This Summer I Went Swimming

Plus: The Birth of Poland's Solidarity Movement ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Today in The New York Review of Books: Daphne Merkin reflects on the bliss and blues of life by the pool, and, from the archives, remembering the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement, forty-five years ago today.   Daphne Merkin Poolside On a broiling summer afternoon I am lying on a chaise, daydreaming about past lovers and abandoned plans. But the water beckons, promising always that we can begin our lives anew.   Free from the Archives Forty-five years ago today representatives from Poland’s Communist government and Lech Wałęsa, the leader of a group of striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk, signed the Gdańsk Agreement, authorizing the creation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union to be recognized by a Warsaw Pact government. Solidarity and Wałęsa soon proved instrumental in ending Communist rule in Poland. For the Review’s October 9, 1980, issue, Abraham Brumberg interviewed Jan Litynski, a long-time opposition leader who had just been released from jail three days after the Agreement was signed, and Edward Lipinski, a ninety-two-year-old economist who had been an opposition leader since he was expelled from the Communist Party in the early 1950s.   Abraham Brumberg, Jan Litynski, and Edward Lipinski After Gdansk: Two Interviews Jan Litynski: Polish society—and particularly the strikers—did not come out against Communist power as such, but simply refused to obey it. They said, in effect, we’ve had enough of the way the government has run this country.       Alexander Stille Killing the Moonlight “From the beginning Futurism had a clear political dimension.... Many Futurist evenings were agitations in favor of Italy’s entering World War I. Proclaiming a brand of ‘revolutionary nationalism,’ in 1918 the movement even founded a Futurist Political Party that blended right and left, mixing bellicose support for Italy’s territorial expansion with promises to combat illiteracy, legalize divorce, abolish the secret police, and rid the country of the influence of the Catholic Church.” Bathsheba Demuth Where the Dogs Run “I did not understand everything I heard in camp then, even in English, and as an outsider I never fully will. But it was clear even to me that no snowmachine or truck could substitute for dogs. Dog is salmon and salmon is story.”     Save $168 on an inspired pairing! Get both The New York Review and The Paris Review at one low price. Get the deal Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. Update your address or preferences View this newsletter online The New York Review of Books 207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305     Preferences  |  Unsubscribe

Found in Translation

Conversations about Translation, moderated by Merve Emre ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Sponsored by Classical Pursuits For “On Translation,” the third season of the podcast The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre convened a panel of translators and publishers to talk about literary translation. We’ve collected all seven episodes below. The panel includes the translators Maureen Freely (who translates from the Turkish), Daisy Rockwell (Hindi and Urdu), Virginia Jewiss (Italian), Jeremy Tiang (Chinese), and Tiffany Tsao (Indonesian), as well as Adam Levy and Jacques Testard, the publishers of, respectively, Transit Books and Fitzcarraldo Editions. During the season, they discuss specific sentences from Marcel Proust and The Thousand and One Nights, how to start a new translation, the fraught emotional condition of their work, global English, and what makes one translation better than another.  These conversations were hosted in 2024 by the Hawthornden Foundation at Lake Como, in Lombardy. The Review has been collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of each episode of The Critic and Her Publics; the first two seasons—on criticism and editing—can be found here.   Advertisement   Practical Translation: Proust We begin the series with an exercise in practical translation: a discussion of seven different English interpretations of one, highly complicated sentence from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Mais à l’instant même où la gorgée mêlée des miettes du gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d’extraordinaire en moi. Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause. First Sentences “The issue with [translating] famous first lines is that everybody is invested. It’s like saying that you have the real recipe for Texas chili. Everybody has a view.” Shame, Seams, Scars “A lot of translation is the middle part that nobody sees or hears or thinks about. If you’re not a translator, you believe that somebody finds a text and thinks, ‘Let’s put this into another language.’ [But] translation is reconstructing a text in a different language that has different parts. We have to use literary references. We have to use language play. We have to use all the things that exist in another language.”   Advertisement   Is English a Monocrop? The English language can flatten the literature of other nations, while at the same time expanding its audience many times over. For the translator, this creates a struggle. What might it look like to enshrine that struggle in the translation itself? Practical Translation: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ There have been countless retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, many of which were written down, leaving many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”? Passing Judgment How do we decide which translations are better than others? To Pay a Translator How should the translator be compensated when their contribution to the process of publishing a book is still so unresolved?     Advertisement     For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.     Save $168 on an inspired pairing! Get both The New York Review and The Paris Review at one low price. Get the deal Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas You are receiving this message because you signed up for e-mail newsletters from The New York Review. Update your address or preferences View this newsletter online The New York Review of Books 207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305   Preferences  |  Unsubscribe

There Goes the Neighborhood

Plus: Ghana; Goethe ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Sponsored by Brick, A Literary Magazine   Today in The New York Review of Books: Adelle Waldman remembers the suburban novel; Anakwa Dwamena and E. Gyimah-Boadi report from Ghana’s years of corrupt presidents; and, for Goethe’s birthday, an essay by W. H. Auden from the archives.   Adelle Waldman The Life and Death of the Suburban Novel Why isn’t there a twenty-first-century Cheever?     Advertisement   Anakwa Dwamena and E. Gyimah-Boadi Ghana: The Victors and the Spoils The country has spent fifteen years lurching from one corrupt administration to another. What could break the cycle?     Advertisement   Free from the Archives Today is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 276th birthday. The paragon of Weimarer Klassik has featured often in the Review—he was “Super Goethe” for Ferdinand Mount in 2017 and, more simply, “Germany’s Greatest” for Gordon A. Craig in 2000—but in February 1967 it was W. H. Auden who first addressed himself in our pages to the sorrows of Herr Goethe: “one of the very few persons in history whose talk one wishes could have been tape-recorded rather than reproduced from memory by others.” W. H. Auden Mr. G “Sometimes one feels that Goethe is a pompous old bore, sometimes that he is a dishonest old hypocrite or, as Byron said, ‘an old fox who won’t leave his hole, and preaches a fine sermon from inside it.’ Yet, grumble as one may, one is forced in the end to admit that he was a great poet and a great man.”       Recently in the Review Alma Guillermoprieto Bodies by Joe With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement. Frances Wilson Tremendous Stickers The Mitfords, a family of extremophiles, are characters that ultimately don’t translate to the screen.     Advertisement     Save $168 on an inspired pairing! Get both The New York Review and The Paris Review at one low price. Get the deal Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. Update your address or preferences View this newsletter online The New York Review of Books 207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305     Preferences  |  Unsubscribe