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December 18, 2024
I Bet People Will Join Us
Na Zhong
Years ago, as an intern at an English-language publication that champions translated literature, I asked the editor how he dealt with the thorny issue of “translation style.” He looked at me, puzzled. “What’s that?” It was my turn to be tongue-tied. “It’s a quality… permeating a work of translation… that immediately tells you it is a translated text.” He didn’t get it. I let the topic drop. I later realized...
December 18, 2024
Men at Arms | Fiction
Steven Potter
We called him Thomas, never Tommy, because Tommy Guns were the weapons of gangsters and no amount of yearning on our parts could make a Red Ryder air rifle so cool. Thomas used no gunpowder, and his metal BBs only penetrated human skin when fired at point-blank range. But he did have a lever action and a beautiful hardwood stock, and these things, taken together, seemed capable of convincing the...
December 18, 2024
African But Not Too African
Carey Baraka
In October 2023, Bloomsbury began to republish titles from the vaunted African Writers Series, an imprint that published 359 books between 1962 and 2003. Put out by the London-based publishing house Heinemann, most of the early AWS entries were originally written in English, but soon translations from other languages into English appeared. The AWS sought to establish a center for African writers, ensuring they were read in countries other than...
December 18, 2024
“Let’s Not Kid Ourselves” | An Interview with Jayati Ghosh
The Drift
According to one narrative that has cohered since the 2024 election, the failure of Kamala Harris’s campaign can be chalked up to the political effects of inflation. After all, voters were more concerned about the economy, per Gallup, than they had been in any election year since 2008; by dismissing economic concerns and focusing on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy, Democrats grossly miscalculated. It seems clear, in retrospect, that “Bidenomics”...
December 18, 2024
Break Maiden | Poetry
Kathleen Radigan
Just when I think I am dead, I see horses in the next yard, glistening. Their bones crack like glow sticks. They honk up ethereal snot, spit pearls into the pool. The minute I hear them pounding down the street, I forgive their stench, their eagerness to deceive. I forget how they left, how they gambled my fortune to dust. What providence! The Lord let them return, velour skin stinking...
December 18, 2024
Context Collapse #7 | Poetry
Ryan Ruby
So when context becomes the new content, CONTEXT COLLAPSE cannot be far behind. And after? What would postcontextual Poetry even look like? Ask Victor H. Yngve, professor of linguistics At MIT, whose 1961 Paper, “Random Generation of English Sentences,” features Computational Poetry generated with the help Of COMIT, his string-processing language, And the words found in a children’s book about A tiny steam engine. Ask Bill Chamberlain And Thomas Etter,...
December 18, 2024
The Past and Passed Over
Michael Barron
What makes a book a classic? Italo Calvino once suggested that the answer is ultimately a matter of personal choice. As he wrote in a 1986 essay for The New York Review of Books, “It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book” — one that you read and reread, always getting something from doing so. This is a nice...
December 18, 2024
Elsewhere | Poetry
Edward Salem
I laughed at the phrase you used, Emptied yourself. I thought, It’s true, there’s nothing left. I didn’t remember how many drinks I’d had as I poured another. Who cares, I whispered to myself, thinking on our day together, how glad I was it was over — earlier, four men walking toward the border were vaporized by a drone that hovered haltingly like a buzzing bumblebee before the stigma of...
December 18, 2024
A Half-Suppressed Strangeness
Marta Figlerowicz
In the fall of 2018, I was invited to chair a panel of distinguished literary translators on my campus. The conversation ran smoothly, circling lovingly around commas, onomatopoeias, and the International Booker Prize for works in translation. Then — inevitably — a belligerent man piped up from the audience to explain that translating foreign literatures into English reinforced the imperial ignorance of Anglophone elites and commodified non-Western literary works by...
December 18, 2024
History of Art | Poetry
David Ehmcke
The paintings were so famous they shook the man’s eyes. His face was a miniature fanfare anointing a halcyon sky. “The red of the prince’s robes means love,” the docent started. “Sex and love,” the man corrected. The tour of global arts went on this way: history, sex, love, war, death. Each room was a tomb of facts, an age of worship caught in a lockbox where the centuries don’t...
