The idea that translation is an art rests on two fundamental premises. The first is that effective translation requires a certain amount of skill, its techniques and methods developed over time not only in the hurly-burly of solitary practice or paid translation projects but also under the guidance of a…
If we stop for a moment on a day’s journey, sagging onto a bench in an orange grove on a rainy day or a perfectly leveled tree stump in the middle of a clearing, we might start thinking chin-in-hand a la Rodin and slowly, after a while, realize something: we…
The way of the dodo, they say. But in this short article, ensconced in the vast anonymity of the Internet, I wanted to mention the value of a select group of people who are becoming fewer and fewer as the years of the twenty-first century continue blowing by in a…
Proust—what an author, eh? He can be difficult to dig into, and not only because his work can give rise to an infamous snobbery, an ironic response to an author that made much of his undying contempt for snobbery. He can also inspire so much thinking and self-reflection that his…
A part of the creative artist that tends to be as inseparable from his work as from his personality and character, a certain egotism often comes with the territory. Immersed in the creative process and the material of her work, drawing from the murkiest depths of her mind as a…
One of the common but unspoken phenomena to which humans everywhere are susceptible—especially those that have bottomed out after finding that life has very few stable guideposts for the individual—is that of existential despair, which takes as many forms as there are individuals. But while the forms are many, the…
After falling for the stratagem of his compatriots, the French, who have ousted him as traitorous and cowardly, Parolles in the fourth of act of All’s Well That Ends Well makes a provocative self-assessment: “Who knows himself a braggart, / Let him fear this; for it will come to pass…
