Translation
The use and abuse of art in an imperfect world.
We are street people. Nomadic by nature. We are the grandchildren of poor, adventurous strangers. Our living radicalizes their legacy.
The novelist’s latest imagines an apocalypse that feels all too likely.
The celebrated Argentine novelist on writing about writers, avoiding labels, and why critics shouldn’t write fiction.
The poet on the politics of the gaze, the migratory act of reading, the anxiety of bilingualism, and the universality of shame.
I have let a prudent amount of time go by and now believe, or more, I am absolutely certain that your spirit will find it auspicious to be in contact with me. I am a reincarnation of a friend you had in other times.
Disfiguring the hegemony of standard English.
In An Approach, the sentence gradually evolves: word choices change subtly; phrases are introduced, transposed, or deleted; punctuation shifts and changes form. Through these shifts and disruptions, the text begins to accede to a nonlinear logic, through which we can glimpse “the unspoken, which is its subject, between the words, through the words.”
Fabulism and absurdity from an under-appreciated Italian master.
Autofiction that explores the borderland between memoir and vision quest.
“All our worst mistakes begin as fiction in our lives.”
A German play based on a French memoir reflects on the global Left’s abandonment of the working class—and finds additional significance in the Age of Trump.
One point: / it came from that way and goes this way / the lukewarm thought
Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion.
Two poets reflect on colonialism, iconoclastic writers, and the political dimensions of translating literature under authoritarianism.
Finally back in the fold of Hollywood—one imagines him advancing mistrustfully, mistrustfully looking up at the high and useless palm trees (an immoderation which serves no purpose: the palm trees “planted on both sides of the expressway in order to purge an already pure sky”).
Pathos, swallows, Hölderlin: a sense of the everyday and its interruptions guide the Austrian writer’s “tender prose.”
Briggs delves into her experience translating Roland Barthes’s La Préparation du roman to offer us a poignant account of what this translation compulsion might be.
Re-imagining antiquity and complicating gender binaries for the modern reader.
when you say / erase / do you mean / stop existing?
