main story, the drive and wonder behind it especially, including what otherwise might be esoteric questions of power,… Continue reading My Roman History: A Review

Where Donkeys Go

Sea of Intimacy keeps surprising me. Sometimes it seems to be about more than what I thought. Other times, it zeros in on something narrow, specific, which then turns out to be more than what I thought. For instance, donkeys. I discovered the names of islands derived from donkeys in the Adriatic last summer while… Continue reading Where Donkeys Go

Translating “meanwhile”

I put that in quotes because it’s a silly idea really, for translators at least. Translating is always its own thing, you concentrate on it, do it almost for its own sake. Or rather, strike the almost. This is my experience anyway, even when one is just trying something out, it turns out to be… Continue reading Translating “meanwhile”

The Promise of Translation

I was reading Peter Brooks’ review of two new Proust translations in the NYRB for March 21, 2024 (“In Search of His Vocation”) and came across a passage quoted from Le Temps retrouvé that Brooks calls the book’s “titular claim”: ‘I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something… Continue reading The Promise of Translation

Words and the World

[This post also available as a podcast.] I’m always a bit more secure on the territory of words and their transfer across the supposed boundaries among languages. Maybe this is inevitable, given my expertise and how I have spent most of my time in the world. So in reading two books recommended to me as… Continue reading Words and the World

A Prize for Kin

My translation of Miljenko Jergović’s Kin was awarded the prize for “Best Literary/Scholarly Translation into English” by the American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) at its just completely conference in Las Vegas. They don’t seem to have updated their website yet, but here’s the link for all the long- and… Continue reading A Prize for Kin

The Man Between the Woman in the Window

One of the reasons The Woman in the Window took so long to finish is that I was always working on other things at the same time. I think all seven of the books I’ve translated came out during the time I was writing WiW, suggesting that it might be a very good thing for… Continue reading The Man Between the Woman in the Window

books

Oh, I do, I do like books. One of my favorite scenes: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (in Michael Henry Heim’s English translation) contemplating the prospect of being killed by the mass of literature that hangs above his bed tumbling down upon him in his sleep. This is not my fantasy!… Continue reading books