New on the SRB:
Dion Kaganon Fiona Kelly McGregor Megan McDowell Abigail Fisheron Olga Tokarczuk Melinda Harveyon Susan Sontag Fiona Wrighton Charmian Clift Sarah-Jane Burtonon Dymphna Stella Rees Alana Lentinon Antoinette Lattouf Matthew AllenJennifer Mae Hamiltonon academic work Dion Kaganon Fiona Kelly McGregor Megan McDowell Abigail Fisheron Olga Tokarczuk Melinda Harveyon Susan Sontag Fiona Wrighton Charmian Clift Sarah-Jane Burtonon Dymphna Stella Rees Alana Lentinon Antoinette Lattouf Matthew AllenJennifer Mae Hamiltonon academic work
Translating New Worlds with Megan McDowell
There’s this thing people do when they talk about translation that I find very frustrating – they focus on what is lost in the process, and I really think that is putting the emphasis on the wrong thing. Because just look at all that is gained. You get a whole new work. People in a new language are reading it a different way, and they’re not reading it in its original language, which some people believe automatically makes it inferior. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it adds a lot. I think it contributes to the literary culture of the language it’s translated into.
Extract from an Encyclopaedia
The Books of Jacob is a book about the internet. That is to say, it’s a response to the experience of encountering information online, and realising as a result that ‘many things remain quietly connected’, as Tokarczuk writes in her postscript. This realisation in turn gives rise to the notion of the system as a whole, a kind of totality – everything that has happened ‘alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.’
Updates & Events
Writing Gender#2
Friday 9 September 2022
Amani Haydar, Eloise Brook, Mykaela Saunders, Eda Gunaydin and Donna Abela will be in conversation about how writing plays a significant role in making visible acts of cultural, physical and gendered violence against women and trans and gender diverse people, through both the telling of stories, and the re-witnessing of trauma.
From the SRB archives:
One F (in Hofmann) – and U-C-K the Consequences
Reading Hofmann has made me wonder whether I got the business of literary criticism wrong. All that straining, for instance: to find meaning and connections, to locate, link up. Why is it a self-evident good? Or the need to be careful, so careful, as in restrained, measured, fair but also taking care of people’s feelings because it’s the right thing to do and because, a separate point this, people break themselves in half to write their books.