Titles Are the Hardest Part
Well, not really: many are easy, literal, straightforward, straight-faced and unpunny. But we all have our pet peeves or favorites that caused trouble at the border crossing between tongues. They’re a short, easy thing to wish had gone differently. Movies provide many quizzical examples. Who knows what arcane ...
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L’école belge de l’étrange
So this fall, much to the merriment of French friends, I’ll be on a Fulbright to Belgium. Why Belgium? they are apt to snicker. Though little known on a world stage, a national literature of astonishing coherence and vitality arose in 20th century Francophone Belgium, its chief feature the use of fantastical elements. It is ...
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Fado
The Polish novelist and essayist Andrzej Stasiuk owns a century-old travel map of Austro-Hungary. Aside from its fragility, he writes, its most notable feature is its level of detail: “[E]very village of half a dozen cottages, every godforsaken backwater where the train stops—even only the slow train, even only once a ...
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Towards New Ways of Reading
Bonjour à tous! Chad Post has asked me to take some time off from designing my “Google Translate is People!” t-shirts (hint: the words are superimposed over a horrified and battered Charlton Heston) and cover for him this week. I am delighted and honored to be guest blogging at “the threep.” I think this ...
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Babel Series: Salman Rushdie
Where: Buffalo, NY Click here for more
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RTWCS: Horacio Castellanos Moya and Chad W. Post
This past Monday’s RTWCS event—featuring Horacio Castellanos Moya (author of Senselessness, The She-Devil in the Mirror, and Dance with Snakes among many other untranslated books)—was easily one of the best events of the series. Castellanos Moya is engaging, hilarious, and extremely interesting, and I think ...
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This Idea Is Insane
OK, I’m totally going to sound like a luddite, a recluse, or that crazy guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn, but I think the announcement from the Library of Congress that they’re going to archive all public Twitter “tweets” is fricking ridiculous. Sure, there are people who are way into Twitter ...
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