Featured In translation essays
Now and Then
Stanišić’s books play with time as much as they play with fantasy, which are more entangled than one might suspect, but perhaps understandably so for someone like Stanišić, or someone like me, that is to say: children born into Yugoslavia and made refugees by the genocidal war that followed its fracturing.
In translation
Now and Then
Stanišić’s books play with time as much as they play with fantasy, which are more entangled than one might suspect, but perhaps understandably so for someone like Stanišić, or someone like me, that is to say: children born into Yugoslavia and made refugees by the genocidal war that followed its fracturing.
The Irreparable, the Inconsolable
for Léger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Léger’s extraordinary short books. Profoundly recondite, they are also deeply moving. Léger understands the literary power of the image and of narrative; the thing and its multiple renderings through mediation. This flickering between the real and its representation, between subject and object, is central to the effect of Léger’s triptych. It is not surprising, then, that the three subjects of her triptych are all associated with the representational power of the visual image and of (self-) performance.
Named and Nameless Others
Most fiction treats workers as fully external creatures, carrying their physicality as a symbol of their position within the division of labour; Weiss presents them as the authentic bearers of our collective human cultural destiny. It is a question of how these workers, who pay for the very possibility of culture with the surplus created by their labour, attain it, and even come to represent it, themselves. By sheer force of will, and the necessity of an inner compulsion, these young men and women return from the shop floor, physically exhausted but spiritually on fire, to study, debate, and reflect.