Year: 2022
-
Reviving Lucrezia: Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait
“Words pressed themselves into her memory, like a shoe sole into soft mud, which would dry and solidify, the shoe print preserved for ever. Sometimes she felt filled up, overstuffed with words, faces, names, voices, dialogues, her head throbbing with pain, and she would be set off-balance by the weight of what she carried, stumbling…
-
Women in Translation
“As a translator I remain outside the container, in that the novel remains the brainchild of a fellow writer. It is liberating in that I don’t have to fabricate anything. But I am bound to a preexisting text, and thus aware of a greater sense of responsibility. There is nothing to invent but everything to…
-
The Place of Memory: Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk
“After a while, being ambitious means having to sift out the few values we feel like keeping and toss the rest, or twist them to suit ourselves. Even the tiny handful of values that remain just get stuffed into the attic of memory, like some old thing bought and used up long ago. What are…
-
Translation, In All Its Forms: Jhumpa Lahiri's Translating Myself and Others
“Translating means understanding, above all, how words slip and slide into each other, how they overlap, how they end up producing a fertile lexical promiscuity.” from Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Lingua / Language,” Translating Myself and Others Reading the ten essays compiled in Translating Myself and Others is like diving into a body of water, one that has…
-
Feels Like Poetry: Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water
“‘You two are in something. I don’t know what it is, but you guys are in something. Some people call it a relationship, some call it friendship, some call it love, but you two, you two are in something.’ You gazed at each other then with the same open-eyed wonder that keeps startling you at…
-
Tracing & Retracing Memories: Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
“Let us begin with two girls at a dance. They are at the edge of the room. One sits on a chair, opening and shutting a dance-card with gloved fingers. The other stands beside her, watching the dance unfold: the circling couples, the clasped hands, the drumming shoes, the whirling skirts, the bounce of the…
-
Unsaid & Undone: Huma Qureshi's Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love
“Every day she felt unnerved by how unreasonable her love and her fury, which had become one, seemed. She spent most days feeling stunned, aware only of a sort of rage swirling loose inside her like a rainstorm gathering speed, and it frightened her to think of what might happen if she were to let…
Sydney K Erickson 