To All the Posts I Didn’t Write Last Year
If I could control space-time (a resolution for 2023 that's about as likely as the others I've made), I would have put in an additional 10 hours of research and data entry into the Translation Database before posting this. But knowing that I'll surely be crunched for time all this week, and next, and the week after, I figure ...
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Likes of the Future Are Shaped by Likes of the Past
As in past weeks here’s a PDF version of this post, which might be a lot easier to read. Two years ago, Yale University Press released The Dirty Dust, Alan Titley’s translation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, a supposedly “untranslatable” masterpiece of Irish literature. This past ...
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Tim Parks, Style, and Europanto
As in past weeks, here’s a PDF version of this post, which might be a lot easier to read. For a few years now, on the first day of my “Translation & World Literature” class, I give my students an impossible task—translating the first few paragraphs of Diego Marani’s Las Adventures des ...
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The Structural Inequality of Comp Titles
Although not as long as “last week’s post,” I would recommend downloading the PDF version. Besides, it just looks prettier in that format. Although the main point of this post is pretty general and obvious—the rich get richer by already being rich—it was inspired by some publishing-specific, ...
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Reader Selection and Market Acceleration: Are We Living in a Backward World?
Given the insane length of this post, I would recommend downloading the PDF version. Besides, it’s easier to read the footnotes that way. Some of which are pretty fun, I think. Much in the same way it’s impossible for me to choose a single part of Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading that I like the best, I ...
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World Literature and Translation (Spring 2017)
I know I’ve mentioned this on the blog (and podcast) a million times, but every spring I teach a class on “World Literature and Translation” that features somewhere between eight and ten recently published translations. Although the individual arrangement of ideas and books shifts every year, the overall ...
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