A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short stories The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.
The Kitchen Table Translation issue of Aster(ix) explores the connections between translation (the movement of texts) and migration (the movement of bodies). It features immigrant and diasporic translators, and brings together personal, cultural, and political dimensions of translation with the literary and aesthetic aspects of the work.
A fascinating collection of essays and conversations on the changing nature of language. From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation,a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating ones own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prizewinner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavanss explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavanss status, in the words of the Washington Post, as Latin Americas liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast. On Self-Translation is a beautiful and often profound work. Stavans, a superb stylist, offers erudite meditations on translation, and gives us new ways to think about language itself. Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographers Dilemma: The Evolution of' Proper English, from Shakespeare to South Park Stavans carries his learning light, and has the gift of communicating the profoundest of insights in the simplest of ways. The book is delightfully free of unnecessary jargon and ponderous discourse, allowing the reader time and space for her own reflections without having to slow down in the reading of it. This is work born out of the deep confidence that complete and dedicated immersion in a chosen field of knowledge (and practice) can bring; it is further infused with original wisdom accrued from self-reflexive, lived experiences of multilinguality. Kavita Panjabi, Jadavpur University
Agents of Translation contains thirteen case studies by internationally recognized scholars in which translation has been used as a way of influencing the target culture and furthering literary, political and personal interests. The articles describe Francisco Miranda, the “precursor” of Venezuelan independence, who promoted translations of works on the French Revolution and American independence; 19th century Brazilian translations of articles taken from the Révue Britannique about England; Ahmed Midhat, a late 19th century Turkish journalist who widely translated from Western languages; Henry Vizetelly , who (unsuccessfully) attempted to introduce the works of Zola to a wider public in Victorian Britain; and Henry Bohn, who, also in Victorian Britain, (successfully) published a series of works from the classics, many of which were expurgated; Yukichi Fukuzawa, whose adaptation of a North American geography textbook in the Meiji period promoted the concept of the superiority of the Japanese over their Asian neighbours; Samuli Suomalainen and Juhani Konkka, whose translations helped establish Finnish as a literary language; Hasan Alî Yücel, the Turkish Minister of Education, who set up the Turkish Translation Bureau in 1939; the Senegalese intellectual, Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work showed that the Ancient Egyptians had African rather than Indo-European roots; the Centro Cultural de Évora theatre group, which introduced Brecht and other contemporary drama into Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution; 20th century Argentine translators of poetry; Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, who have brought translation to the forefront of literary activity in Brazil; and, finally, translators of Bosnian poetry, many of whom work in exile.
The Art of UNIX Programming poses the belief that understanding the unwritten UNIX engineering tradition and mastering its design patterns will help programmers of all stripes to become better programmers. This book attempts to capture the engineering wisdom and design philosophy of the UNIX, Linux, and Open Source software development community as it has evolved over the past three decades, and as it is applied today by the most experienced programmers. Eric Raymond offers the next generation of "hackers" the unique opportunity to learn the connection between UNIX philosophy and practice through careful case studies of the very best UNIX/Linux programs.
In this prize-winning Iranian novel, a spoiled and foul-mouthed young woman looks to get high while her family and city fall to pieces. What do you do when the world is falling apart and you’re in withdrawal? Disillusioned, wealthy, and addicted to opium, Shadi wakes up one day to apocalyptic earthquakes and a dangerously low stash. Outside, Tehran is crumbling: yuppies flee in bumper-to-bumper traffic as skaters and pretty boys rise up to claim the city as theirs. Cross-dressed to evade hijab laws, Shadi flits between her dysfunctional family and depressed friends—all in search of her next fix. Mahsa Mohebali's groundbreaking novel about Iranian counterculture is a satirical portrait of the disaster that is contemporary life. Weaving together gritty vernacular and cinematic prose, In Case of Emergency takes a darkly humorous, scathing look at the authoritarian state, global capitalism, and the gender binary.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A suspenseful and deeply moving memoir that “lays open the Darfur geocide . . . intimately and powerfully” (The Washington Post Book World) and shows how one person can make a difference in the world. “A book of unusually humane power and astounding moral clarity.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) I am the translator who has taken journalists into dangerous Darfur. It is my intention now to take you there in this book, if you have the courage to come with me. Daoud Hari—his friends call him David—is a Zaghawa tribesman and grew up in a village in the Darfur region of Sudan. As a child he saw colorful weddings, raced his camels across the desert, and played games in the moonlight after his work was done. This traditional life shattered in 2003 when helicopter gunships appeared over Darfur’s villages. Hari was among the hundreds of thousands of villagers attacked and driven from their homes by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups. Though Hari’s village was burned to the ground, his family decimated and dispersed, he himself escaped, eventually finding safety across the border. Roaming the battlefield deserts on camels, he and a group of his friends helped survivors find food, water, and the way to safety. With his high school knowledge of languages, Hari offered his services as a translatorand guide after international aid groups and reporters arrived. In doing so, he risked his life again and again, for the government of Sudan had outlawed journalists in the region, and death was the punishment for those who aided the “foreign spies.” And then, inevitably, his luck ran out and he was captured. . . . The Translator tells the remarkable story of a young man who came face-to-face with genocide—time and again risking his own life to fight injustice and save his people.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. “Another masterstroke in a career already filled with them.” —O, the Oprah Magazine Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone. We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change. This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
Ward Allen's Translating for King James: Notes Made by a Translator of King James's Bible is a fascinating look at how the best-selling book of all time took shape and sound. The recovery of thirty-nine amazingly legible pages of John Bois's private notes reveals how a committee of scholarly translators urged and argued, bickered and shouted into being the most glorious document in the history of the English language. Book jacket.
