July 2011
18 posts
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Summer nights
ivebeenreadinglately:
Nights in the gardens of Brooklyn—yes, that’s just the way it was. The boys came home from the war. They were probably men then but we tended to say “the boys.” If home was New York they would probably live in Brooklyn, at least until they were sure they didn’t want to go west to San Francisco or south to New Orleans, or to some countryside to become a farmer. As in Nights...
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Anthea Bell, on translation:
Anthea Bell, translator-extraordinaire* (particularly, of two of the best books I’ve read so far this year [Journey into the Past by Stefan Zweig, and Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki]), on, well, translation:
Translation is not, by its very nature, a high-profile craft. If you have spun your illusion successfully, then you are quite rightly invisible. If reviewers don’t...
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“Well, I kissed her then. I put her head back on the sofa and I kissed her, and I...”
– From “Sacks,” short story by Raymond Carver.
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“You know, this is how cities go wrong:
when someone brave and ready of heart...”
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From Hekabe, a play by Euripides. Which is gahdamned depressing and beautiful. Manong Euripides, quite unpleasant, him. Gleefully so, I suspect.
Today, in relevance.
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“A perplexing consequence of fixing our eyes on an ideal is that it may make us...”
– From The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton.
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“… no curses seem to deter those readers who, like crazed lovers, are...”
– From the chapter “Stealing Books,” in A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. 